Table of Contents

Taking Root 1.1

Taking Root 1.2

Taking Root 1.3

Taking Root 1.4

Taking Root 1.5

Taking Root 1.6

Taking Root 1.7

Taking Root 1.8

Taking Root 1.9

Taking Root 1.10

Taking Root 1.11

Taking Root 1.12

Enemy (Arc 1)

Cat out of the Bag 2.1

Cat out of the Bag 2.2

Cat out of the Bag 2.3

Cat out of the Bag 2.4

Cat out of the Bag 2.5

Cat out of the Bag 2.6

Cat out of the Bag 2.7

Cat out of the Bag 2.8

Cat out of the Bag 2.9

Cat out of the Bag 2.10

Cat out of the Bag 2.11

Enemy (Arc 2)

Lips Sealed 3.1

Lips Sealed 3.2

Lips Sealed 3.3

Lips Sealed 3.4

Lips Sealed 3.5

Lips Sealed 3.6

Lips Sealed 3.7

Lips Sealed 3.8

Lips Sealed 3.9

Lips Sealed 3.10

Enemy (Arc 3)

Stitch in Time – 4.1

Stitch in Time – 4.2

Stitch in Time – 4.3

Stitch in Time – 4.4

Stitch in Time – 4.5

Stitch in Time – 4.6

Stitch in Time – 4.7

Stitch in Time – 4.8

Stitch in Time – 4.9

Stitch in Time – 4.10

Stitch in Time – 4.11

Stitch in Time – 4.12

Enemy (Arc 4)

Esprit de Corpse – 5.1

Esprit de Corpse – 5.2

Esprit de Corpse – 5.3

Esprit de Corpse – 5.4

Esprit de Corpse – 5.5

Esprit de Corpse – 5.6

Esprit de Corpse – 5.7

Esprit de Corpse – 5.8

Esprit de Corpse – 5.9

Esprit de Corpse – 5.10

Esprit de Corpse – 5.11

Esprit de Corpse – 5.12

Esprit de Corpse – 5.13

Esprit de Corpse – 5.14

Esprit de Corpse – 5.15

Enemy (Arc 5)

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.1

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.2

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.3

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.4

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.5

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.6

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.7

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.8

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.9

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.10

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.11

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.12

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.13

Enemy (Arc 6)

Tooth and Nail – 7.1

Tooth and Nail – 7.2

Tooth and Nail – 7.3

Tooth and Nail – 7.4

Tooth and Nail – 7.5

Tooth and Nail – 7.6

Tooth and Nail – 7.7

Tooth and Nail – 7.8

Tooth and Nail – 7.9

Tooth and Nail – 7.10

Tooth and Nail – 7.11

Tooth and Nail – 7.12

Tooth and Nail – 7.13

Tooth and Nail – 7.14

Tooth and Nail – 7.15

Tooth and Nail – 7.16

Enemy (Arc 7 – Boys)

Enemy (Arc 7 – Girls)

Bleeding Edge – 8.1

Bleeding Edge – 8.2

Bleeding Edge – 8.3

Bleeding Edge – 8.4

Bleeding Edge – 8.5

Bleeding Edge – 8.6

Taking Root 1.1

How does it go?  The first lesson, something even the uninitiated know.  For life to flourish on the most basic level, it requires four elements.  Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen.

We were doing fine on that count.  The air around us was stale, but it was still oxygen.  Water ran around and below us, flowing over our bare feet, redirected from gutters to the building’s inside.

What had once been a barn had been made into a warehouse, then abandoned partway through a third set of changes.  A floor of old wooden slats reached only halfway down the length of the old building, what had once been a hayloft.  If we stood on the edge, we could look down at the floor below to see uneven floorboards on top of compacted dirt.  The original barn’s door was still there, mounted on rollers.  I leaned over to get a better look.  I could see a table, some scattered papers, books, and a blackboard.  The only light was that which came in through windows.  A scattered set placed on the upper floor, and more well above head height on the lower one.

Aside from the four of us, one other thing occupied the hayloft.  It was hard to make out in the dim light that filtered in through the window, like an eel in dark water, and if it weren’t for the fact that we’d seen it approach, we might not have noticed it at all.  Sleek, four-legged, and tall enough I couldn’t have reached its shoulder if I stood on my toes, it was wound around the pillar as a snake might be.  Unlike a snake, though, it had four long limbs, each with four long digits, tipped with claws.  Head flowed into neck, which flowed into shoulder and body without a without prominent ridge, bump, bone or muscle to interrupt the sequence.

It uncoiled, setting a claw on the floor, and the old floorboards didn’t elicit an audible creak.  Large as it was, it managed to distribute weight too evenly, and used its tail to suspend some of its weight.

It didn’t walk, but slinked, each foot falling in front of the last as it passed within three feet of us.  Its wide mouth parted, showing just a hint of narrow white teeth.

There was no cover, nothing to hide us from it.

I saw its nostrils flare.  It opened its mouth to taste the air with a flick of a thin tongue.

The way things looked, we were very close to doing the opposite of ‘flourishing’.

It was hard to put into words, but my thoughts connected with that thought, and it was funny.

I grinned, and flakes of wax fell from my face at the movement.  I watched the thing continue onward, toward the back of the hayloft, head turning as it sniffed the surroundings.  It unwound its long tail from the wooden pillar that held up the one end of the overhanging hayloft, and it moved with a slow carefulness.

I stared at its eye, and saw how it didn’t move as the head swept from one side to the next, the slit of the iris barely changing in response as the faint light from the window swept over its head.

“It’s blind,” I whispered.

The movements of the creature came to a halt.  It froze, nostrils wide.

Gordon, just to my left, put out a hand, covering my mouth.  He was tense, lines on his neck standing out.  Trying to put on a brave face, as our leader.  Gordon, strong, handsome, likeable, talented.  A veneer covered his face, as it did all of us, almost clear, cracked and white at the corners of his lips where he’d changed his expression, coming away in flakes at his hairline, where his hair was covered by the same substance.

The creature turned, and as it did its tail moved around until it touched the outside edge of the makeshift gutter that we were all standing in, fine emerald scales rasping against wood.

When Gordon whispered his response, I could barely hear him utter, “It’s not deaf.”

I nodded, and he pulled his hand away.

I had a glimpse of the girls.  Helen and Lillian.  As different as night and day.  Lillian was bent over, hood up and over her head, hiding her face, hands clutching the straps of her bag, white knuckled.  Terrified, and rightly so.  The coating on her face was flaking badly.

In contrast, Helen’s face didn’t betray a flicker of emotion.  Her golden hair, normally well cared for, cultivated into tight rolls, was damp and falling out of place.  Water ran down her face, splashing in through the side of the window where the makeshift gutter came in, and the droplets didn’t provoke one flinch or batted eyelash.  She could have been a statue, and she’d kept her face still enough that the wax that covered it hadn’t broken, which only helped the effect.

Still and silent, we watched as the creature moved to the far corner of the hayloft.

It snapped, and the four curved fangs were the only ones that were any wider than a pencil, visible for only an instant before the head disappeared into detritus piled in the corner.  A furred form struggled before the creature could raise its head.  No swallowing, per se.  Gravity did the work, as teeth parted and the prey fell down its long throat.

A second bite let it collect another, small and young enough it couldn’t even struggle.  Tiny morsels.

“Kitties,” Lillian whispered, horror overtaking fear in her expression.

Mama kitty shouldn’t have had her babies in the same building as the monster, I thought.  Wallace’s law at work.

Gordon nudged me.  He pointed.

The window.

I nodded.

The makeshift gutter was little more than a trough, with little care given for the leaks here and there, and it fed into wooden barrels at the edge of the upper floor, with more channels and troughs leading into sub-chambers and tanks below.  It had been running long enough for debris and grime to accumulate, a combination of silt and scum collecting at the very bottom to make it treacherous.  Our progress was slow, and I had to remind myself that anything faster threatened to make noise, or risked a fall.

As if to follow the thought, Lillian’s foot skidded on the bottom of the trough, and she tipped forward, straight into Helen’s arms.  The creature stopped its slow consumption of the cat’s litter.

We were frozen, waiting, while the creature sniffed the air.

It returned to its meal.

We made our way out, everyone but me flipping up their hoods to ward off the rain.  I let the droplets fall where they would, on hair that refused to be bound down beneath a thick layer of waterproofing wax.

There was no ledge outside the window, only the real gutter.  Bigger and more solid, if still treacherous with seasons of accumulated grime.  The roof loomed above us, more up than over, as barn roofs were wont to be.  Red leaves collected here and there.

“I stay,” Helen murmured.

There was no questioning it, no argument.  We couldn’t afford to make the noise, and it made a degree of sense.

“I’ll go first,” I volunteered, craning my head a bit to see the way down.  Being the sort of building it was, the barn-turned-warehouse-turned-something-else was tall, with a long way to the bottom.  The gutter pointed groundward at the corner, fixed to the brick exterior at regular points by lengths of metal.  It worked as a ladder, but not one that was fun to use.  The ‘rungs’ were too far apart, too close to the wall.

Someone grabbed my arm.  I thought it would be Gordon or Helen, as they had the personalities to be arm-grabbers.  It wasn’t.

“You go second,” Lillian whispered to me.  “I know you well enough to know that If you go before me you’ll look up my skirt.”

“Me?” I tried to sound innocent.

Gordon jabbed me.  His expression was no-nonsense, his green eyes a steely grey beneath his hood, absorbing the colors of the clouds above.  His mouth was a grim line.

“Okay,” I conceded.

“I’ll take your bag,” Gordon whispered.  Again, there was no argument.  Lillian handed over the backpack, loaded down with tools and supplies.

She accepted Gordon’s support in getting down to the downspout, and began her slow descent.

I fidgeted.  My eye traveled over our surroundings, buildings scattered like they’d been blown around by strong winds and planted where they lay.  Older structures had a charm to them, simplicity and a character that came with age and gentle wear and tear.  The oldest and the newest buildings had been shored up by strategic plant growth, branches weaving into and through damaged sections, growing to complement masonry, around bricks and supports.  The very newest growths had a characteristic red tint to the leaves.  The rest were dead, left to petrify.

The Academy loomed above it all, those same elements taken to an extreme.  It had been an old collection of buildings once.  A rush to grow and meet surging demand had led to a lot of the same haphazard growth.

It all had an odor.  There were smells that became second nature, and there were smells that were ingrained in the psyche as bad smells.  Ones that spoke of death, of long sickness, and of violence.  Rendered fat, decay, and blood.  Each were heavy on the air.

Ironic, that things so overgrown and reeking of decay were the parts of the city charged with progress.

You’d think the rain would wash away the smell.

I checked.  Lillian had moved down one rung.  I shifted my weight from one foot to the next, annoyed.

She wasn’t one of us.  She was new.  Allowances had to be made.

It wasn’t the first time I had told myself any of those things.  I’d heard it from Gordon.  It didn’t make it any less annoying.

I bent down, peering over the edge of the gutter to the road below.  I could see the windows, the boxes further down.

“Sy,” Gordon hissed the words, “What are you doing?”

Gripping the ledge, I swung myself over.

I let go, and enjoyed both the moment of utter terror and Lillian’s gasp of horror, before my fingers caught hold of the window frame below.

My right foot slipped on the damp windowsill, scraping peeling paint off and away before I brought it back up to the sill.  Water and paint flakes sprayed below.

When I looked up, Gordon’s head was poking over the edge, looking down at me.

He moved his head, and I could hear him speak, very patiently, to Lillian, “Keep going.  Don’t mind him.”

Peering in the window, I could see the interior, the lower floor.  The desk, the notes on the experiment.  Another table was heavy with lines of bottles, vials, jugs, and yet more papers, scattered.  Rain poured down on me, tracing its way down the back of my neck, beneath my shirt.  The waxed and waterproof cowl and short cloak had kept my shirt dry, and I shivered at the sensation.

I tested the window, and was utterly surprised to find it latched.  I drew a key from my pocket, trying to fit it into the gap, hoping to lift the latch, but it proved too thick.

The key went back in place.  I removed my hands from the windowsill one at a time, to dry them in my armpits and then reposition my grip.

Gripping the windowsill, I strained my body, reaching down and to the right.  The doorframe that bounded the large sliding door was just out of reach…

Holding the windowsill with my left hand, reaching with my right leg, I touched the frame with my big toe.  I found a grip, and I used it to better position myself.  Fingers dug into the space between bricks, where water had worn away mortar, and I heaved myself over, using my toes and only my toes to perch on the top of the doorway.

Were it any other door, I wouldn’t have fussed, but I was still just high enough off the ground to have cause to worry.  This had been a barn, and this door was the type that let wagons or draft horses inside.

I paused on top of the door, cleaning my hands of wet and grit.

“Watching you do that is making me nervous,” Lillian said, looking down at me.  She’d progressed two more ‘rungs’.  She was the shortest of us, next to me, it didn’t make it easier for her.

I flashed her a grin, and more of the waterproofing wax that I’d caked onto my face cracked.

I worked my way down to a crouch, still on top of the door, then slid down, draping my front against the door itself.  I let myself drop the rest of the way, landing bare-footed in mud.

I couldn’t get the smile off my face as I passed beneath the drain pipe, making a point of looking up at Lillian, who was making a point of her own in turn, glaring down at me, very clearly annoyed.

“You had an audience,” a soft voice stated.

I turned.

Amid empty crates and a door that had been taken off its hinges, jumbled together as trash and detritus, I could make out the fifth member of our contingent.  Jamie had a book in his lap, our collected boots and shoes neatly organized around him, and he had company.  A black-skinned boy with a hood and cloak far too large for him, tattered enough that it had probably been a hand-me-down for the last person to own it.  His eyes were wide.

“I thought you were keeping lookout,” I said.

“I was.”

“The whole point of being lookout is that you tell us if there’s trouble.”

“Is he trouble?”  Jamie asked.

“I’m no trouble,” the boy’s words flowed right off the back of Jamie’s, without a heartbeat of hesitation.  “The trouble is inside.”

“The snake thing,” I said.

“You saw it?” he asked.  His eyes went wider.  “Then you should know if you’re going to steal something, you shouldn’t steal from there.”

“We’re not stealing,” I said.  “We’re just looking.”

The boy didn’t respond.  He watched Lillian’s glacially slow descent.

I met Jamie’s eyes.  If it weren’t for Helen, who was a special case, I might have called Jamie the quiet one.  He wore eyeglasses, though there were all sorts of ways to fix or replace bad eyes, and his hair was long beneath his hood.  Not out of any style or affectation.  He simply never liked how it looked when it was short.  His face was narrow, his eyes large as he shifted his gaze to look from me to Lillian.  His hands held firm to a book that sat across his knees.

“Helen?” he asked.

“Stayed upstairs.”

A nod.

I wanted him to figure out how to deal with our bystander, given how he’d failed to warn us about the boy in the first place, but Jamie was silent.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Mine?”

“I know his,” I said, striving to not sound as annoyed at the question as I felt.  I pointed at Jamie to make myself as clear as possible.

“Thomas.  My friends call me Thom.”

“Did you hear about the crying man of Butcher’s Row?”

“Sly,” Jamie said, suddenly paying attention to the issue.  The name was a warning.

But Thom gave an answer, “That stitched that went crazy.  Remembered things.”

“That’s the one.  Do you remember Mother Hen?”

Thom nodded.  “That nurse who- the babies.”

He looked rather uneasy now.

“That’s right,” I said, doing my best to sound calm, reassuring.  “The nurse.  Yes.  Both got caught, right?  Everything got tied up neatly?”

“Yeah,” Thom said.  He couldn’t meet my eyes, so he focused on Lillian instead.  “The authorities from the Academy got them.”

“Exactly, Thom,” I said, “But who told the authorities?”

His eyes moved.  To me, then Jamie, to Lillian, and then the barn-turned-warehouse.

I was nodding before the word came out of his mouth.  “You.”

“You’re clever,” I praised him.

“Why?”

I made the universal gesture for money, rubbing thumb against two fingers.

“Really?”

I nodded.

The gears were shifting in his head.  Processing, calculating.

“I’ve heard things,” he said.

“I bet.”

“Useful things.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said.

“I can get money for it?  For telling people?”

“If you know who to tell, and how to sell it,” I said.

His expression changed, a frown.  Disappointment.

Tick, tick, turn turn.  The gears in his head were still moving.

He wasn’t dumb, even if he wasn’t much of an actor.  Then again, he was only ten or so.

I could guess what he was going to ask, and I knew I might lose him if I turned him down too many times.

My mind ticked over possibilities.  What I needed, what I had to do.

Before he could venture a question, I interrupted him.  “You want in?”

“In?” he asked.  Now he was wary.

I reached beneath my cloak, and I fished out a coinpurse.  Two fingers reached in, and came out fully extended, two dollars in coins pressed between the tips.

The wariness subsided.

“I’ll give you this on good faith.  Eight whole dollars if you follow through.  I need you to do something for me.”

He reached for and claimed the money without any hesitation.

“You said you had friends?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“On top of the grocer’s place. Corner of Oxbow and Halls.  Wait there.  Take turns keeping an eye out.  You’re looking for a black coach, led by two stitched horses, heading toward the Academy.  You’ll know they’re stitched because they’re wearing raincoats.  Won’t be more than two hours’ wait.”

“Uh huh?”

“There’s a rain barrel up there.  They’re going to have to stop to wait for the way to clear before they can carry on their way.  What you’re going to do is tip over the barrel.  Send water off the edge of the roof, onto the horses if you can.  Might want to prop some things up around the barrel, to make sure it happens.”

He frowned a bit.

“Ten dollars, all in all, for you and your friends, for one afternoon’s work.  Pretty good deal.  Don’t think you can do it?”

“I can do it,” Thom said.

“You sure?” I asked.

“I can do it,” he said, voice firm.

I studied him, head to toe, taking it all in.

Reaching beneath my cloak, I collected a note from a pocket.  I pressed it into his hands.

He looked down at the money, stunned.

“If you don’t follow through, you won’t get a deal like this again,” I said.  “Think hard before you try cheating me.  A big part of what we do is find people.”

Mute, he nodded.

“Go,” I said.

He went, running, feet splashing in puddles of water.

Lillian was about halfway down.

“You lied to him,” Jamie said.

“Would you rather I told the truth?” I asked.

“If you’re going to get him involved.”

I shook my head.

“Which leads me to ask… what are you up to?” Jamie asked.  “You weren’t just getting rid of him or making trouble.”

“I’m going inside,” I said, starting for the door.  “Tell the others if they’re wondering.”

“That’s not what I’m asking,” Jamie said.

But he didn’t move from his spot, and I was already gone.

I passed under Lillian a second time, peeking up her skirt a second time, more to needle her than out of any lingering curiosity.  The big door was, as it turned out, locked, and I wasn’t able to bypass the big padlock any more than I could bypass the latch of the window above.  But the door rolled on wheels, and the wheels fit in ruts, a long, shallow channel.

I headed to the end of the door opposite the lock, and I pushed the full weight of my body against it.  The lock rattled, heavy.

I tried a bit more pressure, pushing, and the door tilted, the bottom corner closest to me rising out of the channel.  Gripping the door, I lifted it up and away, wood scraping concrete as I created a triangular gap.

I slipped inside, my eyes immediately going to the hayloft, the upper floor.

Helen was there, sitting with one foot propped up, both hands in her lap to keep her skirt pressed down.  Her face was still expressionless.  Half of her attention was on me.  Half was on the creature.  There was a rain barrel beside her, rigged so it hung over the edge of the hayloft, collecting the water that ran in through the makeshift gutter, feeding a steady stream down into containers below.  Runoff from those containers fed into the corner of the building.  A drain from when the building had been a warehouse, keeping the goods dry.

I studied the papers on the desk.  Water from one of the windows above spat down.  Barely large enough to qualify as drops, but they dotted one paper, making ink bleed.  Sketches of the beast.  Notations on structure and anatomy.

One of the texts on a table beside the desk was hand-made.  Pages had holes in them, and a cord was laced through, tying them to the heavy leather cover.  With care, I paged through the thing.

One being, knit together from several.  The better traits of each, all drawn together.  References to Wollstone’s texts, to the ratios of life, and to the volumes of genetic code for Felidae and Eunectes Murinus.

A whole chapter on digestive enzymes.  Diagrams of the thing’s fangs, which I had glimpsed as it devoured the mother cat, with labels for the reservoirs of venom that wasn’t true venom.  It was enzymes, much like the ones bugs used to dissolve their meals before supping them.  Notes suggested that the feature helped with the digestion of any and all food.

Little doubt of what this thing had been engineered for.

My finger traced the labels of glass containers, bottles and vials.  Blood, bile, cerebral fluid…

Venom.  I’d expected it to be green, but it was clear, in a glass container with a murky exterior, about as tall and wide as a wine bottle, though more cylindrical.

There was a noise at the door, and I took a long step to the side, toward the shadows beside one of the big wooden containers for water.

Only Lillian, followed by Gordon, passing through the gap.  Gordon was the largest of us, and it was a particularly tight fit for him.

I continued paging through the text.

Diet.

My eye traveled down the list.  Meal times, meal sources, meal sizes.

Pig carcass.

Dog carcass.

Pig carcass.

Scavenged meal, unknown type.

Pig carcass.

Pig carcass.

Scavenged meal, dog.

It wasn’t fully grown, but it was close, and it grew fast.  Two meals a week.

I recalled that it had eaten the cat, and then looked back at the entries.

Forty pounds, sixty pounds, forty pounds, est. one hundred pounds…  I noted the numbers, and tried to find the pattern between those numbers and the meals.

I moved ahead a few pages until I reached the first partial page.  Room left for more entries.

Last meal, just over two days ago, goat carcass.  It was hungry already.  Quite possibly getting ready for one last growth spurt.  The more recent meals were larger.

Gordon was crouched, peering at labels on bottles.  He saw me looking, and tapped his nose, then pointed at the bottles

I nodded.

I tapped the book, getting his attention, and stepped away while he read the entries.

He didn’t have much of a chance to read.

There was a sound outside, violent, of things falling over.  Chaos.

I could picture Jamie’s hiding spot, the way the door had been propped up.  This was a warning.

“Hide,” Gordon whispered.

You don’t have to tell me, I thought, but I held my tongue.

Very carefully, I closed the book.  I shifted the angle to return it to the position it had been in.  My eye swept over the room.

Water on the floor.  Did it matter?

No.  There was no time, besides.

I slipped into the shadowy crevice between the water tank and the wall.  Gordon and Lillian were already gone.  Helen, who had been above, watching everything, was now gone.  No doubt hiding behind the water barrel, a step away from where she had been.

Four seconds passed before I heard the lock rattle.

The door’s wheel slammed back down into the rut as it was pulled to one side, but there was no sign of concern or suspicion.

He closed the door behind him, and the sound of something being dragged joined the sound of hard shoe soles on the wooden floor, marking his progress across his makeshift laboratory.

“Damned beast,” he muttered.  “Where are you?”

He made seemingly deliberate noise as he cleared a table, then dropped his burden on top of it.

I heard a grunt, his, and the smell of blood filled the air.

The amount of light in the room shifted.  I judged it to be the beast’s bulk blocking the light from the windows above.

“There you are,” he said.

With swift strides, he crossed to the water tank I crouched beside.  He wasted no time in dipping his hands inside, splashing water as he swished his hands inside.  Some of the water that slopped around the top of the tank splashed down on top of me.

I was close enough to touch him.

There was a scuffle and a thud as the cat-snake creature touched ground, eager to get to its meal.  Its creator was already at the desk, picking select vials, dabbing a bit on his wrist, then rubbing his wrists together.

I thought of Gordon’s gesture.  Touching his nose.

Scents?

Pheromones.

It was how he controlled the beast he had made.

I could see him as he tidied papers, only periodically glancing over his shoulder.  He hummed.  But for some stubble on his chin, he looked like a gentleman, with a four-button vest under a butcher’s apron and an ankle-length raincoat.  His hair was sandy, parted to one side.

I could see the creature raise its head.  The meal was in its mouth, and it was angling its head to let it all slide down its gullet.

Its creator used a pair of tongs to collect a bloody sack.  I took it to be the sack the creature’s meal had been in.  Another pig, perhaps.

He disappeared from view.

A rustle.

Then the tongs clanged to the floor.  The beast changed the angle of its head.

“A child?” the man’s voice was touched with incredulity.

There was a commotion, a scrape of steel on concrete as a foot dragged on the tongs.

I remained where I was.

The struggle continued, intermittent, as he backed up, the desk of papers to one side, the table of bottles to the other.  He had a carving knife to Gordon’s throat.  Presumably the same one he’d used to cut open the creature’s meal and get its attention.

“Two of you.  Are there more?”

Gordon was silent.

“I’m asking you!” the man was angry, outraged.  “Are there more?  Girl!  How many?  Tell me or I cut him!”

“A few,” Lillian said.  “Four.”

“The noise outside.  That was one?”

“Five, if you count him,” she said, her voice small.

“Do not play games with me!” the man roared.  “Show yourselves!  Each of you!”

I exhaled slowly.

I stepped out of the gap by the water tank.

Helen was above, at the hayloft.  Standing by the edge.  Lillian was closer to the door.  She and Gordon had been hiding in or near a garbage bin.

The beast was relaxed, having just eaten its fill.

“Children?” the man sounded incredulous.

He wasn’t wrong.  At thirteen, Lillian was the oldest of us.  Gordon was only twelve as of last month.

“Yeah,” Gordon said, his voice strained.  The man had his throat caught in the crook of one arm, exposing his lower throat.

“An infestation,” the man said.  “My experiment didn’t root you out?”

His eye traveled over each of us in turn.  I saw the faintest crease appear between his eyebrows.

He seemed to come to a realization.  “You’ve covered yourself in something.  So it can’t smell you.  This was premeditated.”

I met Lillian’s eyes.  I jerked my chin.  Pointed at her with my hand.

The easy, natural interactions and cooperation that followed from years of working together weren’t there with Lil.  She was new.  A recent addition to the group.

I almost thought she got the wrong idea, until she opened her mouth.

“Yes,” she said.  “We… heard about you.”

“Heard what?”

“That there was something loose in the slums.  It was eating pets.  It ate a man that was sleeping outside.”

“No,” the man said.

“Yes,” Lillian said.  “There are witnesses.”

“The witnesses are wrong,” the man said.

“You let it go out to find its own food,” Gordon said, his voice still strangled.  “You couldn’t afford to keep it fed as it grew this large.  You let it feed on strays.  Which it did.  Except one of those strays was human.  It’s in the book.  Meal, unknown type.”

I edged around behind the man.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.  I’ve studied its leavings,” the man said, ignoring the label.  “Nothing human.”

“Nothing conclusively human, you mean,” Gordon said.  “But you aren’t able to identify all of what it ate.”

“You!”  The man raised his voice.  He sounded more emotional than before.  “Up there!  Girl!  Stay put.”

Helen froze where she was.

“You’re a killer,” Gordon said, more insistent.  “We were calling you the snake charmer.”

I edged closer to the table.

I didn’t make a sound, but the snake charmer sensed trouble before it arrived.  He wheeled on me, the knife dangerously close to Gordon’s throat.

I lunged in the same movement, seizing the big bottle.  The venom.  I held it high.

“You don’t care what happens to him?” the snake charmer asked.

“I care,” I said.  “That’s why, if you cut him, and if it looks like he isn’t going to be okay, I’m going to throw this at the both of you.”

The snake charmer’s eyes darted around.  He couldn’t watch all of us at once.

“Move!” he said.  “Go around.  I want you as a group.”

I didn’t budge.

“Move!”

“No,” I said.

“It’s over, snake charmer,” Gordon said.

“That is not my name!”

“It’s a name they’ll give you,” Gordon said.  “They’ll make you a monster.  It’s what the Academy does.  Dehumanizes the dangerous ones.  You can’t get all of us, not with the way things are, here.  Some are bound to escape.  They’ll tell people, and those people will find you.  You know the resources the Academy has.”

“No,” the snake charmer said.

“You don’t know?” Gordon asked.

“This is not my fault,” the snake charmer said.  “The Academy… this rests on their shoulders, not mine.  You can’t enroll without showing your skill, and you can’t show your skill without experimenting, but oh, no, they don’t allow that, do they?”

“There are ways,” Lillian said.

“No!” the man barked, “No!  Not nearly enough.  The world is changing, and they’re deciding the course.  They’re putting us in this situation, where risks have to be taken.  Gambles have to be made, or history will continue to be made, names attached to great discoveries, and the rest of us?  If we’re lucky, we get left by the wayside.  If we’re not, we’re just fuel for what they’re setting in motion.”

“I’m a student there,” Lillian said.  “I just started, but… I’m enrolled.  First year of study.  Not them.  Just me.”

I could see the man’s expression twist.  Incomprehension.  Comprehension, which was almost worse.  Hatred for a thirteen year old girl.

Then rage, not a clean, pure kind, but one that only drove him further into a corner.

His hand tightened on the grip of the knife.

I figured out the destination he was arriving at before he did.

I arrived at my own, and I mustered up some courage.

Very deliberately, I grunted, heaving the bottle of acid at the snake charmer.

He heard the grunt, but so did Gordon.  With the snake charmer’s attention caught between Lillian and me, Gordon found a chance to protect his throat, keeping the knife from cutting.

The bottle flew lazily through the air.  Gordon ducked, head down, and the snake charmer released him.

The man caught the bottle in a bear hug.

He stared down at the container.

All the same emotions he’d felt for Lillian, now aimed at me, progressing much faster this time.  Incomprehension, comprehension, hatred, rage.

Directed at me.

I backed away, stumbling, falling.  I covered my face as he swung, using the waterproof cloth to try and shield my body.

He didn’t throw at me, but at the floor.  The chance of me catching it was small, but by throwing it at the floor, he could guarantee that the bottle would shatter into a spray I couldn’t possibly shield all of myself from.

The pain was sharp, at first, droplets touching skin, immediately breaking it down.  Then it burned.

The horrible coldness was worse, because it suggested dying nerves.  All down my arms, and one side of my face.

I screamed.

The creature turned its head, but didn’t move.

The man turned, wheeling on the others.  Gordon was ready, already closing in, taking advantage of the short moment it took the snake charmer to adjust his grip on the knife, so soon after heaving the bottle.

A tackle, shoulder into the man’s gut, taking advantage of smaller size and a good physique.  Gordon drove the man back.

Gordon was the hero, golden haired, noble, likeable.  Talented.

When he broke away, letting the snake charmer stumble back two steps, recovering balance, Gordon had the knife in hand.

The beast rose to its feet.  Sniffing.

I managed to stop screaming, going as still as possible.

It still edged closer to me.  Interested.

Still hungry,  I noted.

Helen acted.  Tipping over the barrel.

Drenching the snake charmer, washing away his charm, the pheromones.

“Brats!” the snake charmer spat the word.  “You little shits!  You think you have control of this situation?”

“Your experiment is trying to decide between you and Sylvester over there,” Gordon said.  “You smell, he’s bleeding.  Both are tempting.”

The snake charmer made an incoherent noise.

“Thing is, if you start bleeding…” Gordon said, trailing off.  “You’ll suddenly be a lot more tempting.”

“Try it,” the snake charmer said.

Gordon did.  He approached, and the snake charmer tried to grab him.

The man’s hands only grabbed clothes.  A hood and cloak meant to keep the rain off.  Gordon let him, and ducked low, the clothing bunching up around his neck and upper chest.

Gordon sliced the snake charmer’s stomach.  A shallow cut.

Another grab, wrestling Gordon, trying to overpower with strength, seizing one arm.

Gordon let the knife drop out of one hand, falling into the palm of another.

He cut the back of the man’s left knee.  When the man fell, screaming, Gordon cut the other knee.  He skipped back as the snake charmer fell.

The snake stirred, its attention no longer predominantly on me.

I could see the snake charmer realizing the same thing I had minutes ago.  He knew his experiment.  He knew how it hunted.  It scavenged, sniffing out prey.  Blind, it reacted to noise and smell.  Minimizing the noise one made was vital.

Given the situation, however, staying silent spelled the man’s doom.  Already, his creation was sniffing him out.  He smelled of blood.

“Pheromones,” he said, knowing how dangerous it was to speak, that every sound helped him lose the tug of war that let the creature decide between devouring him and devouring me.  “Let me- I’ll come with you.  You can take me in.  You win.”

Nobody moved or responded.

He used his arms to pull himself forward, progressing toward the table.  Each motion drew more attention from his beast.

Foot by foot, he closed on the table, and each sound was akin to a fisherman’s line, reeling in the beast.

He reached the table, struggling, and he raised himself up, using one hand to drag a leg forward, propping it under him.  Reaching across the table-

Gordon kicked the leg of the table, hard.  The table shifted a foot, and the snake charmer collapsed.

“No.  Please.”

The snake charmer looked at us.  At Gordon, then Helen, who loomed above, perched on the hayloft.  At me, as I glared at him, my face burned.  At Lillian, who was sitting in the corner, hands over her head.

Who was not one of us.

“Please,” he said.  “Not like this.”

Helen’s expression didn’t change.  Gordon shifted his position, placing himself between the snake charmer and the table, arms folded.  I remained where I was, limp and breathing hard.

I could see it dawn on the man.  Comprehension settling in as he realized what he was dealing with.

The snake seized the man’s feet, and began the very slow process of swallowing him.

The snake charmer’s screams became frantic.

“Lillian,” Gordon said, raising his voice to be heard over the screams.

“I don’t want to see.”

“Then shield your eyes.  But your job is to keep us in one piece.  Sly is hurt.  Focus, and make sure he doesn’t die.”

I felt the burning stop as Lillian tended to me.  By the time she was done, the screams had stopped.  The powder that dusted me made it hard to see, but that was fine.  I was lifted to my feet.

“I have to say, I’m very interested in what the fuck you were doing, faking that fall, setting yourself up to get hurt just now,” Gordon said.  “You’ll have to tell me later, when you can talk again.”

I managed a nod.

“Off we go,” he said.

I could hear the door open.

Helen spoke for the first time in a while.  Her voice was cute.  “The Academy sends its regards, Mr. Snake Charmer.”

Taking Root 1.2

Gordon had one arm, while Lillian was dividing her focus between supporting my other arm, keeping us moving and trying to examine me.  It made for some uncomfortable stumbling and fumbling around, including some grazing touches of the burns, but I didn’t want her to stop doing any of it.  I bit my tongue and inside cheek and endured it, blinking my eyes to try to generate the tears I needed to clear my vision.  I was mostly effective.

Jamie was waiting outside, his book under one arm, our shoes and boots in the other hand.  All the laces had been tied together, making for only one knot that he had to hold to carry them all.

The bundle dropped from his fingers and landed in a puddle.  I spotted my left shoe, on its side in the puddle.

“You’re hurt!” Jamie said.

“You just got my shoe wet,” I said.  I started to point, then winced as skin pulled where the enzymes had eaten away a spot on my arm.  I held back a cry of pain.  My arms had taken the brunt of it.  There wasn’t a spot on the back of my arms where I could have laid a hand flat without touching something the enzymes had devoured.  Some of the burns eclipsed my hands in size, and my arms weren’t large.  My skin looked like a sock that was as much holes as it was fabric, and the flesh beneath was angry, a scalded red, with blood seeping out from crevices.

More burns on a similar scale speckled my neck, one cheek, my side, my legs, and one foot.  My clothes had absorbed the worst of it, elsewhere, only droplets reaching through.

“I saw through the window, but I didn’t realize how bad it was,” Jamie said.  “I thought you all had everything in hand, but then Sy fell, and I wasn’t sure if I should go for help-”

“My shoe,” I commented, managing to point this time around.  Fixating on one thing made it easier to handle the pain.  The wounds themselves didn’t hurt, but the edges burned like fire.

“Sy didn’t fall.  He took a fall.  Wording,” Gordon said.

Jamie’s expression switched from confusion to an accusing glance.  Thinking that Gordon might be wrong didn’t even cross his mind.

“Why?” Jamie asked.  “You got yourself badly hurt, you twit.”

“Did I?” I tried to exaggerate the surprise in my voice, and all the pain-relief chemicals that my body was dosing me with made me sound even more exaggerated, my voice almost breaking.  I added some sarcasm for good measure, “Oh.  I hadn’t noticed.  Thank you.”

Lillian spoke up, “It’s nothing too dangerous.  I don’t like some of these spots on your side, but I don’t think you’re going to die from it.  Not soon.”

“Not soon.  That’s the best we can hope for,” I said.

Jamie looked closer at one of the wounds.  With Gordon still supporting me and both Jamie and Lillian fussing, there were a few more accidental touches of the burns.  One of the touches didn’t actually hurt so much, but I played it up, flinching and letting a gasp out, if only to get them to stop.

“Don’t let him distract you,” Gordon said.  “He’s trying to dodge the ‘why’ question.”

“I’m trying to hurry this along,” I said.  “Priorities.  Can I get medical attention?  Pretty please?”

“Still dodging the question,” Gordon observed.

“Let’s go,” I said.  “Wait.  Jamie needs to pick up my shoe, which is getting soaked through, then we can go.  Maybe since Jamie won’t stop touching me to make sure I’m okay, Jamie and Lillian can make sure I walk okay?”

Gordon looked me over, suspicious.  “You’ll tell us on the way, then?”

“Assuming there’s something to tell,” I said.  I felt the burning at my wrist get worse, and my little noise of pain wasn’t intentional.  I reached for my wrist, and Lillian slapped my hand away like I was a kid going for the cookie jar.  For her benefit, I said, “Hurts.”

“Good,” she said, sounding like a cross between the bossy older sister and a schoolteacher.  “Maybe you won’t do that again.”

She wiped at my arm, clearing away blood where it had welled out from the center of the burn.  Where the blood had run through the edges of the scar, the trickle had left a faint pink line.  Spreading the enzyme around.

“Sy,” Gordon said.

“Gordon,” I cut him off.

There was a pause.  I hesitated to call it tension.  He wanted me to come to my senses, I wanted to wait long enough for his concern for my well being to override his curiosity, which was bound to happen sooner or later.  Tension implied something being stretched to a limit, but we were both being patient.

I felt the burning sensation at my side getting worse.  From a six to a seven on the scale, and I was the one who caved, in the end.

“I promise I’ll tell you after,” I said.

He seemed to consider, rolling his head to one side, then the other.

“Fine.  Jamie, take over?” Gordon said.  “Seems to want you for some reason.”

“Jamie is shorter, I don’t have to stand on my tip toes while he’s holding me up,” I explained.

Gordon transferred his hold on me to Jamie, who had to transfer his hold on his book to the other arm.

“And he’s nicer,” I added.  Jamie rolled his eyes.

“Did you lock the windows?” Gordon asked, ignoring me.  The question was aimed at Helen, who had emerged from the door behind us.

I turned my head to see Helen’s nod.  She and Gordon worked to slide the door closed.  The movement of the wheel through the rut spat water at our legs.

“Let’s hope it stays put,” Gordon said.

“I thought we decided that it wouldn’t go anywhere after eating,” Lillian said.  “Carnivore eating habits.  Hunt or scavenge, eat, rest, rouse, repeat.”

“It was hungry enough to eat two meals.  Probably going through a final growth spurt,” I said.  “Let’s not rule anything out.”

“Okay,” Lillian said, right beside me, and I was genuinely surprised at the note of anxiety in her voice, how it had cut the word short.  “We can leave now.”

Very nearly but not a question.  A plea?

I suspected it was fear, but that suspicion sat askew in my head.  Lillian had experience with that stuff.  She’d had hands on experience with creatures and experiments at the Academy.  More restrained than that one had been, but the idea of the unrestrained experiment wasn’t enough to justify the thought.  It was probably well fed enough that it would ignore any meal that didn’t walk right into its open mouth.

Or lay there struggling as the snake charmer had.

There we are, I thought.  The snake charmer.  I could remember Lillian shielding her eyes.  The anxiety had more to do with the reminder of the man and the way he’d left this world.  If he had left it.  There was a chance he was still in there, alive and slowly dissolving.

Gordon had collected the bundle of shoes but hadn’t handed them out.  Which was fine.  My feet were muddy, and I had a burn on the top of my foot that would have made wearing the shoes hard.  The burn announced its presence every time I stepped in a puddle.

It wasn’t a particularly short walk back, and I was content to keep my mouth shut.  If I started talking, I might have started grunting or making noises in response to the pain.  If I started whimpering, then Gordon might have started reminding me that I’d done this to myself.

Instead, I focused on the future.  The snake charmer had been handled.  Were questions possible?  What about my injuries?

“We’re close to King,” Jamie said, interrupting my thoughts.  I realized Helen and Gordon were talking, with Gordon doing the lion’s share.  I’d tuned it out.

“Yeah,” I noted.

“Busy street means head down,” Jamie said, very patient.  He tugged on the front of my hood, so it could shroud my face in shadow.  “Hood down.  We don’t want your face to scare the locals any more than usual.”

I couldn’t help but smile wide at that.

The main street was framed on both sides by taller buildings, a great many of them being apartments.  People sat on steps beneath the overhang of their porches, smoking, and the occasional light glowed from within rooms above.

The plant growth that supported the structures reached overhead to meet and mesh.  An arch, to introduce us to the main street proper.  King Street.  It was a thick crowd, even in the late afternoon, the sun setting.  Men and women in raincoats, with umbrellas, walking on either side of the road.

Lillian and Jamie stopped supporting me quite so much.  I started to teeter over a bit, and Jamie caught me at roughly the same point I stuck a leg out to catch my balance myself.  I hadn’t realized how heavily I’d been leaning on the others, or how dizzy I felt.

Horses pulling coaches outnumbered cars at a nine to one ratio.  Of those horses drawing coaches, only one in five were truly alive.  The remainder were stitched, their hides patchwork, seams joined by thick black thread or by metal staples with burns where they touched flesh.  Were I able to see beneath the heavy raincoats, I would have seen the thick metal bolts that had been screwed into points down their spines.

Live horses were an affectation, really.  There was a convenience to them, as they didn’t suffer from the water in this city where it always rained, they could be taken out hunting, and they had personalities.  A horse could be a member of one’s family.  There was a lot to like.

But the stitched horses, voltaic horses if you asked someone who knew what they were talking about, they were cheap, they didn’t get tired, and rather than food, they could be kept going by connecting wires to the bolts on their backs and waiting.  When a stitched horse had done its work for the day, it could be placed in what amounted to a long closet.

There were no rules for the road, but everyone found their way.  Most people here knew most others.  A lack of courtesy today could be paid by a lack of cooperation from others tomorrow.  That wasn’t to say there weren’t idiots or disagreeable types who others paid no mind to, but it largely worked.

Like the branches and plant growth, it amounted to a planned chaos.  The exact shape and character of branches couldn’t be decided in advance, but the key elements were given attention, the problematic ones pruned.  The squat apartment buildings didn’t have room for even stitched horses, which meant every essential service had been put within walking distance.  Pubs, grocers, tailors, barbers and the like.

I raised my eyes.  Looking down the length of King, I could see it rise at a gradual incline, until it touched the perimeter of the Academy itself.  Radham Academy, to be specific.  All things flowed from it, all things flowed to it.  I imagined the same went for any Academy.  Stick one somewhere, and people would collect to it like flies to a carcass.  The advances and work that went hand in hand with an Academy would bleed out in a very similar way.  First to the city as a whole, then to surrounding regions.

Jamie grabbed the tip of my hood and tugged down, forcing me to look at the ground in front of me.  I’d been showing too much of my face.

We moved as a huddle, and with our heads down and hoods up, we weren’t much different from half of the streets’ occupants.  My burns didn’t earn me a second glance, because I scarcely warranted a first one.  I suspected that Gordon had chosen where he stood with the idea of shielding me from others’ sight, for added assurance.

I liked the thought.  It made me wonder if any other people in the crowd were in similar straits.

Ahead of us, a large shape loomed.  It looked like the offspring of a deer or rabbit might, if their offspring was squeezed out too early.  No larger than one of the cars on the street, it was pink, with stretched skin, the translucent eyelids appearing bruised with how they let some of the darkness of the black eyeballs beneath leak through.  Its head sat crooked, forcing it to see the way forward with only one of its two wide set eyes.  Its mouth hung open.

Most prominent, however, were the legs.  Not much thicker around than my leg, half again as long as the tallest man on the sidewalk was tall, the four legs ended in points, a single claw to each leg.  Saddlebags were strapped to saddlebags to form chains that draped the thing like a peculiar sort of jewelry.

As the coaches and cars on the road made way and cooperated, so did the people on the sidewalk.  This however, was motivated by discomfort and fear.  Men and women gave the thing almost the entire sidewalk to itself.

A woman led it on a fine chain, holding an umbrella overhead, though the creature’s mass already helped shelter her from the rain.  She was barely entering into her twilight years, but only the pale color of her once-blonde hair suggested as much.  Her face and body were young, and her clothes looked expensive, though they tended toward the simple.

I very nearly tipped over again, as Jamie let go of me and stepped forward to obscure the woman’s view of me.

Feeling as wobbly as I did was more than a little concerning, and a delay was the last thing I wanted.

“Hello Mrs. Thetford,” Helen greeted the woman, smiling.

“Helen,” Mrs. Thetford said, tugging on the chain to make her packbeast stop in its tracks.  Her expression changed from an easy smile to shock.  “Look at you!  You look like something the cat dragged in!”

How apt, I thought.

“It’s Sylvester’s fault,” Helen said.  “He pushed me and I got wet.”

Of course she invents a lie that makes me look bad.  I made a point of hanging my head, to better conceal my injuries.  I could see the crowd passing around and to either side of us.

“Sylvester, for shame,” Mrs. Thetford said, and she used my name as a rebuke, and the way she said ‘shame’ even made me feel a bit abashed over the deed I hadn’t committed.  “You really should be nicer to girls.”

“He really should,” Helen said, and her tone was perfect.  Just a little bit smug, chiding, but not so much of either that Mrs. Thetford would think less of her.

“And you,” Mrs. Thetford said, reaching under Helen’s hood to comb Helen’s hair back with long fingernails.  “You should give some thought to keeping better company.  I know you’re loyal to your so-called brothers and sisters, but you could do so well if you devoted some time to others.  Your caregivers have very nearly polished you into a diamond, and it would warm my heart to see you finish the transformation.”

“Thank you, Ma’am,” Helen said, smiling, pretending to be a little shy.  Not a lot, but enough to be humble.  “It means a lot that you think so well of me.”

“If you decide that you would like to become more of a lady, I would be more than happy to introduce you to some people who could teach you the finer points.  Music, dancing, etiquette.  The same goes for you, Gordon.  You’re evidence that Helen here isn’t a simple fluke.  It would take more doing, but I think we could turn you into a proper gentleman with some tutoring.”

“I might take you up on that offer, ma’am,” Gordon said.

“Do!  You should,” the older woman said.  She brushed Helen’s cheek with her fingers.  “You’re a dear.  I would have you for myself, if I hadn’t already had my fill of raising children.”

“For now, if it’s alright, I’ll have to content myself with getting home before it’s dark.  I’m looking forward to getting dry again,” Helen said, sticking me with a look.

“Of course!  Now I feel bad for keeping you.  You know where to find me if you would like those lessons.”

We hurried on.  Rather than take the long route around to the sides, we passed under and between the legs of the packbeast that was carrying Mrs. Thetford’s shopping.

By the time we’d flowed back into the crowd, almost invisible, Helen’s expression had gone flat again, her eyes cold.  The smile was gone.

She saw me looking.

“Are you upset?” she asked.

“Why would I be upset?”

“I blamed you.”

“I always get blamed.  I’m used to it.”

She seemed to take that at face value.

I might have pursued conversation, but it would have been purely for self gratification, and I was feeling less and less like talking.  My brain had apparently decided that the easiest way to handle what I was feeling was to declare that all of me hurt, and certain parts of me hurt enough that I was reconsidering my ‘one to ten’ scale of pain.  If I focused on any one part of me too much, it quickened.

All of that in mind, I was very glad to see the orphanage.

The building was perched in an odd spot, beside a creek and a stone bridge that was thick with grown-in vegetation. The land by the riverbed was stony, uneven, and threatened to be damp, discouraging building efforts, but the building itself had been here long before the Academy, serving as a home for shepherds when Radham had only been a few buildings set around a crossroads.

That it had withstood the test of time was either pure luck, or the person who had mortared the stones together had known what they were doing.

One floor tall, with a stone exterior, it lacked the reinforcing growths that marked so many nearby structures.  The only wood came from a tree in the backyard.  A short stone wall encircled the property, only three feet tall, and the height both served as a way of keeping the smallest children on the property and was paradoxically welcoming.  I couldn’t approach it without wanting to hop up onto it.

Toward the back of the property, I could see that Ralph Stein was in the process of walking the top of the wall.  The route went from the right side of the gate, over to the right of the house, alongside the riverbank, around the back of the house, under the tricky bit where the tree’s branches hung over, up the left side of the house, and then over to the left side of the gate.  All on the weather-rounded, uneven stones that made up the wall’s top, virtually always in the rain.

My focus wasn’t on that.

My focus was on the black coach parked to the left of the house, beneath the overhang in the roof.  The horses were wearing black raincoats, utterly still.  Their driver stood beside them, smoking.

My eye didn’t leave them as we made our way down the steps that had been set into the slope.  Each one of the stone stairs had seen enough traffic and years that they’d been reshaped, as if buckling faintly under thousands of footfalls.

Gordon pushed open the door.  Lillian and Jamie helped me through.

We stopped in our tracks at the sight of a man in the front hallway.

If it had a brain and a nervous system, the parts could be used for making a stitch, or voltaic creature.  The quality of that stitched was indicated by the placement of the stitches that gave them their name.  Poorer work or a stitched that had been ‘repaired’ often involved joins in visible or inconvenient places.  Across the face, or across the joints, where they interfered with function.  A good stitch had the joins and scars kept just out of sight, under the chin, or in places where clothes could cover the work.

The figure that stood guard by the door was the most human-like stitched I’d ever seen.  Tall, broad-shouldered, the parts had been selected for size and raw power.  But for stitches visible just past the cuffs of his jacket, I might not have known.  He wore a suit under a hooded raincoat and carried a pistol at his hip.

He was, in two short words, a problem.

I smelled tea, and I heard very little commotion.  If I hadn’t seen the coach outside, I could have put two and two together to figure out that we had a guest.

“That would be the children,” Mrs. Earles said.

The others properly put away hoods, cloaks, shoes and boots before toweling their feet to a reasonable state of clean and dry.  Lillian bent down and had me lift up my feet one by one to dry them.

“Thank you,” I murmured.

“It’s what I’m here for,” she murmured back.

One by one, we headed around the corner from the front hall, into the sitting room.  The room itself had homey touches, and was very much Mrs. Earles.  It was her perch in the evenings, the part she made her home.  The knick-knacks and decorative carvings, still, were placed well out of reach of errant hands, on the mantlepiece above the blazing fireplace and on various shelves and bookshelves.

My eyes scanned the shelves and bookshelves.  Searching.

Mrs. Earles didn’t give off the image of someone who ran an orphanage.  She’d struck me more as the assistant to that sort of someone.  Managing one child had a way of turning women into mothers, wearing away at certain things while exaggerating others.  Even with help, managing sixteen should have pushed her to an extreme in some respect.  Something in the vein of a tyrant or a defeated woman, a woman who turned to vice to escape stresses, or a saint.  But she wasn’t any of those things.

A part of me wanted to think of her as a mother, but she wasn’t.  She didn’t pretend to be.  She ran Lambsbridge, she kept us fed and sheltered, and she was quick to use the threat of a smack to keep us in line.  Even though I’d been a recipient more than once, I could appreciate that she didn’t hesitate in that respect.  I had to live with fifteen others, and if they were allowed to run rampant, I faced more grief than I did dealing with the occasional rap to the knuckles.

Mr. Hayle, by that same token, was almost but not quite my father.

He frowned as he saw me, immediately taking in details that more than a hundred people in the busier part of the city had failed to spot.

“I’ll make sure you don’t have eavesdroppers,” Mrs. Earles said, disappearing.

“Thank you,” Mr. Hayle said, without turning to look at her.

We stood in the entry to the sitting room, while he examined each of us, silent.

He was an older man.  Sixty or so, as far as anyone’s age could be pinned down with certainty.  He hadn’t prettied himself up or taken advantage of Radham Academy’s resources to remove wrinkles or revitalize his hair.  His hair was grey and waxed back away from his face, and his wrinkles cut so deep into his face that I could have imagined them as cross-hatching done with a scalpel.  He wore a doctor’s coat indoors, the fabric thick, dyed black so that it wouldn’t show any blood stains.  His gloves had been pulled off, and the ends were sticking out of one pocket.  A collection of files were already tucked under one arm.

“The other children are accounted for.  I’ll be in the kitchen, where I can intercept anyone coming your way,” Mrs. Earles said.

“Thank you,” he said.

She retreated, leaving us alone.

“I was planning on a longer meeting,” Mr. Hayle said.  “To look at Sylvester, he might not be able to stand for the duration.  Is he stable?”

“I’m stable,” I said, at the same time Lillian said, “He is.”

Mr. Hayle frowned.  “What happened to you?  No.  Hold off on that.  If you’re stable, let’s cover the essentials.  Tell me, how was it?”

Gordon answered.  “Our target’s second experiment is in one of the warehouses, off to the southeast of King.  Sleeping off a meal, we’re hoping.  It’s there, with all of the notes.  As for the target, he’s…”

“In his experiment,” I said, managing a smile.

Mr. Hayle didn’t smile back.  “I don’t understand.  Clarify?”

“Dead,” Gordon said.  “Swallowed.”

“Complications?”

We collectively uttered a chorus of ‘nos’ and shook our heads.  I glanced at the back of Jamie’s head, saw the faintest hesitation before he joined us in shaking his head.

“What happened to Sylvester?”

“The snake charm- ah, our target, he arrived, forcing us to hide.  He found me in my hiding spot, purely by chance, and took me hostage.  Sylvester distracted him, and was splashed with-”

“Enzymes,” I said.

“Splashed with enzymes, during the altercation that followed.”

“I did what I could,” Lillian said, “Neutralized the spread with counteragents our target had on hand.”

Mr. Hayle nodded.  “Good.  Lillian, I believe this marks your third assignment with the group?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you do another?”

I didn’t miss the hesitation on Lillian’s part.

I tried to view things through her eyes.  Seeing the man get swallowed.  The horror.

“I would, sir,” she decided.

“Good.  You’ll continue to have my support at the Academy, then.  If you don’t find all doors are open and all resources available to you, let me know.  Your tuition will continue to be waived.”

“Thank you sir.”

“That takes care of the, ah, what did you call him?  The snake charmer?  Now, unless there’s anything else, I should look after Sylvester there.”

There was a jumble of ‘no sir’s from the others.

He crossed the room, and the others were quick to get out of his way.  I used the opportunity to move to one side, further into the sitting room, and scanned the shelves.

There.

Mrs. Earles didn’t keep matches close to the fireplace, and she didn’t keep them where the smaller children could get them.

Even for me, it would require that I stand on my toes and reach high overhead.

The problems that came with being small.

Mr. Hayle was talking while he found and put on his boots.  “I do want to have a longer discussion.  I’ll need to rearrange my evening, which will take me at least an hour.  Add the time it takes to deliver Sylvester… hm, it would be late.  Too late?”

“The younger children will be in bed.  I could ask Mrs. Earles,” Gordon said.

“No.  I’ll be by in the morning.  I only considered tonight because I thought you’d want to know how Sylvester was.  I can send someone your way, if you’re willing to keep an eye out the window for them.  A quiet, short visit to pass on word.”

“Please, sir,” Gordon said, sounding far more solemn than I’d have expected.

“I’ll see to it.  Thank you for another job well done.  Sylvester?”

I was out of time.

With a wall between myself and Mr. Hayle, each of the others positioned to see, I reached up to the shelf, and felt my burns stretch, eliciting a tearing sensation, and a fresh renewal of pain.

I closed my fingers around the matchbook, then collapsed against the wall, panting.

“Problem?”

“Moved too fast,” I said.

Mr. Hayle gave me a sincere look of concern as he did up the buttons of his coat and took his umbrella from his stitched bodyguard.

“Let’s get you looked after,” he said.  He paused.  “No shoes?”

“Burn on my foot,” I said.

“Carry on, then.”

I discovered that stopping and then moving again was quite possibly the worst thing I could have done.  Every burn felt fresh.  The movement of my arm was the worst of it.  The stitched bodyguard helped me, even going so far as to lift me bodily to my seat.  All the same, by the time we reached the coach, I was sweating bullets from pain alone.

The coach’s interior was red, the windows stained to reduce the light that came in, and something that looked like a glowing orange minnow swam in a bowl overhead, casting light on the interior.

The driver steered the stitched horses around.  Before long, we were on King Street, heading for the Academy.

“It’s rare that I have a chance to talk with one of you,” Mr. Hayle said.  “Can I see your arm?”

I offered it.  He probed the edges of the injury.

“I suspect you’ll resist, out of loyalty to your… brothers and sisters?  Is that how you think of them?”

“Friends.  Gang,” I said.  I swallowed hard.  “Sometimes I think of them as siblings.  What am I resisting?”

“Giving me information.  Can you tell me if they’re doing alright?”

“Yes,” I said.  “They’re doing everything they’re supposed to do.”

“Is that so?  Something tells me you wouldn’t tell me if they weren’t.”

I smiled a little.  “What makes you think that?”

“I’ve watched you grow up these past few years.  I’d like to think I know you.”

I nodded.  I forbade myself from looking outside the window.

“Not up to talking?”

“Not sure what to say, sir.”

“Tell me about the snake charmer.”

“Yes sir.  Um-”

A crash shook the coach.

I could hear shouts.  Mr. Hayle’s coach came to an awkward stop, lurching, then jerking to the left before finally going still.

He twisted in his seat, and slid a panel to one side.  “John?”

There was a pause.  The driver replied, “Water.  Knocked me off my seat.  One of the voltaic horses got drenched.  It’s gone quiet.”

“Water?”  Mr. Hayle asked.  He frowned.  “I’ll be right out.”

I remained where I was, very much in pain after the sudden movements.

“Douglas,” Mr. Hayle said.  “Look after Sylvester.  Be ready to come outside at a moment’s notice.”

“I understand,” Douglas said, the words clumsy in a way that was hard to define.  Too precise, the local accent rounded off at the edges.  I suspected it would be worse if it was a more unfamiliar phrase.

The door of the coach closed.

One, two, three.

I forced myself to sit up.

I opened my eyes.

Naturally, going outside, Mr. Hayle hadn’t taken his paperwork.

When problem solving, the simplest answer shouldn’t be discounted.

I reached for the files.

The bodyguard reached out, blocking my hand with his.

“That is not yours,” he said.  The words were clumsier than his ‘I understand.’

If it was a human bodyguard, and not one that had died and been reanimated, rendered very simple and loyal in operation, I suspected I could have manipulated him or sent him out of the coach.

Stitched were easier in some ways, harder in others.

I pulled the matches out of my pocket.

I struck it.

He didn’t flinch.

I blinked.

Reduced to very primal, simple function, they were supposed to have reactions to fire.  Nine times out of ten, it was fear.  One time out of ten, it was violent and destructive rage.

The quality of this stitched was top notch.  Had Mr. Hayle or the person he bought the stitched from somehow solved the problem?

“Put that out,” the stitched told me.

I reached out, bringing the match closer to him.

He didn’t move.

“Put that out,” he said, more firmly.

I moved my hand, and he remained where he was.

No, the problem hadn’t been fixed.  But they’d found a step forward.

He was frozen.

I’d hoped to distract and disturb him enough that he’d forget his instructions and let me snatch up the files.  This, however, worked.  Still holding the match up, the whole of his attention focused on it, I grabbed the stack of folders.

I returned to my seat.

Before I could open the folders, the door opened.

Mr. Hayle studied me, his expression blank.

I froze, caught red handed.  Well, the red hand was the burn, but-

“And it all makes sense,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Sylvester,” he said, climbing up into the coach and taking his seat, “You know why I made you.”

“Yes sir.”

“Each of you.  My colleagues in other departments have made weapons, monsters, they’ve made viruses and more, with the understanding that there may very well be a need for these weapons.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“My focus, as you very well know, is on,” he reached over, and he tapped me on the forehead.  “The brain.”

“And I was dumb just now,” I said.  “Failed project?”

“No,” he said.  “No.  I made you.  Like I said, I know you.”

“If it helps, I’m starting to believe you, sir.”

“It would be stupid of me to make you for a purpose and not expect you to fulfill that purpose.  Mistakes here and there are to be expected, and your mistake here was expecting me to be dumb.  You’re still developing, and each of you are still being refined in your own ways.”

I nodded.

“Why didn’t you ask for the files?” he asked me.

“Because you might have said no, and you would have known I wanted them,” I said.  “And because I think people are more genuine when you catch them off balance.”

He nodded.

“Something to keep in mind,” he said.  “And I suppose I’m getting too predictable, if you were able to arrange this.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Take a look,” he said.

For a telling second, I thought the files would be empty, that he might have checkmated me.

But I paged through them, and I found them filled with pages of data, notes, design, and more.

Helen, project Galatea.

Jamie, project Caterpillar.

Gordon, project Griffon.

Sylvester, project Wyvern

I found the fourth file.  The one I’d wanted.

I glanced over the first page, then closed it, nodding.

“Why?” Mr. Hayle asked.  “All that for a glance?”

“Yes sir.”

“What, specifically?”

“Expiration dates, sir.”

Taking Root 1.3

The syringe was fancy, glass with silver leaf at the ends and at the plunger.  The glass had turned smoky where it had once been clear, and only the faintest trace of the original contents were still inside.  Thicker around than any three of my fingers put together.  It probably cost twenty dollars, if not more.  A good week’s wages.

Somewhat vindictively, I pulled out the plunger until I had the weight balanced, put my fingers on it, and sent it spinning wildly on the desk, periodically rustling scattered papers or sending them floating over the desk’s surface, riding a thin layer of air.  Traveling across the desk, it struck an identical syringe, eliciting a pair of high, sweet songs from the ringing glass.

It didn’t break.  Shame.

I stepped over to the window, my feet kicking up more papers as they might stir leaves in the fall.  I was at ‘the Hedge’, the colloquial term for the wall that encircled the Academy.  A great deal of the wall wasn’t large or tall at all, but it rose in places, and the corner of the Academy closest to Radham had a hospital built into it.  Through the hospital, students bought their turns at getting training and locals bought care.  The view was of the wall itself, the Academy on one side, Radham on the other.

About the only thing that was the same about the two places was that it was raining.  A light rain, but enough that just about everyone had their hoods up.  The boys and girls on the Academy side moved as though they were all in a hurry.  They were all tidy, hair well looked after, white uniforms clean.  Their bookbags had flaps over the top to keep the rain out, and the buckles that kept the flaps in place each had the university’s symbol on it, a full-face helmet in profile framed by red leaves and ribbons.

Almost but not quite a badge of office.

Outside, watched from a distance, people moved as though they were mired in tar.  They found their way eventually, but there was no clear direction, even in a city that had been built with a plan in mind.

I didn’t enjoy looking, but there wasn’t much else to be done.  I’d read the books, I’d read the various papers, and I’d slept.  Seven days I’d been cooped up here.

I felt a chill, and rubbed my hands over my bare arms.  My skin had been replaced where the enzyme solution had devoured it, and while the pigmentation was very slightly different if I looked for it, it remained sensitive, not yet used to heat and cold, to the rubbing where seams of clothing touched it, or to idle scratches.  I kept my shirt off, but that meant being colder, and though it was dawn and spring had sprung, it was gloomy outside.

I held the back of my hand up to the edges of the window, letting the sensitive skin feel the movements of the air.  Slowly, so as not to disturb the air with my own movements, I moved my hand along the point where the window glass met the frame.

I felt the point where the breeze came through as though ice had touched the new skin.  Pulling my hand away, I tore the end off one page of paper and popped the paper into my mouth before setting the syringe to spinning at full speed once again.

The syringe rattled as I got the motion wrong, and the rattle prompted the papers under the cot to rustle.  Not because I’d moved or because I was going anywhere.

Periodically, someone came to talk to me.  I was already figuring out their schedules.  Going by the time of day and the schedules I’d observed over the past week, they were past due to arrive.

Being past due meant they were up to something.  I was tense, chewing on the little bit of paper, listening past the patter of the rain on the window and the sound of the syringe spinning on the desktop.

I could hear the murmur of speech, too far away and muted to make out.

I recognized Mr. Hayle’s voice.

“-Or worse than before?” I could make out the tail end of the sentence.

“More or less the same, professor.  But as intractable as he gets, his behavior differs from month to month.  This time, he wanted to be alone.  Very much so.”

“I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that it followed so quickly off the back of another incident, or the pain he was experiencing.  Make a note.  If we’re bringing another student on board to oversee the Wyvern file, that would be a good way to bring them up to speed while doing something constructive.”

“Yes, professor.”

There was a pause, pronounced, then a knock on the door.

“Sylvester?”

I didn’t respond right away.  Reaching up to my mouth, I pulled the wad of paper out, then jammed it up against the gap in the window where it was leaking cold air.

“I’m here,” I said.

The door opened.  It only opened a few inches before it hit the toppled bookcase that barred the way.  The rest of the floor was carpeted in scattered papers, fallen books, and various folders.

I angled my head to one side, and saw Mr. Hayle do the same, peering through the gap.  He looked at me first, then the bookcase.

“How are you?” he asked.

“My head hurts,” I said.  It did.  It hurt in a very different way than my body had.  My body had been effectively burned by the enzymes, and burns hurt more than just about anything.  My brain, however, it felt like it had been poked, prodded, beaten and kicked into the dirt, then made to do a marathon after the fact.  The burn only hurt the parts that were burned.  This was the sort of pain that made everything hurt, and promised more pain every step of the way for the rest of the journey.

A hollow, empty, tired hurt.

“I can well imagine.  How in the world did you pull over the shelf?”

What he was asking was how a boy who weighed four point seven stone could pull over a floor-to-ceiling solid wood bookcase with half the books still on it.  Mr. Hayle might not have been able to knock it down in the prime of his youth.

“I pushed the upper corner,” I said.  “Then I dropped a book into the gap so it couldn’t go rock back to where it was.  Pushed again, dropped more books in.  Kept at it, and eventually it tipped.”

“You scared the wits out of some of my colleagues.  They thought a part of the roof had fallen in.”

“We thought something had escaped,” a woman’s voice in the hallway said.  “It was like someone had kicked an ants nest, people scurrying around to find out what had gone wrong.”

I couldn’t resist smiling a little at that.

Hayle smiled, though only half was visible through the gap in the door.  “Ah, there we go.  Your expression was so cold I thought we’d somehow lost you, Sylvester.  I don’t suppose you could think up a way to lift the shelf back into place?”

“Probably,” I said.  “I could get started soon.  It would take a while.”

“I was hoping to have you out of there sooner than later,” he said.

“Why?” I asked, without missing a beat.  I knew I sounded hostile, cold as he’d put it.  I didn’t care.

“Your… the Lambsbridge gang has asked for you.  I myself would appreciate your help.”

My eyebrows went up.

“I might see if Douglas here can-”

“Why?” I cut him off.

“Excuse me?”

“Why do they need my help?”

“That, Sylvester, is a question I’m more than happy to answer, but I don’t feel like detailing it all through a door.”

I frowned, reaching up to scratch my head, looking around.

Hopping up onto the back of the bookcase, I approached the door, examining the frame and the door itself.

“As I was saying,” he said.  “I could ask Douglas to try pushing on the door-”

I seized one of the syringes, paused to set the other one to spinning, just for the heck of it, and headed over to the cot.

“-he should be strong enough to move the bookshelf, don’t you think, Lacey?”

“I think so, professor,” the woman on the other side said.

“Now that I think about it, my concern is damaging the door.”

“It should be okay, I think.”

“Okay, Douglas, come here…”

When I glanced up, Mr. Hayle wasn’t looking through the gap.  It was probably awkward to keep in that position, right up against the door.

I put my bare shoulder under the bottom of the cot, using my whole body to lift it up.  The metal of the cot’s frame was cold against my back.  I set the syringe on the floor and slipped to one side to let the cot drop.  The leg came down to break the glass.

The noise made something under the bed move, flying out to the corner by the door and bookcase.

“Stop, Douglas.  Sylvester,” Mr. Hayle said.  “What was that?”

“Allow me one minute,” I said, absently, picking my way past the pieces of glass.

“I’m sure Douglas could get you out.  I’m not sure what you’re doing there, but if we could minimize the damage and the explanations I have to give my colleagues that are working here in the Hedge, I would appreciate it.”

“Damage is done,” I said.  If only to the syringe.  I shifted my position, lifted up the cot again, and repositioned the plunger-end of the syringe.  “I’ll be fifty seconds.”

I imagined him repressing a sigh.  All I heard, however, was a, “very well.”

A doctor using a syringe had to put their fingers into two metal loops just by the plunger.  My target was the loop.  I moved out of the way, and let the leg of the cot fall.

I twisted and worked the loop until the metal gave way, then raised the cot again.

Using my hands, I folded the broken bit of metal in two, for a long length of metal.  I collected a fallen medical text, and it was heavy enough I could barely hold it in one hand.

Placing the long bit of metal on the underside of the hinge, pointing up, I gave it a solid whack with the book.

The pin that held the hinge together popped up.

Another whack made it pop out.

The other hinge was high up enough that I had to stand on my toes to reach it, even with the bookcase under me.

I gave it the same treatment, and the pin came free.

“Okay,” I said, swiftly backing up, “Done.  Push.”

I very nearly stepped on the glass from the syringe, before arresting my movement.  My leg and bare foot stayed up, and I caught my balance, tipping over, twisting, and then throwing myself at the desk with the still-spinning syringe on it, just to have something to grab.

Around that same moment, someone pushed on the door.  Without the hinges, it simply tipped forward and fell onto the back of the bookcase.

Mr. Hayle was there, wearing his uniform, including the black lab coat with a hood, and I spotted the red headed woman in the white lab coat, who I knew only as Lacey.  Shapely, thirty or so, and wholly dedicated to her work.  Unfortunately.  I suspected the first-name-only was supposed to endear her to me, but it really didn’t.

“I’m glad you’re okay, Sy,” she said, her voice soft.  Trying too hard to be gentle.

Mr. Hayle picked his way past the door, stepping onto the back of the bookcase, apparently intent on surveying the damage.

“Sir,” Lacey said, suddenly sounding concerned rather than gentle.

He turned.

“There were two glass cases in the room.  They were inhabited.”

Mr. Hayle froze.

“The snake and spiders?” I asked.  “They’re around here somewhere.  Something was under the bed.  It’s pretty close to you.”

“They don’t concern you?” Mr. Hayle asked.

I shook my head, then wished I hadn’t.  It made the general kicked-into-the-dirt pain in my head come back.

“I won’t come any further then.  If you’d find a shirt and come out?”

I nodded.  I collected my shirt from the bed and pulled it on.

All things considered, he seemed remarkably at ease over the damage I’d done.  I wondered who the office belonged to.

“Walk with me,” he said.  “Douglas, please listen to Lacey as she instructs you about putting the shelf back in place and catching the smaller animals.  Lacey?  Bring him to my office in the tower when you’re done.”

“Yes sir,” Lacey said.

She reached for me while I passed, and I jerked my shoulder to strike her hand away rather than let it rest on me in anything resembling reassurance.

Mr. Hayle hadn’t missed it.

I buttoned up my shirt while we walked.  I was wrinkled, my hair greasy and sticking out at the ends.  I might have looked feral.

“You don’t like her.”

“No.”

“I could tell you she’s a lovely, vibrant young lady, but that’s not the question, is it?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.  Let it be what it is, then.  Tell me, honestly, do you feel up to working?”

“I’m rarely honest,” I said.

“Then give me a convincing lie.”

“Yes, sir.  If they need my help, I’ll give it.”

He frowned a little.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“The night I dropped you off, I gave them a task.  It is perhaps the most important job that the Lambsbridge project has been given.  One only your particular group can do.”

He’d had my attention.  Now he had my curiosity.

He probably knew me better than I was willing to admit, if he was getting to me this quickly.

That, or my defenses were down, and I was giving him more clues than I’d intended.

“I positioned them at the Mothmont ladder school to investigate a problem, and they’ve run into a block.  No forward progress.”

“If I’d known I’d be going to school I don’t think I would have helped you move the door.”

“Then let me tell you why you opened the door.  Three weeks ago, a student at Mothmont killed his father, then himself.  The victim was a Crown State Senator.  Autopsies didn’t indicate any particular chemicals or abnormalities.  Nine days ago, we had another incident.”

“Another Mothmont student.”

“Yes,” he said.  He paused as we passed a pair of students in grey lab coats.  Graduates.  The red and silver of the Radham Academy crests they wore on their breasts were stark against the muted fabric.

“Hello, professor,” the girl of the pair greeted Mr. Hayle.

“Good morning, Heather, good morning, Daniel,” he replied.  We continued walking.  When they were out of earshot, he resumed his explanation.  “A house burned with four individuals inside.  Charred bodies of a lawyer, his wife, and his politician brother were autopsied, and trauma suggests they were cut with the intent of disabling, limiting their movements so they couldn’t escape the fire.  Ankles, knees.  The daughter of the lawyer was found in a separate room, a Mothmont student herself, but the cuts were different.  A day later, there was a third incident.  The day I appeared at Lambsbridge to talk to you.”

“Three makes a pattern.”

“The third incident saw the son murdering his father, grandfather, and mother, the father and grandfather were, again, prominent.  Military.  He set fire to the crime scene and sat in the midst of it to burn up.”

“Method?”

“Beg pardon?”

“What was the murder weapon?  Do they know?”

“The father and grandfather were killed with a sword that had hung over the mantlepiece, both were in their beds.  The mortician believes the mother fled and tried to fight back.  She had defensive wounds  and a weapon of her own in hand.  She lost the fight.”

She lost.  That was interesting unto itself.

“You’re sending us after killer children,” I observed.

“I would call them assassins rather than killers.  You understand the concern here?”

We’d reached the end of the hallway.  Mr. Hayle opened a closet and retrieved my cloak and shoes from within.  I started pulling my outdoor clothes on.  “It doesn’t look good.”

“No, Sylvester, it doesn’t.  Mothmont was made and supported by rich and powerful individuals with the premise that younger students would graduate from there and move on to the Academy.  If they couldn’t pass the entrance exam, they would continue their studies at Mothmont until they could.  Only the best in teachers, facilities, and students.”

“Except for the parent murdering part,” I noted.

We began our way down.  There were more students in the stairwell, four men clustered at one window, smoking, two women sitting on the stairs below.  Both scooted over as we came down.

One of the women smiled at me as I descended.  Twenty and beautiful and wearing a white lab coat that suggested she was still a student.  Almost an older Helen without the Helen-ness.  When I met her gaze, my expression flat, her smile dropped off her face.

Mr. Hayle spoke in a low voice, his head turned to make sure nobody above us was listening in as we continued down the spiral stairs.  “Being different tends to draw attention, whether it’s being inferior or being superior.  Mothmont, being superior, has clearly fallen under someone’s eye.  We would like this to stay out of the public’s eye.  The only reason it hasn’t, I believe, is that the third incident happened halfway across the country.  Given a fourth incident or time for rumors to spread…”

“…The cat would be out of the bag.  I get it.”

“This isn’t quite like any of the tasks I’ve given the Lambsbridge project, but it’s one I feel you’re suited for.  That said, it is sensitive, Sylvester.  Lives are on the line, the people who know and are paying attention matter, and the reactions if others found out could be disastrous.”

“I get it,” I said, again.  I knew I was more irritable.  I had the information I’d wanted, and now I was finding myself slipping back to the point I’d been: feeling the ache in my head and resenting everything for existing.

“Each major department was given a share of funds to go toward major projects.  Rather than devote my funds into one project, I devoted them to six very different projects.  The plan was for the six to form a whole.”

I nodded.

“It’s unfortunate that only four of you proved viable, but you’ve turned out well, you each show more and more promise as you develop, but you remain one member of a unit.  A gestalt.  Your group is feeling your absence, and they feel it strongly enough that they went out of their way to ask for you.”

“I’m touched,” I said.  I wasn’t lying about that, but my thoughts were more on the fact that I’d get to rub it in their faces.  They needed me.  I could be smug about it.

We reached the first floor.  He held the door for me, and we passed through, heading straight for an office.

The grey-coat doctor that had given me fresh skin greeted us, exchanging brief pleasantries with Mr. Hayle before getting down to brass tacks.  I shouldn’t spend too long in the sun until a few weeks had passed.  Never mind that the sun rarely showed its face around these parts.

My thoughts were already on the situation at Mothmont.  I was a week behind the others, and time was already proving to be of the essence.

☙

It wasn’t Mr. Hayle that dropped me off, but his student Lacey.  One of three students assigned to me.  It made for a very quiet, uncomfortable ride to Mothmont.  I did my utmost to make it uncomfortable for her, glaring at her.

To her credit, she seemed to have difficulty meeting my eyes.

“Professor Hayle suggested I take you to get your hair cut,” Lacey said, summoning some courage and meeting my gaze.  “So you’re more presentable.”

“It isn’t long.”

“It’s long enough to get untidy very easily,” she said.  “It wouldn’t take long.”

“No,” I said.

“Sy-“

“No,” I said, again.  “Don’t suggest it again.  There’s a reason I want my hair like it is.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, raising her hands.  “I understand.  How about food?  You barely ate at all after you locked yourself in the office.”

“I ate plenty,” I said, meeting her eyes.  “You didn’t find all the spiders that had been in the glass case, did you?”

She was stricken with a paralyzing sort of alarm at the idea.

She seemed to shake it off, and she managed a titter of a laugh. “You’re messing with me.”

I looked out the window, and very casually remarked, “It’s sort of disgusting when a woman as old as you are tries to giggle and act like a little girl.”

I didn’t look at her to see her reaction.  That would have taken away from the effect.  My peripheral vision suggested she’d reacted as if I’d slapped her full-on in the face.

“Don’t talk to me like we’re friends,” I said, still not looking at her.  “I’m your job.”

“You seem to have civil conversations with professor Hayle, Sy- Sylvester.”  She’d switched to the long form of my name at the last second.

“Yeah,” I said.  I met her eyes.  “I respect him, if nothing else.”

Three students had hands-on roles with the Wyvern project.  With me.  I had no idea how many were peripherally involved.  Looking at Lacey, one of the three students, I couldn’t see any trace of a smile on her face.  The look in her eyes was a mixture of dislike and pity.

Pity.  And she wondered why I hated her as much as I did?

“I see,” Lacey said.  “Understood.  Can I ask-“

I tensed a little, leaning forward with my hands on my knees, and I heard the hitch of hesitation in her voice.  A momentary pause.

“-Why now?” she finished.  “I won’t say there haven’t been incidents in the past, but why are you suddenly taking issue with me today?”

“You can ask,” I said, and I left the statement hanging.

She turned her head, looking out the window I’d been staring out of a moment ago.  Apparently she wasn’t too surprised at the non-answer.

“Every day for the last week, you knocked on the door, you tried to talk to me, to reassure, to offer food, sheets or clothes.”

“And you wanted to be left alone?” she asked.

“I did, but that wasn’t it.  Give a man a gun, tell him to shoot his neighbor or he gets shot.  The first man we put in this situation does it without a care.  He pulls the trigger.  The second man cries and moans, he begs his neighbor for forgiveness, then he pulls the trigger.  The third man cries and moans, begs for forgiveness, and pulls the trigger, and the fourth man takes a bullet because he won’t bring himself to do that.”

“The second and third men are the same?”

“Oh.  Right.  The first and second man went home and went to sleep and rested easy,” I said.

She worked through it aloud, summing up, “First shoots without a word, sleeps easy.  Second man asks for forgiveness, shoots, sleeps easy.  Third man asks for forgiveness, shoots, but doesn’t sleep.  The fourth dies because he won’t shoot.  You’re going to tell me the first man is the best of the four?” Lacey asked me.

I gave her a disgusted look.  “No.”

“The third, then.  You’re implying I’m the second?  It’s a pretty massive, incorrect assumption on your part, Sylvester, if you think I sleep easy,” she said, and there was a touch of heat in her voice.  I’d upset her a little.

“No,” I said, calm.  “I didn’t say anything about someone being better or worse.  They can face the situation any way they want to.  They’ve got a gun to their head, it’s their choice.  You?  Maybe you’re like the second man, maybe you’re like the third, but you definitely don’t have a gun to your head.  If you’re being nice to me, it’s for your benefit, not mine.”

I leaned back, turning away from her, my attention returning to the window.

Human nature.  If I’d simply said it, one line, one sentence, she wouldn’t have listened.  But I’d gotten her thinking, pulled her in, and then forced her to face it.

The remainder of the coach ride to Mothmont was blissfully silent.

Mothmont turned out to be an interesting building.  Four stories with a steep, slanted shingle roof, it took up a third of a city block, it had no yard that I could make out.  The walls were eggshell pale, and the ivy that crawled across the brickwork was dark, almost leafless.  It wasn’t in an end of town I’d frequented, but even among nicer buildings with gargoyles that spat out water from the gutters and built-in stables for stitched horses, it stood out as something prominent.

A woman was waiting for me by the arching entrance that led into the building.

Lacey didn’t say a word as I left the coach, pulling my hood up to shield off the rain.

“Sylvester, I take it?” the woman asked.  She was buxom, the word was, businesslike in a pink jacket and short dress, brown hair curled at the sides, with a touch too much makeup.

“Yes ma’am.”

“You have manners.  Good.  I’m the headmistress.  Let’s have a look at you.”

I pulled down my hood.

Somehow she didn’t look particularly pleased.  I was a little scruffy.

“Come, inside,” she said, guiding me with a hand at my back.

She led me in past the front office, pointing me to the boy’s bathroom.

“Uniform on the chair by the sink.  Take a moment to wash your face before getting dressed.  I’ll bring you a comb so you can tidy your hair.”

I nodded, and I did as she asked.

The uniform turned out to be white.  White slacks and a button-up shirt with short sleeves and a straight, stiff-necked collar.  The white of it was likely a nod to the Academy.

I hated white.  I’d seen too much of it, and it didn’t suit.  My hair was black, and even with grease or glue or whatever else I put into it, the ends would curl up and it would find a way to break loose.

I made myself as presentable as possible, knowing it wouldn’t last.

I stepped out of the bathroom and presented myself to the headmistress.  She knelt before me and smoothed out some of the clothing, picking at one piece of lint.

“It suits you,” she lied.  “You look like a young gentleman.”

Two lies in two breaths, straight to my face.  I almost liked her.

“It’s lunch time.  You can introduce yourself to the others.  The afternoon classes are all dedicated to biology.  On Fridays, we visit the Academy.  Now, a boy named Jamie was staying at the orphanage.  Do you know him?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’ll be in the same classes as him, and you’ll sleep in the same quarters.  You should find him sitting under the tree in the yard, I think.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“This is strictly temporary, you understand?” she asked.  “I don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

“I understand, ma’am,” I said.

She straightened, looking down at me.  “Mrs. Earles believes you might be motivated to try harder, seeing what we have to offer.”

“I think I will, ma’am,” I said.

“Go on, then,” she said.

I went.  A woman stood by a gate, opening it to let me through.

The building formed a square, with the yard in the center, the precious pupils safe within.  A glass was erected with trees grown to support it at the corners, keeping those beneath dry.  The glass roof itself crawled with vines and small flowers.

Youths aged seven to fifteen were gathered within, many playing, or gathered in groups.  Blankets were laid out here and there for them to sit on, so they wouldn’t get their uniforms dirty.

Just as the students of the Academy had possessed a refined, polished air, these students looked proper.

It didn’t take me long to find the others.  Gordon was in the company of the boys, a larger group.  Helen was among the girls.  Jamie was under one of the trees at the perimeter, book and pen in his lap.  He’d seen me before I saw him, and was on his feet in a moment.

Lillian, I found off to one side, with an obese girl and a taller, skinny, buck-toothed man who looked to be about fifteen.  Gordon whistled, sharp, and got her attention.  She quickly said her goodbye to her two friends.

We collected.

Gordon took one look at me, and I saw genuine worry in his eyes.  “You had an appointment.”

I nodded.

“I’m sorry,” he said.  “We’re supposed to be there for each other when it counts.”

“You didn’t know it was coming.  I didn’t either,” I said.  “At least I don’t have to worry about it for another thirty days.”

He looked unimpressed.

“You’re intolerable after an appointment,” Jamie said.

“I’ll try to be intolerable in a useful way,” I answered.  “Let’s get down to it.  I heard you got stuck.”

“Wait, before any of that, did you come alone?” Gordon asked.

I frowned.  “I got dropped off by Lacey.”

“Damn,” he said.

“We’d hoped Hayle would come too,” Jamie said.  “I thought he’d be more concerned at our lack of progress.”

I looked between the two, confused.

Gordon frowned.  “Look, we’re more than stuck, Sy.  We’re in danger.”

“Danger?”

“They know who we are.  They’re onto us,” Helen said, and her voice was soft and entirely unconcerned.  That wasn’t to say there wasn’t cause for concern.  It was just Helen.

“Five attempts on our lives in the last seven days,” Jamie said.  “And the way we figure it, that means they’re either very, very clever…”

“Or rogue elements from the Academy,” I said.

Jamie nodded.

“Talk to us,” Gordon said.  “Let’s hear your ideas, fresh eyes, before we start giving you reason for bias.”

“Alright,” I said.  “Knowing what little I do, I don’t think the kids are killers.  I don’t think they’re assassins, either.  They’re tools.”

Gordon nodded.  The others were still.

“The killings are steadily improving in quality.  That suggests the kids are the weapons, and the killer is out there,” I said.  “and I think you know that already.”

“We do,” Gordon said.

“What you don’t know, and why I think you’re stuck, is that you’re too prone to patterns.  You have your own way of doing things, but it’s too rigid, when your enemies are hiding in the shadows.  You need to shake it up.”

“You have an idea how, I imagine.”

I smiled.

The pain in my head was going away by the second.

Taking Root 1.4

Our conversation had to stop for a moment when a group of boys veered our way, kicking a ball between them.  They circled the tree that was holding up one corner of the glass roof, then headed off toward their makeshift goals.

“The lunch hour is going to end before too long,” Jamie said.  “We should hammer out details.”

“Sy’s idea, making sure we’re all on the same page…” Gordon said.  “Okay, that makes sense.  Sy?”

“Hold on.  I can change details based on where you guys are at.  Fill me in, quick.”

“Okay.  As far as everyone here knows, including the headmistress and the rest of the faculty, I’m the son of a butcher mogul, Helen is the daughter of a diplomat, and Jamie is the orphan son of a military captain who died and left him some money.  At Jamie’s suggestion, the story is that we were all staying at the orphanage as a matter of convenience before our enrollment at Mothmont.  Favors were called in, whatever.  It’s happened before, given the ties between Lambsbridge and Radham Academy, and it’s not going to surprise anyone.”

“I’ve been here before,” Lillian said.  “Before I was a student at the Academy.  Teachers know me, they like me.  We leaked the idea that I was suspended, and the rules of Mothmont mean I can come back here whenever, to get some classes in, use facilities or brush up.  I might have to explain to my parents, but I think it’s okay.  Nobody’s asked how I know you guys, but I don’t think it’s a problem.”

“I suggested the ‘ties to the orphanage’ thing because I recognized faces among the students, and those faces have probably seen us out and about as a group,” Jamie said.

“Overall, we have a cover,” Gordon elaborated, “Nothing so questionable that anyone’s going to raise questions.  But people have a way of taking things at face value, and this situation hasn’t really bucked the trend.”

“Except for the attempts on your life,” I said.

“Except for that.  But there aren’t any holes in what we’re saying that should have raised suspicions,” Gordon said.

I nodded.  “Mr. Hayle filled me in on most of that, but it’s good to have the details.  He said he was intentionally vague about who I was, so I could adapt as the situation required.  He did say that it was a special favor from the orphanage to work me in later than the rest of you.”

“Really,” Gordon said.  He smiled a little, “Why would the orphanage be so eager to get rid of you?”

“Because I’m intolerable,” I replied, smiling back.

“Going by the fact that we’ve been seen together, and we’re being seen together now, who are you, and how do we know you?” Gordon asked.

I shrugged, and I was reminded of just how uncomfortable the uniform was, and the spots where it was rubbing against the new skin.  “I’m an orphan.  We were about the same age, I offered to show you around town.”

“That won’t go over well,” Gordon said.

“I’m betting it won’t,” I said.  “Scrubby kid with messy hair from wrong side of the tracks.  I’ll stick out.”

“Which is your plan,” Gordon concluded.

“In part.  But before that… what have you done so far?  What angles have been covered?”

“Oh, you know me,” Gordon said.  “It’s only been a week and I’m almost the best student in my class, best at sports, and most can’t even bring themselves to hate me for it.  I’ve been mingling with the top dogs among the boys here.  Helen’s done the same for the girls.  Between the two of us, we’ve been able to get the word on who the victims were, as well as keep an eye out for who the potential victims might be.”

“Anything conclusive?”

“Less than I’d like.  We’ve asked for extra help to get up to speed with our classes, and that’s let us keep an ear to the ground when it comes to the faculty.  There’s a chance that the person turning children into murder weapons is one of the teachers.”

“Only a chance?”

“Every weekend, students go to the Academy.  Get a taste of it, keeps them invested in Mothmont.  Split up into groups based on interest and age.  Students who were extra good get special lessons with professors.”

“That’s… messy,” I said.  “Too many things to cover.  You didn’t visit me?”

“I was recovering from being poisoned,” Gordon said.  “Lillian was hovering, making sure nobody had reason to get too curious about me.  That left only Helen and Jamie, and they were busy following up on likelies.”

“Poison, huh?  I wasn’t expecting that.”

“That was the most successful attempt out of the three, two for me, one for Jamie.  One object fell from the roof, almost caving Helen’s head in, and Jamie very nearly got pushed in front of a fast moving coach while he was on his way to the Academy.  Helen saved him.”

I nodded slowly.  “No sightings?”

“They’re careful.  And they’re a they, we’re pretty sure.  Plural.”

“Okay,” I said.  “Starting to get a more complete mental picture.”

My eyes glanced over the collection of youths around us.  Would there be overt signs?  They couldn’t be too obvious, or the others would have noticed.

Without knowing more about how the murders were being done, I didn’t know what to look for.  We were surrounded, and letting our guard down could be dangerous.

Jamie, maybe thinking I was still hurt that they hadn’t come for me, commented, “I looked for you at the Tower, poked my head into Hayle’s department, to check the labs to see if you were around, and because I wanted to ask a quick question about Gordon and the poison.  I got word on where you were, but I didn’t have much time to look around.”

Hm.  I probably would have been where Jamie looked for me if I hadn’t barred myself in the office after my appointment.  Live and learn.

The Tower, Mr. Hayle’s department opposite end of the Academy campus from the Hedge where I’d been, was largely focused on research and development regarding the brain.  Widely viewed as a dead end, the department had defaulted to handling a lot of information storage, memory banks, and files.

If Jamie had been there… I spoke my thoughts aloud, “Jamie went to the Tower because… you guys were thinking about mind control?  Something to do with the brain?”

“We were thinking it could be some neurological manipulation,” Jamie said.  “Helen was looking into hormones and drugs at Claret Hall.”

Claret Hall being the center of campus, where students gathered and ate, where key administration facilities were available, and where some of the key elements of the campus and core classes were taught.  If all aspects of Radham flowed from the Academy, then all aspects of the Academy flowed from Claret Hall.

“And you didn’t find anything,” I said.  “If you had, you would have told me.”

“Nothing meaningful,” Jamie said.

I nodded.

Gordon’s head turned.  I followed his gaze.  Students were still playing, gathering in groups, but his focus wasn’t on the students.  “More teachers appearing around the doors.”

“Trouble?” I asked.

“In a way.  We’re out of time.  Lunch is over.  If you’re going to fill us in, now’s the time to do it.”

“We’re close enough to the door that people will see us,” I observed.  “Everyone but Helen, keep an eye on the crowd.  Don’t be obvious about it, but keep an eye out for hints.”

“What am I doing?”  Helen asked.

A shrill whistle drew the attention of the various students.  It sounded again.  A teacher was signaling for others to come indoors.  Hordes of students began moving toward the doors.  Some lingered, like we were, and some were quickly wrapping up their games.

“Fix my hair,” I instructed Helen, “Give me a kiss on the cheek or something, be tender about it.”

“I like you?” Helen asked.

“You’re a big sister to me, but actually acting like a normal big sister.  It can be misinterpreted.”

She hadn’t quite adopted her deadpan expression, but as I gave my order, her expression changed.  She smiled, and it was warm.

“Your hair is a mess,” she said, and her voice matched her expression.  She reached up and fussed with it, running her long fingernails against my scalp as she fixed it up a bit.  Probably better than I could have if I’d had a comb and more time.  She fixed the hair that went from the center of my hairline to my temple, brushing it up and more out of the way, and then let her hand linger, a quarter second too long.  “You should focus more on appearances.”

“I should,” I said.  “There’s time to learn.”

“I can always teach you the particulars,” she said.  “If you’re able to keep yourself in one piece long enough.  I’m glad to see you’ve been put back together.”

She gave me a rub on the arm where I’d been burned, then leaned close to kiss me on the forehead.

Again, her face remained closer to mine for just a heartbeat longer than it needed to.  With the proximity, I couldn’t help but think that I found her scarier than I’d found the snake charmer’s experiment.  I knew it was purely my imagination, but I imagined it was how I’d feel if I was dropped in a tiger’s enclosure at the zoo, the resident sitting the same distance from me.

Still, I smiled.  “I like me being in one piece too.”

I didn’t look, but I was very aware that of the large group that was filing into the door, a great many boys were paying a great deal of attention to the exchange.

“In we go,” I said.  “Keep an eye out.”

We joined the crowd.  Gordon took up the rear, guarding our backs.

I only realized at the last second that him watching our backs was a bad thing.  A hand reached out in my peripheral vision, and Gordon caught it.

“Woah there, Bruno,” a boy our age said, “Ease up.”

Gordon let go of the hand.  “Calling me names, now?”

“Just poking fun.  I’m a pal, Gordon.  Relax,” the boy said.  He pulled his hand free of Gordon’s grip.

The boy was dark haired, with dark brown eyes, but very much of the same type as Gordon.  Big, healthy in stature and build without showing a hint of being fat, handsome, and confident enough that he was probably one of the top dogs.  Between me and Gordon in size, a couple inches taller than me, an inch shorter than Gordon.  Twelve or so?

He smiled at me.  “Who’s slick here?”

“Sy.  Sylvester if you want to be polite,” Gordon said.  “Showed us around before we made our way to Mothmont.  Sylvester, this is Ed.  Ed is a good guy to know if you want to know people.  We’ve been hanging out.”

“Nice way to put it.  You mentioned you’d figured out where things were,” the boy said.  “Hi Helen, Lil, and Ja- James?”

“Jamie.”

“Jamie.  Sorry.”

We were moving with the rest of the crowd, heading into the school proper.  I was very aware of those who were moving past me.  If they were as brazen as the others had insinuated, I wasn’t sure a knife wouldn’t find one of us while we were part of this press of bodies.

“Tell me about yourself, Sy,” Ed urged me.

“Nothing to tell,” I said.  “I’m nobody important.”

Reel him in…

Ed laughed, but it was a laugh for his own benefit, and probably for the others who were watching from a distance.  “You don’t get into Mothmont without being important somehow.”

“Got in on an ask,” I said.  “I’m from the orphanage.”

“Yeah?” he asked, and there was interest in his voice, with a hint of something else.  The question had more than basic curiosity backing it.  “How’s that work?”

“Someone liked me, I guess,” I said.  I shot Helen a smile.  She smiled back.

“That’s not really an answer, buddy,” he said, but there was a bit of a push to the statement.  Insistence.  Not just that, but really, ‘buddy’?  He was acting like he was an adult and I was the kid, but he only had a few inches on me.  It irritated, and I was feeling particularly irritable.

“Only answer I’m going to give,” I said.  “Don’t worry about it.”

I saw a flicker of annoyance on his face.  He blew a bit of air through his lips, “Pff.  I was just being friendly, there’s no need to brush me off.”

“I’m not brushing you off.  I’m hinting that you’re butting your nose in where it isn’t wanted.”

Ed laughed, again, and I could hear a distinct difference between the laugh now and the laugh just a few seconds ago.  Tighter at the edges.  More forced than natural.

We were in the hallway between various classrooms, and the crowd was thinning out, which made me feel a little less worried for my own skin.  The classrooms each had windows between the class and the hallway, and the window frames were grown, large pieces of broken glass collected with what looked like tree branches growing to hold them in place, glass effectively filling the gaps between each branch.  Past those windows and the classrooms, I could see the yard and the street beyond the school.

Things were so clean.  Bright, crisp, all polished and white-painted wood.  I didn’t like it when things were this done-up.  It felt dishonest.  Nicer people tried to make something look, the less I trusted it.

A place as nice as this, trying to be classy?  Murderous students felt like the least of its problems.

“Sy’s usually like this,” Gordon said, “Don’t worry about it, Ed.”

Ed was smiling, but it was a forced smile in the same way the laugh had been.  “I’m not worried, really.  I just have to wonder about the company you keep.”

“Wonder?  Why?” I asked.  Keeping him talking, talking on his feet.  I was more comfortable with a fast-moving conversation than most.

“You’ve been given a rosy opportunity like this, kid like you in a place like this, me offering a hand in friendship, and you snub me?  Not wise, limiting yourself like that.”

“Kid like me, huh?”  Force him to justify, put myself apparently off balance, trying to adjust, adapt…

“Kid like you.  Of less established breeding, no offense.”

He totally meant offense.  It killed me that he was giving me a golden line like that and I couldn’t give it what it deserved.  I had to go easy.

“No offense taken,” I said, smiling.  There was a teacher not too far away, watching the children in the hallway, making sure her students made their way to her class without dallying.  I gave my response, smiling at him. “It’s funny.”

He didn’t seem to comprehend.  Now I had the reins of the dialogue.  He was forced to ask.  “Funny?”

“Someone clearly inbred talking about my breeding.  It-”

He grabbed me by the front of my uniform and shoved me against the wall, hard.  Some students around us gasped, stopping in their tracks or forming a loose circle around us.

The teacher had noticed, and was heading our way.

“Woah there, Bruno,” I echoed him from earlier.

He pulled me away, then shoved me against the wall again.

Then there was laughter.

Helen.  She had one hand to her mouth, and in her attempts to stifle a giggle, she ‘accidentally’ snorted.

Ed stared at her.  There was something raw in the look.

Whatever else he was, he was still only twelve or so.  He could be good with words, handsome, smart, whatever else it took to be one of the top dogs of Mothmont, but he was new to liking girls, and he was very conscious of his other friends, who were hanging back, watching.

“Sorry,” she told him.  “Really, Edward, I’m sorry.  But you have to admit Sy’s line was funny.”

I love you, Helen, I thought.  She’d figured out my angle and here she was, supporting me perfectly.

The teacher was forging his way through the ring of students.  Ed had noticed, and he had to save face.  Had it not been for Helen, he might have socked me one in the stomach and left it be until later.  But he couldn’t very well hit me without going against her.

He was cornered.

“This isn’t over,” he said.  “We’re going to continue this later.”

“Are we?  Easy to say, but so many chicken out.”

He leaned close and whispered, “After classes, in the corner of the yard, where the two trees will give us some privacy,” he said, making a show of letting go of my uniform.

“I’ll believe it when I see you there,” I murmured my response.

The teacher broke through.  Ed pulled away, hands in the air.

“What’s this?” the teacher asked, stern, one hand on her hip.

“Nothing,” I said.  “All good.”

“All good,” Ed joined in.  “Just playing.”

She gave us a curious look.  “Get to your classes.  Mary, Eliza, I see you talking there, get to your desks, I’m starting the lesson soon.”

Her attention was already elsewhere, gathering up and ordering around kids she knew she had clout with.  The rest fell in step.

“I’m disappointed, Gordon,” Ed said.

“We can talk later?” Gordon asked.  “Don’t want bad blood between us.”

“Maybe, sure,” Ed said, but Gordon wasn’t his focus here, or even second in his focus.  The boy left, turning his back to Helen and me as he rejoined friends, hands in his pockets.

Lillian and Helen hurried to their next class, Helen shooting me a smile.

“When you set your mind to it, you’re remarkably good at getting people to hate you,” Gordon said.  “Poor sap.”

“Me or him?”

“Him,” Gordon said, sounding offended at the question.  “You and Helen teaming up on him.  Why’d you go and do that to him?  You knew you’d get someone’s goat by having Helen be gentle to you, and you did, and then you twisted the damn knife.  If you wanted to verify that he wasn’t one of the people who were trying to kill us, you could have asked me.”

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking that,” I said.

“What were you thinking, then?”

“They say when you go to prison, you should murder someone or join a gang.  Idea is that you want to figure out the pecking order and fit yourself into it somehow.”

“Uh huh,” Gordon said.  He glanced around, noting that the number of students in the hallway had thinned out pretty dramatically.  We were almost alone, and the students that were around were hurrying.  “This isn’t prison.”

“The hell it isn’t.  But that’s beside the point.”

“Then why bring it up?” He was quick to retort.

I sighed, “I’m establishing the pecking order.”

“Sy,” he said.  He put both hands on my shoulders, leaning close.  “I hate to say it…”

“You love to say it.”

“In all the years I’ve known you, watching you from the beginning, I have never ever known you to win a fight.  Or even put in a good showing.”

“I didn’t say I’d be at the top of the pecking order,” I protested.

Gordon stepped back, and he looked at Jamie.

“To be fair, he didn’t,” Jamie said.

“We just got him back, and we’re going to have to send him right back to the Academy for more medical care,” Gordon said.

“It won’t be that bad,” I protested, again.

“What are you shooting for, Sly?” Jamie asked.  “Gotta fill us in.”

“You guys stalled because you’re too safe.  Were you watching the crowd?”

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  Jamie nodded.

“Anyone paying too much attention?  Trying not to look like they were looking?”

Gordon shook his head.

“A few faces caught my eye,” Jamie said.  “I can point them out later.”

“We shake things up, see what happens,” I said.  “What moves, what doesn’t, what doesn’t move like it should.  We pay attention to what comes next, and we might get clues.  I just happened to draw everyone’s attention, and whoever was paying attention to you lot is paying extra special attention to me now.  I’m betting they’re confused.”

“I suspect the only person who really gets how you think is you, Sy,” Gordon said.

“Helen gets me,” I said.

“Helen is-” Gordon started.  “Yeah.”

“I get it too.  But you should be ready.  You might be a target, Sy,” Jamie said.

“I know.  I expect it.  You guys have been worrying about knives in the back or poisonings up until now, it’s only fair I have my turn at it.  The way and timing of their response is going to be important, so keep your eyes open.”

Gordon and Jamie nodded.

We were getting dirty looks from teachers that were just starting their classes.

“Pass it on to the girls?” I asked.

“I will,” Gordon said.  “Watch yourselves.”

I nodded.

Jamie and I resumed our trek to our class.

“He’s not good at this,” Jamie said.  “This kind of task.”

“Yeah,” I said, glancing back at Gordon.

“His talents don’t really lend themselves to it.  Maybe one day, but not today.”

“This is more my domain,” I said.  “Helen’s.  Yours to a lesser degree.”

Jamie nodded.

“Speaking of your domain, what’s the scoop on the guy I just picked a fight with?”

“I don’t know.  He’s not in our classes.  Gordon’s kept an eye on him, I haven’t had a reason to.”

I frowned.

“You’re not worried, are you?”

“I figured if I had a few choice attacks I could fire his way, I could position myself better.  I don’t want to be at the very bottom of any pecking orders.”

“Uh huh,” Jamie said.  “I’ll find out.”

Jamie’s long hair was pulled back into a sailor’s ponytail, low and resting against the neck, which wasn’t how he normally wore it.  It was nearly invisible with his collar up.  I reached out and flicked it with my finger.

He jabbed me in response, which prompted me to bump his shoulder with my own, almost sending him into the nearest classroom door.  He did the same to me, to less effect.

The exchange continued for a few seconds, until he stopped all at once. “Stop, we’re at the class.  They’ll see.”

I immediately fell back into a regular walk, pulling my uniform top down.  Still in the hallway, we had to walk by the tree-branch window that ran along the length of the classroom to reach the door.  Jamie pushed his glasses up his nose and fixed his ponytail.

When he was all fixed up, I surreptitiously gave him a jab in the side of his stomach with one of my fingers.

“I’ll get you for that,” he murmured.  He opened the door.

“You’re late,” the teacher said.

“The headmistress said Jamie should show me around,” I said.

The woman pursed her lips.  “I see.  Take your seats, please.  You can sit by Jamie…”

“Sylvester.”

“Sylvester.  Thank you.  Get the notes from Jamie later.  For now, just sit and follow what you can.”  She walked over to her desk and made a note on what I assumed was an attendance list.

I was very aware of the subtle smiles or glances from various students.  Ones that had seen Ed pushing me up against the wall, knowing full well that I’d been stretching the truth.  My eye quickly traveled over the boys and girls that weren’t smiling.

I wouldn’t be able to remember the particulars, which ones looked like they were trying too hard not to look at me, or who weren’t.

Jamie would.

“Now, back to what I was saying.  Wollstone’s ratios are used in seventy percent of what you’ll be doing if you go on to attend the Academy.  The golden ratio, seen here, could be said to be the precursor to what would eventually be Wollstone’s nine ratios.  With a few quick measurements, we can quickly divine which of the nine ratios is used for a given organism’s physical structure or composition, and working backward, so long as we can keep to the ratio, we can trust that the organism has the fundamental supports for life.

“For example, if you’ll turn to page seventy-five, we can see where the fundamental pattern of a cat is outlined.  Keeping to Wollstone’s ‘wise’ ratio, we can discern which parts of the pattern apply to specific parts of the cat.  Now, it gets more complicated when we decide to alter the pattern, or the how of it, but you should begin to have a glimmer of how a ratio can be used as a shortcut to understanding…”

My forehead hit the desk.  I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep.

☙

To his credit, Ed did know how to throw a punch.  He knew how to throw ten.

To my credit, I managed to stay on my feet until the tenth punch.  I didn’t manage to deliver anything substantial in the meantime, but I wasn’t curling up into a ball and crying uncle.

The group of students around us was smaller than I would have liked.  The Lambsbridge orphans, Ed and Gordon’s friends, and Helen’s group.  Girls for Ed to impress.  Maybe it would make up for my baiting him, if he got to look good in front of some girls.

Landing at the base of the tree, I took a second to catch my breath.  I raised a hand to make Ed stop.

“You done?” he asked.  “You’re not going to say anything about my family again?”

“I didn’t say anything until you-“

I saw him bringing a fist back, ready to hit me again.

I opened my mouth wide, wincing at the feeling at the corner of my jaw.  Tight.

In the process, I saw a movement in the corner of my eye.

There weren’t many windows that offered a good look at the scene.  Three trees had been planted at one corner of the yard, between the glass roof and the building, and they blocked the view from many of the nearby windows.  They also served to keep most of the rain off us.  Only the girls were wearing hoods and jackets, and I was getting dirty, but not muddy, which was better.

We hadn’t been obvious about our fight, and anyone who had a reason to watch was going to be part of this crowd.  But, still, three boys had paid enough attention to us to know the fight was happening, and had found one vantage point inside where they could peer past the gaps in the branches and watch what was happening.  One, thirteen or so, was standing in a way that let the curtain block the lower half of his face.  The other was far younger, nine or ten, and was leaning forward, hands folded on the windowsill, peering over the bottom of the window to look down at me.  The third was somewhere between the two in age, and hung far enough back to be hidden in the gloom of an unlit classroom.

The look in their eyes was clear enough.

As curious as we were about the murderous children, they were curious about us.  They couldn’t know me well enough to know how I operated.  Even Mr. Hayle didn’t, and he’d practically designed me.

Ed jabbed me in the middle with the toe of one shoe.  “Eh?”

“We’re good,” I said.  “Sorry about saying you’re inbred, Ed.”

He didn’t look appeased.

I glanced toward the classroom again.  The boys were gone.

“Come on,” Gordon said.  “Let’s get you looked after.”

I nodded.

“Saw them,” I murmured, as he helped me limp on.

“Where?”

“Inside.  Three boys.  I can give Jamie partial descriptions.”

“Three boys,” Gordon mused.  “That’s not good.”

“Poisonings are usually done by women,” Helen said, as she joined us.  “Meaning we’re dealing with four.”

“At least,” I agreed.

Taking Root 1.5

I watched as Jamie used a pen to sketch out a rough image.

“Head was narrower.  Taller than wide,” I commented.

“Most heads are.”

“That looks round.  Also, he didn’t look sinister, but he didn’t look interested either.  It was cold.”

“Like Helen sometimes looks?”

I considered.  “No.”

“You, then.  On a bad day, after an appointment?”

“I don’t know what I look like after an appointment.  They don’t usually let me have access to reflective surfaces, and I’m not usually gawking at myself, either.”

Jamie leaned back in his chair, and his head bumped my chest, where I was leaning over the back of the chair.

He remained where he was, looking up at me.  “You had a look in your eyes like all the joy had gone out of the world.”

“Depressed?”

“No,” Jamie said.  “Um…”

He turned a page in his notebook.

On the fresh page, he began to sketch.  He was using a fountain pen that flowed fairly freely, but his hand moved with some speed and dexterity.  It was interesting to see, because Jamie wasn’t a strong artist.  He made my eyes too small, the position slightly wrong, paused, then went back, expanding, making the top of the eye into my eyebrows, and drawing my eyes at a larger size.  It was a rough sketch, and it was a sketch that showed my face in heavy shadow, the lines noticeable, thick.

At first I took it for a caricature, exaggerating my features, but Jamie wasn’t good enough to do that.  The hair was drawn in messy, framing it all, and the lines marked my cheeks as being more gaunt, with thin cross-hatching for the shadows in the recesses, I realized that it wasn’t a recent picture, that my eyes were larger in proportion to the rest because it was a picture of me, years younger.

Near the beginning.

Drawing from memory, rather than talent.

I leaned forward, and it was as though I were looking into a mirror cast in paper.  My eyes were narrow, my lips thin and slightly parted, and all the features of my face and ears were fine to the point of being sharp.

Jamie was already putting down notes below and to the side of the image.  I glanced at the first.

Drawn for a discussion with Sly, during the Case of the Bad Seeds.

“Case of the bad seeds,” I commented idly.

“Placeholder,” he said.  He was already going on to write more.  Normally I wouldn’t have been able to resist reading over his shoulder, but I found I couldn’t keep my eyes off the image for long.  The eyes were just scratches of black ink, almost hidden in the shadows that had been etched around them, but they took up much of the focus.

“This was… that time I had to do two appointments, back to back?”  I asked.  Only time my cheeks would have been that hollow.

Jamie didn’t respond, but his pen moved, indicating a line he’d just jotted down.  He tapped his fountain pen against paper, leaving three blotchy dots in the margin.

From memory: Sly in the Tower, after he ran away.  Before he recovered from one month’s appointment, he had to do the next.

Reading the line, I suddenly felt excruciatingly uncomfortable, and the hour-old bruises from my encounter with Ed weren’t why.  Feeling so restless I couldn’t bear it, I turned away from Jamie, his chair, and his book, and I paced across our little dorm room.  Two beds each with a chest at the foot, one desk, and one bedside table between the beds with drawers for us to share.  Mothmont was fancy, but not so fancy that we each got a palace.  Real estate mattered, if nothing else.

“We didn’t think we’d get you back,” Jamie murmured.  “We suspected you were lost.”

“That’s not it,” I said, forcing my voice to sound different from how I felt.  I worried I didn’t sell it very well.  “No.  It’s not like Helen is, and it’s not like that, okay?  That’s not the look they had.”

“Okay,” Jamie said, sounding very normal, placid, and very calm.

Though I didn’t like it, I was finding the conversation helped me to clarify my interpretation.  “They weren’t lost.  There was emotion there.  They were human, but they weren’t nice humans.”

“You’re not a nice human sometimes,” Jamie remarked.

I shot him a look.

“Only saying, Sly, only saying.”

“I looked at them, and I knew they were the sorts who’d stick their parents with something sharp and then light up the family home.  Or try to drop a piece of masonry on someone they didn’t like.”

“You’d-”

I narrowed my eyes, making the look darker and more intense.

He seemed to give up, pulling his hands away from the page, slumping back.  “Yeah, Sy.  Got it.  But if you can’t tell me how they looked all murderous, I’m not sure I can draw it.  I’m not sure I can draw them in the first place.”

“It’s fine,” I said.  “Don’t fret about it.”

“Think you’d recognize them if you saw them?”

“If I saw them?  No.  They were standing in shadow.  If I talked to them, maybe.”

“There are one thousand, two hundred students at Mothmont, give or take, ranging from year one to year twelve.  It’s going to take you an awful long time to talk to them all.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I was still on the far side of the room.  Three sets of my uniform had been provided, alongside a little cloak and hood for the rain and an umbrella, all stacked neatly on the chest at the end of the bed.  My bedside drawer had a new comb, bottle of toothwash, washcloth, and a new set of books.

Nothing that was mine.  I didn’t like it.  The office back at the hedge with the grille on the windows and the bookcase blocking the door had felt less like a cell than this.

There, I’d been free to be me.  Here, I was being made to conform, just like some of the fruit I’d seen grown at the Academy, placed inside molds that would shape their growth.  Fruit shaped like certain animals, or like human faces.

Were our murder-children in that same situation?

I frowned.  “I’m thinking…”

“Yeah?”  Jamie twisted in his seat, elbow over the back of the chair.

“Why here?” I asked.

“Resources are available, on multiple fronts.  You’ve got access to children, you’ve got access to tools and starter labs.  Maybe things go missing, maybe it gets put back at the end of the day?”

“Maybe,” I said.  “One way or another, something is going on with their heads.  Either they’re being made to do something they normally wouldn’t, or they’re not them, and something more nefarious is going on.”

“Nefarious?”

“There are parasites that induce suicidal behavior in the host as part of the life cycle.”

“Sure.  Transoplasma Felidae.  Feverish behavior and a compulsion to drown oneself.  Weaponized version was Transoplasma Necis, but that saw reams of people biting off their own tongues to choke on the tongue or aspirating the blood.  Well known enough.”

“I’ll take your word for it.  Maybe the students we’re talking about have a parasite in their heads, something that’s making them act funny.  Maybe we’re dealing with the parasites and not the children themselves.”

Jamie seemed to consider a moment.  “Raises questions.”

“You ask, I try to justify.”

“Why do they care about us?”

“They’re complex.  Pre-set instructions.”

Jamie shook his head.  “I don’t buy that someone capable of that would be here and not at the Academy, making a fortune.”

“Then they’re paranoid.  Like they’re rabid, they’re wary of everything.”

“Why us?”

I started to come up with an explanation, then dismissed it.  Felt weak, like too much of a reach.  “What if it made them suggestible?  Broke down the walls in their heads, left them open to receiving instruction?  Get access to the children, slip them something that leaves them open to being influenced.”

“We’d see it in their behavior,” Jamie said.

“What?  That they’d be willing to take orders?  Follow the rest of the sheep?  We’re in a school, Jamie,” I said.

“Point.”

“A highbrow school.  Look, I’m not sold on the parasite idea.  But we’ve got an awful lot of children here, ones that might be more vulnerable to whatever, or of an age where some symptoms might be easier to hide.  Maybe the fact that we’re all fitting into some cookie cutter archetype is an advantage for our puppeteer in the background.  If their little experiments feel disoriented?  Have lost memories?  If their behavior is a little outside the norm?  All our ‘bad seed’ has to do is imitate their peers.”

Jamie was nodding, already thinking the idea through, rounding it out, “If they act too far out of line, then the faculty steps in, gets them to shape up.  If that fails…”

“What happens when someone futzes up and doesn’t look like they’re going to straighten out?”

“Detention,” Jamie said.  “Or a talk with the headmistress.  You don’t think she’s the one doing it?”

I rolled my head to one side, then the other.  “I talked to the woman.  I didn’t get that sense out of her.”

“Why?”

I gave Jamie an annoyed look.

“It’s good to think about why,” Jamie said, his voice quiet but not meek.  “You have a good sense of things, but it’s important to identify the details that are feeding into that sense.  You see little details, and your brain picks them up and puts them into storage, while your conscious mind doesn’t register them.  Prey animals use that low-level awareness a lot, figuring out that a predator could be nearby, and we still have traces of that prey thinking.”

“I don’t see myself as a prey animal,” I said, smiling.

“The idea is sound, Sy.  We all use that sense to some extent, but you’re a little better than most.  You can train it, but training it starts with being aware.  Think about your surroundings, pay attention to the details, and-”

A knock sounded at the door.

“You two decent in there?” Gordon asked, voice muffled by the intervening door.

“Am I ever decent?” I asked.

The door opened.  But it wasn’t just Gordon, which surprised me.  He was accompanied by a boy, narrow in build, with thick eyebrows and wiry black hair cut a finger’s width from his head.  It didn’t look like one of the boys that would be in Gordon’s cadre.

“We ran into each other at the door,” Gordon said.

“I know him,” Jamie said.  “Book trade?”

“Yeah,” the boy said.  He held out two dime novels.  “Read them?”

Jamie glanced at the novels, “Yes.  But it’s fine.  I’ll trade.”

He opened a drawer in the desk, pulling out five more dime novels.  “Doll Man and the song of the moon?”

“Read it.”

“Doll man and the revenge of the swarm queen?”

“That’s out?”  The boy stuck out his hand.  Jamie dutifully handed over the book, no more than a hundred pages.

“I liked this one,” Jamie said, “But you might want to wait until there’s more material.”

“What’s that?” the boy asked.

“Huh?” Jamie asked.

I turned, and I started to cross the room, before I saw Gordon moving in the same direction.  He was faster, and he was closer.  I deferred to him.

Before Jamie was able to process just what had grabbed the boy’s attention, Gordon touched the cover of Jamie’s notebook and flipped it over.  It slapped closed and slid a bit across the desk.

Jamie put a hand out to stop it.

“That’s Jamie’s journal,” Gordon said.  “You don’t read someone’s journal, pal.”

“Oh,” the boy said.  He turned a little pink.  “Didn’t know, sorry Jamie.”

“It’s okay,” Jamie said.

“That picture was something.  Scary, if I can say so,” the boy said, turning to look at me.  “That was you?”

“You don’t comment on someone’s journal if you happen to get a look at it, either,” Gordon said, his voice firm.

The boy’s face turned even pinker.

“Mickey,” Jamie said, offering a bit of relief where I would have pressed the advantage. “Take a look.”

Jamie held the other three little novels so they fanned out.  A lady in white and a rat crawling out of the darkness, a man with a bird mask, and a handsome young man with a dog accompanying him through a forest.

“What’s that last one?” Mickey asked.

Jamie pulled it away before Mickey could grab it.  “When we stopped by the Academy last weekend, you see anyone go off in a very small group?”

“Very small?”

“More than three, less than ten.”

“Uh.  Some special students got instruction with professors, or got to sit in on classes.  Top of certain classes, or something.  But they were alone.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Okay, thanks anyway,” Jamie said.  He put the books down, then handed over the one Mickey had expressed interest in.  “Barber John and the dark forest monster.”

“Keen.”

Gordon stepped out of the way while the boy headed back to the hallway.  He closed the door behind him, and stood with his back to it.  “Asking questions like that can draw attention.”

“I’m very careful about who I ask,” Jamie said.

“Okay,” Gordon said.  He seemed to take that at face value.  He didn’t mention Jamie’s lapse about the book.

Gordon and I wouldn’t go after Jamie for that any more than any of the others would come after me for my behavior after an appointment.  We had our strengths, and we had our individual weak points.  If everything was working as it should, we covered the weak points and highlighted the strengths.

That meant accepting that sometimes Jamie had enough stuff in his head that he was a little slower to get things rolling when surprised.

If I’d been on the ball, I would have reminded Jamie, but my head hurt.

“It’s time for dinner,” Gordon said.  “Thought I’d check in.”

“Still alive,” I said.  “No surprise murders.”

Gordon’s expression didn’t twitch.  “What do you think?”

“We were thinking maybe the structure of the school is being used to shape or correct behavior where it might go off rails,” Jamie said.  I cleared my throat, and Jamie amended his statement to say, “Sy thought so.  It makes some sense.”

“Something to watch out for?” Gordon asked.

“Quirks in behavior, students pushing the limit and getting pushed back in line by the group,” I said.  “And it might be worth seeing who is in charge of correcting the students when they get too problematic.”

Gordon nodded.  “Our mad doctor or doctors act the role of the murderer, the children are the murder weapon, and that weapon needs to be kept controlled and concealed.  The school is a setting for it.  That still leaves questions.  Who, how, why.”

“Who is the murderer, how are they doing this with the students, and why are they doing it?  What’s the motive?” Jamie asked.

“How, also, are they giving orders?” Gordon asked.  “The students here got orders to kill us.  When?  What form did it take?”

“Food for thought,” I said.  I perked up.  “Speaking of food…”

“That was contrived,” Gordon said.

“Brain feels sluggish, and I haven’t had an actual meal in…” I counted on my fingers, then paused, stuck.  “When did we eat, before the snake charmer?”

Gordon blinked.  “At that point, I think the question is academic.  Have you had water?”

“I had some water, yeah,” I said.

He frowned.  “If you hadn’t, I’d wonder how you were still standing.  Let’s slap a feedbag on that face of yours, Sy.  And you wonder why you’re short.”

I grabbed the comb from the bedside table and hucked it at his head.  He caught it, which didn’t surprise me.

We collected ourselves, getting our things.  Jamie picked up his notebook, tucking it under one arm.  The pen was capped and slipped into a breast pocket.  Gordon was all set up, and all I needed was a bit of protection from any rain.

The school was arranged into a square, with the yard in the middle.  The front entrance sat at the southern wall with the front office, infirmary and other administrative rooms.  The west and east sides of the square had classrooms.  The more interesting area was the northern end, furthest from the entrance.  Here, we had the dorms, boys at the west corner, girls at the east.  The two sides of the dorms were separated by the teacher’s quarters and washrooms on the upper floors, and a spacious dining room on the lower floor.  I supposed the idea was that it made mingling harder.

The dorms were ordered by year, with the older students on the upper floors, and being right in the upper-middle of the range of ages, we were left to make our way down on our way to the dining room.

My eyes searched the crowd, looking for a familiar face or feature.  I’d told Jamie I wasn’t sure if I could place them, but that didn’t stop me from trying.  Kids milled around us.

“Ed was asking about you, before your little tussle under the tree,” Gordon commented.  Keeping the conversation to stuff we could talk about freely.

“Tussle?”

“I’m trying to phrase it so I don’t hurt your feelings, Sy,” Gordon said, sounding as condescending as he was able.  “Because if I was honest, I’d have to say you didn’t just embarrass yourself.  You embarrassed all of us.”

I jabbed him.  He took it without flinching.

“I’m guessing that, following your usual pattern, you’re going to get in trouble, ostensibly to see how the justice system of Mothmont operates?”  Gordon asked.

The question could be taken two ways.  Anyone hearing would think I was a troublemaker, which wasn’t wrong, but he was asking if I’d see which faces or individuals might be tied to the correction of errant students.  Or errant ‘bad seeds’, as the case went.

The maneuver had other uses.  If our opposition here was less graceful, they might well get themselves into trouble, just to follow me or keep an eye on me.  Simply paying attention to see who acted and reacted after I got myself into trouble could reveal a great deal.

But my answer to Gordon was a, “Not just yet.”

“No?”

“Still waiting to see what happens after my brawl with Ed.”

Jamie, trailing a bit behind us, snickered audibly.

Gordon openly scoffed.  “Brawl.  You got beat, Sy.  I was talking to some of the others, and Ed actually got worried when someone suggested that you might be a real scrapper, growing up in the orphanage.  I nearly split something, trying not to laugh.”

“Ha ha,” I said, without humor.

We reached the end of the dining room, and the girls were filtering in through the door on the far side.   It was nice, very spacious, all long tables of dark wood, benches, with the two sides separated by a buffet style table.

The kitchen was visible, a recessed area, with the chefs busy at work over various stoves.  Students aged twelve to sixteen were wearing aprons, carrying food out.  Racks of bread, bowls of salad and empty glasses were placed on the table, while larger pots of food were placed on the buffet table, beside stacks of plates.  Stew, soups, and portions of meat.

From the smell in the kitchen, they were already working on dessert.

I took it all in, studying it.  The system.

Gordon leaned close, murmuring, “Put yourself into their shoes.  How many ways can you see, to poison someone?”

“Pre-assigned seats?” I asked.

“No, but they’ll call us together by homeroom for a roll call soon,” Jamie said.

“Make sure all the students are present and accounted for,” Gordon elaborated.

Dust the glasses with something, poison the silverware, deliver the poison while serving water, refresh the bread bowl or salad, drop something in the food while we go from the buffet to our seats, or simply take advantage of the bumps and shoves that come with being in a crowd of hungry students to stick us with a needle.

“Seven off the top of my head.”

“Lillian and I counted out twelve ways they could’ve gotten me, looking back in retrospect,” Gordon murmured.  “Jamie and Helen added one each once they got back from the Academy.”

“Kind of takes the joy out of eating for the first time in a week,” I murmured.

“You shouldn’t eat too much on an empty stomach anyway,” Jamie said.

I made a face, but I didn’t take my eyes off the crowd.  I saw Helen and Lillian on the other side.  Helen had a bevvy of girls around her, and she was playing it up.  Lillian stood off to one side, talking to a teacher.

Oddly in her element, in a very not-the-way-she-acts-at-home way.

“Incidentally,” I said, still looking over the crowd for a glimpse of the boys I’d seen through the window.  I didn’t see any telltale signs, and I certainly didn’t see them together as a group.  “What do we do if I happen to spot a possible culprit?”

“Signal me and Helen.  We’ll go after him.”

I nodded.  “Easier if you’re together.”

“We’ll sit together as a group.”

“Okay,” I said.

Sure enough, we were called to specific tables by our homeroom teachers.  They read our names off of lists, and then gave the official go-ahead to get food.

I held back out of the way while everyone stampeded for the buffet table, or ran over to reunite with friends.  Nobody returned to the seats they’d been in for the nightly attendance, and the teachers didn’t enforce anything.  There were striations by year and groupings of cliques, but no divisions beyond that.

Helen approached with a group of her friends, while Gordon went to go talk to his clique.  The teenagers had all gathered around the buffet table and were screening out the kids, claiming first pick, but Gordon’s group looked set to take up the first gap that formed.

I appreciated that he going out of his way to stay in our line of sight, allowing us to watch his back.

“Sy, was it?” one of Helen’s older friends asked.  An attractive brunette with her hair in a short bob.  She’d hiked up her skirt just a fraction beneath her uniform top, so the bottom of the skirt was higher, revealing more of her very nice looking legs.

I realized I’d been caught looking, and met her eyes without a trace of shame or guilt, “You can call me whatever you want, so long as you give me your name first, and maybe the number of your dorm room.”

She smiled, amid some ‘oohs’ from other girls in the group, then gave me a pat on the head.  “That was a good try, and it might have worked, but you’re a little too young for me, and I like the idea of a man who can stand up for me.”

“You saw my duel with Ed,” I spoke my realization aloud.

“I did,” she said.  “I’d offer some comforting words, but the less that’s said, the better.”

“I could say I let him win,” I said.

“Did you?” another girl chimed in, interest piqued.  Blonde, like Helen, but more pixieish in many respects.  Helen could have been an actress or a model, but this girl made me imagine a ballerina, in build and how she was more expressive in general movement.

“No.  But I could say I did,” I said.

“Whatever convinced you to pick a fight with Ed Willard?” the brunette asked.

“Some people are born to be the hero of a story,” I said.  “I was born to be the villain.  I see the charming, good looking, obnoxiously noble type of guy and I feel compelled to start a battle I’m doomed to lose.”

“Does that include monologues while you’re winning and standing over the bloody hero?” another girl asked, a smile on her face, suggesting she was well versed in that sort of thing.  Not many girls read the books and dime novels meant for boys.

“I wouldn’t know,” I said.  “You saw my poor showing earlier.  I haven’t gotten that far.”

I heard a few chuckles and smiles, and belatedly realized that I’d effectively and accidentally drawn the attention of Helen’s entire clique.  Heads at other tables and the buffet line were turning, looking at me as some of the more attractive girls in our grade were grouped around me.

“Okay, wait, I have to poke a hole in your story,” a girl closer to Helen’s and my age declared.  She was a brunette too, but wore her hair longer, with white ribbons that complemented her school uniform.  “You say you don’t get along with good guys, but you get along with Helen’s friend Gordon, don’t you?  If anyone’s noble, it’s him.”

“Oh, Gordon’s a villain at heart,” I said.  “I don’t know if he knows it yet, but there’s a scoundrel in there just screaming for an excuse.”

“How would you know that?” she asked.

“Because when I was showing these guys around, I saw them with all sorts of people, sometimes in the rougher parts of town.  I’ve seen Gordon here, all nice and ordinary, and I’ve seen him go toe to toe with people you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, and they walked away respecting him.”

A half dozen pairs of eyes turned Gordon’s way.  He caught sight of a crowd of girls giving him serious looks and looked about as bewildered as if I’d drawn a gun on him.

Miss Ribbons wasn’t looking though.  She was focused on me, her right eyebrow raised.  “I’m not sure I believe you.”

Pixie-blonde chimed in, turning from Gordon to Ribbons, and then to me.  She put her hands on her hips.  “Are you being a good friend and trying to get us interested in your fellow over there?”

“Maybe,” I said, smiling.

“It’s good if you’ve given up on making yourself look good, because that ship sailed hours ago,” Miss Ribbons commented.

“That’s cruel,” another girl said.  “I quite like Sy, here, and it’s noble of this little villain to play up his friend.”

With the words ‘I quite like Sy’, she put her arms around me, giving me a hug.  I very nearly ducked out of her grip, but a quick glance at each of her hands suggested that they were empty, with no weapon or needle in evidence.  Given the difference in stature, the girl being three years my senior, it pulled the side of my head right into her bosom.

A nearby teacher loudly cleared his throat, and my new friend pulled her arms away, raising her hands as if she were being held up.

“Believe it or not,” Helen said, still smiling, acting very much the young coquette, “Sy isn’t lying.  For once.  What he said about Gordon was true.”

That line spawned more conversation, but my focus was on Gordon.  He navigated his way through eager young students, holding four plates in two hands.  He looked a little wary of joining the group, with so many eyes on him.

“What’s going on?” he asked, once he was close enough to ask.

“Just talking,” Helen said.

“Healthy lad,” the girl who’d hugged me said, indicating Gordon’s plates.

“For my friends,” Gordon said.

Lingering paranoia made me study her expression for any hint of danger.  Had she powdered her shirtfront with a poison that could be inhaled?

Gordon handed us our individual plates, one for me, Helen, Lillian and Jamie, then asked, “Is anyone in dire need of a meal?  I was going to go back to serve myself, but I can get more plates.”

The short-haired brunette raised her hand, smiling way too much at Gordon.

“That’s one,” he said.

“I’m getting waved over,” Miss Ribbons said.  “I need to take over for a friend and start serving.  She’s been in the kitchen all day.”

“Good girl.  Talk to you later,” Helen said.

“Enjoy your meals,” Miss Ribbons said, before dashing off.

I watched her retreat, zig-zagging through the crowd on the way to the kitchen, hair and skirt bouncing before she reunited with the friend she’d mentioned.

She glanced back, looking at me.

“I do think Mary likes Sy,” Pixie-blonde said.

“Does Sy like Mary?” another girl asked.

“I’m going to sit,” Helen said.  “Come sit with us, Sy.  I don’t think these girls are going to let you go, like this.  They’ve got their claws in you, and I don’t think they’ll let you go.”

“Claws?” a girl asked, archly.

Helen, doing her part to keep us together in a very natural seeming way.

It took time before everyone had a plate and food.  My focus was on the crowd, keeping only enough attention on the conversation to keep up with it.  Where were the dynamics?  What were the possible approaches for attack?

I was exceedingly aware of the state of my food.  On such an empty stomach, I couldn’t afford to get poisoned.  We already knew our enemies were aware of us, so I didn’t mind being a little guarded.  One girl commented on it, even, and I explained it away as a casualty of being from the orphanage.  That, in itself, spawned more discussion.

Jamie and Lillian seemed content to be in the background.  Jamie was taking it all in.  If something happened, he’d be able to tell us who was where.

Had I been familiar with the dynamic and the situation, I might have been more on point, aware of when it all started to go wrong.  It tied into what Jamie had said about the prey instinct.  Taking in the subconscious details, things that one’s mind and attention weren’t picking up on.

Changes in volume, shifts in tone.  The behavior of people at the fringes and in the background.

Little boys who were hunched over their plates.

It only clicked when I saw that dessert was being served, and that the cooks and serving girls were looking a little nonplussed.  I paid attention to what they were sensing with their own prey’s instinct.

That dessert was being placed on the table, and very few students seemed inclined to go get it.

Looking around, I saw expressions of pain.  People squirming.  Not a lot, but as I watched, I saw it was getting worse.

I dropped my knife and fork.

“Don’t eat,” I said.

Helen, Gordon, Lillian, and Jamie dropped their utensils.

They didn’t settle for poisoning us.

They poisoned everyone.

Why?

“Oh,” Erma, the pixie-haired blonde said.  “I thought I felt full, but now-”

She raised a hand to her mouth.

“Just nausea?” Lillian asked.  She got a nod.  “Feverish?  Does it hurt?”

Whatever she was feeling, I didn’t experience it.  My friends didn’t either.

Maybe a handful of people had escaped it, whatever it was.

My mind was going a mile a minute as I took it in, tried to figure out the approach.

What was the goal, the plan?

They’d hit everyone, but missed us.  Was it an accident, luck on our part, Gordon being safe?

“The teachers are affected too,” Gordon said.

“It doesn’t seem to be serious,” Lillian said.  “It’ll get explained away as a stomach thing.  Something improperly cooked, perhaps.”

As if to answer her statement, someone threw up.  It seemed to set off a chain reaction.  People were rising from their seats, hurrying out of the dining hall.

“The entire school is going to be shut down,” I said.  “Everyone in their beds for at least the next few hours, if not the next day.”

Everyone.  It’s not a frame, or they would have left the teachers alone, done more to set us up.  Again, I have to wonder… why?

My eye fell on Miss Ribbons.

I felt the uneasiness, watching her.  I saw the look in her eyes.  Just the same as the boys had been.

I jerked my head, and the others looked, following my gaze.  Miss Ribbons was already making a hasty exit, pulling off her apron.  If anyone asked, I bet she’d say she was going to the nurse.

“Nobody to look after us, or keep us out of trouble,” I commented.

Locking down the school.  They were largely free to roam, or to feign being sick until our backs were turned, but I suspected it wouldn’t be so easy or safe for us.

They’re making a play, and we’re still completely in the dark about what they are and what they’re doing.

Taking Root 1.6

With the people starting to vomit or rising from their seats to run for the nearest toilet, it was pretty clear that something was wrong.  Students were getting distressed, and students were getting scared.  The teachers weren’t in great shape either.

Our opposition was smart.  Whatever was going on, they were capable of making plans with multiple phases or steps.  Knowing we’d already served ourselves, they’d tainted the food, affecting most of the other students and teachers.  Probably.  It fit with Miss Ribbons’ actions and the general timeline.

Mary.  Helen’s friends had called her Mary.

Our seats at the table were arranged with intent.  It wasn’t anything we’d blatantly coordinated or organized, but we’d simply accepted it as an approach.  At the table furthest from the kitchen, Jamie, Lillian and I sat on the bench with the wall right behind us, Helen and a share of Gordon’s friends on either side.  Helen and Gordon themselves were opposite Jamie and I, their backs to the rest of the dining room.

The position meant that Jamie and I could observe the room, and getting to us was rather more difficult.  Gordon and Helen could look after themselves, for the most part, if someone happened to approach from behind.

I leaned over to Jamie, and I took advantage of the general noise, bustle, and distraction of the other students to murmur in his ear.  “The other students are too smart to reveal themselves in the midst of this.  Watch the teachers.”

“Sure,” he said.

I met Gordon and Helen’s eyes.  This was an awkward situation, because we couldn’t coordinate by speech without cluing the others in.  If we left, we ran the risk of being blindsided.  When our enemies were in the shadows and we were in plain sight, the chaos here worked very much against us.  While everyone else was distracted or incapacitated, they were free to attack us from any number of angles.  If we happened to die, well, even minor food poisoning could kill.

That in itself was dangerous, but I was willing to bet there were more layers to this attack.  A specific reason they’d done it this way.

“Helen,” Gordon said.  He put a hand on Helen’s shoulder.  “You okay?”

Helen shook her head.  She was already leaning over slightly, one hand to her collarbone.

She very briefly met my eye.

Good.  Play along.

“Do you need help?” Lillian asked.

“Just walk me to our room?” Helen asked.  There was a tension in her voice, as if she were suddenly trying very hard not to puke.

“Lillian isn’t that strong,” Gordon said.  “I’ll help.”

“Boys aren’t allowed on the girl’s side,” was the protest from Erma the pixie-blonde.  She looked visibly green around the gills.

“Special circumstances,” Gordon said.

“You’re really not allowed,” Erma protested, again.

“I really don’t care,” Gordon said, firm.

“We’ll come,” I said.

“Groups of-” Erma started, then bit the sentence short as she fought a wave of nausea.

“Erma,” I said.  “Let us be gentlemen, okay?  We’re mostly okay, I think.  We can walk you to your rooms.”

She didn’t look happy with that idea, but she wasn’t able to talk, either.

Gordon began to stand, helping Helen out of her seat.  He offered a hand to Erma.

“The teachers,” Jamie said, alerting us.

My head turned.  One of the teachers was standing.  He wore slightly old fashioned clothes.  His pants clung to his legs, disappearing into boots, while he wore a bright red jacket over a button-up shirt without a tie.  He had a strong build, with a prominent barrel chest, and the clothing had a way of making his legs look far too small while his upper body was made to look larger.  His hair was the same way, wavy hair across a head that was already very triangular, with a prominent upper brow and pointed chin.

The red jacket was unfortunate, not because it was a sad attempt at acting a member of the upper crust, but because his skin was now very flushed, matching the jacket.  He was sweating, in obvious discomfort.

He hadn’t escaped the effects of the poison.  The man seated to his right and the headmistress another seat down were both looking about as uncomfortable.

Had they eaten more, being larger in build?

“Everyone!” Red-jacket boomed out the word.  He had a faint but real British accent.

The noise level dropped.

“Something in the meal looks as though it might have been undercooked.  Head straight to your dorm rooms.  If you have to-” he paused.  “It is best if you use the wastebins in your room instead of trying to make your way to the toilets.  I expect there will be too much demand.  You will be looked after, but go now before you feel any worse.”

We’ll be looked after?

Jamie was staring intently, still in his seat.  He stirred when I reached across his field of vision for a pitcher of water, only a quarter of the way filled.  I emptied the contents into another pitcher, then slid it across the table to Gordon.

“What’s this?”

“If we can’t get to a wastebin,” I said, “Better the jug than the floor.  You hold onto it?”

Gordon took the glass pitcher by the handle, one arm supporting Helen.  It wasn’t much, but it served as a weapon.

“Go ahead,” I told Jamie.  While he and Lillian circled the table, I emptied another pitcher into the one at the center of the table, holding it in my hands.

Not that it mattered too much.  If it came down to me needing a weapon to defend myself, I doubted things could be salvaged.

Still made me feel better.

We headed for the girl’s dormitory with Helen and a few stragglers.  I was glad to be shorter than the norm, as I ducked my head down and let the crowd shield me from the eyes of the teachers.

I’d hoped that the act of taking care of Helen would let us break away, but there were too many people vacating the dining room.  Even those who were well were being driven out by the aroma of vomit.  It was humid in the room with the heat from the kitchen and the sheer number of students, and the humidity helped carry the offensive odor.  We couldn’t break away from the crowd, and I wasn’t sure that the dorm room would be much better.

Beside me, an older girl hunched over, making a guttural noise.  Everyone near her cleared out of the way.

I took advantage of the gap in the crowd to step closer.  I stuck the empty pitcher beneath her mouth, pulling my head back and away so I didn’t have to look as she emptied a portion of her stomach’s contents.

“Thank you,” she said, still bent over, smiling.

She reached to take the pitcher, and I pulled it away from her grasp.

“Reserved for friends,” I said.

She looked a little bewildered and lost.

“And here I thought you were a gentleman,” Erma mumbled.

“I’m a bastard, born and bred,” I said.  And there’s no way I’m handing a weapon over to a potential enemy.

With students moving slowly and some pushing or jostling, the way up the stairs looked like more of a jam than any day on King Street.  We were probably safe while we were a group, but if the crowd separated us, or if someone tried to slip us the wrong end of a knife while we were in the crush of bodies, I wasn’t sure we’d be able to respond accordingly.

I saw Gordon shooting Jamie a look, and I sensed that he was thinking along the same lines.

We were stuck.

“Where are the showers?” I asked.

“Showers?”

“Baths?  Where do we wash up?”

“Upstairs one floor,” Gordon said, “Above the dining room.”

He took the question as an instruction, and he and Helen dutifully forged their way into a gap in the crowd.  Jamie, Lillian and I hurried to follow, me holding my pitcher off to one side, to avoid the smell.

People were slow, some had stopped on the stairs, sitting or on all fours, and there was a smell that suggested they weren’t all simply throwing up.  It was a mess, a disaster, and a stain on Mothmont on many levels.

That part of it all was almost certainly a clue.

There were a lot of details to be picked out of this.  Motivation, approach, the nature of the enemy…

I idly moved the pitcher to one side, intending it to be a shield against anyone reaching for me or holding a weapon, but it ended up serving another purpose.  The sight of a glass container filled with vomit made two girls shy back.  It was an avenue for me to slip upstairs, skipping ahead three steps, ducking past two students, and stepping to safety, free of the sickly herd.

The others followed me as we headed into the girl’s showers.  Two showers were already running, and the room was filled with steam.  The floor was white tile, the stalls themselves were wood painted with an exceedingly glossy paint.  Each stall was recessed, with hooks and benches before the door and the shower beyond.

“They get individual stalls?” Jamie asked.  “Why do they get individual stalls?”

“Shh,” Gordon shushed him.

Erma had followed us, and staggered past us to the first available stall, where she promptly decorated the floor with her dinner.

I glanced around, then pointed.  While the others led the way, I stepped to nearby stalls and turned on the water.  The hiss of water filled the room.

By the time I caught up with the others in the furthest shower back, Helen was standing upright, her expression blank.  Gordon stood with a foot resting on one of the little benches at the entry to the stall, while Jamie and Lillian occupied the other short bench.

I stood at the entrance to the stall, where I could peek out and keep an eye on the door.  Clouds of steam drifted.

Helen reached past the others for my pitcher, and I let her have it.  Without flinching, she emptied some onto her sleeve.  She turned on the water, cold more than warm, and stepped under the stream.  The water ran over her, soaking her hair and uniform.  The makeup around her eyes ran.

I glanced away, my attention on the other stalls.  Pacing back a bit, I bent down, peering under stalls.  I saw some bare feet and wet socks.  It looked like Erma was sitting on the floor of the shower, letting water run over her.

“Were we followed?” Gordon asked, his voice low.

“Don’t know,” Jamie murmured.

“When things get this messy, it gets harder to keep track of things,” I said.  “Which might be what they’re counting on.”

“Trying to catch us out?” Gordon asked.

I nodded.  “Shaking things up, yeah.  What worries me is Mary.”

“I didn’t have any clue,” Helen said.

“It’s okay,” Lillian said, reassuring.  “It’s not your fault.”

“I’m well aware,” Helen said, turning her blank expression on Lillian.  Anyone else might have sounded irritated, but Helen didn’t sound anything.  “If I had an idea and ignored it, then it would be my fault.”

“I… okay,” Lillian said.

“Who is she?” I asked.  “This Mary?”

“Mary Elizabeth Coburn,” Helen said.  “Her father isn’t influential.  Accountant to the rich and famous.  It’s why I didn’t pay particular attention to her.”

“Who is her mother?” Gordon asked.

“I don’t know,” Helen said.  “I just looked at the men, because of the prior pattern.  Would have asked, but it’s harder to ask about a girl’s mother.”

I nodded.  Most mothers were teachers, nurses, or homemakers.  Nothing so interesting that we could ask.  There were more women attending the Academy, but few from the last generation.

“Worth looking into,” Gordon said.  He ran his fingers through his golden hair, which was damp with the light spray that had touched it.  “Check the rest of her family, why she might be selected out of all the students here.”

I could sense how stressed the others were.  This maneuver had put us all in a reactionary position, and our options were limited until the other shoe dropped.  I volunteered some information, hoping to get them focused again.  Not necessarily improving morale, but I doubted that was a real issue.  We knew this sort of situation well enough.  “We know she had a role in this.  She might as well have told us to our faces that she was involved, the line about enjoying our meals, the look she gave us.   It means something, if she doesn’t care about us coming after her.”

Jamie nodded.  “The puppeteer is using these students as murder weapons.  As a killer, he has a pattern.  Murder-suicides.  One after another.  The suicides cover up evidence.  If Mary keeps to the pattern, she’s either going to come after us-”

“Or she’s going to go home,” Gordon said.  He paused.  “Oh.”

I followed his thoughts to the same conclusion.  “This is the endgame.”

“I’m sorry,” Lillian cut in.  “I’m not following.”

“They know we’re onto them,” Gordon said.  “Our puppeteer somehow figured out about us.  Maybe through a connection to the Academy, maybe by some other means.  He got scared, and now he’s wrapping up.  Get everyone sick, and in the midst of the chaos he can send his weapons after us, or students are sent home and finish their jobs.”

“Or both,” I said.  “If they’re careful about how they come after us, there’s nothing saying they can’t take a run at us and then disappear.”

“That’s possible,” Gordon agreed.  “Especially if they know who we are, they might not want to pick a fight.”

I heard a noise and glanced past the entrance to the stall to check the door.

Two more students.  One was crying.

I stepped further into the steam and shadow and eyed them until they disappeared into a stall.  No sign of hostility.

“Either way,” Gordon was saying, “our puppeteer may be wary enough to take a break for a few years, let interest in things die down, or pack up and head to another campus at another school.”

“Maybe,” I said.  “This approach here feels ugly.  Making students sick?  Vomit and shit everywhere.”

“Hurts Mothmont where it counts, and what hurts Mothmont hurts the Academy,” Gordon said.

“Personal,” Lillian said.

I nodded.  “Now you’re getting up to speed.”

She looked annoyed at that phrasing.

“We have a man-” Gordon said.

“-Or woman,” Jamie cut in.

Gordon continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted, “-Who considers these children to be expendable assets.  He alters them somehow, gives them a target, and has them die after the fact, tidying up the evidence.  He does this because he hates the school?  That’s an awful lot of hate.  Do we really think he’s a teacher?  That’s a lot of involvement and hours of the day to spend around something you hate that much.”

“Isn’t it possible?” Helen asked.

“No,” Gordon said, frowning a little.  “I really don’t think it is.  It feels too spiteful, twisting the knife for good measure when he could simply stab.”

Helen nodded.

“What if this isn’t about the school?” I asked.

“Go on.”

“It’s personal, but it’s a grudge against a person.”

“Against the headmistress?” Gordon asked.

I offered a languid shrug.  The moisture in the air was starting to collect on my skin and clothes.  I wiped my forehead and pushed my hair back and away from my forehead.  “Jamie?  Any thoughts on the faculty?”

“They were talking as a group before Mr. McCairn did his announcement,” Jamie said.  “The headmistress didn’t have a lot to say.”

“Did students serve the teachers food?”  I asked.

“Yes, right from the kitchen,” Jamie said.  He paused, glancing to the left, “Mary served the three at the end.”

“Making the headmistress look bad by keeping her ineffectual,” I said.  “More poison or whatever it was-”

“Emetics,” Lillian said.  “Maybe laxative.”

“Mary gave the headmistress more emetics than anyone else,” I amended my statement.  “The question is who would have a grudge against-”

I sensed a movement out of the corner of my eye.  My head turned, my hand and one finger going up for the benefit of the others.

“To your rooms, now,” a woman’s voice cut in.

I heard footsteps.  Both those belonging to the woman and the footsteps of the fleeing girls.

A sharp knock, a few stalls down.

“Out,” was the order.

Doing the rounds, clearing everyone away.

Gordon held up his hand, counting off on his fingers, his voice low.  “Who has a grudge against the headmistress?  Someone on campus, who can communicate with the students.  Who is Mary and why her?  Look at who her mother is.  What is the mechanism of control?  And don’t forget that they’re liable to come for us.  Be on guard, and don’t forget they might try to take you out with them.”

“And their families,” Lillian said.  “If they get away…”

“We’ll step in if it looks like there’s any danger of that happening,” Jamie assured her.

“We will,” I agreed.  “I’d bet money this ploy of theirs has another angle.  Watch out for the angle.”

There were nods.

“Out,” the teacher gave the order, several stalls down.

“My friends,” Erma said.  “They were in here.”

Selling us out?

No, Erma didn’t know we were trying to avoid the spotlight.

“Do we need to worry about Erma?” Gordon asked.

“I don’t know,” Helen said.

“Not wanting us in the girl’s dorm was suspicious,” Gordon said, his voice a whisper.

I could hear the teacher’s approaching footsteps, hard soles on tile.

“Oh, that?” Lillian asked.  “Her room’s a sty.  She doesn’t know how to look after herself.”

Our entire group collectively relaxed.

There was a metal-on-metal squeak as another shower was turned off.

I turned to face the woman as she emerged from the steam.

“Boys in the girl’s showers?” she asked, her voice arching, as if she were about to launch into a tirade.

“It’s okay,” Lillian said.  “We-”

“Not another word.  This is most certainly not ‘okay’!” the woman said, building up steam.

Helen stumbled forward, lightly headbutting the woman in the solar plexus.  With wet hands, she clutched the woman by the shirtfront.

“Miss Williams,” Helen mewled the words, “I feel so bad.  Please.  I-”

Helen paused, apparently holding back her gorge.

Gordon stepped forward, hurrying to offer my pitcher of vomit to the woman.  The woman had to fight Helen’s clutches to get to the pitcher and offer it to the girl.

Helen managed to unload a mouthful of vomit and missed the pitcher entirely, dropping it on the floor between the woman’s feet.  She coughed, clutching at the woman’s shirt again.  “It hurts.”

I jumped in.  “We know her, and she had it worse than anyone, and we didn’t know what to do.  There were so many people on the stairs we weren’t sure we could get anywhere in time.”

“She had someone else’s mess on her sleeve,” Lillian said.  “I thought she could clean off, but I couldn’t support her myself, because Erma was there too, so we came here, and she went into the shower like that.”

“I wanted to get cool,” Helen said.  “I feel hot and sweaty and gross and…” her words dissolved into incoherent whines.

“I-” the woman started.

“Please, we don’t want to get in trouble,” Gordon said.  “We didn’t know any way to help her.”

“You don’t-”

“It hurts,” Helen said.  “My stomach is cramping.”

“Enough,” the woman said.  She managed to extricate herself from Helen.  “Enough of that.  You need to act like young adults.  I understand that this young lady is feeling unwell, but that’s no excuse for the rest of you.”

She glanced over us, and we collectively managed to look miserable and pitiful enough to get to her.

She gave me a curious look.  “What happened to you?”

“Scrap, ma’am,” I said.

The woman made a face.  “Boys, to your dorms, right now.  They’re doing headcounts shortly.  I’ll look after Helen here.”

We nodded and hurried to obey.

Once I was at the entrance to the showers, I glanced back.  I could make out Helen with her head resting against the woman’s chest, giving me a sidelong glance, a light smile on her face.

I resisted the urge to smile back.

Had things been different, I might have tried to get myself in trouble.  As nice as it would have been to see how punishment worked here and if it might be used to keep the bad seeds in line, I didn’t want to add more complications to a bad situation.

I was damp but not wet from the ambient moisture of the shower, and I ventured into a hallway that reeked of sick.  The students had been cleared out, but the air would have that bitter taste to it for weeks.

Jamie, Gordon and I all made our way down the hall.

“That was good,” Gordon said.  “Being able to talk, touch base.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “But we’re on our back foot.  We know very little where it counts.  They’ve seized the initiative.  Until we turn things around, we’re going to be responding, not acting.  We don’t have time to waste, if they can just call it quits and go murder mom, dad, and themselves.”

“At which point the Academy can’t keep the situation under wraps,” Gordon said.  “What do you think, Sly?  Want to slip away, see what you can do while you’re staying out of sight?  See if you can turn things around or get the right words to the right ears?”

“If they’re doing headcounts, they’ll wonder where I’m at.  Depending on how things go, that wondering might reach our puppeteer.”

“That’s not a no,” Jamie commented.

I smiled.

“He has at least an idea of who we are,” Gordon said.  “Having you lurking could scare him.”

“Or she has an idea who we are,” Jamie said.  “We could scare her.”

Gordon rolled his eyes.

“I’m just saying.  Most teachers are female.”

“I’m only saying this doesn’t feel like a woman’s work,” Gordon said.  “Women care about kids on a deeper level.”

I thought of Lacey.

Jamie was shaking his head.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Jamie said.  “If I try to argue, you’ll win.  You’ll say something about the poisoner being a woman after all, and you’re faster on the draw than I am, so okay.  I forfeit the argument.  You’re right.”

Gordon frowned, clearly annoyed.

“Either way, I’m thinking we don’t want to scare him.  Or her,” I said, adding that last bit for Jamie’s benefit.  I saw a slight smile on Jamie’s face at that, and a slight deepening of Gordon’s frown of annoyance, which was even better.  “If we assume our puppeteer is operating under fear right now, tying everything up and attempting to remove us before we can uncover him, or packing up and running, then we don’t want to push him too far.”

Gordon nodded.

“How do we seize the initiative if you’re worried-” Jamie started.

I reached up, shushing him.

We’d approached a corner, and the man in the red jacket was further down the hallway.  He wasn’t moving, slumped against the wall.

“You think you need me?” Gordon asked.

As if in response, the man in the red jacket passed gas.  It was a long, high pitched sound.

He sighed in audible relief, patted his rear end with his hand, checking, then pulled himself away from the wall.

I took a second to admire the man’s courage before saying, “I don’t think so.”

Gordon nodded, but he didn’t move from the base of the stairwell while Jamie and I headed toward our room.

“Hello, Mr. McCairn,” Jamie greeted the man.

“Jamie.  And… I don’t recognize this one.”

“Sylvester,” I said.

“To your rooms, stat.  I’m doing a headcount as we speak.”

You’re standing there suffering, or you’re acting, but you’re most definitely not in the midst of doing anything else, I thought.

Still, I obeyed.

I closed the door, then immediately began studying our surroundings.  Jamie sat on his bed.

“You were saying?” he asked.

“We head back to our room, and you tell me about the faculty.”

Jamie nodded.  “Where do I start?”

“Headmistress.”

“Not a lot to say.  She was a teacher for five years before her superior came down with a pregnancy, she took over, and she did a good enough job that she kept the job while moving from place to place.  When Mothmont sprung up, they went looking for someone with a squeaky reputation and clean face to watch over it all.”

Squeaky reputation.  That didn’t mean it was a clean reputation, but it changed the tone of things.  Was it ambition at the heart of it?

I nodded.  I searched the room, looking over the desk, opening the drawers.

Nothing of particular interest.  Ink bottles, pens, a kit for sewing, in case we needed to mend our uniforms…

I removed the contents of the drawers, setting the items on top of the desk.  I considered them.

“McCairn?”  I asked Jamie, when I was done considering.

“Ex-military.  Does drills with the boys, looks over the boy’s dorm.”

“Physical education?”

Jamie nodded.

“It’s all an act,” I said.

“Is it?”

“Yes.  Dressing up, playing up the accent.  They picked him because he was local, not because he was upper crust.”

“Do you think he’s a consideration?  If he’s picking off the powerful, maybe he doesn’t like being the low man on the totem pole?”

“I’m more likely to think he’s beholden to this place than an outright enemy.  Besides, how does he control the children?  Who else?  Second person at the table, between McCairn and the headmistress.  Academy-trained?”

I turned my attention to the chests at the foot of our beds.  I opened the lid, and then tested the weight of the lid itself.

Solid wood, three feet by two feet, give or take.

“Not Academy trained, no.”

Returning to the desk, I claimed a pen, then set to unscrewing the hinges from the bottom portion of the chest.  “Who is he?”

“Mr. Percy.  He teaches the younger years.  Fundamentals of Academy science.”

“But he’s not Academy trained?”

“Teaches it from the books.”

I pulled the lid free of the chest itself, hinges dangling.  I set it aside.  “Help.”

Jamie was on his feet.  Not a question as to why.  He just obeyed.

Together, we moved the chest to the base of the door.  The entire thing must have weighed six or so stone.  A piece of furniture unto itself.

I upended the chest, so the side was facing up, and then dragged the lid over.  I climbed up onto the chest so my eyes were level with the top of the door, and the two of us managed to raise the chest’s lid up to the same level, resting the end of the lid near where my toes were.

“Get the chair?” I asked.  “And a book or something.”

He did.  Standing on the chair, he had a little less height than I did, but he was able to help me, lifting the lid higher.  When it got too high for Jamie to really help, he used the book for extra leverage, while I used my other hand to steady it.

In the process, we managed to get the entire thing up so it rested on the top of the doorframe, flush against the wall.

With one hand up to keep it from falling down on top of us, I took the book from Jamie and adjusted the bend of the hinge, until it bent at a right angle.

I opened the door a crack, peered through to make sure the hallway was empty, then gave the hinge a solid whack with the book.

The hinge punched into the wall.

Tentatively, I let go.

“You have the oddest sense for decorations,” Jamie said.

“I left the screws on the corner of the bed.”

“Ah, sure.”  Jamie went to fetch the screws.

“If he’s had access to the books, he could know something.  Percy.”

“He could,” Jamie agreed.  “But if he was this good, why wouldn’t he be employed by the Academy already?  He’d rather be headmaster?  It’s weak.”

I nodded.  Taking the first screw from Jamie, I used the pen to set it in place, just enough to be firmly in the wood, still sticking out.

“Strangest sense for decoration,” Jamie observed.

“Shut up, and give me a screw,” I said.

Jamie obliged.

It took only a minute to get the screws into place.  Set randomly, as my reach allowed.

“Sewing kit?” Jamie asked.

“Yeah,” I said.  “And while I work with that, unlace your shoes.”

“You’re aware this is going to make a racket when it comes down?” Jamie asked.

“I’m aware,” I said.  “But Gordon was right.  It makes sense for me to be out and about… except I don’t like leaving you defenseless.”

“I’m better in a brawl than you are.”

I frowned.  “Don’t say that.”

“It’s true.”

“It’s depressing, because you still suck at it,” I said.  “My worry is that they won’t give you a chance to scrap with them.  If the situation calls for it, this will at least give them pause.”

I put the first pin’s point against the wood, then pressed the cover of the book against it until it stuck out.  I started with the second pin.

“Laces done.”

“Both shoes?”

“Yeah,” he said.  He handed them to me.

“Lie down, get a wink or two,” I said.  “I’ll wait around until they’re done the headcount, then I’ll disappear.  You leave me a signal if it’s unsafe for me to return?”

Jamie nodded.

☙

No plan went a hundred percent smoothly.

Sitting in the dark of the room, I could feel the lingering headache from my appointment.  The lights were off, the building was almost silent, but for the sounds of people continuing to be ill.  There was nothing to distract me from my own pain.

The shoelaces hung limp in my hand.  With my own shoelaces attached, they strung up to the board I’d fixed above the wall.  It bristled with collected screws, needles, broken pen tips, and a few choice pieces of glass.

The limited length of the shoelaces had meant I’d had to sit on the corner of Jamie’s bed or the chair, and even though sitting on the bed meant getting periodically kicked as Jamie tossed and turned under his covers, it was far more comfortable than the hard wooden chair.

I didn’t mind the company, even if the company was asleep.

My trap here wouldn’t kill, but killing wasn’t the aim.

Couldn’t interrogate the dead.

Every few minutes, I’d hear someone being sick or crying out, the rustle of running footsteps, or smell rank aromas from nearby rooms.

The trick was to connect the sounds.  I drew a mental picture, tying it all together, sequences of events.

It was when I heard a murmured conversation and the rustle of footsteps without any sound of distress to precede it that I tensed.

Young voices.

Moving the shoelaces to one hand, I slid back reaching as far as I could, and put my fingers over Jamie’s mouth.

He was awake in an instant.  I felt his hot breath between my fingers.

He nodded.

Floorboards creaked.  The doorknob rattled.

The light from the corridor outside was blinding as the door yawned open.

“Hey,” Ed said.  I could only barely make out his smile.  “You’re up.”

My eyes widened.

Three people.  Ed and his buds.  Boys who hadn’t sat at the table with me, Gordon, and the rest of us.

They’d collected their food around the same time Gordon had, as part of Gordon’s pack, even if they weren’t feeling too kindly toward my orphan brother.

I considered all the options, then sighed.

“Ed,” I said, “You don’t know the sort of mess you’re getting yourself stuck into.”

He approached me, and I felt a kind of resignation as I let the shoelace slip from my slack fingers.

“Sy,” Jamie said.

“Shut it,” Ed said.  “Stay put, don’t make a fuss.  Our business is with Sy.”

“Right,” Jamie said.  “Yeah.”

“What’s Gordon going to think?” I asked.  But it wasn’t really an ask.  More a statement, to Jamie.

“Gordon’s got his head up his ass,” Ed said.  “Now keep your voice down.  Don’t bother calling for help.  We’ve got someone keeping McCairn busy upstairs.”

I bet, I thought.

He grabbed me, and he hauled me up.  I didn’t try putting up a fight.  It would have been useless, and I hoped they’d get sloppy and give me a chance to surprise them.

With his buddies, he marched me forward, glancing this way, then that, before forcing me over toward the stairs.

We were half a flight down before I heard Jamie’s running footsteps above, going up to talk to Gordon.

I hoped to hell they’d be able to find me in time.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” I said.

“I know well enough.  You’re an ass, Sylvester, and you made enemies.  Now it’s catching up with you.”

I decided to keep my mouth shut.

The descent continued until we reached the first floor, then continued down another flight.

Once we were at the bottom, I could feel the heat in the air.  The area was barely lit, the lighting buzzing audibly, flickering now and again, threatening to plunge us into darkness.

The boys opened a door.

There were no lightbulbs, but a very large furnace blazed, casting irregular orange flames throughout the room, while leaving much of the rest in darkness.

“Mary,” I guessed.

“Got it in one,” she said, from the gloom.

I nodded slowly.  “You’ve been paying a lot of attention to me.”

“I’ve been paying enough,” she said.

She leaned forward.  The light from the fire flickered over her face.

“What’d you tell them?” I asked.  I jerked my head to one side.

“The truth.  That you insulted me.  A bigger boy beating you up, you can use that.  Get pity from girls, from my friends.  But if a girl beat you up?  You’d never live it down.”

“The truth, huh?” I asked.

“Do you disagree with my version of events?”

I considered.

I sighed.  “No, I suppose not.”

Not if it meant that she’d clean up Ed and his cronies while dealing with me.

“Because I really wondered if you were that type of person.  If you were that much of a scoundrel.”

I shrugged.  “I’m not denying that I’m a scoundrel.  I do have to wonder what you are.”

“That, Sylvester, would be telling,” Mary said.

“Are you going to start fighting yet?” Ed asked.  “The little ass gets a whupping from me, and goes straight back to cozying up to your friends, disrespecting them, disrespecting you.  I want to hear a proper apology from his lips.”

“I’m not really the apology type,” I said.

“That!”  Ed said, “Right there.  I want you to make it so I never have to hear him say anything like that ever again.”

“Not until you’re gone,” Mary said.

“Huh?  I want to see.”

“A girl has her modesty,” Mary said.

“That’s bull,” Ed said.  “We went out after curfew and brought him here.”

“I’ll make you a bet,” Mary said.  “If he turns up at school tomorrow, I’ll give you my company for an entire day.  We can go out on the town over the weekend.”

“She’s leaving school tomorrow,” I said.

“The trouble with being a little grease-stain, Sylvester, is that your words lose their power.  Anything you say comes out sounding like a lie.”

“You really have been paying attention,” I said.

“One day for each of us,” Ed said.

“One day for each of you, or he’s so embarrassed he never turns up again,” Mary said, her voice soft.  “Win-win.”

“Sure,” Ed said.

“Do me a favor, though?”

“Hm?”

“His friends are probably hunting for him.  There’s a stash of cards and dirty books in the kitchen, behind the shelves by the stove.  Duck over there, hang out for a while before going back to your room.”

“For real?” Ed asked.

“For real.  I’ve seen the cook boys goggling over it.”

I hung my head.

Ed’s group wasted no time.  I could hear the door shut behind me.

“You’re good,” I said.

I heard a click.

I recognized it as the sound of a gun lever.

“You’re very good,” I said, raising my arms.

“I saw your showing against Ed.  There’s no way you’re that bad in a scrap.  It’s a show.”

“It really isn’t,” I said.

“I’m going to assume you’re lying and stay comfortably at a safe distance,” she said.  “You’re going to tell me about your friends.  Share what you know.  In exchange, I’ll be merciful.”

“Merciful?”

“I’ll shoot you properly, once in the head, once in the chest.  Then I haul you over and push you into the furnace before taking my leave.”

“The alternative being?”

“I take your legs out from under you, then hold you up to slow cook you while you’re alive.”

My eyes were adjusting to the gloom.  I could see the look in her eyes.

She totally would.

I exhaled slowly.  “Okay.”

“Good boy.”

Taking Root 1.7

“Catch,” Mary said.

Something flew at me.  I couldn’t see it in the darkness, and it bounced off the door by my head.

I figured out where it had bounced off to and collected it.  I felt it rather than looking at it.  A key.

“Without turning around, lock the door.  If it opens or if you try anything funny, I shoot.”

I did as instructed.

“That was a little too fast,” she said.  “Stand with your back to the door.  Try the knob.”

I did.  I turned the knob to the side, tugged on the door, turned the knob all the way to the other side, and then tugged on it again.  The door rattled against the frame.

“I stand corrected,” she said.  “Toss me the key.”

I did.

Unlike me, she did manage to catch it, but she had the benefit of the light from the furnace.  She held it up to the light, examining it.

While she wasn’t looking directly at me, I glanced around the room.  There was a workbench with tools on the far end of the room, and she sat on the corner of it, legs dangling and not reaching the ground.  She wasn’t wearing her uniform, but a sweater, cloak and hood, and a skirt with stockings and boots.  The gun was in her lap, pointed at me, and other weapons sat within arm’s reach.  A hatchet, hammer, and the knife she probably planned to use if it came down to it.

By contrast, there was nothing of substance near me.  I was uncomfortably close to the furnace, but the door didn’t quite face me, so I got the heat without the benefit of the light that streaked across the room in lines.  The space around the furnace was kept clear, so fire wouldn’t catch.  A coal-operated monstrosity of a thing.  There was a pile of the fuel in the corner, a sliding door on the chute where the coal was deposited.

We’d voiced our suspicions aloud, that they would strike at us and then disappear to finish their missions.  I had a sense of what her escape route was.

I started to slide to the floor.

“What are you doing?” she asked.  “Stop.”

I stopped halfway, legs bent, back flat against the door.

“I was sitting down,” I said.

“I don’t trust anything you do.  Certainly not this,” she told me.  The way she phrased certainly was good.  Very proper, enunciated like a girl raised by the best teachers.

“You’ve made it clear that I’m going to die,” I said, holding my position.  “I didn’t expect it this soon, but I’ve always figured it was going to happen.  If there’s a chance I get to die sitting down, just after an interesting conversation, I consider it a pretty good end.”

She moved her head, and the light from the fire danced across her face with the motion.  “This isn’t a conversation.  It’s an interrogation.”

“Now I’m the one who stands corrected.”

I thought I saw her expression change.  A frown.

Had she caught me mirroring her?  Was she aware of what mirroring was?

“May I sit?” I asked.

“Feet apart, hands where I can see them,” she said.

I obeyed on both fronts, but I didn’t drop to the floor.  “But can I sit?”

“That was implied.  With your back to the door, please.”

“Implications are dangerous when you have a pistol pointed at you,” I said.  I slid the rest of the way down, keeping my hands up.  I rested my wrists on my knees, palms toward her, fingers spread.

I took a second, rolling my shoulders.

She didn’t say or do anything.  She remained in the shadows.

“I’m stiff,” I commented.  “I just spent three hours or so sitting on the end of a bed.  I had a trap rigged, was going to pull it down on top of anyone who came in through the door.  Except it turned out to be Ed.”

“He was in one piece,” Mary observed.

“For the same reason I didn’t tell him what you really were.  Doesn’t serve a point, only gets him killed.  If it works somehow, I’m still up shit creek.  Cat out of the bag.”

“You’re very calm, Sylvester,” Mary said.  A sudden change of subject.  “Why is that?”

“Like I said, I’m not too surprised I might die.  You know, about a week ago-”

“No stalling for time,” she told me.

“It’s relevant, I promise,” I said.  Several seconds passed without a word from her.  I started up again, “About a week ago, Professor Hayle from the Academy’s neurology department gave me a ride to the Academy.  Do you know why?”

“Keep going, Sylvester,” she said.  “Don’t ask me questions to try and squeeze details from me.”

“If you were really merciful, you’d tell me.  It’s a kind of torture, making me go to my grave without all of the answers.”

“I’m only offering mercy because it’s the only thing I’m willing to give you in exchange for information,” Mary told me.  “You were saying?”

I sighed.

“I was hurt.  I got myself hurt on purpose, contrived to be in Professor Hayle’s coach and get him out of the coach, so I could take a peek at his files.  On me, on Gordon, on Helen, Jamie, Lillian, and Evette.”

Nothing in her expression or body language changed.

Was she ignorant?  Did she not know that that wasn’t the real composition of the group?  They didn’t have particulars?  Or was she very good at hiding her tells?

I had to assume she was competent, and couldn’t push my luck without getting a bullet in the leg for my trouble.

“It was a lot of trouble, but there was a reason I went that far.  I needed to find out what they weren’t telling us.  I wanted to find out how long they expected us to last.”

“Last?”

“In terms of life expectancy.  Or project expectancy.  There’s more glory in breaking new ground than there is in refining someone else’s work, and the entire setup of the Academy is all about innovation more than doing good work.  We’re a casualty of that.”

“You and the others,” Mary said.

“We, Mary,” I said.  I angled my head down until the angle of the light from the fire was enough to be especially bright in my eyes.  I couldn’t see Mary as well, but I knew that she’d see the reflection.  “You too.”

“We’re not talking about me,” she said.  “Go on.”

I moved my head back, shrugging.  “Most of us weren’t going to live to see twenty.  Barring outside intervention.”

My hands moved to indicate her, the outside intervention in question.

“My concern isn’t with your life expectancy.  I know exactly when you’re going to die.”

“I haven’t even told the others the numbers,” I said.  “Promised Gordon I would fill him in later, but the opportunity never came up.  How do you tell someone-”

“Sylvester,” Mary said, unamused.

“Okay.  Okay.  New projects.  You know how the departments portioned out cash for various measures?  We got funding as a special project.  Got it better than some.  Six individual cases, each managed with an entirely different approach.  If you want to know what you’re up against, that’s it.  I don’t like Professor Hayle, but he gave us money, and he tried for the gamble.  Longer-term approach than some of the other special projects, and with less than twenty years before most of us expire, that’s saying something.”

“Details.”

I shrugged.  “There are some big names on the other projects.  Do you know Doctor Ibott?  Of course you know Ibott.”

“Details about you, and your group.  Please don’t test me, Sylvester.”

“Hayle has been fighting to keep his department afloat, while others get regular injections of cash to keep innovating.  He gets a lot of criticism because in this age of innovation and immediate results, we’re taking too long to show anything demonstrable.  Their word, demonstrable.  If you pronounce it right, you could fit ‘monster’ in there.”

I smiled, while Mary didn’t look amused in the slightest.

“We’re meant to develop into something monstrous over time.  Most of us.  Each member of the group with a role, a defined identity, and a specific set of skills, crafted using entirely different means.  What you’re dealing with… we’re good, but we’re not there yet.”

“Defined identities,” Mary echoed me.  “You called yourself a villain, back in the dining room.”

“I’m the black sheep, or the black lamb, Mary.  Gordon is the multi-talented hero, Helen the actress, Jamie the bookworm and record keeper, Evette is the problem solver who steps out from the background to deliver answer and solution in one fell stroke, and Lillian is a student on the verge of becoming the teacher, eventually to become master, surpassing professors in her mastery of the Academy science.  Me?  I’m only the bastard.”

Were the sharp contrasts between light and shadow playing tricks on my eyes, or had Mary’s expression changed?

Sorry, Evette.  I hope it’s some consolation that you’re here with us in this sense, if nothing else.  A phantom enemy they have no details on.

“It was smart of you to come after me first.  Go for the weak link.  That’s a good instinct you have.”

“Something tells me you aren’t a weak link, Sylvester.”

I shrugged.  “We’re opposites, aren’t we?”

“Opposites?”

“I’m supposed to cover the gaps for the others.  You… you’re very specialized.  You were prepared for one task.  Anything else is peripheral.  I’m built to be part of a composite whole.  You… you’ve got the boys, but you don’t have them.  There’s no support.  You’re among kindred but you’re alone.”

My eyes were adjusting to the gloom.  I could see how she wasn’t moving.  Both hands held the pistol.

She didn’t move a hair.  Only the licks of fire from the furnace illuminated anything.

“You don’t know me,” she said.

This far into our dialogue, I had a sense of her.  Before, I might have had to guess.  Now I was suspicious that this was a willful lack of movement.  She was trying very hard not to give me anything.

I shrugged.  “I know more than you think.  You don’t trust your… should I call them fellow experiments?”

“I think you’re taking your own experiences and transplanting your experiences onto me.”

“Do you?  If you think I don’t trust the others with my life, you couldn’t be more wrong,” I said.  I clenched my hands, kneading the upper palms with my fingers to crack them, knowing full well that she was on the alert, that it would distract and force her to divide her focus between watching and listening.  “You, on the other hand, are paranoid.  Exceedingly careful.  Locking the door, taking the extra measures you are, keeping more than enough weapons in arm’s reach.  You made the boys a part of your plan, but you don’t trust them to have your back.”

“You keep saying that.  ‘The boys’.  I know you’re trying to make me let something slip.  Keep trying and-”

“Bull,” I cut her off.  “You want to know how we operate?  This is part of it.  Every single thing you do, even this?  We can use it.  We can pick it apart and unravel it.  Every action you take, you tip your hand in one way or another.  There’s no other girl.  The boys were a group.  Ed said they were distracting whoever was walking the halls.  They, plural.”

“Ed’s friends, you mean?”

I shook my head.  “Ed and his closest buddies didn’t sit with us at dinner.  The rest like Gordon enough they wouldn’t pull something like that.  It was your fellow experiments.  The boys.  They operate as a group.  But while they shared the task of distracting the man, you have nobody else with you.  Dealing with unknown quantities, you could have had another girl there with you, standing in the shadow, ready to use the same escape route.”

I gestured toward the closed chute beside her.

“You showed yourself, acting the individual, taking point.  You showed off while doing it, that line about enjoying our meals.  That tells me you did it voluntarily, to stand out.  There’s no other girl in this narrative.  You stand alone, Mary Elizabeth Coburn, and you know it.”

She looked down at the gun.  “I feel like shooting you now.”

“That reminds me, just in case you feel like shooting me all of a sudden.  When you do it, can you do me a favor?  Shoot me in the heart?”

She looked up at me.

“I always thought my head would be what went first.  I’d kind of like to stick it to fate.”

“Not knowing what you are, I’m not sure I’m willing to risk it.  For all I know, you’re a human they grew in a jar.”

“I’m real.  Woman-born,” I said.  “An adjustment made after the fact, so my head works in a slightly different way.  A shot to the heart will kill me.  But maybe one to the heart, watch me die, then finish me off with one to the head?  As one experiment to another, it would be very much appreciated.”

“You’re a fatalistic little shit, aren’t you?  That’s really not an act, huh?”

“I said we were opposites, before.  Even our positions here make for a pretty good contrast.  You up high, armed to the teeth.  Me down below.  Roasting.  My weakness is my head.  Yours-”

“It strikes me,” she said, interrupting me, affecting an arch tone of surprise, “that I’m sitting here, and it truly feels like I’m the one being interrogated.  For the past minute or two we’ve barely talked about you in any meaningful capacity.”

That was the kind of epiphany that was punctuated by the pull of a trigger.

I’d hoped to lead into it more, but…

“If I were him, I would have told you that you were special,” I said.

She didn’t pull the trigger.

“You don’t have to say anything,” I said.  I even dropped my head down to look at the floor, so she didn’t have to worry about me studying her in the darkness.  “I’m just going to talk out loud.  You’re alone.  You’re smart enough and you have free reign enough that you have to know what happened to your predecessors.  Word gets around a school like this, and you’ve shown you can connect the dots.”

I continued, “That leaves a question.  How does he keep you in line?  How does he convince you that you’re safe, that you won’t go the same way the others did?  My line of thinking is that he tells you that out of all the tries, you worked.  This on top of whatever story he’s concocted, that he’s equipped you to kill your parents and that nobody will suspect you, the orphan.  You’ll get the inheritance and everything ends happily ever after.”

Still no bullet.

“You believed him.  You still do, because you have no other choice but to face the grim reality.  That your lifespan is measured in hours.  He tells you to do what you can to deal with us, as discreetly as possible, and then go deal with your parents.  The emetics would be his idea, but this thing with getting me in this room and having the furnace going, it’s all very well done, you put effort into it.  You’ll put effort into dealing with your parents…”

I paused.

You put the effort in because you think he’ll praise you.  You’ll be his triumph.  His girl.  You love him, as a parental figure or as anyone at the start of their journey to adulthood can be infatuated with an adult.

We’re opposites in that respect too.  You love your creator.

“…And you’ll end up exactly like the others, unable to move while the family home burns up around you,” I said, instead.  Attacking her relationship with the puppeteer would get me shot.  I raised my head to look at her.  I couldn’t quite make out her face in the gloom.  “How does he do it, Mary?”

“I thought I didn’t have to say anything,” she said.

Her words were empty of inflection, like Helen’s sometimes was.

I got it wrong?

“I’m trying to help you, you stupid little twit!” I said, clenching my hands again.  “He did something to make you sharper, to put ideas in your head, so that you’d walk the path he drew out in front of you.  I want to know so I can stop you from walking off the cliff that’s waiting at the end!”

“You seem to be forgetting something, Sylvester,” she said.  She hopped down from the edge of the workbench, and used a free hand to smooth out her dress and fix her cloak at the shoulder, the pistol never leaving me.  “Did you think that if you kept saying ‘oh, I’m going to die, I’m going to die, you’re going to kill me’ like it didn’t matter, getting me to let my guard down, that you could turn it around?  Start talking like I’m going to let you live and change my mind on that level?”

“No, actually, you’re quite wrong on that count,” I said.  “I really didn’t.  But it’s really kind of telling that you thought that.  Did you get that idea from him?  Is that how he thinks, and the sort of thing he pays attention to?”

She shook her head.

But it wasn’t a shake of negation.

Mary was losing her faith.  If there was anything I could do to keep her from stepping closer to me and pulling that trigger, it was giving her something to hold on to.

“You’re right that I’ve been interrogating you.  Thinking aloud and watching your reactions.  I can tell that you care about him, and you wanted to do this, right here, for him.  I can give you what you want.”

I can tell that you care about him.  If she was human at her core, finally having a confidant for feelings that had been under lock and key had to count for something.

“A bullet in your head?  A clean disposal?” she asked.  “A job well done?”

“I won’t tell you where Evette is.  But I can tell you who to watch out for.  You can tell him, and he’ll be pleased.  With you.”

She switched to a two-handed grip, aiming at my chest.

All show.

No way she’d shoot, now.

I decided to push my luck further.  “I have a condition.”

She let out a titter of a laugh.  Cultured through and through.

“Don’t go home.  Don’t go visit your parents.  If I’m right, then you’ll find that all the work the puppeteer has done has made it automatic.  You’ll see their faces and all at once you’ll be like a stitched, going through the motions with a very limited capacity, but all of the sharpness the puppeteer gave you.  Execute mom, execute dad, and then burn up yourself with all the rest of the evidence.  If I’m wrong, you lose nothing.  You can take the information I gave you, you can communicate the details to the puppeteer, get a rare compliment that means ever so much to you, and then go kill your parents another day.”

“Delaying gives you a window of opportunity to act against us.  If I communicate with him, that’s a chance for you to identify him.  I’m not that easily manipulated.”

“No you aren’t,” I agreed.  “But you’re wrong about my motivations.  Years ago, back at the beginning of my becoming Sylvester, I stole my file.  I found out about the expiration dates.  That it was so common a thing that it’s a pre-typed line in the documents that go with being an experiment.  I decided that I’d dedicate myself to helping the others.  If I can keep them alive longer, or support them, I’ll do that.  But I think my best bet is to prove that Professor Hayle’s secret project was a success.  Because then they’ll want to keep us alive, they’ll dedicate more to us.”

“What does that have to do with this?”

“You’re similar to the others.  To me, as much as I talk about us being opposites.  I want to keep you alive because you’re kindred.  Not kin, but a bird of the same feather.  Your success is our success, even if we’re on opposite sides.  Even the puppeteer’s success is, in a way.”

“I’m starting to regret letting you talk at all.”

“Because I hit the mark?” I asked, hopeful.

“Because that’s the biggest load of goatshit I’ve ever heard,” she said.

With the back of my head against the door, I could hear the sound of footsteps.  Heavier, running.

No! I thought, even as I kept my expression still.

Not now, I thought.  You damn idiot.  You’ll force her hand and get me shot.

The footsteps receded.  Going the wrong direction.  I resisted the urge to sigh in relief.

I was now forced to rush it.  I couldn’t keep stringing her along, offering her bait to keep her from pulling the trigger.

“Gordon is the one you should watch out for.  Investigating?  He’s still learning.  Acting, disguise, infiltration?  He’s okay at the third, in terms of sheer agility and ability to get places, but the rest are points he needs to shore up.  But when they figure out who the puppeteer is, and they just about have, it’s Gordon who will handle the man.  You can tell the puppeteer that.”

“Assuming I tell him anything.”

You have to, I thought.  Evette is too dangerous as an unknown.

“Assuming you tell him anything, yeah,” I agreed.

The footsteps resumed.  There was a murmur of voice.

Gordon was too fast, and the others were at the bottom of the stairs.

For gods sake, at least be quiet.

I heard a statement, quick and quieter than the ones prior.  Then silence.

They’d seen the light from the furnace under the door, or they’d heard something.

Now they were coming.

“Do what you have to,” I said.  “But know that whatever you do, the moment you go home to fulfill your last order, you’ll be a statistic to the puppeteer, and nothing more.  You’ll revert to the instructions he gave you, and in the midst of it, you’ll be completely and utterly alone.”

The expression in her face went cold.  Angry.  A killer’s eyes.  I believed her, that she didn’t have an iota of mercy in her when it really came down to it.  Her world had been reduced to her and her creator.

“In the meantime, Mary, keep in mind that there are others like you out there.  Including me, at least until you pull that trigger.”

The best way to lie was to believe the lie.  Not that I was lying, but the idea connected to the next.

The best way to surprise someone was to be surprised as well.

The door smashed into the room with a force that sent me from my seat at its base to the center of the room.

Gordon pushed aside the remnants of the door.  It looked as though he’d dislocated his shoulder, from the way he held his arm.

Mary, holding the gun, seemed momentarily caught between finishing me off while I lay two feet from her and dealing with the boy that was half-again her size and apparently capable of throwing himself through a door.

She decided in the same instant Gordon moved.  The pistol wheeled on him, and he threw himself between the wall and the furnace.  The bullet flashed where it hit the edge of the furnace.

She spent five shots in total, and then aimed at me.  I covered my face.

I heard the bullet, but didn’t feel it.

She reached to the table to seize the hatchet, and moved toward me.

Taking me hostage with a hatchet?  She was careful enough to sharpen it.

That would be ideal, but the others wouldn’t let her do it.  There were benefits to acting alone, I supposed.

Instead, I pointed at Gordon.

He was already emerging from behind the furnace.  She heaved the weapon at him, an expert motion, sending handle spinning over axehead.  He ducked back behind the furnace for cover, while the axe struck the wall right where his head had been.

She leaped over my legs on her way to the coal chute, throwing the door open.

Gordon moved to follow.

I heard a rasp.

“Nope!” I called out.  Non-sequitur, but it was what my brain produced in the moment.

Gordon paused.

Fire appeared within the chute.

Our golden boy kicked the chute door closed before the fire could touch the pile of coal at the chute’s base.

Leaving Mary to make her well-planned escape.

I let my head sink back to rest against the floor.  Above me, at the doorway, I could see the others standing on either side of the door, peering into the room.

“What did you get from her?” Helen asked.

“How are you doing, Sy?” I asked, injecting plenty of sarcasm into my voice, “How did you do it, Sy?  Are you okay?”

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What did you get from her?” she asked, again.

I sighed.

Gordon offered me a hand in getting to my feet.

“I think she’s vat grown,” I said.  “When pressed, the first thing that popped into her head was a person grown in a bottle.  That’s where I’d lay my money.”

“Vat grown?” Gordon asked.  “Made from scratch?  No, that would be next to impossible, if they’re supposed to resemble the kids they ended up replacing.”

I nodded.  “Clones.  Possibly with implanted behaviors.  Probably something plugged in for imprinting to their creator and a reversal of the typical love for your parents.”

“We can work with that as a starting point,” Jamie said.

“We have a lot to work with,” I said, looking down at the mark the bullet had made in the floor when she’d fired at me.

Too far away to be anything but a deliberate miss.

Taking Root 1.8

“You’re bleeding,” Lillian noted, touching my chin.

“Someone shoved a door into me,” I said, glancing back at Gordon.

“You’re welcome,” Gordon said.

“Thank you,” I said.  “I appreciate the rescue.  The sentiment, anyway.”

Now it was his turn to shoot me a look.  I was going to say something, but Lillian grabbed my chin, lifting it up.  She patted at it with a pad that smelled like something burnt.

“We almost missed you,” Jamie said.  “We went to the yard, then we were going to split up from there.  I didn’t think you’d be straight down from the dorm room.”

“I saw the smoke at the chimney,” Gordon said.  “I thought it was the kitchen, but Jamie knew the layout better than I did, and we found our way down here.”

“Good as my memory might be, I’m not in top form when I’ve just woken up.  We went to the wrong end of the hall.  There are multiple furnaces for different sections of the building.”

Slow to get things moving, I thought.

“I feel terrible I almost fucked up,” Jamie said.  “It would have been better to follow you first, then gone to get Gordon.”

“They would have seen you and adjusted the plan,” I said.  “This would have gone worse if it was the two of us instead of just me.”

“How’s that?” Gordon asked.

“She could have hurt Jamie to pressure me, or done it the other way around.  Being alone, I could build a rapport.”

“You could have gotten shot,” Jamie said.

“When push came to shove, she missed.  I think there was a reason she missed.”

“More than her being pressed for time?” Jamie asked.

I nodded.  “She’s been imprinted with set behaviors, but she’s still human, with hopes and fears.  Right now, she’s uncertain, very possibly more than she’s ever been in her whole life.  Her creator more or less had a monopoly on how she behaved.  Grow a child in a vat, imprint them with behaviors that fit the grand plan, stick them in school to surround them with people to mimic and model themselves after, step in now and again to reinforce, shape behavior and train.  I’m the first real challenge to her reality.  I’ve got her questioning things.”

“You make me question my reality,” Gordon said.

“Ha ha,” I said.  Lillian examined my hands, turning them face-up.  She had to squint to see, but she put the powder on the bases of my palms, where I’d scuffed them on the floor during my fall.

“What’s the next step?” Jamie asked.

“Sy’s call,” Gordon said.

“I gave her ideas and things to worry about.  I don’t think she’s going to check in with her compatriots here.  It would increase the chance of running into us a second time.”

“You don’t think she’s confident about their abilities?” Gordon asked.  “She threw that hatchet like a pro.”

“She’s confident in her abilities.  But that’s not where I hit her.  It’s called dissonance.  You believe one thing deeply enough that it’s central to your identity.  Then something, me, steps in to challenge that belief.  It’s a hell of a leap of faith to go from believing something and understanding how much of the world works, to saying ‘I don’t know’.  Some deny, and you can get stupid-as-hell behaviors from those who see something plain as day but deny it because it conflicts with something they believe.  Some get angry, some distract themselves until they can figure out how to deal with it… but very few will turn around and throw themselves headlong into more questions.  More dissonance.”

“If she’s not going to her old friends-” Jamie started.

“Which would force her to face the questions,” I cut in.

“Or coming after us-“

“Risks even more questions,” I added.

Jamie frowned at my interruptions.  “She’s going another place, another route.  Who is she?  How does she operate?  Will she try to escape her worries by fulfilling her mission?”

“I told her that if she tries, she might well lose herself to her imprinted behaviors.  I don’t think so.  She’ll want answers, I think we should track her and get some answers for ourselves.”

“She just covered her trail pretty well there,” Gordon said.  “Is it even possible?”

“It’s possible,” I said.  “We know where she’s going.  She’s going to pay a visit to her creator.”

“Which would be great if we knew who he was,” Jamie said.

“It would,” I said.  “It’s not going to be in the school.  If it was another kind of project, maybe it could be hidden, but if I’m right, and these are clones grown in tubes, then it’s too big a task.  Even ignoring that, she’s trained.  That takes time, and it takes space.  You need room to swing weapons around or practice your aim with a pistol.  A school with thirty members of faculty and over a thousand students isn’t going to give you that.”

“Off-campus, can’t be too far away,” Jamie said.  “How often would this training happen?”

“Training, instructions, shaping behavior,” Gordon said.  “I’d guess once a week?  Can’t say.”

“If they are vat-grown,” Helen said, “Then they’d need training on other fronts.  How to be human, basic niceties.  How to use silverware, how to talk… it might not take too long, but they need to be able to pass.”

“A house,” I said.  “That’s more what we’re looking for than where.”

“With a kitchen, clothes…” Helen said.

“Room to move around,” Gordon said.  “It’s not a small house with walls shared with anyone else.  Neighbors would get suspicious and complain about the noise just as much as anyone else.”

“And,” Jamie said, “There’s the question of how you make a child act well enough like their former self to pass muster with the child’s own parents.”

Gordon frowned.  “I really don’t want to run away with the wrong idea here.  If we go chasing after a wild goose, we might not get another opportunity to get them.  How sure are you, Sy?”

I leaned against the wall.  Lillian finished checking me over, and moved over to Gordon.  She began unbuttoning his shirt.

“How sure?  Um.  It fits.  The little detail thing that Jamie was oh-so-recently trying to get me to focus on.”

“He wasn’t there for that conversation,” Jamie said.

“Wasn’t he?”

“No,” Jamie said, very patiently.

Gordon grunted as Lillian pushed his shoulder back into the socket.  She had him go through a range of motions, extending his arm and moving it around.

“Well, Jamie was talking about the little things that we don’t necessarily pay attention to, that still register in the subconscious.  I made a point of calling Mary an experiment, part of my trying to build a rapport with her.  She never called me out on it or sounded uncomfortable with the idea.  I don’t think she’s ever had illusions about being anything else.  She paid a lot of attention when I talked about roles, identity, labels.  Part of that is going to this school, but part of it is that she’s acting out a role, and has been for a long time.  Whatever’s going on with her, it runs deep.”

“One student died and was autopsied,” Gordon said.  “The rest burned.  Wouldn’t a clone turn up on autopsies?”

“Moment I heard about the remainder being burned, I thought maybe they missed something in the first autopsy, and our puppeteer went out of his way to risk a second close call.  But I don’t know for sure whether it would show up.”

After a pause, we collectively turned to Lillian.

“It depends on a lot,” she said.

“That doesn’t tell us anything,” I said.

“Don’t be a butthole, Sy,” Jamie told me.

I rolled my eyes.

“If he tried to accelerate growth, which he must have, then there’s a good chance something would show up.  There are chemical ways to promote aging.  Hormones, substances, alter the seventh ratio.  But those substances turn up, and they have effects.  Any drug is like a puzzle piece.  We flood the body with puzzle pieces of a particular shape, and intend for those pieces to fit into a specific place and enact a specific function, but you can’t stop it from connecting to other sites, enacting other functions.  It’s how we get side effects.  We control it with how we deliver the medication and other factors, and some of the best graduates of the Academy have it down to an art, making it so one drug only affects one thing in one way, but that’s a delicate balancing act.  That’s without getting into the fact that a badly made clone might be more prone to wear, tear, and side effects.”

“Is our guy that good?” Jamie asked.  “Enough to have the aging drugs down to an art, hiding symptoms from an autopsy?”

“We don’t know,” Gordon said.  “But if what Sy said is true, I’d say he isn’t.  He has one area of focus and he’s giving his all in pursuing it.”

“Okay,” Lillian said.  “The second method is more complimentary, then.  Altering the fundamental pattern of the clones.  Humans mature at an exceptionally slow rate.  We saw people try this a decade ago in the Indian Empire.  Crown scientists tried to make a slave class that grew to maturity, with a specific level of intelligence.  Domesticated humans, strong, playful, good natured, attractive, and obedient.  If I’m not mistaken, they tried a lot of things, including imprinted behaviors.”

Like Mary?  I raised my eyebrows.  “How did it go?”

“How do you think it went, Sy?” Gordon asked.  “Do you see slaves everywhere?”

“That’s not saying it didn’t work,” I said.

“It’s pretty damn indicative,” Gordon said.

“Guys, guys,” Jamie cut in.  “Focus.  Please.  We need to figure out a direction to go, here.”

“It involves other problems,” Lillian said.  “Like the drugs and hormones, it’s an art unto itself.  It requires precision of a different sort, and a broad kind of knowledge.  There’s prior work to draw on, other projects that tried similar things, but there would be signs of the attempt that would crop up in an autopsy, unless the work was perfect.  Change one thing in the pattern, and it has ripple effects throughout the organism’s development and makeup.”

“I didn’t realize it was that difficult,” Helen said.

“Oh my god.  It really, really is,” Lillian said, eyes wide, the incredulity she wasn’t voicing clear in her expression.

“Again, if our puppeteer was that good, why the hell isn’t he already employed by the Academy and earning a small fortune for his talents?” Gordon asked.  A rhetorical question.

Many of us were nodding.

“Got any more suggestions, Lillian?” Jamie asked.  “Because this is good.  Very useful.  But I don’t think it’s screaming ‘this is our guy’.”

“For accelerating aging?  Those would be the best routes,” Lillian said.  “There are others, but I think I’d be wasting our time.”

“Then we’re stuck,” Gordon said.

“No.  Not exactly.  There’s a third possibility,” Lillian said.  “Maybe more, but I’m only thinking of three.  It kind of complicates things.”

“Go on,” Gordon said.

“Don’t,” Lillian said.  “Don’t accelerate the aging.  If you need them to age, you make them age by letting time pass.”

“Mary is twelve,” Gordon said.  “He’s had this plan in the works for twelve years?”

“Yes,” Lillian said.  “Except not exactly.”

I opened my mouth, and Jamie shot me a look.  I closed my mouth before he called me a butthole again for my poking fun at Lillian.

“I said it complicates things,” Lillian said.  “Because our ‘puppeteer’ could strike a balance.  Some natural aging.  Some hormones or changes to the pattern.  The more he relies on real time passing, the less he needs to accelerate the process.  Maybe this project has only been in the works for nine years, or six.”

“Meaning there could be clues,” Gordon said, “Ones that slipped through in the autopsy.”

Lillian nodded.

“More time to develop them,” Helen said.  “Either he inserts them while they’re young, where a half-socialized clone might go unnoticed amid rabid and rambunctious first graders, or he waits and he observes their real counterpart, and he trains the clones to mime the behaviors in his off-hours.”

“Yeah.  We were wondering why he picked Mary,” I said.  “Her parents don’t seem important.  But if this project has been in the works for a while…”

“Maybe we should be looking at who they were,” Gordon finished for me.  “Or who they were supposed to become.  Our puppeteer was taking stabs in the dark, this could be a stab that missed.”

“I can look into that end of things, given time,” Jamie said.

“We might not have a lot of time, but go for it,” I said.  “After you direct me to wherever student records are stored.”

“By the front entrance.  Below the front office.”

“Good,” I said.  “Great.  I’m going.  It’s better if I’m not here.  Assuming Mary hasn’t communicated anything to her fellow clones, they’ll assume I’m dead.  Play it up, act upset and distressed.  Stick together, try to keep them distracted and occupied.  Best case scenario, they’ll still think I’m dead and I can catch them off guard when I’m back.”

“If you do, don’t try to fight them,” Gordon said, his expression blank.

“They’re trained, I know,” I said.

“That, too,” Gordon said.

I frowned, but I was already heading toward the stairs, so I turned on the spot, switching to walking backward, if only to make my expression as clear as possible.

“Lillian,” I spoke up.

She looked at me, a crease between her eyebrows.  Annoyance, worry?

“That Academy know-how you just dropped on us?  That was good.  Smart stuff.”

If anything, the crease between her eyebrows deepened.  Her mouth moved, the start of a frown.

I didn’t see the rest of it.  I headed up the stairs, taking them two at a time, very nearly silent.  I ducked low and peered into the darkness to check the way was clear.  Only when I was on the move again did I spare Lillian’s expression another thought.  I’d given her a compliment, and she’d reacted like I’d slapped her in the face.

Dissonance, I realized.

☙

The school’s prison-like elements turned out to make being stealthy remarkably difficult.  The rooms were large and every single one, bathrooms excepted, had a window, either facing out into the street or inward, at the yard.  I couldn’t very well turn on the lights without the room illuminating and risking that people half of the Academy’s rooms could see through their windows.

My movements through the front office, thus, were done with the benefit of and detriment of darkness.

The doors, I had to assume, were locked.  At the same time, people were far worse about attending to windows.

Water ran down over me and through my hair while I scaled the wooden branches and twigs that grew into and around the masonry.  It was far finer than the usual, not quite branches but not so thin as to be ivy, it was thorny, to discourage children in the yard from climbing on it, but it was still a place where I could find handholds, if I was careful to do it.

All the same, I was left bleeding in no less than five places; I couldn’t always see the thorns in the dark.

I reached the window and teased it open.  I slipped inside, then closed it behind me.

Glancing outside, I didn’t see any lights going on, suggesting that a faculty member might have seen the dark shape scaling the paler wall.

Jamie had told me that the records were kept beneath the front office, and my experience with the headmistress had suggested the office’s location.  Rather than go straight for the records, I found myself in the room between the front entrance and the principal’s office.  Typewriters sat on desks where the secretaries were stationed, benches lined one half of the room, and desks and cabinets of papers and supplies filled the other half.

The principal’s office, once I found it with its name plate on the door, proved to be unlocked.  I was glad I didn’t have to go out and back in again.

The interior of her office had a desk and chair, cabinets, some pictures meant to impress parents more than please herself or her students.  There were prominent faces I couldn’t name depicted on the wall.  Gradutes of Academies.  A ‘this could be your student in ten years’ thing.

But I knew that however good she was, few people remembered every detail about every single one of the people who worked under them.  If some of her staff slept in the building, some slept out, she still needed a means of contacting them.

I found a box of notecards, filled with teacher’s names and mailing addresses.  I took it with me.

Humans were complex creatures.  Add the rewriting of patterns, augmentations, grafts, revival, drugs, and everything else, and ‘human’ became an awfully unclear term.  Every new discovery meant the introduction of things that had never been done or discovered before, more things that muddied the waters.

Or bloodied them.

My ‘gang’ was muddy and bloody both, but they were fairly simple, with defined roles.  Here, in this, I was the odd one out.  If all five of the other projects were successes, I might never have been given the go-ahead.  It was sobering, to know that the foundation and excuse for my being rested on the backs of two corpses.

Two who were like me.

I’d been asked, once, how I could predict people as I did.  Jamie, I think, had raised the subject.  My answer had been simple.

Humans as a species were like a collection of bugs in a box.  Left alone, it was hard to predict how they’d move, or the patterns that would form.

Shake the box, and it generated chaos.  Maddened, they would seek to escape, butting their heads against barriers.  They would turn on their closest neighbors and strike out.  Even seek to kill.  In their frenzied movements, they were very predictable.

Jamie had been very quiet after that response of mine.

But it was true.  It worked on many levels.  Force people into darkness, then offer them a light, and they were a moth to a candle flame.

The darkness that surrounded Mothmont wasn’t my darkness.  It was meant to work against me.

But it was darkness I could use.  The headmistress was worried, and I very much doubted she was sleeping after so many of her students fell ill.  Many of them had rich and powerful parents.  She’d been driven into a corner.

Taking a blank piece of paper from the drawer of her desk, I placed it on the top, and I penned out a simple statement with a fountain pen.

The Academy would like for you to please order a quarantine.  Your students are to be fully examined in the wake of their illnesses, regardless of whether they fell ill.  Take care that it includes one and all, and that it is by members of the Academy.

None of the blame in this lies with you.  Provided you speak of this letter to no-one, you have nothing to worry about.  All will be well.

Giving the moth her candle flame.

The only way this situation could go sour was if something happened to my group, or if more of the puppeteer’s Bad Seeds decided to make a break for their families.

The quarantine would keep that from happening and it would force our adversaries into a corner.  If there was something they were trying to hide from an autopsy, they might well be uncomfortable with a full physical examination.

The only danger was that she might not listen.

Let it never be said that I couldn’t have fun.

I opened the fountain pen and took a second to work it out.  There was a syringe by the ink bottle.

I hated needles.

But I didn’t hate them so much that it would stop me.

I took a minute to empty the pen with the syringe, and then took another minute to refill the syringe with blood from a thorn-puncture in my palm.

I penned out an illegible signature in blood.

Let her think about that.

I locked the door,then locked all but one of the windows.  Removing a shoe to wipe at the drips of water on the floor, retreating while I covered my tracks, I found my way to the remaining window and drew out a bit of thread from my sleeve and cut it with a letter opener, which I pocketed.  I carefully looped it around the latch-end, leaving more than enough slack – there was a good foot between my hand and the loop that sat around the latch’s arm.  Only tension keeping things from falling to mess and disaster.  Pointing up, the latch was unlocked.  A simple turn meant it fit into a waiting cradle, and resisted attempts to open the window.

I climbed out of the window, then eased the window shut.  Pulling on the thread with the knot, I worked the latch down, until it sat in the cradle.

I pulled on one end of the thread, and worked it out of the gap in the window.

There.

Let her wonder who at the Academy would be leaving her a message signed in blood, in a room with all means of entrance and egress properly locked and sealed.

Hopefully while she was wondering she wouldn’t be telling herself she couldn’t risk the quarantine.

I headed down one floor, sticking myself with a few more thorns on the way.  I was thoroughly soaked by the time I reached the set of windows on the ground floor.

The letter opener slid between windows to lift a latch.  I let myself into the records room.

The benefits of an organization being as hoity-toity as Mothmont were that they kept good records.  I had what I needed in two minutes.  Mary Coburn.  I tucked it into my waistband behind my back, and pulled my shirt down to cover it.

I exited through a window opposite the one I’d entered, stepping out onto the street beyond Mothmont.

The rain poured down on me and the notecards.  I didn’t care.

She had them categorized.  Staff was a category.

Of that staff, two thirds were women.

I found myself fumbling through the cards that remained, wishing Jamie were around.

Jamie would know the names of streets better than I did, even in an unfamiliar end of town.

Still, we knew they were close.  If these students were paying regular visits, they had to be slipping away in the evenings, or when others were making their special visits to the Academy.

House, I thought.

I placed two cards back in the box when the addresses suggested apartments.

Another card, McCairn’s, proved to be too far away.  Poor bastard probably had to travel a ways every morning and night.

Unless he was staying at the Academy like he had tonight.  Either way, I felt confident in ruling him out.

Richards, Harper, Mason, Kelly, Caldwell, Percy, and Blankenship.

I moved at a quick pace through the rain, favoring the parts of the street where the lamp-light didn’t shine.  The only soul who saw me was a large man that was walking a near-empty cart of bodies through the streets, ringing a bell with a low tone.  Coin for bodies.  The area here was too nice for it to be lucrative, compared to areas closer to the orphanage where people couldn’t pay their way out of being sick.  I guessed he probably only did a walk-around once a month or once every few weeks.  Often only at night, because of the reactions the wagons drew in public.

If our puppeteer wasn’t entirely alone, there could well be a few adventurous sorts who might do the reverse transaction, lightening the wagon.

I considered for a second, then caught up with him.

It was so very human of him to be startled by my sudden, quiet appearance.  I thought for a second he might have messed himself, but the smell came from one of the bodies.

He seemed immune to the smell.  He wore a heavy rain-cloak that trailed down all the way to his calves, and was thin, with lanky hair suggesting he perhaps didn’t eat most nights.

Maybe he was doing his rounds here because others had edged him out of another territory.

“Has any one person delivered a number of children your way?” I asked.

“Children?”  He frowned.

“Boys and girls, about my age, or a little younger.”

“Dunno,” he said.

I badly wished I had some coins to spare.

“These street names,” I said.  I held up cards, pointing.  “Where are these?”

He gave me some quick directions.

“Any with big houses?”

He shrugged.  “Most.  Why?”

“Work with me, I’ll make it worth your while.”

He scoffed.

I remained still and silent, hoping that he might come around if I was serious enough.

He didn’t.  At the end of the day, I was only a child, half-drowned in the heavy rain.

“Out of my way if you don’t want to get run over,” he said.

I stepped closer, and I stuck the letter opener into his crotch.  Not hard enough to pierce anything, but enough to let him know there was a point to it.

I didn’t say or do anything.  I remained where I was, a blade held close to a part no man wanted to lose.

I waited, once more, not moving or making a noise, hoping he would come around this time.

My hand went up, holding the soaked cards with their running ink.  He caught my wrist, and for a second I thought he had me.

I pushed the point a little deeper, and his entire pelvis moved back.  I was careful to keep the blade in place.  I suspected the point might have hooked on a tag of skin, incentivizing him to stay right where he was.

There was a growl to his voice as he said, “Trellis is closest further down that way.  Then Yarrow, a little to the right, then in same direction, then Olds which is a hard right.  You’ll see the other two streets if you stick to Olds.  Biggest houses on Yarrow.”

I nodded, “Let go of me, now.”

He did.

I twisted away, withdrawing my letter opener, and splashed off into the rain.

Trellis was dark.  The buildings looked more like apartments than anything else.

Yarrow was where I found my prize.  Mr. Percy’s residence.

The lights weren’t on, but there was a candle flame on the second floor, and as ever, the branches were inviting in how they offered me places for my hands and feet.

I got as close as I could to the window where I’d spied the candle flame, where it rose from a steeply sloping roof, and I listened.

“…the boys!?” Mary’s voice rose at the end, a question.

There we go, I thought.

And she was using the words I’d given her, using my labels.

I sat back and listened.

Taking Root 1.9

“Mary, I won’t talk to you while you’re being like this.”

“I’m scared!  I’ve never been scared!  And you’re not answering my questions, which-”

“Mary.”

“-isn’t making me feel any better!”

I shifted positions and settled back, now that I knew I was close enough to hear, the box of notecards in my lap, the contents thoroughly soaked.  The words were muffled by the intervening wall and window, but I could make them out and differentiate the speakers.  The man, who I was assuming was Percy, was speaking in a very careful, measured tone.

Mary was displaying more emotion in a given word than I’d seen from her during my entire discussion with her.

The rain streamed over me, and I pushed my hair straight back, away from my face, glad that it was so very wet that it didn’t just spring back into the most inconvenient position.  I was soaked through, and imagined that the spot at my back where the file was tucked into my waistband was so wet that the print from the pages was staining my skin.

It wouldn’t, but I still imagined it.

Where my skin was new on my arms and various points on my body, I could feel the cold of the rain like rough circles of ice.  The passage of a single droplet left an ache singing through my nerves for seconds after it was gone.

I shifted over, so the section of the room that jutted out to frame the window was tight against one of my arms and the slight overhang of shingles provided a bit of shelter.  It helped.

The puppeteer spoke, “Mary.  I told you to be ready for anything, that the Academy was almost guaranteed to respond.  You did very well to discover them as early and accurately as you did.  I’m proud of you for accomplishing that.”

“It wasn’t anything special.  A group of kids shows up all at once?  Just had to keep an eye on them.  The boys-”

“The boys,” he said, and he gave the word a different tone in the process.  He was apparently noting the phrasing.

“They did most of the work there, finding the group from the Academy.”

“I’m still proud of you, Mary,” he said.  There was a pause, uncomfortable and long.  I had to fight the urge to peek in the window.  The puppeteer resumed, his voice low and soothing, as if talking to an infant “Deep breath now.  In… and out.  There we go.  Tears wiped away, hair fixed up, and you’re not so flustered.  Do you feel a little better?”

“A little.”

“We knew they would send someone or something.  I warned you to be prepared for anything.”

“I thought it would be… one of those tools you hear the Academy talking about.  The Dog and Catcher, or the man with the hands.  Something like that.  I was expecting to have to deal with monsters, I didn’t…”

“You didn’t…?” the puppeteer asked, trailing off much as Mary had.

“I wasn’t prepared for them to be like that.”

My eyebrows were already up.

The Dog and Catcher were well known enough as they could be seen around town, but I was surprised that ‘the man with the hands’ had come up.  That would be the Hangman file from the Academy, and that file was pretty damn confidential.  Enough so that even I hadn’t known about it until I’d started to wonder what special project the Tackhouse had put together and went out of my way to get the file.

Had the little clones here been similarly busy during Mothmont’s excursions to the Academy?

“You’re very much alive, Mary, which you might well not be if it was another individual or group from the Academy.  I’m quite grateful for that fact.”

“I don’t know how to move forward, and I don’t like standing still when I’m not sure where I stand.  The boys-”

“Your brothers are your brothers, nothing else.  You were born from the same womb.  Have I spent half as much time in their company as I have in yours?”

“No,” Mary said.

“You look like you still have doubts,” he said.

“I’m okay,” Mary said.  “About the children from the Academy-”

“Don’t change the subject.  Do you have doubts, Mary?”

“Yes.”

“Try to voice them.  I’d like a chance to answer them.”

“I feel as though, if I had to guess, you might have told them that they were special, and you only spend time with me because I need the extra practice and training.”

“No, Mary.  No, no no,” he said.  I could hear the huff of a heavy sigh.  “I’m so caught off guard by the idea that I don’t even know what to say.”

“I knew it was unfair,” Mary said, and her voice was so quiet I could barely hear it.  “There isn’t a right answer, nothing you could say that would make me feel better.  So I wasn’t going to say anything.  It’s poison they put into my head, and I don’t want the poison to bleed out into this.  Us, our family, our home.”

“Tell me.  Share your worries when they come up.  I know that what we’re doing here is a lonely exercise.  I rely on you and your brothers to be my hands, while I continue to refine my work.  I hope you can rely on me in the same way.”

Her reply was so soft I couldn’t hear it.

“Good,” he said.  “That’s what I like to hear.”

“What do we do?”

“Your brothers are in the dark?”

“Yes.”

“We fix that, first.  I’m glad you came to me, but as special as you are to me, I do care about your brothers.”

“Yes.”

“We can’t do anything about this unknown member of the group.  From your description, I imagine she’s better suited against specific threats that are vulnerable to a chemical or counteragent.”

“I thought about that.  She can’t do anything without communication, either.  The members of the Academy children have to give her information to work with, if she’s going to do anything to find us.  If we wait and watch, they’ll eventually lead us to her.”

I wanted to laugh.  The irony.

“The boy, Gordon, he was a physical threat?”

“I don’t know if you could call him that.  He’s stronger than he looks.  He shoved his way through a locked door.  Sylvester, the one I talked to, he said Gordon was the one to watch out for.  Described him as being a jack of trades, or something like that.  Physical prowess.”

“The one to watch out for.  Do you believe him?”

“No.  Not completely.  But he said Gordon would come for you, if they identified you.”

“They will, and he will, I think,” the puppeteer said.

“I don’t want that.”

“Nor do I.  But I don’t see any way around it.  This is how the Academy operates, and just as we can’t cry over the rain, which we cannot change, we cannot cry about the Academy being what it is.”

“I like the rain,” Mary said, and her voice was a hair louder than it had been.

I was sitting beside the window, to the point where I was looking across it rather than into it, but the square of orange where the glass had caught the light from within changed as Mary’s head and upper body blocked some of it.

She was only two feet from me, and she didn’t even know it.

I shifted one hand to cover the spot on my arm where it was sensitive, the cold almost unbearable.  Unfortunately, the backs of my hands had suffered as much as anything, and the cold rain touched them just as sharply.

The light shifted again.  The puppeteer had drawn closer to the window as well.

“A moment ago you said you were afraid.  For the first time?”

“Yes.”

“Fear is rooted in the unknown.  I think that is why great minds tend to find such an unreasonable confidence in the process of plumbing it.  They face the unknown, they conquer it, and they diminish it until it no longer holds sway over them, and they continue to charge onward.”

“When you say great minds, do you include yourself?”

“I don’t.”

“I would,” Mary retorted, without hesitation.

“You’re biased.  Someone could say I’m clever, and I might agree with them, but I wouldn’t say I’m great.  We’re getting sidetracked.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I wasn’t planning on sharing this with you.  It’s not because I was hiding anything, but because I didn’t see the need.  But if it helps you forge through the unknown, there’s a need.  I may not know who they are, but I know what they are.  Or is it the other way around?”

“The Academy children?”

“Yes.  More than a decade ago, I was involved with the Academy.”

“Involved?”

“The system and structure were different.  For a time, the amount of space outpaced the glut of students.  They opened the doors and let some in.”

“You?  Really?”

“I was one such individual.  Not a true student.  I didn’t pay a tuition, and I didn’t ever harbor delusions of being a graduate, a teacher or a professor.  They left us scraps, told us that when classes weren’t full we could fight between ourselves to take the additional spots.  We could use the libraries, and we had to put in a certain number of hours in service to the Academy.  Each and every one of us knew that if a paying student walked in the door, one of us would be leaving in that same heartbeat.  Those of us who endured it did so because we were hungry for it.”

“Why?”

“Why were we hungry, or why did we do it?” the puppeteer asked.

“Why did you do it?  How could you stand being second class citizens?”

Does that rub you the wrong way?  Do you think that if people knew what you were, that they would put you a rung lower than any ‘true’ human?  Think you derivative?  A curio?

“We were told that we were training to be assistants.  To know our way around the labs and the books and to know what needed stirring and how often, or to be effective sounding boards for the real great minds, when they were talking their way through a problem.  Every seat we were able to claim for ourselves was another dollar we were worth.”

“It’s weird, hearing you talk about the Academy like this.  You hate them.”

“I do.  That doesn’t mean I don’t value the knowledge or the education.  I got my position at Mothmont.  Everything they promised came true.”

“But?”

“But we’re getting off topic,” he said.

“That’s not what I was asking.”

“I’m giving you a different answer to a different question.  Listen, I managed to barter my way into a seat for a class, I think it was called ‘The Applied Mind’.  We were given projects.  Brainstorming, application.  Students had to work in groups, and I was paired with another non-student student.  He lost his position in the school, leaving me entirely on my own.  My project was amateurish, more concept than anything close to a proper execution.  But I got to sit through the entire class and I got glimpses of the work others did.  They kept it quiet, but they couldn’t completely silence twenty-five students out of a class of sixty.  The timing made too much sense, with the first appearance of certain special projects.”

“You’re talking about the Academy children?  They’re the work the other groups did?”

“Yes, I think so.  You’ve already told me some of it.  I moved on to another year of classes, and I heard through word of mouth that the project had fallen through, not enough viable results.  Died in the womb.  I saw how despondent some of the students were, and I believed it.  I heard the department was getting cut back a great deal, and I believed that too.  I still do.  I paid attention for two more months, and then my seat was taken.”

“They’re not just a special project, but a secret one?”

“One of several.  But, based on everything you’ve shared with me, those details I could process in the rare moments you stopped for breath, I remain suspicious these Academy children are a failed project.”

“Failed?”

“Only a suspicion.  The funding is spent, the department was cut back, but several of the projects lived, and it costs relatively little to keep an ongoing project operating.  Perhaps other failures were given a second chance because it was inexpensive.  It would explain the group being larger than it should.  Thus, we would have a failed project maintained as long as there is spare change to keep it going, made use of whenever an appropriate situation comes up.”

“He said something about being injured, and it was recent.  I don’t think we’re the first job they’ve done lately.”

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t a niche project,” he said.

“That’s true.”

“I was there for the conception, the brainstorming, and the discussions.  All I took away was that it wasn’t a roaring success, and a great many people were disappointed.  I don’t think I retained anything else that’s noteworthy… well, one thing, of course.”

“One thing?”

“You, Mary.  Your brothers.  You were my project.  The seed of the idea was born then.  It sat with me for a few years, until I had the means to make it happen.”

Mary was silent.

“You were a gamble.  You still are, but back then, I remember losing sleep.  I tried to put two projects forward, but I only had so much time to dedicate to the task.  I had to make a decision.  Would I follow the instructions to the letter with an inferior idea, or would I present you, knowing that you were novel as an approach, but doomed to be dismissed for not fitting to the rules?”

“He said- Sylvester said that the Academy prizes innovation.”

“Yes.  He’s right, and that idea is probably why I decided to do what I did.  I thought a great deal about what happened back then.  What I’d do differently, given a second chance.  Then I decided to see it through, and I did it on my own, which is something they can never forgive me for.”

“Because they want control,” she said.

“Yes.  As much as they prize innovation, they prize control more.  A mind that runs away with ideas is cherished there, so long as it remains there.  Within or with the Academy.  Here?  Past arm’s length?  Not something cherished, but despised.  That’s our enemy.”

“A little less of an unknown,” Mary said.

“Yes.  Now you know why they’re doing what they’re doing.  You have a sense of who they are.  A failed venture.  Does that take some of the fear away?”

“Yes.”

“Your hand,” he said.  There was a pause.  “Look at that, it’s as steady as a rock.  Arm yourself, conceal the weapons, but bring enough to arm your brothers.  I’m going to the school, and you’re coming with me.”

“You’re going to the school?” she asked, and she sounded anything but calm.  I heard sounds as she followed the instructions, all the same.

“Where do you think I should go?”

“Anywhere but the school.”

“You don’t think they’ll find me?  Or that they might have sent other resources after us?  I’m safest in your company, in the cover of the crowd, or where I can use my power as a member of the school faculty.  I’ll have all three of those things at the school for as long as I’m there, which won’t be for long.  You can’t communicate with your brothers for as long as the Academy children know your face.  Leave that much to me.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t.  You were always my most careful one.”

“You’re going ahead with this?”

“I don’t see any other way to do it.  Trust me, Mary.  I gave you a wealth of talents, but I’m not without my own.  This is something I can manage.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt.  I’m not as afraid for me, but my fear for you is enough that I can barely think straight!”

“Mary-”

“Please.  You made me, you raised me, I’ve never refused to obey.  I’ve done everything you asked.  Let me have a say just once.”

“You would have me abandon your brothers?”

“You said they weren’t that viable.  They know what they have to do.  If they make it, they’ll fulfill their mission.  Let’s go.  Leave, take the notes, drain the tanks, burn the house to erase the evidence.  The Academy won’t catch up to us if we’re quick about it.”

“I won’t do that.”

“You said it was about me and you.  That I’d be by your side as the elder sister to all the viables.  Do this for me, prove it.  Prove that.”

“If I sacrificed your brothers to save my own skin, you would always suspect that I would do the same to you.”

“No.  I wouldn’t, I promise.  Please, don’t make what he said true.  Prove that you’re right.  Prove it!”

“Mary-”

“Prove it!”

There was a frantic edge to the words, now.

In stark contrast, the puppeteer’s voice was low and drawn out, voicing multiple syllables I couldn’t put together into a word.  A nonsense utterance with a cadence to it.

Mary had fallen silent.

An imprinted phrase?  Planned, crafted as something that wouldn’t be repeated in everyday conversation.

I heard noise, but from the heavy footsteps and creaks, I took it to be him and him alone.  Papers rustling, a thud, steps disappearing into another room, very possibly downstairs.

Almost a minute passed before his return.

“Take it,” he said.  “Drink.  Keep drinking… there.  You’re dehydrated and tired.  It’s been a long night.  Finish collecting the weapons and tools, we’re leaving as soon as I have my coat.”

“I-” Mary started.  “I don’t-”

Far more hesitant than she’d been a minute and a half ago.

What exactly had happened?

And was it something I could use?

I shifted my position, grabbing the rain-slick windowsill and leaning out and over, to glimpse the front face of the large house, locating the front door.

I slid as much as I crawled, dragging myself across the rooftop, beneath the window’s field of view, to get to the other side, and it was even more awkward a process with the box of notecards still occupying one of my hands.

My uniform was filthy, and it wasn’t just muck and dirt, but with the crawl over the shingles it was a muck and dirt that had been driven into the fabric.  I took care finding Percy’s notecard in the dark, then tucked it into a pants pocket.  The rest of the notecards I clamped between my teeth.

I waited, listening as the puppeteer resumed speaking.  “I need you to focus.  It’s been a long night, but my well being and your well being depend on your ability to watch our backs.  Remind me why you’re my best work.”

“Yes,” she said, and the word was warm with pride at the same time it was just a little faint.  Whatever he’d done to her, she was still reeling from it.

I made sure my position was secure, then snapped off the end of a shingle, where rain and weather had worn it down to the point where it was soft, hanging over the gutter.

I did the same for the next length of shingle, though it required a little more work.

Each piece was as thick as eight or so pieces of paper put together, two fingers’ width wide, and of varying lengths, all gritty like sandpaper.

Each piece of shingle went into the box.

I scooted along further, pausing now and again to listen, hearing nothing.  More shingles went into the box, but it wasn’t much larger than a brick, and I soon reached the point where the shingles were being wedged in rather than dropped in.

It was true I wasn’t good in a fight, but that didn’t mean I didn’t occasionally have my moments.

The trick was to avoid making it a proper fight, per se.

I rolled my shoulders, and found they were still stiff.  My arms were cold.

The door opened below me, and in my eagerness to react, I very nearly launched myself forward, over the gutter, and two stories down to the ground.

I hefted the weight of the box that had held the notecards.  It wasn’t so heavy.  Five, six pounds.  A little larger than a brick, and about as heavy.

While Mary was reeling from whatever the puppeteer had done to her, she might be slower to react.  I had to gauge my options, trust my ability, see them step away from the door after the puppeteer had locked it.

I got my first glimpse of the man.  Tall, hair slicked back from a widow’s peak, casually forming what looked like two horns, pointing at some area behind the back of his head.  Streaks of grey reached back from his temples.  His mustache-less facial hair swept forward much as his hair swept back, the point of the beard extending the chin of an already long face.  His jacket was long and clung to his body, adding to his apparent height and very lean build.  It was in the style of a lab coat without actually being a lab coat, very fashionable, and black.  It said as much about the man as anything else.

All put together, he was meticulous.  It was the first and last word that sprung to mind.

I’d heard his confidence as he talked about how he’d fend for himself at the school.  I knew how hard it might be to get to him, or to catch up to him once he tapped the available resources and made his escape to some other town.

Mary hadn’t quite believed him when he’d said he would be okay.

I did.

Which was why I brought the box back, and smashed the window with it.

I saw him stop, turning.  Mary turned too, but it was a slow reaction.

I’d seen Gordon in a good fight.  There were moments where I’d seen him throw a punch as his opponent turned their head, so it made the hit worse.  The opposite of rolling with the punches.  I’d fallen in love with the image and tried to emulate it in a fistfight and been kicked in the ribs several times over for my trouble.

In this case, it was pure accident, but he made it happen.  His head turned to look up at me, and the brick-ish box of shingles had already left my hand.  He brought his face straight into it.

I saw spatters of darkness that might have been blood, and I saw his ass hit the wet footpath leading between the door and the road.

I wanted to crow my victory to the night sky, to laugh at the success my ribs had suffered for just months ago, but that might have ruined the effect.

Better to stay a small, dark, dirty, drenched shape on the roof, and see if I could re-awaken little Mary’s fear all over again.  Fear of me, and fear for her puppeteer’s safety.

I saw her crouch, caught between keeping an eye on me and helping the puppeteer.

She had weapons, I knew.  She could throw a hatchet, and knives weren’t out of the question.

In a throwing contest, she was liable to win.

I had to turn up the pressure.  The moment this became a contest of skill or strength, she would win.

I reached into the broken window, disappointed that the lights were off, and felt inside until I found a wine bottle with only a few gulps left in it.  I hucked it at them.

Mary put herself between Percy and the bottle, hunching over so it smashed against her shoulder.  The top end disappeared into the grass at the boundary of the property.

The irony being that if she hadn’t put herself in the way, the course would have led to me missing entirely.

I found a book and threw that, but it opened in mid-air, drifting off course.  It landed a few feet to their left, my right.

“I’ll kill you,” she said, her voice carrying over the patter of the rain.

“Try it,” I said, blindly fumbling for the next thing I might be able to throw.  “Come after me.  We can play hide and seek, and the moment you lose track of me, it’ll be because I’m busy slitting his throat.”

I held up the letter opener.

She didn’t need to know that it wasn’t particularly sharp.  She just needed to know that I was armed.

But the gesture was a mistake, because it gave her a window to act, where she didn’t need to shield the puppeteer.  I didn’t even see her palm the knife, and her entire body moved with the throwing motion.

Not entirely surprised, I swung lazily to one side, holding on to the top of the window frame, moving over to the other side.

She was already readying to throw again.  Two knives at once?

I swung again, hoping to irritate her into making a mistake.  I badly underestimated how good she was.  The first knife hit the window frame a quarter-foot in front of my face.  A slightly faster swing, and it would have hit me.

The second knife… I didn’t feel or hear it land, and the lack of sensory awareness fed straight into that ‘prey instinct’ that Jamie and I had discussed.

A sense that something was wrong.

She’d pretended to throw two at once, but had held back the other.  Before I’d fully processed the fact that I’d almost swung right into the knife’s path, she was throwing it in a simple clean, crisp motion.  No choreographing, no putting her entire body into the throw.  The sort of thing I could very nearly miss if I wasn’t paying enough attention.

She’s aiming for-

The half formed thought was enough to make me let go of the window frame, falling and sliding until both of my feet landed in the gutter, the back of my head banging against the windowsill.

The knife buried itself into the spot where my hand had been.  While I’d been moving from side to side, my hand had been staying in place, keeping me from falling.

This time I was paying attention to what her hands were doing.  They traced the bottom of her uniform top and the fingers curled inward, holding what was presumably another throwing knife.

I grinned at her.  “I saw that.  Not quite subtle enough.”

“Don’t waste them,” the puppeteer said, raising one hand to the side of his face, then removing it, revealing a mess of blood on the fingers.  “He’s baiting you.”

“He’s a bastard,” she said.

“I never pretended to be anything but,” I said.  I reached up for a grip on the windowsill, and found a large piece of glass.  I whipped it at her.

She blocked it much as she had the bottle, flinching as it broke.  One of the eyes she’d closed remained closed after she lowered her arm.

“Go, we gain nothing by staying.  I can walk,” I heard the puppeteer say.  He rose, and Mary was quick to put her entire body under one of his arms, helping him to stand and put a few more steps worth of distance between us.

“What about the lab?” Mary said, looking up at me.

“It’s as good as gone,” the puppeteer said, mumbling some of the sounds.  The hit to his face seemed to have caught his cheekbone and nose, but that was somehow impacting his speech, too.  The skin was badly split, and it looked ragged enough that a shingle’s edge might have caught it.  An impact and a sawtooth edge.

I’d got him good, it seemed.

That wasn’t the sort of thing that made me want to shout my glee to the heavens.  The satisfaction was colder, quieter.

“You don’t have all your work,” Mary said.

“I have enough to start over.  If he wants to destroy it, he can destroy it.  Survival is paramount, and that includes yours, Mary.”

Hearing him, I almost believed it, and I would have if I hadn’t heard his special word and noted the aftermath.

I pulled another piece of glass free of the window itself, where it was only hanging on because of the paint.  I wasn’t strong enough to give it proper distance without putting so much into the throw that I’d lose all accuracy.  They were too far back, standing on the street now.  Mary and her hobbling puppeteer.

She was glaring at me through one eye, the other staying shut.

They turned, Mary watching me out of the corner of her eye, supporting the puppeteer as they retreated in the general direction of the school.

I counted the seconds between each over-the-shoulder glance she gave me.

One, two, three… glance.

One, two, three… glance.

One, two, three, fo- glance.

One two three, glance.

One, two, three, four, pausing for breath, a long stare back in my direction.

One, two, three, four, glance.

The moment she turned away, I moved.  To one side, to break line of sight, putting the corner of a building between us, then down the face of the building.  It was a reckless, haphazard descent, one where I fell more than I descended, stopping myself now and again with a grab at a window shutter or a bit of branch.

Providing the moths a flame to follow was one thing.  Creating a desire and filling it, destroying the prey at the conclusion.

It was another to leave your enemy only one path, and follow them along it.

I wasn’t strong.  I might never be.  Gordon could have brained the man with the shingle box.  Hell, even Helen could’ve.  Jamie could have done more damage, but probably would never have hit.  I’d hurt the puppeteer, at the very least.  Mankind had a long and involved history of being hunters, following a wounded beast for miles.

He’d already been intent on getting to Mothmont and gathering the boys, his three other killers.  Now it was the only place nearby that he had access to where he could tend to his injured face.

Nine in ten chance he would do that.  One in ten chance that the blow to his head would leave him relying on Mary.

It meant I didn’t need to follow, exactly.  That carried its own risks, when little Mary was so very good at throwing things at people.  Better to lag behind, to watch my flanks and move with appropriate care and caution.

If I happened to catch up with them, there was nothing I could do to capitalize on the situation.  If I stayed back, out of sight, then she had to wonder, and that wondering was a very useful tool.  It made every decision she made more difficult, with more variables to consider.  Every step of the way, she had to watch her back.

Approaching the school, I found my way to the same alcove where the coach had stopped to drop me off, and peered around the corner.

The puppeteer was alone, his keys rattling as he stood at the locked gate.

I immediately whirled around, looking, searching.

No Mary in sight.

You want to play that game, Mary?  I thought.

I’d really hoped that her bond to her creator would mean she stayed close to him, even as he got to the school.  But she was sticking to the plan.  I couldn’t go for the man without risking that Mary would step out and kill me, much as she’d promised back at Percy’s home.

I’d angered her enough that she was going to kill me very, very thoroughly, if she got the chance.

I could go straight for the puppeteer, but that was a gamble.  Was Mary close?  Hiding?  Would she intercept me?  She had a couple of inches on me in height, she had been trained, honed, and I wasn’t positive I could outrun her if it came down to it.

I didn’t like that gamble.

The man was still working to find the right key when the gate opened.

It was the headmistress.

“Mister Percy!” she exclaimed.  I looked through the window and thought it was a vagrant.  What happened!?”

“I was feeling better,” he said, mumbling.  He coughed and spat, “Thought I’d check how things were.  A thug on the street waylaid me.”

“Good mercy.  Get yourself inside.  We’ll get you patched up.”

I heard the gate shut and click.  That was my mark to go, double checking for a murderous Mary, then heading to the same window I’d used to exit the building, slipping inside.

My shoes had hard soles.  I slipped them off.  Comfort was secondary to moving quietly.

If I could get past Mary to reach Percy, I won.  If Mary could get to any of us, possibly excepting Gordon or very possibly Helen, it was over.  We’d never get the advantage over them with one of ours down and out.  If she could reach her group, they’d have an overwhelming advantage.  If I could reach mine… well, we’d be a group, and I could share what I knew.  In a situation as tenuous as this, their combined strength beat out ours.

Lopsided, as games went.  Her with her arsenal of knives and whatever else, me with my letter opener and the knowledge that she was scared, though she was only willing to show it to her maker.

Who, as he’d endeavored to communicate to her, wasn’t to be discounted as a player of our dark little game.

I smiled to myself as I darted off into the recesses of the building.

Taking Root 1.10

This was what I lived for.  Literally speaking.

I knew my enemy now.  I knew where she was weak, where she was strong.  I knew how dangerous she was, and through all of that I could make assumptions about the others in the school.  I might have preferred to know where she was and interact with her from a safe vantage point, but this was the next best thing.

I knew that the best way to handle this would be to get to the puppeteer, Mr. Percy, and deal with him before anything else.  He was hurt, my odds weren’t that bad.  Once he fell, the others would fall.  I knew that Mary knew the same thing, and would react accordingly.  She knew I knew, and I knew that.

Ad infinitum.

I liked these games, when the system broke down.  It was no longer about how good we were at predicting and planning.  We were both just good enough that we wouldn’t get ahead of the other by that alone.  It was about understanding the other, and I had the edge there.

The yard was dangerous.  Too wide a space with no cover.  Mary’s space.

That left me the school itself, hallways and classrooms for places I could navigate without exposing myself.  If I made it far enough, then I’d be in the back of the school, with the dorm rooms, showers, kitchen, and the boiler rooms in the basement.

The Lambsbridge gang would be back there, I was fairly certain.

I stopped where I was, beside a classroom door that was already open, something to keep me out of sight while not getting in my way.  The only light that filtered through was from outside, passing through windows on the outside that fit older styles, square and proper and framed, illuminating bits of the classroom, then touching the windows inside the hallways, where it was all broken glass secured in place with custom-grown branches.  The light that reached me was faint and mottled, like the light that might filter through a heavy forest canopy.

I couldn’t move forward until I knew how Mary would react.  Who was she?  How would the others read her, assuming I’d filled them in on the particulars?

She’s dangerous, she prefers to stay at arm’s length.  Throwing weapons, pistol, poison.  It’s not just a fear of you, it’s how she is, I imagined Gordon telling me.

Helen might say something like: The puppeteer raised her with care and a great deal of control.  A special trigger phrase to keep her compliant if she started to slip the leash.  He waited to use it, so it wouldn’t have been a common thing.  Remember everything we said about why he raised them at Mothmont.  Control and a firm hand.  Somewhere he could be close to them and steer them.

Except not in so many words.

Jamie was a hard one for me to guess.  I couldn’t slip myself into Jamie’s shoes and imagine what he’d say because Jamie would be the type to call up some obscure set of details.  He had a good memory, while mine was below average.  But Jamie would also have a sense of the building layout.  He could sketch out a quick map in that book of his, I could stare down at it, put all the pieces together, and start to imagine where Mary might have entered the building, where she might have positioned herself.

I tried to imagine the building as well as I knew it, but it wasn’t a complete map, and parts of it were nebulous, the scale not quite right.  I couldn’t draw a sharp picture, not a crisp image that stayed still in my mind’s eye.

Then there was Lillian.  Not an Academy project, except she was, in a way.  She’d grown up with the Academy in mind, had spent some time at Mothmont, and went on to be one of the Academy’s younger students.  Her family wasn’t so wealthy that she would thrive regardless of what happened.  She’d had to throw herself into her studies, into our activities, just to secure her future.  The Academy had its claws in her.

Lillian would share something about the science of the clones.  Maybe explain how the trigger phrase worked.

…Or, now that I thought about it, she might surprise us and say something very human.  Something like, she was so cold around you, but she let her guard down around him.  She even cried.

I imagined that as the moment I could pull the pieces together and get an idea of where Mary might be lurking.  I could formulate a plan and enact it.  But imagination was only imagination, and as much as it helped to put myself into others’ heads and look at things from set angles, I was missing pieces of it.  Jamie’s map, the extra tidbits that I could never come up with on my own.

But I still had an impression of where Mary was, even if I couldn’t pinpoint the exact location.  Given how much she cared about the puppeteer, how afraid she was of me, there had to be a comfort zone.  A certain range she might wander, where she could potentially keep an eye out for me while still watching him.

My head slowly turned.  End of the hallway.  Either one of the classrooms on either side, the last classrooms at that end of the hall.  Everything beyond that was offices.  More likely to be locked tight, too close to him, not close enough to observe me.

What else?

The yard?  I’d called it her territory.  She could look in the windows just as well as I could look out, and it gave her a lot of range of movement.

I started to imagine a Mary at each of those points.  A phantom image lurking in shadow, just out of sight.

The puppeteer was her weak point.  When he was strong, he could give her strength, centering her.  When he was weak or in danger, she cracked.  The brick I’d thrown at him had been aimed at her, in an abstract way.  That in mind, I was willing to bet that she was devoting more thought to how to protect him than how to catch me if I tried to break away and run.

Strings extended from him to the phantom Marys.  An abstraction of the fundamental hold he had on her.  They were strings that could snap, if given cause, but there was a resistance.  Tension.  Anything she did would always, always be prefaced by a concern for him.  A momentary worry.

That was the tool I had to use.

I could make out a heavy, low sound further down the hallway.  A large object being set down, a book being dropped.

What are you doing, Mary?  I wondered.

The phantom images were suddenly busy.  Enacting various scenes and scenarios.  Mary, anxious, making a mistake.  Mary intentionally making a sound to distract, then slipping closer toward me.  Mary setting a trap, a deadfall or a heavy object that held down a tripwire, impossible to see in the dark.

It was very possible that she didn’t just have weapons.  Poison, wire, any number of things could be stowed away in and around her uniform.  I liked traps, but they were hardly exclusive to me alone.

It was an approach that let her actively protect the puppeteer while keeping the right position respective to me and the man.

If that was what she was doing.

I was visualizing her at the end of the hallway, or in one of the adjacent classrooms.  I wasn’t thinking about the yard.

I raised myself up, head snapping over to look into the window of the classroom beside me, past desks and chairs to the window that looked out into the yard.

Between the rain and the branches, there was no way to tell if she was there, moving around to circle behind me, or if it was just weather and gloom playing tricks with my eyes.

Think twice, Sy, I told myself, going back to thinking about Mary being at any one of the positions in a quarter-circle around me.  Right classroom, hall, left classroom, yard.

This is why Gordon gets on my case, I thought.  Spend too much time thinking, miss my chances.

She was watching, apparently secure in the idea that she’d spot me or confirm my location if I made a break for it.  I needed to disrupt that security.

Need to make a noise someplace I’m not.

I looked, peering into the windows, searching the classrooms around me.

Books could be slid across the floor.  A small object could be thrown to break something, but both were crude, obvious.  I wasn’t strong enough to throw or slide either all that far, the sliding book would make too much noise and the broken glass would be too cliche.

My eye settled on a shape at the back of one room, barely visible as a silhouette against the vague light that made it in from outside, even against the paler background of the wall.

I darted across the hall, low enough to the ground that I had to put my hand down to touch the floor for balance and to keep my nose from smashing into the tile.

My heartbeat picked up as I made it into the classroom, moving amid desks and chairs.  There were windows, yes, but the only exit that didn’t threaten to cut me to shreds on the way through was the door I’d just passed through.  If Mary appeared in the doorway, I might well be done for.  Even if I did make it through a window, I wasn’t sure she couldn’t catch up to me.

The only defense was to do it fast and do it quiet.

I headed to the corner of the room furthest from the door.

Teacher’s desk.  Nothing of importance.

But beside the teacher’s desk, next to the window, there was a globe, resting on a stand, fixed in place at the poles so it could spin.  The colors were rich, even in the gloom.  A third of the globe was dominated by a rich crimson, each etching of place name topped by a crown.  The independent countries were marked out in their own colors, paler, less saturated, scattered and patchwork.

I took it down and pried it free of the stand with the letter opener, then made my way back to the door.

I was paranoid enough of emerging to find Mary standing just outside the door that I raised the globe a bit to shield myself from an impending stab or pistol shot.

But she wasn’t there.

I glanced down the length of the hallway, then set the globe rolling in the direction of a door that sat slightly ajar, leading to a more distant classroom.

I watched it roll, glancing back periodically to make sure she wasn’t sneaking up on me.

It touched the door.  The door moved, creaking slightly, clicking.

I ducked back to cover, hiding just inside a classroom, between the door and the shelf.

Closing my eyes, straining my ears, I counted to twenty.

When the time was up, I took a peek around the corner.

The globe had moved.

I moved in that same heartbeat, toward the globe, low enough to the ground that I couldn’t be glimpsed through the windows, glad for once that I hadn’t grown since I was nine.

As much as I was trying to find her and identify her location, she’d been doing much the same as I had.  I had little doubt she’d watched me break into the school from a window, tracked my general location, maybe even spotted me as I made my way through the school itself.

She had made a sound, but I’d been able to afford staying still.  Not a good thing, not entirely safe, if it was a precursor to her coming after me, but the ball was more in my court.

I’d made a sound, it forced her to react.  Staying where she was risked that I’d go after her ‘brothers’.  Or that I might loop around and find another angle to use in going after the puppeteer.  Or anything.

But seeing the globe, knowing it was a ruse, it forced a decision.  She had to figure out where I really was.  Was it a ruse, or was I leading her one way while slipping through to go after the puppeteer?

Given a fifty-fifty chance with no clue otherwise, the strings pulled her back to the puppeteer.

I passed the globe and the door it had touched, and felt a cool draft.  The excuse for the globe’s movement.  She’d slipped in through the window, had used it to make her exit, or both.

I rounded the corner to the west side of the school, moving as fast as I could toward the dormitories and the Lambsbridge gang.

Even just approaching the boy’s dormitory, I could smell the sickness.  Over a thousand students periodically venting fluids out of every orifice.  Looking through windows, across the corner of the yard, I could see that many lights were on in hallways, though not necessarily in the rooms themselves.  Staff doing patrols and making sure the students were alright.

I couldn’t quite see with the trees in the corner of the yard, but I saw motion.  Fast motion.

The other Lambsbridge members.  Running away or giving chase?

I only had a half-second to make the call, picking up speed, making noise as I ran.  A glimpse through two sets of rain-covered windows, past branches and leaves.

I saw Helen’s eyes, and I saw Gordon’s.

The focus, the killer instinct.

I picked up speed, running faster.  My feet were bare and wet, partially from water that had dripped off the rest of me, and the tile was slick.  I managed to keep my footing, but there were one or two points where I wondered if I was going to slip.  Approaching the bend, where my hallway met theirs at the corner of the dormitory, I could hear them.

As we intersected, I spotted the smallest of Mary’s ‘brothers’, eight or so years old, with two knives in hand.  Red haired, flushed in the face, but with a very cold look in his eyes.  Those same eyes widened as I sprinted his way.

Surprise.

Almost unconsciously, he switched his grip on one knife around, so the blade pointed down.

I dropped to the floor.  Still soaked with the rain, I slid on the tile.

He leaped, to avoid tripping on me, and I grabbed one foot.  It slipped from my grasp, but I’d put him off balance.  He flopped over, belly hitting the floor.

Spry little bastard.  He was already on his feet when Gordon caught up with him.  Without slowing, Gordon slapped one knife-hand to the side, caught the other wrist, and slammed the kid into a wall.

The kid went limp.  Gordon held his wrist, letting him dangle.

The kid’s eyes opened, and he jerked his other knife hand, pointed at Gordon’s middle.  Helen’s foot went out, pinning it against the wall.

“Damn,” the kid said.  I thought I might have seen a glimmer of fear in his eyes, but Gordon hauled him away from the wall, then cracked the kid’s head against it, hard.  He paused, watching, then did it again.

The knives fell from the boy’s hands.

“Lillian, got something to put him under, just in case?”

Lillian did.  She hurried forward, pulling her bag around in front of her to retrieve a syringe.  She squirted out almost half of it before jamming it into the boy’s stomach, depressing it.

“No interrogation?” I asked, as I picked myself up.

“This is the second we caught up to,” Jamie said.  “First was uncooperative enough that I don’t think Gordon is willing to entertain this one.”

As if to explain, Gordon turned and lifted up his shirt.  A bandage was already showing some blood.

Helen and Gordon let the tyke drop to the floor.  Gordon collected the knives, offered one to Helen, who shook her head, then stuck both into his belt.

“They’re better than I am,” Gordon said.

“At?” I asked.  “Fighting?”

He shrugged one shoulder.  “Wouldn’t say that.  Using a knife?  Throwing something?  Definitely better.  Fighting?  Eh.  Brawling?  Definitely not.”

“No real-world knowledge,” Jamie said, looking down at the boy.  He looked up at Gordon.  “No visiting seedy parts of town to trade money or drink for some lessons from the meanest guys around.”

“But they’re still really, really good,” Gordon said.  He looked at me.  “How’d it go?”

“Mr. Percy, our puppeteer, uses sounds to make them compliant if they get antsy,” I said.  “He’s here, with Mary.”

“Percy,” Jamie said.  He paused to consider, then nodded.  “Okay.”

“Attended the academy without being a student.  He knows of the Lambsbridge project, but doesn’t know the particulars.  Still no idea on greater motivation or plans.  He’s hurt, getting medical care.”

“Hurt?” Lillian asked.

“Brick smashed him in the face out of nowhere,” I said.  “Puzzling.”

Gordon was on one knee, searching the little kid.  He collected four knives and a small sack with a weight inside, which he examined.

“Blackjack?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.  He tossed it to me.

I gave it a look-see, then pocketed it.  “Our headmistress got a letter in her office, recommending that she call the Academy, discreetly, to ask for a thorough search and examination of the student body, keep everything locked down.  I didn’t expect her to be up and about this early, but it works.  Puppeteer is here, kids are here.  The noose is in place.”

“They only need a push, then,” Helen murmured.

I matched her flat stare with a grin.  “I love you, big sister.”

Her expression unchanged, she reached over to rap the top of my head with her knuckles.

“Ow.”

Gordon tied the kid’s wrists and ankles, then hefted him, folded over one shoulder.  Gordon was big for his age, the kid was small, but Gordon made it look effortless, which was something else altogether.

“Which way?” Gordon asked.

“Mary was that way,” I said, pointing down the way I’d come.  “Puppeteer is in or near the front office.  The third boy is… up to you to figure out.”

He shook his head.  “Last we saw, he was near the kitchen, sent this one after us, we were busy staying out of the way while the little one used all his bullets trying to gun us down.”

“The others had guns?”

“Have,” Jamie said.  “The oldest one has a gun, still.”

I nodded.

Gordon started walking, and the rest of us fell into an easy formation around him.

“Um, have to backtrack a bit, but I wasn’t keeping up with the discussion,” Jamie said.  “You said the quarantine was arranged.  They’re searching the entire student body?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Us included?”

“Ideal world, we won’t be here,” I said.  “Even if we are, we can adapt.  But I wanted to pressure them, and this does that.”

Jamie frowned.

“Sorry,” I said.

“I’m not good at adapting,” Jamie said.  “Less than you three, anyway.”

“Sly is right, though.  The pressure we’re putting on them is a good thing,” Gordon said.  “That said, the ten year old very nearly killed me, this one was hard enough to keep from slipping away, let alone catch.  Helen wouldn’t put up a fight, and you, Jamie or Lil would die in two seconds flat if any of them got within arm’s length of you.”

We were making our way past the kitchen.  The smell of vomit was thicker here, not just because we were close to the place the poison had first taken hold, but because we were between both dormitories.

“I hate it when people call me Lil,” Lillian said.

I made a mental note of that, storing it for future use.

Gordon did the opposite and apologized, “Sorry, Lillian.  What are we thinking we do with the oldest clone, Mary, and the puppeteer?”

“Separate them, pick them off one by one,” Helen said.

“Mary is devoted to her creator,” I said.  “And the last one-”

“The teenager,” Jamie said.  “Oldest of the clones.  Physically the strongest, presumably the most trained.”

“You don’t have eyes on that one?” I asked.

“No,” Gordon said.  “We’ve glimpsed him, but he was leading this trio.  Keeping his distance.”

I chewed on my bottom lip for a second.  “Doesn’t work.  I don’t see it.  They’re going to band together.”

“I agree,” Gordon said.  “I’m betting he knows his fellows are down, or he will when we turn up.  He’ll stick with Mary, and both of them will stick with their puppeteer.”

“Brothers,” I murmured.

“Hm?”

“They’re Mary’s ‘brothers’, to Mary and the Puppeteer.  Mary is their sister.  It’s a little family unit.”

“I notice you called Helen a sister,” Jamie said.  “Interesting.”

“One isn’t related to the other,” I said.

“I seem to recall you going on at length about the intricacies of the human mind,” Gordon said.  “Everything impacts it on some level or something like that.”

“Okay,” I said, “Whatever.  Let’s joke around about Sy really wanting a family, deep down inside.  Mary’s situation has made me realize it’s what I really want.  It’s a yearning even.”

Hands settled on my shoulder.  Prey instinct, wham.  It took me a moment to realize it was because I saw Gordon, Jamie, Lil, and the smallest clone, but I didn’t see Helen.

Her arms wrapped around my shoulders from behind, and she hugged me tight, before leaning forward to give me a peck on the cheek.  Too perfunctory to be anything serious.

I didn’t move a muscle.

“I’ll be your big sister if that’s what you really want,” she said.

“Sarcasm,” I said, still not moving.  “I’m not sure what we are, but I don’t think ‘family’ is exactly it, and I’m really truly okay with that.”

She pulled away, giving me a rap on the head as she stepped over to Gordon’s side.  I caught a glimpse of a wry smile on her face as she gave me a sidelong glance.  For my benefit.  Her way of letting me know she’d been joking too.

Geez.

“We’re the Lambsbridge orphans,” Gordon said, as Helen leaned against the wall beside him, raising her hand to fix the placement of a strand of hair.  “That’s all we need to be.”

I nodded.  “Yeah.”

“But,” Jamie cut in, “part of being the Lambsbridge Orphans is doing our job.”

“Which brings us back to the ‘how’,” Gordon said.  “You guys think you can hold your own and keep one of them busy while I confront the other?  I’m not sure I can take the older one.”

I shrugged.  “Don’t have to ‘win’.  Assuming the headmistress reached out to the Academy, which I do assume, it’s all a matter of time.”

“What if you’re wrong?” Gordon asked.

“I’m never wrong,” I said.

The sudden burst of protest that came from every corner and every mouth overlapped to the point that I couldn’t pick out individual words.

“Point-” I started.  I was talked over.

I rolled my eyes.  I was pretty sure at least half of them were doing it to try to be funny.

“Point taken,” I managed.

They stopped.

“Get it all out of your system?” I asked.

“It’s late, our sleep was interrupted, we’ve been on edge all week,” Gordon said.  “Thanks for that.  The laugh helped.”

I stuck my tongue out at him.

I studied them.  Most were in uniforms, though Jamie was wearing pyjamas with shoes, an odd combination.  He’d left our room too quickly to get dressed first.  I’d never changed into my pyjamas, myself.

Gordon was hurt, and it showed a little in how he held himself and his expression, and Helen was a little rumpled, though unharmed.  Lil, oddly enough, seemed more together and comfortable than I’d seen her in a long time.  Maybe ever.

She saw me looking and hugged her bag of medical stuff to her chest, glaring at me over the top of it.

“You’re home,” I said.

She didn’t move, but the glare became a more perplexed expression.

“This.  It’s where you belong.  Or the Academy is, and this is a close second.”

She didn’t reply immediately.  Her eyes moved, taking in the surroundings.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Sorry we’re not sticking around for longer,” Gordon said.

“I’m okay being anywhere I don’t have to worry about getting poisoned or stabbed,” Lil said.

“Just an hour or two more,” Gordon said.  “If Sy’s not wrong about the quarantine.”

“Trapping ourselves in here with skilled murderers,” Jamie said, “What could go wrong?”

“Corner the rats and hope they don’t bite too hard,” I said.

“Speaking of,” Gordon said.  His voice had dropped, which helped complete the thought.

We were further from the more lit dorms, now.  In less secure territory.  If we made it around to the front office, I would be very close to having completed a full circuit around the building.

The conversation was, I supposed, our way of touching base, leveling each other out, propping each other up.  Helen was being selective in what she said, letting me know she was glad to have me back in her peculiar way, but she didn’t need reassurance in the same way.

The attitudes of the individual members of the group changed as the surroundings did.

“We got the last two by moving around as a group,” Gordon murmured.  His voice was lowered so he wouldn’t give us away.  “They were trying to keep us away from any place we could arm ourselves or hole ourselves up.  Cornered the first one in the kitchen.  Second one was faking sick.  Jamie figured him.”

I nodded.

“They’re going to be ready for us to come as a group,” Gordon said.

I nodded again.

“We may not be able to keep them from running if they want to run, even if they don’t have a trap.”

I exaggerated my nods until I lost my balance, and bumped into him.  He elbowed me.

“This is serious.”

“Don’t get shot,” I said, echoing Jamie.  “Give me a chance to talk to them.  Mary is off-balance enough I think I can get to her on a level.  She’s pissed because I threw a brick at the man who brought her into this world.”

“That’s harder if they’re all together,” Gordon said.

“I don’t know how up to talking the puppeteer is,” I said.  “Again, brick to face.”

“You keep saying that like you’re proud,” Jamie said.

“It was a beautiful throw.”

“So you are proud,” Jamie said, voice quiet.

“Yeah,” I breathed the word.  “Gordon couldn’t have done better.”

“You’re the filthiest liar,” Gordon murmured, smirking.

“Can we stop talking?” Lil asked.

We obeyed.

The hallway turned, and we came face to face with a scattered group of youths.

Gordon drew a knife, but Helen’s hand reached out, stopping him from going any further.

They were ordinary kids.  Miserable kids in pyjamas who looked like they’d died and been brought back as stitched.  These would be the especially sick ones who needed help, ones who, if the metallic smell to the bodily fluids was any indication, had been so violently ill that blood was involved.

We were near the infirmary.

“Next door on the right,” Jamie murmured.

Gordon gave him a tight nod.

Gordon and Helen edged closer to the door, while I ducked low, to peek past their knees.

Mary, unarmed, standing in the middle of the brightly lit room, ribbons removed, hair in relative disarray.

Gordon was fastest to grasp that something was wrong.  He shoved Helen backward, and Jamie caught her.  I reacted too, backing away, not entirely sure why until Gordon turned the other way.

The room opposite.

A pistol went off, the bullet striking the doorframe where Gordon’s head had been.  It was almost too loud in the hallway where there was nothing to absorb the sound, the sound bouncing off the walls, an echo that played off the ringing in my ears.

The sick children around us screamed, panicking.  They leaped up from chairs and the floor of the hallway.

The screams continued as the children got in our way and obstructed our movements.  One tried to hide between me, clutching the back of my shirt, and made it hard for me to rise to a proper standing position.

It was a moment of stupidity that left me mostly in the front of everything as our third boy stepped out of the room he’d been hiding in, pistol in hand.  He wore a uniform, but he had a cloak and hood on over it, possibly to conceal himself better in the dark.

For all my talk about effective use and prediction of bugs’ movements when the box was shaken…

“Oy!” Gordon shouted.  “Got your kid brother here!”

I saw the hesitation.  The pistol’s barrel slid away from me as his focus turned to Gordon and the youngest clone.

I started to move, ready to kick up and try to knock it away or out of his hand, but the kid behind me still clung to me, and I immediately knew I wouldn’t make contact.

For an instant, I thought we hadn’t accounted for all the clones, but then he made a small sound of fear.  Human frailty, not maliciousness.

Gordon was heading for cover, still carrying his burden, turning his body and running almost sideways so the littlest clone was more between him and the gun-wielder.  The gun moved, wholly focused on Gordon.

One shot rang out, and the clone moved to reload.

Did Mary warn him that I’d said Gordon was most dangerous?

I made my escape, grabbing the kid who’d clutched me and dragging him behind, even though it slowed me down.

The third shot was aimed at me.  It hit the same boy I was trying to rescue, leaving me to stumble as my grip broke.

Helen grabbed me and pulled me around the corner.  We were right at the bend in the hallway where the hallway at the southern part of the school met the long hallway from the eastern part.

The commotion broke up.  The children who’d been sitting there waiting for their turns in the infirmary had mostly fled.  Two were apparently too sick to move while bullets were flying, and the third lay there with a bullet hole in him.  The one who’d clutched me.  Younger than I’d expected, going only by the strength of his grip.

I exhaled slowly.  Gordon was across the hall, in a classroom, ass on the ground, back to the wall, the littlest clone propped up beside him, still unconscious.  The others were behind me.

Unconscious and whatever else.  Being knocked out didn’t mean waking up okay after a set amount of time.  It could mean serious brain injuries.

“I have to ask, for context,” I started.

The pistol fired yet again.  I saw the puff where it had hit the corner.

It was a ball pistol.  One shot, firing balls of lead or whatever else.  It wasn’t efficient, in terms of the number of bullets it spat out, range, velocity, or whatever else.  Where a bullet from a high-end gun passed through your enemy, these guns were meant to fire a small metal sphere into the other guy’s body, where it could bounce around and tear up their insides.  A good killer would make the bullet count, and the damage done by these particular weapons meant that Academy trained doctors would have a far harder time patching them up.

“Context,” I started again.  “Does the Puppeteer read you bedtime stories at night?”

I heard Mary speak, and she sounded very tired.  “Don’t answer.  He’s trying to get to us, or trying to buy time.”

“Oh, Mary!  How are you doing?” I called out.  “They really like using you as bait, don’t they?”

“I volunteered,” Mary said.  “My plan.”

“Funny how that works,” I said.  “You’d think the puppeteer would work harder to convince you that you should stay alive, if you’re that special to him.”

“Puppeteer?” the older clone asked.

“Don’t listen to him,” Mary said.

“You responded,” he pointed out.

“Mm,” Mary said.

I could imagine her expression.  Not very happy.

“I’m curious, Mary, why did you change your mind?  You sounded so insistent about not wanting the puppeteer to put himself in danger by coming here.  Then he said his magic words and, well, can you clarify?  It doesn’t make sense.”

“Magic words,” she said, her voice soft.

“You’re special, Mary, he was going to make something of you, right?  Big sister to all the new clones of the next generation.  Why would he do that, trying to control you?  Maybe if he came out, I could hear his explanation.”

“He’s-” the older clone started.  He stopped short.

I frowned, staring down at the ground, trying to picture why.

“We’re not going to put him in harm’s way,” Mary said.  “You’ll have to get through us to get to him.”

“Basically what I was going to say,” the older clone said.

“He puts you in harm’s way,” I said.  “What part of this is fair?”

“It’s none of your business,” Mary said.

“It’s exactly our business!  It’s what we do.  We do it to make money.  The definition of business.”

I couldn’t see either of them.  I was talking to thin air, which was worse than it had been trying to talk to Mary in the furnace room.

“You’re the cleanup crew for a corrupt and distorted organization.  Child soldiers and killers.”

“I think any argument you could make against our group would apply double for your puppeteer,” I said.

“Think so?  You don’t know us,” Mary said.

Something was off.

For someone recommending avoiding talking to me, she was doing an awful lot of it.

I raised a finger, pointing at the corner of the wall.  Very slowly, I moved my fingertip.  I glanced back at Jamie and Helen, then over to Gordon.

I got nods in response.  They got it.  Gordon leaned back, out of sight.

Mary was distracting us while the other clone approached down the length of the hall.

We didn’t have guns.  Much less guns intended to rip someone up inside.

“I know you, Mary,” I said.  “I get you.  We’re the same.”

She faked a laugh.

I held the blackjack and letter opener, poised to throw the first and stab with the second.  The other clone had to be close.  He could well have his back to the same corner I was crouched beside.  Close enough to smell, if the smell of blood and puke hadn’t made the use of my nose impossible.

“Laughing, you don’t see it?  Tell me, did you have breakfast with him, Mary?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Often enough?  In the way you really wanted?”

A pause.

Glass shattered.

That was my cue.  I threw myself forward, out into the hallway.

Gordon was still mid-air, having leaped through one of the tree-branch and broken-glass windows that separated classrooms from the hall.  Glass and bits of wood danced around him, his knees pulled up to his chest to clear the wall beneath the window.

Not anything I’d expected, but it was something.

My shoulder hit the ground.  I’d planned to stab if he was close enough.  He wasn’t, so I threw the blackjack.  A little weight in a long, semi-rigid bag for smacking someone over the head.  It served as something to distract, to buy Gordon a fifth of a second as our teenaged assailant reacted.

Gordon collided with him.  In the midst of the collision I saw the two pistols the eldest clone was armed with, saw Gordon reach for just the one, twisting it around in the clone’s hand so the barrel pointed at the boy, the trigger finger slipping away from the trigger.

Our Gordon.  A hero on paper, skilled, strong, fit.  But if anyone took him for noble, they’d be wrong.  A noble person didn’t take advantage of inches of height difference to slam their forehead into someone’s mouth.

The older clone shoved Gordon away.  He raised his pistol in the same instant Gordon did.  One aimed at the other.

Slowly, I found my feet, rising beside Gordon.

The glass had cut him on the way through.  That didn’t happen in the books.

“You had two guns,” Gordon said.

“Was going to shoot both ways,” the clone replied.

“We’re not here for you,” Gordon said.  “We’re here for the puppeteer.”

“That’s not his name,” Mary said.

“It’s a good enough name,” I joined in.  “You can’t deny he has control over you.  He pulls your strings, he decides what you do.  Uses you as bait.”

“And they don’t use you?” Mary asked.  “You’re not tied to them, these other orphans?  Would you give them up to save your skin?  Oh, wait, you don’t care about your skin.  Expiration dates, huh?”

I saw Gordon’s gun waver a fraction.

“Yeah, you forgot to tell them, huh?”

“Was going to at the conclusion of this,” I said.

“You described yourself as a villain.  You’re a liar, a cheat, a thief, a grubby killer.”

“Yet,” Gordon chimed in, “I believe him.”

Mary didn’t have a quick response for that.

“When I was asking about breakfast, about the little things that count,” I said.  “I was really asking if you felt loved, if you truly loved your… father, or whatever you see him as, or if it’s just something ingrained in you.”

“I think that’s my cue?” a voice said.  Not a confident one.

A female voice.

The headmistress emerged behind Mary.

Her hands clutched a piece of paper.

My thoughts moved so fast that they were a jumble.

“La, re, tu, la, sun-”

I found my conclusion.

Left alone with the headmistress, the quarantine, our puppeteer had figured out what I’d done.

“They are not on your side!”  I called out.  “They are not with the Academy, Headmistress!”

He’d turned it around.

“-ro, ta.”

The eldest clone reacted, pulling the trigger.  Gordon’s reaction was a fraction of a second later, off-balance as he reeled from getting hit.  The clone was hit in the shoulder.

The look in his eyes went beyond cold, and had become something else entirely.  Dead, empty, hollowed out.

That was how he had them kill the parents.  A kill phrase, a letter they were to read at a set time or something sent to the home.

Gordon fell, and the clone barely staggered, heedless of pain and injury.

Helen wasn’t a fighter, and the rest of us didn’t stand a chance.

The puppeteer was a manipulative bastard, one that could well be on his way out, and he might well have beat us with one fell stroke.

Taking Root 1.11

Letter opener, get close, stab, doing any damage at all can make the difference, get low, make better use of shorter stature-

The eldest boy stepped closer.  I ducked, drawing my arm back to stab, and he kicked me.  He caught and twisted my wrist while I was trying to catch my balance and before I grasped what he was doing, he’d grabbed the letter opener.

He pushed, and with the way my arm was twisted around, my head pointing forward rather than up, I was put in the position of having to let him destroy the arm or letting myself fall.

I toppled, landing next to Gordon.  He was hunched over, his hand to his chest.  I didn’t like the amount of blood I saw.

Mary was standing back, between me and the Headmistress, who was kneeling on the ground, trying to help the little boy who had been shot, her eyes wide, paper in one hand.  Mary’s expression was unreadable, but her body was tense enough I could visualize every muscle being tight, ready to spring.  The headmistress was the opposite, as if she would have fallen to pieces with a touch.

The others were still around the corner, half-crouching, caught between running and trying to do something.

Helen was the one who stepped up.

We’re better as a group.  Just need to put him off balance, give Helen the best opportunity possible.

I found my feet, half-walking, half-stumbling over to Gordon, where I grabbed one of the knives he’d stowed in his belt.  I paused, behind the clone, watching, waiting for the best chance.

He reached forward, to his belt.

Helen took a step, and I lunged in the same instant.

“Behind you!” Mary called out.

My instincts told me that Helen saw me, that she was capitalizing on the eldest clone’s distraction and my position.  Together, the pair of us might be able to accomplish something, whether he was drawing  a knife or loading his pistol.

But Helen stepped back, instead.

I found myself on a collision course with someone almost twice my size, who was better armed than I was, far better trained.  He followed Mary’s warning by turning and spotting me.

Situations like this were where I felt like the Academy had screwed me over.  The thoughts were in place, I knew what I had to do, and I could see everything play out.  Knife in hand, my enemy’s soft gut in plain view, almost in reach, nothing to stop the knife from punching deep.  Let the pain and the damage done slow him down.

But thoughts ran away, I started naturally thinking about cause and effect, follow-up, what to do to maximize the damage done and turn the situation around.  What if he made that one in a million movement to knock my knife aside with the letter opener or the barrel of the one-shot pistol?

While talking it wasn’t a problem, I could say one thing while thinking about the next step.  A fight moved too fast.  It slowed me down, made it feel like my hands and body were a step behind my thoughts.  Enough to make the difference in a fight against someone ordinary.

This guy wasn’t ordinary.  He swept his arm out, holding the pistol high –more thoughts about complications, predicting what he was doing, countering it– and letting his cloak fan out.  The fabric of the raincloak caught the knife.  His arm moved and helped the cloak naturally fold around the knife and my knife hand.  He bent his arm and used his elbow to force both hand and weapon to one side.

Before I could try to pull away, he was twisting, bringing his knee into my hand, driving it into the wall.

I grimaced in pain and followed through on backing up, aware that I’d lost my knife in the tangle of his cloak.

The letter opener clinked to the ground as he straightened his arm, fixing the flow of his cloak so his own limb wasn’t trapped in the folds.

Before I could catch my balance and pull my thoughts together, he was leaning forward, chasing me faster than I was retreating.  My knife was in one of his hands, freed from the cloak, filling the hand the letter opener had just been dropped from.  The pistol was in his other hand.

Good job, Sy.  Pick a fight, achieve nothing except arming the other guy with successively larger weapons.  Shall we go find a sword to give him?

He kicked me, hard, and sent me stumbling backward.  Keeping me off balance.

I was in the middle of thinking about how to regain it and turn things around when I stumbled over Gordon.  I hit the ground, the back of my head cracking hard against the floor.

One of the best minds the Academy can produce, still no better in a fight than a typical underweight, underdeveloped eleven year old.

I felt a little better knowing that Gordon was now between me and the clone, even if he was crawling on the floor, one hand held tight against a bullet wound, my feet on his back while I lay on the floor.

Then I felt guilty for feeling better.

I shot a quick glance at Mary and the headmistress, and saw that Mary was on the approach.

“Mary,” I said, backing away.

“Don’t even try,” she said.

“Do you want this?  Do you want to be-”

I was cut off by the slam of a door.  The eldest clone had kicked a door that Jamie was trying to use as a shield.  The door closed, and Jamie, Lil and Helen backed up.

“Do you want to be that?”

Her expression was still blank, unreadable.

I knew she had emotions.  I’d seen them, or I’d seen hints of them.  The problem was that she only let herself be vulnerable with her creator.  The same man that had turned his back on her.

She lifted up her skirt at one side and slipped a knife free from a garter.

Gordon moved, straightening, and my feet slid off his back to drop onto the back of his legs.  I pulled them out of the way as he got one foot under him and started to rise up to a standing position.

Mary, for her part, backed off.  Her hand moved at the side of her skirt, and she held another knife.  Smaller, less fancy, and probably weighted for throwing.

“Gordon,” I warned.

He didn’t seem to notice, and he didn’t seem to notice Mary either.  He headed for the older clone.

Mary threw, and in that moment, Gordon stopped in his tracks.  The knife carried onward, striking the wall.  Gordon barely spared Mary a glance before grabbing the knife from the wall and throwing it at the other clone’s back.

The teenaged clone stumbled.  Helen started to move toward him, but he held up his knives, warning her off.

Gordon, for his part, made it another two steps before something refused to support him.  His upper body went askew, seemingly twisted more by pain than anything else, and he stumbled into the wall.  I saw him look at the others, then Mary, then me, a measured study, taking it all in.  His eyes lingered on mine.

One of the first lessons students learn in the Academy, is that life wants to survive.  We’ve been at the survival game for a terribly, terribly long time.  Against hostile environments, against predators.  So long as a student doesn’t work against that impulse, either on the fundamental level or while dealing with the individual, they can trust that life will find a way.

Meeting Gordon’s gaze, I was shocked to see just how hard walking that way was.  His eyes had dark shadows under them as if he hadn’t slept in a week, and his skin was pale, his pupils narrowed.  Each breath he took was laborious, the sort of ragged hauls for breath I’d expect someone to take after being underwater for minutes, but they each came right on the back of the last, with a phlegmatic cast to it, prompting his entire body to jerk a little, as if something kept getting stuck and coming unstuck as he strained himself.

Best of the best, I thought.  I want to take your place, so you don’t have to do this.

Gordon didn’t seem to be up to talking.  He looked at Mary, who was reaching for another throwing weapon, and spread his arms to either side, stepping away from the wall.

“I wouldn’t,” I told Mary, which was the truth.  Then I lied, “When he’s like this he’ll just catch them out of the air.”

Though her expression was blank, I saw the pause in her follow-through.  A moment of doubt.

Gordon pushed himself away from the wall, taking advantage of the bend in the hallway to escape Mary’s throwing range and advance on the clone he’d thrown a knife at.

I saw Mary grab the knife and hurried to duck into the classroom where the youngest clone had been propped up against a wall.

She didn’t throw the knife.

Gordon drew closer to the clone he’d knifed.  Both were injured, Gordon suffering from a gunshot that had very possibly danced around the inside of his torso, the clone shot in one shoulder and knifed in the back.

The clone, however, seemed largely immune to pain, the killing phrase driving him past such mundane things, putting him in the mind for efficient aggression and murder and nothing else.  He was using his wounded shoulder to a reasonable extent, a stark contrast to Gordon, who wasn’t using one arm while he held a hand against his injury, though both arms were in good working order.

Our clone had about three inches and twenty-five pounds on Gordon, who was already of a good size.

To top it off, it seemed he had a pistol and the wherewithal to use it.  While Gordon limped his way, he drew a pellet out of his pocket and slipped it into the gun’s chamber, pulling at the lever along the barrel.

Helen appeared behind the clone, doing exactly what I’d intended when I’d come up behind him, earlier.  She caught the clone’s arm as Gordon drew closer, hauling it back and forcing the pistol off course.  I ducked lower in the wake of it going off, though I knew that by the time I heard the thing it was already too late.

I saw a flurry of movement as Helen scrabbled for a grip on him, only to get elbowed once, kicked, and slashed at by the knife.

Gordon collided with him, keeping him from doing anything further.

They’re still nascent, I thought. Gordon was still undeveloped.  Still young, largely untrained.  Our exercises and adventures in the ass-end of Radham weren’t sanctioned, but weren’t discouraged either.  Gordon had been hungry to put his brain to work, and he’d done it to good effect.

I’d been less hungry, more desperate, but my own studies at the back-alley brawl had been far less effective.  I’d stuck it out for far too long before the others had stopped letting me come.

Gordon had put himself chest-to-chest with the clone.  It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t fancy.  It was exactly what he needed to do to reduce the effectiveness of the skills the clones had learned in the ring.

This was how he operated, and this was how he thought.

The Academy hadn’t gone out of their way to make him especially tough, but they’d given him a good head and a good body and that counted for something.  They had, however, equipped him so he would pick up the skills he needed and master them faster than most.  Part of having a good head and a good body was that he had the coordination between both, no matter the situation, moving and thinking quickly with neither suffering for the other.

Knives were terrible weapons, and our two brawlers each had one.  They were messy things, messier when the one wielding them was good, and both fighters here were good. Tentative slashes were fended off, hands of one boy gripping the wrists of the other, to try and limit the movement of the knives, but even the chance cuts were gruesome, parting skin. Blood dripped from Gordon’s chest wound to the floor now that he was no longer holding his hand there.

I yelped a little as I saw Gordon take a knife in the side.  I saw him bring one arm down, away from the clone’s wrist, pinning the knife in place.  With the slickness of the blood and Gordon’s sheer tenacity, the clone couldn’t pull it free.

Gordon, for his part, still practically hugging his enemy, was able to stab several times, despite the clone’s efforts to keep his arm still.

This is the puppeteer’s mistake.  Take away something’s will to continue on, no matter how strong it is, no matter what else you do, you create a losing battle.

The clone didn’t try to stop Gordon, instead striking out with hands, striking at head, ears, even at Gordon’s bullet wound.

But Gordon kept stabbing, and soon reached the point where the clone wasn’t resisting as the knife went in and out of his midsection.  The clone soon dropped, and Gordon went with him, having been leaning so heavily on him for support.

Jamie and Lil went immediately to his side, looking after Gordon while dealing with the dying clone.  Helen, badly cut, didn’t move from where she’d fallen, but a glance suggested Lil had given her some preliminary care.  All three of them were around the corner from Mary and the headmistress.  Joining them meant crossing the breadth of the hallway.  I decided that wasn’t too wise.

“Mary,” I said.

I didn’t get a response.

I glanced out of the hallway, then pulled my head back as I saw a flurry of movement, out of the corner of my eye.  A knife hit the doorframe.

I tried to grab it, found I didn’t have the strength to pull it away where it had embedded into the wood, removed my hand, and saw another hit the spot where my hand had just been.

“It’s over, Mary,” I said.  “What are you even doing?”

“I’m doing what the Academy needs me to do,” she said.  “Protecting the children of this school.  I just… I have to buy time and make sure you don’t get away, before the quarantine.”

“What are you even talking about?” Jamie asked.

I raised a hand, urging Jamie to hold back.

“Mary,” I said.  “Forget the headmistress.  As pawns go, she’s mostly used up.”

“Pawn?” I heard the woman utter the word.  Outrage had pushed her to speak where she’d been caught up in silent horror, watching children shoot, stab, and use weapons on each other, spattering her school hallway with blood.

I ignored her.  “Where do you go next, Mary?  The puppeteer is gone.  He left the headmistress with a paper that was supposed to turn you into weapons, presumably one by one.  Something about that tells me he didn’t plot a way for you to meet again.”

“I’ll do what I’m supposed to do, and then I’ll find him,” she said.

“Oh, you want to prove your worth, after being discarded?” I asked.  “Prove that you worked as an experiment?  He’ll be so overjoyed at how good you are that he takes you back in with open arms?”

“Something like that.”

“Oh come on, Mary,” I said.  “Come on.  I bet I’m describing almost exactly what you’re hoping for.  You don’t care about the boys, this kid who’s unconscious next to me, or the big guy that just got carved up by Gordon.  You just figured you’d stand there and let them throw themselves at us, do as much damage as possible, and then you’d clean up.  Go back to the puppeteer as the one who succeeded.”

There wasn’t a response.

“Thing about you being created for one thing and one thing only, you’re pretty easy to figure out.  You have a reality and the puppeteer is at the center of it.  You’re trying very hard to avoid thinking about what it means, that he went out of his way to plug a special sequence of sounds into your head, and set it up so that you’d kill.  The lies, the basic underlying thought process that he had from the beginning.  What he’s doing right this moment, leaving you… and what lies in the future.  Even in your perfect hypothetical world, what happens?”

Still no response.

“Let’s say you kill each of us.  Gordon’s dead, Helen can’t fight so effectively, Jamie’s almost as bad in a scrap as I am.  Then you go to him, and he welcomes you with open arms.  But you know he’ll have his doubts.  He knows you know that he abandoned you.  What you are.  Can you picture the tense conversation, the rules he sets in place so you don’t go running the mouth and filling in the next generation of clones?  How grim is that life, the two of you never speaking about what happened tonight, and how things changed?”

She was still silent.

I frowned.  Did I lose her?  Had she slipped away?

“The reality of existence, of life, in every sense of the word, Academy or literal or figurative, is that things change.  Nothing is static.  Your relationship to the puppeteer has changed, and-”

I chanced another look out into the hallway.

I thought I saw a movement, and flinched, ducking back.

When no knife appeared, I looked again.

There was only the headmistress, clutching her hands in front of her.  I saw her eyes move.

To the broken window.  After Gordon had come into the classroom with the littlest clone, he’d made a dramatic exit-

And Mary had made a silent entrance.

I scrambled to move out of the way.  The knife that hit the door wasn’t a throwing weapon.  Larger, burlier around the handle.  She’d still managed to throw it hard enough and accurately enough that the blade stuck in the wood.

She came through the aisle of the dark classroom, ducking low, a weapon in each hand.

I didn’t need to see anything more.  I escaped into the hallway.

Jamie’s eyes widened as he looked over my shoulder.

Before his mouth was even open, I was reacting to the warning he was about to communicate.  No overthinking possible in this, at least.  ‘Get out of the way’ was a ‘get out of the way’, and it didn’t need to be fancy.

I turned, and in the process I fell awkwardly against the corner where the two hallways met.

Mary stopped in the doorway, looking at all of us.  She had one knife in hand.  The other hand was empty, clenched.

Her facade was slipping.  There was emotion in her eyes.  Anger, hatred.

Many of us were beaten, battered, and bruised.  Jamie and Lil had avoided more than a few simple scuffs, but Gordon, Helen and I had taken our individual beatings, roughly in that order.

I wasn’t so sure we could put up a fight.  Especially if she played it clever.

“Don’t say it,” Mary said.

Don’t say what?  I thought.  My memory wasn’t that good, for me to know what she was referencing.

But whatever it was, it was something I’d said that had stuck with her, something she was afraid I’d say.

I offered her a sympathetic expression, while my brain raced to try and piece it together.

The sympathy hurt her.  It made her fist clench tighter.  I’m pegging her wrong, I realized.  The anger, hatred, and fear all stemmed from something else, flowing from a source that ran deeper and left more painful wounds.

Need.

“I won’t say it, then,” I told her.  “But put the weapon down.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“There’s nothing left for you here.  If you hold on to it, whatever futures flow from there, they-”

I saw her flinch.

“…I said I wouldn’t say it,” I told her.

“And you’re a villain,” she said.  “A liar.  Just say it.  Out with it.  Say it, or I will.”

“Alone,” I said.  “If you move forward, you’ll be alone.”

Her head snapped to one side.  I saw the pain in her expression.  The facade was broken, the vulnerability exploited and trampled.

“Headmistress,” she said.

Oh no.

“Headmistress!” I called out.  “No, nope, don’t listen to her!”

“Read it,” Mary said, pointing.

“Don’t!” I called out.

I saw the indecision on the headmistress’ face.

In the midst of a situation she didn’t comprehend in the slightest, she held the means to turn Mary into the weapon, a mad, reckless one, but one we might not be able to properly fight.  For Mary, though, it was an escape.

Something to take the dissonance and simplify it.  Reduce everything to one basic, self-destructive impulse.

“If you don’t,” Mary said, “They’ll kill us both and escape before the Academy gets here to draw up the quarantine.”

That seemed to be the needed push.

“Mary,” the headmistress said.

I couldn’t step forward without Mary lashing out.  Couldn’t run and leave the others.  A few sounds, and we were utter goners.

I needed to convince the headmistress.

But I couldn’t think of the words to do it.  If I could figure out what the puppeteer had said, the line of logic… professing to be from the Academy, maybe, a long-time plant, protecting the students.

Start with what I knew she knew.

“The office was locked,” I said.  “Doors and windows.  The letter was signed in blood.  Look, blood!”

I showed her my hands where the thorns had injured them.

She didn’t even flinch, glancing up, then back to the paper.

“Yu du-”

Notecard, cards, pen-

Letter opener.

“Letter opener!” I called out.  “Your letter opener.  I have it from when I left the note!”

“Nah-” She stopped partway.  I saw a blink.  The moment where she wondered.

I pointed, but Jamie had already noticed the letter opener.  Before I’d even recalled exactly where it fell, he was sliding it over the tiles.

I stopped it with my foot, then kicked it toward the headmistress.

It stopped a few feet away from her.

“It’s yours.  I know it’s yours.  But I have it.  Think.  Why would the Academy shoot and hurt your other students?”

My eyes fell on the one student who had been shot.  The one I’d helped into the line of fire, letting him take a bullet for me.  The headmistress looked down at him.  Her own hands were bloody from trying to staunch the flow of blood, though his stillness suggested it was too late, the damage done.

She let the bloodstained paper fall to the floor.

It was as if the words had been read, all the same.  Mary charged, mindless or unwilling to think, knife in hand.

I ran, but Mary was taller, and she wasn’t running backward.

She closed the distance, knife ready.

I knew escape was impossible, futile.

But I reached the others, where Helen had joined Jamie and Lil.

I grabbed Helen and, before she could react, thrust her in Mary’s general direction.  It wasn’t a very good thrust, but it served.

Better her than me.

Helen winced as the knife pierced her side or back.  Mary raised the knife up to Helen’s throat for what would have been a quick and terminal cut, and Helen caught the hand, stopping the blade before it could make contact.

Mary settled for taking her hostage.  She was breathing harder than the momentary exhaustion justified.  I imagined her thoughts were chaos and noise and pain.

“Alone,” she said.  “That’s what you said?”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice soft.

“Acting like this, throwing allies away when it suits you, I think you’re going to end up more alone than I am.”

I nodded slowly.  “Maybe.”

“You’re despicable.”

“Never denied that.”

“No right to say anything to me.”

I watched Helen tighten her grip on Mary’s wrist.

“I already said most of it,” I said.  “We’re works in progress.  Helen, Gordon here, Jamie, even me, in a lesser way.”

I saw Mary’s expression change.  She raised a hand to try and pry Helen’s hand loose, but Helen grabbed her other wrist.  The knife strained to move, but Helen didn’t let it.

Helen wasn’t a fighter, but that wasn’t to say she wasn’t strong.

“Helen isn’t really an actress.  Well, she is, but that’s not the end result.  I planted that seed, reinforced an idea you had already.”

Helen rolled her shoulders, and I could see movements beneath her school uniform, as bones shifted and found new configurations.  Her limbs moved in ways they shouldn’t have, joints bending the wrong way.

I looked to one side as Helen raised one leg up, over her own shoulder, and wrapped the foot around the back of Mary’s neck.  Had I been looking, I would have seen up Helen’s skirt, and that would have been rude of me.

Mary made a sound as her struggles failed to make progress.

I walked past them, still averting my gaze, and approached the headmistress.

“Go,” I said.  “Take the boy and go.”

I saw the confusion and fear, and the momentary relief at having an escape.  She fled, carrying the boy in her arms.

“Back in the furnace room, I mentioned Doctor Ibott.  You cut me off before I could say more about him.  See, he’s the one who handled Helen.”

I saw confusion join alarm on Mary’s face.

“But-” Mary started.  She didn’t get further. Helen raised her other leg, and the shift in weight made Mary tip forward.  Helen snapped her leg around, taking advantage of the fall to slip herself around behind Mary.  Arms moved and twisted, and at the end of it, Helen was on top of Mary, who was face-first on the ground.  Mary’s arms were caught beneath and in front of her, Helen’s hand around hers, forcing her to hold the knife at her own throat.

Every muscle and bone seemed to be straining in the wrong ways against Helen’s skin.  It conjured up ideas of an insect, or a starved jungle cat, perched atop its prey.

“But Ibott only does big things.  Monsters that can win wars.  Juggernauts and ship sinkers.  Well, the guy who heads our project poked at Ibott’s pride, and got Ibott to do something smaller and cleverer.  Helen’s the only one of us who isn’t human, you know.  Vat grown, like you, but built from scratch.  She’s only an actress because she had to learn from the beginning.”

Mary made a strangled sound.  Helen was choking her, staring down at her with a blank expression.

I bent down, and I picked up the bloodstained paper the headmistress had dropped.

I read it.

“We’re works in progress.  Helen’s still growing into her role.  The femme fatale.  A little odd when she’s still a child, but she’ll be something when she’s older.”

I glanced over at Mary, who was struggling and failing to escape Helen’s embrace, then folded up the paper and stuck it in my waistband.  I reached for Mary’s file folder, and withdrew a paper.  I’d thought I’d use it to compare notes if I could find Percy’s place and break in, but this would do.

I reached down and touched the bloodstain where the shot child had fallen.  I gripped the paper, crumpling it in my hands.

“Let her go, Helen.”

Helen did.  When she let go of Mary’s hand, Mary let go of the knife.  Helen collected it.

Mary didn’t move as I approached.  The fight was gone out of her.

I held the bloodstained paper.

Then I tore it, slowly, for dramatic effect, into very small pieces.

I let the pieces fall in front of Mary.

“It’s your call,” I said.  “Fight to the death like he wanted, or stick it to him.  Join us.”

It took a long time before she found the courage to nod.

☙

I sat in the rain, watching the Academy’s students gather around the school.  Individual members of our teams had come, looking after their projects and keeping us from being discovered, and I was enjoying the fact that Lacey was here for me and unable to find me.

My fingers unfolded the paper I’d collected.  The puppeteer’s note.  Instructions to the headmistress, useless.  The kill command for a dead clone, useless.  And his command to Mary, which was an interesting puzzle I’d have to work out in the future.  Something to discuss with Hayle.

Mary.  You do not have a command like Clyde does.

I won’t say I didn’t try, but only managed to induce short fits to reset your mind.

I grew fond of you, I admit.  What I told you was not lies.  If it comes down to it and Clyde fails, run.  Find your way.

I will find you.  We will be together, and we will succeed.

– Percy

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Taking Root 1.12

Down on the street, I could see the others making their way to a coach.  Lacey’s body language changed, as she craned her head, looking in the direction of the Academy.  She asked a question, and Jamie pointed to the Academy.  Lacey hesitated, then headed indoors.

I started my descent the moment she was gone.  Out to the front face of the building, down the branches, touching the street.  For all that the ‘quarantine’ was in effect, students forming a loose circle around the school, one team erecting a tent near the entrance, I wasn’t spotted.

Getting past the perimeter that was in progress was another story.

Walk with confidence, as if you don’t expect to get caught.  Be small, take advantage of your size.

People didn’t want to disturb norms.  If one looked like they fit into the greater scheme of things, then it took a kind of courage to step away from the herd and stand out, challenging that.  Doubly so when schools or the Academy were involved.

It was often easier to avoid the attention of ten people than it was to avoid the attention of one.  Even scratches, bumps, bruises, and being soaked to the bone became invisible if one had the poise.

“Hey, you,” one of the students called out as he intercepted me.

Apparently I don’t have the poise.

I suppressed a sigh.  I pitched my voice just a bit higher, my eyes wide.  “I’m supposed to be in my dorm.  What’s going on?”

“You’re not- you were coming in the other direction.”

“You let me walk by you,” I said, a little breathless, panicky, “then I got scared because there are so many people and then I turned around and I’m supposed to be in my dorm, why, what’s going on?”

“We didn’t let you walk by us,” one said.

“You did!” I said, in the tone that only children could pull off.  One hundred percent certainty.  Adults learned to doubt themselves, but a child could truly believe.

I saw the doubt on their faces.  I latched on it.  “You let me walk by just now.  Why are you lying?”

“We-”

“Why?” I asked, cutting him off.  Keep him off balance.

I saw the glance, the shift in his gaze.  His lips parted, about to speak.

“You-” I started.

But he ignored me, reaching for my hand, hauling it up and away from my pocket.

“You’re bleeding,” he said.

Drat.

Just my luck, I couldn’t get an Academy student who was in it for the power or prestige.  He had to care about the profession.

Bully for him, it probably made him a more effective student in the long run, but it didn’t help me right now.

“He’s with me,” I heard a voice state, behind me.

I cringed a little, glancing back.  Lacey, who had one hand on her hip.

“That doesn’t mean anything to me,” the student said.

“I know him.  He’s mentally unsound and a challenge to deal with.  The blood on his hands is his own fault.  He got away from his caretaker, and I need to get him back now.”

Dirty pool, Lacey, I thought.  I looked up at the student, my eyes wide, my lips now slightly parted, tongue visible between my teeth.  Nothing obvious, but still playing along.

“If he was in the school-”

“He was telling the truth,” Lacey said.  She put a hand on my shoulder.  “You let him walk right by you.  I’ll vouch that he wasn’t anywhere near the sensitive areas, and I’ll stay quiet about your lapse.  If you don’t make us miss our coach.”

The student glanced over at the coach where the others were already getting seated, then stepped out of the way.

Lacey guided me, her grip on my shoulder a little firmer than it needed to be.  Rather, she was digging her fingernails in as if she thought I was going to run away.

We made our way to the coach.  Gordon was apparently in another coach, being looked after by a few of the collected students assigned to our projects, but Helen, Jamie, Mary and Lil were inside the waiting coach.  Lil had an empty syringe in hand, and Helen was occupying the whole bench beside her, head on Lil’s lap, eyes partially closed.

No adults sat inside.

“You came back pretty quick,” Jamie spoke to Lacey.  “Second thoughts?”

“I find that when I’m dealing with Sylvester, directly or peripherally, and I have the little doubt in the back of my mind, I have to take a moment and second guess what I’m doing.  I didn’t expect it from you, Jamie.”

“Sorry,” Jamie said.  “I thought he’d come down if you left.”

“I thought as much.  I asked myself, what is the most inconvenient thing he could do?  Making me search the school for him, only to find the coach was gone when I step outside.”

I shrugged my way free of her claw-grip and climbed up into the coach.

“Goodbye, Sylvester,” Lacey spoke to my back.

I collapsed into the cushioned seat and looked her way, an eyebrow raised.  The goodbye felt meaningful.  Her expression was dead serious, driving that idea home.

“I thought about what you said,” she told me.  “I don’t know what to say except that you’re right.  You win.  I’ve asked to be taken off your project.  Professor Hayle agreed.”

I nodded.  I was very aware that Mary was watching this exchange between Lacey and I.

“I want to make excuses, justify, argue, give any one of a number of responses.  But I’m doing it for my sake, if I remember right, not for yours.  I guess the only thing I have left to say is that it’s your loss in the end, Sylvester.  You need people who know you and your history.  How you’ve developed, how you operate, what you need.”

“Maybe,” I said.  “But I also need the autonomy to decide who I work with.  You say you know me, you get how I operate, in a lot of ways.  You see that as a good thing, but it’s the opposite for me.”

She gave me a long, hard look.

“Goodbye, Sylvester,” she said, for the second time.

“Goodbye, Lacey,” I said.

She shut the door to the coach.

A moment later we were in motion, on our way to the Academy.

No chaperones, which felt odd.  Was that Hayle’s call?  Someone else’s?  It was convenient, but if Mary decided to strangle me with the chain, I wasn’t sure how good of a fight we’d put up in these tight quarters.

She sat just to my right, and she was completely silent.  A little damp, now, rumpled, her ribbons gone, hair loose and in need of a combing.  Her wrists were shackled, the shackles themselves thick and heavy, with proper chains that a bull couldn’t have broken.  A blanket was draped over her lap, but the outline was unmistakeable.

She’d been disarmed, though I doubted everything had been collected.  She was too careful.

Too delicate right now.  I couldn’t poke or test her.  Dangerous.

I turned to look away, and saw Jamie was writing in his notebook.

Not writing.  Sketching.

My face, looking in Mary’s general direction.

The pen went still.  When I looked up from the pen’s tip, Jamie was staring at me.

“What?” I asked, uncomfortable.

“That was nice of you,” he said.

“I’m never nice.”

“You’re a damn liar, and you’re lying about not being nice,” Jamie said.  “You messed with Lacey-”

“Which is very not nice,” I pointed out.

“-And you told her why you did it,” Jamie said.

“I told her it was because she pitied me and pretended to be nice, which wasn’t wrong.”

“You’ve handled worse without flinching,” Jamie said.  “You just gave her the real reason.”

I closed my eyes and let my head move back until it hit the padded back wall of the coach.  The wall vibrated with the movement of the wheels over the road.

When I heard the scratch of the pen on paper, I chanced a look at Jamie’s work.

The sketch was left unfinished, but was being captioned.  ‘Sly, after a rare moment of kindness.’

I rolled my eyes and closed them.

Two mistakes in a relatively short span of time.  Getting caught by the student at the quarantine perimeter, and how I’d dealt with Lacey.  I was tired, my brain too active for too long.  I was starting to stumble.

Except the night wasn’t quite over yet.

“Someone’s gone ahead, we should have an escort when we arrive,” Jamie commented.  “For our passenger.”

I gave Mary another look, and saw her looking outside the window.  Watching the rain-soaked city pass us by, the lights, the streetlamps, and rare figure standing in the dark.

Was one of them the puppeteer?

Her mind was roaming, her thoughts escaping the confines of the coach to focus on what lay beyond, very possibly dwelling on the puppeteer.

“Helen,” I said.

Mary startled at the sound of my voice, or because it was Helen that I named?

“Yes?” Helen asked.

“Do you have a comb?”

She produced a small comb from a shallow pocket in her uniform dress.  Rather than make her move, I rose from my seat and took it from her hand, before letting myself fall hard against my cushioned seat.

I held it up for Mary.  “So you can feel more like yourself.”

“I don’t know who myself is,” she said, but she took the comb and began working it through her hair.  There were more than a few tangles that required sharp, violent tugs to figure out.

Couldn’t push too hard.  Just had to make sure she was grounded, focused on us.

“For now, let’s get through tonight,” I said.  “I don’t think any of us want you chained up.  Except maybe you.”

She snapped her head around, looking offended.

Because I’d crossed a line, or because I was right?

“You just said you don’t know who you are,” I said.  “Are you, right this minute, someone who wants to be chained up?  Saying yes or no doesn’t mean betraying him or threatening your standing with us.  It’s about who you are in this moment.”

She made a face, looking out the window at the city once more.

“Sy?” Lil asked.

“Yes, Lil?” I replied, my response as syrupy as I could make it.

I saw the annoyance on her expression, but it didn’t distract her from what she was going to say: “Don’t be a butt.  Leave her alone.”

The statement was forceful enough to catch me off guard.  Surprise gave way to annoyance.  How about you trust me to know what I’m doing?

But Jamie must have seen something in my expression, because he gave me a light tap with his elbow.

Fine.

Fine.  I wasn’t entirely on the ball, either.  I was positive I wasn’t crossing the line, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t make more minor mistakes.

I gave Lil a smile, then let my head rest against the cushion.

“Do you want me to patch you up?”  Lil offered.  “Your hands look bad.”

A conciliatory gesture?  She couldn’t recant what she’d said, but maybe she hadn’t meant it to come out as forcefully as it had.  Fatigue affected her, too.  Emotions were a drug with their own side effects, ebbs and flows, and after half a night of activity and a week of fearing for her life, she might not have been on point any more than I was.

“They’ll want to look us over anyway,” I said, closing my eyes.  “It’d be redundant.  Relax instead, look after Helen.”

Lil looked down, where Helen was sleeping.  Tranquilized.

We were silent as the coach made its way through the streets, the stitched horses keeping up their hard patter of hoofbeat on roadtop.

We reached the Hedge, and there was more light there, less space between streetlights and streetlamps.  A glance out the window showed the perimeter wall, lit up by the ambient light.  It seemed to say ‘The Academy: A glowing beacon at the edge of Radham.’

Through a gate, and into the Academy proper.  We passed the Rows, Claret Hall, and the Rise, heading straight for the Tower.

Mary was tense.  Her shoulders were stiff, and she’d moved enough to make the chain move since the journey had begun.

Here we are.

“You’ve been here before,” I said.

Mary snapped her head around, as if unsure who I was talking to.  I wasn’t sure who she expected it to be, but she seemed to figure out that I was talking to her.  “Visits.”

“That’s all this is.  A visit.”

“One that decides my fate,” she said.

I shrugged, slow.  “Maybe.  Is that why you’re so anxious?  Or is it something else?”

“You keep talking like you read my mind,” she said.

You’re more of an open book than the literal open book in Jamie’s lap.

“It’s not hard to figure out.  You were told we’re the enemy.  We’re the bad guy.  Visits were visits.  You knew where you stood.”

“Sure,” she said, the word curt.

“They’re going to want to talk to you, ask questions.  Be ready for it.  You don’t have to tell them everything, but anything you tell them will smooth things over.  I don’t have anywhere to be, so I’ll be with you until we figure out where things stand.  I’m your ally, your advocate, I offered you a place with us, I will make it happen.  I promise things will be okay.  ”

“Promise,” she said.  Not a question, not a statement, only an echo.

Did the word have a significance?

“Do they even agree with you?” she asked.

They?  The other Lambsbridge orphans?

“I trust Sy,” Jamie said.

“Yes,” Helen murmured.  She’d sensed the coach slowing down, and had roused.

I glanced at Lil, and sensed the hesitation.  Mary would too.

But Lil said, “Yes.”

Mary’s expression didn’t change.  Not deadpan, like Helen’s; it was a vaguely lost, heartbroken look that she had about her, and it was a look that didn’t offer any tells.

It suggested she was more comfortable or certain about what was going on than she had been a moment ago, when all the walls had been down and in ruins.

The coach stopped, and we made our way out, Lillian removing the blanket that covered Mary’s shackles, clumsily folding it and dropping it on the spot where Helen had been lying.  One by one, we made our way out, passing the Stitched bodyguards on either side of the door.

When Mary reached the door, they seized her.

“Go easy,” I told them.  “She’s not a threat.  You can stay close, but don’t manhandle her.”

The handlers for the two stitched bodyguards echoed my orders.  The two bodyguards let go of Mary, leaving her free to follow a pace behind me.

We were on dry ground.  At the base of the Tower, a roof had been set up so one side rested against the Tower itself, the other side propped up by a row of custom-grown trees.  Stitched horses were lined up beneath, with cords and wires stringing them up to a rack of large metal cables that ran down one side of the tower.

Gordon was already out of the other coach, lying in a stretcher, with the team that worked on the Griffon project surrounding him.

Three students looked after me.  Two, now that Lacey was gone.  Nine looked after Jamie.  Lillian had special tutoring and attention from a set of teachers, giving her support and care.  Helen stood alone with no students or teachers to maintain and look after her, each one getting driven away in time, but she did have her black-coat professor.

Twelve individuals looked after Gordon, and nine of those individuals were present, walking in a group around, ahead of, and trailing behind him as the stretcher was wheeled into the tower.  I was willing to bet that more were inside.

The rest of us almost didn’t matter, while they were focused on their subject.  Debating and discussing ways to move forward, consulting lists and charts.

He was in their hands.  I wasn’t too worried about how it would turn out.

As they filtered away, we were left in the company of a few scattered students who stood closer to the Tower’s entrance.  I recognized some as members of Jamie’s team, two men and two women who looked a little more tired than all the rest.  I also spotted the two remaining members of my team, two men who were standing to one side, smoking.  Behind us were the students who managed the stitched guards.

“I didn’t realize how badly I was outnumbered,” Mary said.

I smiled at the notion.

She didn’t smile back.

“It’s the Academy,” I said.  “This is a small department with a shortage of funding.  You should see the manpower backing the other projects.”

Lillian, Jamie, Helen, Mary and I ventured closer.

“Jamie,” one of Jamie’s project workers said.  Older than the rest.  “Uh, a few questions, first, but Professor Hayle wanted to see her.  Everyone’s to have their checkups, appointments, and testing.  If you could give us a moment with Jamie-”

“Have your moment,” I said, cutting him off.  “No rush.”

My two remaining team members were Dewey and Alton, puffing away at cigarettes.  Take away the white coats, and they could have passed for street toughs who were waiting to hold me at gunpoint and force me to empty my pockets.  There was a brutishness to their builds and expressions.  Alton had a heavy brow and an ugly look in his eye that Academy medicine couldn’t change.

Dewey’s face, by contrast, had seen too much of the Academy’s attention, smoothing all of his skin to the soft texture of baby’s bottom.  I knew Dewey had been given treatment a few years back for a bad slouch, but habit had won out, and even now he was just a touch hunched over.  His hair was blond and gossamer fine.

I knew where I stood with them.  I knew that Alton had been signed on because of a mean streak and a bad disciplinary record from a school very much like Mothmont, while Dewey was, along with Lacey, the only one who’d been present from the beginning.  He’d had been through lengthy and painful treatments for bad scarring he’d suffered as a child.  In their own ways, they weren’t the type to flinch, and they were good enough at what they did.  Lacey had just been good.  I imagined she’d learned not to care, rather than starting out that way.

“You need anything?” Dewey asked.

I shook my head.  “Had my appointment.”

He looked annoyed.  “I know that.  We don’t have any reason to stick around?”

I shook my head again.

“Yeah,” he said.  “What’d you say to Lacey that bothered her so much?”

I shrugged.

“Yeah,” he said, again.  As if he was answering a question or statement.  “Okay.”

“I know where to find you if I need you,” I said.

“Find one of us in the office tomorrow,” he told me.  “Should check levels.”

“Okay,” I said.

He nodded.

Easy.  No dancing around, no tricks, no posturing.

Just business.

Jamie was talking to the others.  His team.  From what I overheard, he was trying to convince them that no, he didn’t need to stop by their office now.  Yes, he would be there soon.  Yes, he understood that people were present now.

My eye went to the book.  He was holding it with both hands, but he wasn’t holding it with a deathgrip, he wasn’t hugging it.

He didn’t need help.

I retreated a bit, approaching the three girls at the edge of the canopy.  Lil was talking to Mary while she fixed the bandage at Helen’s side.  Helen seemed to be taking it in stride, arching one eyebrow as she glanced back at me.

The arch, much like the smiles, winks and nods, seemed to be for my benefit rather than her own.  Little touches that made me feel more nervous around her, rather than less.

“…Mnemonic trick to figure out how things are laid out,” Lil said.

“Trick?” Mary asked Lil.

“It’s a body.  Each department has a focus.  The Tower is the head.  Record keeping.  The Rise is the shoulders, or the collarbone, the neck, supporting structures, storage, think backpack.  Then you have the Academy headquarters.  Center of everything, Claret Hall-”

“The heart,” Mary said.

“The rows,” Lil suggested, trailing off to give Mary the chance of offering an answer.

Mary shook her head.

“Ribs.  Dormitories.  I think of it as rows, ribs, bars, cage, zoo, students.  That’s how I put it together in my head, drawing the connection.  I started doing it from the beginning, but even though I know, I still sort of think that way.  I make the connection like that,” Lil said.

She sounded so excited.  A kid with a chance to show her stuff.  She wasn’t a project, but she was clever in her own normal way.  Exceptionally so, it could be said.  Maybe it was because she’d been pushed to keep up with us, maybe it was because she was a rare breed.

But she wasn’t one of us.  She had a family, a place to go home to.

“What do you think the Hedge is?” I asked.

Mary started a little at the sound of my voice.  “Hedge?  Exterior wall… skin?”

I shrugged and nodded.  “Immediate care, contact with the city outside, first line of healing and prevention.”

“Does that help?” Lil asked.

“Help?” I cut in.

“With feeling lost and overwhelmed in this place,” Lil said.

“It helps a little,” Mary said, in a way that didn’t convince me in the slightest.  She moved her hands a bit to tug at her uniform top and the chains rattled.

“Okay, that’s great!” Lil said, perking up, “So, after the Rows, you have other main buildings.  There’s the-”

“Helen,” a voice cut through the patter of rain on the canopy roof.  It was a hard voice.

Lil’s train of thought crashed right there.

“Ibott,” Mary murmured.

Ibott.  He was someone who had been elevated to a position in society that didn’t suit him in the slightest.  He was among the most brilliant minds at Radham, clever, not bad looking on the surface, he had the veneer of the upper class and none of the follow-through.  His hair was neatly parted, set firmly in place by something that had a way of smelling rancid at the end of the day, leaving his hair locked into hard strings that crossed one corner of his forehead.  His round eyeglasses were gold-rimmed, but so smudged I could barely see the eyes on the other side of the glass.

A name that might not have been known by every household, but was known to most.

“I expected you earlier,” he said, and his phrasing was civil and proper, the tone far from it.  “In the future, you come straight inside and report to me.  Do not make me come out here.”

“Yes sir,” Helen said.

But you’re not always here, I thought.  Is she supposed to report regardless?

Ibott seemed to think so, and now Helen would.

He was now close enough to speak to us without raising his voice.  I sensed Lil shrinking back and shifted my position a little, to put myself between Ibott and her.

“You’re bleeding,” he observed.

“Yes sir,” Helen said.

“Explain.”

Before she could, I spoke up, “Sir.”

He ignored me.  “I want to hear it from Helen.  I certainly hope she recalls.”

“Sylvester put me in harm’s way so we could capture our target,” Helen said, before I could say anything.  “It was the best way to get me to where I could be most effective.”

I would have worded that better, I thought.

I was barely finished the thought when Ibott struck me.  He wasn’t a strong man, but he was several times my size, and he was a man.

The noise of the back of his hand connecting with my face made virtually every head present turn.

“Take more care,” he instructed me.

I had to blink a few times before I was able to figure out that I was on my hands and knees.  I opened my jaw yawning-wide, feeling it pop before I was able to work my mouth to form words.  “…Yes sir.”

Helen offered me her hand.  I took it.

“Do not help him up,” Ibott said.  “Come.”

Helen let my hand drop from hers, but she didn’t move.

“Good work tonight, Helen,” I murmured.

She turned and followed a step behind her creator.  Jamie’s crowd and Dewey all took care to move out of the way as the pair entered the tower.

Conversation didn’t resume until the door shut behind Helen.

I ignored Lil’s offer for assistance in standing, and got to my own two feet.

“Always good for a first impression, Ibott is,” I said, glancing at Mary.

“I don’t understand.”

“If he wanted to, he’d run Radham,” I said.  “He doesn’t want to, but he still has that clout.  Not what I would have wanted you to see while trying to win you over.”

“You’re assuming I have someplace else to go,” Mary said.

Yeah, I thought, I am.  But maybe you don’t see all the options that really lie in front of you.

I saw Jamie shift his grip on his book.  Head bent a little, arms crossed over the notebook’s leather-bound cover.

“Lil,” I said, without taking my eyes off him.

“Lillian.”

“I don’t know how to say it without sounding like I’m telling you to go away, but… if you wanted to go to your room and get a good night’s sleep, this wouldn’t be a bad time.”

“That does sound like you’re trying to get rid of me.”

“But?” I asked.  “Pillow, covers, your own room, peace and quiet…”

“Nightmares,” she said.

“Do you think you’re going to have less nightmares, if you spend more time hanging around us?” I asked.

She made a face.

But she flipped her hood up, picked up her bag, and headed down the long road to the middle area of the University, where the Rows radiated out around Claret Hall.

“Come on,” I said.  I grabbed Mary’s chain, tugging a bit.

“Don’t,” she said, suddenly tense, resisting the pull.

Which a student and a stitched bodyguard took as leave to give her a push.

“Cooperate,” the student called out.

“It’s fine,” I said.  “Really, it’s fine.”

But it didn’t feel fine.  Jamie was shrinking into himself more, glancing my way as his group led him inside.  I was caught between the two.  Couldn’t abandon Mary at this stage, but letting Jamie go ahead without giving support…

“Please, Mary,” I said.

Mary hesitated, then obeyed.

We covered ground quickly, Mary’s chain rattling, but I had to hold the door for her, and then the stitched bodyguards and their handlers were right behind us, wanting to keep an eye on Mary, and all in all, it was clumsy and awkward, and it took some time for us to catch up with the brisk, businesslike strides.

I pushed past students in lab coats to get to Jamie.

He unwrapped his arms from the book, and after a moment’s pause, he handed it to me.

I took it with reverent care, and held it securely in my arms.

“See you,” he said.

“Soon,” I replied.

Griffon getting pieced back together.  Galatea in the care of her maker, who is as different from her as night from day.

And the Caterpillar…

I watched the caterpillar disappear down the length of the hall.

Appointment was the wrong word.

I rubbed the side of my face, where I knew I’d bruise, then turned to Mary.  We were as alone as we’d get, with our stitched escort.

“I wanted to show you better,” I told Mary.  “I want to show you Lambsbridge.  How we have a home, how we have each other.”

“You have his book,” Mary said.  “I think I get it, even if I don’t understand the details.  I’m not sure I would have believed whatever you meant to show me.”

The perils of being an established liar.

“I want you to be one of us,” I said.

“I think I might want to be,” she replied.

“That’ll have to do,” I told her.

We had nine flights of stairs to climb, and when I offered to hold up the midsection of the chain to alleviate the weight of it, she didn’t resist.

When we arrived in Hayle’s office, he didn’t seem to miss that detail, either.  I saw his gaze linger where my hand held the metal links.

“Dog and Catcher are after Percy,” he said.  I noted how he watched Mary.  It seemed he’d been filled in on my intentions there, too.  Jamie’s work, no doubt.  Keeping everything in order, making sure the messages were passed along.

Mary didn’t flinch or react.

“The pursuit would have been easier if you hadn’t burned down Percy’s home,” Hayle told me.

I reacted to that.  I blinked a few times, trying to organize my thoughts and work through the shoddier bits of my memory.  “I didn’t.”

Hayle leaned back in his chair.  “You didn’t?”

I shook my head.

“Dog and Catcher say it wasn’t Percy who did it.  They would have had the scent, even with the rain.”

“I don’t have an answer for you,” I told him.

“I do,” Mary said, her voice soft.  “The plan was… more complex than I think you understand.”

“Complex how?” Hayle asked, his pale eyebrows rising.

“The children we were copied from, he had to do something with them.  He sold them, to others with ambitions in line with his,” she said, and she couldn’t maintain eye contact, staring down at the ground instead.  “It’s a group.  One he tried to keep secret from even me.  And it’s a lot bigger than you’d think.”

Enemy (Arc 1)

Overshoot, Percy mused.  A species finds itself with no predators and an abundance of resources.  The species grows by leaps and bounds, oftentimes exponentially, and quickly reaches a point where it vastly exceeds the space and resources available.

Percy held his umbrella up at an angle, pointing it against the rain that was driving down, now.  His eye fell on the Academy.  This late in the evening, it was one of the only points of light in this dark little city, walled in, with enough lights around the Hedge that the front wall was illuminated.

He turned away, shifting his grip on his umbrella.  His free hand reached up to tenderly prod his own damaged face.  The moment he’d been hurt, he’d chosen to exaggerate the severity of it.  He’d trusted his Mary.

His walk was brisk.  Running was a giveaway, walking was too slow.  He compromised on both fronts.  Living here, one got used to the rain, walking on slick sidewalk and road.  The Academy had wanted rain, they had devised a method to get it, algae that were now part of the water system.  Buildings at the periphery of Radham spouted out fumes that would catalyze the bacteria.

When Overshoot occurred, the end result was often a devastating collapse of the system that had formed.  Populations often died en masse.

The wind nearly tore his umbrella from his hand.  He had to pause to fix the arm at one side, where it had inverted, turning one side of the umbrella into a cup rather than a shield.  While he did so, he took the opportunity to glance over his shoulder, double-checking.

He didn’t see anyone that shouldn’t be there.  He kept a particular eye out for children, and saw nothing.

He felt both relief and disappointment.  To see Mary there would have lifted his heart and it would have made him feel safer.  To see all of the boys with Mary would have left him ecstatic.  Given him hope.

Only rain and shadow in equal proportion.

Radham worked so hard to portray itself as something good and proper.  He’d known that much already, spending the better part of six years at Mothmont, but he’d never been one to wander the street in the worst weather.  He’d been aware of the existence of such stitched, but he’d never seen how many stitched were active late at night, collecting trash, bodies, or simply going about on predetermined errands, especially now that he was in the shadier part of Radham.

A stitched was picking through a can of trash that had been left outside of a business, moving as though drunk, too loose, prone to swaying.  When it found something, a broken clock, a child’s toy, a pair of scissors, it fumbled to fold back a waterproof cloth that had been draped over a crate, placed the item inside, and then replaced the cloth.

Percy wanted to help it.  To give it an hour of his time, or find its owner and tell them how to maintain it better.  Some individuals were prone to complaining about how their relatives, friends and neighbors were collected before they ever touched a coffin, or dug up at the first opportunity by grave robbers looking to make some coin by selling to would-be-students.  Oh, but if they knew that stitched were sometimes used like this, ordered to go through garbage for anything that might be of value, taking the materials to a location where the valuables could be sorted out and sold?

A stitched wasn’t easy to make, but the attempted and ultimately partial revival of the dead had been one of Wollstone’s first projects, and had consequently been one of the most detailed in Wollstone’s literature.  All one had to do was obtain the materials that the Academy controlled and follow the documentation to the letter.

The materials were inexpensive, the end product lasted years, longer if kept dry and maintained at the right temperature, which this poor thing wasn’t.

He appreciated few things more than good work.  A craftsman with care regarding their trade.  This wasn’t that kind of good work.

The creator no doubt had access to a great many bodies, and thought it easier to go to a third-rate Academy graduate and have another made, than to work to keep this one functioning.

Flesh was cheap.  Dead flesh cheaper.

The stitched turned its head, looking in Percy’s direction.  The eyes were nearly gone, the pupils and irises clouded with milky white.

It wasn’t, however, looking at Percy himself.

He followed the gaze of the stitched creature, and he saw two figures in the rain.

The first and most obvious was a monster.  Four-legged, It stood tall enough that if it walked against a building, its shoulder would brush the upper end of a doorframe, but it was narrow enough that it could fit through the doorway itself, if it ducked its head down.  It had parts of a human face, writ large, the features largely concealed by long black hair.  Here and there, where flesh wasn’t sufficient, large amounts of metal had been set in place, fixed to flesh and bone.  Light from a streetlamp reflected green in its eyes.

The other figure was a man, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a long jacket. The light from the streetlamp reflected green in his eyes as well.  He carried a stick with a collar fixed to one end, ready to snap shut once touched to the throat, a bear trap without the teeth.  Sometimes it had spikes, Percy knew, but no.

No, Dog and Catcher wanted him alive.  To question.  To take his work, repurpose it.  It was only a matter of time.  The only reason they hadn’t noticed him was that they were distracted by something else.  It seemed Catcher was saying something, though the collar of his jacket was high enough to hide his mouth.

Dog nodded, and the sound he made in reply was deep and loud enough to be almost audible.  Speaking was impossible for the thing, given the mangled metal wreck that was his lower jaw.

How could Percy even describe the feeling that came over him, then?  The dread, the misery.  He imagined the feeling being very much like what he might experience if confronted by the family of the children he had replaced with his own.  If he had been cut down mid-stride, before accomplishing his goals.

As if a weight had been dropped on him from high above, smashing all he was to pieces, while leaving his body intact.

But dread didn’t help him.  He circled the garbage-scrounger and used the creature’s bulk and smell to hide him from sight and nose.

With a note of regret, he folded up his umbrella, subjecting himself to the rain.  Bone handle, properly waterproof.  Too large to go in the crate, too obvious a thing to be carrying.

“I hope your master rewards you by tending to you,” Percy murmured.  “So please forgive me for this.”

He pulled the waterproof cloth away from the top of the crate, where it protected the contents, threw it over his head and shoulders, then hefted the crate.  He contemplated kicking off his boots, but decided against it.

Visually, it would mask him from their view.  But their eyes were the least of his problems.

They could see better than him, they could track scents as well as any bloodhound, they could hear, as rumor went, a leaf settling on the ground, and they had the wits to use that information.

If they were this close, they had his scent, and if they had his scent, that mancatcher was as good as around his neck.

A sound behind him almost made him startle, but jumping or jerking could well be a giveaway.

Dog disappeared into an alley, traveling parallel to him.

Percy stumbled forward, box in hand, his thoughts a dull roar.  There were no good options.  Even if Mary or Clyde were here, the best they could hope to accomplish would be buying time.  If the stars aligned right, perhaps they could put down Catcher.

But victory wouldn’t happen.  Escape was out of the question.

Dog revealed himself by making a clatter, three floors above the ground, walking on a nearby rooftop.  With each step, shingles broke free and skidded down the roof to sail toward the ground below.

There were only three building lots between Percy and the war machine.  It had stopped at the end of one rooftop, and now strained, head raised, broad, bat-like nostrils flaring.

Dog almost casually leaped from rooftop to road.  Metal braces in and around the legs locked, sprung, and slammed into new configurations, absorbing some of the impact.  Muscle and mass handled the remainder.

Now that Dog was closer, Percy could see how tubes ran up and around the legs, disappearing into metal-framed slits in the side.  Two tubes carried blood, while the third carried what might have been water.

Dog was an ugly piece of work, which was odd, considering that Dog was one of the best known of the Academy’s ‘secret’ projects.  There were experiments that were done with care, thought through from the beginning.  This was not that.  It was a project that had been started, one largely doomed to failure.  When structural integrity had failed, crude metal engineering had been set in place.  When circulation was poor, things were rerouted, tubes set in place to serve where veins and arteries couldn’t, sometimes outside the body.

Little doubt there were other problems.  The Academy was probably happy that was the case.  A Dog couldn’t run if it needed regular drainage or a specialized diet.

The Academy had overshot.  In this case it had made effective use of that fact.

Dog turned his head, staring at Percy with those eyes that caught the light, the eyelids moved, providing a smile the mouth couldn’t.

It was fruitless to resist, or even try to run, but it galled Percy to know that it would be this that ended him.  He turned and prepared to go, when he saw Catcher drawing near.

The man toyed with the mancatcher, the collar on a stick.  The collar section of the tool spun, whirling so fast it was a blur in the gloom, sending off a spray of water droplets.

Catcher’s voice was rough-edged, a man who had smoked or was speaking through a bad cold.  “You changed coaches twice, walked through deep puddles.  Even wore a maggot-ridden blanket.”

Maggots?

Percy pulled at the piece of cloth he’d put over his head, but it still took a second for his eyes to adjust.  He saw the maggots wriggling, and flinched, casting the cloth away.

His scalp crawled, now, his neck and face.  Once he felt it, every drop of rain he couldn’t verify with his eyes was potentially a maggot, vermin, filth.

Catcher shifted his grip on the mancatcher, and Percy stumbled back, only to find that Dog was behind him, mouth open, teeth ready to bite.

But he still held the crate.  Using it for Dog would be useless, but-

Catcher thrusted, aiming for Percy’s throat, and Percy raised the box, the opening facing the weapon.

The crate was torn from his hands, thrown a distance away by a violent swing of the pole.

Too strong.  Catcher alone would have been enough, but there were two of them.

Wollstone’s work had caught hold of him from an early age.  It had defined his life.  Now it would, in a roundabout way, end it.

He thought of his creations.  Of Clyde, and of Mary.

In the same moment he realized his own mortality, he knew his legacy was gone.

He felt a flare of anger.

Percy nurtured the feeling, used it to find courage, and reached into his jacket for his pistol.

Catcher seized his wrist, then stopped, glancing down.

“That was…” Catcher asked, trailing off.  His head turned.

Dog growled, then darted off in the same direction.

A fog was rising around them.

No, it was a gas.  Pea-soup thick, the cloud rose steadily despite the downpour.

Catcher started using his grip on Percy’s wrist to pull, tugging him away from the swelling cloud.  Percy used his other hand to reach across his front for the gun, only to have Catcher move the mancatcher to prod his arm.

The collar, slightly too wide around for Percy’s upper arm, slammed shut.  The hole was large enough that he could have pulled his arm free if he’d been given the chance, but he wasn’t.  The weapon rotated, the edges digging into his arm, and the implicit promise was that trying to pull free despite the pressure might see skin scraped away by the weapon’s edges.

Out of the same flame of anger that had driven him to reach for the gun, Percy found himself fighting Catcher.  His opponent was strong enough to lift him, but Percy hauled himself downward, made every step a difficult one with one of his feet braced against Catcher’s thigh.  He strained to move toward the gas that had alarmed these two abominations so very much.

It was stupid, reckless, and it was ugly, everything Percy had worked against.  Every step of the way, he’d fought against the current, and every step of the way, he’d done things with care.  Not all of it was things he could be proud of, but he’d weighed his options, and had never done a thing he felt he could later regret, in the grand scheme of it all.

Even his dealings with the children.

This, he instinctively felt, was something he might very well regret more than anything else, even if it only left him minutes or seconds more of life.

In the end, he succeeded.  His head moved too far back, and the gas washed over his face.

In an instant, he was blind, seeing through a veil.  Foul, acrid tastes and smells flooded his nose and mouth.

His struggles with Catcher continued, less effective now that he was blinded.

When he was dropped, he kicked and flailed into the blurry darkness.

When a hand pressed around his mouth, he struck out, hit flesh.  He struck again, and felt long hair.

His hand moved more gently through the hair, with a degree of caution this time, with care.

Mary?

He opened his mouth to ask, but whatever it was that had filled it with foul taste, it was like a thick flour, caking his tongue and inner cheeks, making them stick to his teeth.  His lips bound together, cracking and bleeding as he pulled them apart.

The hand over his mouth moved, until only one finger pressed against his lips.

The fingers seized his bleeding lower lip and tugged.  Leading him like a mutt on a leash, and he knew it wasn’t his Mary.

He obeyed all the same.

A few staggering footsteps, not knowing where he was going.  A ruckus occurred behind them.

The hand took his wrist, instead, and he followed, for what seemed like an interminably long time, but was likely only a handful of minutes.

The hand freed his wrist.

Another minute passed.  He started to feel his heartbeat pick up.  Fear, humiliation, worry.  He was dirty, covered in maggots, bloody, and except for his silent companion, he was alone.

He heard a woman’s sigh, not one of exasperation, but relief.

“It’s water,” she said, and her voice was muffled.  “Right in front of you.  Rinse your face, try to get your nose and ears as well, or you won’t see or hear very well for a long time.”

He obeyed, fumbling until he found the rain barrel.  He made use of the water, rubbing at his eyes, only to pull away long strings of goop.  It snapped before he could get much of it.  He pulled away as much as he could, checked his vision, and still found it blurry.  His second attempt suggested that absolutely none of it had dissipated.

“It uses the mucus membranes,” she explained.  “Binds to to the mucus itself.  You’re going to be congested, and you’ll be pulling gobbets of the stuff from your nose and mouth for a long time.  Give it an hour or two and it’ll be more solid.  The rinse is meant to clear things up.”

“How long?” he managed.  He still felt as though his tongue was coated in wax.  He blinked and made out a raven-haired beauty in a close-fitting jacket.

“Long enough you might worry I lied to you and that permanent damage was done.  Wash with regularity, it will get better.”

He looked back over his shoulder.

“They’re gone,” she reassured him.  “It affected them worse than it affected you.  They still put up a fight, which I didn’t expect.  I had three stitched with me, and Catcher took them to pieces.  The Academy will diagnose the problem and mend those two within a day, and then they’ll devise a means to prevent it, but…”

“But you saved me?” Percy asked.

He could make out enough of her face to see a smile.

“You saved me, and you sacrificed three stitched and a trump card to do it.  You’re with them.”

“Yes.”

For the first time since the anonymous note had informed him the Academy was coming for him, he felt himself relax a touch.

He dunked his face again, then shook it violently in the water, side to side, splashing, trying to free up any of the substance that might be clinging.

When he stood straight, he put his hands to his hair and then combed it with his fingers.

His vision was still only half of what it had been.

“Come,” she said, smiling.

The destination, as it turned out, was a nondescript store with an old cowboy’s hat over the door.

“Ever been to a place like this?” his companion asked, ascending the stairs ahead of him.   She shot him a light smile over one shoulder.

“I, ah, never have, believe it or not.”

“I believe you,” she said.  “You’re more the type to find someone of that calling and invite her to your place.”

She knew him that well?

“During daytime, no less,” she said.

Ah.  “You’ve been watching me that well, then.”

“The man that walks around your home outside of the school hours, pulling the cart?  Ours.”

“I see.”

They’d reached the top of the stairs, two floors up, and reached a door with another cowboy’s hat above it.  Rather than open it, his companion turned around, then wiped at his face, touching his hair.

His blood still pumping and face already hot from the humiliation of his futile struggle against Catcher, just after hearing intimate topics raised so readily, he felt more than a little flustered.

From the smile on her face, she seemed to know it.  Perhaps she had been watching him even more carefully than he’d known.  Enough to know he liked to be in control, to steer things, and she was denying him that chance.

Before he could ask a question, she opened the door.

The walls were draped with red velvet or silk or something very close to it, traced with gold.  The pillars had branches reaching up and around them, and one branch had a small bird on it.  The light was electrical, cast through red glass.

Scattered around the room, in a very haphazard fashion, there were eight or nine people in chairs, on couches, or standing.

“Cynthia,” an old man greeted her.  “And Mr. Percy.”

“Catcher and Dog were there.  I used my blinding powder, they’ll know what it is for next time.  Louis is going to tell you I didn’t let him set the Academy’s Dog on fire, but it seemed too risky.  Every time we made a sound, Catcher would charge at us.  I let the stitched make all the sounds they wanted, and we left.  It was the best option, Catcher wasn’t slowing down.”

“He doesn’t, that is his design,” the old man said.  Percy blinked to try and get a better view.  Changing his tone, the old man spoke again, “You did well.”

Talking to me.

“I failed.  My creations are dead.”

“Mmm, I’m afraid so,” the old man said.  “We confirmed for ourselves.  Three boys and a girl, killed by the Academy’s set.”

Percy felt a wrench in his chest.  He managed to keep his expression calm.

It was good.  The deliberate act of control helped to center him.  He felt more like himself.

“What were you doing?” a woman asked.  She was surrounded by cages.  The shapes within suggested birds.

Percy opened his mouth to answer, then shut it.

“You won’t say?” Cynthia asked, and her tone was teasing.

“You brought me here for a reason.”

“We did,” the old man said.

Percy chose his words carefully.  “I feel as though I’m being judged.”

“We all are, always,” the woman with the birds said.  “Are you weak, strong, useful, a fitting romantic partner, a friend, an enemy?”

“I’ll reword.  I’m on trial.”

“No,” the old man said.  “Wrong word, that.”

“It matters, what I say, how I say it.  And don’t say it always matters.  You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” the old man said.  “I know.  Tell us, what were you doing?”

Percy remained silent, considering.

When Cynthia spoke, her voice was soft, but it wasn’t uncertain in the least.  “There is nothing you can say that is worse than saying nothing at all.”

Percy didn’t speak right away, but he did make the decision to speak.  “I’m not proud.  I started out wanting to prove myself to them.  I had an idea, I wanted to see it through, and show them that they were wrong to refuse it.”

“Your clones.”

“Yes,” Percy said.

“Your work seemed impeccable, considering your limited access to Academy resources.  They protect their texts and charts with a dangerous passion.  It’s half of what Dog and Catcher do, rounding up those who have or copy the books.  Every academy has projects that do, dressing them up as patriots and protectors of the Crown.”

“There were teachers who brought sections of the texts to the school.  I caught glimpses, and I held phrases and numbers in my head until I could write them down, sometimes hours later.”

“Impressive,” a man in the corner said.  “Why?  You started out wanting to prove yourself to the Academy, then you started killings.  To hurt Mothmont, and to hurt the Academy too?”

“To become Headmaster.  Once I could dictate policy, I planned to mass produce.”

“Mass produce clones?”

Percy managed a smile with his cracked, gummed-up lips.  “Imagine, please, a new method of warfare.  One where a single man or clone can infiltrate, they can target children, replace them, the clones would educate their new peers in how to act like children, and slowly but silently capture an entire generation.  One command or order, all in one night, and an entire city would be brought to its knees.”

“I do like this sort of imagining,” the old man said.  “The Academy likes its weapons, as you saw with it’s pet Dog.”

“The Academy didn’t like my weapon.  Not because of what it was, but because they had a vision in mind, a group of children working together.  My idea was too slow for Hayle.”

“You wanted to make it work.  The lives of children meant nothing to you, you sold them without a care as to what we were using them for?”

Is it a trial after all?

“The lives of my children mean something to me.”

“Do you want revenge for them, Percy?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll have it.  You’ll carry out your plan.”

“They know how I operate.  They’ll be checking, to be safe.”

“Let them waste their time, then.  There are other routes.”

Percy narrowed his eyes, felt the film in them, and rubbed at one with the knuckle of his thumb.  “Other routes?”

In answer, Cynthia reached up and tapped one of the red lights.

Percy nodded in realization.

“We’ll be working together,” she said.  “To create beautiful pieces of work.”

“And you’ll be doing it with more resources,” the bird woman said.

“While staying well out of sight,” the old man said, with a little more emphasis.  “I’m sure you understand.”

Percy nodded slowly, taking it all in.  He allowed himself a smile.

“I’m sure it won’t take much convincing to have you act against the Academy?” the old man asked.

Percy mused for a moment.  “Whenever I think of the Academy, I think of the concept of the Overshoot.  You’re familiar with it, I presume?“

“I was a professor,” the old man said, “you can trust I am.”

Percy smiled a little.  “They’re treading dangerous ground.  Verging on collapse.  Hayle sees it too, but he thinks he can make minds brilliant enough to solve the problem.  I think he’s only going to wind up contributing to it.  No, I most definitely don’t have a problem acting against them.”

The demeanor of the others in the room told him he’d passed his trial.

“Can I wash my face?” he asked, as others settled in, and the din of conversatino rose.  “Again?”

“This way,” Cynthia said.  “You have a room.”

She led him to his quarters.  His eyes went as wide as the blinding film let them.

A complete set of Academy texts.  Large vats, sufficient to house a person.

“The basin is this way,” Cynthia said.  “You have an bathroom adjunct.”

He almost didn’t hear her.  His finger traced the closest vat.

He would create life, play the littlest of gods.

Clones, he thought.  From Ancient Greek Klon-.  Meaning Twig.

He smiled at the thought, before going to wash his face.

Cat out of the Bag 2.1

“You’re going to get sick, doing that,” Rick told me.  He picked up my hood and pulled it over my wet hair.

A little petulantly, I pulled it back down.  I glared at him.

Rick, one of the older boys at Lambsbridge, only smiled.  Back when he’d arrived at the orphanage he had taken me for someone much younger.  He’d quickly realized how much I hated it when I wasn’t taken seriously and decided to kill me with kindness.

He looked the part, too.  Where Gordon was big in the athletic sense, Rick was round-chinned, wide-hipped, with a heavy, dense body.  He might have looked like a proper Bruno if his face wasn’t so damned innocent; rosy cheeked, bright eyed and clear-skinned for a fifteen year old.

To the adults, he was cuddly.  To me, he was a nuisance.

“Hey, Gordon, can I grab that extra umbrella?” Rick asked.

Gordon and Helen were walking together, each holding large umbrellas, a herd of the younger orphans walking around them.

“I think Sy would prefer it if you left him alone,” Gordon said.

“Thank you,” I said.  “Yes.”

“He’s going to get sick if he gets this cold and wet.”

“It’s summer,” I pointed out.  “It’s warm rain, and I want to get wet.  I’m changing when I get back anyway.”

“Why would you want to get wet?”

“Why is it any of your business?  My head gets hot, I like to cool down sometimes.”

“Your head gets hot?” Rick asked.  He gave me an indulgent smile.  “I think you’re already feverish, Sy.”

I gave him a very unimpressed look, then ducked around a pair of recent arrivals, aiming to put them between me and Rick.

It didn’t work.  I felt a hand grip my hood, and spun on the spot, slapping at it, harder than was necessary.

It didn’t have much effect, but it made for a loud slap, and the speed with which I’d turned caught eyes.  Other children and a few bystanders on the street were staring, now.  The Lambsbridge group slowed, some stopping altogether.

I stared Rick down, glaring.

“You need to take better care of yourself,” Rick said, in the nicest tone imaginable.

“I can.  I do.  I don’t need you to step in and tell me how,” I said, my voice tight.

“Sy,” Jamie said.

I didn’t move, still staring daggers at Rick.

“I’ve got my hands full with my book and this umbrella, and I need to scratch my nose,” Jamie said.  “Can you give me a hand?”

I turned my back on Rick, and advanced to the front of the group, where Jamie was walking alongside Eliza and Fran, the only two girls around our age that weren’t Helen, and all three of them were carrying large umbrellas to shelter themselves and a few small children from the water.  I reached up and scratched his nose for him.  He scrunched it up suitably, provoking a laugh from some of the smallest children in the herd.

Breaking tension.

“I meant for you to take my umbrella,” he said, but he was smiling a little.  He started walking, and our group started moving again.  I took the umbrella from him, holding it with both hands and falling in step  between him and Fran, prompting a, “Thank you.”

“Put his hood up, Jamie,” Rick said.

I tensed.

“Rick,” Gordon said, “C’mere.”

Gordon’s help served to put Rick at the tail end of the group, while Jamie had me at the front.  The kids in the middle were splashing in puddles.  Altogether, we took up most of the sidewalk and some of the street.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and it was about as far from gloomy as Radham got, with sunlight pushing at but not yet breaking through the clouds overhead.  The rain was warm to the touch, and about half of the people on the street were doing just what I was doing, keeping hoods down and umbrellas away.

Discount the stitched that were here and there, like the group that was leading one large, almost featureless, hairless mammal in the direction of the Academy, and maybe two thirds of the people were enjoying the rain.

Which Rick didn’t seem able to understand.

“He really gets to you, huh?” Jamie asked.

“He should get to everyone,” I said.  “There’s something seriously bent in his head, and the fact that nobody but me understands that is a bigger bother than he is.”

“Rick isn’t a bad guy, he’s just awkward,” Fran said, beside me.

I pulled one hand away from the umbrella to gesture at her, giving Jamie my best ‘see!?‘ look.

“I sort of understand,” Jamie said, gently.  “I do see elements of it.  I also think you exaggerate it to make it something it isn’t.”

“I understand people,” I said, being very careful with my words.  The other orphans did not know who or what we were, and the wrong phrasing could be disastrous.  “I know what makes them tick.  I know how to use that.  I’ve had to know all that, because… of where I came from.  I’ve told you this, and more.”

“Yeah, I know,” Jamie said, just as careful.  He knew what I really meant.  Fran and Eliza were decorous enough not to pry or ask about my past, though I saw them exchange glances between each other.

“Let’s not dwell too much on the bad stuff with the small ones around,” Eliza said.

I shook my head.  “I don’t get Rick.  I can push, I can prod, I can test him, and he doesn’t budge.”

“He knows you just as well as you know him,” Jamie said.  “You’re clever, Sy, but don’t underestimate just how effective the average person is when they’re one hundred percent focused on one thing.”

“He’s one hundred percent focused on me?  And you don’t see what’s wrong with that?”

“Do you blame him?  You met each other on one of your bad days, one of the days when you’re in particularly foul, spiteful moods-”

After an appointment.

“-and forced him to figure out how to deal with you.”

“Which he did,” I muttered.

“Which means he doesn’t give in, he doesn’t change course.  You made your bed, Sy.  Now you get to sleep in it.  Go after people and don’t be surprised if they fight back the best ways they know how.”

I scowled, “If I had a clue, some inkling of what makes a person that fundamentally messed up…”

“Sylvester!” Fran rebuked me with enough force that the children we were walking with jumped a little.  “Don’t be unkind!”

“Sorry,” I mumbled, shrinking down a little.  “I’m just saying.  I don’t get him.  I don’t know what adds up to Rick being Rick.”

“I know,” Jamie said.  “I know his story.”

I was immediately a puppy, eyes bright, ears perked up.

“And I’m not going to tell you,” Jamie said.  “Ever.”

“But-”

“Because you’ll use it.  I know you.  Let it lie and deal with it as best as you can.  It’s good for you.”

I fought the urge to smack Jamie with the umbrella I was holding.  I only managed to avoid it by telling myself that Jamie had to have written it down in one of his notebooks.

“It’s not in my diaries, Sy,” Jamie said, quiet.  “Well, it is, but I blotted the words out after you threw the cup at his head, just a bit before Christmas.  I knew you’d look eventually.”

The annoyances of dealing with someone who knew you well enough to predict how you thought.

“I was about to ask if you’d really read his diary,” Fran said, “But then I thought, gosh, silly me, it’s Sylvester.”

I sighed.  I considered hitting the both of them with the umbrella, but then I caught sight of Jamie’s expression.  Light concern, caring.  Gentleness.

Jamie’s so slow he wouldn’t ever get out of the way fast enough.  Not sporting, I told myself.

He moved his book to his other arm and put an arm around my shoulders.

“Can you give Sy and me a moment?  We’re just going to walk ahead a bit,” Jamie said.

“I’ll watch the ankle biters,” Fran said, taking the umbrella from me, holding one in each hand.  I didn’t miss the smile on her face as she said it.

Jamie gave her a curt nod.  We picked up our pace to pull ahead, which wasn’t too much of a problem, considering how slow a collection of five year olds sometimes were.  He moved his book so it was more out of the rain.  I reached over to pull his rain-cloak over it.

It took a minute before we were out of earshot.  We had to circle around a slow-moving obstacle.  The obstacle took the form of a large glass case the size of a coach, a cloth thrown over the top, already soaked with the water that sloshed within.  Live horses were pulling the thing, and the Academy students who weren’t leading the horses were holding formation in a loose circle around the tank, warding off incoming traffic so a coach didn’t crash into the side.

When we were on the other side, I commented, “Rick’s the sort of guy who ends up dressing in his mom’s clothes and smiles as he kills his victims with a knitting needle or something.”

“You’re not going to bait an answer out of me, Sy,” Jamie said.

“Not a knitting needle.  But something inventive,” I mused.  “Common household item.  You’re the one that reads the books.  What item fits?”

“You’re more agitated than usual,” Jamie told me.  “I think high-strung is the term.  I’m guessing it’s Mary?”

I frowned.

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

“You don’t have to act so smug.”

“I’m not being smug,” Jamie said, giving me every indication that he really believed what he was saying.  “Look, it’s been a few weeks.  You have a tendency to want to steer the ship, even if Gordon is supposed to be the one captaining it.  I know you haven’t been that able to steer Mary as much as you’d like, despite your very frequent visits.”

“I told Hayle everything,” I said.  “I-”

Jamie was giving me a look.

“Almost everything.  I explained, I got him to agree and get Mary’s oversight to cooperate.  Yet half the time I couldn’t even talk to her, because they were doing stuff with her or with her parents.”

Jamie nodded, taking it in, storing it, maybe processing something else, or paging through a set of memories in his head.  “You weren’t that successful when you did see her.  It’s why you’re so insecure now.”

“I’m not insecure.”

“Okay,” Jamie said.  He didn’t sound much like he believed me.

“She did try to kill you,” I pointed out.  “If this goes an ugly way, then she might try again.”

“She came closer to killing you than she did to killing me,” Jamie pointed out.  “Several times, in fact.  If you’re trying to make me join you in the hand-wringing, you’ll have to do better.”

“You’re no fun,” I said.

“I know,” he said.  He squeezed my shoulders.  “I’m a terrible bore.”

“The worst bore.  I have no idea why Fran likes you.”

“Hm?”

“She likes you.  Like-like.  The way she acted when we left them behind, I’m sure.”

Now it was Jamie’s turn to look a little bit annoyed and concerned.  Good.  For all he wanted to mock me about wringing my hands over Mary, I knew he’d worry over this.  He’d do the worrying for Fran, I knew, and it wasn’t necessarily a bad sort of worrying, but I felt a little thrill of victory.

“She really likes me?”

“She thinks boring old Jamie is the best.  Let me tell you, if any girl liked me as much as she likes you…” I trailed off.

“Yes?”

“I dunno!  I could make them do anything.  Color their hair blue, or spit in Dog’s face, or-”

“Anything,” Jamie said, cutting me off.

“Yeah,” I said, smiling.

“That’s one worry off my mind, at least,” he said.

“What?”

“I was thinking about you and Mary, and the interplay between the two of you,” Jamie said, stumbling a bit as he tried to explain.  “…few years too early for that, I suppose.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You pick things up quickly,” Jamie said.  “Obviously.  And you picked up human interaction first.  Your word choice, how you express yourself, is sometimes very adult, because of how you used it to craft your persona.”

“Uh huh…” I said, inviting him to go on.

“It’s a relief to see past that and get a glimpse at the you beneath all of it.”

“You’re a butt,” I said.  “That is the real me.”

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe.  You’re definitely a butt.”

“I meant-”

“That you’re a butt?  You butt?”  I took advantage of how slow he could be to get up to speed, needling him.

He shifted his grip on my shoulders to catch my neck in the crook of his arm, lightly choking me.

I jabbed him in the soft side of his belly, which only made him choke me harder.

Our roughhousing carried on until we caught sight of Mrs. Earles, standing at the corner of the road.

From her reaction, it looked like she’d been looking for us.  Jamie  let go of my neck and the back of my underwear.  I released him, too, and fixed my clothes.

“Where are the others?” she asked.

“Maybe a minute behind,” I said, looking back to check.  “We needed to talk a bit.”

“So it seems,” she said, before reaching down to fix Jamie’s collar.  “Something’s come up?”

“Mary?” I asked, without missing a beat.  “Did something happen?”

“No.  Mary just arrived with her bags.  But she came with company.”

The puppeteer?  No.  Too soon.

“Mr. Hayle?” I asked.  Without missing a breath, I added, “Did he want something?”

“Yes to both questions,” she said.  She was distracted, craning her neck to see if she could spot the others.  “Professor Hayle asked you to meet him at the old stable?  Do you know where that is?”

“Yes,” Jamie said.

“Good, because I don’t.  If you want to go ahead, I can point the others your way.”

“We’ll wait,” I said, at the same time as Jamie’s, “Okay.”

“We’ll wait,” I reaffirmed.  Jamie nodded.

It did take less than a minute for the others to catch up.  When they came into sight, the smallest children picked up speed, stampeding toward Mrs. Earles.  She didn’t bend down to greet them, but reached out to touch a head here and there.

When Gordon and Helen saw us, I pointed down the side street to our right.  Gordon nodded.

It took Helen some work to peel away from the children that had clustered around her.  Not the youngest, the four to six year olds didn’t take to Helen as much, but the girls who were closer to my age, just a step below hers, they tended to idolize her.

While she said goodbyes and gently cut them short as they tried to question her, I had a thought.  “Lillian?”

“Lillian is with Mary,” Mrs. Earles said.

That bothered me.  It was hard to put my finger on why.

I glanced back at Rick, who was looking at our contingent with a curious look in his eye.  He started to follow, but Mrs. Earles served to run interference, ordering him to help her with the children.

I took too much joy in that.

Helen finally caught up, turning her back to everyone but our little group, her expression going flat.

We walked down the side street together.  Toward the old stable, which hadn’t held any proper horses for a long time.  It was a minor landmark, and it was too much of one to be knocked down, too ramshackle to see any use.

“I told Rick to back off,” Gordon said.

“He won’t,” I said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “I figured.  But I thought I’d try.  Wish I could do more.”

“Tell me that you agree he’s bent in the head.”

“He’s bent in the head,” Gordon agreed.

“Thank you!” I said, pointing, looking at Jamie.  “See?”

Jamie stammered, “That’s not- No.  I didn’t say he wasn’t.  I said it’s not-”

“You don’t think he’s the smarmy, too-nice, wear Sy’s entrails as a belt sort of bent,” I said.

“I, uh, no.”

“Just you wait.  If Mrs. Earles catches him licking the bathroom floor again, then-”

“Again?” Jamie cut in.

“See?  Right there.  First place your mind goes isn’t ‘he wouldn’t do that’.  You’re fixating on the ‘again’ part!”

“No,” Gordon said, very calmly, “I think it’s fine to fixate on the ‘again’ part of it.  I think you’re a little over the top on that one.”

“Just you wait,” I warned.

“I’ll wait,” Gordon said.  “Don’t kill him in the meantime.  It’s probably undeserved and it’ll upset Professor Hayle.”

“And not the kind of upset that he usually lets you get away with,” Jamie pointed out.

“I know, I know!”

The trip to the stables didn’t take too long.  The rain gradually increased in intensity, then settled to a light drizzle.  I welcomed it, pushing my hair back.  Jamie had his hood down too now that it was only drizzling, his long hair damp but not wet.  His glasses were speckled with droplets he wasn’t wiping away.

When we arrived, I caught sight of Mary.  Lillian was a short distance away.  Hayle stood by the door of the stables, with Dog and Catcher nearby.  I spotted the Gorger in the stables, sitting on the floor, his forehead as high as the stable door.

Mary looked a little out of her depth, but she was centered enough that she wasn’t letting it show.  I had to infer not from expression or body language, but by the distance between her and Lillian.  I liked that they weren’t standing close together.

Mary was wearing regular clothes for the first time since I’d met her, no Mothmont uniform or patient’s gown, and she had her hair in ribbons, a different configuration than I’d seen at our first meeting.  Her hair was longer, and hadn’t been cut, though it was braided at one side for neatness’ sake.

She acknowledged me with a small smile as I approached, Jamie trailing after me.

Hayle was wearing his black lab coat, a simple shirt and slacks beneath, a folded umbrella at his side.  The overhanging roof above the stable door was shielding him from the rain.  He was talking to Gorger, but his eyes were on us, looking us over, assessing us, his eyes flickering between Mary and me a few times, measuring, much as I’d measured her distance from everyone else.

As Jamie had speculated, I’d modeled much of what I knew and did after other people around me, and I supposed one of those people was Mr. Hayle.

Dog was lying down in mud, very possibly enjoying the cool muck and grime.  His expression was always hard to read, as he didn’t have a proper mouth and the metal fixtures around his face stretched skin and pulled at muscle in ways that made it less intuitive.  Metal shutters that were normally down around the jaw had been raised around the nose, I noted, covering the lower half of his face.  More guarded?

Catcher was still, unmoving, hands in pockets, his mancatcher standing up so it leaned against his elbow.

And the Gorger… well, the Gorger was the Gorger.  Fat and naked, with skin that looked too thick, bugged-out eyes with too-small pupils that moved too slowly drifting lazily over each of us, small, too-puckered lips pursed.  Hayle was talking to him, but he wasn’t reacting or giving any hint that he was even listening.

“The Lambs,” Catcher said.  “It’s been a little while.”

“Just a little while,” I said.  “Doing okay?”

“It’s been worse, Sy,” he replied.

Gordon and Helen had broken away from Jamie and me.  Gordon went straight to Dog.  Where a handshake would do for someone else, Gordon simply reached out to touch the side of Dog’s head, brushing some hair back and away from Dog’s eye.  Something in Dog relaxed the slightest fraction, muscles all down his shoulders and backs easing where they’d been tense.

Lonely thing.

Helen, for her part, was walking more slowly, swaying a little with her hands clasped behind her back, her skirt swishing left and right with each set of steps.  She came to a stop somewhere midway between Gordon and the rest of us, hands still clasped behind her.

The swaying was almost playful, which was very interesting unto itself.  Helen didn’t have a very expressive personality, and any expression she did give was usually for someone else’s benefit.

That raised the question of just who Helen was acting for, here.  I looked over everyone, human and experiment alike, and I couldn’t pin it down.

That made me think it was for her own benefit.  A hint of the personality that Helen was crafting for herself?  An experiment, to see how people she saw as important might react and validate?

She caught me studying her and smiled a little, and it was a naughty smile.

Because Jamie wasn’t the only one who knew me well enough to guess what I was thinking.  Was it for my benefit?

“She’s scary,” Mary murmured.

“You’re scary,” I said.

“Well…” Mary said, and from the sound of it, she didn’t have a particularly good retort.

“She’s on your side,” I said.  “Which makes her a good scary, right?”

“Yeah,” Mary said, not sounding convinced.

This very scene was very much Helen’s medium.  It was very much not Mary’s.

It made me feel a great deal more confident in having her join the group.  I hadn’t lost her in the time that Hayle and Lil and all the other Academy people had been poking, prodding, and interrogating her.

I reached out with a hand, touching hers.

She clasped my hand, and the surprising tightness of the hold told me my read on her wasn’t wrong in the slightest.

“Whatever this is about,” Gordon commented, “It’s big.”

Hayle had just finished talking to Gorger.  He turned to face us.  “It’s… potentially problematic.  Other special projects are already working on it.  I wanted to bring you up to speed and make sure you’re communicating effectively.”

“That’s not a problem,” Gordon said, hand still on Dog’s temple.

“I’ll be brief.  This is an all-hands-on-deck situation.  Something got loose in the Academy.  A student project.  Catcher suggested we reach out to you, simply to have more eyes on the scene.”

“If something got loose and they can’t catch it, what makes you think we can?”  Gordon asked.

“We lose nothing by putting ourselves out there to help, and refusing would look bad, when the Academy is this concerned,” Hayle said.  “It was a lose-lose, where standing down would make us look ineffectual, but they weren’t confident you wouldn’t get in the way.  I made our case, and they agreed to let us participate in the hunt, with the proviso that I have you meet some of the other special projects, tell you to communicate, and stress, very carefully, very emphatically, that you are not to get in the way.”

We all nodded, Mary included.

“Don’t nod, Sylvester,” Hayle said.  “I’m directing this largely at you.”

I couldn’t keep the smile off my face.  “I- what?  Why me?”

He didn’t dignify that with an answer.  Instead, he pointed at Mary, “I agreed to your request to let her join.  I’ve indulged you a great many times in the past several years.  I’m asking you to cooperate here.  Please.”

The smile slipped from my face.  I felt Mary squeeze my hand.

“I will,” I said.

He nodded.  “The experiment can’t leave the bounds of the city.  Gorger will be in the wooded outskirts, Dog and Catcher in the city.  We’re operating under the assumption that it’s still somewhere in the Academy, and much of the focus is there.  You’ll be there, and I’ve arranged for you to talk to the culprit.”

“Culprit,” Gordon said.  “That’s an interesting word choice.”

“It’s the right one,” Hayle said.  “This incident was a deliberate one, and it was carried out by a student, who wasn’t operating alone.”

“Is it… them?” I asked, glancing at Mary.  “The group that Percy was working with?”

“We don’t know,” Hayle said.  “We’re following up on some things, but probably not.  I’ve heard others suggest it’s something else.  Whatever the case, word is out about the escaped experiment, and it’s spreading.  People are scared.  A fast resolution is preferred.”

I bit back a sigh and a smartass comment.  He had to jinx it.

“We’re on it,” Gordon said.

“Good,” Hayle said.  “Go.”

We moved.  Gorger rising, heaving his massive bulk to a standing position.  Dog and Catcher turned, moving off down a side street as a pair.  The remainder of us, the Lambs and our medic, headed in the direction of the Academy, Hayle following behind.

Mary didn’t let go of my hand the entire way to the Academy.

Cat out of the Bag 2.2

We entered the Academy.  The road divided, with a loop moving around to the emergency entrance for the Hedge, and the main road continuing straight beneath a massive arch.  I noted that double guard had been stationed between the emergency entrance and the archway.  The men in uniform gave us wary glances, but Hayle, still trailing well behind our group, gave them a wave, and they let us through.

The way in was a gate with heavy doors.  They were paneled with wood, but I knew from past experience and observation that the wood covered heavy steel.  They were heavy, they were massive, and the idea was that they would stand up to a bomb blast if need be.  If things came down to it, the Academy doubled as a fortress.

Pity about the town, but the Academy was built to stand tall through virtually any scenario.

“We didn’t get much of a chance to talk,” I remarked to Mary.

“No,” she agreed.  “I don’t think they wanted us to talk.”

“I can see that,” I said.  I thought about how Hayle had stressed that I shouldn’t play fast and loose with this particular job.  Had he wanted to assert his own degree of control over Mary?  How would he have done it?

Well, keeping us separated was a way.  I’d promised that she wouldn’t have to be alone, and Hayle had forced me to break that promise, in a minor way.  By showing my face I’d done what I could to convince her I was trying, but now it was time to follow through.

“I remember overhearing you talk about how you hadn’t expected to deal with us,” I said.  “You thought it would be Dog and Catcher, or one of the other experiments.”

“Yeah.  We researched what we could, but things were hard to find.  We didn’t want to tip anyone off,” she said.  She pulled her hand away from mine and adjusted her sweater, tugging at the side of her skirt, and very pointedly didn’t put her hand in mine again.

My mind raced through three immediate possibilities as to why she’d done that.  She craved to belong somewhere; had she imprinted on the Academy, and was she now conscious of the Academy watching her expression and interaction with me?   That meant Hayle had won, in a way.  She was his as much as she was mine.

Or had I made her uncomfortable, reminding her of the past and her past affiliations?  That meant my grip was slipping, but it could be recouped.

Finally, it could be discomfort.  Was she adopting a passive role?  Subordinate, loyal, following my lead explicitly.  If that was the case, then I had to be especially gentle.

“Hm,” I said, calm and quiet, as if I’d been thinking about something else altogether.  Then, not betraying my racing thoughts, I asked, “What was the plan to deal with them?  Can I ask?”

“We had ideas.  Stockpiles of weapons, traps.  It’s hard, with the school being what it is, there aren’t many hiding places with that many people running around.”

“But you had things.”

“Mostly on the roof and in certain places in the basement.  I had a stock of hair coloring and skunk musk, so I could go from brunette to blonde, throw them off the scent and then disappear into the crowd.”

“That’s a myth,” I pointed out.  “The skunk urine.  Perpetuated by the Academy.  It only makes it easier for Dog to track you.  Doesn’t slow him down.”

One hand behind my back, I made a ‘come hither’ gesture.

“Oh,” she said.  There was a pause.  I noticed Gordon’s approach.  Mary noted him coming up to walk on my right before she said, “Is it bad that that really bothers me?”

I smiled, making a sound that was half-exhalation and half-laugh, raising my hand behind my back, a ‘stop’ gesture.  “No.  That would drive me nuts.”

“Sy more than most,” Gordon said.  “It’s one of the three best ways to put him in a foul mood, when a scheme of his doesn’t come together, past, present, or planned.”

“Scheme,” I said.  “Using that word makes me think I should grow up to have a fishhook mustache I curl with my fingers.”

“I think that’s accurate,” Gordon said.

If it were Jamie, I would have jabbed him, started a light tussle, but it wasn’t.  Gordon would make me look bad, and he would do it without trying.

Mary managed a proper smile for the first time today.  “What are the other two ways to get to him?”

Gordon snickered, and there was something in the sound that betrayed his ‘nice boy’ image, hinting at the guy he really was.  In a way, it was more honest, showing that side of himself, but it wasn’t gentle or nice.

“You’ll have to give me something to get something,” he said.

“Will I, now?” she asked, easily falling into the stride of the conversation. “I’ll have to keep that in mind.”

One day, not now but soon, I imagined he’d hone that hidden edge to a razor point.  Used right, he could draw girls to him, good looks, build, and ‘knight in shining armor’ image to get their initial interest, then hinting at the secret beneath the surface to hook them.

Mary was too wary for the hook to set, barb and all, but she was intrigued enough to let walls down.  Her shoulders were less tense now.

“You’re the hero of the Lambs.  The vanguard,” Mary observed.

“I’m nothing special,” he said, looking beyond me to give her a one-sided smirk that betrayed the lie.

“Sy said you were.”

“Did he?  Well, then it must be true,” Gordon said, softening the sarcasm with with a smile.  Mary smiled back.  “Which direction are we going, again?”

“Bowels, I’d think,” I said, pointing.  I turned, starting to walk backward, raising my voice and pointing.  “Bowels?”

Hayle, just in earshot, nodded and pointed in the same direction.

We turned left.  Claret hall was only a little ways to our right, bordered by other main buildings, the Rows, and various roads.

“Bowels,” Mary said.  “Haven’t heard that one.”

“Students call them the dungeons, the tunnels, or the pit.  The official name is ‘Labs, comma, recessed’,  Gorger’s home.”

“I heard about the dungeons and the tunnels,” Mary said.  She paused.  “Gorger.  We didn’t have a plan for him.  What could we even do, except scatter, run, and stick to the public eye?”

“Mm,” I said, noncommittal.  “Let your guard down, he hits you like a freight train.  Can’t hurt him with anything short of a proper cannon, and I doubt even we could contrive to get him to stand in the way of one for long enough.”

“I’m a little surprised it’s even a consideration,” Mary said.  “You’ve clearly thought about it, weighed options, and decided you’d lose?”

“Wrong on four counts,” I said, right off the back of her question.

I saw her pause, raising a hand to count on fingertips, rephrasing her question in her head.

“I haven’t given a lot of thought to that particular problem, so that stuff and everything that follows is off the top of my head.  Gorger doesn’t get out much, so he’s one of the ones we see the least of, next to the Hangman.”

“Hangman?” she asked.

I plowed on past the question, “Second, I didn’t weigh options, I turned my thoughts to strategy-”

“Scheming,” Gordon said, sounding bored.

“-and plotted-”

“Schemed.”

“-the best way of doing things.  Thirdly-”

“You have to ignore him when he gets like this,” Gordon commented.

“-I don’t think it’s a loss, thank you very much.  I think the cannon would be a failure, but that’s hardly the only way to do it.  I’m betting a victory of sorts could be managed.”

“Though he’s harder to ignore than I’d like,” Gordon remarked.  “I agree with him there.  I think we’d win.”

“That’s only three, and you’ve run out of points to argue,” Mary said.  “Did you say four to get me to pay attention?”

“Yeah,” I said.  Because you’re insecure and you’re more likely to fixate on a proper number, which can be more easily proven or disproven.

“Ah,” she said.  I thought I caught a roll of the eyes as she glanced away, looking over the Academy.  The trees grew wild in between buildings, and there were places where the branches meshed with the branches that jutted out of buildings.  There were more stitched at this end of the Academy, and more general experiments.  It was interesting to look at.

“Pause for emphasis,” Gordon said.  Mary snapped her head around to look at him.  He was smirking.  “Then Sy’s reveal.  There was a fourth reason.  He never said there wasn’t.”

“You’re ruining it,” I said.

“Only because you’re predictable.”

I mock-gasped.  “You take that back, you oaf.”

He didn’t flinch.  “Better to be an oaf than to be puny.”

I mock-gasped again, with a little more emphasis.

“Four?” Mary cut in, before we started fighting in earnest.

I shrugged.  “You said you.  That Gordon, Helen, Jamie, Lillian and I would lose if we were up against Gorger in some confrontation or another.  Maybe you’re right.  But that’s wrong.  You’d have been more accurate if you’d said we.  You’re a member of the team.”

Mary turned my way.  For someone else, the statement might have fallen flat, phrased as casually and awkwardly as it was, but the inclusiveness mattered to her.  I’d touched on a topic at the core of her being.

I had her attention.  I suspected that if I grabbed her hand, she wouldn’t pull away.

But suspicion wasn’t good enough.  Not when I didn’t know why she’d pulled away in the first place.

I’d phrased it in a matter-of-fact way, leaving it to hang out there and be taken for what it was worth.  Now I distracted from it.  Better to avoid letting Mary sit with the idea and the statement long enough to doubt it or tear it to pieces.

“We’re here,” I said.  “We should let the others catch up and get the debrief.”

Mary leaned over to peer down.

‘Here’ happened to be a hole in the ground.  It was a nice hole in the ground, with a roof over it and a short wall to keep the rain out.  Lights punctuated a spiral stairway.  An easy-to-miss plaque on a nearby wall indicated to those who were looking that this was the entrance to the Bowels.

Still, there were very few people who had cause to enter the Bowels without already knowing where and what it was.  Guests didn’t tend to, unless they were from Academies other than Radham’s, and even regular students didn’t have much cause to go beneath.

Some students passed us, giving us weird looks, looking like they might say something, before they spotted Hayle following up the rear.

They hurried on, disappearing down the stairs, each with a hand on the rails.  The descent was a nervous one, with stairs taken quickly, heads down and eyes fixed on points further down the stairs.

Lillian was holding the strap of her satchel with both hands.  “About once every two weeks, they have to lock a whole section down.  Something’s escaped, something went missing, a container broke, a chain broke.  Send Gorger in, then seal it off.  Drop stone blocks that whole teams of stitched have to winch back up, maybe flood the section, maybe ignite the air, and give it some time to be sure.”

“Whatever it is,” Hayle said, “If it’s here in the recessed labs, it’s likely better to be safe than sorry.”

“Whatever Dog, Catcher, Gorger and all the rest are hunting, it came from the Bowels, didn’t it?” Gordon asked.

“It did,” Hayle said.  “The students that carried out the release are still down there.”

“Makes sense,” Lillian said, in a small voice.  “I don’t think even the students that work down there like being down there.”

It gets even better.  With Gorger out and about, they don’t have anyone to clean up.  If something happens, and they don’t flood or burn the section, they’ll just wait it out.  Leave the section blocked off until everything inside has starved to death.  Including us.

“You don’t have to come,” I told Lillian, knowing full well she did.

She smiled, a light of hope in her eyes as she looked to Hayle for confirmation.

“I would insist that she accompany you,” Hayle said, shattering that hope.

Lillian’s face fell.

Hayle started down the stairs, and we followed.  Hard shoes on stone stairs made for a bit of clatter, and the sounds echoed off the walls.

“I assumed you’d ask about the job if you had questions,” Hayle said.  “Are you wanting to go in blind, or did you want details?”

“Details now are good,” Gordon said.  “Please.  Sir.”

The sir sounded like an afterthought.  Was Gordon a little irritated that Hayle had pushed about Lillian coming?

Gordon was being protective?  Cute.

Then again, I had no place to comment.  I was very aware of everything Mary was doing.

“The project is a living weapon, C-tier.  It’s vat grown, cartilaginous, with a simple construction.  Redundant, durable organs, a thick exterior of placoid scales, and a brain diffused across its body mass.”

C-tier.  Larger than a man, smaller than a coach car.

“Placoid… it’s covered in teeth?” Lillian asked.

“In a fashion.”

“What’s the angle?” Gordon asked.

“Sensory organs.  Our creature is covered in fine, flexible ‘hairs’, with fine sawtooth construction.  It can sense and process changes in air current, temperature, lighting, and vibrations in the atmosphere.  It remains hyper-aware of its surroundings, and this is, we think, why it has proven so hard to track down and catch.”

“Smart?” I asked.

“Instinctive intelligence.”

“Fast?” Helen asked.  “Dangerous?”

“Less than you might think.  It moves deliberately.  It identifies lone prey and smashes itself against that prey.  The hairs cut on contact, and the experiment uses its own mass to pulverize.  It smears itself against destroyed prey to coat itself in blood and absorbs the nutrients through the gaps in the scaling.”

“That sounds really inefficient,” Lillian said.

Hayle smiled at her, pleased at how well his student was doing, but his words weren’t smiling words, “Unfortunately so.”

“Unfortunately?” Helen cut in.  She was doing that walk again, hands behind her back, almost playful, thunking her shoes against the stairs with each step.  It was annoying, possibly trying to provoke a reaction, but our collective attention was elsewhere.

“If it is that inefficient, then it has to do it more often,” Lillian said.

“Even more often if it’s shy and bolts the moment someone comes to investigate the noise and screaming,” Gordon said.

“Seven have died this morning,” Hayle said.  “I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about an eighth or a ninth when I return to my office.  Six died on the Academy grounds, one died on the top of the outside wall.”

“Leading to concerns that it might have slipped through the net,” Gordon said.

“And the decision to bring more eyes in,” Hayle said.  “Which leads us here.  Our culprits included one of the students on this project.  He had a note with the time for release.  We have the other students on the project, but we don’t believe they were involved.  They’re available for you to talk to, of course.”

We’d stepped away from the staircase.  The hallways were brightly lit, which didn’t quite fit the ‘dungeon’ theme, but every wall was thicker than my arms were long, cut from slabs of stone, and the doors were heavy and reinforced.

I eyed the ceiling, looking at the notches, furrows, and larger pieces of stone that were held up by relatively small clasps and braces of metal.  I wasn’t the only one looking.

“Remember.  The students are your focus here,” Hayle said.  “You’re not equipped to deal with the escaped experiment.  It instinctively slips away from anything and anyone that approaches, favoring darker, quieter areas, unless that thing or someone is both small and alone, in which case it feeds.  There is no ‘fight’ to be had, here.  Focus on the students.  Motivations, ulterior motives, accomplices.”

“Yes sir,” Gordon said, nodding.  I joined in, despite wanting to add something along the lines of ‘I think he wants us to focus on the students’.

Had to be good.

We were quite a ways down the length of a hallway.  A quartet of students saw Hayle and picked up their pace a little.

If a black-coat Professor was in the Bowels and walking fast, it was probably a good idea to pick up one’s pace and get out.  Just in case.

Hayle stopped abruptly by a door.  He plucked a file from a slot that was built into the door’s exterior, and handed it to Jamie, who opened it and started reading.

“You’ll find him in here.  Walter Gund.  Better than average student, his father is a politician in Wiltwyck, but he’s lost any and all favor he once enjoyed.  Anything is permissible, so long as you don’t maim or kill the boy.”

Nods.

“Questions?”

We exchanged glances between us, then shook our collective heads.

“You know where to find me.  Be good,” Hayle reminded us.  Me, for that last part.  He handed Gordon a key.

He left as quickly as he’d arrived.  Leaving us to our own devices.

We watched as he made his retreat, his footsteps echoing down the hall.  Just when we were clear, a group of students emerged from another room, opening the door and closing it behind them, looking stunned to see us gathered outside another office, then went on their way without kicking up a fuss.

Once they’d left, we were clear.

“Should one of us take point?” Gordon asked.  “Or we take turns?”

“Kind of boring to be standing out in the hallway doing nothing,” Jamie said.

“Yes,” I agreed.  “Yes.  That.”

“All of us take point?”

“All at once,” I said.  “Introduce him to the Lambs.  And Lillian.”

Lillian gave me an annoyed look.  Better than the waves of sheer terror that had been radiating off her a moment ago.

Mary wasn’t much better, but she had a better poker face.  Almost flawless, as faces went.

“Don’t worry, honey.  It’s not so bad down here,” Helen said.

“It’s pretty bad,” Mary said.  “Any place where you casually mention setting the air on fire as a just-in-case measure is pretty bad.”

“Thank you,” Lillian said.  “You put it in words better than I could have.”

Mary smiled at her.

“I grew up here,” Helen said.  She was smiling, looking excited.  “I wasn’t born here, I was harmless when they made me.  But Doctor Ibott spent a lot of time observing and working down here, and he wanted me at arm’s reach.  I think you can even find toys I hid from Ibott here and there.”

Mary maintained a very neutral expression at Helen’s casual mention that she’d grown up among the ‘if it escapes, drown and burn everything’ projects.  I could have probably cracked her composure by mentioning what young Helen had deemed a ‘toy’, but stayed quiet.

“I’ll be happier when we’re gone,” Lillian said.  “No offense.”

Mary nodded in solidarity.

“No offense taken,” Helen said.

Mary and Lillian were friends.  For all my efforts, I hadn’t been able to see Mary as often as the girl who actually lived on Academy grounds.

It annoyed me.

“All at once, then,” Gordon said.  “Approach?”

“He’s a good student,” Jamie said.  “Citations for smoking in the dorm room-”

Jamie stopped as I reached out and tore the bottom of one page.

“Um.  Lost my place.  Let’s see… Almost got kicked out, but the Academy dropped the issue.  Being out and about with friends, drinking, in town for girls… no issue.  He’s only twenty-two, and he’s on a project like this.  That suggests something.”

I rolled up the paper.  I knew the answer, but didn’t give it.

Gordon looked at me, he was thinking the same thing.

I just prayed Lillian didn’t jump in with the answer.

“Daddy helped him out,” Mary said.

“Exactly,” Gordon said.  He flashed a smile.

Mary smiled back.

I chimed in, “He’s led a sheltered life.  Let’s make it clear just how unsheltered his existence is now.  Helen?  You lead.  Gordon, talk, I’ll signal you when I want a turn.  Jamie?  Jump in, facts from the folder.”

“And me?” Mary asked.

“He has a powerful dad.  Are you telling me you didn’t pick anything up at Mothmont, when it comes to parental expectations and the wrath of Dad?  Hit him where it hurts.”

She nodded slowly.

“Ready?” Gordon asked.

Not hearing a ‘no’, he unlocked and opened the door.

The metal hinges of the heavy door creaked painfully as the door swung open.

Our man wore a handlebar mustache, and he was big, ginger-haired and broad shouldered, with no sign of a gut, despite his large arms.  He’d been stripped of his coat, and now sat at the corner of the cot, one of only four pieces of furniture in the room – cot, toilet, table, and chair.

No books, nothing to do with himself.

Walter stood as he saw us.  I saw bewilderment, consternation.

Where the Bad Seeds had known who we were right away, this young man didn’t, I was certain.  He saw a group of children, Helen smiling, Gordon glaring, Jamie and Mary with blank expressions.  He looked to me, the smallest, as if I was somehow less threatening, and I gave him the coldest look I could manage.

Our group slowed, Gordon pausing to shut the door and lock it.  Helen maintained course.  She headed straight for him.

“Uh,” he said.  “I think-”

Helen, smiling sweetly, grabbed him by the balls.

He staggered, but the movement didn’t break her grip.  He swung, and she bent low, taking advantage of his height.  She passed between his legs, almost swinging, pulling his dangling bits backward toward his asshole, and led him to bend far enough forward that he fell onto his hands and one knee.

“If you fight her, she’ll do permanent damage,” Gordon said.  “Ease up, Helen?  I think he’s willing to cooperate.”

She eased up, but she didn’t let go.

He heaved for breath.

“What are we calling this thing, anyway?” Gordon asked.

“Whiskers,” I said, a moment before Helen called out, “Fluffy!”

Jamie’s, “Twitches,” was so far behind it was closer to a fourth place finish than a third.

Mary glanced at me, confused.

“Bit of a competition,” I whispered.  “I tend to win these.”

“Ah,” she whispered back.

“Let’s talk,” Gordon spoke to our hostage.  “Motives.  Start.”

“You can’t-”

“Your dad knows,” Mary said.  “We’ve talked to him.  We explained.  He’s done with you.”

Hm.  Right for the jugular.  It fit the Mary I knew, but I had to give her a lesson in this.  To properly break a person, one had to start at the outside edges, and work inward.  Once you hit them with the worst possible scenario, there was little place left to go from there.

Still, it was interesting to get to know Mary on this level.

“No,” Walter said.  “I don’t believe that.”

“You’re the eldest son,” Jamie said.  “But when people die like people have been dying, and one’s son is responsible, sometimes a man has to face the fact that he’s raised a failure.”

“I’m not-”

“You’re crawling on the ground with your balls in a little girl’s hands,” Gordon said.  “What do you think you are?  The next Jacob Black?”

I watched the man’s face change.  I puzzled over it.  The confusion.  The reaction.

Ah.

I raised my hand, and saw Gordon’s head turn incrementally.

He passed the baton to me, in a manner of speaking.

“We know your dad is involved,” I said.  “We sent someone after him, and we have him in custody.  He’s throwing you out with the anchor, Walter.  Talking is the only way to stay afloat.”

I saw his eyes widen.

“Start fast,” Gordon said.

His reaction had told me that something didn’t add up, and it was related to something we’d said already.

His dad was involved, a powerful politician, in another prominent city, no less.

Which raised ever so many questions.

Cat out of the Bag 2.3

“I- I- Um,” Walter started.  He winced as Helen changed position, repositioning and squashing Walter’s future children in the process.  “Agh.”

“Start talking, Walter,” Gordon said, “We have all day.  You most definitely don’t.”

“I’m think- thinking,” Walter said.  “It’s kind of hard when-  Ow!  Augh.  I might… throw up.”

“I wouldn’t,” I commented, still giving our man a cold, dead look.  “Every second counts.  You need to give us something your father won’t.”

“What- who are you?”

“That’s not helping you, Walter,” Gordon said.  “You need to focus on the answers, not on coming up with questions.”

“I… what do you want to know?”

“That’s another question!” Helen chimed in, chirpy and cheerful, sounding just like a little girl on Christmas morning.

“Urrgh!” Walter grunted.  He kicked, twisting, very possibly deciding the momentary agony was worth pulling himself free of Helen’s grip.

He was underestimating how strong Helen’s grip could be.

The pain was bad enough that he did follow through on his promise of throwing up.  I winced a little in sympathy.

Mary leaned closer to me.  She murmured in my ear, “Why didn’t you send her after us like that?”

“Her musculature and joints are different,” I murmured back.  “In configuration and type.  Mostly, she’s bad at exerting a lot of strength very quickly.  She’s almost weaker than me when it comes to throwing proper punches, and that’s with her being bigger than me.”

“She’s almost weaker,” Jamie remarked, leaning in to join the conversation.

“I said almost!” I protested, annoyed.  “Geez.”

“Give her a few years and some practice, maybe she’ll be dangerous in a scrap,” Jamie said, ignoring me.

“If she can get her hands on someone, we’re good,” I said, not taking my eyes off Helen.  “You could use a prybar and you wouldn’t make her let go, and the sudden strength she can employ lets her take advantage of any openings.”

We watched our man flounder.  He was only just finishing puking.

“I-I thought there was going to be a trial,” Walter finally said.

“Who do you think we are?” Gordon asked.  “We’re your trial, Walter.”

Walter managed to focus, raising his head to peer at Gordon through disheveled red hair.

“We’re the Judge…” I said.  Really, really, hoping someone else would pick up the tail end of the statement.

“Jury,” Jamie said.

I love you, Jamie.

“And executioners,” Mary said.

You’re awesome, Mary.

“If need be,” Gordon tacked on.

Eh.  You’re alright, Gordon.

It made sense, to give the man a little hope, maybe, but I would have rather ratcheted up the tension another notch or two.  As it stood, the man looked like he couldn’t wrap his head around the idea, and Gordon’s softening of the blow wasn’t helping to hammer it through and make Walter’s situation crystal clear in his very confused mind.

“Executioner?”  Walter asked.

“You intentionally freed your little project, Wally,” I said.  “Gorger is out doing what Gorger does.  You know what Gorger does, right?”

“He cleans up messes,” Lil said, when Walter didn’t respond quick enough.

“He cleans up messes,” I said, staring Walter down.  “Well, Gorger’s doing just that.  But while he’s away, we’re here.  Filling in his shoes.  Are you going to help, Wally, or are you going to be a mess that Gorger’s temporary replacements need to clean up?”

I saw the light dawning in Wally’s eyes.  The realization.

Yeah.  You’re in a much, much worse situation than you thought.  All the pieces are fitting together.  You were wondering who these children are, and now I’ve connected the dots for you.  The only way it all makes sense is if we’re with the Academy, same as Gorger is.  When we talk about being possible executioners, you now know we’re telling the truth.

Now how are you going to react, knowing more than just your balls and dignity are on the line?

It was visible across his body.  The adrenaline rush, the fight-or-flight response.

He was a big guy, and as launched himself into a mindset that was all ‘survival’, the pain of being crushed between the legs apparently disappeared.  He flipped himself over, so he was on his back rather than all fours, and kicked at Helen.

I winced at that.  Not because Helen couldn’t take a bit of abuse, but because Ibott would get fussy and maybe hit me again.  That last bruise had taken a week to fade.

Helen was like a rag doll, sagging, leaning heavily to one side, letting herself be flexible enough that the relaxed motion absorbed the impact more than her head did.

Walter lurched forward, slamming Helen against the wall, forearm against her throat.

Mary started, as if she was going to run forward.  I put my hand out, stopping her.

Walter was tall, and he was muscular, probably someone who did sports to get away from the hassles and stresses of spending much of the week in the Bowels.  With his ruddy complexion, it was probably something like horseback riding or a field sport.  His belly suggested that it wasn’t all muscle, either.  Women tended to like a guy with a barrel chest, broad shoulders, and Walter was very much that.

All in all, our man was fourteen stone, maybe.  Maybe as much as seventeen.  Helen was less than half his weight, and he was leaning hard, the vast majority of his weight pinning her down, pressing down on her windpipe.  It made for an awkward, hunched position, as Helen still hadn’t let go of him.

Frantic, a little nervous, Walter looked back over one shoulder.  Worried about being attacked from behind.

Gordon hadn’t moved from the side of the table.  Lil, Mary, Jamie and I were all by the door.

Nobody was moving a muscle to react.  Even Mary had relaxed at my suggestion.

“This is looking more like a mess that really needs to be cleaned up,” Gordon commented, calm.  “Don’t hurt him too badly, Helen.  Even if he doesn’t decide to talk, the Academy could use him for raw materials.”

I couldn’t resist smirking at that line.  It was a good one.  Very Gordon.

Walter turned back to Helen, and found her smiling, sweet as she ever was, while he tried and failed to crush her throat, strangling her.

Slowly, he began to slip, huffing, panting, tearing at the eyes.  His arm moved, jerking.  He started to groan, and the groan became a scream.

Then he broke away, releasing her, falling onto his back.  One of his legs was twitching, as if the pain was bad enough it couldn’t stay still.

Helen released him, then grabbed one leg, holding it still while she wiped the blood off of her hand, where it had seeped through cloth.  She apparently didn’t think he was up to putting up a fight.

She flashed a smile to our little group by the door, rubbing at her throat.  She didn’t seem to be having trouble breathing.

Gordon, for his part, stood over Walter, looking down.  Walter would be seeing him upside down.  The man was heaving in breaths.

“People died, Walter,” Gordon said.  “The blame is going to fall on your shoulders.  Other students are going to think it makes them look bad.  The Academy is going to want to make an example of you.  Just to be safe.  Because this sort of thing can’t happen again.  Not with regularity, not ever.”

Walter shook his head.

I chimed in.  “When a mistake happens, that’s bad.  But intentional sabotage?  Boy oh boy, Walter.  Not good.”

“And… I’m supposed to talk, get you to take… take it easier on me?”

“That ship might have sailed,” Gordon said.  “But given where you are right now?  Circumstances and all?  I’d really recommend trying.”

“They… we spent a long time talking about it.  Hypotheticals.  What if.”

“What if you let something loose?”

Walter nodded.  “We, my dad and I, we… I almost didn’t attend the Academy.  There were problems, my… dad never liked it.  But we thought I’d join, I’d see how it was, what could be done.”

“Destroy it from within?”

Walter made a face, like he was going to laugh, but there was only pain and agony instead.

“Well?” Gordon asked.

“No.  We didn’t think that big.  The Crown has come closer than anyone, anything, to actually controlling the world.  The Academies are what let them do it, mostly.  I’m… I’m strong, smart, but not so damn deluded that I think I can destroy them, damn it.  Damn it.”  His voice cracked with those last two words.  Emotion.

“Take them down a peg, maybe,” Gordon said.

Walter nodded a little.  He let out a little whimper of a sound, looked over toward me, Jamie, and Mary.  “Was going to steal some books, make a run for it, go to another country, sell the knowledge for enough to get rich.  My father had everything ready, I thought.  But I didn’t get far enough.”

“Every student thinks about how much they could get for the sort of knowledge the Academy has,” Jamie said, holding his book and the file that Hayle had given us.  “Not many actually try it.”

“It’s suicidal,” Lillian said.  “You had to know you’d get caught.”

“We talked ourselves into it,” Walter said, he gave us a smile, one that was awfully sad.  Self-pitying.

“Just you and your dad?” Mary asked.  “That’s as far as it went?”

Walter made a sound of pain, by way of response.

“Doesn’t really make sense,” Mary said.  “Him going this far, using his own son as a tool, then discarding his son as soon as he got caught.”

It doesn’t make sense because it’s a lie, I thought, tensing up a little bit.  Maybe we shouldn’t make Wally think too hard about it.

Walter wasn’t responding.  I wondered if he was in the process of passing out.

“Why did he care so much about the Academy?” Mary asked.

Still pushing…

“He… he’s powerful, he’s rich, but he’s only a man in the middle,” Walter responded.  “Servant to the people, servant to the Academy.”

“Servant,” Jamie echoed him.

Walter nodded.

“And it bothers him so much he’d sacrifice you as a pawn,” Mary said, her voice soft.

Was Mary clutching too hard to her past, failing to see and interpret this situation for what it was?

If it was the case, if I couldn’t fix it, then she was useless to us.

We’d have to discard her, and I’d have to admit to Hayle that I’d been wrong to invite her.

I was in the process of trying to analyze that situation when I realized that Walter hadn’t replied.

I looked at Jamie, then Gordon, then Helen.

Were they all thinking the same thing I was?

I decided to prod, knowing it was no longer Mary that was risking pushing him too far and shattering our deception here, but me.  If I got this wrong, it would be my fault.

I looked at Lil, “Want to step outside and pass that on?  If Wally Gund’s daddy is that angry, it’s something they can use in the interrogation.”

Lil frowned, but nodded.

Gordon withdrew the key from his pocket and threw it.

Our field medic moved to catch it.  Mary seemed to sense that Lillian would miss, and caught it instead, before handing it over.

Lillian smiled at Mary before letting herself out.

Our man, crumpled on the ground, fearing for his life, red faced and sweating, was watching the door, focusing on Lillian, who had just left.

Huh.

Why did it feel like Walter was the one concerned with this lie about his father standing up?  Not about himself, not about reconciling who his dad was, or the betrayal…

He was lying about something.

Gordon opened his mouth to speak, I moved my hand, where it was right by my pocket, a small spreading of my fingers, and the motion was enough to catch Gordon’s eye.

“Tell me, Wally, do you really think what you’ve given us is good enough?”

“It’s true!” Walter said, suddenly alarmed.

People rarely sounded more like they were lying than when they protested like that.

“Maybe,” I said, stressing the word.  “But it’s not the whole truth.”

“I don’t know what you want from me,” he said.

“Me?” I asked.  I stepped closer, spreading my arms a little.  “I don’t want much of anything.  I admit, it would be easier if you talked and gave us something juicy.  I could take whatever you said to people who matter, and that would make for less clean up work for us.  The only thing that matters here is you.  The only one you can depend on is you.  The one who suffers the worst the Academy has to offer, if you don’t convince your jury here…”

“Me,” he said.

I nodded slowly, putting my hands in my pockets.

“You’re not supposed to talk about what happens down in the Bowels of the Academy,” Helen said.  “But people do it anyway, don’t they?  You know the sort of things the Academy can do.”

He was starting to break, now.  I could see it.

Before long we could well have a grown man weeping.

I could have said it was okay, if only because he’d killed people by releasing Whiskers, but the truth was I didn’t care all that much.

I didn’t feel bad, no pit in my stomach, no pain for my fellow man.

Maybe a bit of sympathy pain for what Helen had done to him, but that was something else altogether.

He was only another job.

The door lock clicked, and the door opened.  It was heavy enough that Mary had to help Lil to pull it open.  She rejoined us.

I held my hand where Walter couldn’t see it, and beckoned Lil.

She hesitated, most likely because she didn’t trust me, but she did eventually summon the courage to come close.  I leaned close, and managed to make it look like her bringing her mouth to my ear was her idea.

To Lil’s credit, she got what I was trying to do.  She whispered in my ear, “It’s really creepy being out in the hallway alone.”

I nodded, smiling.

“Don’t smirk,” she whispered, sounding annoyed.

I turned to Walter, as if it was a logical progression from the whispering.  “Your dad is talking.  There are others involved.  He hasn’t named names, but he will.”

“He-” Walter started.  He stopped himself.

“He what?” I asked, noting that Walter hadn’t told me I was wrong.  “You don’t think he’ll say?”

“I agree with my friend there,” Gordon said.  “I want to do this without blood and cleaning.  It means I can go back outside and enjoy the nicest day Radham has seen since last fall.  Your father will talk.  He’ll continue selling you upriver, and he’ll name names.  Do us all a favor, here.  Talk.  Share what we need to share, our Academy student over there has the skill and the tools to mend some of the damage Helen did to you and give you complete and total relief from the pain, you get to live, and we get to go out and enjoy a very nice day.”

“I don’t-” Walter said.  I was suspecting we’d pushed him too far.  He wasn’t operating like he should.  “I…”

“There is no good ending if you don’t wake up and act,” Mary said.  “Stop thinking of him like a father.  Start focusing on yourself.  That’s all you should do right now.  Focus on you.”

“And us,” I pointed out.  “Judge, jury, blah blah.  Getting on our good side is smart.”

“I don’t-” Walter said again.

Is he completely broken?

“I don’t need her help,” Walter said, looking at Lil.  “I’m Academy trained.  I’m older.  I can do the work myself.”

Got him.

“You’re assuming we’ll let you have tools to attack us with,” Gordon said.

Walter paled visibly, making the redness in his cheeks, chin, and the center of his forehead more pronounced.  Fear.  He was in the palm of our hands.

“Sorry,” the man said.

Gordon’s voice was calm, gentle, “It’s fine.  You can have everything you want.  We’ll let you patch yourself up, administer the medication.  We can even leave you something, if you want help sleeping, so you don’t have to lie awake wondering what’s going to happen.”

“We can’t let you leave, of course,” I said.

“Of… course, yes.”

“Now, before we get a call and a knock on the door saying that your father spilled the beans…” I said, trailing off.

Walter hung his head.  “It wasn’t father who instigated it.  He and I were roped in together.  My access, my father’s money and resources.  My friend, he works on other projects, but he was part of it too.  Keller.”

He seemed to find the singling out of his friend the hardest thing to do.

“The instigator was a man called Reverend Mauer.”

“He’s local,” Jamie said.

“As of recently.  He wanted more access to… he dislikes the Academy.  He says it’s a perversion.  Which it is, but-”

“Are you calling me a perversion?” Helen asked, still in her best ‘good girl’ voice.

Again, Walter paled.

I signaled Helen to back off, a flick of my fingers, as if I were shooing something away.  Hands behind her back, she sauntered backward until she stood in a corner.

“Keep talking,” Gordon said.

Walter nodded.  “It’s not about stopping the Academy.  I don’t think anyone can do that, even the Academy itself.  Even the Crown.  But if we could make people wake up, let them know what’s happening inside the walls of the Academies, here in the dungeons, other things in other areas…”

He trailed off, as he stared at Gordon.

One of those other things.

“…There’s no way you let me go,” Walter belatedly realized.  He looked at each of us in turn.

“You killed people.  Academy students.  Some were connected, some weren’t.  Some of the people you tried to wake up are going to die, if we can’t stop…”

“Whiskers,” I said.

“Whiskers.”

“Yeah,” Walter said.  “I thought…”

He was acting like he was very, very tired.  I might have suspected blood loss, but it was more likely his emotions had taken too many turns, and now he was running out of steam.  It was defeat that was the telling blow, here.

“You weren’t thinking,” Mary said.  “You don’t seem like a man with a plan.  You were convinced to take action, your dad joined in.  Your friend, too.  How do you step back and realize what you’re doing is wrong, when everyone around you is caught up in it, agreeing with it and spurring you on?”

“…Yeah.”

“When you think back to the person or thing that was pushing you forward the hardest, stepping in when you started to have doubts, was it the Pastor?”

“Mauer?” Jamie asked.

Walter nodded.

“You told him things you shouldn’t?” Gordon asked.

Another nod.

“Things the Academy would prefer were kept under wraps.”

Nod.

Gordon looked at Jamie.  “You know where this guy is?”

“Yeah.  Hear about him sometimes.  If I think about it, I think I even know his routine.”

“Good man,” Gordon said.

“Tell us about the monster, Walter,” I said.  “What was the end goal?”

“Means to an end,” Walter said.  “That’s all.  We wanted to do work on senses, but we couldn’t get budget without giving the Academy a weapon.  We made… Whiskers.”

“Making it a weapon, you had to justify it,” I said.  “How it operates, how it’s meant to be used.”

“Low cost from raw to vat.  Relatively short time.  They come out at half size, and steadily grow over the course of days as long as food is available.  After a few more development cycles, we thought it could be something we mass produced, dropped or deployed near enemy lines.  Up pressure, soldiers can’t go to use the latrine alone, have to move in groups of two or three if there are full sized ‘Whiskers’ around.”

“Just tell us it’s not pregnant,” I said.

Walter shook his head.  “Male.”

I exhaled in relief.

“No tricks to catching it?  Weak points?”

“No,” Walter said.  “Fire, maybe.  Even then, I’m not sure, and it can sense heat from one hundred and fifty meters away, even ambient body heat.  I don’t think you’re going to catch it.  I don’t think the Academy is going to catch it.”

“But you said something about other development cycles,” Lil said.  “Why?  If it’s that good, why did it need more work?”

“Lifespan,” Walter said.

“Tell us it’s hours,” I told him.

He shook his head.  “Weeks.  Maybe months.  We never got around to it with this version.”

I exchanged glances with the others.

A long moment passed, and nobody volunteered any more questions.

Gordon walked away from Walter, gesturing at Lillian.

Lillian, for her part, stepped over to the table, reached into her bag, and fished out a syringe and two small pills.  They were lumpy; she’d probably made the pills herself.

“Needle for the pain,” she said, as she continued rummaging in her bag.  “Pills for sleep.  I’ve got a fresh, sharp scalpel I was saving for surgery.”

“Lillian,” Gordon said.

“What?”

“No scalpel.  Nothing he could use on himself.”

“But-  Oh.”

“Hayle or the other professors might want something more from him.”

“The syringe is probably a bad idea too,” Lil said.  “I’m going to use it and then take it with me, okay?”

Walter nodded.

“You won’t grab me?”

He shook his head.

When Lil turned around to double check, it was me she looked at.  I was a little surprised.

I nodded.

Lillian ejected a bit of fluid from the needle, bent down and used her fingers to measure spacing, touching the base of Walter’s gut.  She jabbed the needle in, then depressed the plunger.

He didn’t move or grab at her as she finished up and backed away.

She fled back to us, double time, finding safety in the assembled group.

Gordon opened the door, we stepped out into the hallway, and we waited while he locked the door.

“Mauer lives and works at the church on Flax avenue,” Jamie said.

“We’ll update Hayle before we leave,” Gordon decided.

We moved in formation, heading for the spiral staircase.

“Mary,” Gordon said.

“What?”

“That was good work.  Really.  I had doubts, but… good job.”

Mary didn’t seem able to find words.  She nodded, a little too fast.

“I thought you were going too hard on him, but turned out to be just right,” I commented.

She had to turn around to give me a smile, and it proved to be a hesitant one, as if she thought I might pull a ‘just joking!’ on her.  But I didn’t say anything more, and she smiled again, with the expression sticking this time.

Jamie reached out and tapped Mary’s head with his book.  She flinched, maybe a bit too much, but then she saw his small smile.  The playfulness.

He hugged his book, and she turned away, walking with a bit more bounce in her step, close enough to Lillian that their arms touched.  The camaraderie there was already established.

Helen, walking beside me, was the only one who didn’t say anything, but she was the furthest one from Mary, in a manner of speaking.

Still, I didn’t need to interfere.  Better to let her have her taste of the group, like this.  If we could give her a sense of belonging that she hadn’t had with the puppeteer, there was a possibility that he could come back, reaching out, and she wouldn’t want to leave.

As a group, the six of us headed up the stairs, back to the closest thing to daylight that Radham ever got to enjoy.

Off to see our Reverend Mauer, I thought.  He has the ears of the masses, a way with words, and a hell of a lot to say.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Cat out of the Bag 2.4

The press of bodies, the general shuffling and movement, and the warmth of the summer’s day made for a haze in the air.  A fog, if fog smelled like body odor and rain.

But it was easier and more evocative to call it a symptom of the general mood.  If one person could be so mad that steam came out of their ears, was a crowd of very upset people capable of producing this kind of atmosphere?

“This is not what I expected,” Gordon remarked.

I nodded in silent agreement.

A woman stopped to take notice of us as we forged our way through a tangle of legs and hips.  She was in the company of her husband and her son, who was twice our age.

“What are you doing here?” the woman asked.

“Trying to get a seat with a view,” Gordon said.  “Excuse us.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said, not letting him by.  Her son nudged her, pointing at a gap in the crowd, and she shooed him off.  “You’re too little.”

My eyes narrowed, my eyes dancing over her, taking in the simple braid, the worn seams of her clothes, and the particular lines in her face.  “And you’re-”

Gordon reflexively tried to clap a hand over my mouth, but with the crowd crushing in on us and our mutual proximity, he ended up smacking me in the lower half of the face with his forearm.

“Mmph,” I said, wincing.

“We’re fine,” Gordon said, smiling.  He partially turned my way, muttering, “Sorry.”

“Mff.”

“You’re going to get trampled.  Emotions are running high today,” the woman told us, her voice stringent.

“Mum,” her son said, impatient.

“One moment,” she said, a little impatiently.  She looked at us and gave us her best ‘mother’ voice.  “Go home.  It’s safer there.”

“But-” Jamie said, and I had to suppress a smile at hearing his tone.  The tone and the wide eyed look he gave her through his thick glasses was wounded, concerned, and bewildered.  “Ma’am.  We’re orphans.  We don’t have a home.”

It wasn’t quite how I would have timed or phrased it, but it wasn’t quite an option for me.  I felt like if I tried to go the pitiful orphan route, someone like this woman would look me over, see the scruffy hair, see the eyes, the thin mouth, and think, ‘yes, that’s an orphan.’

But Jamie was another thing altogether.  His long hair was tied back in a sailor’s ponytail, he wore glasses, and his clothes didn’t quite fit him.  He was just a step away from being an ordinary child, so fixable, and the effect came across well.  Perfect for when we wanted to put people on the defensive.

I’d worked with him on that one, with Helen’s help.

I did my best not to smile as I watched the woman flounder.

“Mum,” her son said.  “We’re going to lose sight of dad if you don’t hurry.”

She seemed caught up in the moment, but with a push one way and a pull the other…

“You shouldn’t be here,” she reminded us, before turning away, joining her son.

I tackled Jamie, throwing my arm around his shoulder.

“Hmm,” Jamie said.

“That was good!”  I told him.

“Uh huh,” he said, again.  But he smiled.

“Beautifully timed.”

“In a few years that won’t work anymore.”

“But it worked here, now!  Just a second ago,” I said.  “That was good!”

“That’s all it takes to make Sy’s day,” Gordon remarked.

When I looked, I saw he was talking to Mary, who was safe between him and Lil.  Helen was closer to me and Jamie.

“A good execution of a technique?” Mary asked.  “It makes sense to me.”

“No,” Gordon said.  “Well, yes, maybe, but no.”

“Mixed messages, there,” I said.  I winced as a few members of the crowd backed away, jostling us.

“No,” Gordon seemed to decide.  “It’s not about the technique.”

“Oh,” Mary said.  She looked puzzled.

“He-” Jamie started to chime in, then stopped short as the crowd moved again, bumping him.

“Let’s move somewhere else,” Gordon said.  He looked at the crowd ahead of us.  People were shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip.

The entire neighborhood turned up.

“Up there,” Helen suggested.

She was pointing at a nearby rooftop, an addition to a nearby building, larger than a shed, not quite large enough to be an adjunct stable.  A storehouse?

Either way, it had a gently sloping roof that was low enough we could potentially climb up to it.  We had to hop a short fence that surrounded the lawn, possibly to keep bugs away.

“Sy,” Gordon said.  He was entwining his fingers together.

I nodded, and picked up my pace.

It wasn’t quite a running start, but I had forward momentum all the same, when he caught my foot in his hands and hauled me up.

I landed on the roof, and immediately dropped to all fours, palms and shoes skidding on the shingles before I found the traction to stop.

By the time I did, Helen had made her way up.  Gordon very deliberately looked to one side as her dress brushed his face.  She didn’t drop to all fours as I had, but instead found her balance by touching the side of the adjacent building, her feet firmly planted on the sloped roof.  She turned around to face the other direction, peppermint green dress flaring around bare legs, her sockless feet in little white shoes finding balance.  I knew Helen was in the process of growing her hair longer, but for now it was in tight blonde rolls at the side and back, the rolls absorbing most of the length.

She was still smiling, giving me an amused look with a very intentionally placed gleam in her eyes.

I almost missed deadpan Helen.  I understood deadpan Helen.

“Sy,” Gordon said.  “Heads up!”

I looked just in time to see Mary fly at me.

I caught the apex of the roof with one hand and Mary’s hand with the other.  Her shoes weren’t as good for climbing as mine were, too flat on the bottom, and she skidded.

I watched her adjust her weight, the foot that was set lower on the roof sweeping in a sharp, focused half-circle, scraping the shingles for maximum traction.  Not quite enough to stop her downward movement, but it made for less of a violent tug when I had to catch her full weight, my arms stretched in two opposite directions.

“You’re smiling,” she said.

I hauled her up, and she found her way to the peak of the roof, standing across it.  We had the best view of the crowd, but she was staring at me, looking puzzled.

“Your…” I said, not finding the words.  I made an inarticulate waving gesture toward her legs.

Mary looked down, sticking out one leg.  She wore a white blouse and forest green skirt, and she was looking down at her bare calf.

“The way you kept from falling,” Helen clarified.  “Kicking out.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Oh,” Mary said.  She still looked a little perplexed.

“Sy, Mary,” Gordon said.

I reached out and caught Jamie’s hand.  Mary caught his elbow, where he was holding his book with one hand.

“You were taught that?”

“It was one of a few things,” she said.  “I’m more of a tomboy than you’d think.  I learned a bit on my own.”

“No kidding,” I said.  To please the puppeteer?  To please us, now?  “It’s impressive.”

She looked away as she smiled in response to that.

We caught Lillian, helping her up, and then Gordon hauled himself up on his own.

Six of us on one roof.

“Grimy,” Gordon said.  I looked down at my brown-black palms to verify, then to Lillian.  Her dress was smudged at the knees, where she hadn’t been quite so graceful as Helen or Mary.

Straddling the roof, I pulled off my raincloak.  I laid it across the top of the roof.

At my silent invitation, Mary sat down on one side of it.  I plunked myself down beside her, and not because of any scheme or anything.  Lillian might have been a girl, but it was my damn cloak.

Lil shot me an offended look, then arranged and sat on her satchel with all the equipment and notes.

Gordon and Helen were standing, toward the side of the building, while Jamie elected to sit on his book, balancing it on the roof’s peak.

Together, finally settled with a view, we were free to look out over the crowd.  A small handful of faces looked up at us on our perch, but nobody spoke out.  The focus was elsewhere.

Fear, anger, agitation.

“Something’s stirring,” I murmured.

Jamie, watching, nodded.

The church was across the street from us, not one of the largest in existence, but Radham wasn’t an overly pious town.  The structure was pale, the shingles were brown, and the stained glass stood out all the more for the drab exterior.  A lot of reds in the glass used for the window.

Damage sustained some time ago had led to the patching up of one of the side walls, but the branches had been heavily pruned.  Where some buildings let the branches grow out, reaching and growing leaves, the church had cut back everything until the plant growth was almost indistinguishable from mortar.

A cart had stopped by the side door of the church, and much of the crowd had gathered around it.  Two men were standing on or by the cart, I saw.  They were talking, and a lot of people were listening.

“That’s not the reverend, is it?” Gordon asked.

“No,” Jamie said.  He pointed.  “Left side.  Bill Warner.  He owns the production line down by Tenent street.  You knew his son at Mothmont, Gordon.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“To the right, we have Dicky Gill, who really shouldn’t be here,” Jamie observed.  “Or at least, not in this capacity.”

“Why?” Mary asked.

“Because he’s in a position of power that the Academy gave him,” Gordon said.  “He’s on the shortlist to be the next mayor?”

“Oh boy,” Mary said, finally understanding.

“It’s a very short list,” Jamie said.  “A list many people want to find themselves on.  An academy town of the Crown States of America.”

“Short road to power, if he’s willing to walk it,” I remarked.  “Why is he here, and not walking that road?”

“Same general feeling as Walter’s dad?” Gordon asked.  “It’s not true power, it’s just being stuck in the middle while the Academy runs things.”

I frowned.

“No?” Gordon asked.

“Power is a lot more tantalizing when it’s almost in reach than when you have it hand,” I said.  “For him, it’s almost in reach.  What’s going on that’s making this more appealing than that?”

“You have to ask?” Gordon asked.

“Hm?”

He gave me an odd look.

“What?”

“Look.  This crowd.  I know you can tell just how upset they are.”

“Uh huh,” I said, resisting an ‘of course’.

“That simmering rage?  It’s his, or close to.  This many people, restless, and he owns them.  He and Warner, anyway, maybe Reverend Mauer too.”

“Uh huh.”

Our collected eyes moved over the crowd.  People talking in heated tones, the forceful gestures, the restlessness.  Expressions tight, with lines of anger across foreheads and between eyebrows, grooves deep around the mouth, suggesting disgust, and eyes too wide open, revealing too much white.  Fear.

Perhaps something more than fear, too.  A wilder sort of feeling.  Something ready to cut loose and act on things long suppressed.

“They only need direction,” I said.

“You’re saying you don’t see the appeal in that?”  Gordon asked.  “For a guy who’s never had power, to now have the ability to direct this?”

“I see the appeal, I guess,” I said.  “I prefer to interact with people, not crowds.”

“It’s a big crowd, and it wouldn’t take much to turn this state of things into a riot,” Gordon commented.

“This didn’t come out of nowhere,” Mary said, “Did it?”

“No,” I agreed.  “There was work going into this.  There’s a reason people gathered here at the first sign of trouble.”

The church door opened.  Conversations stopped.  People paid attention.

Mauer.

He wasn’t what I was expecting.

A part of me was expecting Hayle, someone aged, stately, perhaps a bit grim, dressed in black, with the priest’s collar.

Reverend Mauer was young, or he’d been worked on by the Academy at some point.  His hair was vibrant, a bronze that verged on a surprising red where the sun peered through clouds to touch it, and his skin was smooth and unlined.

When he walked, it was a touch off balance, back bent to one side, almost a limp.  He did wear black shirt and slacks, one arm bare , and he wore a chaplain’s collar, not the tab at the shirt, but a proper band of white that encircled his neck.  To go with the limping gait and odd balance was a heavy sleeve that covered one arm, extending past the fingers.

The uncharitable part of me wanted to call him a chicken, or a cock.  The shock of red at the top, sharp chin and a roman nose, the long, thin neck, the youth, and the way he walked.

But the more charitable part of me saw that he was quiet, very at ease with how he slowly took in the crowd with his eyes.  When he moved for a purpose other than walking, his actions seemed fluid, relaxed.

His very state of being seemed to pass to them.  The fires that had been stirring when the crowd was left on its own seemed to flicker and fade.

We’d pegged him for the provocateur of the situation with Walter and Whiskers.  Looking at him, going by gut feeling, I suspected he was far from being a stupid man.

“I suddenly feel like we should have gotten closer,” Gordon remarked.

“For what?” Jamie asked.

“To be able to act.”

“There’s no way to act with this many people around,” Mary said.

“You’re saying that?  After your scene in the Mothmont cafeteria?” I asked.

“I’m… saying there’s no way to do it without advance preparation.”

“Point,” I said.  Then, after a second’s pause, I couldn’t hold back.  “Ugh.  Talk, Mauer.  I want to hear what you have to say.”

“So do they,” Lillian said.

The crowd was paying close attention.

Mauer climbed up onto the side of the wagon, standing on the short ledge beneath the door.  It put him a few feet above the crowd, sticking up by the waist.

Without a word, he gestured at Gill.  Our Academy backed politician.

I only partially managed to hold back a groan.

“Everyone!” Gill called out, climbing up to stand beside the Reverend Mauer, proving to be a bit shorter and somewhat plumper than the reverend.  Still, good projection skills.  “You’ve heard the rumors, and I have to thank you for passing the word on to others so they know what’s going on and can make sure they’re safe.  For those who haven’t heard, yes, there is a creature loose from the Academy.  It is dangerous to you all, but you can minimize the danger by staying in groups.”

It is dangerous to you all.  Emphasis on ‘is’, to strike any doubt from their minds.

Any public speaker worth his salt could have reworded that or even changed the emphasis to soften the blow to the Academy.  He’d done it intentionally.

“Bad politician,” I murmured.  “Bad!”

Jamie was nodding.  Mary leaned forward, arms around her knees, paying rapt attention.

“What is it!?” someone called out.

Yes, I thought.  What is it?

“Sources with the Academy have told me it’s a project meant to advance research in the five senses,” Gill said.  “That it’s not meant to be dangerous, but we should take care all the same.”

My eyes narrowed.  I was aware of the murmurs and conversation.

“We heard people had died!” another voice.

“Yes.  Nine individuals have been gravely hurt in and around the Academy, but so far, the damage-” Gill paused as Mauer reached out to put a hand on his shoulder, then finished his statement, “-is contained to the institution.  They’re putting all resources forward, to stop…”

He halted toward the end there, then let the sentence die unfinished.  Mauer was using his grip on the man’s shoulder to let him know that he wanted to speak.

“It’s not true, I’m afraid,” Mauer said.  His voice carried, but it wasn’t loud like Gill’s was.  Strong contrast.  He paused, another contrast to Gill’s attempt to drop as much information as he could in a short span of time.

Were the contrasts intentional?  How much were they collaborating?  Was even this interruption of Gill’s reassurance calculated?

“I just received word that two individuals in the upper west part of Radham were attacked.  They were school-age.  One of them is gravely injured, to the point that he may be crippled for life.”

His expression changed, and his face was very expressive, in a way that might have rivaled Helen’s own control of how she presented herself.  The weariness in his eyes suggested he was much older than he looked.  He looked down, taking a second to purse his lips, as if trying to get them working right.

“The other child is dead,” he stated, overly stiff, having waited just long enough to let people think he might have completed his last statement.

Now, again, the crowd stirred, pain, fear, anger, redoubled for the peace that Mauer had just given and taken away.

“Please!” Mauer called out.  His words were nearly drowned out by the noise of the crowd.  “Please!”

Gordon shifted, crouching, and spoke to us, “He can definitely speak louder than that.”

He’s in full control of this crowd.  He’s stoking the fires and bottling up the heat.  Things are going to explode, and they’re going to explode damn soon.

“Who is this guy?” I asked, a little awed and impressed.  “Is he an experiment?”

“Pretty sure he isn’t,” Jamie said.  “I overheard about his history.  He was a soldier in the wars down south.”

“The limp?” I asked.

“Not a limp.  He’s off balance.  They gave him a new arm, after he lost his.  It’s not very functional, and it’s not very pretty,” Jamie said.

“A weapon?”

“A regular, oversized arm.  Nothing fancy.  It seems to cause him constant pain.  He refused offers of further work and replacement.  Went straight to seminary.”

Reverend Mauer’s shouting was picking up in volume.  He was getting attention.

“Please!” Mauer said, more forcefully, almost a little angry.  Another act.  “This is not about the monster, and it is not about the Academy or the mistakes they made!”

“He’s doing that on purpose,” Mary said.

I’m not the only one who thinks so.

“Yeah,” Helen said, one of the few things she’d said since we’d climbed up onto the roof.  The smile was gone from her face.  She was deadpan again.

“They don’t see it?” Mary asked.

“Emotions are clouding their eyes and ears,” Gordon said, simply.

“This is about the children!  Please!  A moment of silence and a prayer!”

In the palm of his hand, I thought.

I could see everything that was about to unfold.

Stoke the fires, contain, store the heat.  Stoke the fires, contain, store the heat.

Let it all build up.

Right now, he was containing.

“Their names are Martin and Oscar Meadows,” he said, and he barely had to raise his voice to be heard, now that the crowd had been silenced.  “Let us give them a moment and a prayer.”

Nobody with a heart, no matter how angry they were, could dare to speak up in the midst of such a meaningful silence.

“Is he going to start a riot?  Directed at the Academy?”  Lillian asked, whispering.  We were far enough we wouldn’t be overheard.  With the nearest members of the crowd a good thirty feet away, aiming to be closer, to see as well as hear, the shuffling of feet and the periodic coughs were enough to mask the whispering.

“Maybe,” Gordon whispered.

“No,” I whispered, without missing a beat.  “No.  Why the hell would he do that?”

“To hurt Radham Academy.”

“What good comes of that?  They shut the doors and the gates and wait out the chaos,” I whispered.

“Then why?  What?  He has some goal,” Gordon said.

The silence lingered as I watched, looking over the crowd to the red haired man who was standing on the side of one coach.  He was examining the crowd, but he hadn’t noticed us.

“Look at him,” I said.  “We can’t even touch him right now.  He’s surrounded by this many supporters, and even if he wasn’t, if we could get to him somehow, we’d only stimulate the crowd, like an electric shock to a latent stitched.  Wake them up, drive them to action.”

“Making him a martyr,” Mary whispered.

“He has full and complete control.  He knows what he’s doing, and he knows how dangerous it is to stand against the Academy.  He knows they’re going to pay attention to him, and he can only hold his position by maintaining a very delicate sort of balance.  Starting a riot gives up that control,” I whispered.

Reverend Mauer was peering through the crowd, finding people who weren’t at ease.  A man who was more agitated than some, shifting weight from one foot to another, was met with a look of deep sadness from Mauer.

The agitation quieted.

“Are you sure this guy’s human?” I whispered.

“After his botched arm graft and new skin, I don’t think he’s willing to let anyone touch him,” Jamie said.

“You’ve paid a lot of attention to this guy,” Gordon remarked.

“He’s a popular topic for gossip,” Jamie whispered.  “The Academies don’t have the best working relationship with the churches.  A lot of people wondered what sort of man would turn up to man a station in an Academy town, of all places.”

“I guess we know, now,” Gordon remarked.

The silence was lingering to the point that it was almost painful.  More than a minute, easily.

Who are you, Reverend Mauer?  I wondered.  Are you drawing this out for your own pleasure?  To test how firm your grip on these people is in practice?  Are you focused on the same taste of power that stole Gill away from the Academy, or are you laboring under a goal?

People with their heads and eyes down were perhaps unaware, but the crowd began to shift, a little restless, as if their bodies were voicing the questions their mouths didn’t dare to.

“Now,” Reverend Mauer said, as if gently rousing everyone present from a dream.  “I know you’re upset.  It is hard not to be, given the lives that have been lost, and your fear for yourselves, your neighbors, and your loved ones.”

He had everyone’s ear, and mine was no exception.  I was hanging on every word, picking apart how he was playing with emotions, saying one thing while gently stoking the fires, validating fear and outrage.

“Aimless anger won’t help anyone, and would be an affront to those we’ve already lost.  Nothing would be sadder than if we went out looking for answers or justice, only to sully the memories of Martin and Oscar, or worse, to join those killed by the escaped creature, because you were acting with emotion, not caution.”

Control.

Mary was giving me a sidelong glance.

I was right.

What we don’t know is what your next move is.

“The Academy, from what we’ve been told, is deploying more creatures, weapons of war and armed men, with the intent of finding and stopping the escaped creature.  Dog and Catcher are the least of the assets being brought to bear.”

“Academy didn’t tell you that,” Gordon murmured.

“Hard for them to turn around and say they didn’t, that they wanted to keep people in the dark,” I commented.  Gordon nodded in agreement.

There isn’t a single person here that likes that.  Phrased so well, too.

He went on.  “I don’t like this, but at the present time, the only thing we can do is stay safe.  Stay with family and friends, give each other comfort.  If you still find yourself lacking, you’ll find Dicky, Bill, and myself here in the church, with several others, ready to offer prayer and counsel, should you need it.  If you have any news, please, come to us.”

“Soldiers,” Mary said.

I nodded slowly.

How many people are going to turn up at that church, talking about banding together and doing something, as if it were their idea and not Mauer’s?

“A prayer!” Mauer declared, spreading his arms slightly.

“Let’s go,” I said, climbing over the roof, intent on sliding down the far side, away from Mauer.  I peered over to make sure the landing would be clear.  “The Academy is going to want to be on top of this.  It’s a bigger problem than Whiskers.”

“Bigger?” Lillian asked.

“He’s putting himself opposite the Academy, gathering soldiers, he’s telling people about the secret projects, if only in broad strokes, and he’s making himself effectively untouchable,” I said.  “This is going to concern the Academy more than any murderous experiment, believe me.  We need advice on how to move forward, and we might need help.”

Cat out of the Bag 2.5

“This keeps getting worse.”

I took Gordon’s statement to be a thought about our errant reverend Mauer and the riot.  Then I caught a glimpse of the Academy, a considerable distance down the road.

Even standing so far back that we were closer to Lambsbridge Orphanage than to the Academy, I could tell that the Hedge was closed.  Shutters closed and no doubt locked, front entrance closed with an iron gate. More security would have been used inside.  The Hedge was the easiest and most obvious point of access for anyone looking to attack the Academy, and measures had to be taken to make it defensible, while keeping it accessible to the public.  I suspected the measures were very similar to those in the Bowels of the Academy.

Where twice the number of men had been posted there earlier in the afternoon, it sat at over three times the usual, with ten men and ten stitched.  The gates they guarded were only open wide enough for a man to slip through, ready to be closed at a moment’s notice.

It was getting to be later in the afternoon, now, and as long as the summer days were, the daylight was fading.  The lights were just being turned on, in anticipation of looming sunset and evening.

“What do you want to bet they won’t let us through?” Jamie asked.

“We need badges,” I said.  “Secret badges that we can flash to any member of the Academy that gets in our way.  Maybe we can get the Academy heads to pass a rule so everyone knows they have to do anything we say.”

“That would be useful,” Helen said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said, with a generous heaping of sarcasm and emphasis.  “Does anyone here think Sy wouldn’t abuse that six ways from Sunday?  Anyone?  Show of hands.”

“I’m hurt,” I said.  “And I still want badges.”

“I hate to break it to you,” Gordon said, “But nobody who knows you in the slightest is going to sign off on that.”

I huffed, sticking my hands in my pockets.

Jamie gave me a pat on the shoulder.  “Don’t be grumpy.”

“I’m not being grumpy!  I think it’s dumb that we keep getting held back because of arbitrary stuff and secrecy.  Half the students know us, the other half keep getting in our way.  Like back when we were wrapping up the Mothmont thing, that guy stopping me from walking out?”

“I wouldn’t say half,” Gordon said.

“Don’t nitpick,” I said.

“Don’t use hyperbole, then,” he countered.

“I wasn’t.  I was generalizing.”

Mary made a little ‘ahem’ sound.  Our heads turned.  “It’s interesting to see you interacting like this.”

“Interesting how?”

“After meeting Sy at Mothmont, seeing how he was there, having weeks to worry about how I’d deal with all of you as a group, um.  It’s not what I expected.  Seeing you, him, here like this?”

“I understand,” I said.  “It takes people some time to adjust to how amazing we are.  Me in particular.”

Mary’s mouth parted a bit, but she didn’t manage to produce any vocalization.  Beside Mary, Lillian’s hand went up to her face.

I took advantage of it, turning so I was walking backward, flashing her a smirk.  I used a hand to push hair away from one corner of my face, where the rain had made it damp, posing like I was a hero on a cover of some seedy romance novella.  “You’ll get used to it.”

Jamie spoke up, “I think Mary might have been talking about the contrast of how you portrayed yourself at Mothmont and how badly you were just losing your argument with Gordon there.”

My smile disappeared, and I glared at Jamie.  He, in turn, shot me a quiet, small smile that suggested he was secretly pleased with himself.

“Jamie,” I said, “You’re one of the very few people I can beat in a fight.”

“In theory,” Gordon offered.

“Like Wollstone’s ratio set is a theory,” I said,  “At a certain point, you have to accept that it’s a given.”

“I’m the book-reader and scholar with glasses,” Jamie said.  “Why are you the one making the pathetic stabs at intellectual wit, here?”

I raised my eyebrows.  “Gordon’s bad enough, but you?  You’re asking for it.”

“Come on,” Jamie said.

I threw myself at Jamie, arms around his neck, but we didn’t stop moving toward the Academy gates.

“There’s a dynamic,” Gordon said.  “A big part of the dynamic is keeping Sy from becoming unbearable.”

As if to illustrate the point, he reached back to take Jamie’s notebook with a reverent care, freeing Jamie’s other hand and making life harder on me in the process.

“-Resent that!” I grunted out the words, meaning it in more than one sense.

“Why is he special?”  Mary asked.

“He’s meant to be the unpredictable one, bending and testing rules and altering the patterns we operate in.  Sy said you got the broad strokes from the puppeteer?”

“Broad strokes.  Not necessarily all the right strokes.  While I was still being questioned and tested on at the Academy, Sy told me that Evette and Ashton didn’t work out.”

Jamie and I stopped our struggles at the mention of the names.

“No,” Gordon said.  He sighed.  “No, they didn’t.  They didn’t make it past the beginning stages.”

“Ashton was like me,” Helen said.

“Except not at all,” Lillian pointed out.

“Except not at all,” Helen clarified.

“Vat grown?” Mary asked.  I noticed the change in her voice and body language, interacting with Helen.

“Yes,” Helen said.  “Like you and I.”

Abruptly, almost to the point that I’d call it impulsively, Helen reached out and touched the side of Mary’s face.

The word ‘stricken’ derived from the word ‘strike’ in the same way that struck was, and Mary looked more stricken than if she’d been struck with a sword.

“She’s doing that-” I started.

Jamie pulled on the back of my shirt, forcing me to bend over to maintain free range of movement with my arms.  I did what I could to jab at the softer sides of his belly, tickling him.

-on purpose, I finished the sentence in my head.  Helen wasn’t doing anything wrong, exactly, even if she was being weird.

Gordon reached out and took hold of Helen’s hand, removing it from Mary’s face.  He stepped between the two of them and held Helen’s hand, more for Mary’s sake than for Helen’s.

“The original plan was for each of us to have a role, a specific set of talents, and for us to be able to address any problem.  A gestalt.”

“I got that part,” Mary said.

“Nothing goes one hundred percent according to plan.  Not all of us wound up being entirely what we were designed to be, and Sy wasn’t intended or even proposed for the gestalt group.  Entirely different project, minor in the grand scheme of things.  Hayle picked him up anyway.  He’s, I’m blanking on the word, starts with ‘v’.”

“Versatile,” I said, redoubling my efforts to tickle Jamie.

“Variable,” Jamie said, almost at the point where he was able to pull the bottom of my shirt over my head and arms.

“Variable,” Gordon said, probably going with Jamie because it made me wrong.  “Sy is variable, to the point where he inadvertently covers other bases.”

“As a scoundrel.”

“As Sy, whatever labels apply at the moment.  But see, point I’m getting around to is that Sy likes to describe humanity as a collection of careening objects, bouncing and ricocheting off established boundaries.”

Jamie pinned my hands in his armpits by pressing his elbows tight to his body, and hiked up my shirt more.  That he could talk and I couldn’t suggested he was winning, which was as irritating as hell.  “He says that because he’s a bouncing, random object.”

“Sort of,” Gordon said.  “He’s human.  Only things keeping him bound in and constrained are the firmest ones the Academy sets, and us.  As Jamie is demonstrating.”

“Eat dicks!” I told Gordon, my voice muffled by the shirt Jamie had pulled up around my head.

“I was scared of him, once,” Mary admitted.  “And now?”

“Say what you will about Sy, he’s very good at making people experience that dissonance between what they expect and what they get.  Sy is scary, he is dangerous and capable, you weren’t wrong when you judged it, back then.  But now you’re with us, a member of our group, which is very possibly the safest possible place you could be when dealing with Sylvester there.  With us as a whole, even.  Keep that in mind if you’re ever entertaining the idea of stabbing us in the back.”

There was a pause.

“I was wondering when that was coming,” Mary said.

“Had to be said.  Sorry.”

There was an awkward pause.  I struggled with Jamie for a second, seriosuly annoyed at this point.  I wanted to be able to do more to handle the Mary thing.  Left alone, Gordon could push her away.  I was the biggest villain of the two of us, but when Gordon hurt people, they took a while to bounce back from it.

Mary broke the silence.  “That stuff you were saying, in a roundabout way, am I right in interpreting that as you saying that I don’t need to worry?”

“How worried were you?” Gordon asked.

“Mary’s been very tense,” Lillian volunteered.  “Worried about how things would go.”

“I was.”

“You don’t need to worry about us in general.  Really.”  Damn Gordon.  He was so good at sounding sincere.

“Oh, good.  Gosh!  Even Helen, then?”

“Am I so scary?”

“A little!  More than a little, but if Gordon says you’re okay, and Sy’s not protesting…”

I was silent.

Gordon jumped in, stumbling with his words in a way he usually didn’t.  “I’m… saying that you don’t need to worry about us in general.”

You’re a cruel, cruel man, Gordon.

Correcting her about Helen without saying anything outright.

Nobody was saying anything.  I suspected Mary’s fears about Helen had been redoubled, and I had further suspicions that Gordon had done it on purpose.

He wasn’t as confident about Mary being a part of the group as I was, or he was concerned on a level.  Just as he’d talked about the group keeping me in line, he was using Helen as the proverbial whipping stick for Mary.

I wasn’t so keen on that.  Mary had enough sticks.

I struggled to pull my shirt down, while Jamie interfered with those struggles.

“We’re at the academy,” Gordon said.  The meaning was clear.  Stop roughhousing.

Jamie let me free.  I fixed my shirt and tucked it in, then fixed my hair.  Mary was giving me an amused look, and Jamie looked smug.

I wasn’t proud.  I was willing to look silly in front of Mary if it meant she could let her guard down a fraction, easing into the group.  Losing to Jamie was part of that.

Entirely intentional.  For real.  No joke.

The people by the entrance gathered together as we drew closer.  The six of us against ten or so Academy students and their stitched.

“We’ve been invited,” Gordon said.

“No entry,” one of them said.

“We’ve been invited,” Gordon said, again.  “Thank you.”

One way to win an argument, just keep hammering at them until they give way.  If they tire or show weakness, seize on that, hammer again.

“No entry,” the same student told us.

Gordon looked at Jamie.  Jamie’s prediction had been right.

“Go inside, find and talk to Professor Hayle.  He’ll tell you we’re allowed inside.”

“He’ll tell us the same thing every other Professor has told us.  Nobody in or out.”

It was the same problem I’d had with Rick.  We could be manipulative, we could poke, prod, bait, and mislead, and if we found any give at all, we could capitalize on it.

No give here.

“Professor Hayle told us to run an errand, and report back at the earliest possible moment.  If you don’t let us past, it’s going to upset him.”

“I’m willing to take that risk.  You’re being irritating.  Go home.”

“This is our home,” Helen said.  “It’s my home.”

The man studied her, up and down.  Helen didn’t look like a proper student.

“Helen Ibott,” she said, extending a hand for him.  “Yes.  I am his daughter.”

The name carried weight.  I saw two men behind our obstacle exchanging glances.

“He’s not married,” our antagonist said, unmoved.

“I’m still his daughter,” Helen said, without flinching.

One of the two spoke up.  “I could just run over to Claret Hall and-”

“No,” the man said.  “There’s no need.”

It was so stupid.  Such a waste.

Mary stepped back a bit, until she was standing to one side of me.  Her voice was soft, “I don’t think they’re very good at fighting.  I could try something, make a distraction, and we could slip through.”

“Too messy,” I murmured.

“I thought so.”

“It’s interesting that you think you could win against ten people and ten stitched,” I said.

“I don’t think I could win.  I do think I could get us inside and slip away.”

I nodded slowly.  Interesting.  Gordon couldn’t do that, and Gordon could probably beat her in a scrap, but she did have techniques and talents.

Everything about the group fit together, a larger puzzle of talents, strengths and weaknesses.  Every element was a thing I could potentially use or a thing I had to account for.

“You’re Vernon,” Jamie said, cutting off Gordon mid-sentence.  “Cornet?”

Our barrier to entry nodded, frowning a little.  “That’s my name.”

“You were working on the group project last year, Claret Hall, the kit.  Smaller, lighter pack for field care of soldiers and stitched on the battlefield.”

Vernon didn’t respond, but his frown deepened.

“It didn’t go well, I heard,” Jamie said.

“That wasn’t my fault.  The others dropped the ball.”

“But it was such an unfettered disaster that your classmates talked about it, and I heard about it, and I remember hearing about it.  A year later.”

“What went wrong?” Lillian asked.  I suspected it was out of genuine curiosity rather than an effort to play along.

“They took it on themselves to develop a smaller, lighter pack.  A basic failure would be producing something smaller and lighter, but less effective,” Jamie said.  “But when you design by committee, and you somehow produce something heavier, bulkier, and less effective, a failure on every count…”

Vernon suddenly looked exceptionally unhappy.  “I said it wasn’t my fault.  Why even bring this up?  You think I’m going to let you in because of it?”

“No,” Jamie said.  “I’m not that cunning.  I remembered and thought it was interesting.”

I picked up the slack.  “But if you’re trying to earn brownie points by pulling volunteer duty standing guard, and being a problem because you’re trying too hard to do your job, well, the professors are going to get upset we weren’t able to report in…”

I trailed off, letting someone else pick up.  Gordon for that note of authority and command, perhaps.

“We might have to drop your name, Vernon Cornet,” the ‘daughter’ of Doctor Ibbot said, instead.

Just as good.

Vernon looked over his shoulder, “Go find one of the professors and ask if the kids are allowed in.”

“Hayle,” Gordon said.

“Hayle,” Vernon corrected.

We settled in for a wait.

☙

Claret Hall was the rare sort of building that was entirely grown.  The wood had been given a deep red color as part of the growing process, it had been shaped every step of the way, and made into a veritable work of art.

It was the starting point and end goal for most members of Radham Academy.  Students took their introductory classes here, Lillian included, and those who climbed the ranks and proved their mettle ended up as part of the administration, elsewhere in the building.

The guard had gone in and found Hayle, then reported back to us with his location.

As a group, we entered one of the faculty-only rooms.

Professors Briggs, Sexton, Hayle, Fletcher and Reid were all present, in black lab coats.  They sat in chairs, stood, or leaned against the tables around the perimeter of the rooms.  Though it was summer, a fire blazed in the fireplace opposite the entrance.  Two plates with only morsels of food remaining on them suggested that some but not all had eaten their dinners.  The wine glasses were full, the firelight catching the contents and making the deep reds into something bright.

The other professors didn’t pay us much mind as we approached.  The glances they deigned to give us were almost disinterested.

Briggs was the one to impress.  He ran Claret Hall, and through that position, he was the head of the Academy, controlled much of Radham, and a fair portion of the surrounding area.  He was older but not old, and unlike Hayle he had colored his hair and rejuvenated his skin.  He looked as if he’d stretched himself a half-foot taller, but retained the same body weight, making him into a living caricature of the man he’d once been.  His fingers were spidery, one hand holding a wine glass, the other on the desk, pads of the fingers pressing down so the fingers themselves bowed.

The armless, crimson-tinted glasses that were perched halfway down his nose were purely for show, but they caught the firelight as he stared at the source of it.

It might have been my association with Hayle, but I tended to have less respect for those who’d gone so far to alter themselves with medicine and surgery.  Professor Briggs was an exception.  It was hard to disrespect a man who could terminate the Lambsbridge project, or terminate the Wyvern project and me with it.

He was, in an indirect way, responsible for the existence of the Lambs, for Dog and Catcher, for the Hangman, Gorger, Foster, the Whelps and all the rest.

His pet project, however, wasn’t out and about, hunting for Whiskers.

Hayle wanted to prove our worth as a group.  This was where it counted.

I touched the small of Gordon’s back before he could say anything.  He didn’t give any indication that I’d done anything, but he did remain silent.

“Insurrection,” I said, as we drew close enough to be in earshot.

That turned heads.

Briggs, however, was unfazed.  “We expected something in that vein.”

“Reverend Mauer.  He’s got Dicky Gill and Mr. Warner at his back.”

“Gill was already restless, suggesting something was wrong.”

“That something is the Reverend,” I said.  “He’s probably been laying groundwork for a long time.”

“Since he arrived in Radham three years and two months ago,” Jamie said.

Briggs nodded.

“He told a crowd that two people were killed by the experiment,” I said.  I looked at Jamie.

“Upper-west part of Radham.  Oscar and Martin Meadows?”

It was Sexton who answered.  Young as professors went, pale, with blond hair neatly parted, he had a shadow on his chin that suggested he hadn’t had time to shave earlier in the day.  “We didn’t hear about that, and we should have.”

“It was probably a lie,” I said.  “And if he can lie about that, he’ll lie about other things.”

“Useful information,” Hayle commented.

“Of course you think so,” Fletcher said.  “They’re yours.“

“I prefer action to information.  Unless your children removed the problem, Hayle?”  Professor Briggs asked.

“If they didn’t, there was a good reason for it,” Hayle said.  “Gordon?”

“We couldn’t reach him, and we thought we should ask, just in case.  Mauer is surrounded himself with people, and he’s preparing them as soldiers.  The crowd nearly rioted.”

“We can handle a riot,” Briggs said.  “It’s poor timing, but if he’s determined to be inconvenient about this-“

“He’s not,” I interrupted.

Briggs frowned.  He finally turned away from the fire and looked at me.  When he spoke, however, he remarked, “Six, Hayle?  Are they multiplying somehow?”

“Mary over there, with the ribbons and brown hair, is a new addition to the Lambsbridge program.”

“I didn’t authorize the increased budget.”

“I didn’t use one.  It was Percy who developed her.  I simply took over guardianship of her after he fled.”

“Brilliant,” Fletcher said, under his breath.

I suspected the man was quite drunk.

“You told me I had discretion to manage the project as I saw fit,” Hayle said, in a tone that was overly clear and calm.  He was trying to frame it all so that if Briggs spoke out, he’d sound unreasonable.

“If you aren’t misappropriating funds, I don’t care,” Briggs said.  “The project has yet to impress, I don’t see how seven disappointments are much worse than six.”

Seven?

Oh.  He was counting Evette and Ashton in the number.

Insulting them.

Considering that I’d never even met them, I felt a surprising degree of loathing for the man who’d insulted their memory.

I must have been giving some indication of what I was feeling, because Jamie bumped into me, his hand finding mine, clutching it hard.

“If your children are incapable of dealing with the Reverend, Hayle, then we can have the Hangman accompany them to the church.  Once they point the way, the Hangman can deal with the Reverend.  Kill the problem at its root, then deal with the peripheral concerns, it’s a matter of time before we find our escaped project.”

“That won’t work,” I said.

“Sylvester,” Hayle said.  “If you could show Professor Briggs an appropriate amount of respect by not interrupting him or jumping in to correct him, I would very much appreciate it.”

He put emphasis on ‘very much’, in a way that insinuated Hayle might have me put down if I didn’t shut up.

“I’m showing Professor Briggs respect by not letting him make a mistake that would reflect badly on him.”

Hayle didn’t say anything, but the look in his eyes promised consequences.

“Why wouldn’t it work?” Briggs asked.

“He knows very well who you are, what the Academy is, and what you’re capable of.  He’s clever, and he’s positioned everything in such a way that you’ll pay in spades for anything you do to him.  Kill him, and you martyr him.”

“As I said, we can handle riots.”

“And as I said,” I pointed out, without missing a beat, “He’s not concerned with being inconvenient.  He’s set on making himself convenient, entirely essential to the smooth running of Radham.”

I didn’t dare look away from Briggs, in case he took it to mean I was weak, but I was pretty sure Hayle was ready to kill me.  One didn’t generally debate with Professor Briggs.  He had the clout and power to handle most problems in a direct means.  He probably could handle this situation by throwing everything he had at it, and he wouldn’t regret the aftermath, messy as it might be.

“Explain,” Briggs said.

It was Gordon who explained.  “He’s been planting seeds and nourishing them in key people.  Yes, if you have him killed, you’ll have riots.  But things don’t end there.  He’s reached some of your students.  He’s reached major figures across the city.  He’s playing a game of chess, and he’s laid out the board so you can’t take one of his pieces without his taking two of yours.”

“We have more pieces,” Briggs said.  The man didn’t even flinch.

He was fully prepared to wage a war if it came down to it.

“We have more pieces, but he has an agenda,” I said.  “He’ll spread word to other cities, other Academies, because that’s how he can hurt you best.  He’s already telling people about the special projects.  Word might leak out in other cities, they might have problems now and again, they might even have a riot now and again, but if he makes everything go wrong, lets all the information slip, he could make Radham look like a joke.”

Looking at Briggs, he most definitely didn’t like that.  I wondered if it was concern for the problem or the implication that Radham could even be a joke.

“I have to say,” Fletcher said.  “One thing I like about Dog and Catcher is that they don’t talk so much.”

“The Lambs aren’t like Dog and Catcher,” Hayle said.  “They are, I should stress, much better equipped to solve problems that brute force won’t answer.”

“So you say,” Professor Briggs said.  He pursed his lips a little.

It looked like he was going to say something, but the doors opened.

A man in a grey coat strode into the faculty room.  The room was large enough it took him a few seconds to get into earshot.

“Word got out,” the man said.  “About three more escapes.”

“Three more?” Sexton asked, voice arching.

“Only one we know of, but it was visible.  Large enough to be seen as it climbed the wall.  Bullets wounded it but didn’t stop it.  Citizens are talking about there being three, which-”

“Is a lie,” Hayle said.  “Our Reverend is in full control right now.”

“How very fortunate that we had your Lambs to inform us what was really happening,” Briggs said, with a note of sarcasm.  “Lambs.  You can do this?”

“Yes,” Gordon said.  And he was exactly the right person to say it with utter confidence.

“I’ll need some things,” Hayle said, “to better coordinate.”

My eyes widened.  I jumped in.  “We need two things.”

Oh, the look Hayle gave me there.  I’d promised to be good, but I suspected I’d never get another chance.

“Two things?”

“Hayle might need more.  But for us… badges.  A way to get past the blockades and general interference.”

“Hand written notes,” Briggs said.

“With something permanent after?” I asked.

I was testing my luck, considering the tension I felt from my fellow Lambs, Hayle, and Briggs, and the incredulity on the other professor’s faces.

“Possibly,” Briggs said.  “What else?”

“We need an adult,” I said.

Cat out of the Bag 2.6

“I will be with you shortly,” Hayle said.  “Cecil, if you’d wait a moment?”

“Yes, sir,” was the answer.  Cecil, then, was the doctor who had entered the faculty room to deliver the news about the false escapes.

That said, our supervisor shut the door to the faculty room with more firmness than it deserved.  Where Claret Hall had been grown, the windows and doors had been put in by ordinary means, and the door chosen for this particular room was big and solid enough that it could have shattered any arm caught in between it and the frame.

It made a good slam.  Hayle was not happy with me.

Our group stood out in the hallway, some of us shuffling our feet.  The doctor that stood off to one side was looking at us with curiosity, but didn’t venture to say anything.

“That could have gone worse,” I commented.

There was no response.

“Professor Briggs was in an uncharacteristically good mood,” I said.

The awkward silence lingered.

“We’re going to get badges,” I said, because things were reaching the point where annoyance or anger would have been preferable to the non-answers.

I didn’t get annoyance or anger.

Silence.

“We waste so much damn time on stuff we shouldn’t,” I said.  “It was a chance to stop doing that.  Step up our game.”

I looked at each of them in turn.  Gordon was giving me a level stare, Helen seemed more preoccupied with fixing scuffed nails, and both Jamie and Lillian were avoiding my eyes.  Mary looked a little confused.

This was an egg I could crack.  Mary was the most obvious go-to, but I felt like going that way would stack the deck against me.  The others would see through what I was trying to do, in part because it would be as transparent as all get out, and then they’d side against me.  Me and maybe Mary against the four of them.

I’d lose any points I’d won with Mary if I put her in that situation.

“Helen,” I said.  “You know the badges make sense.  I know that you have to go through a lot of checkpoints to see Professor Ibbot, depending on where he’s working at a given point in time.”

“I do,” she said, looking up from her nails.

“Don’t engage him,” Gordon said.

“I’ll do what I want, thank you very much,” she said.  Prim and proper of tone, and fully capable of using that tone as a weapon on its own.  She turned her gaze to me.  “You forget that in dealing with Professor Ibbot, I have to deal with very capricious personalities.  I know what it means to deal with powerful people.”

You mean you have to deal with his personality.

“I didn’t forget,” I said, sullenly.  “I was trying to downplay that part of things.”

“Don’t worry,” she said.  “Professor Hayle is more reasonable than most.  He can’t blame you too much.”

“Too much,” I said.

“Can I ask?” Mary cut in.  “Why is everyone acting like Sy is going to die or something?”

Thank you for forcing some discourse, I thought.

“You can ask, but we’ve got company,” Gordon said, indicating the man that Hayle had called Cecil.  “It would be unwise to go into details.”

Damn you for shutting down said discourse.

“Excuse me?” the man asked, archly.  Teacher, doctor, gray coat, whatever we called him, he’d grown accustomed to a general degree of respect.  Being shut out of a discussion between children was a few rungs below where he was used to being.

“Beg pardon.  We’ve been asked to keep silent on certain subjects while we do errands for the faculty, sir,” Gordon said.  He feigned a lack of confidence.  “If that’s okay?”

“I see,” the man said.  He digested that nugget, which wasn’t a hard thing to do.  The hierarchy was reinforced.  Professors had more say than doctors, who had more say than we did.  “That’s alright.”

Gordon gave him a grateful smile.

More how Gordon operated, really.  My modus operandi was to put people off balance, see where they were most vulnerable, and push to topple them.  Gordon was almost doing the opposite here.  Reaffirming the rules and the social order.

“You know,” I told Gordon, “If we-”

“I would strongly urge you to think about what you’re going to say to Professor Hayle, after he comes back out,” Gordon said, cutting me off.  “I’m not mad.  I’m worried about you.  And if you goof this up bad enough we suffer for it, I will be mad.”

Doctor Cecil spoke up, speaking in a slightly patronizing tone, “Whatever you’re doing here, if you’ve got connections to the guys in that room, it’s a gig I’d recommend you hold on to.”

“Exactly,” Gordon said, playing along.  “I like this gig, Sy.  Don’t lose us this gig.”

“What happens if we lose this gig?” Mary asked.

“That is a very good question,” Gordon said.

“One you’re not going to answer?”  Mary asked, glancing at the Doctor, who made a face at the glance’s implication.

“Not because of any secrets,” Gordon said.  “I really don’t know what happens.”

Mary nodded.

“I think you’re being paranoid,” I said.  “They’re not going to toss us out.”

“I think,” Gordon said, very carefully, “that out of the two of us, I’m the one who has faint memories of your predecessors.”

Ashton and Evette.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It suggests that you really should stop arguing with me and plan how you’re going to get back on Professor Hayle’s good side.”

“It suggests nothing of the sort!”

“Sy,” Gordon said.

“Gordon,” I said, without missing a beat.

“Remember when I said I wasn’t angry?  You’re changing my mind.  Please don’t.”

I sighed, crossed the hallway, and leaned against the wall opposite the others.  I fished in my pocket for a small folding knife, more for cutting twine and carving sticks than for opening people up.  I unfolded it, and tossed it in the air.  I caught it by the flat of the blade, between thumb and index finger, made it bounce as I tested the weight, then flipped it over again, catching it by the blade again.

I always focused my thoughts best when I had something to occupy the rest of my attention.

The door opened too quickly after that.  Hayle stepped out, then shut the door behind him.

“This way, please,” he said.  “Cecil, too, if you could?”

“I can, sir,” Cecil said.

We followed our gray-haired Professor and father figure a little ways down the hallway.  Hayle stopped by the window, glancing out at the city beyond.

He let us wallow in the silence.  Even I wasn’t reckless enough to break the silence and test him.

“Cecil, I’ve been told you don’t have any pressing obligations?”

“I, uh, do not, no.”

“You’ll be one of two individuals to go with them.  Do what they require of you, within reason, facilitate them, and don’t ask too many questions.  Do this for us and a recently vacated laboratory in the underground area will be yours, along with some leeway to pursue any personal projects.  Some leeway, I hope you understand.”

“I understand I shouldn’t waste academy funds,” Cecil said, “But if something has my fancy and I can justify it, that would be alright?”

“You understand, I think.”

“A friend of mine is more passionate about his project than I am about any of mine.  If I brought him in-”

“That would be fine,” Hayle said, curt.  “If you don’t mind?”

Cecil raised his hands, “By all means.  I’m sorry.”

“Sylvester,” Hayle said, and he said it in a way that made me shrink a little.

“Sir.”

“Good response, that,” he said, in a tone that betrayed some anger.  “Keep it up.  Cecil, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t repeat any of what I’m about to say.”

“I’m already in your debt.”

“Sylvester,” Hayle said, again, driving the point in.  “As cunning as you think you are, with carefully laid schemes and nonsense, the rest of us do entertain our own ideas and plans.  Me among them.”

I nodded, mute.  I’d only seen him like this once or twice.

“I have been anticipating and waiting a rather long time for a situation like this to crop up.  One where, whether they like it or not, they depend on my resources.”

The look he gave us made it very clear that we were among those resources.

“I knew, right away, that I would have some leeway, with the ability to call in favors and ask for resources.  All the more so if I can resolve this problem.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Imagine my frustration when the situation happens to unfold just as I want it to, and an impertinent little boy steps forward and makes his own bid for favor, asking for resources, because he thought it would be funny.”

“I thought it would be useful,” I said.  “We waste so much damn time on stuff we shouldn’t, getting past patrols and bureaucracy, maintaining the ruse.  It was a chance to free ourselves to act faster and more efficiently.”

It was the same argument I’d posed to my friends.

Had all gone well, if they’d been more willing to play ball and argue with me, maybe I could have felt more prepared posing the same defense to Professor Hayle.

“Maybe,” he said, and it didn’t sound like a concession or agreement at all.  “If that was the case, you could have come to me with it.  I would have been able to make it part of a number of concessions I asked for, from our esteemed Professor Briggs.  As it stands, I’m not entirely certain he wouldn’t tell me no; that he’s assisting you and that my project should stand on its own merit.”

My heart sank.  “Yes sir.  What were you going to-”

“Speak less, Sylvester, nod and agree with me more, please.  For both of our sakes.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Reverend Mauer is attacking the reputation of the Academy.  As much as we’d like to be entirely self sustaining, we depend on Radham at large for certain resources.  As much as I hate to admit it, Briggs is very likely correct in suggesting we could solve this with brute force, but it would be messy.”

I nodded.  The others were nodding as well.

“I told you just this afternoon that I wanted you to impress, no shenanigans, no jokes or off the wall behavior.  As it stands, your saving grace would be to see this through, executing it perfectly enough to impress me, impress Head Professor Briggs, and even impress Professors Sexton, Reid, and Fletcher, who were quick to make jokes at my expense, as soon as you left the room.”

“Executed perfectly,” I said.

“Perfectly,” Hayle said, in a deliberate way that suggested he thought that a careful enough pronunciation could get it through my skull.  “I know what you’re capable of.  Impress me.”

“I will,” I said.

“You asked for an adult, Cecil is one.”

“Of two, sir?” I asked.

“Of two.  When I was put on point and forced to think of students who I could trust to look after you all, those I knew, who had no other obligations…”

“Lacey,” I almost groaned the word.

“Lacey, yes.  She won’t be happy, but I believe she will make herself available for the evening.”

“Cecil,” Hayle said.  “Miss Lacey will catch up with you shortly.  I told you to do what these boys and girls said, within reason.  I hope you can rely on Lacey to define what is actually reasonable, should you find yourself wondering.”

“I see.  I can’t help but feel as if I’m missing something.”

“That feeling will get a great deal more pointed before you’re done with this task.  Ignore it, push it to the back of your mind, and focus on the much-coveted lab you’ll have all to yourself when all of this is over.”

Cecil nodded.

“You’re going to the church?” Hayle asked.

I glanced at the others, then nodded.

“Lacey will catch up with you in my coach.  Do not try to evade her or make it hard for her to find you.”

“Noted,” Gordon said, putting a hand on my shoulder.

Apparently I had suffered enough in Hayle’s sights.  Gordon was backing me up, even if it was only a little.

“Watch him,” Hayle said.

“We will,” Gordon replied.

The latent anger and frustration was clear in Hayle’s body language as he headed back to the faculty room.

When the door shut behind him, not quite as loud as it had been earlier, we remained silent for several long moments.

“Don’t worry,” Doctor Cecil said, very gently.  “I’m not nearly as scary as Professor Hayle, there.  I don’t know if it helps to win you over, but I plan to be far kinder to the common people when I become a professor.”

“I think that makes you one of our new favorites,” Gordon said, and the condescending lie was so transparent I was certain Cecil would see through it.

But Cecil only wallowed in his self indulgence, smiling, and placed a hand on Gordon’s head, then mine, leading us on our way.

☙

The rain and moisture that the summer heat had held off was returning now that it was cooler, Radham paying us back in spades for the warmth we’d enjoyed earlier in the day.

The sunset was in full sway, and the light filtered through clouds in veins of purple and red.  The clouds themselves were thick enough to be almost black.  On the ground, lamps were bright, but the dull yellow glow was meager compared to the puddles and the moisture running down the branches and wood on walls, where the light from above was reflected, bringing the surfaces to life.

The black coach rolled up.  Two stitched guards were perched on top, both clad in heavy raincoats.  The only openings in their coats were the slots that had been left for their milky white eyes, and even those slots were protected from rain by cap-like brims in the raincoat hoods.

The rain was warm, but the stitched were warmer.  Horse and man alike were virtually steaming, the moisture rising off their heads, shoulders and backs in clouds.

The coach door opened, and an umbrella unfurled.  In the midst of stark blacks and reds, Lacey’s red hair caught light and looked absolutely brilliant.  Well matched to our Cecil’s neat black hair, which was cut a little too close to the head at the backs and sides, a little too coy in how the parted hair curled at the brow.

There were jokes about whether a Professor was left mentally off-kilter by the lengthy and torturous process of getting licensed as such, or whether only the mentally cracked were inclined to pursue that path.  Well, being a teacher or a doctor was a step down that road.  Cecil being a little eccentric was entirely to be expected.

And Lacey, who I’d left on bad terms, was staring at us, lips pressed together in something approximating irritation.  She looked very human and very grounded, standing out in her white coat.

She reached into one pocket, and withdrew a small envelope.

I reached out to take it, but Gordon beat me to the punch, giving me a look.

Our temporary badge.

“Lose the coat,” I told Lacey.

Lacey didn’t immediately obey.

“We were talking about it while we waited for you.  We’re going undercover, in a sense,” Gordon explained.  “The people we’re dealing with are very upset with the Academy.  Wearing a coat would be counterproductive.”

“Very well,” Lacey said.  She handed her umbrella to a stitched, who held the umbrella in place while she doffed her white lab coat and placed it inside the coach.  “Anything else?”

“The less attention we attract, the better,” Gordon continued to explain.  “The Reverend is gathering soldiers.  He put out an offer in a very subtle way, telling people that if they were angry, they could come to him.  Then, in a very coincidental bit of timing, he spread the word that three more experiments had escaped.”

“Only one of which was true,” Lacey said.

“Yes,” Jamie said.  “Large and visible enough to get attention, and give life to the fears that people have about the other two.”

“We need to get close,” I said.  “He’s gathering people around him, ready for the war that Briggs was prepared to give him.  If we confronted him, we’d be up against everything he had arrayed and positioned against us.  If we go with the flow, and successfully join the influx of people that are heading his way…”

“A brilliant little idea,” Cecil informed me, in a tone so patronizing it made my teeth hurt.  “But, again, you refuse to admit the very real fact that you’re children.  Hardly a good choice for an army.”

“And you’re adults,” I said, not for the first time.  “We’re going to try it.  If it doesn’t work, we’ll adapt.”

“It seems convoluted.  What if this attractive young lady and I were to go alone?”

I think you’d cock it up, I thought.  I tried to figure out a way to phrase it nicely.

“I think you’d cock it up,” I told him, when I couldn’t.

His mouth dropped open.  I saw a flicker of genuine anger in his expression.

“Sir,” Gordon cut in, giving me a dark look.  “Professor Hayle told you to do as we asked?”

Cecil shut his mouth.  He took a second before admitting, “Yes.”

“Please do this, sir.  Hayle asked for it for a reason.”

Cecil composed himself.  He looked very unhappy compared to where he’d been at the moment of Lacey’s arrival.  His words were painfully stiff as he asked, “Is there anything else you’d like me to do?”

It was Helen who jumped to the rescue.  “Would you please escort Miss Lacey?  I think Gordon needs to give Sylvester a talking to, and he can’t do it while you’re here.”

As unhappy as Lacey had seemed, her expression grew darker at that request.

Doctor Cecil, for his part, beamed.  He offered Lacey his arm.

While he wasn’t looking, Helen, followed soon after by Lillian, Jamie, Mary, Gordon, and myself, in roughly that order, clasped her hands together in a pleading gesture.

Lacey took up Cecil’s arm.  Together, they walked about ten paces ahead of us.  We started after them, maintaining the distance.

Well done, Helen, I thought.

“You think we’ll have the means to get in?” Gordon asked me.

“I think so.  Whatever Cecil thinks… I suspect the Reverend is trying to win over the community.”  I gestured at Cecil and Lacey.  “Man, woman…”

“And child,” Mary finished.  I flashed her a smile, grateful for the line.

“Recruiting children is reprehensible on its own.  Recruiting a family?  Or recruiting a family man?  A caretaker with his kids in tow?”  I asked.

“I believe it,” Jamie said.  “There’s still a chance we won’t get in.”

“We’ll get in,” I said.

“If he’s plotting something specific, and children don’t fit into the plan?”  Jamie asked.

“I just got things arranged so we don’t have to get stalled and stonewalled by random Academy bureaucracy and security,” I said.  “Don’t tell me I’ve got to push every last thing past you guys and your twenty questions.  You trust me, or you’re supposed to.”

“Trusted.  Past tense,” Gordon said.  “Forgive us if we’re just a little bit cautious, after you made an enemy of Hayle.”

“Fine,” I sighed.  “What was the question, again?”

“What if he’s got something in mind?” Jamie asked.  “Something we can’t finagle our way into?”

“We’ll deal.  We can’t anticipate all that.  Let’s assume this will work.  We each know what we do and how we operate.  Any questions?  Coordination?  Ideas?  Or do you want to wing it?”

Our boots splashed more violently through a deceptive puddle, which filled a dip in the road.  I felt water find its way to the bottom of my rain boot.

“I know how I work,” Mary said.  “You said we can’t kill the Shepherd.  Can I do something else?”

“What?” I asked.  “Wait a second, repeat.”

“Can I do something else?”

“Before that.”

“The Shepherd?”  Mary asked.

It was dark, but not so dark that I didn’t see the small smile on her face.

I groaned.

“Well played,” Gordon murmured.  Mary’s smile grew wider

“The Shepherd and the Lambs,” Jamie remarked.  “I like it.  We know the name of our enemy, now.”

Mary looked entirely too pleased with herself, working it in as casually as she had.

I couldn’t even bring myself to dislike it, because it was Mary.

“To answer your question,” Gordon said.  “My gut feeling is that slowing the man down could do us a world of good.”

“He’s planned his moves out in advance,” I said.  “Timing things, the note that Wally had, giving him a specific time to release his experiment.  The spread of the story about the three escaped experiments was timed to coincide with the actual release of the one.  Yeah.”

“Slowing down,” Lillian murmured.  She moved her bag around in front of her, and rummaged inside.  “Um, side effects, ratios, um, um, um…”

“Diarrhea?” I asked.

“I don’t have anything fast.”

“Impaired judgment?  Nothing so obvious he’d immediately think he’d been poisoned, but something to make him more likely to make mistakes?”

“No side effects like that.  Headache?”

Mary extended a hand.  Lillian passed over a short glass vial with something inside.  A powder.

“For a man his size, I’d guess a teaspoon,” Lillian said.  “Or you could ask Cecil or Lacey, they’ll know the ratio off the top of their head.  If you give me a second, I have a measure.”

“It’s fine,” Mary said.

“It’s fine?”

“If it’s just a teaspoon, I can eyeball it, nine out of ten times,” Mary said, holding up her hand so one finger was extended.  She tapped her long fingernail with the little vial.

Cut to a very specific length.

“What happens the other time?” Jamie asked, quiet.

“I’ll err on the side of giving too little,” Mary said, with confidence.

“Good,” Gordon said.  “Sy?  What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking… our Shepherd is playing a game of chess.  We’re late to the game.  Every piece of his is well positioned.  All so he’s untouchable.  We’d be a lot better off if they hadn’t waited before asking us to jump in.”

“Can’t cry over spilled milk,” Gordon said.

“No.  That’s true.  But haven’t you ever been sitting at a chess board, thinking to yourself just how nice it would be if you could just take his turn for him?  Make the worst possible play, then watch them scramble to try to recover?”

“No,” Gordon said.  “Never crossed my mind.  I have wanted to swat you across the head when I realize you’ve cheated.”

“You have an idea, Sylvester?” Jamie asked, before Gordon and I could get in an argument.

“I do.  I just need to figure out an angle.”

“Start figuring,” Jamie said.  “Because we’re here.”

The church was busy, brighter than any building in Radham, short of the Academy.  Even at the darker periphery, where bright lights didn’t quite reach far enough past the windows and through the rain, there were lanterns and glowing cigarette ends.

We approached, picking up the pace to draw closer to our guardians.

“I’m your…?” Lacey asked.

“Older sister,” I said.

The look she gave me told me my attempt to curry favor hadn’t quite worked.  She saw right through me.

“And I’m?” Cecil asked.

“Teacher.  Not an Academy teacher, but a regular one.  Parents left us in your care.  If Lacey doesn’t want to be an older sister, she can be a colleague.”

“I see,” Cecil said.  “I can play along.”

I dearly hope so, I thought, turning my mind toward options to speak up or cut him off.  Kicking him in the back of the knee would have to do in a pinch, if he was a particularly bad actor.

As it turned out, it wasn’t so necessary.

The door was open, and people were waiting as we approached.  Being with Cecil and Lacey made the entrance painless.  Nobody spoke up or stood in our way, as we joined a crowd that was now gathered within the building.

Where fear had ruled, earlier in the day, there was anger now.  Restlessness.  Too many people wanting to do something, yet finding themselves unable.

The Shepherd had been at work, tending to his flock.

The Shepherd was right there, ready to greet all newcomers.

“Welcome,” he said, and his smile was warm.  He extended his good hand to us, his other arm limp at his side.  “And I see I recognize one of you.  Mary Cobourn?  It’s been a few years.”

A plan never survives contact with the enemy.

I didn’t see a break in her facade, and her smile was natural, but safe behind Lacey and Cecil, her hand found mine, clutching it with a tightness that suggested alarm.

Our little clone didn’t remember this part of Mary’s history.

Which threw a fair sized wrench into our machinations.

Cat out of the Bag 2.7

“Good evening, reverend,” Mary said.

The Shepherd smiled, for perhaps the first time since I’d seen him.  It was disconcerting, especially considering our somewhat precarious situation.  Smiles meant things, and a rare smile boded ill.

“Come in, please.  I’m glad to see you, Mary, you’ve been on my thoughts in recent months.  Are these your…?”

“Friends,” she said.

Good, keep it simple.

“And you are?” the man asked, directing his attention to Lacey and Cecil.

“Teachers,” Lacey said, following Mary’s lead.

“I had a great many conversations with your father, Mary, and your education was one of the topics.”

“He didn’t tell me about that.”

“He wouldn’t, I don’t think,” the Shepherd said.  “That’s not the image I have of him.  You spent quite some time here when you were small.”

“I did, but my memory of then isn’t so good.”

“No?  I would have thought otherwise.”

“I… daydreamed, mostly.  When I think to back then, I think of the games I played in my head.  The church seems smaller than it was.”

“Well, I can’t help but take a small amount of offense at that,” the Shepherd said.  “We put some work into expanding it.  It was quite a trial, even.  The men I answer to tend to think a church in Radham a lost cause.”

I wanted so badly to help her, but I couldn’t.

Jamie must have felt even worse in that regard.  Jamie probably knew what the remodel had been, and the actual year and seasons it had taken place.

Mary defaulted to silence.  A terrible, awkward, damning silence.

“A small amount of offense,” the Shepherd said, offering her a smile.  “You’re not so different from your father.  Will you join me for a conversation?  With your chaperone and friends, of course?  Things are fairly quiet right now, and I’m hoping a few more people arrive or come back inside before I give Mr. Gill the stage to address everyone and quiet their fears.”

“I, um,” Mary said.

I gave her hand a squeeze.

“That could be nice?” she ventured.

The Shepherd smiled.  “Come, then.  We’ll have some tea and a bite to eat, if your teachers are fine with that?”

“Yes,” Cecil said, a little too quickly.  Then, as if to compensate, “that would be fine.”

The Shepherd smiled at that, as if enjoying a private joke.  “I’ll show you the way, then.  It’s foul out there, in more ways than one, and creature comforts go a long way.”

We were lead down the aisle, through an open set of double doors at one side of the church.  To look at it, going by the coat by the door and the sets of shoes, Mauer lived in the building, and this intermediate area between the area that was open to the public and the living area was something of an office.

It was a more private place to meet people, from what I gathered.  There was even a door leading from the little office to the outside, so people could come and meet him here directly.  I noted the presence of little stones at the base of the door, too small to be the type to hold it open.  Not that people tended to leave doors open in rainy Radham.

Not solely a place of business, the space felt a touch too staged to be a proper part of his home, either.  A dark red military jacket, trimmed in gold cord, sat behind glass, within a fair sized frame.  A smaller frame of the same make held three badges and an emblem from his old military company.  They were here for the sake of others, not for Mauer, I suspected.  The way the cabinet to Mauer’s left was laid out, he didn’t have a good view of either.  We, finding seats in chairs and benches on the far side of his desk, had a clear view of both.

There were other things and keepsakes too, better placed for Mauer to see.  Photos of him with family as a child, when he was about our age, black, white, and blurry.  A professionally taken, expanded photo of a relative wearing a baseball jersey, mid-pitch.  A cross, however, took center stage behind his chair.  Worn, beaten and battered, with chips of paint missing, revealing pale, old wood beneath.

It was a stark contrast to this very put-together man with his bronze-red hair so neat, yet I fully, one-hundred percent believed that the cross was his, not the church’s.  A family keepsake, perhaps.

He’d just finished filling his kettle with water from a pitcher, and had turned a little heated plate on.  Half-turning, he’d caught me looking at the cross.

“I’m guessing you’re not one to attend church,” he said.

“Most don’t, do they?” I asked.  “Especially people our age?”

“No.  Not in Radham, at least until bad things start happening,” Mauer said.  He leaned a little to one side to look through the doors to the church proper, where the crowd was still getting sorted out, gathering in groups and talking in low tones.  “As we see tonight.”

‘Bad things’.

To me, it sounded like a tepid way of referring to the escaped experiments, but to a real child of my age, coming from a man of authority, it could be reassuring in a way.  Acknowledging and downplaying the problem.

I found myself wondering what process was at work behind his words.  Did he tailor them to his audience with intent, thoughts flying to pick the best one for each situation, or did he do it naturally?

“It sounds like you’re trying to guilt him into attending church more,” Cecil said.

“One of my jobs,” Mauer said, smiling at Cecil.  “You’ll have to forgive me.”

Cecil gave him a tight smile in response.

Awkward.  Cecil was not the right man for this job.  I should have been more specific.

“Mary,” the Shepherd said, taking it in stride, “Your father and I had long debates about your attendance at Mothmont.  I don’t see it as confidential, as many of the debates were in public forums, more as friends than as council.  When he took up the accounting job for the mayor, he became too busy.  I think I asked what became of you, but memory fails me.”

“I did go to Mothmont,” Mary said.

“Past tense?”

“Yes sir,” she said.

He waved his hand.  “Trust me, I’ve heard the word ‘sir’ enough for one lifetime.  ‘Father’ works, but I’m not too fond of that either.  When you said past-”

“Aren’t titles and symbols important for a reverend?” she asked.  “Oh, I’m sorry, Father, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

It was interesting, seeing how Mary’s mind worked when she was put on the spot.  This wasn’t her focus or specialty.  She wasn’t an actor, and for much of her relatively short existence, she’d been raised to emulate one role, possibly for one audience, her parents.

But Mary wasn’t foolish or stupid.  Even the ‘sir’ could have been intentional, turning the discussion back on the Shepherd.  Now she was putting the focus back on him.

Not the tactic I would have chosen, but it was a good tactic.  Almost attacking him, in a sense, not letting him return a strike.

“The symbols aren’t so important to me, not in that way,” the Shepherd said.  He looked very at ease as the kettle started whistling.  He poured it into a waiting teapot and deposited some teabags.  “I believe in simple and fundamental truths.  I’ve seen people in my position try to give counsel to the suffering with fancy words and high concepts, with symbols and rituals.  It felt hollow, and I told myself I wouldn’t do that to others.”

“What are you doing, then?” Cecil asked.

Holy hell, Cecil, would you shut up?

It wasn’t the words alone, but the tone that he’d given them.  Accusatory.

It was Gordon that sprung to the rescue.  “Is it okay if I don’t have tea and treats?”

“Me either?” Lillian asked.  A little too fast.  Gordon might have prodded or signaled her, if I had to guess.

“Ah,” Cecil said.  “Yes, I think it would be.”

Gordon sprung up from his seat, retreating, Lillian following right after.

I saw what he was doing and started to formulate a way to communicate it to Lacey when she spoke.  “Charles.  You should watch them and make sure they don’t get into trouble.”

I couldn’t see it, which meant the Shepherd couldn’t see it either, but it was very possible that Lacey had given Cecil a wink to drive the point home.

“I think I should.  If you’ll excuse me,” Cecil said.  “I’m sorry father, but I would love to have tea and a discussion another time.”

“Of course,” the Reverend said.  “Three less cups of tea, then?

He brought the teapot over to his desk, then retrieved cups from the cabinet.  “People are scared.  The rest of you are all right?  Don’t feel obligated to stay for Mary’s sake.”

“I’m quite alright,” Helen said.  She offered him a winning smile.  “Tea would be lovely.”

“You just want the treats that he’s serving with the tea,” I teased her.

Helen’s expression shifted, a touch of momentary outrage, suppressed, consternation, composure.

My statement was partially intended to augment Helen’s mask, and partially in hopes that I could maintain the distraction, draw things out further so that Cecil’s accusatory question could more easily be forgotten.

“Yes,” she admitted.  Then, delayed, as if she’d just remembered, “Please.”

All for the benefit of the Reverend.

“Fruit cake?” he asked.

Helen’s smile widened.  “Please.”

For a man that professed to have little interest in ritual, the tea was most definitely one.  Serving tea to a group all the more so: asking what everyone wanted, portioning out the cake on little saucers with individual forks, and handing them out.

And in all of that, there were no clues as to how he’d grown so good at manipulating the masses.

“What’s going to happen?” I asked, before he’d finished portioning out the cake and gotten settled, ready to focus wholly on the discussion.  Taking the initiative, much as Mary had fought to maintain it, just minutes ago.

“I think that depends wholly on the Academy,” the Shepherd said.  He turned the fancy little tea spoon from his tea over in his hands.  “Four experiments got loose in the span of one day.  I have to wonder how it even happened, if some safeguard failed.  God willing, we’ll only need to stay safe until they’ve cleaned up their mess.”

Can’t clean up experiments that only escaped in rumor, I thought.

“What if it doesn’t stop?” I asked, but what I was really asking was, what if you keep up these rumors?  Stir people up into a frenzy?

“Then I suppose Mary will be counting on you to protect her,” the Shepherd said.

I wasn’t left at a loss for words terribly often.  The Shepherd had managed it.  My mouth sat open.

“I caught a glimpse of you two holding hands, seeing inside the crook of your teacher’s elbow,” the Shepherd said.  He finished doling out the saucers of cake, then took a seat, stirring his tea with a small, thin-handled spoon.  “You’re asking these questions out of concern for her welfare?”

“I am,” I finally managed.  My mind was racing.  He’d noticed that detail.  What else had he seen?

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Sid,” I told him.

“You’re going to grow up to be a good man, Sid.  Mary is lucky to have you.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I focused on my tea, instead.  The saucer of cake sat in my lap, and I held the teacup with both hands, raising it to my mouth.

He might have taken it for embarrassment, but I was taking the time to think, free of further poking and prodding from our Shepherd.

I wasn’t missing the fact that I was losing in this verbal battle, and I wasn’t positive our man was even playing.

“We got off track earlier,” he said.  “What led you to leave Mothmont, Mary?”

“There was an incident.  Children got sick, the school was closed.  I talked to my parents, and they thought I would be safer elsewhere.”

“With your lovely teacher here.  Miss?”

“Lindsey,” Lacey said.

“Are you teaching the students in hopes that they will attend the Academy, then?” the Shepherd asked.

“I- no.  They’re free to make that choice, but that’s not our goal.  After the incident at Mothmont, we’re even downplaying it, for the parents’ benefit.”

The Shepherd nodded, but he had a concerned look on his face.

“Is that wrong?” Lacey asked.

The Shepherd sipped at his tea, then put his cup down.  No response was forthcoming.

“Father?”

He let out a sigh.  “When I was small, younger than these children are now, my father was a soldier.  He served in the American War.  The young men were all told how important the war was.  They were given all sorts of reasons.  Patriotism, principle, faith.  Their value as men was entirely dependent on how willing they were to die for their country.  How others valued them, and how they valued themselves.”

“My father was too young to participate, but he remembered what it was like,” Lacey said.

“On one side, men, shooting, dying, panicking.  On the other side, rank and file of stitched soldier.  Utterly obedient, each capable of getting up after being shot, needing only quick repair work before they were ready to see the field again.  Two or three times as strong as any soldier on my father’s side.  They had weaknesses, yes, but they had more strengths.”

He seemed to realize who he was talking to, and frowned.  “I’m sorry, I had a train of thought, and was musing aloud.  Am I scaring the children?”

I shook my head, joining Jamie, Helen, and Mary.  Jamie ventured, “It’s interesting.”

“I thought of my father, then myself, and looking at the younger generation, hearing how their education progresses, it got me thinking.”

“I want to hear,” I said, with the blithe eagerness that only a child could get away with.

“Mmm.  I’ll leave out details.  The Crown won, as they win virtually every war.  America lost.  I reached the age my father had been when he’d been convinced to go to war, but no reasons were given when they gave me a rifle and jacket.  See over there?”

The Shepherd stood.  He made his way around the desk, past Mary’s knees and mine, to reach the frame where his jacket was hung.

The moment his back was turned, Mary leaned forward.  A deft movement of her hand over his cup of tea, and the powder was deposited from the hollow of her smallest fingernail to the tea.  She picked up the spoon and stirred, not letting the spoon touch the edges of the cup and clink, then set it back in place, at the same angle it had been.

Lacey gave Mary a long, hard look.  It seemed to take apparent effort to compose herself.

A good thing that the Reverend didn’t turn around.  Oblivious, he tapped the glass, “Unlike my father’s, my jacket had a crown on the sleeve.  My war was longer and uglier.  I hope you understand if I don’t go into the details.”

It was Jamie who spoke up.  “Your father’s war was lost with brute strength.  The strength of stitched against men.  Your war was won with…”

“Abominations,” the Shepherd said.  He turned around, making his way back to his seat.  “Yes.  How exceptionally well put.”

“I read something like it in a book,” Jamie said, hugging his notebook.  “I like books.”

The Shepherd smiled.  “I do too.”

“Are you afraid of what war these children might see?” Lacey asked.

“No, Mrs. Lindsey.  That is not my greatest fear,” the Shepherd said.  “A fear, but not the greatest by far.”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me, Father.”

The Shepherd was settling into his chair, mouth opening to respond, when I saw the reaction.  A momentary hesitation, while his eyes rested on his cup.

“Yes,” he said, finding his stride again.  “It seems I have.  I’m sorry.  My thoughts are elsewhere.  I think we may have to cut this short, it’s about time Mr. Gill and I address the room.”

“It’s okay,” Mary said.

“I’m sorry to dwell on your education, Mary.  I spend time worrying about the next generation, and after interacting with your father as much as I did, you’re one of the faces that spring to mind.”

Mary nodded.

“Thank you very much for the cake, Father,” Helen said.

“You’re very welcome,” he said.  “You children are welcome any time, to talk about anything.  There may even be cake waiting for you when you do.”

“Thank you!” Helen said, smiling.

“Provided you have permission from your teacher or parents to partake,” he said.

Helen’s face fell a little.

“I appreciate you humoring me, I hope I didn’t bore,” he said.  We shook our heads.  “If anyone asks, I’ll be out in a minute, no less.”

“Father,” I said, right away.

“Yes?”

“You said that your fear wasn’t so much that we’d fight in a war worse than the one you fought in, but you didn’t say what your fear really was.”

“It’s complex and silly,” he said.  “It wouldn’t make much sense, trust me.  Taken the wrong way, it might even offend.”

“Please?” I asked.

“Please?” Jamie asked, chiming in.

The Shepherd looked surprisingly weary, looking at us, collecting the first of the dishes we’d left behind.  He seemed to weigh his options a little.

“Please,” Mary said.  “We’re not as dull as you might think.”

He startled a little at that, then gave her an appraising look.

“My greatest concern, Mary Coburn,” he said, “is that there won’t be an opportunity for you to fight at all.”

Leaving us with that terminal dose of irony, he turned away, collecting the dishes.

From the time he’d returned to his chair to the time he saw us out the door of his homey little office, he hadn’t touched his tea.

Glancing over my shoulder, I could see through the open door as he quickly stacked saucers and gathered the scattered cups we’d left behind.  All went to the counter by his little heating plate and kettle, likely to be washed at a later time.

I saw him carry one cup to the same counter, clearly heavier than the others.  He unlatched his window, removed something from the top of the window, opened the window and tossed out the contents.

“Lacey,” I said.

She gave me an annoyed look.  “Don’t call me like a dog.”

“Find Cecil,” I said.  “Gordon or Lillian would work too.  Whatever they’ve been up to, we should get caught up.”

“Say please?” she asked.

“Time is really of the essence,” I said.  That was apparently enough to send her on her way.  To her back, I added, “Fetch.”

She stopped in her tracks, apparently decided it wasn’t worth it, and headed off again.

“You’re a jerk,” Jamie commented.

“He knew,” I said.  “The Shepherd.  Something tipped him off.”

“I did it right,” Mary said, under her breath.

“Apparently not,” I said.  “Plus side is, I think he blames Lacey.  He seemed eager to invite us back, but not so much for our teacher.”

Mary looked annoyed, apparently not even hearing what I was saying.  “The tea shouldn’t have even been swirling by the time he returned to it.  The powder didn’t change the color, I even moved the spoon back.”

“No,” Jamie said.

“No?” Mary asked.

“No.  It wasn’t the same when you put it back,” Jamie said.  “I’m thinking back, and the spoon was upside down.  It was rightside up when you put it back.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Mary said.  “How would you even tell until you took the spoon out?”

“They were nice spoons, maybe with marks on the underside of the handles,” I said.  “Something you said at the beginning tipped him off.  I think he took it to mean she’d been brainwashed or the Academy had its hooks in her.  He took a sudden interest in your welfare.  While getting into a protective mindset, he got into a defensive one too.  Got a bit more cautious.  Prey instinct, maybe.  Probably not, but maybe.”

“Sensing something wrong from clues he didn’t even consciously take in,” Helen said.

I nodded.  “If I had to guess, he’s been especially wary ever since the war ended.  He had coins or something stacked in a certain order above every door or window he doesn’t tend to leave open.  Stones left at the base of the door, so he knows if it’s been opened.  Everything in a place, to the point where he knows if anything’s been tampered with.”

“Why?” Mary asked.

“Because he’s paranoid, and rightly so,” I said.

“The war he fought in had parasites,” Jamie said.  “The worst ones paralyzed a man, left him screaming so the Crown soldiers could collect them and turn them into stitched.  Or just left them to scream themselves raw and die from exposure.  I can’t blame him for being careful with his tea.”

“Those weren’t the worst ones,” Helen murmured.  “I’ve seen some of the ones people don’t talk about without clearance.”

“Lovely,” I said.  “But we’re getting off topic.  Our concern is the Shepherd.”

“He didn’t have much to say about what he had planned,” Jamie said.

“No,” I said.  “But we did get a good chance to study him as a person, and we have a sense about his motivations now.  That bit at the end.”

“Assuming you think he’s genuine,” Mary said.

“I do,” I said.  I thought for a second.  “Are we sure this guy isn’t an experiment?”

“Why?” Jamie asked.

“Because, ugh.  He’s better at manipulating groups than any of us.  I’d say I’m better at him at one-on-one stuff, but he did throw me off with that one line.”

“That was funny,” Jamie said.  I elbowed him.

“He’s sharp, too,” I said.

“When Ibott gives me lessons,” Helen said, “He sometimes warns me not to underestimate people.  Humans did some amazing things over the years.  Geniuses pop up now and again, people with exceptional natural ability, or those with talent.”

“He’s just an incredible person?” Mary asked.  “One in a million?”

“I respect him,” I said.  “I’m a little spooked at the idea of what he might do if we let him keep this up.”

“You respect him, but you want to stop him?” Mary asked.

“I respected you,” I said.  “I still do, all the more.”

That cut that argument short.  It seemed to stun her a little, put her on her heels.

I was learning little tidbits about Mary, and one was that she didn’t like to fail.  This was where we differed.  She valued the execution, while I liked getting a reaction out of people, even if it was in an indirect way, through some lesson I’d given Jamie.  When her execution wasn’t enough, she got cranky.  Same as I did, when I failed to budge people.  Rick being first and foremost among them.

“You did good,” I told her, taking her hand.  “Problem is, he did better.  We underestimated him.  I thought he set things up so that the people around him were all perfectly arranged, a chess board with every piece trapped.  But he does it with his environment too.”

Lacey was coming back with Cecil and Lillian.

“What do we do?” Mary asked.

The others reached us.  Gordon was absent.

“What did I miss?” Cecil asked.

I ignored him.  I asked Lillian, “Where’s Gordon?”

“On the roof.  He said to wave, and he’d make an entrance.”

I took a look around.  The building was only two stories high, but it had been expanded, like the Shepherd had said.

On the roof, yet able to see us if we waved?

My eye fell on one of the stained glass windows.

Good old Gordon.  He’d remembered what I’d said.

Taking the chess board and making an opponent’s move for him.

“Did he take anything?” I asked.  “Ask for supplies?”

“Soap and a scalpel,” Lillian said.

I had no idea what Gordon was doing with soap and a scalpel, but I was so excited at the prospect of finding out that I could barely sit still.  I grinned.

“Let’s let Gordon enjoy the spotlight,” I said.  “This plays well into what I was thinking.”

“And what were you thinking?” Jamie asked.

“Right now?  Lacey, get close to the altar.  Everyone else?  Spread out.  The Reverend is going to want to assert control, keep everything in position.  But as Mary demonstrated, he’s not so good if he’s kept on the defensive.  Spread the word that there are riots happening elsewhere.”

“I can do that,” Cecil said.

“No,” I said.  “You have the most important job.”

“Important?”

“Run to the nearest telephone, as fast as you can,” I told him.  “Get word to the Academy.  Tell them there’s a riot happening here.”

“This is not the clean and tidy Hayle wanted,” Jamie reminded me.

“It will be,” I said.  “Trust me.”

“Gordon didn’t trust you,” Jamie said.

“I think he and I are on the same page here,” I said.

Everyone moved to their assigned spots.  Locations and positions.

Reverend Mauer had set up his own board.  Now we were setting up ours.

I gave Cecil a few minutes, watched each of the others.

The Shepherd and Gill were talking, and Gill made his way to the stage.

I saw the Shepherd looking over the crowd.  He saw me.

I gave him a wave.

Two seconds passed.  I supposed Gordon needed a running start.

He came crashing through the stained glass window behind the altar, head over heels, clearing a good distance.  The landing was violent, clipping the edge of the stage.

The marks on his arms and body, scalpel-carved, looked like the gouges of claws.  He was covered in a mucus-like slime.  Soap.

Lacey was the one at his side.  She helped him sit up.

He found his breath.

“The things are attacking!” he screamed.

Cat out of the Bag 2.8

As situations went, it was chaos.  People flocked closer to Gordon and fled to the edges of the room.  There were shouts, cries of fear, conflicting orders.

Gordon was a good-looking guy, if I looked past the minor details of rips, tears, blood and the goop he’d smeared on himself.  Tall, broad shouldered, muscular.  He was good at whatever he set his mind to, a step behind me in assessing people, a step behind Jamie in memory, and he had a lot of other talents besides.  More than any one of us, he had everything it took to thrive if separated from the group.  The lynchpin that would hold us together.  Girls liked him, guys respected him.

And this, that he got to be at the center of this chaos, the stone that set the ripples in motion, this was what made me jealous of him for the first time.

That he got to lie there and bleed while we had to do the work, pshh.  Salt in the wound.

My eye was on the Shepherd.

To his credit, he didn’t miss a beat.  He was already moving as fast as he was able, toward Gordon.  As people shouted and argued, some turning toward the door, he properly shouted for the first time that I’d heard.

“Stay inside where it’s safe!” he shouted.

Heads turned, the chaos settled a fraction.  People who were heading for the door slowed or stopped.

“No!”  Gordon shouted, twisting, turning.  He struggled against Lacey’s grip, as well as the grip of two men who’d jumped to his side, and in the process, he made momentary eye contact with me.  He maintained it as he shouted, “No!”

When I was sure he could see, and that the Shepherd didn’t have line of sight, I gestured.  Ring, middle, and index fingers flicked upward twice.

“It’s going to kill us all!” Gordon screamed, thrashing as Lacey tried to hold him down, steadily ratcheting up the intensity.  “It’s going to kill us!  It’s going to kill us!  It’s going to kill us!”

This was a balancing act.  We didn’t want disaster, riots, or madness.  We wanted the situation to be almost unmanageable, with emphasis on the word ‘almost‘.

“Gill!” the Shepherd called out.  “Through my office to my room.  I have four guns.  Two pistols in the desk, rifle by the bed, the third-”

“-Shotgun, in the cabinet, will do,” our would-be mayor said.  He recruited two people with a gesture.

The Shepherd approached Gordon, but turned to a group by the door.  “Terry, Hews, Arthur, I know you’ve done the gardening work for me.  You know where the stuff is stored.  Pole-saws, pitchforks, chopping knife.  Anything that can be used as weapons.  Don’t go-”

“We’re going to die!” Gordon screamed.  “Please, please, God!”

“-Outside!” the Shepherd had to raise his voice to be heard.  “Go through the back, the shed has two doors!”

Clear, sensible directions, giving the people here something to rally to.  Weapons gave them back a kind of power.  Taking the group that was closest to bolting it and empowering them.

To their backs, as they crossed the church, he said, “We’re counting on you!”

Turning them into heroes.

Gordon twisted, screaming, “Get off me, let me go!  It’s going to get me, they’re going to get me!”

I was able to see Gordon, in the midst of pulling ineffectually at Lacey’s grasp, an intentional sort of ineffectual, give her two taps on the side.  The universal signal for release.  It was discreet, subtle as such things went, in an area where most wouldn’t be looking, and those who didn’t know he was acting might not realize it was an intentional double-tap.

She let up on her grip of him, and he chose that same moment to pull free, still thrashing, playing out a mindless panic.

In the doing, he threw one fist out, and he socked the Shepherd one, right in the jaw.

No!  I screamed in my mind, while forcing my expression to match the crowd around me, which was aghast in a completely different way.  No, no, why!?

Why does he get to do this part?

It was, as maneuvers went, a pretty damn good one, I had to admit that much.  I wasn’t even sure I would have done better, in his shoes.  My acting would have beat his, probably, I could have chosen my words better, but I couldn’t have delivered a hit like he did.  Even if I’d gone for the Shepherd’s balls, I wasn’t sure I would have hurt him quite as much.

It was something Gordon was good at.  When he hit someone, even at almost half the size and body weight he could achieve one day, it hurt.  It wasn’t just the punch.  It was the fact that his hand was already messy with his own blood, and now the Shepherd was bloodied, his face a reminder of the danger.  He wiped his cheek with a handkerchief, but there was still a smear.

The second part of it was that he’d hit the Shepherd in the mouth, and it hadn’t been a tap, either.  Gordon was stronger than most.

As if time had slowed down, I could see the Shepherd scooting back a bit, eyes opened wide, moving his jaw as if to test how functional it was.  For a man who relied so much on his words, it had to hurt on a complete other level.

I would never say that Gordon was anything but a genius.  A genius that was now being pinned down by three grown men, with Lacey close by.

“Stay-” The Shepherd started.  He winced a little, then managed to say, not to Gordon but to the room, “Stay calm.  We cannot panic!”

“Please, please!” Gordon said.  He was winding down, struggling less, perhaps sensing that he’d used up all the leeway and influence he’d been afforded, or he was saving his strength and his words for when he could have more impact.

He twisted around, looking my way once again.

I glanced around the room.  I’d situated myself just to one side of the central aisle, standing on one of the pews, so that I had a view of everyone.  Jamie, Lillian, Helen, and Mary were all at different points at the perimeter of the room.  Gordon and the Shepherd were just beside the altar, in plain view of everyone.

I offered him the same gesture as before.  An ‘up’ twitch of the fingers.

The way I saw it, if he couldn’t meet the request and up the tension again, then I got to be smug.  If he did have it in him, then we could potentially solidify our hold on the situation before the people came back with the weapons.

I figured there was a three out of ten chance I’d get to be smug.  Gordon was too good at thinking clearly through moments of crisis.

“Please,” Gordon said, in an agonized way that might have broken more sensitive hearts in the room.  It sounded like he was giving up.  “Please.  They’re going to come after us.  We’re all going to die if we don’t do something.”

“They?” the Shepherd asked.  The room was almost silent, every set of ears listening.  “A moment ago you said ‘it’.”

“Yes,” Gordon said.  “I think it’s a mother?  And it has babies.”

Gill and his buddies re-entered the room, carrying their guns.

Gordon was able to intuit that that arrival meant we needed just a little bit more of a push to leave the Shepherd with a little bit less in the way of control.  He added, in a hollow, breathy voice, “Lots of babies.”

It was all I could do to avoid grinning.  We’d dealt with threats that bred, on two separate occasions.  The Fishing Man, so named because of a mispronunciation of ‘fission’, had been bad, though the problem had ultimately corrected itself.  The Wise Rats had been worse, another all-hands-on-deck situation, though it had been far tidier, confined to one laboratory building.  It had taken three weeks to clean up the mess.

I imagined the people here were now contemplating the implications.  They had no damn idea what could happen when something fertile got loose.

The Shepherd might have had a better idea, he’d been part of the war down south, but he didn’t flinch, didn’t crack, but I could see that his attention was elsewhere as the others around Gordon asked a flurry of questions.  What was it, could he describe it, how did it happen?

He knew what experiments had escaped, had used connections to reach students and manipulated those students into acting against the Academy.  He wouldn’t have urged anyone to release something that bred or multiplied.  There was too much chance that things would get out of control.

What’s more likely?  Do you think that the Academy is sending the bad stuff after you, or do you think there’s something suspicious going on with Gordon?

How do you process this, how do you move forward?

I was genuinely interested.  I respected our enemy.  I liked him.  I wanted to see how he functioned when the chips were down, the situation bad and inexplicable.

He was stone faced, eyes not focused on anything in particular.

He raised his eyes only as the group from the shed returned.  They each carried between two and four tools that served as weapons.  Poles with saws on the edges, sometimes used for trimming buildings, sledgehammers, a short chopping sword, bent halfway down the blade, used for tending to growing woodwork, a pitchfork and a two-handed shovel with a pointed end.

They passed them out to friends.

Gordon was still describing the ‘monster’ that had thrown him through the window, in the most incomprehensible, breathless manner he could.  “Big, and scaly, and it drooled and it had ears and it picked me up with these smaller arms and carried me up, but when I kicked it, it threw me with the big arms.  That’s when I got this cut, then I kicked it again, and it threw me the other way, and then I got thrown through the window.  It’s out there!  The mother thing and all the babies and-”

“Hush, hush!  Quiet.  You’re safe now,” a man reassured a seemingly panicked Gordon.

I’d joked with Rick, earlier in the day, that my brain ran hot sometimes.  It didn’t, but it felt like it was getting close.  There were more than a hundred faces and postures to focus on, people, positions, fashion, track records, all making this moment exactly what it was.

There were people around me. Unfamiliar faces.

Everything had to be balanced and weighed.

Maybe a gentle push to start.  The room was paralyzed, caught in indecision.  The man in authority was lacking, bleeding.  Gill was up there by the Shepherd, now, half-kneeling and talking at a volume I couldn’t make out from the other end of the church.

If the Shepherd wasn’t going to make a move, I’d have to at least act to counterbalance the impact of the group with the makeshift weapons.

“We’re not safe at all,” I said, under my breath.

A woman near me reached out, putting her hand on my head, while saying nothing.

The gentle push wasn’t enough.

“We’re not safe at all,” I said, again, just a little bit louder.  “We might be getting surrounded by the monsters.  We need to run, before they close in.”

If she said ‘no’, then I’d gain no ground, and would have to find another way to push.  But the entire room was hanging on Gordon’s words, the impact he’d made.  Maybe, if she was undecided, that would be the deciding element?

It wasn’t her that I wound up pushing into action.  A man nearby spoke, “I’m going to peek outside.”

“Is the way clear?” I asked, the words leaving my mouth before he’d even closed his mouth.  If I could attach my statement to his, make it seem like his idea…

“I’m not going out there,” he said, without turning.  Too much to hope for.  People weren’t cogs in a machine.  They were milling around, looking for an out.  I had to guess how they’d weigh risk versus reward, or one risk versus another, and then use that.  I’d guessed wrong here.

The woman beside me touched my head again, smoothing my tousled hair, as if that would reassure me and not irritate me nine ways from Sunday.

I ducked out from under her grip, hopping down from the pew.  I’d lost cachet with this particular section of the crowd.  I could move elsewhere and try again.

I found Mary, closer to the front.  From where Gordon was, up by the altar, Mary all the way over to the rightmost wall, in the corner closest to the stage.  Lillian was in the back corner, only a few paces from the door.

Mary was looking my way.  I gave her a ‘come here’ wave.

Lillian wasn’t looking my way, and a furtive motion on my part didn’t get her attention.  The way she was standing, there were too many people around her who blocked her view of the surroundings.  Her attention was on the stage.  On Gordon.

Our Mary worked better in coordination with the rest of us than Lillian did.  That was after being with us a day.  Lillian had been with us for a handful of months.

I shook my head, turned around, and moved through the crowd to get to Lillian.  I pushed against people and jostled them aside.  Any more agitation was a good thing, even if it was mild annoyance.

I seized Lillian’s hand and hauled her over to the other side of the church.

Gill was saying something.  I was only barely processing it.  Orders.  Aim at the window above, in case it comes through.  Organizing people in groups.  The words were just noise.  People listened, but our would-be mayor didn’t have the clout.

The Shepherd was oddly quiet.  Unable to talk?  Unwilling?

Thinking?

Jamie had told me that I’d built my personality and means of dealing with people by copying and studying the adults around me.  It had been a necessary thing, a scrabbling for control when I’d been subjected to appointment after appointment, the space between filled with every imaginable form of testing, for sanity, for memory, for competence of all stripes.

I’d learned to read people because I’d had to.  The Shepherd, though, was the first person I wanted.  I wanted him in a box where I could make him perform and glean everything I could.

It was his charisma.  It wasn’t the usual sort of charisma like Gordon or Helen might show off when they were ‘on’.  Not smiles and warmth.  When he spoke, when he acted, he tended to achieve things.  When he didn’t speak, as was the case right now, people were left waiting, hanging on the silence, in anticipation of the words.

They didn’t know the particulars, not exactly.  He was someone born with an enormous amount of natural talent for something, and after being altered irrevocably by the Academy, its war, and the modifications it made to his body, he’d found the drive to dig deep and utilize that talent.

I was one of the people in his thrall, in a way.  I very much wanted to hear him speak, to study him… but we’d left him speechless.

I wanted to push until he found his voice.

With Lillian trailing behind me, her hand in mine, stumbling to keep up, I hopped up onto a pew mid-stride, tugging on her arm as I made my way up.  Her hand slipped from mine.

I found the others, hopped down, and crossed the remainder of the distance.  Mary had already made it, without Lillian slowing her down.

Half of us crawled under a table that had been placed in a nook, books on top, formed a huddle, heads so close together that the sides of some of our foreheads touched. To onlookers, we were sort of hiding under a tablecloth.  Friends finding security among one another, clustered together.

Mary looked far from secure, squeezed in next to Helen.  Helen, for her part, was smiling a little, but apparently oblivious.

Lillian was late to arrive, worming her way into the cluster beside me.  I gave her a pinch in the side, and she hit me far harder than necessary, in retaliation.

“What do you think?” Jamie asked.

“I think we need a stampede for the door,” I whispered.  “I was going to try and move the crowd, spread fear and suspicion, but they feel too safe indoors.  If we could take that safety away…”

“We can take that safety away,” Mary murmured.  “I can.  We cut the power.”

“We need the situation manageable,” I said.

“You want a manageable stampede?”  Lillian asked.

“I wanted a manageable riot,” I whispered, “I thought spreading the word through the crowd would make people more restless than it did.  The Shepherd is so good, damn it.  We need…”

I floundered.

“Start with the basics,” Jamie suggested.

I nodded.  “The whole idea was to start a localized riot.  If Cecil did his job and avoided getting eaten by Whiskers while running around in the rain, the Academy can arrive, shut down the riot in the early stages, and lay the blame at the Shepherd’s feet.”

“Eaten by Whiskers?” Lillian asked, horrified.

“Not important right now,” I said.

“Cecil’s nice!”

“Not the word I would have chosen,” I said.  “Dense, unhelpful-”

“He’s nice, Sy!” Lillian said.  “He means well.”

“When someone says ‘means well’, they mean the person is dumber than a stitched chicken.”

“Sy,” Lillian said, her tone suddenly hostile.  “Not another word about Cecil.”

“Great!” I said.  “Because Cecil doesn’t matter.”

She reached out, grabbed the general vicinity of my nipple through my cloak and shirt, and did a twisty sort of pinch, hard.

“Agh!”

“Back on topic?” Jamie suggested, very diplomatically.

“Fuck, that hurts,” I said, rubbing my chest.

“Manageable stampede?” Jamie reminded me.

“Manageable stampede,” I said.  I looked over my shoulder at the Shepherd.  “No.  Even a regular stampede.”

“Regular stampede,” Jamie said, in the same disbelieving tone that Lillian had used when I’d brought up the idea.

“I want to see how he deals with it.”

“I’d like to remind you that Hayle needs you to impress?” Jamie said.

“I don’t need reminders, my memory isn’t that bad,” I lied.  I’d almost forgotten.  “It’s fine.  We’re good.  Even if things get sloppy, the Academy should be close.”

“I’d like more confidence than ‘should’,” Jamie said.

“Too bad,” I told him.  “Unless you have a better idea…”

He shook his head.

“Trust me,” I said.

“This from the least trustworthy person in Radham,” Lillian muttered.

“Trust me.  He has something up his sleeve.  We need to rattle him way harder to make him show his hand.  We still have cards to play.  Gordon is a big one.”

Jamie pursed his lips.  “Helen?”

“I trust him on this.”

“Lillian?”

“Ha!”

“Thought not.  Mary?”

“I don’t know for sure, but… feels right.  We don’t have the whole picture, I guess, if I had to put it into words?”

“Okay,” Jamie said.  “Alright.  Then I’ll agree.  You know this is on your head if this goes wrong, Sy?  Not because I want it to be, but because-”

“I get it,” I said.  “I really do.”

“I’ll go cut the power,” Mary said.

“Okay,” Helen said.  “And I’ll follow Gordon’s lead.  We need another victim to make this count.”

“Wait, what?” I asked.

Mary seemed to take the fact that we hadn’t told her no as a signal to go ahead.  She pulled away from the huddle and darted off into the crowd.

“Lillian,” Helen said.  “Cut me.  Give me claw marks, like Gordon has.  You do have a scalpel.”

“I’m not doing that,” Lillian hissed.  “Ibbot would kill me, and I’m supposed to put you back together, not take you apart.”

“You know how to cut people to minimize the damage, don’t you?” Helen asked.

“Wait,” I said.  “Hold on.  Why not me?  Why can’t I be the next victim?”

“Because I’m a better actor,” Helen said.  “And you’re more useful out there, than someone that’s being looked after.”

“Helen,” Lillian said.  “It’s going to leave scars.”

“It will not, don’t be a silly-billy,” Helen said.  She laid a hand on the side of Lillian’s face.  “They’ll make me as good as new.”

“It’ll hurt.”

“It will,” I said.  “I should do it.”

“I don’t feel pain the same way you all do,” Helen said.

“I should still do it,” I said.

“Sy,” Jamie said.  “Maybe shut up?”

“But-”

“I’m doing it,” Helen said, firmly.  “This is what I do.”

“But-”  I looked at Lillian.

“Am I supposed to tell him no, too?  Because I’d rather cut him,” Lillian said.

“Yes,” I said.  “And if Lil is more comfortable cutting me, she’ll cut cleaner, and it’ll be more believable-”

Jamie put a hand over my mouth.

“Do it,” Helen said.  “Now.  There’s no time.  Or I’ll do it to myself, and it’ll be messy enough Ibott will be mad.”

“But-” Lillian said.

Helen raised her thumbnail to her eye.

“Okay?” Lillian said, sounding unsure.  She drew a scalpel from a pocket.

I glanced back.  The Shepherd had seemingly committed to silence.  He was looking after Gordon.

People were getting organized, the situation was stable.  He was apparently content to let that remain the case until the monster showed up or something happened.

I wanted so badly to make something happen.

Stampede would shake the box.  Take us out of the comfort of the church, or spread people out.  He would need to round up his flock, do something.  I really wanted to see what that something was.

He’d let people get killed, freeing experiments to shake up the community.  He was operating to specific ends, and a quiet dislike for the Academy was almost definitely a factor… but that wasn’t the whole story.  He was working toward something big, and I suspected that something big would get a lot of people killed.  A small war.

Mary worked fast.  Lillian was barely starting the second set of claw marks, Helen holding her hand and forcing her to keep moving it, while her fingers held the scalpel steady.  The first set had been done across Helen’s shoulder and chest.  This set was on Helen’s face, of all places.

She started to rise.  I put my hand out, stopping her.  I gestured for Lillian to continue.

The fear and panic were reaching a pitch, now.

I wondered what was going through the Shepherd’s mind.  If he was thinking the Academy was after him, this was a bad sign, right here.

Lillian finished the third mark across Helen’s eyelid and cheekbone.  Blood welled out.  Helen smeared it, and grabbed her hair to muck it up.

I moved my hand away.  Helen crawled out from under the table.

She took two steps toward the pews, then let out the most perfect blood-chilling scream I’d ever heard.

Then she threw herself into the little table with books on top.

So jealous.

“They’re in the church!” I howled.  “Run!  Run!  Run!”

People ran.  The double doors were hauled open, which meant we didn’t get stuck in them.  People fled into the rain and darkness.

A gunshot sounded.

I felt a thrill, more than anything else.

In the gloom of the church, lit only by candles, the Shepherd stepped forward.  He held his rifle, the butt to his shoulder, barrel pointed at the roof.

Eyes turned to him.

He shrugged back his cloak, where his bad arm was covered.

As new arms went, it was horrendous.  Even in the gloom, I could see how it had been rebuilt using fungus or wood, like so many ruined buildings were, but the flesh around the fungus was ragged and ugly, not quite adhering or holding in place.

He raised his arm, then gestured, a crisp right to left movement, one meaty, misshapen finger pointing.

Guns cocked.  More than a few.  More than just the ones he’d carried with him.

It explained his calm, all this while.  From the start, he’d had soldiers in reserve.  Hiding, maybe in the crowd, maybe in adjacent rooms.  The weapons he was equipping his army with weren’t just improvised ones.

People had stopped in their tracks for the second time, standing in the rain.  They watched him.

He advanced down the aisle, flanked by a dozen men with rifles, who were watching the crowd, looking out for monsters that weren’t there.

One had Lacey, holding her arms behind her back.

Believed to be an agent of the Academy.  Not wrong, but not quite right, either.

“The Academy is coming,” the Shepherd said.  “They’re coming for us.  It was always their plan, and I’ve been planning how to stop them for some time.  I’m going to need all of you to listen very carefully.”

Cat out of the Bag 2.9

“The creatures have gone,” the Shepherd lied.  “Mother and babies both.  It was a shock tactic, nothing more.”

The restlessness of the crowd was intense, but in the exchanged words, the glances out into the darkness, I didn’t make out much that seemed to be doubting the Shepherd’s words.

“The fear and confusion you’re experiencing right now is theirs.  So is the anger, and the that deep seated feeling of frustration that there’s nothing you can do about it all.  You’ve all heard it before.  The Crown doesn’t lose wars.  When they fight, they do it using monsters.”

I’m almost offended.

“They do it using people like her, who would put children in harm’s way for her goals,” he said.

The man who had Lacey stepped forward.  She struggled a bit before freezing.  I assumed she felt a gun at her back.

He pointed back at where two of his soldiers were holding the injured Gordon.  “Two children have been harmed tonight.  At least two more have been killed, earlier today.  The Academy is walking a dangerous path, one that starts with claiming our dead for their work, then starts using us as pieces in their great machine.  Lives are being lost.”

He paused for dramatic effect.  I wanted to signal Lacey to interrupt, break his stride, but she couldn’t see.  Her head was bent down, red hair falling around her, and the silence belonged entirely to the Shepherd.

“I kept in touch with old friends who fought in the war with me, the men you see standing behind and beside me.  I’m sorry to have kept this secret from you, but we’ve lived the last decade working out means and methods of stopping the Academy from doing so much harm.  We have been devising a plan.  I do this out of faith, and I do it out of fear.  Fear that if we do not act now, together, decisively, then they might give up the last gasps of decency.”

Another pause.  Lacey started to speak this time, but a hand covered her mouth, and she was pushed to her knees, held there by two firm hands on her shoulders.

“If you run out into the rain and darkness tonight, you will be running straight into their embrace,” the Shepherd spoke.  “They’ve used fear as a weapon for a century now, and they’ve gotten very good at it.  Trust me, I’m not asking you to fight.  I am asking you to take a stand.”

There were murmurs, hesitation.  He had them on the hook, but they weren’t caught by any means.  Something told me that was intentional.  Probably the vague tail-end of the statement.  ‘Take a stand’, what did that mean?  He’d leave them wondering, and then give them what they wanted.  He probably did that a lot.  It was why they were so well trained to listen to him.  Oratory skills at work.

“Stand at our back, respond to fear not by pulling away, but by banding together.  The Academy is built with flesh and blood as its foundation.  With people.  We have the power to dictate what we need, the boundaries we expect, and the lines that should not be crossed.”

He’s been building toward this for some time.  Seeds of doubt and concern, building on those doubts anyone might have when the world was actively changing.

With the heavy clouds and the later hour, it was dark enough that people were barely more than silhouettes, only illuminated where light reflected off the water that streamed off of them.  The water was coming down hard enough that there was a definite weight to it, pushing every single one of us down, heads hunched over, shoulders bent in.  I didn’t mind it so much, as it was warm.  My hood stayed down, and the rain washed through my hair and down my face.

I turned to move away.  Small figures in the crowd joined me.  With them, with my fellow Lambs, a few doubters found the courage to turn away.

“The Academy is already making its moves!” the Shepherd called out.  “The monster the little boy described was not one of the escaped experiments that were described to us!  It was a weapon the Academy uses, just as Dog and Catcher are.  I saw enough of them when I was a soldier, and I know what they look like, what they do.  My comrades know that the Academy and the Crown have no reservations about using those things on their own people, if they deem fit.  Very soon, they’re going to act.  They’re going to do something more to scare you, because they don’t want to see us united!”

The holy man makes a prophecy, I noted.  He did know how the academy operated, even if there was no way he could know that Cecil had run off to go call for help.  He’d anticipated this move on our part, in a general way.

The other Lambs reached me.  We were minus Helen and Gordon now.  We stood off to the side of the road, huddled in the alcove by a door, where we could still peer out and watch the crowd.

“The Shepherd didn’t seem to notice that both of the cut up kids were from our group,” Mary said.

“He noticed, at least with Gordon,” I said.  “I don’t know if he even saw Helen, though.  She wasn’t acting for his benefit.”

“Where is Helen?” Lillian asked.

“Back in the Church,” Jamie said.  “Or making her exit by a side door.”

“Are you sure?” Mary asked.

“Yes,” Jamie said, very patiently.

I sensed doubt from her, and cut it off.  “If Jamie says he’s sure, then we go with that.”

“Thank you,” Jamie said.

I glanced over.  By Jamie’s estimation and what I could verify with my own eyes, that put Gordon in the midst of the Shepherd’s group, while Helen had free range at the Shepherd’s flanks and rear, assuming nobody spotted her.

I’d have to make do with this.

A distance away, we could hear the crowd.  A part of me very much wanted to hear every word the Shepherd was saying, but we had other issues.

“Okay,” I said.  I was doing my best to piece thoughts together.  “Okay.  Much as I hate to say, same trick won’t work again.  Only so many times kids can get cut up and scream.”

“Condolences,” Jamie said.

“I’ll manage somehow,” I said.  “He’s too damn good at handling them.  We can’t shake up the crowd without him calming them down, turning them into this tool he can use against the Academy.”

“If I’d managed to dose him, we’d be a lot further along,” Mary said.  “And that woman-”

“Lacey,” Lillian volunteered.

“She wouldn’t be under suspicion, probably, or be caught.”

“You care about that?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Uh,” Mary said.

“Nevermind,” I said.  It’s a mark against your abilities more than anything else.  “Listen, nothing goes according to plan.  Humans are weird.  Trick is to adapt the plan.”

“The plan will work if you’re good enough,” Mary said, in a tone that made me think she was mimicking someone.  I was guessing his name started with P and ended with -ercy.

“That so?” I asked.

“I think so.  You just have to work at being good enough.”

“Well then,” I said.  “Let’s be good.  Can’t shake the crowd.  Would be great if we could get at the Shepherd, but I’m not sure how to do that.  He surrounds himself with people.  It would be awfully nice to have a riot happening when the Academy deigns to arrive.  If it’s out of the Shepherd’s control but still within the Academy’s, then we’re good.”

“If they arrive,” Lillian said.  “There’s the chance Cecil couldn’t get help, or people might not believe him, or something.”

Or Cecil could be dead, I finished the thought in my head.  I’d raised the idea earlier, and Lillian had reacted rather strongly to it.  Didn’t bear bringing it up again.

“If they don’t arrive, we adapt,” I said.  I looked over to the crowd.  “For a holy man, he mentions faith a lot, but he doesn’t leave much up to it.”

As if in answer to that, a horn sounded from within the crowd.

“Ugh,” I said.

“What was that?” Mary asked.

“A horn,” I said.

Mary and Jamie hit me across the back of the head, with Mary being a step faster.

I winced, and added, “He’s got other friends.  Whatever he had planned tonight, he’s doing it.  Calling in other groups.  Calling in the Academy too, while he’s at it.  Anyone looking for him knows exactly where to go.”

“We’re out of time,” Mary said, looking in the opposite direction, down the street.  “Only a matter of minutes now before the Academy gets here, if that.”

“Why?” Jamie asked.  “Why do this?”

“He knows the Academy can’t just slaughter it’s people.  Even with all the weapons they have at their disposal, the Academy can’t get everyone, and if they let some slip the net, then word spreads.  It cripples Radham and it hurts the Crown as a whole.”

“Professor Briggs was willing to,” Mary said.

“I don’t think he would be, looking at this.  The side that makes the first move loses.  If there’s a riot, actively harming Radham, the Professor is justified.  If the Academy moves first, the crowd is free to protect themselves and word can spread about the brutality of the Academy, how it hacks down its own people.  We need to take down the man at the center of it all, and we need to do it fast.”

We headed back toward the crowd.

The Shepherd was talking.  “…years of infiltration, we quickly discovered that each of the major buildings had a special project.  Dog and Catcher are but one of an assortment.  In my time fighting in the war, I saw some of the ones from other Academies.  There’s a pattern, almost always a pattern in how they operate.”

Willing to bet you’re wrong, I thought.  You’ve got exceptions to the rule, like us.

“The first and biggest one, one that convinced me I needed to rally the people, rally you, was the knowledge that with a small few exceptions, big and powerful weapons, the special projects and weapons the Academy uses are less effective against groups.  In wartime, Dog and Catcher might attack supply lines, the Gorger might attack trains and coaches, or plow through regiments to attack leaders, Foster would bolster a group’s numbers, and the Whelps might scout.”

Having difficulty when there were too many people around.

Okay, well, I was willing to cede this one to him.  It was proving to be an obstacle.  Couldn’t get to him without getting past all these people.

Another man spoke out, one of the Shepherd’s comrades in arms.  That the Shepherd was deferring to him suggested that the group was being prepared for another kind of leadership entirely.  “In case of gas, anything airborne, anything you can smell or taste, hold your breath.  One of my men is handing out cloths.  Tie them over your noses and mouths.  The fluids we put on them will help filter out the gases.”

“Smells like piss!” someone shouted.

“You can use your own piss and a handkerchief if you prefer,” the man said.  He was wearing a raincoat, but his expression had a military cast to it, as if he’d held a grim and serious, staring-past-you expression for far too long, and his face was forever stuck that way.  Something about him was very similar to the Shepherd.  Disconnected, too calm given the situation.  It was strangely compelling, because it seemed like something was missing, or he’d once been very lost, deep inside himself, and he’d come back having found something.

Most people didn’t manage that.  Whatever didn’t kill us tended to leave us hurting, rather than making us stronger.  But something had happened to the Shepherd’s regiment that left them harrowed, all the emotional or mental fat flensed away.  Parasites?  Psychadelics?  A horror unlike any other, that they’d been forced to survive?

The soldier spoke, “They’ll try to scare us with the Stitched.  March them at us to make us retreat.  We must hold the line.  We have allies moving into position, they’ll break the ranks of the Stitched instead.  If you have the courage.”

Allies moving into position.  That’s who the Shepherd was signaling.

“It is fine to be afraid,” the Shepherd said.  “God-fearing is praise for a reason.  Fear makes everything clearer.  But do not panic.  This is the first momentous step among many to making it so that the Academy’s wrongs and mistakes no longer weigh on our minds.  We do not build or change something without care.”

Another horn sounded in the distance.

“The Academy is coming,” the Shepherd said.  “They’re meant to be serving us, bettering mankind with great truths and brilliant discoveries.  Instead, they crush us under their heels.  You’ve felt it in your bones for a long time.  Maybe you’ve felt it since the day you opened your eyes and looked at the world.  Maybe you’ve wondered if it could be different.  I’m promising you that it can.  You get one chance, and this is it.  Turn around.  Be ready.”

The soldiers were passing through the group.  People were being handed weapons and the cloths.  They didn’t all match, like a proper military regiment.  Many were improvised.

“If we do this right, if the Academy has any humanity at all, it shouldn’t come to a fight.  Hold firm, defend yourselves if you must, but don’t act without need.  They’ve made you afraid for a long time.  Pay attention to that fear, make it yours again.”

There were maybe two hundred people present.  Maybe slightly more.  Each stood in the rain, gripping the weapons they’d been given.  There was silence.

There was going to be blood.  A lot of these people were going to be hurt, if not outright killed.

You’re all sheep.  You were the Academy’s sheep before, and now you’re his.

I needed to get close.  Close enough to say one or two things to the Shepherd.

I turned away, pushing through the crowd, every individual of which was now facing away from the church.  People didn’t get out of my way, and some even tried to stop me, still me, and make me conform.

“The Academy,” a man said.

I stopped.  No.

“One coach?” another man asked.

“I recognize the coach,” Jamie said, a few feet away.  Then he piped up, “Teacher!”

Cecil.

Jamie wasn’t fast to move when the situation called for it, but he wasn’t able to move very fast while he worked his way back out of the crowd, anyway.  I looked over my shoulder and saw him sprinting across the empty space between the crowd and the coach.

Jamie had a plan.

I needed to do something.  To stall, to execute, to buy time.

Being small had its disadvantages.  As easy as it was to move around, I struggled to make headway through a mass of bodies, people who’d been asked and ordered to stand resolute.  People who collectively smelled like piss.

I reached the perimeter of men that were around the Shepherd.  Hands seized me, stopping me.

A moment later, one hand was off me, then another.  I heard a man cry in pain, saw him twisting his arm and hand in a weird way, and realized that a small hand had a grip on it.

“You leave him alone!” Mary shouted.

Mary was with me, facilitating.

I broke past the soldiers, stepping into the space between the Shepherd and the crowd.  There wasn’t much of an audience like this.  People might hear my voice, but they wouldn’t see me.

Gordon and Helen had enjoyed their moments in the spotlight.  I wanted mine, damn it.

I found a short wall, dodged one soldier’s reaching hand, and hopped up onto it, grabbing an overhanging tree branch for balance.

“You never believed in God, did you?” I called out.

With the crowd so quiet and expectant, the words rang out.  Heads turned.

The Shepherd was silent.

It was a powerful tactic in arguments, especially when one had the position of power.  Let another person make their arguments, exhausting themselves, then shut it down, one decisive blow.

Which meant I had to make as strong an argument as I could.

“You just want to manipulate us!” I cried out.  “You chose a job that would mean we listened to you, you used us, you lied to us!  You never told us any of this!”

Problem was, I had to make my argument while sounding like a child.  Could I call this Emperor out on his new clothes?

“You didn’t give any proof that she did anything, you only needed a- a scapegoat!  Why are you hurting my teacher, Reverend Mauer!?  Why!?  She’s nice!”

On the other side of the crowd from the Reverend, I saw Cecil do the saddest, stiffest, ‘lift the child up by the armpits and whirl them around’ act that I’d ever seen.  Jamie must have asked him, to play into whatever Jamie’s plan was.

The two of them stepped into the shelter the coach offered, talking.  Again, very stiff, the doctor reached out to touch Jamie’s head.

With Cecil so close, I had to do what I could to disarm the Shepherd on that score.  Defending Lacey or forcing him to argue in her favor would play into that.

While I was dividing my focus between the Shepherd and Cecil, a soldier grabbed for me.  With me up on the wall, and Mary so low to the ground, she wasn’t able to stop him or interfere.  Not without doing anything fancy.

He lifted me down.

“Hush, boy,” he said, gruff.  “This isn’t the time for that.”

“It’s like he said,” I said, louder than was polite or socially acceptable.  The benefit of being young.  “If not now, then when?”

“It’s fine,” the Shepherd said.  He gave me a hard look, and I knew that he was suspicious now.  He hadn’t missed seeing Jamie and Cecil either.  Between Gordon, Jamie, Mary and I, we were doing too much to work against his ends.  “Sid, I want you to listen, and hear how much I mean it.  I wouldn’t be doing any of this if I didn’t truly believe.”

“You don’t sound like you mean it much at all!”

“I do.  You’re scared, and you’re hearing only what you want to hear.  I don’t think any regular member of my congregation has any doubt how much I believe, or how much I care for their welfare.”

It was a cheap, dirty tactic, and it was a cheap, dirty tactic that worked.  Retreat to the unassailable position.  An argument so vague and seemingly from-the-heart that it couldn’t be taken to pieces.  Emotion-based arguments were annoying like that.

“Your teacher used your friend,” he said, in that same calm voice.

“She was with you and me the whole time!  You saw!  Why are you lying!?”

I had so many listening ears, I was changing minds incrementally, instilling doubt where there had only been loyalty, and I was taking all the joy I felt in the moment and translating it into a kind of outrage, more emotion to feed into my words, accusing.

“I-” he started.  He paused, his head turning.  I couldn’t see through the crowd to follow his line of sight.

The soldier that was holding on to my wrist turned to look, and I chose that moment to pull myself free.  I danced back and hopped back onto the wall.  He reached for me, and I ducked back.  The same branches I’d held onto before poked at his face and shoulder, almost invisible in the darkness.

It was Cecil, approaching the crowd, Jamie a step behind.

“Come!” the Shepherd called out.  “Over here, let’s talk!”

Cecil started forward.  Jamie held firm onto his hand, keeping him from following the offer.  The Doctor paused, then shook his head.  “I’m… I’m not talking to you, I’m sorry.”

“You were in my Church earlier.  Before the boy was hurt.”

Working on tying him to Lacey.  But my defense of Lacey and the show of familiarity with Jamie gave Cecil a kind of protection.  The Shepherd would look unreasonable before his flock if he wasn’t careful.

“I’m not- no,” Cecil said.  He bowed his head.  He seemed to compose himself.  “There were more riots.  Men, boys and women from other areas got hurt.”

“If there were more riots, we would have heard more horns,” the Shepherd said.

“I don’t know,” Cecil said.  “I’m just reporting… reporting names.”

His words were halting.  He seemed terrified before the crowd, sensing the latent hostility, the strangeness of it.  But the terror seemed to work for him.  It gave him an authenticity that he might not have had if he were speaking in monotone.

He fumbled for a paper, unfolding it.  “L… J.J. Bridges.  K. Downs.  I- I can’t read in the dark, with this rain.”

A man broke rank, stepping forward to raise his cloak up over Cecil’s head.  A lighter glowed, illuminating the paper.

“R. Hartman.  D. Estrada.  M. Mayes.  D. Thomas…”

With every other name, there were noises from the crowd.

“What happened!?” a man cried out.

“I just know that they were hurt or killed.”

“The full name.  Was that Doug Thomas!?”

“I don’t know the full names,” Cecil said, and in his fear, his voice was small and hollow, almost powerless.

My eye fell on Jamie.

We all saw so many people over the course of the day.  We heard names.

Jamie knew names, he knew faces.  He’d actively gone looking for them, in quiet moments, had listened for them.  He’d asked questions over the years.  He’d pieced together a mental picture.

Not complete, I was sure, but he knew important people and he knew who their children were.  The faces that weren’t in the crowd.

Jamie just stood there, rain streaming off his glasses and rain-cloak, having served as the harbinger of the worst kind of news anyone with a family could get.

A restlessness grew within the crowd.  These were people they cared about, people neighbors cared about.

“Calm down!” the Shepherd called out.  “Nothing is proven, nothing is certain!”

But the crowd was beyond the point of listening.

“If you react to this, you’ll be doing exactly what they want!” he said.

But there was no response.  He was shouting at a force of nature, now.  He knew it.

The crowd made a noise.  A growing roar.

They had an enemy.

The Academy was here.

Guns fired, where people in the crowd had been given such.  Too early, shooting at the wrong targets.

A formation of stitched, twenty-strong, each in uniform.

People broke rank, hurried to grab things they could throw at the Academy’s beasts.

We had our riot.

We also had a problem.

In this scenario Jamie had painted, the Academy had made the first move.  It helped that people would go home and find their loved ones safe and sound.  But if we couldn’t correct the interpretation, things would go sour.  Hayle would be upset with me, because this wouldn’t be a perfect execution.

We had a second issue, now that I thought about it, figuring out where things stood.  The Shepherd was one to position himself carefully, so any piece that we took was well defended.  That made me think about his men, and thinking about his men made me think about the fact that he now knew that we were working against him.  His flock was scattered, turned into something wasteful, soon to be shut down, and he had nothing to stop him from dwelling on us.

He met my eyes, and there was something there I hadn’t seen before.

He was looking at me.  Not as a child, or a member of his flock, but as the person on the other side of the chess board.  Or one of them, anyway.  He knew what we were, or he had an idea, now.

I gave him a smile.

Cat out of the Bag 2.10

The Shepherd touched the shoulder of one of the soldiers nearest him, then leaned close to whisper something.  He didn’t take his eyes off me.  Nothing in his posture or body language gave anything away.  He didn’t seem affected by the warm rain that ran down his face.

He might not have given anything away, as I smiled at him, trying to bait something out of him, but the soldier quickly made the Shepherd’s intent clear.  He strode forward, saying something I couldn’t make out over the chaos of the crowd to my right.

He pointed at Mary as he was talking.  I was suspicious he was saying names.  Ordering the men around him.

They started forward too, a pair.

“Six in total, we already have two,” the Shepherd said, his voice carrying where the soldier’s was drowned out.

Capture the children.

No!

Shepherd, no!  You were supposed to be looking at me as an equal!  You butt!

Mary seemed to come to the same conclusion I did.  I saw her look toward the crowd, with the soldiers doing what they could to keep people from falling back and retreating to the church.

She looked at me.  I held out a hand.

“Stop!” a man with a gun shouted, aiming.

Mary didn’t flinch, nor did I.  She hopped up to the wall, I grabbed her hand to help her balance, and we went down over the other side together, me a half-step behind, so I could put myself between her and the guy with the gun.

I landed in a puddle, one hand, both knees, and the toes of both feet getting thoroughly wet in the process.  My other hand held Mary’s.  She’d landed in a crouch, so the short wall would provide some protection, but she’d managed to keep her skirt clean.  Her expression was… I liked it.  Not perfectly cold.  I thought she might be enjoying herself on some level.

More guns went off, not behind us, but from the larger part of the crowd.  The stitched who were too close to reload used fists and butt-ends of guns to strike people down.  It was painful to look at.  The stitched didn’t hold back nearly enough, and they were strong.

I sprinted from my crouching position, running along the wall, toward the crowd.  Mary followed.

An orange light lit up the surroundings as a fire burst to life at one corner of the crowd.  Something explosive or very flammable.

Even among regular civilians, the knowledge of the rules around the stitched was common.  In a city like Radham, there were a great many farmers who relied on stitched animals and stitched farmhands.  Inexhaustible, strong, requiring no food or pay.  Fire tended to rile a stitched up and set them ablaze if they hadn’t been well tended, water tended to cause partial or total paralysis, if not deeper problems, and any given stitched had psychological tics.  The brain was cut down to the barest minimum needed to follow orders and retain information, stand up, and exchange words, and in what remained, there were often trace memories, fears, words, names, or faces that all provoked responses out of the norm.  When some stitched were hurt, poorly maintained, or when they got sick despite their high body temperatures, they would fall back on key phrases or habits.  Children were told to limit interactions until the owner of the stitched could tell them what to do or what not to do.

With a stitched soldier, the cutting was often more ruthless, the ability to converse left more limited, the range of abilities vastly reduced.  They followed orders, they learned how to use weapons, they hurt people they were told to hurt.

In Hayle’s carriage, the night after we’d taken on the snake charmer, I’d seen how the stitched bodyguard had reacted to fire.  A new development in the production, treatment and teaching of the stitched, I was pretty sure.

The soldiers didn’t react to the flame, though they avoided it.  They pressed forward, almost harder, less cautious, more violent.  They’d been trained against fire, made to stay on course, even if that meant doing whatever they’d been doing until there was no more fire around them.

I couldn’t be sure, but I suspected this was a surprise to the Shepherd’s comrades in arms.  What they’d learned about the stitched fighting alongside them in the war was no longer true.

Mary and I made our way into the crowd.  The soldiers who’d been sent after us were only a few steps behind.

It was a very different dance for them and for us.  Mary and I were moving as fast as we could, nimble, dodging between people who were alternately pressing forward and trying to run.  I turned sideways at points, jabbed two fingers into one man’s ass crack to get him lurching forward and out of my way, ducked between one set of legs, and very nearly got knocked in the head by the end of a hoe someone was holding as a weapon.  Mary was right behind me.

The people following us, by contrast, were pushing through.  They had presence, people naturally moved out of their way, and they had the physical prowess to work past the ones who didn’t, or who moved the wrong way and ended up as obstacles anyway.

We weren’t the only ones navigating this strange battlefield of terrified and outraged civilians.  Several stitched had made their way into the crowd.

One stitched nearby had both hands on its gun, and was swinging left and right, hitting people with elbows, the butt of the gun and the bayonet on the end.  It had been stabbed twice, one weapon still stuck through its chest cavity, its face had been sliced open to reveal a thick wire that had been placed beneath the skin.  The wire was insulated by a tight coiling of something or other, and where the insulation had been cut by the same weapon, the wire periodically sparked, the surrounding flesh twitching reflexively in reaction.

It had leveled ten or so people just getting this far, leaving them crumpled, bleeding and broken.  Surrounded, it was strong enough to keep the crowd back, and scary enough that people were fleeing from it, pushing and jostling others.

Had the Shepherd expected things to go this way?  Had he expected to win?  Because the crowd wasn’t winning, and I suspected things would be much the same if Jamie had left things alone.  His side would be doing better, but things would be moving toward the same end result.

An incoherent shout from the Shepherd’s camp went out.  It was picked up by others, traveling forward through the crowd.

“Burn the handlers!”

Oh, well, that was one way to do it.

Stitched didn’t tend to scream unless they were broken by fire or delirium.  Still, as the fires erupted, the eyes were treated to a sudden flare of light, illuminating everything, and the ears were treated to screams of panic and pain.

Not quite as tidy as I’d hoped.

I’d entered the crowd for a reason.  I chanced a look back, and saw that the crowd had bogged down our pursuers.  The press of bodies shifted, blocking my view of them.

Blocking their view of us.

I found Mary’s hand and tugged, changing direction.  We weren’t the only ones who were trying to move back toward the church, away from the fire, the stitched, the bullets, and everything else, but we were the only ones who were less than five feet tall.  That counted for something.  It gave us a fraction more mobility.

Okay.  This was usually the part where I fucked things up.  Gordon was better at it than I was.  I tended to overthink it.

Not just fighting.  Strategy.  I could plot like nobody I knew, but strategy was an entirely different game.

I tried to recall the number of soldiers that had been stationed at the back of the crowd and along the wall, compelling people forward, standing on or partially on the wall to shoot over the crowd.  From that number and the general positions of them, there were any number of things I could do.  The soldiers were all committed.  Those that could be spared had been sent after us.  That gave us options.

I cut my thoughts short at that.  No use in complicating things, getting too far ahead of myself, and then having my plan fall to pieces when something unexpected happened.

Decide two things I want.

The first was finding Lillian and even freeing Gordon.

The second was maximizing disruption.

Okay, no, wait, I had three things I wanted.

Getting the Shepherd to see me as an equal was the third one.

There.

That was the plan.

I checked Mary was with me, double checked we weren’t followed, then pushed my way through.

Lillian wasn’t far from where we’d left her.  The soldier who’d taken custody of her had, probably at the Shepherd’s instruction, backed away, keeping her closer to where the Shepherd, the captain of the soldiers, and the guy holding Gordon all were.

The guy that had been watching her had been relieved by someone else.

The man was holding his rifle out sideways, a barrier to discourage people from retreating.  He was shouting, driving them forward, saying something about the Academy, something about how to deal with a stitched.

Being short was an advantage.  I ducked under the rifle and through the gap.  He hadn’t expected anyone to be moving quite as fast or with quite so much focus as I was, and even the ones that were had been liable to bump into his weapon.

The Shepherd’s captain saw me.  He shouted, “Grab him!”

I gave the man an arm, practically slapping my wrist into his reaching hand.  My other arm I held back, in Mary’s direction, hand up.

Stop.  Wait.

Wait.

Another explosion of flame erupted at the far end of the battlefield.  The soldier that had me looked up and over the crowd.

More importantly, most of the crowd looked away.

I dropped the arm.

Mary moved.  Her skirt clung to her mud-streaked legs as she lunged forward.  The soldier saw the incoming attack, but his weapon was still held up to hold people back, and my hands went around his wrist, holding his hand so he couldn’t move it.

Mary stepped up onto the soldier’s thigh, grabbed his shirt to help her upward momentum, and drove the top of her head into the man’s chin.  She held onto him as he dropped, adding her weight to his.  He tumbled, stunned, and his hand released my wrist.

The soldier nearest us turned to look, eyes going wide.

I was already bending, grabbing the rifle from the fallen man, spinning-

One or two people who’d seen the gap and were panicked by the latest explosion rushed past me, bumping me.  My aim was off.

I still managed to scrape the back of the second soldier’s calf.  He dropped.  A second person pushing past me knocked the rifle out of my grip.  I didn’t bother to rescue it.

“Run away!” I howled, my voice raw.

It didn’t take much to tip the scales and give life to the idea that was already in people’s heads.  What was an initial one to three people quickly turned into a stampede.

What had been a mass of people outside the short walls of the church was now draining out, feeding into the yard just past the church doors.

Mary was smiling as she joined me, mingling in with the rush of bodies.

Disruption managed.  Now for the rescue of Lillian.

The Shepherd gave a command.  The men that had been holding back the crowd and the captain all converged on us, pushing past the bodies.

Had to do this right.

Like a professional.  Tidy, like Hayle wanted.

Well, insofar as any of this was tidy.  I could make the argument that some of this was inevitable.  The trick was leading this to as tidy a conclusion as possible.  Given a sequence of things to focus on, people liked to focus on the beginning and the end.

Our beginning had been good.  We’d identified the threat.

Our end… well, we had to neutralize it.

My eye fixed on the man who held Lillian.  He had his gun, and he had her collar in a deathgrip that pulled it up and tight to her neck.  Her bag was on the ground to one side.

Tidy, I thought.  Properly.

I rushed the man.  Mary had done the headbutt to one vulnerable area.  I aimed for one that was closer to the ground.  Between the man’s legs.

For my trouble, I got a knee in the chest.  He struck me in the head with the butt end of his gun.  I fell.

Mary was a step behind me.  She grabbed the wrist of his gun hand with both hands, and with this happening so quickly after he’d clubbed me with the thing, he took a second before reasserting his strength, holding the weapon firm.

Mary drove her shoulder  into the side of the weapon.  The bayonet blade slammed into the man’s forehead.

She did it again.  A second gash in the brow.  He let go of Lillian to grab the weapon with another hand.

Mary stepped past the defense to slice him with a knife.  Quick slashes, inner thighs.  She ducked as he slammed the side of the rifle toward her face, then stabbed him twice in the belly.

He staggered, almost tripping over me, but Mary grabbed him by the sleeve and belt, hauling on him with all of her weight.

I rolled in the opposite direction, rising to my feet so quickly that I nearly fell over again with the sideways momentum.  Mary let him fall, reaching out to block the bayonet he swung at her on his way down.

“Lillian!” I said, loud enough to be heard over the crowd.

“Sy!”

I swept up the bag, pushing her as we started moving again.  Mary was already in step, not needing further cues.

As a trio, we continued toward the church.  The men coming after us were closing in, only a few steps away.

“Just the girl I was looking for,” I said, as we ran.  “I need you.”

She smiled wider than I’d seen in some time.

“Scalpels,” I told her, shoving the bag at her.

“Um,” she said, she reached in.  She handed me a scalpel with a cover over the end.

“Gunk!”

“Gunk?”

“Gunk!” I said, louder.

She gave me a squat container with a screw-off lid.

“Great!” I said.  “Now go, get lost!”

The smile dropped off her face.

“Hide, I mean!” I shouted.  I wasn’t thinking straight, trying to think along multiple tracks at once.  “Mary, go with her!”

“But!”

“Go!”

They carried forward, heading toward the church.

I stopped, twisting, and turned around.

There were about five civilians rushing my way.  Between them were three soldiers, one of whom was the Shepherd’s captain buddy, about as different from the Shepherd as a man could be.  Tan skinned, short dark hair, a weather-worn face, all browns and darkness and leatheriness.

A clean, tidy finish.  My disposal of the last guy hadn’t been very successful, but this had to succeed.

The soldiers were blocking the gaps between civilians.  The civilians were running with a mindlessness that suggested they’d run straight over me if I got in their way.  It was a wall of people twice or thrice my size charging at me.

I picked up speed.  My legs were sore from a more-than-usual amount of running, but I gave my all, gave my last to charge forward, straight for the nearest civilian.

Toward the Shepherd, toward Lacey.

To Gordon.

Just when it looked like the guy was going to run into me, I ducked.  I slid on wet grass.  The man half-jumped, half stumbled over me.

I found my feet, but just as I’d slid on grass, the soles of my shoes did too.  I’d meant to dart forward.  Instead, I stumbled a little.

If I’d been an inch further ahead, I might have avoided the reaching hands.  Instead, one caught me.  I twisted to avoid the other.  Twisted again to make the wet cloth of my cloak twist until the man’s grip on it broke.

I made it another couple of steps.  But just as I’d reoriented myself, so had my pursuers.  The captain seized me.  Firmly this time.

I hurled the container.  I hurled the scalpel.

They landed in arm’s reach of Gordon, who had also been caught.

He stared down at both.

He met my gaze.

One deep breath.

“Stop fighting!” Gordon howled the words.  “Everyone, stop fighting!”

He had a great lung capacity.  Then again, he had a great everything.  Powerful vocal chords.

Heads turned.  He had attention.

The soldier grabbed him, tried to shut him up.  Gordon leveraged all the strength he’d held back up until now, bullying his way free.

“Stop fighting!  Please!” he screamed.

He had the attention of most of the crowd, now.

“Relax,” the Shepherd called out.  “Calm down!  There’s nothing to worry about.”

“He,” Gordon pointed at the Shepherd, “He did this to me!”

His hand went to his face, touched the deep cuts the ‘monster’ had supposedly inflicted.

“He cut me so he could scare you!  The monsters are made up!”  Gordon cried out.

The silence was so real it could have been cut with a knife.

“He’s crazy!  He did this!”  Gordon cried out.  He scrambled forward, away from the soldier who’d been holding him. grabbing the scalpel and jar.  “Look at this, taste the slime!  It’s soap!  My teacher didn’t do anything at all!  He blamed her to take attention off him!”

The soldiers who’d been after me headed toward Gordon now.

The captain turned, too, but I grabbed onto him, fought him every step of the way.

He hit me.  Not a big blow, but a heavy enough one to knock me free.

“He’s… he’s not right in the head!” Gordon cried out.  “Please!  Don’t listen to him!  He wanted this!  All of it!  Before it all started he called us into his office and told us what we were supposed to do, and threatened us.  The man who read out the names!  He was working with Reverend Mauer too!”

Poor Cecil.

“The boy is deluded,” the Shepherd spoke, and his voice carried.  “It’s easier to imagine a monster here than to recognize the monsters that the Academy created.”

The stitched that had been plowing through the crowd were on the approach now.  The crowd backed away, and wound up moving toward the Shepherd.

A woman reached Gordon, taking his less bloody hand.  She bent down and, after a dubious look, touched her mouth to his knuckle.

“Soap,” she said.

“Soap,” Gordon echoed her, pushing the things into her hands.  “Soap and a knife.  Please don’t let Reverend Mauer hurt me anymore.”

He turned toward the Shepherd, giving the man a wounded, accusatory look.

She embraced him, arms around his shoulders, wrists crossing over his collarbone.

Outraged shouts rose from the crowd.

The Shepherd was still, taking it all in, looking at his crowd.

Do you have any magic words, Shepherd?  I thought.

He looked at me.

Goal three completed.

He let the look linger, then broke away, staring over at the row of stitched and the one or two handlers that were still pressing in.  Only one or two stitched had properly died in this assault.

The Shepherd gave a hand signal.

The captain blew his horn.  Two sharp blows.

With that, the soldiers turned.

The retreat was planned.  The direction was already known.

They’d known they would lose this fight, I realized.

They’d planned it, even.  The retreat was part of it all.

Did they have a waiting vehicle?

The soldiers, including the captain and the ones who’d been after me and Mary, raised their weapons, warding off the handful of people who looked like they were going to start rioting against the Shepherd.  They retreated as fast as they were able.  People were caught between avoiding the stitched and the threat of the guns.

They stopped, going still.  They dropped to their knees and raised hands.  The wall of stitched came to a halt.

The Shepherd started to make his retreat.  He turned to look, and in that instant, Helen appeared, emerging from the shrubbery in front of the church.  She’d been within a few paces of him for the better part of the skirmish.

Striding forward, right through a collective blind spot.  The soldiers and Shepherd were all focused on the crowd behind.

She threw her arms around the Shepherd’s waist.

He stumbled.

“Let go,” I could hear him from a distance.

She held firm, face pressed against his side.

“Let go!” he raised his voice.

He tugged at her arm.  She didn’t release him.

The stitched were drawing closer.  The crowd was staring.

He pushed her, so that she no longer had her feet under her, then tugged again.

Nice, Helen.

She held firm, a six and a half stone weight, tying him down.

The Shepherd reached into his coat and withdrew a pistol.  He pressed it to the girl’s head.

I could hear a collective intake of breath from the crowd.

He was done.  He would never again have the people of Radham.

She looked up, staring him in the eyes.  She didn’t let go.

I felt a chill.  A premonition.

Prey instinct at work?  Putting together all the little context clues, the hints in his body language, demeanor, the clues he’d given me all night, adding up to my estimation of who he was?

He was going to shoot.

“Helen!” I called out.

She glanced over her shoulder.  The look she gave me was cold.  Probably the same look she’d given the man.

“Let him go,” I said.

She did, without a moment’s hesitation.

The man backed away, holding the pistol up and out.

The captain caught up with him, clapping a hand on his shoulder.  The two of them turned, marching forward.  The soldiers were just behind, weapons pointed at the mob.

I walked up to Lacey.  She looked hollowed-out.  Haunted.  It was almost scary to see.

I’d asked too much of her tonight.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

The shocked look on her face looked more dramatic than any emotion she’d shown us while being taken hostage or accused.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, to drive the point home.  “I’m sorry to ask for more, but… the Academy needs to win over the crowd.  Get the permission slip from Gordon.  Take it to one of the Academy people on the other side.  Tell them to blame things on the Shepherd.  Someone says they knew he was bad, he was manipulating people, drugging them, let’s say.  Take the blame away from people, just-”

“Sylvester,” she said.

“You can call me Sy,” I offered, as a conciliatory measure.

“Sylvester… shut up, please.  I understand.”

“They need to offer medical attention.  They have to be kind.  The stitched need to go, fast.”

She nodded.  She stood.

“Send Gordon into the church, when he’s given you the thing,” I said.  “Get Jamie, send him.”

“The church?”

I nodded.  “Gotta go after the Shepherd, if we can.”

She frowned.

I didn’t press any further.  I looked at Helen and beckoned her.  I found Gordon, saw him looking at me, and pointed at Lacey.

Then I ran to the church.  Mary and Lillian stepped out of cover by the altar.

It took only two minutes to regroup.  Lillian daubed powder on Helen’s injuries, then Gordon’s.

When Jamie arrived, I pointed at the side door.  The side door in the Shepherd’s office.

As a group, we headed through the side door, then broke into a run as we headed in the direction the Shepherd had gone.

He wasn’t moving at a fast pace.  He couldn’t, given his arm, the balance and the weight of it.  He’d made a good distance, but we did too, even with our shorter legs.

He had a gun in one hand, but something glinted in his mouth as he turned his head.  His cheeks puffed.

He turned further, and we collectively ducked into cover of shadow.

More soldiers were joining him.  The flanking groups, the ones who’d firebombed the stitched.  Others, maybe scouting parties.

A small army, and there he was in the center of it, with the captain and a shorter man.

He puffed his cheeks again.

A large shape moved.

It looked like a headless cat, the neck inflated in size, or a lion with a massive mane, the head removed, all drawn out in spines that were too white to seem real.  Easily the size of an automobile, a bit larger.

It prowled on a rooftop, hopped down, and paced around the perimeter of the group.

The Shepherd said something, the group parted, and the Shepherd blew again on his tiny, silent whistle.

The thing, Whiskers, approached.  It got close enough that the Shepherd could reach out with his meaty, mutated hand, and touch it.  He dropped his hand, the fingers bleeding from the tips.

The group moved, and Whiskers retreated as quickly as it had come, darting onto the top of a shed, then a garage.

The Shepherd periodically blew, to keep it close enough, a constant retreat from Whiskers and a compelling call from the Shepherd.

I moved to follow.  Gordon reached out to stop me.

“We have to,” I said.

“It’s good enough as is,” Gordon said.

“But he- I want to catch him,” I said, watching the man’s back.

“We won’t.  Not with that many people guarding him.”

“I want it as much as I’ve wanted anything,” I admitted.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “And I’m bleeding, Helen’s bleeding, you’re bruised.  Let’s call it a night, report to Hayle so he can send some other projects after them, then go home.  There’ll be another try.”

I made a whiny sound, deep in my throat.

“Come on,” he said.  “Let’s hurry, see if we can’t get Mary settled.”

It was a good thing to say to change my focus.  I allowed myself a nod.

We headed toward the Academy.

“Good work,” I said, to nobody in particular.

“Yeah?” Gordon asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Was fun!” Mary said, suddenly lively.

“It really was,” I said, quiet.

“Glad it was fun for you,” Gordon said.

“What?” I asked.  “Huh?”

“That was awful.  Hated it, the acting, the playing the lame duck, trying to sway the crowd, doing nothing.”

We walked a few more steps.

“I hate you so much,” I told him.

Cat out of the Bag 2.11

“You should really put your hood up,” Jamie told me, as we got out of the coach.  Lacey and Cecil were just behind us.  We’d been picked up on our way back.

I frowned.

“I know Rick got on your case about it earlier, but it’s cold out.  I worry about you.”

“If I get sick, the Academy will make me better.”

Jamie pointed at the Hedge, which we were just now approaching.  “And if you have to come here or somewhere to get a few shots, then they’ll keep you and set you up for an appointment, just like they did when you burned yourself with flesh-dissolving spittle.”

“Technically, the Snake Charmer burned me.”

“I don’t know why you insist on correcting me on the details,” Jamie said.  “I know the details.  I don’t forget the details.  I have the details in writing, even.”

“I do it to annoy you when you’re being annoying.  Quid pro quo.”

“That’s not what quid- you’re doing it again.”

I grinned.

He was too tired to hit me, so I threw an arm around his shoulder instead.

We stopped as a group in front of the four guards by the Hedge’s doors.  We remained silent as Lacey and Cecil approached the guards.  Lacey handed over the paper that Briggs had given us.

A moment later, the doors were open, the paper returned to us, and we were free to enter the Academy’s most public area.  A hospital for the people of Radham.  The Hedge was, perhaps for the first time in a year or two, staffed by a skeleton crew.  Empty benches filled the lobby, with a student sleeping on one, a book left open across his chest, a few doctors in gray coats stood by with some students in their white lab coats, attending to papers and doing what they could to get organized.

“Travis,” Cecil greeted one.

“Cecil.  You came in through the front door?”

“Things are mostly resolved, I think.  Wouldn’t be surprised if those doors open soon, with word from the higher-ups.”

The doctor Cecil was talking to, an older man, looked fairly annoyed by that.  “I was hoping this would go on for a bit longer.”

“People were dying and getting hurt,” Jamie said, quiet.

Doctor Travis blinked.  “Good to know.  Becca, would you go wake up some of the other doctors?  With the backlog and these injured parties coming in, we’ll be busy tonight.”

“Actually,” Cecil said.  He took the slip of paper from Lacey, then showed it to Travis.  “We need to talk to Professor Briggs first.  As soon as possible.”

Travis frowned, looking at the note.  “Why do you have this?”

“Can’t say.  I do need it back, though.”

“Nick, then,” Doctor Travis said, returning the paper.  “You’re a fast runner.  Go find Professor Briggs.  On your way back, wake up the other Hedge Doctors.”

A young man that wasn’t much older than eighteen sprinted from the room.

“That wasn’t what I meant,” Jamie said.  “About people dying and getting hurt.”

“I know what you meant, son.  It might seem callous, but the work comes first, feelings second.”

“I like to think they mingle,” Cecil said.

You’re a prat, I thought.

“They can,” Doctor Travis allowed.  “But when you work in the Hedge, you can’t tie your emotions to every piece of work that comes through those doors.  Half the time they’re mostly gone by the time they make it here.  When you know you could save everyone, but the money and resources aren’t so plentiful, and you have to make choices.  Even when it’s a child, or someone’s mother.”

“There’s a good reason I don’t work in the Hedge,” Cecil said.

“Do those children behind you need some attention?” Travis asked.

“It’s why we’re here,” Cecil said.

He was talking about Gordon and Helen, who were cut up, though they’d received preliminary treatment in the coach with Lillian, Lacey and Cecil tending to them.  I was bruised, scraped, and filthy, while Mary had scuffed up hands, though I wasn’t sure the Doctor could see that.

We were taken to benches, where we put our feet on the seats and sat on the backs, the doctors and students looking after us.

The student who was looking after me informed me that, “This bruise will turn a very fun orange color later tonight.  It will be gone by the morning.”

“Fun?”  I asked.

“Isn’t it interesting?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

“Don’t be a dick, Sy,” Gordon said.

I shut my mouth, frowning.

The student wheeled over a cart, where a dozen implements were laid out on top, wires with insulation coils running down to the covered box on the cart’s lower half.  He picked up a woodpecker,screwed on three vials, each with a stylish, flourishing letter printed on it, the contents colored for further clarity, then flicked a switch to start the needle to its back and forth motion.

Urgh.  I hated needles.  Even motorized ones.

My mind started running through scenarios, much as it had at several points earlier in the night.  Possibilities, where things were, where people were, tracking details, plotting.

Jamie’s hand settled on mine.

I let the train of thoughts unspool, each idea running off course until they collectively dissolved into a general air of negativity and resentment.  I flinched as the woodpecker started stabbing me, then grit my teeth.  There was a painkiller in there, making the pain of the needle’s stab a fleeting one.  He covered what would have been the full breadth of the bruising thus far.

“I take it this is your stitching work, Cecil?” Travis asked.  He was removing the stitches in Gordon’s face.

“It is.  Miss Lacey did most of the work on Helen over there.”

The female doctor who was working with Helen commented, “Who did the collarbone and upper chest?”

“I did,” Lillian said, quiet.

“Really?  Well applied binding emulsion with minimal stitching.  Applied outside of a hospital environment?  Mix?  Antibacterial base, I imagine.”

“No need,” Lillian said.

We weren’t so clumsy to actually turn our heads and give her shocked looks, but I could sense the reaction from the others.  Jamie’s hand tightened up a bit where it was holding mine down against the top of the bench.

“She was already on a regimen,” Lillian said.  “P base, A, D, E mixes.”

“Mmm.  Overall, very nearly perfect.  The kind of work I’d expect from a year ten student.  A year twelve might not do this kind of work out in the rain,” the doctor said.  Travis looked over to investigate and murmured approvingly.

“We were in a coach, and I’ve focused a lot on field care,” Lillian said.  She kept her expression placid, tone modest, but I could tell from the agitation of her hands and the slight kicking movement of her feet that she was inordinately pleased at the praise.

“Nonetheless,” Travis said, turning his attention back to Gordon.  “What are your plans for the future, honey?  I’d like to steal you.”

“Ahem,” the female doctor said.

“We’d steal you,” Travis amended his statement.  “For the Hedge?”

“Um.  I may have other obligations,” she said.

Travis made an annoyed ‘tsk’ sound.

“Who?” the female doctor asked.

“Professor Hayle is sponsoring me,” she said.

The silence was telling.  Had she given another name, the response might have been a ‘Good choice, good choice’ or  a ‘Promising!’, but Hayle’s department was seen as a doomed one.

The woodpecker stopped, and I felt muscles relax where I hadn’t even known they were tense.  I raised a hand toward my forehead, and the student slapped it away.  “Don’t touch.”

He turned his back to wheel the cart away, and I raised my hand toward my forehead again.

Jamie slapped it away this time.

My student returned, and turned his focus to Jamie.  “Do you need care?”

Jamie shook his head.

“You have a mark on your collarbone.  It looks like it goes lower.  If you’d take off your shirt, I can look after that.”

Jamie shook his head again, with more force than before.  He fixed his shirt.

“Are you sure?  I won’t hurt, I can apply-”

“No,” I said.  “No, thank you.  Jamie’s fine.”

The student gave me a curious look, but didn’t say anything further.

Jamie gave my hand a pat.

“And you?” the student asked Mary.

“My hands are a little scraped up.  I’d rather Lillian look after them.”

“Ah, your friend?  I imagine you would,” the student said, smiling.  “She’s good.”

Mary gave an awkward smile back.

It didn’t take long for Briggs to arrive.  He came in the company of a stitched and a young female doctor.  The stitched carried an oversize umbrella and a set of files, while the young doctor had three birds on her arm, each one hooded.

“Leave us,” Professor Briggs said.

The doctors and students left the room as quickly as they could without actually running.  Equipment was left behind.

“You too, Cecil,” Briggs said.  “The young lady can stay.”

Cecil frowned, but he made his exit, following Doctor Travis.

“Explain,” Briggs said, which was probably the least positive way he could have asked.

Gordon spoke up.  He wasn’t stitched up anymore, but had wet streaks over the cuts that were now virtually invisible, they’d been pressed together so neatly.  “He’s running, and he has Whiskers-”

“Whiskers?”

“Um.  The first escaped project.  We didn’t know that it was possible to control it.  We would have given chase if we hadn’t been surprised.”

“Wally, the guy we interrogated, he left out the critical detail, sir,” I said.  “If you need a test subject for parasites, look no further than him.”

Briggs nodded.  He didn’t look happy, thought.

“Mauer went due east from the church,” Gordon said.  “He has thirty soldiers that we saw-”

“Thirty seven,” Jamie corrected, quiet.

“Thirty seven,” Gordon said.  “If the other projects aren’t in that area, they’re wasting their time.  If you direct them after him, they could get both Mauer and Whiskers.  Or they could get killed, depending.”

Briggs reached into a voluminous coat pocket to retrieve a notepad no longer or wider across than his hand.  He picked a pen out of the pocket on the other side, then scribbled out a note, tearing it off and handing it to the girl with the birds.

He kept writing as he spoke.  “Soldiers?”

Gordon continued, “Mauer was an ex-soldier.  He kept in touch with old colleagues.  Years of resentment adding up to a loathing of the Academy.  He wanted the Academy to attack so that he’d have ammunition to use in future efforts.  This was a long-term plan, working against the Academy.”

I added, “Sir, he has or had moles inside the Academy walls to sabotage us, he was actively working to turn the public against us, probably to cut off supplies and make life as hard as possible, and he had soldiers with knowledge of the Academy and its methods to disable our best efforts.  I think he wanted to play the long game.”

“To what ends?”

I shrugged.  “Demanding concessions, getting into a position of power where he could hit the Academy where it hurt and walk away untouched?  I’m sorry, sir, but we can’t say for sure until we catch him and get him in an interrogation room.”

“I was alerted to the fact that the riot did start, despite your efforts.”

“No, sir,” Gordon said.  “It started because of our efforts.  We set things in motion in a controlled way, with the idea that we could turn the tables on Mauer.  We did.”

“He’s neutered,” Helen said.

“He’s a villain to the people, now, sir,” I clarified.  “Someone who cuts children, lies, makes up stories about escaped experiments, tries to make innocent women into scapegoats, and puts a gun to the head of a wounded little girl.”

“That last one was me,” Helen said, wiggling a bit in her seat, smiling.

“The anger over what happened tonight should mostly be directed at Mauer, not at us,” Gordon said.  “Short of getting him and getting all the answers, it’s the best resolution we could hope for.”

Briggs nodded.  He finished writing the third piece of paper, then worked with the young doctor with the birds.

“Go,” he said.

I craned my head as the girl with the birds headed out the door.  “Are those messenger birds?”

“The birds are modified to be able to smell the other projects.  They’ll find them and deliver the messages, provided they’re in or near the city,” Briggs said.  “There’s no good way to communicate with them in the field, this was the means we devised.”

“Is- do we have a bird, sir?” I asked.

“No,” Briggs said.

“Can we, sir?”

“Sy,” Gordon said, in a tone that made it sound less like he was going to kill me and more like Gordon killing me was an inevitability.  “No.”

“But-”

“No.”

I slouched a bit, then leaned forward, elbows resting on my knees.  I was still sitting on the back of the bench, Jamie standing behind me, Mary a short distance to the side, silent and nearly invisible.

“Lacey, was it?” Briggs asked.

“Yes sir.”

“You can confirm all of this?”

“It seems accurate, based on what I witnessed.  I should note that Cecil was accused of being in league with Mauer.  Measures should be taken to keep him out of the public eye for a time.”

“That’s something we can do.  I’m sure he’ll be content to be in his new laboratory.”

He seemed to consider a moment.

“Good,” Briggs finally said.  “The Lambs project will get those badges that were asked for, if it means they can keep up this degree of work.  I was told they could resolve this better than we might have if I’d sent a regiment of stitched to quell the riot, and the Lambs followed through.”

“Yes sir,” Lacey said.

“Hayle can have the budget increase and additional staffing I know he intended to ask for.  I’ve also signed off on the requests.”

Briggs took the file folders from the stitched beside him, shuffled through them to find one specific one, and then handed it to Lacey.

Sounds too good to be true.

“Is there a catch, sir?” Gordon asked.

“Catch?  In a way, yes.  Professor Hayle has been going on at length about your collective merits.  My own methodology when building something is to test it until it breaks.  Then I repair or start it anew.  I repeat this process until it cannot break.  The superweapon that sleeps under our feet is evidence that this can work.”

There were some nods from us.

“I will be making more use of you, in coming weeks and months.  I will be testing you.”

Until we break.

“And,” he said, “I don’t want it said that you broke because I didn’t give you or Hayle the necessary resources.  Change is afoot, a firm hand will be needed to keep things steady.”

More nods.

“Go.  Miss Lacey, if you could deliver that to Professor Hayle?”

“I can.” she replied.

“Thank you for your hard work.  The Lambs can go home.  I don’t expect they’ll be much use against a squadron of ex-soldiers and an experiment on a leash.”

“Mauer is the most dangerous of them,” I said.  “Um, sir, sorry.  He’s brilliant, he’s good at manipulating people on a large scale.  You really shouldn’t underestimate him.”

Briggs’ expression didn’t change.  He really liked his long pauses.  He had the clout to make others entertain them.  He finally said, “We’ll deal with him to the best of our ability.  Your part in this is done, however.  You should rest.  Tend to your wounds.  I may call on you as soon as tomorrow morning.  I have things to look after.”

Tomorrow morning.

His bird-woman crossed the room to his side, joining Briggs and the stitched.  The three of them headed for the other side of the Hedge, where it exited into the Academy grounds, inside the walls.

Lacey looked us over.

“Thank you,” I said.  “You did well.”

“It’s annoying, being patronized to by a child, but that’s probably intentional,” she said.  She frowned.  “But you’ve thanked me and apologized several times tonight.  I get suspicious when you act that way.”

“Probably smart,” Gordon said.

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

“Pretty much,” Helen said, chipper.

“Sy’s a jerk,” Lillian said, with a hair too much emphasis.

Lacey rolled her eyes.  She turned to go.

She didn’t make it three steps before I started following her, flashing a quick grin to the others, who sat and stared.

Three seconds later, when we were almost out of the room, Lacey stopped, spinning in place.  I wasn’t quite quick enough to duck into cover.

“Huh?” I asked.  “Do you have eyes in the back of your head?”

“No,” she said.

“I didn’t make a sound.”

“You didn’t,” she said.  “But they didn’t either.  And when the room is that quiet and I have that niggling feeling of doubt deep inside…”

“You get suspicious enough to act on it,” I said.

“What were you doing?” she asked, sounding as tired as she was stern.

“The file.  I wanted a peek at the file.”

She held up the file that Briggs had given her.  Supposedly whatever Hayle had been so emotional about earlier in the evening, when I’d undercut him in going to Briggs for the badge.  Part of it, at least.

“It isn’t classified,” she said.  “And I know Briggs is strict about those things.”

She opened the folder.  She took her time reading it.  Rubbing it in, making me ache from head to toe with the yearning to know.

She could get revenge for everything I’d subjected her to by turning around and walking away right then.

I sensed it.  That she was going to do it.  It was in her body language, the tension in her legs, the angle of her body.  It was in her expression, which was far from being a proper poker face.  A smirk in hiding.

The expression changed.

That put me off balance.  I shifted my weight from foot to foot.

“Okay,” she told me.  “Hands behind your back.  I don’t want you running away with this.”

I nodded, hands going behind my back.

“I wasn’t going to show you, but you should read it,” she said.

Which only piqued my curiosity before.  If she pulled it away now, I probably would have jumped her, improvised weapon in hand.  I wouldn’t have gotten the information I wanted, but I would’ve at least burned off some of the nervous, frustrated energy in me.

She lowered the file to the point where I could read it.

My eyes scanned the page.

Nothing special.

Nothing special.  Boring legal wording.

I felt a chill at the third offered provision.

The fourth jarred me to my core.

My hands, previously behind my back, dropped to my sides.  I swallowed hard.  “But…”

“You’re not surprised, are you?” she asked, and her voice was soft.  “You know who Hayle is, how he operates.”

I shook my head, “But… really?”

“I can’t say,” she said.  “It wouldn’t be until next year.  Even then, it would take some time before you had to worry on any level.”

“I almost- I thought-”

My hands went up to my hair, clutching at it a little.  A part of me wanted to cry, all of a sudden.  The buzz from our successful dealings with the Shepherd was gone.

She reached out to put a hand on my wet hair, knocking my hands out of the way in the process.  Again, they dropped to my sides.  I left them there.  She gave me a tentative pat on the head, as if I were a stray dog.  Her voice was gentle, a kindness that I would have called hypocritical, before.  “Go home.  Get your new Lamb settled in.  Tell them, so they know.  I’ll tell Lillian as I walk her to her dormitory.”

Numb, I nodded.

I felt like I was in a daze as I rejoined the others.  They clustered around me.

I knew that they were hungry for information in ways that were very different from how I was insatiably curious, but they didn’t push.  Their concern was for me.  Whatever my expression or body language was like, it seemed to worry them.

Even Lillian seemed reluctant to step away and join Lacey in heading into the Academy grounds.  She cast me a backward glance.

The others ushered me out the door.  The coach we’d taken to arrive was still there, manned by a stitched driver.  We climbed in, Gordon the last to file in through the door, stopping to give the driver instructions on where to go.

It wasn’t a long ride.  Just down the road.

I was so used to my thoughts running along multiple tracks, too busy to stay on one subject, but in this, I didn’t have the energy.  I watched out the window, and my brain was slow, chugging along, the majority of my focus set on trying not to think.

I’d taken the expiration dates in stride.  I’d expected it almost from the beginning.

This was harder to handle, in an ironic way.

The others murmured in conversation the entire way back.  All the same, the words were noise, my thoughts were on some musing about how Radham worked as a kind of motte and bailey, which was a safe way of thinking, unless I thought too much about Radham Academy.  The loosely defended city, the fortress that residents could retreat to if they had to.  In time of serious attack, people could enter the Academy, wait out the enemy while bombarding them and defending the nigh-impenetrable walls, and then exit to rebuild and live in the city once again.

Safety.  Safe way of thinking.  My brain was tired.

I was surprised when the coach stopped.  Time had passed too quickly and too slowly at the same time.  I felt dazed.

Mary, I thought.

“Welcome home, Mary,” I said.

My words seemed to startle a few of the others.  Only Helen smiled throughout, unflinching.  The others looked concerned.

“Thank you,” Mary said.

“I’m really glad to have you with us,” I said.

She nodded.  But she looked disconcerted.

We made our way inside, not opening umbrellas, but flipping up hoods and dashing for the door.  Again, Gordon was the last to follow, giving word to the coach driver to return to the Academy.  He should have been trained to go back anyway, but it was always better to be safe than sorry.

Mrs. Earles was waiting up for us, and joined us in the hallway before we had all of our coats and boots off.  In hushed tones, so as not to wake the younger ones, she urged us upstairs, promising us tea.

Mary needs attention, I thought, and this was the new focus.  Not idle thoughts, but getting her settled.  I found her hand, and was surprised at how tightly she clutched it.

“Mary’s sharing the right corner room with Helen,” Mrs. Earles said.  “We’ve moved Helen’s stuff and Mary’s luggage over.”

Mary nearly tripped, she was so startled by the announcement.  I had her hand, and Gordon put a hand out to catch her.  When she straightened, she had a look in her eyes.

“Don’t worry, I’m harmless.” Helen whispered, then she made a tiny, excited sound, barely keeping her volume down, “One room for the two of us!”

Our resident monster skipped ahead, stepping exactly where she needed to step to avoid the creaking of floorboards.

Mary looked more disturbed in the wake of it.

I was puzzled more than anything, and the puzzlement added to my general lack of focus.  Helen was different, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.  I resolved to ask.  But, again, Mary was the priority.  I tried to pull myself together.

“Can I share a room with Mary?” I asked.

“Not at all.  That wouldn’t be proper,” Mrs. Earles said.  “You stay with Jamie.”

I wished I had the badge, so I could show her and make her listen.  She was an Academy employee, in a roundabout way.

“We need to talk before bed,” Gordon said.  “And we haven’t eaten.  Could you please get something?”

Mrs. Earles gave him a disapproving look.

“On my word,” he said, with utmost sincerity.  “It’s important, and I’m ravenous.”

“Get changed, I’ll have crackers, cheese and meat, with some treated tea.”

“Thank you,” he whispered.

She gave him a pat on the shoulder.

We headed into our individual rooms.  Gordon already had one corner room, but it was a tiny space, cut off by the stairs that went up to the third floor, where Mrs. Earles’ bedroom was.  Mary and Helen’s room was usually reserved for older girls or girls who were expecting to be adopted out.  It was a treat.  No sleeping in a room with four or five other girls.

Jamie and I changed as quickly as we were able, which meant I was done before Jamie had his shirt off.  I went out of my way to avoid looking, though I’d seen many times before.

When he pulled his pants off, though, I turned my back altogether.

We all had our burdens, we all needed support in our own ways.  This was one of Jamie’s ways.

He put a hand on my shoulder, signaling it was okay for me to turn around.  He had pyjamas that buttoned down the front.  My own was only a sleeveless and undersized workman’s shirt that showed how horribly skinny my shoulders and arms were, along with pyjama bottoms.  I hated being confined in clothes while I slept, but Jamie tended to wake me up by swatting me with his book if I slept without anything at all.  It didn’t help that I kicked my sheets off, most nights.

“I’m so tired,” Jamie admitted.  “And I have so much to write in my book before bed.”

“Let me,” I said.

He gave me a look.

“No mischief, I promise.  I’ll write down everything as I remember it.”

“I don’t think I can read your handwriting.”

“I’ll try, for real,” I said.  “You can add stuff after, fill in blanks as you need to.”

He frowned.  “Maybe.”

“Okay.  Maybe.  That thing with the names, starting the riot?  That was incredible,” I said.

“I was terrified.”

“It was incredible,” I said, again.

We reached the kitchen and began to dine on salty crackers with slices of cheese and meat.  I went for the cheese first.

Gordon joined us, but he went for the meat, naturally.

And then there were the two girls.  Helen and Mary.  Both wore long nightgowns, white and riddled with lace, though Mary’s had a ribbon at the collar.

I drew in a deep breath.  I felt a horrible pressure on my chest.

The others didn’t push, and Mary seemed to be following the others’ lead.

“Helen,” I said.  “I have to ask…”

“Yes?”  Unlike Gordon, who was eating about three pieces of meat to every piece of cheese and every cracker, she was eating exclusively meat slices, gathered together and rolled up into tubes.

“What’s with this new you?  You’ve been different.”

“Oh!  Oh.  I had my thing with Professor Ibbot last month, and a check-up just a couple of days ago,” she said, smiling.  “He got upset with me.  He hit me a few times.  Not hard enough to do any damage, but, just because.”

I was silent.  I had a lump in my throat already, and I didn’t like hearing this.

Her smile widened a bit.  “He said I shouldn’t slack off.  That I couldn’t just stop acting.  It was something I had to practice.  So I’m practicing.  I’m trying to figure out who Helen Ibbot should be when she’s not acting for someone else.”

“Oh,” I said.  “You’re a perfect actor already.  You don’t really need to practice.”

“He told me to, so I will,” she said, very firmly.

“I liked the old Helen,” I said.  “The one who didn’t feel like she had to smile.”

There were nods from Jamie and Gordon.

“That’s too bad,” Helen said, in a very matter of fact way.  “You’re going to have to get used to the new me.”

I nodded, feeling a touch more lost than before.

I didn’t like that.  I wanted to hurt Ibbot for it, but I wasn’t sure how, or if it was even possible, or right.

“What’s going on, Sy?  Does that have anything to do with the file?”

“No,” I said.  I ran my fingers through my hair again.  “No.  I’m just… not wanting to dwell on it.”

“What is it?” Jamie asked.

I drew in a deep breath.

“There were provisions.  Things Briggs was giving Hayle, things Hayle wanted.  The first was money, funding.  The second was manpower, extra space.”

“We knew that much,” Gordon said.

“The third, it’s not fun to hear, but I already talked to you guys about this.  About the expiration dates.”

“You brought it up,” Gordon said, his tone suddenly different, very careful.  “And I told you that if you ever dare to tell me or hint to me what my date is, I will never forgive you.”

“And I believe you,” I said, very quiet.  “I’ll never tell you, and since the others aren’t asking, I won’t tell them.”

Gordon nodded.

Even though you’re supposed to die first, I thought.

My expression didn’t betray a thing.  I sighed.  “Briggs authorized replacements.  When we die, when we break, according to Briggs’ terminology, then there will be new, better Lambs.”

“Not so surprising,” Jamie said.  “I’ve heard hints of that before, from my caretakers.”

I nodded.  “But it’s not fun to hear.”

“No,” Gordon said.  Mary nodded.

“That’s not it, is it?” Jamie asked.  “What got to you this badly?”

“I… I almost fucked it up,” I said.  “I… uh.  Ugh.  I can’t get over the fact that I almost fucked it up.”

“They’re reviving the other projects?” Helen guessed.  “Evette or Ashton?  They’re going to take another try, start over from scratch?”

She was clever enough to connect the dots.  Head in my hands, I nodded.

The silence that followed only added to the weight on my chest.

“One project,” I said.  “Hayle wanted to revive one project, and in my dicking around with the badges, I almost took that away.”

“That’s not surprising at all,” Gordon said, leaning back in his chair.  “We always knew you were a disaster waiting to happen.”

“Wow,” I said, sitting straighter.  “Wow.”

But the words lifted the burden, in a small way.

“You’ve almost gotten any one of us killed a half dozen times already,” Jamie said.  “Why does this matter?”

“Because I trust you guys to handle yourselves.  But these two…”

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “I get it.”

“Our little siblings,” Helen said.  “We’re going to get one of them back.”

I nodded.  I smiled a little, even.  “But that’s a year off.  We already have one new Lamb.”

“Hear hear,” Helen said.  She would be second last to go.

We raised our mugs and clunked them together.

“Hear hear,” Jamie said.  He wouldn’t die, but he would expire a year after Gordon, if the files were right.  I suspected he already knew, and that knowledge defined him on a level.

Mary smiled, and it was genuine.  She was one of us, and it was the sort of thing she’d craved for a very long time.  It was like a warmth was flowing out from within her.  Our little killer, and I had no idea when she would expire, there was no way to find out, and there was something safe in that.

She met my eyes, and I smiled at her.

Me, who would outlast the rest, and who would wish I hadn’t.

Enemy (Arc 2)

The machine guns fired in set bursts, joining the irregular sounds of the bolt-action rifles.  Each bullet or burst of bullets was an initial crack, followed by an echo that seemed to reach out forever.  When a bullet struck dirt that was close enough, it prompted a spray of dirt and dust, touching on those in the trench.

More machine gun fire.  Hollered words were cut to pieces by the sound of the guns, rendered incoherent.

In the trench, Mauer sat with his back to the wall of packed earth.  Both of his hands clenched the rifle, the fingernails seemingly too clean, the grit at the edges too dark.  The ground was dry, but the air was humid, and the grime and sweat were mingling and gathering minute by minute.  If he thought too hard about it, he felt like the grime was so concentrated on his face, neck and hands that it was finding a way to spread beneath his collar and into his sleeves.

A day ago he’d been splattered with blood, and with the water rationing, he hadn’t been able to wipe it off.  He’d made a mental note of which splatters on his arm were Andrew’s, a signature, remembering the boy who’d bartered so enthusiastically for new books and dime novels to read during his downtime.  At some point, in all the chaos and the mess, the streaks had dried into a deep, dark brown, joining the dirt and the mud that formed when dust and sweat mingled.  Andrew’s demise had been washed away and overshadowed by everything that had followed.

He only had to look at the others who were sitting by the wall to know how he probably looked.  Exhaustion and the burden of emotions wore away at the man, and accumulated dirt and blood masked the face and identity.  Here and there, there was a pair of eyes that seemed too blue for the dingy palette of their surroundings.

It wasn’t the people he stared at, as he waited for the dreaded order.  That was too much like looking at himself; it forced introspection, and introspection wasn’t good for the heart or the soul.

Instead, oddly enough, he stared at the stitched.  Those who weren’t actively digging or fixing existing trenches were kneeling in the middle of the trench.  Most barely moved, they didn’t flinch, and they didn’t sweat.  The dirt on them was dry.  One was caught in an obsessive loop of dismantling a gun, cleaning the pieces, and putting it back together.  The handler was holding on to Andrew’s spare gun, ready to hand it to the stitched in case a situation called for it.

The things were oblivious, sad, and not entirely sound.  The stitches were ugly, utilitarian, opening up pathways for the wires to sit within, some crossing the face.  Two of the things had flesh from multiple people.  One of them was put together with a mix of white and black flesh.  The others called him ‘Bull’.  The second had pieces that might have been from a woman.  It was the look of its eye.  The lashes were too long, the eye large, the surrounding brow not deep enough.

A woman or a child.  An innocent eye, he told himself.

The machine guns continued their fire.  The bullets raked over the top of the trench, causing dirt to spit up at the corners on both sides.  Just when he relaxed, an explosion went off about thirty feet away.

It was almost what some of the others called a pants-shitter.  The sheer impact of some of the shelling, even if it didn’t touch anyone, could ripple past and through the men, the shock of it loosening muscles that were supposed to keep the shit in.

He was lucky he’d managed to retain his dignity and avoid that thus far.

The stitched with the innocent’s eye stared into space.  Mauer stared at the eye, stared past and through it.

He couldn’t say why, but it ate away at him, and yet he couldn’t keep his eyes away.  He inevitably found his gaze wandering back each time he tried.

The captain, bent low to the ground, moved along the line.  He had two containers of water.  He offered one to each person.

Mauer wanted more than anything to wash, to feel more human again, but when the captain came, he reached for his own water bottle, giving it a slosh.

The captain said something, but it was badly timed.  The cracks of guns going off drowned him out.  He tried again, “Drink.  Fill yours, just in case.”

Mauer could see the boys to either side of him flinching at those last three words.  He didn’t.  He took the heavy water bottle from the captain, holding it with both hands, and drank until he felt like he might be sick, then tipped a portion into his own bottle.

The captain had a look on his face when he took the bottle back.  A deep concern.

“What?” Mauer asked.

More bullets touched the edges of the trench.

“You here with us?”

There was more meaning to the question than it initially seemed.  There were a hundred hidden comments, ideas, and observations tied to that four-word question.  Mauer was almost certain he could have said ‘no’, and his captain would have sent him back, away from the front line.

“I’m here,” Mauer said.

The man didn’t argue, but in a very soft voice, as he handed the water bottle to the next man, he said, “You look more like one of them than one of us, right now, Mauer.”

The day was hot, and the heat was worse because some of the guns on the Academy side were venting hot air into the trench, but he still felt a bit of a chill.

Mauer had always known that he was better than most when it came to communicating.  He had known some people who were similar, in school, working, getting to know others while training to be a soldier, just months ago.  The others had had excuses.  An abusive father they’d had to learn to manipulate, heavy pressure from a businessman parent to follow in footsteps.

It wasn’t like that for Mauer.  When he thought seriously about the way people interacted, certain ideas were so clear as to be obvious.  ‘Us versus them’ was a pervasive one, defining virtually every interaction across cultural, class, religious, and national lines.  One of the ones he’d grasped very early on.

But his captain wasn’t crouched here in the trench, telling Mauer that he was like one of the men with guns on the other side of no man’s land.  The captain was saying that Mauer was like one of the stitched.

How very odd, that in the midst of this, the captain had phrased things in a way that made ‘them’ the stitched.  Not the men that were trying to kill them, not the men with brown skin, not the Mexican forces, but the stitched.

Mauer nodded slowly.  Though the captain had already moved on from his neighbor to the next man, the man was looking over one shoulder, still watching and waiting for a response.

The stitched are dead.

Dead, but they still walk.

I’m more like them than like you?

An exploding shell nearby answered his thoughts.  He didn’t flinch as quickly or dramatically as some of the others.

Somewhere along the line, when he’d been too heartsick and tired to care, he’d started acting a little, to match the others as they’d cringed and cried out, or swore.  Now he wasn’t sure how much of his reaction was real.

His entire body hurt, but nothing had actually touched him yet.  No bullet, no explosion.  Only dirt.

But where the stitched were so hot that it could be uncomfortable to make sustained contact with their skin, he felt very cold in this hot, humid weather.

The captain glanced back at him one last time, then relocated, moving over to a little notch in the wall where he could confer with the captain of a squad further down the same long trench.

Mauer’s eyes settled on the stitched with the woman’s eye.  She blinked slowly.

As her eye opened, the ground started to rumble.

There were shouts of alarm.  Mauer was silent as he rose, stepping away from the wall.  Sections began to crumble from the edges.  Further down, the rumbles made the bottom of one portion of wall give out, crashing into a man’s lower legs.  He was pulled out and out of the way before the unsupported top tipped over to join the rest.

The rumble didn’t stop, but increased.  A distant sound joined the rumble.  It was too deep, momentous and dull to be the crackling of a fire, but it was a crackling nonetheless.

All of it came to a stop, even the sounds of the guns.  Mauer’s ears rang, and he felt dazed as he was pushed aside, the stitched who had been in reserve now hurrying to fix the damage to the wall.  A slew of bullets fired, and hit the one in the lead, but it didn’t even slow down.

He made eye contact with the stitched he’d been staring at, and took an inadvertent step to follow it.

Someone grabbed him, held him back.

He realized why.  Where the wall had collapsed, there was no longer any cover.  He might have stepped out and taken a bullet for his trouble.  He couldn’t bring himself to care about the near-death experience.

Now that he’d advanced closer, however, he could see out past the hole.  They’d dug into a gently sloping hill, so they’d have the benefit of high ground and so that enemy fire would have a harder time reaching them, and now he could look over, out, and down to the distance.  The coast.  Undrinkable salt water.

Two ships.  Titanic boats, ungainly in size, loaded down with weapons.  They’d cut deep enough into the beach that it would take a monumental strength to free them.

Strength, perhaps, that was provided by the lashing, boneless limbs at the back of each boat.  These ships were partially alive.

The fronts of the boats moved, yawning open like great metal-plated jaws.  From each emerged beasts that must have taken the entire hold.  Larger than buildings, taller than the hills that the trenches had been cut into.  They were blunt-featured, thick-skinned, with eyes far too small for their great frames.  They walked on all fours, not dissimilar to hippos or rhinos in general frame, but had lumpier heads, and chests that were both taller and deeper, possessed of a massive capacity.

Far from being Noah’s ark, this.  There were only two beasts to each ark; the one that pushed the boat and the one that was birthed.

One beast roared, and it was a nasal, mooing bray that was just as pronounced and vast as the arrival of the boats had been.  It made the air shake with the sound, made heartbeats skip with each heavy footfall.

Its fellow beast picked up the cry.

In answer, the machine guns started again.  The time between bursts was shorter, and both the cracks and the bullets had different sounds to them.

No longer directed at Mauer’s regiment.

The beasts had moved to a position he couldn’t see through the gap in the trench wall.  He chanced a look beyond.

One beast opened its mouth, lowering his head closer to the ground.

A red-yellow fog flowed out, the thing’s chest heaving and pumping as if to drive the gas out.  It clung low to the ground, spreading.  The chest was pockmarked with little spatters of red, where the massed bullets had bit deep enough into skin to leave tracks, gouges, and punctures.  Not enough to stop the thing.

The captain walked over, looked out and beyond, following Mauer’s gaze.  The man ducked back behind safety.  Mauer remained where he was.

“They’ve lost,” the captain said.

Mauer nodded.

Now the enemy soldiers were the other.

Mauer had to step back and out of the way as the stitched started shoveling dirt back up toward the gap in the trench wall.  The one with the eye wasn’t there.

“Not that we’ve won,” the captain said, in a conspiratorial tone, not meant for all of the soldiers.  “The Crown doesn’t lose wars.  When it looks like things are going that way, they force a draw.”

The gas was dissipating.  The enemy soldiers were still standing, still seemingly alive, gathering their strength.

“I saw this a few years ago.  Something like it,” the captain said.  “This may be where things get harder.”

“Harder?”

“That gas, it’s plague.  Parasites, maybe, or a communicable poison.  Win or lose, if those brown-skinned S-O-Bs go back home to their families, they’ll be killing them.”

A shell went off, a beast flinched, moving its head to one side.  The damage seemed remarkably minor, all things considered.

“They have nothing to lose,” Mauer said.

“Exactly right, soldier.”

The enemy was regaining its strength.  More shells were going off.  Even from this distance away, shouts could be heard.  One command, echoed by squadrons of other men.

The beasts were so large that almost every shell hit.  Every shell hurt, even if the sheer mass of the monsters was so great that it was like taking buckets out of a lake.

One particularly well placed shot hit an injured area.  The spray of blood that followed was phenomenal, albeit short-lived, blowing a small injury out into a larger one.

A command came from far down the trench.  Like the enemy had done, captains echoed it.

Mauer stared at his captain, waiting.

Thirty feet away, the next squadron’s captain picked up the cry.

“Going over!  Target the installations!”

Mauer’s captain drew in a breath, then repeated the warning.  “Going over!  Target the installations!”

Destroy the artillery to save the beasts.

“Stitched first!” the captain ordered.  “Use them for cover.  Do not fall behind, or you’ll stick out!”

There was so much fear and uncertainty in the trench, now.  Murmurs of catching that plague, of being shot.

Mauer had heard once that, given a typical arrangement of soldiers, even in a life or death situation, one in twenty would not act to hurt another human being.

The thought almost warmed the chill that had settled deep in his chest, fear and anger and frustration bottled deep within.  Intrinsic human kindness.

“Make sure your rifles are loaded and ready,” the captain was saying.

The reminder helped, but the men needed help in another department altogether.  Mauer knew it.

The captain had woken Mauer up to something gradual that had been occurring over days and weeks.  The gradual, quiet slide toward being a man that was already dead.

He couldn’t go back that way.

The only way was forward.

He would be forever grateful that he’d been given that small awakening.  Even if his forever only lasted a few minutes more.

More shells went off, all directed at the great plague-beasts.  Pants-shitters, as the others called them.  Mauer had never liked the vile language.

He preferred words that had more power.  He bent his head.

Bowing his head, he spoke.  “I pray to you, Lord God, for protection.  You do what is right, so come to our rescue.  Listen to our prayers, and keep us safe from harm.  Be our mighty rock, the place where we can always run to for shelter.  Save us, by your command.

He continued, “You have made us suffer greatly, but you bring us back from this deep, muddy pit.  You give us new life, you make us truly great, and we will strive to take sorrow away.”

When he looked up, he realized many were watching.  The stitched with the innocent’s eye stared, its mouth moving to echo his words.

He couldn’t be sure why that disquieted him so much.

When he looked at the captain, the man wore a serious expression.  Expressions without words or tone were harder to understand, but he wasn’t blind.

The man gave him a nod.

“Go!” came the cry, from the far end of the trench.  It was immediately picked up, an echo in different voices.

“Go!” Mauer’s captain cried out.  “Over the top!  Stitched first!”

The stitched went over.  Where the rumbling and shells had weakened trench walls, some broke down a little with the weight of the dead bodies.

Mauer watched his stitched go over, urged by the handler, who stayed behind.  It wasn’t expected to return, or to need another order.

“Go!  Right after them!  If you wait, you die!” the captain bellowed.

Mauer went.  He watched the stitched he’d felt such a profound, dangerous  connection to.  He followed it, gun in both of his hands, and was joined by the other soldiers.  The dry ground was just steep enough to make running faster, without making him stumble.

Where he’d been so cold before, there was only a wild, mad fear, and an anger directed more toward them than to the enemy.

“Clear the trench, press through to the installation!” the captain bellowed the word.

Each step Mauer took was a step away from being a dead man, in the most ironic of ways.  There was a passion to his movement, and ideas of what he might do if he survived all this danced through his mind.

With a dispassionate expression, he watched the stitched with the innocent’s eye die.  A child or a young woman had gone into its making, he knew.  He’d felt a connection to the thing, and he wasn’t sure what that connection was, as if there was something he was supposed to put together.

Three men died by his hand, and their faces didn’t even stick in his mind.  One rifle shot, two stabs with the bayonet.

Another two were injured, cut across their faces, though those faces were already crawling with things the Academies had created.  Parasites and leeches.  The orange fog had housed other things.  Things that hurt and debilitated.  The enemy was slow to put up a fight, feeble, but not lacking in conviction in the slightest.  An odd combination.

What Mauer might have been, if he hadn’t been woken up.

He didn’t hold back, couldn’t, out of fear that he might never be able to summon up this mad courage again.

He made his way across the enemy trench, saw nobody capable of standing or holding a weapon.  With shaking hands, he pulled himself up and over the other side, to move toward the artillery installation, reloading the moment he had his two feet on solid ground.

The men at the artillery installation had to have known what was evident enough to Mauer and the other members of the squad.  It had been a one-sided slaughter.

There was no reason, then, for the artillery squad to hold back.  The cannon lowered, aiming front and center.

Mauer raised his rifle, aimed, and shot in the moment.  He watched a man die.

The man who manned the artillery cannon, however, survived to pull the trigger, firing toward the front of Mauer’s squad.

Mauer felt his arm go, like a scrap of cloth caught by a strong wind.  Blind and nearly deaf, bowels empty, he dropped.  It was only when he lay there, yearning for unconsciousness, that he felt the burning across what remained of his skin.

He thought of the stitched, and now wondered if it had been real, or if it had been something meant only for him.  A sign.

He screamed, not because of fear or pain or hopelessness, but because he couldn’t bear to let the flame go out, and a scream of rage and defiance was all he had left to give.

☙

Mauer raised the hand the Academy had given him.  Rain streamed into and over crevices and cracks.  Here and there, muscles twitched, agony lancing through veins, nerves, and around the openings where the fungus -and it was all fungus, despite appearances- broke through the flesh.  He likened the experience to having a red-hot needle pulled through his arm every few seconds,

“How’s the pain?” his captain asked.

“It never stops,” Mauer said.  He blew the whistle, managing the location of the Academy’s beast.

“Maybe when we’re done, it might feel better,” the captain said.

Mauer knew the man’s name, of course.  Edwin Gibson, a friend and confidant, but the man would remain his captain in many ways.  It was a way of holding on to the fire, keeping from slipping into that dead place.  Remembering that day, almost more vivid and clear than real life could be.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be done,” Mauer admitted.

“You chose the right enemy for an endless war,” the captain said.

“I chose?” Mauer asked.

“Poor wording on my part.  I’m more a man of action than a man of words.  A fighting man.”

“Mm hmm,” Mauer said.  He smiled.  “I’ve missed you, Ed.  It’s been a lonely year without your company.”

“I could have visited.”

Mauer shook his head.  “Not worth the risk that others might come to conclusions or start asking questions.”

“I know.  Not that it mattered.”

“Unfortunately not.  The Academy is changing.  We might have to act sooner than later if we’re going to avoid being left behind.”

“Okay.  We’ve waited too much as is.”

Mauer smiled.

When a few seconds passed, he ventured, “I’ve been reminiscent, lately.  Do you remember that day?”

“I do.”  There was no question as to which day it was.

“Was it a good day, or a bad one, do you think?”

The captain smiled a bit.  “Ever with the tough questions.”

Not an answer unto itself, but perhaps the only answer he’d give.  Mauer was fine with that.

Neither of them were thinking of the last day they fought.  That had effectively been the last day of the war.  The Crown had given up on the war weeks earlier, the motivation for which was a question of resources.  It had been too costly to keep going with Academy productions spread so thin and no thunderstorms for their stitched soldiers.  Not the loss of good men and boys.  Resources.

Mauer and his fellow soldiers hadn’t been much different from the stitched in that regard.

No, the day they were thinking about had been the day that Mauer had limped out of the hospital with his new arm, the fire burning fiercer than ever, but with no outlet.  Even in fixing him, the Academy had taken their pound of flesh.  The arm was one more experiment.  They would fix it or replace it as the need arose, he’d been promised.

He preferred the pain.  Better that than to give them more data and help their work.  The pain drove him forward, reminded him to keep moving, to focus his talents and focus his mind to figure out all the possibilities.

Even with that, he hadn’t anticipated the children.

He would know better in the future.

God doesn’t back their side, Mauer thought.  When he’d met up with his squadron for what was meant to be one last visit before they went separate ways, those were the words he’d uttered.  A call to arms and an excuse for his own prayer’s failure, back before they’d gone over and charged across the empty space.

He’d said a lot more, after that.  They had listened.  They had talked, all of them, well into the late hours.

They had planned.

Those plans were supposed to have come together tonight and tomorrow.  He could rally the people to stand against the Academy and see it for what it truly was, and let them fail.  Failure could breed other sentiments, if he was careful.

The Academy’s experiment reacted, jumping back, just barely avoiding crashing into one of the soldiers at the vanguard.

A man, far too large, thick skinned, misshapen and fat, lurked on a nearby building.

Gorger.  Mauer and his men had done his research.  Moles inside the academy had provided the critical details.

Mauer felt the heat within him burning quiet and clean.  Less a raging flame, and more a white hot steel.  He raised his hand to lift the whistle up to his lips and held them tight.

Tell the Academy anything, but don’t tell them about the whistle, he’d told the boy.

He’d given other instructions to others within the Academy.  Some he hadn’t yet had a chance to make use of.

Whistle in place, he grabbed his rifle and tossed it straight up, caught it so his hand was low and in place, and put his thumb through the ring he’d had installed to work the bolt.  He shifted his grip again, raising his Academy-given arm to steady the end of the rifle.

Gorger moved off to one side.  Too fast for something of his bulk.

But Mauer had anticipated the movement.  Gorger had once been human.  He thought and operated like a human.  He followed the same rules.

The rifle moved in line with Gorger’s movement.  Mauer fired.

He watched Gorger drop.

That white hot fire and the pain that kept him up nights had forced him to focus.  When he couldn’t sleep at night, he walked to the outskirts of the city and practiced shooting.  Always with his rifle.

Gorger wasn’t so different from those great plague-beasts he’d seen on the last day of the war.  Thick skin, but they made the eyes small for a reason.  For Gorger, the real eyes were hidden, masked off to the sides.

Gorger staggered, one hand to his cheekbone.  A bottle of liquid fire splashed against his chest, and the contents sloshed out, flowing off his skin like water off a duck’s back.  He wasn’t even singed.

Mauer blew.  The number of short, sharp whistles indicated direction.  The spiny beast lunged, sweeping past Gorger.  Anything else might have been sliced, but Gorger wasn’t touched.

“Aim for the eye!  Right cheek!” the captain shouted.

Gorger charged.  Mauer redirected the beast, putting it in the monster’s way.  It was lower to the ground, better braced, while Gorger was incredibly strong.  Gorger could deal with the beast, but he couldn’t shield his other eye in the process.  He tried another tactic, turning sideways, running with his shoulder forward, driving the monster out of his way and continuing forward.

The squad parted, one soldier a step too slow in getting out of the way.  Jean Dupuy, Mauer knew, who’d hurt his leg in the same explosion that had taken Mauer’s arm and flesh.  Dupuy died, or he was hurt badly enough that only the Academy could put him back together.

Mauer whistled, two sharp sounds.

Gorger turned, reorienting, looking to see where things were, using his one remaining eye.

The spiny beast attacked him, raking his face and chest.  From his reaction, the beast had come close.  He nearly stepped on Dupuy as he wrestled with the beast.

The captain’s turn to whistle, now.

It was an odd reflection, in a way, of that day in the war.  Except Mauer and his men were on the other side, now.

Gorger saw the small, dark objects land in a scattered pile around him.  The beast that Mauer had been given sensed the objects while they were still in the air, and it was fast to retreat.

No less than a dozen grenades went off in quick succession.

This wouldn’t be it.  It wasn’t enough to kill Gorger.  It was enough to stall it, get them a block or two away.  They’d have another chance to blind, other weaknesses to capitalize on.  There would be more obstacles tonight, before they got to safety.

But Mauer wasn’t concerned.

The battles he fought, be they against Gorger, children, or the Academy itself, weren’t battles he was supposed to win.

But he’d seen his death, a dead man walking with an innocent’s eye.  He’d outlived it, surpassed it.  If anything was missing, now that it was gone, he’d replaced it with a steadily burning rage of the quietest, most patient sort.

There was little obstacle he couldn’t surpass, when he had conquered death.  He knew it, his comrades knew it.  Others would soon know it.

He had faith in that.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Lips Sealed 3.1

The room flooded with light.  I opened my eyes just enough to glimpse Gordon sanding there, curtains in hand.  He was wearing a white Academy uniform, minus the jacket.  He took his time, tying each curtain back with the ribbons that were hooked into the wall.  Past the rain-streaked window, the trees and the leafy branches on buildings were a breadth of colors; mostly red and red-black for the buildings.  The color green was all but gone from the view.

I pulled the covers over my head.

“Up,” he said, tearing the covers off me in one sweep.  “Mary can’t wake you up every day, much as you’d like her to.”

“But I don’t want to go to school!” I groaned, pulling the pillow over my head.

“Orders.”

“I don’t care about orders!  I’m the black sheep of the lambs, the rebel, the villain!  I can play hooky!”

“You’re coming,” he said.  “I’ll drag you along in your pyjamas if I have to.”

“I’d make it work,” I mumbled into my pillow.

“I’m betting you’d revel in it.  But you’d stand out, and we’re already on shaky ground there.”

I moved the pillow and looked at him, “You’d sabotage the project?  Reveal us for what we are?”

He looked very casual, leaning on the footboard at the end of Jamie’s empty, neatly-made bed.  He didn’t flinch at the question, but instead asked, “Aren’t you already doing that, trying to skip out on this job?  Professor Briggs said he’d make use of us.  He followed through on his word.  This is our assignment.”

“I didn’t think he meant this!” I said.  “It’s so horribly, awfully, agonizingly boring!”

“It has to end soon.”

“Nuh uh!” I said, flipping over and sitting up a bit.  “We finish and, oh, guess what?  We have to start over!  He’s sinking the project and he’s trying to keep a leash on us.  This pointless busywork is exactly that.”

“I wouldn’t say pointless,” he said.  “If you’re not going to get up because of the project, how about getting up because you don’t want to look like a baby in front of Mary?”

“Baby?”

“I can play head games too, Sy.  If you want to whine and throw a tantrum-”

“First of all, that’s not a good head game, if I know you’re playing me.”

“It’ll work,” he said.

“Second of all, I’m not throwing tantrums, you dick.”

“You’re not acting like an adult, either.”

“Yeah?  Are you sure?  Because I think a lot of adults groan and moan behind closed doors.”

“Do you really think those hypothetical adults are the ones you want to turn to as role models?”

“Yeah.”

“Especially considering that you’re a sponge when it comes to that sort of thing?”

“Yes!  Because the alternative is ending up a tightwad who doesn’t know how to express himself or have fun,” I said, giving him a pointed look.  “If I live to be an adult, then I want to be the kind of adult who skips work and goes and gets drunk and knows how to enjoy the good with all the rest of the murky, bleary day-to-day garbage.  I want to do work that’s exciting and interesting and me.  Not this kind of work!”

“There are times when I don’t understand you at all,” Gordon said.  “But I do know that you don’t want to look like a baby in front of Mary.”

“Stop saying that.”

“Is it getting to you?”

“No,” I lied.

The look he gave me told me he knew I was fibbing.  I wasn’t at my best first thing in the day.

“You and I both know you’re going to get out of bed, you’re just stalling at this point.  You have three seconds before I head down to the breakfast table and casually mention that you’re being a brat and a baby.”

“That’s dirty.  I’m going to get you back for this.”

“Two…”

“I mean it.  I will get you.  Today, even.”

“I know,” he said.  “One.”

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, bringing them down to the floor and standing in the same motion.

When he didn’t react, I flourished a little.

He gave me a short round of clapping, though his expression didn’t change. “Come on.  I don’t trust you not to go back to bed if I leave you alone.”

I grumbled, but I went with.  He clapped a hand on my back as I walked beside him.

“I hate it too,” he said.

“But you don’t hate it enough to do something about it,” I said.

“I’m patient.”

“It’s been three months.  Three!  This is the worst job.”

“I know.”

“Life is short!” I said.

I belatedly realized what I’d said.  I bit my tongue, literally, with enough force that I might have drawn blood.

But he didn’t get angry, and he had gotten angry in the past, when I’d said similar things.  He only sighed out the words, “I know.”

“Sorry,” I said.

He didn’t respond, but clapped a hand on my back instead.

We reached the dining room.  Even with two tables, we couldn’t seat everyone at once.  What tended to happen was that the older kids looked after the youngest, who were given something simple and quick to eat, then moved along with something they could carry with them as they ate.  In the summer, the place of choice was often outside, under the eaves.  Now that it was getting cooler, only a few went out, and the rest were relegated to the stairs and front hall, where dropped bits of toast and fruit were easiest to clean up.

The good stuff was available on a first-come, first-serve basis, which meant I rarely got any bacon or grilled tree jerky.

Jamie, Helen, and Mary were already seated when we arrived at the table.  Jamie and Mary were looking after the little ones.  Jamie’s long hair was wet, combed and parted, and he had drops of water on his glasses, and he was still wearing his pyjamas.  Mary was wearing a cardigan over her nightgown, hair tied back with one ribbon.

Helen, both washed and dressed, like Gordon, was generally disqualified from the breakfast duties.  None of the kids were privy to who or what we were, but somehow, by some clue or cue that I couldn’t figure out, the littlest kids had a way of reacting to Helen like a rabbit might react to a swooping hawk.  If she tried to urge them to eat, they tended to stop doing anything but acting nervous and focusing on her.  She often helped watch the food or turn over the toast, instead.

“You’re up,” Mrs. Earles greeted me.  The food on the stove was only being kept warm, and her focus was more on cleaning up than anything else.

“Good morning, Mrs. Earles,” I said, still half asleep.  “I didn’t get a chance to say last night, but I think your haircut looks nice.”

“You got your hair cut?” Rick asked, twisting around on his bench.

“Just a trim,” Mrs. Earles said.  “And it was very kind of Sylvester to notice and say so.  That doesn’t mean I’m going to turn the stove back on to cook him some bacon.”

“Early bird gets the bacon,” Rick told me, in the most smug manner possible.

Fat bird arrives early enough for the bacon and takes up table space until everyone else is done.

“Wasn’t trying for bacon.  Just saying,” I said.  I collected a bowl and plate, holding them out.  “Oatmeal?”

“Oatmeal,” Mrs. Earles said, plopping a too-generous helping into my bowl.

“Fruit.”

“Fruit,” she said, using a ladle to deposit mystery fruit on my plate.  Something from the Academy that they were trying on the public of Radham.

“Toast.”

“Toast,” she said, reaching over to the side of the oven to grab the long-handled wire setup that had toast trapped within its lattice.  She popped the wire configuration open and dumped the toast onto my plate.

Boring food for a boring day.

“Thank you, Mrs. Earles,” I said.

“Work hard today,” she said.

I gave her a weak smile.

I sat down with the others, making a smaller kid scoot over to give me more room, so I wasn’t forced to take the spot next to Rick.

Mary was sitting beside Helen, and didn’t seem to remember that she was supposed to be afraid of the girl.  Things were bound to go one of two ways as time passed, with Mary’s fear of Helen escalating or dissipating, and it was perhaps a testament to Mary’s character that she’d found a way to take it in stride.  Her focus was more on Ally, a six years old who was staunchly refusing to eat her oatmeal.

“Eat fast,” I chimed in.  “It only gets grosser if you let it get cold.”

“It is cold, and it is gross,” Ally told me, which I’d expected.

I rose up from my seat a little, peered over, and checked her bowl.  I stole it from her.

“Sylvester,” Mrs Earles said.  “No tricks.”

I spooned most of my oatmeal over into Ally’s bowl, then gave her what was left of mine, still hot, noticeably less than she’d had before.  I passed it back to her, then looked at Mrs. Earles, waiting.

She huffed out a sigh, then went back to cleaning dishes.

It was the perfect response, because I could look at Ally and give the girl a wink.

It was clear that she didn’t want to eat, but in this small battle of kid versus adult, I’d sided with her.  She couldn’t refuse now without betraying the covenant of kids everywhere.

Still, she was noticeably sullen as she took to shoveling the oatmeal into her mouth.

“Ready to face the day?” Mary asked, now that she was free of her charge.

“Are you?” I asked.

She made a disgusted face, tongue sticking out.  I smirked, then set to eating, mixing the cold oatmeal in with the hot.

It was pretty quiet as mornings went.  I wasn’t the only one that was feeling a general weariness.  It was visible in Jamie, in Mary, in Gordon to a small degree, and even in Helen; Helen wasn’t putting a lot of energy into acting.  She’d slipped back to her default: smiling, cheery, coy.

“I believe I was the one that mentioned Mrs. Earles’ haircut to you last night,” Jamie commented.

“Uh huh,” I said.  “Did you tell her?”

“No,” Jamie said.

“Joint effort, then,” I said.  “Mrs. Earles?”

“Yes, Sylvester?” she asked, sounding way too tired for the early hour of the day.

“Jamie likes your hair too.”

“Thank you Jamie,” she said, in a way that made it sound routine.  More for the benefit of the littler kids than anything else.

I looked at Jamie.  “See?  Teamwork.”

“Thank you,” he said, but he rolled his eyes.

I ate quick, but as one of the last to the table – Gordon had already eaten before waking me up – I was still one of the last to finish.  Ally finished her oatmeal, which freed Mary to head upstairs to wash and change, with Helen and Jamie a few steps behind.  I’d timed things well enough that I could go up with them.

I looked at Rick, who was still seated.  The look he gave me was a curious one.  Not the usual.

Something had changed.  He was studying me, and I didn’t know why.

I shivered.

We passed Gordon, who was working to manage the kids and help Mrs. Earles.  It would probably be my turn tomorrow, and sleeping in wouldn’t be an option.  Blah.

“You look nice too, Mary,” I commented, quiet.

“I haven’t even washed up.”

“Even so,” I said, shrugging.

“Thank you?”

“You too, Helen, of course, but that’s only natural, right?”

Helen gave me a warm, coy smile that made me shiver in a less-good way.  Then, to make me more uncomfortable, she added,  “Naturally.”

Jamie gave me a curious look.  I nearly missed Helen taking Mary’s hand.

“Come on.  Let’s wash up, and I’ll brush your hair for you,” Helen said.

The look on Mary’s face suggested she wasn’t entirely used to Helen yet.  She said, “I can do it myself.”

“Please.  I get so bored doing my own hair,” Helen said, pleading.  “I want to do yours.”

You don’t get bored at all.  I know for a fact that you can sit and stare at a wall for hours without a problem.

Mary had to know the same thing.  She gave me a helpless look, but all I could do was shrug.

Jamie and I headed to our room, leaving Mary to be dragged to the girl’s washroom by Helen.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” Jamie said.

“Girls are scary,” I said.

“I’m pretty sure that it’s only those two.”

We reached the room, and I went to close the curtains that Gordon had opened because of me.  Idly, I mentioned, “Okay, I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way.”

“Do I do that?  Take things the wrong way?”

“No.  You’re good about that.  But you do get weird about some stuff.”

“Weird.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.  Say or ask me whatever you’re thinking, and I’ll try not to get weird about it.”

“I wish I was a girl.”

“Do you?”

“Look at what Helen does.  It’s so much easier to manipulate people.  So many more levels of nuance and ways to abuse people’s expectation of you.”

“Uh huh.  You do that well enough as a boy.”

“And if I was a girl, I’d be going to the girl’s washroom right now.”

“Ahhhh, that’s what you were getting at.”

“I could protect Mary from Helen, and I’d be closer to her.  Lillian’s close to her, and Helen’s getting closer to being a real friend of Mary’s.  It’s… what’s the word for building a relationship through closeness?”

“Propinquity?”

“Sure.  Propinquity.  That’s why I think I’d want to be a girl.”

“One of these days, Sy…” he said, trailing off.

“You said you wouldn’t get weird!”

“I’m not getting weird.  I’m trying to decide if I should pity or fear the person you’re going to be in a few years.”

“Pity or fear,” I said, snorting.  “You’ll feel friendship, because we’ll be friends.  We’ll be together.  What’s to pity or fear?”

“You’re assuming we survive that long,” he said.  “And no, that’s not an excuse for you to tell me when my time is supposed to be up.  I won’t ask until Gordon does.”

“I guarantee you,” I said.  “You and I, together.  You’re my best friend.”

I gave Jamie his space, keeping my back turned, while he got dressed.  Reaching into the wardrobe, I pulled out two Academy uniforms on hangers.  Both were badly wrinkled, and one was stained with blood.  I started measuring the two to figure out which one was most wearable.

Cloth rustled against my hand.  I didn’t look, but felt it, then seized it.

Jamie had passed me his spare uniform.  Unwrinkled and clean.

“Might be a little big, but it’s gotta be better than that.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“It’s okay,” he said.  “Best friends, right?  Or chalk it up to teamwork.”

“Yeah,” I said.

White shirt with the Radham emblem on the lapel and sleeve, light gray uniform jacket, dark gray pants.  Socks, shoes.

Same as I’d worn six days a week for months.

I fished my badge out of one pocket, a silver etching of Radham’s coat of arms, backed by a black piece of leather, connected by a buckle at the top so it could flip up.  Both sides of the leather were marked by a script, though general wear and tear had made it hard to read.  Clearance to do what I needed to do

The badge went in a pocket, out of sight.

When we were done, we stepped back out into the hallway, where we waited for Gordon, Helen, and Mary.

“I’m not suited for this,” I said.  “Uniforms, schedules, routine.”

“Make a game of it?”

“I’ve made so many games of it,” I said.  “I’ve made games about the games I’ve made of it.”

“I don’t know what to say.  I feel like you’re buttering us up.  You’re being too nice.”

“I’m trying not to be an asshole,” I told him.  I had to choose my words carefully to avoid letting details slip to an overhearing ear.  “I’m so god-damned tired of this thing we’re doing at the Academy.  I’m cranky and I’m feeling spiteful, and it’s almost that time of the month.”

Jamie snorted.

“For my appointment,” I whispered.  “And after my appointment I’m going to be worse.  I can’t take much more of this.  Something’s going to break, or give, or something.  I want to make sure I’ve established who my friends are before it happens.”

He reached up and put his hand on my head, mussing up my hair, side-to-side.  I let my head rock with the motion.

The girls emerged, radiant in white, Mary with her hair done up in a slightly different style, two thin braids reaching behind her head, where they met and were tied into place with a ribbon, trailing down at the back.  The rest of her hair was brushed straight.  She was smiling in a way I hadn’t expected.  Whatever magic Helen had worked, this was above and beyond.  Mary looked like an entirely different person, from an emotional standpoint.

“Looks nice,” I said.

She leaned close to Jamie and I, smiling all the while as she whispered, “We figured out how to hide knives in there.  Can you even see them?”

“No,” I said, as Jamie shook his head.

“You would not believe how many weapons I’m carrying right now,” she said, smiling like the cat with the canary.

Jamie and I glanced at each other.  I knew we were thinking the same thing, an echo of our earlier conversation.

Girls are scary.

☙

Lillian met us at the entrance to the Bowels.  She was holding a small stack of files.  Without a word, she joined our rank and file, handing the files to Gordon.

We descended the stairs into the more dangerous laboratories of the Academy.  Gordon passed one file back to us.  “You do one, we do one?”

“Who’s you and we?” Mary asked.

“You and Jamie go with Sy.  Helen, Lillian and I work on this one.”

“Sure,” Mary said.

Odd, that he’d put me together with Mary and Jamie.  Was he going easy on me?  Did he sense that I was close to my limit?  Suggesting I join up with the people I got along with best?

Good guy, that Gordon.

“Two-eighteen,” he said, pointing off to one side.  Two floors deep.

“We’ll be in Three-twelve,” I said.

Our groups parted.

We descended another floor, then went to find the right lab.

Mary knocked on the door.

The man who answered wore a grey coat, and had a patch of skin on his face that was paler than the rest, with a frost-like pattern to how it was discolored and no hair growth on that part of his head, just above and behind the ear.  I was pretty sure that it was from a few decades back, when they were still experimenting with new skin growth.  When I’d had my skin melted off with the Snake Charmer’s special venom, I’d had the newest kind, and it had been uncomfortable for days.  This guy would be that uncomfortable for the rest of his life, very probably.

“I know you,” he said.

“You do?” Mary asked, surprised.

“Word’s getting around.  The audit.”

“Where’d you get the word about this audit?” I asked.  “Or that we were the ones doing it?”

He smiled.  “I can’t name names.  But you can’t expect to interview every single notable staff member and project team leader without someone letting something reach the wrong ear.”

I frowned.  Well, that took any potential fun we might have out of this.

“I’ve even heard that you’re a special project yourselves,” he said.

I didn’t give a tell, and I knew Mary wouldn’t either, but he still smiled as if we’d given something away.  Jamie?

“How does that work?” Jamie asked.  “Are we supposed to be killing machines?”

“I’ve heard you’re adults in kid’s bodies.  To catch people off guard.”

Well, they’re wrong, but that’s still a really bad sign.

I spoke up, “Are you going to tell us who you heard that from?”

He shook his head.  “Oddly enough, I don’t think I can remember.”

“Yes.  Very odd,” I said, suppressing a sigh.  “That’s stupid.”

“Stupid, huh?”

“It’s really, really stupid.  It sounds like you don’t even know how the Academy works.  Funding experimental kids.  Is that why they think you’re doing something wrong in that lab of yours?”

The table was successfully turned.  Patchy frowned.  “My work is exemplary.  I’ve been supported every step of the way.”

“Exemplary,” Jamie said, while writing in his notebook, more slowly than usual.

“Show us?” Mary asked.

The man nodded.  He invited us in.

It smelled like a barn inside, which probably wasn’t a bad way of putting it.  The lab was one of the larger ones, but iron bars blocked off one side from the other.  On our side, there were tables and notebooks, slates with equations and notes written out in chalk, and a full set of Ratios by Species.

On the other side, the experiment lurched.  It was five-legged, unbalanced, it had no less than ten heads.  The body was patchwork, some areas feathered, some furred, some scaled.  With every movement, it made a hoarse whine, or a high pitched growl.  It was hard to say.

“Doesn’t look very viable,” I said.

“Not… viable,” Jamie echoed me, penning it down.

“Hold on,” Patches said.  “Do you even grasp the very basics of what we’re doing here?”

“Um, yeah,” I said.  Then I added a lie for good measure, “Our project, like all the other groups going around, is to summarize your projects, take notes, and do reports on them for class.”

When what we’re really doing is scouring the university for Mauer’s moles and spies.  Investigating and interviewing every single damn person who might know something Mauer might be able to use or pass on.

Checking ten to twenty a day, out of thousands of relevant doctors, teachers, students, and staff members.  Six days a week, for three months.

We’d only caught one.

This is my personal hell.

“I’m talking about method,” he said.  “It starts with a goal.”

“Making a weapon,” Mary said.

The doctor gave her a very condescending look.  I prickled a little at that.

“No,” Patches said. “That’s one option.  It’s an easy way to get bonus funding and extensions.  But if someone can contribute to the greater scientific knowledge in a demonstrable way, we can use that.  Right here, we have my study on ratios.  Common lines of thinking are that all sustainable lifeforms naturally fit into certain configurations on the macro or micro scales.  So long as the scale is maintained, or not deviated from too much, the lifeform should survive, even as other life is grafted into it on the micro and macro levels.”

“Doesn’t look very sustainable,” I said.

“Seeing when, where, and why it fails is my goal.  It’s very possible that thousands of doctors and professors around the world are operating under a flawed assumption,” he said.  “In the process, I’ve cataloged whole texts with numbers on the ratios pre- and post- graft.  I have support from four different professors in Radham, and two more in other institutions.”

“File has details on your past,” Jamie said.  “We’re getting a sense of where things stand at present-”

“Four papers and one text published in the last three months,” Patches said, with pride.

“What’s in the future?” Jamie asked.

The creature made a noise, louder than before, a guttural whine.

“Next step in determining sustainability.  I’ll have my creature impregnate itself,” Patches said.  “It’s a chimera, actually two sets of compatible DNA in one creature.  It won’t bear a clone, but a genetically distinct member of its own species, I’m hoping.  If it can carry offspring to term, that’s the last major benchmark in sustainability.”

Jamie nodded, but I noticed his hands as the giveaway, clutching pen and book.

“Any other questions?” I asked Mary and Jamie.

They shook their heads.

We stepped out of the room, and the door was shut firmly behind us.

“Nope,” I said.

“Didn’t get any impressions he was hiding anything,” Mary said.  “He even knew we were investigating on a more official level, didn’t flinch.”

“I was thinking it was more to do with his personality.  That’s a long-term project, ties him in pretty deeply to the academic community.  He had some idea who we were, even.  That’s not someone who gets caught or used by the Shepherd.”

“No,” Mary said.

“What do you think, Jamie?”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said, absently.

“Okay, I’ll rephrase.  What are you thinking?”

“The animal in there.  What he was talking about.  Doesn’t sit well.”

“Our sensitive soul,” Mary said.  She stepped over and gave Jamie a kiss on the side of the head.  He smiled at her, still clutching his book tight to his body.

“Wuss,” I said.

He hit me with the book.

I amended my statement.  “Nah, I’ll back what Mary said.  I think I get it.  You’re a good person like that.”

He nodded.

We reached the staircase, and started our way back up to Gordon, Helen, and Lillian.

We were only partway up when we saw the woman coming down.

Half-again as tall as a woman should be, she wore clothes that were a part of her, waves of raw-edged, scar-tissue flesh flowing back to cover her hair, wrap around her arms, encircle her legs like a dress, and cover her feet.  Only her face was normal, and it was a very pretty face, though the eyelids were fixed open with staples, and her mouth sealed shut by the same.  Tubes ran out of her cheeks, down from her tear ducts, and out of her ears, while more extended from belly button, each tube feeding out a constant supply of black or bile-yellow fluid.  The tubes themselves disappeared into the folds of the cloth covering.

Her arms were bloody, up to the elbows.  That same blood was splattered all over her front and legs, with droplets on her face.

She made her way down the stairs at a brisk pace, crimson hands clasped in front of her.  We hurried to get out of her way.

We were silent as we watched her continue her herky-jerky descent deeper into the Bowels, perfectly upright throughout, though her head bobbed with each step down she took on the stairwell.

We exchanged glances.

We bolted.  Up the stairs, down the hall.

Jamie knew the room number, though I’d forgotten.  It didn’t matter in the end.  The door was open.

Broken glass was everywhere.  Helen was sitting against the wall, Gordon and Lillian were kneeling over a mangled body, Lillian doing what she could to help the man, though it didn’t look like it was enough.

“Mole?” I asked.

Gordon shook his head.  “But he was hiding something here.  Moment we started asking questions, he panicked.”

“His panic agitated the experiment,” Helen said.  “The experiment agitated his insides with her hands.”

“Please,” Lillian was whispering.  “Please, please, please…”

“I don’t think you can save him,” I said.

“He’s… I wish I could, but that’s not what I’m worried about,” she said.  She looked at me and whispered, “Lockdown.”

A silence followed her word.

“Let’s go,” Gordon said.  “Get out of here before-”

The siren went off.  All through the complex, throughout the Bowels, the lighting shifted.

“Oh,” I said.  I slapped my face with my hand.  “Oh.  Well, you just had to go and jinx it, didn’t you?”

Heavy thuds marked the barricades dropping down.  With the experiment loose as far down as she was, chances were good that they’d only sealed off the exit.

“I’m sorry,” Lillian said, in a small voice.  “I’m really sorry.”

Like we haven’t spent enough time down here already, I thought, as I heard the loudest thud yet, a final, terrible impact, burying us inside.

Lips Sealed 3.2

In the wake of the biggest seal coming down, breakers, locks, and defense systems could be heard, one after the other, throughout the complex, each one a distinct ‘boom’ with a long series of echoes following it.  The room vibrated with the motion of water through the floor and ceiling, before something filled up or the flow became consistent.

“Just to make it absolutely clear,” I said.  “I wasn’t here when this happened.”

“What?” Lillian asked.  The look she gave me was a bewildered one.

“First thing Hayle or Briggs are going to think is, ‘Sy did it.’ Guarantee you.  I’d like to point out, for everyone in the room, except maybe the dead guy there, who isn’t listening, that I’m innocent this time.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Helen said.  “You weren’t here.”

“How is that a priority?” Lillian asked, her voice tremulous, like she might break at any second.  “Why does it matter?”

“It matters to me,” I said.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.  She was gesturing far more than usual, and her hands were bloody.  She shoved them in my direction, “This is one of the very worst things that could happen, and it happened in the worst way, and you’re assigning blame?”

“Deflecting blame.”

Lillian wheeled around and lunged for me.  Gordon swept her up and caught her in a tight hug, holding her back, and holding her at the same time.  It served as emotional support just as much as it was keeping her from trying to strangle me with her gore-smeared hands.

“I can beat you in a fight, Sy!” Lillian shouted, still struggling.  “Just give me an excuse!”

I spread my arms helplessly, unsure of what to say.

Outside the door, a long train of people in lab coats ran down the length of the hallway, shouted instructions flying between them.

Lillian had seen her share of crises.  Yes, she was young, and being very good and spending a lot of time around us did influence her behavior to sometimes mask how young she really was, but I’d honestly expected a response similar to the other doctors, rather than this.

I looked at Jamie, one eyebrow raised.

“She’s claustrophobic,” Jamie informed me.  “Right now she’s-”

“I’m not claustrophobic,” Lillian cut him off.  “I’m phobic of this, whatever the phobia is for being trapped in a dungeon with dangerous experiments and sterilization procedures!”

“Understandable,” Jamie said, gently.

“When I think of worst case scenarios and I think of those a lot because I work with you guys, when I think about the stuff most of it starts like this and I’m in the Bowels of the Academy,” Lillian said, and she put an awful lot of emotion into her voice at the end.

Mary approached, and Gordon handed off Lillian to her.  Lillian buried her face into Mary’s shoulder.

The emotion in Lillian’s voice carried over as she continued speaking.  “I like to be prepared just in case so I can be strong, but in the worst thoughts I’m here and there’s almost no point to being strong because I’m here, and if I feel like imagining something especially bad to test myself, then sometimes something’s loose and we have no idea what it is, and if I feel like being really, really mean to myself, then I imagine Sy being there and he’s making fun of me all the while.  And it’s happening!”

“Why?” Gordon asked.  “Why do that to yourself?”

“Because it sucks being the only one that’s freaking out!  Just like this, right now!  I don’t want to stand out when you all are saying, ‘that’s one big spider, do you think it eats horses?’  But no, I get freaked out and Sy acts like a penis, and Helen acts like she’s seen worse because she has and that doesn’t make me feel better at all!  The rest of you are okay and nice about it.  I want to mentally fortify myself, so I don’t get scared anymore.”

“We can work on it together,” Mary offered.  “We’ll get through this, and we’ll work on it together.”

“I don’t want to be scared anymore,” Lillian mumbled.  “I’ve heard too many stories from my classmates and stuff.”

“Dumbass,” I said.

Jamie punched me, giving me a glare.  Everyone else stared at me in shock.

I pressed on anyway.  “You’re valuable to us because you’re normal.  Mary should know as well as any of us, how we need people to remind us how normal people act.  The day you stop being scared and become one of us, we won’t need you like we do.”

The counterpoint is that by being around us, she’s absorbing our qualities, trying to emulate us.

“That almost sounds comforting,” Mary said.

“It isn’t,” Lillian said.  “Sy doesn’t do comforting.  He does manipulation.”

“No, Sy does comfort people,” Jamie said.  “He just does it in his own special way.”

Lillian scowled.

Everyone has a weak point, I thought.  Everyone has good days and bad ones.  It’s only when we’ve seen someone on their best and worst days that we can truly know them.

This was Lillian’s bad day, it seemed.

“You want to be a professor someday, right?” I asked.  Her good day.  The day she gets her coat and degree.

Lillian nodded.

“If you’re going to be the best Lillian you can be, it’s not going to be by trying to fit in with us.  Take another step closer to being the woman that wears a black coat.  That doesn’t mean being fearless, it means doing what needs to be done.”

Lillian nodded again.  She seemed a little less distraught than before.  Mary gave her a reassuring squeeze of the shoulders.

“…So tell us what’s going on,” I told her.

Her face fell.

I expected Jamie to hit me for that one, but he didn’t.  Perhaps he wanted to know as much as I did.

Lillian started explaining in a way that made me think of a stitched, very deliberately, without a whole lot of emotion, “I said this happened in the worst way.  These first few floors are supposed to be for stuff that isn’t so dangerous.  The lockdown protocols here have to be manually activated by the people in the labs.  Something that dangerous shouldn’t be here, and it shouldn’t have gotten loose.”

“Further down you go, the more there is to keep things contained,” Helen added.  “With some exceptions.  It gets wobbly with people trading for lab space.”

“What was this experiment, exactly?” Mary asked.

“Project codename Sub Rosa.  Another attempt at reviving the dead,” Gordon said.  He had the file.  Jamie reached for the papers, and Gordon handed them over before continuing, “They pitched it for weapon funding, saying that it had uses in feigning death.  Spy dies in an obvious and undeniable manner, pulse stopped, heartbeat stopped, gets placed in the cocoon, revived.  Or the Academy removes one of its enemies, steals them away from the morgue, and then revives them for questioning.”

“Does it work?” Mary asked.

Lillian shook her head.  “Destroyed brain structures are still gone.  We were asking the doctor about this inhibitor that was reported to vastly speed up brain and muscle cell regeneration, but even if it rebuilds, it won’t rebuild the exact same things that were there before.  Some, but not all.”

“Blank slate,” Jamie said.  “Heal the body, restore the brain’s capacity, but the person doesn’t just magically grow back.”

I gave him a curious look.

“Yes,” Lillian said.  Though she was oblivious to my exchange of glances with Jamie, she was more focused on the task at hand than she had been.  I wondered if it was my advice or the fact that she was talking about something she was passionate about.

“She doesn’t have any offensive weapons?” Mary asked.

Gordon shook his head.

“She’s strong,” Helen said.  “There wasn’t anything about that in the file.”

Lillian said, “Doctor Shipman-”

“Him?” I asked, pointing at the body.

“Him, yes.  He had to know that Sub Rosa was exceeding expectations,” Lillian said, “But he chose to keep it secret.  Why?  Telling the Academy would have meant extra funding.”

“Excellent, Lillian,” I said.  “That’s a question we need to answer.  Secrets within secrets, with that experiment at the center of it.”

Gordon nodded, “We should probably check in with Gorger, then figure out how we can help.”

We nodded, though Lillian seemed reluctant.

“The experiment is probably killing everyone she comes across,” Gordon said.  “If we’re going to contribute, it can’t be in a face to face confrontation.  We gather information, disseminate that information, and see if we can’t work with Gorger to keep the problem contained.”

A bunch of us started to speak all at once.  It was Lillian who came through the clearest.  Or Lillian that Gordon chose to listen to, anyway.

“Without us in the containment?” Lillian asked.

“Exactly,” Gordon said.

Mary, Jamie and I spoke up at exactly the same time.  He deferred to us.

I let Mary win.  The nebulous benefit garnered by being the one to bring it up wasn’t worth getting on the wrong side of Mary’s competitive spirit.

“She isn’t killing everything she comes across,” Mary said.  “She walked right by us as we were coming up.  We weren’t even really hiding, we were on the stairs.”

“Yep,” I said.  “That’s what I was gonna say.”

“She went down?” Gordon asked.

“Down.”

“It’s reassuring that she didn’t go after you, but why go down?  Why is she being selective about who she kills?” Gordon asked.  “Something happened to make someone call for an emergency state.  They must have found a body.  She would have moved on, or they’d have locked down one specific area.”

Helen nodded.  “Code blue.  Or a code indigo is possible.  Or a code white.  Code brown, even?  That doesn’t narrow things down.  There are any number of reasons they could have locked everything down.”

“I know what those codes mean,” Lillian said, quiet.  “This is moving closer to me getting all panicky again.”

“All I meant was that something happened, and it wasn’t just a strange creature wandering around that made people react,” Gordon said.

We headed out the door.  After a moment’s pause, glancing at each other to make sure we were all together, we started down the stairs.  Gordon and Mary took the lead, Helen and Lillian second, with Jamie and I at the rear.

“We need to find Gorger, first of all,” Gordon said.  “He hangs out more at the lower levels.  Eight or nine.”

“Stop at floor six first,” Jamie said.  He handed the file back to Gordon.  “Our scientist here has relatives.  You guys interviewed one a month ago.”

“We did?” Gordon asked.

“Bug swarms, tranquilizing and anaesthetic venom.  Helen, Lillian, and Sy.”

“I remember,” Lillian said.  “The girl, right?  I liked her.”

“Okay,” Gordon said.  “Sounds like a plan.”

With the way the stairwell was constructed, the Bowels constituted a deep, circular shaft that disappeared far, far below.  The stairwell spiraled down the exterior, with doors at set intervals.  Floor two, labs one through twenty four.  The entrance to labs twenty five through fifty was a bit lower.

After floor two ended, there was a gap where there were no openings at all.  A given floor or ceiling was very, very thick, loaded with sterilization and containment measures.

“Don’t forget to watch walls and ceilings,” Mary said, pointing at the space under the stairs to her left.  “Is that old hat for all of you?  I’ve only done the one job with you, and a lot of interviews, but those aren’t really a job, I don’t want to keep giving advice that you’ve all heard before.”

“Definitely not a job.  Torture, more like,” I said.  Mary turned and flashed me a smile.

“Walls and ceilings,” Mary said, again.  “Tip Percy gave us when we were planning how we would deal with various weapons the Academy might send after us.”

“It’s a good tip,” Gordon said.  “But I don’t think she can climb on walls or drop down on top of us.”

“I like being extra careful,” Lillian said.  “Being extra careful sounds fantastic.”

She said fantastic with a dismal tone.  If she hadn’t actually said it, I would have heard the inflection she gave her words and thought that ‘fantastic’ was a word that was never going to leave her mouth.

We passed floor three, the hallway that led to labs one through ten.

Long, long way down.

“Tetradeleocleithrophobia,” Jamie whispered to me.

“What?”

“She said it wasn’t claustrophobia.  It was a phobia of being trapped in a place with monsters and life-exterminating deathtraps.  I really wanted to take a stab at it, but then she would’ve been trying to strangle me, not you.”

“Take a stab at it?” I asked.  “You memorized a dictionary when you were eight.  I’d think you’d know.”

“They don’t let me learn Latin, like how I’ve been forbidden to read Academy texts.  I pick some up, just like I’ve glimpsed textbook pages now and again, but I’m not sure.”

“Ahh.”

“I don’t like not being sure.  Not about day to day stuff.  But about my head.  Either I know something, or I don’t.  But I think tetradeleocleithrophobia would be right, right?”

I gave him my best shrug.

“That’s going to bother me for a long time,” he said.

“If we make it out of here, I’ll find a way to double check it for you,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.  They don’t expect me to retain much, memory-wise, but I can figure it out and keep track of that much.”

He threw an arm around my shoulders.

We passed the start of the fourth floor like that, Jamie with the book under one arm and me under the other.  I could see Lillian getting more agitated as we got further down.  Gordon and Mary were in their element.  Helen didn’t tend to show much at all.

Footsteps pounded on the stairs, echoing up the stairwell.  We stepped into a hallway to get out of the way and take what little cover we could.

A group of men and women in white lab coats fled up the stairs.  One glanced at us, but was too out of breath to say anything.  Fear and concern marked her expression, and her unwillingness to stop for even a few seconds helped fill in the rest of the story.

Or not.

The start of the fifth floor was a little distance below us.  On the stairs around the hallway, there were pieces of bodies, smears of blood, and more dropped pieces along the way.

Bloody footsteps marked the passage of the escaped experiment into the hallway.

“She went this way?” Mary asked.

“Seems too easy,” I said.  “Too obvious.”

“Sometimes things are easy and obvious,” Gordon said.  “If she is in here, we can close off the section.”

“Requiring a sacrificial pawn,” Jamie observed.

It was a heavy concept.  Which of us were we willing to sacrifice?

Why did I feel like one or two of the others might nominate me?

“Or we could try to convince someone else to do it,” I offered an alternative.  “Yeah?”

“Maybe,” Gordon said.

He led us into the hallway.

We’d spent some time down here already.  I knew that the hallways on the lower levels were more complex.  There were thicker doors, heavy ones that would be hard for even a stitched with a battering ram to smash down.  Beyond would be more hallways, ones with safeguards, sterilization and elimination measures.  Stitched guards, probably.  At least one of the corpses that had been used to decorate the surroundings had been a stitched, going by the dry flesh and the wires that had been pulled free here and there, sticking out of the flesh like porcupine quills.

Things had changed since then.  Lightbulbs had been smashed here and there, and there were sections of hallway where a surprise party could have been laying in wait, complete with cake and clowns.  Or monsters.

Monsters were more likely to be lurking in the shadows.  We could walk into the darkness and bump noses with her.  Even Mary or Gordon wouldn’t be able to achieve much if that were to happen.  Torn to shreds.

“This screams ‘trap’,” I said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  He’d already stopped advancing.  “I was thinking something along those lines.”

“Sub Rosa was human once.  Probably isn’t very human anymore,” Jamie said.  “Blank slate syndrome, unlearned skills, partially retained skills.  She might be more similar to a fevered stitched.  Odd patterns of behavior, with brief and narrow moments of brilliance.  It’s not impossible that she could be capable of laying traps.”

“Including preparing ambushes,” I said.

“What are your instincts?” Gordon asked.

“Leave,” Mary said.  “Better to live to fight another day.”

Another Percy-ism?

“I don’t disagree,” I chimed in.  I was actually glad that Percy’s philosophies and mine lined up here.  If they hadn’t, I would have been put into the awkward position of either going with a dumb plan or possibly disturbing Mary.

Not upsetting or angering or anything like that, but disturbing her.  Moving her from a place of peace and balance to something she was less easy with.

We backed out of the corridor, heading toward the stairwell.

As we retreated, a silhouette formed out of the shadow.  Our missing experiment, taller than even a tall man, adorned in folds of skin.  She had more blood on her now than she had when we’d last crossed paths.

Sub Rosa.

A knife had appeared in Mary’s hand.  She didn’t throw it, but spun it around one finger, catching it, spun it, caught it.

From the look of it, and I’d seen most of Mary’s knives at this point, I took it to be a throwing knife.

“No,” Gordon said, under his breath.  “If she was passive toward you earlier…”

Mary nodded.  The knife stayed where it was, but the periodic spinning motion continued.  A comfort thing?

Sub Rosa advanced, then stopped.  She turned her attention to a set of double doors, heavy, built to interlock and seal.

She gripped the handles, fluid churned in the tubes that riddled Sub Rosa’s body, and the experiment hauled, her entire body contorting to maximize leverage, simultaneously forcing her body toward the ground and hauling back on the doors.

“No,” Lillian said, under her breath.  “This is bad, this is bad.  Run.”

“Run,” Helen echoed her.

That was a special word, coming from Helen.  We ran.

We reached the stairwell, and I was moving fast enough that I had to catch the railing to come to a halt.

“The security measures,” Lillian said.  “This far down, if you damage the doors, cause too much disturbance knocking things around, then the slabs built into the ceiling fall down and the gas gets pumped in, and worse stuff.”

“How automatic is that little feature?” Jamie asked.

“Very?  There are places we’re not even supposed to run because the tremors can disturb mechanisms.”

“Look,” Jamie said.

We looked.

With the lighting so bad in the hallway and Sub Rosa being as far away as she was, things were barely more than smudges, dark grey on black, easy to miss when joined by spots in my vision and the throbbing of my heartbeat against my eyes.

The noise gave context to the vague images I was seeing.  An eerie scream of tearing metal, followed by a metal-on-stone collision.

“If everything’s automatic, why isn’t she triggering the safeguards here?” Jamie asked.  “She just tore a metal door off its hinges.”

“I don’t know,” Lillian said.  “It should go off.”

“But it isn’t,” Gordon stated.

“I don’t know.”

Screams echoed from the other end of the hallway that Sub Rosa was in, overlapping with one another.

“We should go down.”

“We’ll corner ourselves,” Jamie said.

“We’re already cornered.  If we go up, we’ll be out of options and still won’t have a way out.”

“We could ride it out,” I said, “find a lab to lock ourselves in, but I don’t think that would go over so well with Hayle and Briggs.”

“We’d have a better chance of living,” Lillian pointed out.

“If you want to do that, Lil, don’t let me stop you,” I said.  I watched down the length of the hallway that Sub Rosa had gone down.  “You’re a free person.  Still, I can’t think of anything more miserable than being in a locked room and being unable to do anything but wait for the monsters to come find us.  It would be nice to have you along.”

“I can think of a lot of things more miserable,” Lillian said.  “I’ve been practicing imagining terrible things.”

“We should go,” Mary said.

“Not until we figure out if the group is splitting up,” I said.

The screaming stopped.  Another sound quickly picked up in its place: the sound of tearing metal.

“Question is, is the Lillian you want to be in six years the type to go upstairs and hide, or is she the type that solves problems?”

“That’s a stupid question.  I want to be alive, you idiot!”

“Up, down, split up.  Pick one,” Gordon said, with more stress than usual in his voice.

“Lillian isn’t deciding,” I said.

“I did, I have, you’re the one making this sound more complicated than it is!” Lillian told me.

“You want to go upstairs?  Go, then.  Maybe Mary or Gordon can go with you, keep you company and keep you safe,” I said.

“I can,” Mary said.

“I’m going downstairs with the rest of you,” Lillian said.  “That was my choice!”

“You didn’t-” I started.  Gordon clapped a hand over my mouth.

Things were emerging from the hallway.

Not Sub Rosa.

They were men and women, and none of them looked like they’d eaten well at all.  They didn’t shamble, they didn’t limp, but many were hunched over.  Glass cases and canisters were fused to their backs and shoulders, ranging from the size of a fist to the size of a breadbox, each one filled with a urine-yellow fluid, and each one housing what looked to be a sinuous aquatic lifeform, black and periodically uncoiling in the murky fluid.  Octopus, eel, or a combination of the two.

Each had long tracks of stitches on their arms, legs, and chests.  Their wrists were bent perpetually at right angles, metal spears forced out from beneath the flesh of their forearms and through their palms.

Modified stitched?  They didn’t look well looked after.

The men and women with the jars implanted into their backs picked up speed.  They were too malnourished to be fast, but it was a good indication that they’d decided to come after us.

“Down!” Gordon hissed the word.

We turned and made our way down.  With one hand on the wall to steady myself, I could take the stairs three at a time.  The others weren’t far behind.

Mary flipped a throwing knife around in her hand, then whipped it at one of the tinted lightbulbs.  The light died, leaving an entire section of stairs in near-pitch darkness, while leaving me to almost miss the stair I was planning on stepping on.  We fled into the makeshift shelter that the darkness provided, then stepped into the first hallway for the sixth floor.

Mary didn’t come with us into the hallway.  Seeing her only in silhouette, I could see how she was pulling the ribbon from her hair.  She knelt by the railing on the stairs, and then slowly backed up, joining us in the hallway.

A tripwire.  Crude, but effective, especially when the experiments looked as fragile as they did.

Lillian and Helen stopped at a heavy metal door, much like the one Sub Rosa had torn off the hinges.  The keypad clicked audibly as each button was punched.

“Damn it,” Lillian said, under her breath.

Our pursuers emerged, grabbing the railing for support, or shielding their eyes from the light right above them as they scanned the stairs above and below them, looking for fleeing children.  That same light made the cases on their backs and shoulders seem to glow, and the jaundiced color of their skin became especially apparent, a sallow yellow marked with dull grey tattoos.

Prison tattoos.  Convicts.  They weren’t stitched.  They were people.  The Academy needed its fodder for human experimentation, and prisoners of war, the worst criminals, and ex-slaves deemed unfit to be citizens of the crown were all candidates for such.

Meaning they were people with cause to be angry, desperate, and above all else, they were people who were an unpredictable sort of dangerous.

Sub Rosa exited the hallway, and came to stand in the midst of the group, head and shoulders above the rest.

She’d let them out.

“She has a strategy?” I murmured the question out loud.  “She knows where she’s going, who she’s going after, and she knows how to bypass the quarantine measures?”

“Let’s not forget about her friends,” Gordon said.  “She might have left you three alone, but it’s not likely they will.”

“Too many questions, no answers.  We need to talk to Shipman’s relative, and find out anything we can,” I said.  I checked over my shoulder.

Lillian punched a finger at the keypad once again, then mashed her fist into it, forehead coming to rest on the door.

Her bad day kept getting worse.  I’d seen Gordon’s bad day, I’d seen Jamie’s, Mary’s, and I’d seen Helen’s, in a way, though Helen’s concept of ‘bad’ was different from ours.

Would it be consolation to her if I told her that I might start thinking of her as one of us if she could just see this through?

Best not to test her when she was this close to breaking.

“Seems we can’t get through,” Helen said, turning my way to offer a cute smile.  “Whoever took shelter inside changed the code.”

Lips Sealed 3.3

The footsteps sounded, drawing closer.  Heavy feet striking stone, the periodic bang of metal spikes on the railing, a muttered curse from one of the convicts.

We were in the dark, halfway down a hallway with only a bit of light coming through a slot above and halfway down the door.  An angled piece of metal at the ceiling caught the light from above the door and reflected it down onto the door’s surface, making the keypad visible.  At the other end of the hallway was the cylindrical shaft, deep, with stairs spiraling down the exterior, but Mary had destroyed one of the lights and the others were far away and out of sight.

Sub Rosa and a gang of Academy-modified convicts were making their way down toward us.

“We need to run,” Mary said.  She was closer to the opening, crouching, holding one end of the tripwire in one hand, a knife in the other.

With luck, barring any surprises, she could remove two of our pursuers.  If we ran, we could slip ahead of Sub Rosa’s group and try to make our way down the stairs to another level.

“If it was just you, me, Gordon, maybe Helen?  Sure,” I said.  “But I don’t think half of us would make it.”

“What?” Lillian asked.

“You, Jamie, maybe Helen, I don’t think you three would be fast enough,” I clarified.

“No,” Lillian said, breathless.

“Staying might mean we all die,” Jamie said.  “I’m okay with trying running, that in mind.”

“I’m not,” I said.  “If Mary wants to, or if Gordon wants to, then okay.  We can split up.  But I’m staying with.”

“I’m staying,” Gordon said, voice firm.

“Me too,” Mary said.  “If we lose too many members of the team the Lambs might be disbanded, anyway, and I don’t know what happens to me if that happens.  I like you guys.”

I smiled a bit.  Mary was coming up with excuses, the group being disbanded, but something told me she was more attached to our little ‘family’ than any of us.

“All or none, then,” I said.

“All or none,” Gordon agreed.

“Which means our only option is to get through,” Jamie said.

“Except we can’t!” Lillian said, with a note of panic to her voice.  She hit the keypad.  “Damn it!”

“Let me,” Gordon said.

Lillian and Helen got out of the way.  Gordon set about dismantling the keypad with his pocket knife.

I could hear the footsteps approaching, not just the echo, but the actual knock of foot on stair.  I looked back and forth from one end of the hallway to the other.  As I looked in Mary’s direction, she met my eyes, her grip on the knife tightening.

I could see the ways this might play out, though things got a lot less predictable when the convicts got close.  I wasn’t sure what they were, but I was willing to bet that Mary and Gordon together wouldn’t stand up to four or five of them and one experiment that could tear steel doors out of the frame.

“Mary,” the word left my lip before the thought had fully coalesced.

We’d lose.

I gave her a shake of my head.

“No?” she whispered.

The footsteps were drawing closer, to the point that I could make out the individual footfalls between the scrapes and bangs of Gordon’s attempts at working with the keypad.  They were just around the corner.

“No,” I whispered.  I reached out.

She abandoned the makeshift tripwire, stood, and crossed half of the length of the hallway to reach me, taking my hand.  My hand was more sweaty than hers, which caught me by surprise.  I held her hand tight, being careful not to hurt her fingers.

My heart thudded in my chest, making my entire body rock with each beat.  I was jittery, and I wasn’t normally a jittery type.

The Lambs, my friends, my gang, my family.

I didn’t want to see them get hurt.

Come on.  Down the stairs, I thought.

The footsteps got closer, and shadows moved just beyond the exit of the hallway.

Down…

Sub Rosa was foremost among them.  She reached the broader stair that was just beyond the hallway’s exit, then turned, facing us.

The convicts surrounded her.  I could only barely make out their eyes in the gloom, as they stared down the hallway at us.

I heard a snicker.

I gave Mary’s hand a fierce squeeze, then let go.

In a fight, I was useless.

Better to give the group as much warning as possible, if this went sour.

I stepped forward, putting out a hand to tell Mary to stop, to urge her to keep back.

Another step forward.  It put me at the head of the group.  The rest were behind me, a few steps away from the door.

Might be nice if you popped that door open, Gordon, I thought.  Would rather run at this point than put my life on the line for you guys.

Sub Rosa advanced, in the lead of her group.  A woman in robes and habit of flesh, eyes permanently open, mouth permanently sealed, stained with blood.

The convicts were jaundiced, malnourished, but what remained in their ravaged bodies was a hard, scary sort of ranginess, as different from normal people as snarling mutts chained up in a graveyard were from house dogs.

A big fellow broke the silence.  He stood a head taller than everyone, only a foot or so shorter than Sub Rosa.  He looked like he’d eaten better than the rest.  The leader?  His voice was soft, but it had a whine to it, not suited to how large he was, the kind of tone I expected to hear from one of the youngest kids at the orphanage, telling Mrs. Earles how his toy had been stolen, except it came from the throat of a man.  “Academy brat.”

I kept my mouth shut.

“Look what you did to me,” he said.  He raised his hand, showing me the spike that speared out of the palm, forcing his wrists into a permanent right angle bend.  The flesh around the spike looked red and infected, and there was a great deal of black and yellow fluid there.

I’d thought it was a giant needle, connected to the jars of fluid on his back, but it wasn’t.  It was solid, without a hollow part to it.  Almost as long as his arm.

“Look,” he said, more insistent, his tone more of a mewl.  Then, fierce, he raised his voice, “Look!”

I kept my mouth shut.  Damn him.  He wasn’t the one I wanted to be focusing on right this moment.

Oblivious to the man’s cries, Sub Rosa strode toward me.  Now that she was closer, I could see the odd musculature on her body, highlighted by the thin shafts of light that made it through the door.  Of her entire body, only the face seemed ordinary.  The rest was put together in an odd way, with a strange aesthetic to it.

I swallowed hard.

But I didn’t move out of her way.

As strategies went, this wasn’t one that was well founded in fact and a deep understanding of our opposition.  This was one that was very likely to get me killed or maimed.

But she was acting with deliberation, not quite as if following a script, but not rampaging either.

She’d left us alone before.

She had been following a set course of action.  Now I was putting myself in the way of that course.  Testing it.

Behind her, the soft-spoken, mewling convict spoke up, looking past her to stare at me.  “You did this to us.  I’d give you the worst spanking of your life, little boy, but I can’t, because of what you all did to my body.”

“Our bodies,” the one woman of the group said, with a hard sort of anger to her voice.  She didn’t have the same whiny tone, so it wasn’t a part of the changes that had been made to them.  It was only the one guy.

I didn’t take my eyes off Sub Rosa, I couldn’t.  The convict’s words were reminding me that I didn’t have a course of action planned for what came next.  I was laying odds on Sub Rosa killing or striking me.  If it came to that, at least the others would know they had to fight if they were going to have a chance to make it out.

Between me and the others, there were only about ten paces of hallway between Sub Rosa and the door.  The six of us were confined to that space.

I still had my hand out a little ways behind me, the flat of it facing Mary,

“Sy,” Gordon said.

“Door?” I asked him, still staring Sub Rosa down.  Her eyes moved down to look at me for the first time.

“I can’t.  If you gave me two or three more minutes, maybe, but… I’m sorry.”

I didn’t turn away.

“Can’t spank,” the convict mused aloud.  “Next best thing, if I stick this down your throat, you think I can get the spike coming out the other end?”

I resisted the bait.

Sub Rosa was only a short distance away.  She was my focus.

“Breakfast was nice,” I commented, for the benefit of the others.

Eating together with everyone.

Silly last thing to be saying, as I put myself in front of a brain-damaged, door-rending killer, but I didn’t have time to really come up with better.

I could hear the sucking of the tubes at Sub Rosa’s face, chest, and stomach.

She turned, walking around me.

Her hand reached out, touching the top of my head.  She absently smoothed my hair down in passing.

If I was shocked, showing it would have been a terminal mistake.  I stayed still, my expression steady as the convicts approached me.  The others had to handle Sub Rosa on their own.

The soft-spoken giant with a heart of perverse violence approached me.  He touched the metal rods together, and they sparked.

“I’ll give you your breakfast,” he said, under his breath.  Just for him and me.

Oh.  Huh.

I was between him and Sub Rosa now.  He picked up the pace, raising his hand, spike extended right for my face, thrusting.

I could have sidestepped, but I didn’t see that going anywhere good.  I stepped back, instead, and bumped into Sub Rosa.  The spike came right for me.  His steps were bigger than mine.

He was aiming for my lower face.

In one end and out the other.

I opened my mouth, and the spike touched my front teeth, something cracked, I felt like a vein in my face had leaped out the front of my head and torn away everything in the way, followed by a wave of clenching pain gripping the other side of my face, until I thought my own muscles would destroy themselves.

“Sy!” Mary cried out.

I sprawled to Sub Rosa’s left.  My face clenched again, as if the one side of it was a fist.  The spike wasn’t even still touching me.  I gasped in a small breath, and realized I could make a sound if I needed to.

If she was kind enough to fix my hair, could I ask for help here?

Yes.

But instincts told me no.

The thoughts that played out in the next few seconds told me why my instincts had told me no.  Of all the possible outcomes that followed, Sub Rosa standing up for me and fighting the convicts was the only good one, and I couldn’t explain why she would.

I couldn’t explain why she wouldn’t either, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to make a shot in the dark when I wasn’t even sure what I was shooting at.

I moved my tongue, trying to figure out the extent of the damage, and felt a large chunk of tooth roll between my tongue and the roof of my mouth.

My gaze was fixed on the convict as I spat out the little bit of tooth.

Stare him down, show no fear.

He was an animal, he barely had opposable thumbs anymore.  I had to communicate by the most basic means available.  Body language, expression, eye contact.

If I acted as afraid as I was, I became a known element.  Even if every single one of his victims had fought back, even if he was an innocent man, if he’d been in prison long enough to get the crude, washed-out tattoos that I saw on his arms, he had to have learned about pecking orders, hierarchies, power.

If I spoke, if I tried to convince him, if I used logic, then I became a student of the Academy, and it was a very unfortunate thing that I was wearing a white uniform.  They had cause to be angry at students of the Academy.

The remaining action I might have taken would have been to appeal to emotion, to communicate in terms of desire and drive, hopes, mercy.  It was a shot in the dark, I had no idea who he was or what he’d done, but from his words and situation I didn’t trust his ability to give mercy.  Still, it was the first choice I would have made, if I’d had to do something, like if he were to move on to threaten Jamie, Mary, or one of the others.

Instead, lying on my back, staring up at him, I spread my hands a little, turning my palms upward, fingers spread.

The man approached until his feet were to either side of me.  The spike moved over, until it pointed at the base of my throat.

I wanted to smile, laugh, taunt him, but that was as dangerous as any appeal to logic or emotion might have been.

My sanctuary here was in being alien, in making him as unsure as possible.  I channeled Helen.  The cold stare.  Well, a cold stare with my one eye twitching involuntarily from the last grazing touch of the spike.

He didn’t seem to care.  He brought the tip close enough to my throat for the energy within to make contact.

Man, that hurt.  My back arched as I found myself involuntarily pulling back, trying to pull my head and throat down through the floor.  A trace of whatever was within danced down the back of my head, making my thoughts explode into white noise.  He moved it toward the center of my body, making my arms, then one of my legs kick.  He left it like that, my leg going nuts, my body unable to move away without me heaving my chest up and into the waiting point.  Any second now, I’d lurch up and forward and impale myself.

The woman of the group stepped forward.  She couldn’t use her hand, but she reached out and nudged the convict’s arm with the back of her hand.

My leg kept kicking and cramping up, even as the spike moved away from my chest.

“Hm?” the convict asked her.

He followed her gaze.  I did too, raising my chin to look above me.

Sub Rosa had stepped forward, into the midst of the others, a few paces away from the door, and her upper body was twisted, looking back at me, at the leader of the convicts, and the woman.

Her expression was largely fixed by the modifications to her face.  Still, an intensity radiated from her.

The convict who’d had me at spike-point looked down at me, as if debating his options.  His gaze moved over the other Lambs.  He spat to one side, then stepped over and around me.

It wasn’t like it had been with Mauer.  These convicts weren’t with Sub Rosa because they knew her.  She was as much a mystery to them as she was to us, and the discovery that she didn’t approve of this sort of behavior was as much a surprise to the convict leader as it was to me.

A nice surprise, for me, but all the same…

Nobody gave me any help in standing.  Given the modifications that had been made to the convicts, that was a good thing.

My leg kicked once as I used the wall to help myself to my feet, nearly forcing me to the ground again.  I recovered, straightened, and wiped at the corner of my mouth with the back of one hand.  It came away with far too much blood on it.

I kept my expression still.

The others had backed away from Sub Rosa, and were standing on either side of the hallway.  Lillian looked scared, Jamie’s expression betrayed concern for me but not to the point I was positive the convicts would notice, and the others were managing to stay stoic and calm.

Sub Rosa stepped closer to Gordon, who stepped away, giving her space.

She reached into the simple mechanisms of the keypad, past them, and gripped something else.

The ceiling shuddered.  Something heavy fell above us, inside a hollow space.

With a glacial, careful set of movements, Sub Rosa pulled out a length of what looked to be mummified intestine.  Past the worn, shredded lining, wires were clearly visible, clustered together.

She pulled a little from the top, and the ceiling shuddered again.  Dust streamed down in plumes from the spaces between slabs of stone above us.

Sub Rosa pulled some from further below.  Something fluid moved through the walls and ceiling.  Lillian shrieked a little.

The fluid stopped as quickly as it had began, but I could hear the trickling as the remainder found a way out.

She’s brain damaged, even.

What if she forgot a step?

Sub Rosa’s fingernails tore away the lining around the wires.  She seized one, gripped it, and tore it.

Even with her incredible strength, she had trouble keeping the individual pieces from pulling up and down, respectively.  Still, she hauled it together, closer, and tied it into a crude knot.

Far too crude a knot for my liking, given everything that those mechanisms were apparently designed to do.

My eyes met those of the other members of the group.  They were watching as much as I was.  They were thinking the exact same thing I was.

She knows exactly what she’s doing.

Sub Rosa gripped the door that Gordon, Helen, and Lillian  had been trying to open, then contorted her whole body to shove it.  It rattled violently in the frame.

She adjusted her grip, then heaved, pulling back.  Every muscle in her body, including some beneath the robe of flesh she was cocooned in, seemed to stand out in relief as she put everything into hauling back on the door.

Something within the door snapped.

Push, pull, heave, ho.  There was a mechanical kind of motion to it, it was so steady, precise, and relentless.  Each motion seemed to bend things only a little.  Stress lined appeared around the edges of the frame.  Those stress lines became folds.

The convict who’d been threatening me was giving me a sidelong glance.  I didn’t do him the favor of meeting his gaze.  He didn’t know who I was, he didn’t know why Sub Rosa was interested in my welfare, and I wasn’t interested in informing him either way.

The handle came away in one piece, mangled screws sticking out the other side.  She tossed it back and to the side.  Gordon stopped it from sliding along the floor with one foot.

Sub Rosa had a singular focus.  She hooked her fingers into the holes before resuming the forward-and-back motion.  I thought her fingers might break from the movement, with the positions she had them in, but she didn’t seem to mind or care.

She heals fast, if nothing else.  I wasn’t sure if that meant she healed in seconds, minutes, hours or days, but either way, she didn’t seem to mind.

The door folded toward the middle, and she placed hands inside the gap, forcing it wider.

Once she got that far, the door didn’t stand for long.  In a matter of seconds, she was standing with arms extended to either side, muscles flexing against flesh until they looked like cords of rough-spun rope, thick as my leg and spun out in darkest crimson.

Shouts echoed from further down the hall.

Sub Rosa advanced, each step sure, oddly graceful with her abundant natural strength.

The leader of the convicts sneered at me as he walked by.  The woman stared me down, an angry expression, dismissive.

It might have been rebelliousness that made me do it, but I was inspired.

I turned, and I walked in formation with Sub Rosa and her group of convicts, beside the woman of the group.

“The fuck are you doing?” the woman asked.

I gave her a sidelong glance, but I kept my expression as still and as cold as I could manage it.

She frowned, but she didn’t press me further.

Without a word on the subject, the others fell in step, joining the crowd that had gathered around Sub Rosa.  Even Lillian followed suit, miraculously enough, though her hands clenched her bag and betrayed her fear.  Gordon was the last to join the group, and walked close to Lillian, so his body blocked the others’ view of her.

Apparently, the alien nature of the rest of us was enough to keep the convicts from making something of it.

“What the fuck’s going on?” one of the other guys asked his buddy.  Both had scraggly beards, but one was bald, and the other had long hair.

“Whatever the fuck it is, it’s better than where we were,” the leader of the convicts said.  He gave me a dirty look.

We made our way down the hallway, and more shouts joined the first, people ducking into labs, shutting doors.  Locks clicked.  The hallway extended into branches, forming a loose cross shape.

Sub Rosa stopped before stepping into the middle.  She found another piece of metal on the wall, and pried it free.  The work she did this time was faster, simpler.  Again, a tearing of one wire, tying it.

Her head inclined up, looking at the singular slab of stone that hung over the branch.  She shifted her weight carefully onto the next section of floor, then lowered her gaze, turning to face us.

She pointed at the convict leader, then the baldy-beardy, down one length of the branch.

At the next two convicts, including long-hair-beardy, second branch.

At the woman.  She pointed and started walking in the same moment.  Toward the next set of reinforced doors, protecting the next section of hallway.

The first door to our left was swiftly kicked open by the convict leader.  I heard the commotion, the taunting, and the scream that followed.

The others were already working to kick in doors, punching at wood or prying at metal with their spikes.

The woman was hanging back, halfway between us and Sub Rosa.  Watching both, a concerned look on her face.

Maybe not a violence-happy killer like the leader was.  The individual most interested in figuring out what was going on.

I glanced at the others.  Speaking was dangerous, if it could give us away to the woman.  All we needed to be utterly ruined would be a single word from her.

Mary was standing next to me.  My hand touched her hip, traced down her leg, and reached the bottom of her Academy-uniform skirt.

I slid my hand under it, along her leg, and found the sheath with knives placed along it.

She gave me the funniest look as I plucked one knife from the sheath at her inner thigh.  Mingled curiosity and suppressed outrage, all bound together into a quirk of the eyebrow and a smouldering look in the eye, so small an expression that the convict woman wouldn’t see it.

I looked at Jamie, who was as cool as Mary was heated.  His eyes flicked over in Sub Rosa’s direction.

I had to read so much from so little.  Jamie had a focus, he remembered.  What was he remembering?  What was he dwelling on, more than any of us?

We were on the sixth floor.  The relative of the dead scientist, Sub Rosa’s creator, was somewhere on this floor.

And he was looking over in the direction of the deeper sixth floor labs.  Which Sub Rosa was in the process of breaking into.

I gave him the slightest of nods, my chin moving by hairs.

He blinked confirmation.

The convict leader stepped out of the one lab, and his weapons were splattered in blood.  Had things gone differently, it might have been mingled with my own.

With a spring in my step, blade palmed in my hand, I headed in his direction.

“Next one is mine,” I told him, my expression cold and flat, as I headed to the next door.

He didn’t respond right away.  He finally offered a begrudging, confused, “We’ll see.”

The others were already moving in their individual directions.  To other convicts and other people who were slated to die.

It was a merry dance, dangerous, but merry.  Each of us moved in coordination.

And we still lacked answers.  We were dancing in pitch darkness, and one misstep here could end us all.

Lips Sealed 3.4

I tapped the handle of the knife against the side of my leg as I walked, the flat of the blade pressed against my wrist.

People were about to die.  Depending on how this played out, those people could include us.

As experiments, we’d been subjected to all kinds of testing.  Most of the time, the testing was specific to us and our individual situations.  Helen had started out doing a lot of tests that involved passing muster among her supposed peers, while I’d been tasked with studying up new tasks and long, painful sets of memory games.

One of the tests, however, was one that involved all of us, probably because Hayle liked it, and because he was interested in how we functioned as a group.  Each of us were given a set of choices to make, selfish and kind.  He mixed it up, added new rules, and organized us into teams, pitting us against regular students.  The dilemma was simple, usually.  If both parties were kind, both received a minor benefit.  If both were selfish, both were punished.  If one was kind and the other selfish, the selfish one was rewarded, the kind one punished.

It stuck in my mind because it was, for me, the circumstance of my meeting Gordon and Helen, taking a seat across the table from them, with Hayle introducing us.  Curiosity had won out and I’d gone to find and meet Jamie on my own, which had been a lifesaver in many respects.

But that wasn’t my focus right now.  It came down to the game.  Sometimes we’d played and we’d been allowed to communicate.  Sometimes we’d been silenced and forced to communicate through decisions alone.  There was even a point in time where we’d played with territories and quadrants, and I’d been the only one silenced, because Hayle was tired of me skewing his results by winning as often as I was.

Right this moment, we were playing the game.

The convict leader walked beside me, periodically giving me curious looks.  He was a sadist of the worst sort, and his innate savagery had been given an almost desperate edge.  He ruled by fear.  A simple show of strength could inspire that fear and cow others, but he’d spent some time in prison, he’d spent some time with his fellow experiments, and at some point he must have realized that others were just as strong as him.

Sometimes people found a kind of uneasy peace with that kind of power.  If everyone had a gun, cocked and aimed at the next guy, nobody was willing to shoot.  That went for prison muscle and voltaic spikes sticking out of people’s hands.

This was a guy who hadn’t backed down or found that uneasy peace.  He’d learned that when everyone else was hitting as hard as he was, he could still scare people by twisting the knife, maybe being a little crazy or a little scary.

No guarantees about particulars, of course, but in terms of drawing up a mental picture of who he was and how he operated, it served.  I knew what things I had to watch out for, and foremost among those things was the notion that this was a man who asserted control through fear and pain, and with more than a few ongoing mysteries at present, myself included, he might be feeling a little out of control.

I’d put myself within arm’s reach of him.  I was walking in step with him.

He moved the spike in my direction.  I watched it, but didn’t flinch.

“What makes you think I’m going to let you do anything?” he asked.

“You’ll do it because you want to see what I can do,” I said.  I wiped at the blood on my lower face, doing my best to get as much off my face as possible.  It hurt, but I didn’t let the pain show.  I left the blood cupped in the palm of my hand.  I still had the knife palmed in my other hand.

“That so?”

“It is,” I said.  I picked up the pace, moving ahead of the convict leader.  And you’ll do it because you probably feel insecure letting the other three out of your sight.  Like I did with Mary.

I reached the door.  It was a large piece of metal work, thick, with a slot halfway down for paperwork.  Whatever was inside wasn’t big enough to escape through the slot.  Still, it was very nearly as secure as the doors that separated the sections here.

I stopped, paused, and then knocked.  Shave and a haircut, two pence.

No response.  Something moved within, rummaging.  I didn’t hear words, which meant it was only one person.  Probably.

Probably heard the screaming just down the hall.

With two clean fingers, blood still mostly on my palm, I plucked the badge from under my pocket.  I passed it through the slot for the papers, and it dropped a short distance before clinking landing in the tray on the far side.

The simplest answer was often the best.

The door opened a crack.  The person on the other side took a second to look down enough to see me.

“Excuse me,” I said, pushing on the door.  They resisted for a moment, then grudgingly let the door open.  Which was good.  If the convict standing behind me had felt the need to push his way through, I wasn’t sure I could have stopped his forward momentum.

The man who looked down at me was thirty or so, hair cut short, beard longer, trimmed into a point at the chin, his mustache styled.  His white coat was pristine.  No doubt one of several.

He was new to this, no doubt new to this sixth floor lab within the Bowels.

His experiment was still in an early stage, within a heated incubator at one side of the room, sealed off behind jail doors and glass panes.

And here is where the game comes to a head.  The others are in other rooms, facing similar situations.  Convicts nearby, scientists and scholars in the rooms, and between Sub Rosa’s vague instructions and the convict leader’s example, the other thugs are going to want to kill other scientists.

The choice between selfish and kind.  If I killed the scientist and the others killed the convicts in other rooms, I’d have a crazy bastard at my back who’d want to put me down the moment he realized what was going on.  If I killed the convict and the others killed scholars, they’d be at risk.  There were so many variables to take into account.  How capable were they of doing one thing or the other?

The trick with Hayle’s game, the reason I’d been able to win so consistently, was that the game was never a standalone thing.  There were a hundred or a thousand clues communicated over past iterations of the game, informing the most current game.

It was these clues I relied on now.  I could trust Gordon and Helen to match pace with me.  We’d faced Hayle’s test enough times as a group to know how each of us thought.  Jamie could remember the results of each game he’d participated in, and that would inform his decision.  I trusted him more than anyone.

The real question, the test of our group cohesion, was, well, what choice would Lillian make, and what choice would Mary make?

Lillian was kind, a healer more than a killer.  Mary was the opposite, though she wasn’t unkind, exactly.

I had to figure out which decision they’d make, and I had to figure out what decision Gordon, Helen, and Jamie would think those two would make.

“I’m going to kill you now,” I told him, giving him a very pointed, obvious wink.  With my back to the convict, I kept my hand and the knife in front of me, and scraped up the blood with the blade.

“Huh?  What?” the man asked.  Then, in a tone more suited to rebuking a very small child for stealing candy from a store, he told me, “No!”

“Yes,” I said.  “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

“What’s the difference?  What are you even talking about?”

“Hard way it is,” I said.

Holding the knife upside-down, I punched the butt-end of it into his nether regions.

Most available, vulnerable spot, given the difference in height.

He made a strangled noise, then fell to the ground.

I turned on the spot, flipping the dagger over, and showed the convict leader the knife that was smeared with the blood from my hand.

“Cut it at the root,” I said.  I gave the convict leader a wide smile.  “He’s going to bleed out.”

The convict leader didn’t look impressed.  “These doctors are good at patching themselves up.”

“Good point!” I said.  Upbeat, chipper, still channeling Helen.  “Help me.  Stand on his hands?”

“You’re giving me orders?”

“It’ll be fun!” I said, smiling, holding the knife up.  “Please?”

“What’s going on?” the man managed to speak.  Every syllable was colored with pain.  “Ohhh, it hurts so much.  Please!”

The convict approached. He stepped on the man’s hands.

“Wait, no, on his wrists,” I said.

The convict leader gave me a dirty look.

I waited patiently, keeping the same dead-eyed smile on my face.

He shifted his footing.

“What are you doing?” the man on the floor moaned.  “Please.”

I bent down, closer to his head.  I was stopped by the point of the skewer, an inch away from my neck.

“Lose the knife,” the convict said.  “I don’t want you getting close to me like that, after what you did to him.”

Keeping the knife would have been better.  I tossed the knife off to one side, at the desk.  It clattered onto the wooden desktop.

Disappointing.  I’d hoped it would land point first.  Would have been so damn cool, just casually throwing it like that and having it stick.

I bent down just behind the convict.  I grabbed one of the scholar’s fingers in both hands.

“Please.  What’s going on?”

“I severed something important between your legs,” I told him.  “Now…”

I bent the finger back until something gave.

He screamed, thrashed and howled as much as he was able to without moving his legs all that much.

“…I’m making sure you can’t fix it,” I told him.

The convict leader let out a light chuckle at that, looking down at me over one shoulder.

I repeated the process with each finger, faster now.  Each one brought fresh screams.

My heart was pounding, but it had nothing to do with what was going on in this room.  What were the others doing?

What was Sub Rosa doing, even?

There were so many factors to consider, too many people in play, too many unknowns.

Even on my own team, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I could predict Lillian or Mary.  After today, after I saw the decisions Lillian made on what she’d admitted was her worst day, I might have a better idea.  Mary, I couldn’t decide on until I’d seen her on her best day, whether that day was the day she finally had a family or the day Percy came back for her.

I broke the last of the fingers, leaving each one curved in the wrong direction, then stood.  The convict leader released the man’s wrists and stepped back to admire my handiwork, while the man writhed belly-down on the floor.

I crossed the room to go collect the knife, then sauntered over to the fallen man, hand and knife behind my back.  I sliced my own palm, at the base, suppressing a flinch, then worked my thumb into the wound, opening it up.

The more blood, the better.

The rest was posing and posturing.  I was fortunate, in a way, that the convict leader’s attention was on the back of the door.  The mail slot.  He had the badge.

I knelt between the legs of the man I’d maimed, and used my bloody hand to grip his bits.

I look forward to being taller than five feet, so I’m not limited to going after the balls all the time.

He yelped in pain, and the convict leader looked my way.

When I raised my hand, it was covered in blood.

“You’re going to bleed out, sir,” I told him.  “You can’t do anything to stop it, now, it’s just a matter of time.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“I could have made this a lot worse.  I’m betting he would have put the skewers through you in two different directions and tried to make the points touch.  All I did was cut you,” I told him.

I gave him a kick in the side for good measure.  He grunted.

“You get me?” I said.  “Or do I have to show you how mean I can really get?”

“I don’t understand,” he said.  He was panicking a little.

“Thank me,” I told him.  “Thank me for going easy on you.”

“I don’t-  Thank you.”

I nodded slowly.

Then I kicked him again for good measure.

I walked over to the door.

The convict leader looked more wary than ever.  Had I pushed things too far?  Left him confused enough that he’d try simplifying his life by removing me from the equation?

I had to put myself on his terms more.

“Did I do good?” I asked.  A child looking for a parent’s praise.

His brow knit in a frown.

“What’s this?”  He asked me, showing me the badge.

“Before she let you out, she let us out,” I said.  “Got that from the guy who was in charge of our experiment.”

“Uh huh,” he said.

I plucked at my uniform shirt.  “We got these from some kids who were wandering around.  Mine doesn’t really fit, but…”

“Uh huh,” he said, taking it in.

Were the pieces falling in place, or was he contemplating how to deal with me?

“I like you,” he decided.

I grinned, a genuine smile.

“Come on,” he said.  “More witnesses to remove.”

My heart sank a little.

While fine, this situation being something I could work with, each room we cleared out was another chance for things to go wrong.

Doubly so when the others were off on other branches of this floor, and we were engaged in our game, our merry dance where coordination was so vital.

I slammed the door closed behind me as we returned to the hallway.  The man would hurt, his balls might swell, his fingers would take some time to fix, but he would live.

I walked with one hand in a pocket, knowing that bloodstains were spreading through white fabric, but I had to staunch the minor flow of blood, and pressing it into my hip was the only available option that wouldn’t attract too much attention.

“Badge,” I said, reaching up.

“Hm?” he asked.

“I’m wearing a uniform.  I can use it better,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said.  “But I’m going to hold onto it, I think.”

Damn him.

That was my badge.

I contemplated killing him and letting the game be damned.

“Okay,” I said, smiling, stowing the dark resentment and anger deep inside.

We reached the next door.  This one lacking a slot for files and mail.  We didn’t get far enough to do anything with it.  My head turned as shouts came from the far end of the hallway.

The others.

Did we misstep?

Lillian.

The convict headed that way.  I did too, but where he started off walking at a brisk pace, I broke out into a run.

If this went sour, then I wanted enough space between him and me.  I needed to be able to act, speak, do something.  It wouldn’t do if he could simply assess the situation and then murder me in the next moment.

My head was a storm of possibilities and half-formed plans.  I swapped the knife over to my right hand, with the cut at the base of my palm, and held it with the blade between the index and middle finger, handle gripped hard against the cut.

What do we do?

How do we tackle this?

I need more information!

In the end, it wasn’t Lillian.

Mary was backed up against the wall, chin raised.  Baldy-beardy had his spike at the base of her chin, ready to penetrate the part just below the bone.

The other convicts were alive.  The woman, shaggy-beardy, and the older man.  They stood back, keeping the other Lambs from rushing to Mary’s rescue.

Passing the junction in the hallway where Sub Rosa was, I could see that she was still working through the wiring and protections.  Whatever was beyond warranted steeper protection.

I got closer, and the woman with the spikes at her hand pointed her other spike at me, stopping me from advancing.

“What the hell are you doing?” the convict leader asked.

“This little bitch just tried to stab me in the back!”

Come on, Mary, I thought.  I felt genuinely disappointed.  Did you really think I have the ability to surprise and murder the convicts’ leader in a brawl?  What did you think the next step was?  Were we going to go with Sub Rosa and expect her not to notice that her pet convicts weren’t coming with?

Worst of all, I could see it on her face.  That she knew I was disappointed.  That she’d been tested, and she’d failed.  Under the pressure, she’d defaulted to doing what she’d been created to do.

Mary hated failing.

“That so,” the convict leader said.  He gave me a look.  “That so?”

“Probably,” I said.

“Freak of nature is still working on the door,” the convict leader said.  “Kill the little bitch.”

“No,” I said.

“Do it,” the convict leader said.

Baldy-beardy stabbed, but Mary slipped to one side in the same moment, and the spike only touched the side of her neck.  She flinched, strength momentarily going out of her as though she were a marionette with the strings severed.  As the spike moved to follow her as she tumbled toward the ground, she put her hands out.  Something made a sound, a hard object striking the metal, and the spike was knocked aside.  Something in her sleeves that didn’t conduct.

She landed on her back, beside the wall.  Convicts with Academy augmentations in front and to either side of her.

She was quick, trained, and she clearly had something in mind, but even in this situation, there wasn’t a lot she could do.

But there was an advantage to the fact that she was surrounded.  There was a pause as each of the three convicts worked to figure out who would deliver the final blow.

I saw Gordon tense.  He had an avenue for attack here.  He met my eyes, and I shook my head.

“She’s a mad dog,” I said, in the most casual tone I could manage.

The final blow was delayed another moment.

I was doing my utmost to avoid rushing my words.  If I wanted them to listen, to stop and listen, even, I needed to phrase things carefully.  “She’s the most complete of any of us.”

“Complete?  What the hell are you saying?” the leader asked me.

“Why are you even listening to the little fuckspittle?”

“Sh,” the leader answered, a short, sharp sound.

“Complete.  They wanted to make us all like her.  Killers.  I think they did too good a job with her.  It’s not her fault.  Just have to keep her on a leash,” I said.

“Fuck leashes,” the man Mary had tried to kill spat the words.

“Killers,” the leader mused.

“Ones you wouldn’t expect,” I said, quiet, giving him my best deadpan stare.  “And right now, we’re just killers who want to hurt the Academy.  Your buddy there probably did something like get in between Mary and her prey.”

“Mm,” the leader said, but it was a sound that didn’t come across as particularly convinced.

“From what I saw of those two,” the older man said, indicating Gordon and Helen, “Makes a lot of sense.”

They’d played along.  Chances were good the people they’d ‘killed’ were alive, like the one I’d gone after.

“Mm,” the leader said.

“Little girl here didn’t do much,” shaggy-beardy said, indicating Jamie.  “Watched while I took a roomful of people to pieces.”

“Boy,” Jamie said, staring the man down through his own long hair. “I’m a boy.”

“Whatever.  You didn’t come off like some special killer.”

Damn it, I thought.  Not that I was too surprised.  Jamie was slow to act when caught off guard.  Devising a plan for faking someone’s murder was hard enough.  Doing it off the cuff was harder still.

“He’s not as far along,” I said.

“There’s this one too,” the woman said, looking Lillian’s way.

“She’s even less far along,” I jumped in.

“Put ten kinds of needles in people in that room over there,” the convict woman said.  “One was foaming at the mouth.  It was… something.”

The convict woman wasn’t so bloodthirsty, it seemed.  Angry, yes, but not bloodthirsty.

I met Lillian’s eyes.

She looked scared.  She wasn’t clever or controlled enough to hide that.

But she’d done it.  She’d danced the dance, played the game, and she’d done it even without the benefit of playing a hundred rounds of Hayle’s game with the rest of us.

“You take that girl,” the leader told me, pointing at Mary.  “You watch her.  If that rabid dog of yours pulls another stunt, I’m finishing off the both of you.”

He jabbed the spike toward my eye.  It took more than willpower to avoid flinching.  I had to trick my senses, change my perception of what the spike was, so I wouldn’t flinch instinctively.

Only a gesture.

“You’re letting her live?  She tried to put a knife between my ribs!”

“I’m fucking letting her live!” the leader said.  “You’re arguing with me?  I like this little fuck, I want to see what else he’s capable of.  If this fucking place created him and he wants to get them back, I want to see it happen!  Do you really want to say otherwise?”

Baldy-beardy scowled, but didn’t open his mouth.

“I’ll hear you out if you want to say something contrary!”

“No,” Baldy said.

“No?  You sure?”

“I’m sure, yeah.”

“Yeah,” the leader said.  “Sure hope you are.”

While they were talking, I walked over to Mary.  I gave her my hand.  She used it to stand.

I could see the hurt in her eyes, the anger that was directed at herself more than anything.

“Got all the rooms here?” I asked.

There were nods.

“There’s a few more that way,” I said.  “We’ll get ’em.”

The convict leader glanced at me, unhappy with my initiative, but he gave me a nod.

I was his buddy now.  He liked me, and I doubted he liked any of the other members of his little gang.

Letting me do this, giving the go-ahead, it was a way of asserting his authority in an odd way.

We left the convicts behind.  We passed by the door that Sub Rosa was still working on.  She hadn’t even started prying at it.  She was elbow deep in mechanisms at the frame.

We headed down the hall in the direction the leader and I had gone.  Two rooms.  I tried to hold Mary’s hand, and she pulled away from me.

I didn’t dare meet the eyes of the others or try to say something.  The convicts were watching.  We had one ally among them, the most important one, but I didn’t want to foster any doubt.

Two doors.  One without a slot, the other with.

I knocked on the one without a slot.  I heard a murmur of a response.

“Jo Anna Kelper,” Jamie said.  “Let us in.”

There was the sound of a lock.  The door opened.

“You,” the woman in the lab coat said.  She was older.

“Your life is in danger,” Gordon said, flashing the badge.  “We need to fake your death.”

She frowned.

Lillian held up a syringe.  “Tranquilizer.  I’ll also slow your system.  Induced hibernation state.”

“I’m old, I might not wake up from something like that.”

“If we don’t do something like this, those guys down the hall will make sure you don’t wake up at all,” Gordon said.

Jo Anna frowned, then nodded.

Lillian administered the dose.

It was only after the syringe was emptied into Jo Anna’s arm that Lillian gave another syringe.

“This will make her seize up,” Lillian said.  “Not fun, but it’s ugly to look at, and they’ll think she’s dying, even as they don’t sense much of a heartbeat or breathing.  Turn her on her side.”

We did.

Sure enough, the old woman in the lab coat started having fits a couple of seconds after the dose was administered.

We started to vacate the room, and I glanced at Mary, who was standing watch in the hallway, jaw set, an angry look in her eyes.

People were so hard to manage.

Mary wasn’t the entirety of the group.  I looked at Lillian.

My hand found hers.  I gave it a squeeze.

“Don’t give me that shocked look you give me every time I’m not mean to you,” I murmured, my head tilted to be closer to her ear.

“What are you up to?” she hissed.

“Right now, I’m saying you did a fantastic job,” I whispered.  “You came across like a true Lamb.  Good work.”

She didn’t react to that.  We made our way out into the hallway, and she tugged her hand from mine.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.  You get your kicks by being all nice-nice and then the moment I let my guard down, you kick me in the shins or something.”

“No kick, no shins,” I said.  “I meant what I said.”

I left her with those words.  She stared at me as I went over to Mary.  She wasn’t holding my hand, so I bumped her shoulder with mine.  She gave me an annoyed look.

Still, she didn’t outright murder me when I put an arm around her shoulders.

Last door.

In the absence of my badge, I plucked the one from Mary’s uniform jacket pocket and put it in the mail slot.

“We got company,” Gordon observed.

Damn.  It couldn’t be easy.

Sub Rosa was on her way, and the convicts were behind her.

The door opened just as Sub Rosa arrived.

The man on the other side, skinny with circular glasses, dark circles under his eyes and tufty hair at the top of his head, let his mouth go agape, his eyes widening.

Recognition.  Answers.  Yes!

“You’re-” he started.

Sub Rosa reached out and grabbed his head.

It took her relatively little effort to crush his skull with the one hand.  Once the bone gave way, the rest followed fairly quickly after.

My answers!  No!

“Door’s open,” my new buddy the leader told me.  “She apparently wants us with.”

I nodded.

Sub Rosa shook the bits of scientist-head off her hands, turned, and started her way toward the door.

I didn’t look at Jamie, but I knew that he’d be staring at me, willing me to remember that the daughter of the man who had created Sub Rosa was on the other side.

More importantly, the last easy chance we had to get answers was on the other side.

Question was, how did we get the girl out alive?

Lips Sealed 3.5

Convicts, as it happened, smelled.  Problem was, I was now the convict leader’s new best friend, and he was staying close to me.

It had its benefits and drawbacks.  For one thing, so long as I kept Mary close, it meant our new benefactor was protecting her.  For another, it meant I didn’t have a great range of movement.  He was keeping me close, he was talking to me, and I couldn’t wander off and try to get ahead of Sub Rosa.

On the plus side, we had a few minutes.  The Bowels were built around a cylindrical shaft, a few hundred feet deep, two-dozen feet wide.  The hallway here extended in a semicircle around to the far side of the shaft.  Extra protection, extra thickness, and more room for someone to pull a lever or seal off the area.

Sub Rosa had to stop to work with another panel in the wall.  It gave me a second to think.

My new buddy elected to distract me, instead.

“I was a skinny little fuck like you, once,” he told me.

“Really?”  I asked, more to be polite than anything else.

“Bad combination, being tall and scrawny.  Tried to eat and even did some farm work when I coulda done something else, just to bulk up.  But all the energy went to making me taller.  A lot of people learn they can make themselves look better by messing with someone taller than them.”

“Gotta hurt them bad enough they don’t try it again,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.  “Something like that.”

Sub Rosa resumed walking, another set of safeguards effectively cut off and removed.

“Is that how you wound up in prison?  Because you hurt someone?” I asked.

“Huh?  Eh.”

“Eh,” I echoed him, acting disinterested.

“Was a woman.  Around the time I started being able to fight back if someone messed with me, I was working on a factory floor, went out for drinks.  Guy picked a fight with me to impress his woman, I won, I took my prize.  Spectacular piece of work, and at the start, that was only in the best way… but I don’t suppose you get that sort of thing, young as you are.”

“I do.  I get it,” I said.  I realized I sounded a little defensive, then said, “I spend a lot of time with these girls.  They’re pretty.”

“Thank you, Sy,” Helen said, brightly, from the tail end of the group.

Mary gave me a look I couldn’t read.

He gave me a condescending look, and I mused about possibly sticking him with my knife.

“Well, good for you,” he said, sounding very unimpressed.  “My girl was top notch, as girls go.  Raised the standard for womenfolk everywhere.  But she wanted a bad boy and didn’t realize it.  She’d yelp at me and growl at me for most everything I did, for drinking, for being rough, she’d get fed up, run away, and she expected me to chase her, tell her I was sorry, that I was reforming my ways.”

“And?”

“I didn’t.  I told her straight-up who I was, how I was.  If she didn’t want me, she could go, and she did… except she kept coming back.  Hoity-toity dad, y’know?  Rich, laid down the law with her, so she’d run off to slum it with me.  Decided she didn’t like me, went back home.  Would’ve been annoying, but oh, she was gorgeous, and when she came running back, hungry for me…”

He paused, looking down at me.  I met his gaze.

“Yeah,” he said.  “I figured it would do.  She decided otherwise.  One night, she ran off home to her daddy, only she told tales.  Charges laid against me for shit I didn’t probably do.  Old man even pulled strings, I’m betting.  I didn’t spend more than a year in prison before I got brought here.”

“What do you think you’ll do to him when you get out?”

He gave me a funny look.  “Out?”

“Sure,” I said.  “Out.”

“I gave up on getting out a while ago,” he said.  “Don’t lie to me.  Don’t lie to yourself.  This is where we live out the rest of our very short lives before we die.”

I glanced up at him.  I could see the hardness in his features, the look in his eyes beyond the simple anger on the surface.  A kind of hopelessness that went beyond simply being a monster.

That hopelessness was, in part, the source of his inhumanity, the willingness to hurt others.

I suspected he was irredeemable, if this was left alone.  As a human being, flawed and violent and probably beating his girlfriend on the regular, he’d probably been fixable, but that was no longer the case.  His humanity had taken too much of a beating, and there was no light of hope in his eyes.

“We’re going to get out,” I said, in a matter-of-fact way, turning my eyes forward.

“How do you think that works?” he asked, and he sounded almost angry.

“How many Academy students are down here, do you think?” I asked.

“I don’t know.  Why don’t you tell me?”

“Enough.  Hundreds, probably.  Now think, each one of those people has family.  They have connections, friends who will ask about them,” I said.  I would have been lying if I said I wasn’t touching on the convict leader’s past, and the circumstances of his incarceration.  He’d been caught because his girl had had connections.  I was doing my best to speak in a language he understood.

I was also bending the truth.  Not everyone was guaranteed to be down at their stations in the Bowels, and I wasn’t sure that the Academy would value their lives so highly.  It would be easy to sentence all of the people down here to death and then point to legal documents they’d signed.

“Uh huh,” the leader didn’t sound impressed.

“Now think, how many projects are down here?  We’re one, you’re one, she’s one.  How much money is invested in all of this?  It’s not like they can just take a new student and tell him to go pick up where someone else left off.  The question is, are they really willing to abandon all of this, all these people, all the money and investments?”

“You don’t think so, huh?”

“No,” Gordon said, backing me up.

“No,” I said, echoing Gordon.  “It costs them too much.”

The convict leader gave me a look.  I could tell he was having doubts.  It was only natural – he’d accepted his death, and now I was giving him a new lease on life.  He was experiencing dissonance.

In reality, though, it was easier and safer for him on a mental and emotional level to hold to his old ideas, that death was certain.  To hold onto those ideas, he had to doubt me.

“One of the scientists that worked on us, Lacey, she was terrified of being down here.  It’s what the scientist in charge of us told her,” I said.  “I overheard.  Of course, things are different if an entire section gets locked down, since then they can evacuate the rest, but we have her.”

Sub Rosa, still leading us down the extended, curved hallway, glanced back at me.

“And she’s making it so we can’t get locked inside one part of this place,” the leader said, as if I hadn’t implied it already.

“Exactly,” I said.  “Eventually they’re going to have to decide whether it’s better to condemn everyone and everything in here, or if they’re going to open things up and let us out.”

The convict leader was quiet.

“Sounds too easy,” the woman convict said, behind me.

“It’s not easy at all,” I said.  “There are a lot of problems.  For one thing, they’re going to have a lot of stitched and a lot of guards up there.”

“Uh huh?” the leader grunted.

“Probably.  And there’s probably other safeguards down here.  Supposed to be a big monster.”

“Glutton?” the leader asked.

“Gorger,” the oldest of the convicts said.

“Gorger, right,” the leader said.  He looked back, as if expecting Gorger to be coming down the hall behind us.  “If she can get us past the protections, she might have a way of dealing with that thing.”

That’s not completely out of the question, I thought.  I mulled for a second on whether it would be better to disarm him and leave him worrying more or whether I liked him thinking Gorger wasn’t a problem.

“She seems to know a lot of stuff,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, though it came out more like a ‘yeh’.  “That leaves the question of what we do to get out, once they open things up and meet us with a small army.”

And quarantine measures, probably, if things even get that far.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “If we could find some super valuable experiment and threaten to destroy it, or use it against them…”

I scratched the back of my head, sticking my thumb straight down.

Behind me, Gordon picked up on the cue.  “Doesn’t work.  No saying what’s valuable enough, or scary enough, or if they have a way of dealing with it, or any of that.”

“Yeah,” I ‘conceded’ the point.  “And if we did it out in the open, nobody would blame the Academy if they put a bullet in us.”

“Not an object, then,” the convict leader said.  “People.  Hostages.  You think people down here have friends?  People would blame the Academy if they died, a bit away from getting free.  And they won’t be shooting at us without being especially careful.”

I nodded, as if it hadn’t been my idea in the first place.  I’d all but directly told him.

Sub Rosa stopped to work on another panel.

The big guy looked at the other convicts, as well as my friends.  “Hostages, you hear me?”

There were nods.

That would save some lives.  Sure, some of my motivations had to do with, well, saving lives and crap like that.  Human decency and whatever.  But really, I figured alive people were more useful if we were going to figure this out, it would be brownie points with the faculty if we saved as many lives as possible, and if we had to do more bullcrap interviews to find moles for Head Professor Briggs, then living people we’d already interviewed were better than new people who needed to be screened.

Sub Rosa finished tearing the console apart and rejigging it in a matter of seconds.

It was interesting to see: she’d been tentative before, but now was finding her stride.  This was something she was learning to do, based on some previous knowledge.

She knew how to disarm the safety measures, and she’d known where to find the convicts.

She’d gone after the man who recognized her.  She’d gone after her creator.

Our mysterious experiment was working with some foundation of knowledge.

I had questions I wanted to ask Jamie, but I didn’t dare ask with the convicts and Sub Rosa in earshot.  I imagined there was a dim possibility that Sub Rosa had been down here from the beginning.  It would explain why she was on an upper floor, if she’d never been moved.  She would have had a chance to overhear things about the security measures.

A dim possibility, I reminded myself.  Sure, the security measures weren’t too complex, and some employees down in the Bowels might have heard how to disable the security in an emergency, if an earthquake or something shook things up, but an experiment hearing such?

Hard to justify, and it didn’t explain the man’s look of recognition, not so long ago.

Sub Rosa was striding forward with purpose now, toward the girl who had our answers.  We were nearing the end of the hallway, by my recollection.  I hadn’t been here, but I had seen similar hallways on upper floors.

Maybe she knew because she’d been told.  The Academy had enemies, and the Bowels had already been identified and used as a weak point.  If one such enemy had found a convict or a dying woman who was to be sent to the Bowels to be used as an experiment, they could have equipped her with knowledge provided by previous moles and spies within the Academy, then have them cause as much damage as possible.

If that someone was angry enough, then they might delight in having the chance.

Still, it didn’t explain the recognition.  She was an element known to some.

Had the man known her as an experiment, or the person she had been before?  If the former, what had happened, and why was she on this rampage?  If the latter, who the hell was she?

We were nearing the end of our destination.  Jamie was picking up speed, moving forward in my peripheral vision, so I slowed down, until I was a step behind my smelly buddy.

Jamie was hugging his book.  I glanced at him, and I saw him shift his grip.  On the corner of the cover was a mark in pencil.

Nineteen.

“Hey, c’mon,” the leader said.  He reached out for me, hand turned backward, and rubbed my head with his knuckles, deliberately avoiding touching me with the spike, while still urging me forward.  “Almost showtime.”

The far-side labs were larger, more comprehensive, and specialized.  When they’d originally been put together, they’d been built for specific tasks.  Many had even been put together for the superweapons that were now unique to each specific section of the Academy.  At this point in time, very few of the old experiments were still running.

Labs sixteen through twenty.

All of this hinged on what Sub Rosa did.

If she went into one lab, could we escape?  Reach Gorger?

The instant the thought crossed my mind, she stopped in her tracks, standing in the middle of the hallway.

Damn it.

She raised an arm, pointing.  She was giving us an instruction.  She fully intended to block anyone from fleeing.  We were supposed to go fetch, or go kill.  She’d let us know soon enough.

There was no tidy way to do this.  Five labs, five convicts, six of us, with me watching ‘mad dog’ Mary.

I heard the words in my head before they left his lips.

“Each of us gets someone from a room,” the leader said.  “Take the kids with.  I’ve got these two.  Remember, we’re taking hostages.”

There were nods.

Our last chance for answers.

Gordon and the woman took the first door, and Gordon hammered on it, a heavy knock, and also a way of cluing in people further down the hall.

Good job.

Helen and shaggy-beardy took the next door, seventeen, with Helen peering down to the mail slot and opening it to speak through it, shaggy standing back, tense.

Eighteen was Jamie and baldy-beardy.  Jamie used the badge.

Nineteen.

I approached the door and stopped.  While I stood there, thinking, the old man and Lillian walked past us to the last door in the hallway.

Sub Rosa was watching, staring with eyes that could no longer blink.  An intensity radiated off of her.

She’d come here for this.  For our source of information.  The relative of the man who had altered her.

I knocked.

The door opened, without hesitation.

There were two scientists within.  One was middle-aged, a woman, brown-haired and stout in build, the other was a wisp of a girl, small and light in every sense of the words.  The girl, our source, had opened the door.  She was sixteen or so, blonde, hair so fine and insubstantial that it looked like she was underwater, the hair that had come free of her ponytail floating around her, free of gravity’s pull.  Her eyes were dark, glasses cleaner than most, with fine rims.  She had a lens on her forehead, something that could be flipped down over one eye to view small things.

“What?” she asked, in the most impatient, bitchy tone I’d heard in some time.  She looked from me to Mary to the convict leader, then back to me.

I hadn’t expected this attitude.  Everyone up to this point had been scared, worried about possibilities.

“You’re aware there’s an escaped experiment?” I asked.

“That usually goes hand in hand with the facility being sealed,” she said, in a very condescending way.  “Whatever.  It’s fine, I do hope things open up soon, but I came expecting to put in a full day or two of work with minimal sleep.  This doesn’t change my plans.”

“Studying bugs,” I said, eyeing the glass tank in the center of the room.  There were flies swarming within.

“Yes,” she said, giving me a curious look.  “I’m sorry, kids, but if you want someone to hold your hand while you freak out about being stuck down here, this isn’t the place for it.  I have work to do.”

“That’s, uh…” I started.

“Things are more complicated than that,” Mary said, her voice soft.

The convict leader behind me spoke up, “We’re taking you hostage.”

“No you’re not,” the woman on the other side of the room said.  She was studying the tank so intently she’d barely glanced at us.  “We just reached the breeding phase.  We’ve been building toward this for four months.”

“I see you need convincing,” the leader said.  He pointed the spike forward.  The girl at the door backed away as the leader advanced, weapon ready.  I caught the door as she let go of it, but I also stayed in the leader’s way, so he couldn’t attack her.  I needed her cooperative.

“I’m starting to see how it is,” the girl said.

“Yeah,” the convict said.  “Move, kid.  I want to drive the point home.”

Here was the moment of truth.  I moved suddenly, toward the spike.  I’d build up a rapport with him.  Now I tested it.  Would he instinctively protect me?

He moved the spike out of the way, lifting his arm.

But the door- I’d let go of the door, and now it swung shut.  It was metal, it was heavy, and the convict leader lacked hands.

He was caught between the door and the frame for a moment, unable to use his shoulder to bump it open without risking the breakage of the glass tank of yellow fluid.

I backed across the room as he grunted, moved his leg and kicked it open.

In backing away, I moved between the girl and the older woman.  Mary followed suit.  Where the girl tried to back away, Mary helped me corner her.

The convict leader kicked the door open, stepping into the room.  Gordon and the convict woman appeared behind him, and Gordon caught the door, keeping it from closing.

Two convicts, our two scientists, and Gordon, Mary, and I.

The leader gave me an ugly look, but he didn’t say anything.  Was he conscious of the other member of his group, just behind him?

“The experiment is here,” I informed the girl.  “I heard someone call it Sub Rosa.”

No sign of recognition at the name.  The older woman didn’t seem to take special notice either.

“Project by Shipman,” I said.

“I’m Shipman,” the younger girl said.  “Oh.  You mean my uncle.”

The convict leader frowned at us, a momentary look of puzzlement on his face.

“How is he?” Ms. Shipman asked us.

“Dead,” I said, my voice cold for the leader’s benefit.  “Very, very dead.”

“How?”

“His creation offed him before starting her rampage through this place.  She came for you, it seems.”

“Enough talking,” the convict leader said.  “Grab them.  Tie their hands.”

“With?” Mary asked.

He jabbed one spike in her direction.  “Don’t go talking back to me, brat.  I haven’t forgotten you attacked one of mine.”

He’s insecure.  He’s realizing he doesn’t have total control, and he’s acting on it in the way I figured.  Violence and threats.

“Get the other woman,” I told Mary.  The woman convict was over there, spikes ready, and I wasn’t sure I trusted her to keep those weapons to herself.  Things were manageable, but the moment they started prodding these two women with spikes to try and make them compliant, the convicts would have their control, and the Lambs wouldn’t be able to do anything.

“Got wires?” Gordon asked from the door.  “Ropes?  Cord?”

“No,”  Ms. Shipman said.  “Resin gun, but that would burn flesh.”

“We could tear the lab coats into strips,” Mary said, holding up a knife.

“I like my lab coat, thank you very much,” Ms. Shipman said, in a very prim, uptight way.  “I earned it.”

“Do you like living?” I asked.  “Because this is a very real choice.”

I was growing to dislike her with a startling speed.

“I’ll live, and I’ll keep my coat,” she said.  “If I may-”

She bent down, unclipped a stocking, and then began rolling it down.

Was she exceptionally cunning?  Because the convict leader was suddenly paying rapt attention.  Yes, she was young, but the closest the man had been to a woman had probably been his yellow-skinned fellow convict and Sub Rosa.

Gordon was paying a great deal of attention too, I noticed.

“Gets cold down here,” she said.  “But, ugh, skirts are expected.  I’d rather wear trousers.”

“Me too,” Gordon said.  A stab at humor.

Ms. Shipman didn’t laugh.  She stood straight, stocking in hand, and handed it to me.  I balled it up and tossed it to Mary.

The young lady started on the other one.  The one I’d be using to tie her up.  I looked at her legs, but I didn’t see the magic that had others so enchanted.  Maybe because it was attached to such an unlikable person.

“Heads up!” I heard Gordon comment, in the same moment Ms. Shipman drove her shoulder into my ribs.

I tipped over, landing on my ass, and saw her running in the opposite direction, toward the closet in the corner.

She was going for her bag?

She didn’t make it.  Gordon reached her, wrapping his arms around her upper body, pinning her arms to her side.  She had years on him in age, but she was petite, and Gordon was an early bloomer.  He was bigger, and he was strong besides.  He was able to lift her bodily off the ground.

“Nice try,” he said.

She bent her head down, mouth yawning open, to bite at the spot where his neck met his shoulder.

He practically tossed her, heaving her up and away, then catching her again, this time with her head too high and far back to reach him to bite.

She kicked, she struggled, but he didn’t let her go.  After about twenty seconds, both were left panting into one another’s faces, Ms. Shipman red in the face with spent fury.

I reached her and tugged off the stocking that was halfway down her leg.  Gordon shifted his grip until her wrists were crossed behind her back.  I tied them.

She kept struggling and kicked at his shin as he let her down, gripping her by the binding.

Idly, I walked over to the closet and found her belongings.

Her bag was empty, a quick search through her wallet suggested nothing pertinent.  “Gladys Shipman.”

“Hi, Gladys,” Gordon said.

“What the hell do you want?  Something came for me?  Are you delusional?  I’m not important.”

Her tone rubbed me the wrong way.  It was a perfect storm of condescension, arrogance, and sheer bitchiness.  My skin crawled with it.

I wish I could gag her, but I really want to hear what she says.

“First room was empty, by the by,” Gordon said.

“Right,” I said.

I searched the remainder of the things in the corner.  In the pocket of the smaller of the two raincoats, I found a pistol.  Six-shot.  I held it up for Mary and Gordon to see.

“Gimme,” Gordon said.  “I’m a better shot than you are.”

I turned it around until I was gripping the barrel, pointing it away from anyone, and held the handle toward him.  He took it, used one hand to check the ammo count, and slipped it inside his uniform jacket, all while keeping hold of Ms. Shipman’s arms.

“Don’t suppose you feel like talking?” I asked the young lady.

“Talk?  I don’t know what’s going on!”

“That’s too bad,” I said, meaning it.  I reached for her, but Gordon didn’t hand her over.

“I’m good,” he said.

“You’ve got the gun.”

“She got you once, while you were looking at her legs, and I’m stronger,” he said.

“Right,” I said.  I didn’t correct him about the leg thing.

Mary had the older woman, who was quickly taken over by the convict woman, who held spikes to the woman’s neck.  I was left with my hands in my pocket as we retreated from the room.

Mary clapped a hand on my shoulder in a gesture of support, which was totally unnecessary, but I let her do it for her benefit.

We stepped out into the hallway.  The others were there.  Two scientists were with them.  One was badly bruised at the forehead.

Ms. Shipman turned her head to give Lillian a quizzical look.  She opened her mouth to say something, and I jabbed her in the side, giving her a warning look.

Sub Rosa reacted the instant our Ms. Shipman was brought out into the open.  She drew nearer.

The intensity we’d experienced was ratcheting up by the second.  Something like fury, but not anger.  Something parallel.

“Oh,” Ms. Shipman said, her voice suddenly, mercifully very small.

Sub Rosa reached out for Ms. Shipman’s head.  I felt my heart sink.

Repeat performance, I thought.  No answers.

At least we had a game plan.

Gordon moved, a sudden, swift motion, reaching into his jacket.

Wait, what?

He fired from the hip.  Sub Rosa flinched, her entire upper body twisting, with blood spraying the ceiling.

Gordon fired again, turning as the bullet left the chamber, to aim at the convicts.

But Sub Rosa had taken a second shot to the face, and she hadn’t died.  The damage was grievous, immense, but she hadn’t fallen.  She continued reaching out, with one hand for Ms. Shipman and one now meant for Gordon.

Why?

He raised the gun, aiming, and fired.  Four more shots, in quick succession, all aimed for the head.  One hit the neck, but the rest were on point.

What are you doing?

“The hell!?” the convict leader shouted.

Sub Rosa collapsed against the wall.

Gordon returned to using the gun to try and scare off the other threats behind us.

The rest of us took the opportunity to run.  I saw Sub Rosa reach weakly for Mary’s leg, and leaped on top of her wrist, pushing it down before carrying on my way.

I nearly lost my balance as she heaved herself to her feet again, the angle of her arm changing in the process.  Mary caught me, twisted, and flung a knife.

One convict dropped.

Gordon, why?  We were having enough trouble with coordination with Mary’s screwup.  Why this?

We were being chased, and it was an unfortunate fact that Jamie and Lillian weren’t the fastest of us.  Helen’s physical structure was different, and sustained running was hard for her.  We also had a set of scientists from the Bowels with us.  Ms. Shipman, her companion, and the ones from the other rooms.

The convict leader shouted something about six shots.

He knew as well as we did that we were out of bullets.

It was a long journey down the long hallway, but as it turned out, my concerns about our ability to outpace the convicts and a still-alive Sub Rosa were unfounded.

Gorger stood at the other end of the hallway.

To be more specific, Gorger filled the other end of the Hallway.  He was a massive physical form, a living seal to occupy the entirety of the hallway, capable of advancing, reaching to hold, and devouring to contain, though that last option was meant for hardier things than mere humans.

He’d arrived at the worst moment, blocking our only escape route.

All things clicked into place as I saw Gordon tighten his grip around Ms. Shipman, keeping her steady as she ran.

Of all the times to develop a first crush, Gordon my man.  Of all the damn times…

I sighed.

Had to figure out a way out of this, and we had to do it while keeping Gordon’s crush alive.  Matter of principle, really, questions of taste and approach aside.  Guy didn’t have that long left.

With nowhere left to run, we stopped in our tracks, turning to face down our pursuers, who included Sub Rosa, bleeding openly from six bullet wounds.

Damn it, do you ever owe us for this one, though.

Lips Sealed 3.6

The hallway was wide enough that Jamie and I could have held hands and stretched our arms out to either side and only barely touched both walls.  The ceiling was high enough that Sub Rosa didn’t have to stoop down to avoid banging her head.

Gorger filled the entirety of that space.  His physical structure was organized to let him move forward at a good speed with the use of his arms and legs.  Abrasive skin, thick enough that bullets would be stopped or slowed, resistant to fire, resistant to chemicals, and immune to all known forms of disease.  His body was hostile to parasites, and his stomach was a holding chamber for tough specimens, a compactor for smaller ones.  His weak points had been minimized, and the ones that could be buried deep within his center of mass were.  The remainder of him was self sustaining and built to last.  Raw mass and power for the sake of such.

No exit.

We backed up until we were nearly touching him.

“Hi Gorger,” Gordon said, “Good to see you, mate.”

“Mm,” Gorger grunted.

“You’re in our way,” I said.

“Mm,” he grunted.

Sub Rosa was approaching, one hand pressed to the one side of her head where the injuries were more severe.  She moved in a jerky fashion, unpredictable, lunging and lurching forward in a zig-zag fashion, every movement violent, and the convicts were keeping their distance.

“Don’t suppose you can back up?  Or squeeze over to let us by?”

“Mm-mm,” he grunted.

I almost took it for assent, but I looked back and saw his head, pulled back into his neck and shoulders, as protected as he could get it, moving from side to side.  Rolls of fat moved with the action.

“Bloody hell,” I said.

“Who are you?” the woman that had been working with Gladys asked.

“Official Academy problem solvers,” I said.  “So all of you shut your mouths, be quiet, and let us solve this problem.”

“Sy,” Gordon said, with a warning tone.

“Untie her,” I said, not taking my eyes off of Sub Rosa.  “Reload, shoot more?”

“Out,” he said.  Then to Gladys, he added, “Got more bullets?”

“In my coat.”

“Rats,” I said, with emphasis.  “Mary?”

Mary gave me a look over her shoulder.  It wasn’t the Mary I was used to.  She looked a little uncertain, even.  Lost, hurt.  Her confidence was still shaken from earlier.

“You with us?” I asked, my words carefully chosen.

“I’m with you,” she said, stumbling a bit with the odd placement of the words.

“I know I’m thinking about ways out.  Jamie’s wracking his brain for anything in her files we could use.  Gordon’s thinking about what to do if worst comes to worst.  If I know you, you’re thinking about what to do to hurt her.”

Mary broke eye contact, looking at Sub Rosa.  Thirty feet away, twenty-eight, twenty-six… not moving in a straight line, the experiment was periodically reaching out to touch a wall and steady herself.

Mary nodded.

“Hurt her,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” Gladys asked.

“I don’t-” Mary started.

“You can do it.  And it’s going to be awesome.  I promise,” I told her.

“What is she going to do that six bullets couldn’t?” Gladys asked.

Come on, Mary, shut this girl up.  Please.

Mary was already stepping forward.  Her fingers touched the sides of her legs, reached up beneath her Academy uniform skirt, and plucked knives free.  Her right hand stayed at her leg, fiddling for a second, while still holding the knife.

A coil of something dropped from her upper thigh to her ankle.  She rotated her foot to position it, then kicked it up into the air with her toe.  She caught it out of the air, not breaking eye contact with the incoming Sub Rosa.

Sub Rosa was close enough that Mary could have reached her in three or four running paces.  The experiment paused to touch the wall for balance and twist to stare at us with her good eye.

“Oh god,” Gladys said.  There were similar utterances from the others.

“Oh god,” Lillian echoed her, but she added a, “Please, Mary.”

Mary let the loop uncoil, extending into a crazy mess that sagged to her feet.  Her wrist made three quick circles, and then she threw, right as Sub Rosa made her final lunge for us.

The knife sank into Sub Rosa’s eye socket.

The woman barely flinched.  If anything, it egged her on.

Mary turned, having already drawn a third knife, one meant for close-quarters fighting, and held the blade, extending the handle above her head while using her other hand to throw the second knife.  It was a fierce throw, and it wasn’t aimed toward Sub Rosa.  It was aimed the light above us.

The light flashed as it broke, and shards of glass joined sparks in raining down onto our heads.

Two more lights further down the hallway went out.

We were cast into relative darkness.  I saw Sub Rosa’s form in only the split second the light flashed.  She was stricken, rearing back.

I heard her hit the floor, rather than seeing it.

“What the fucking hell?” the convict leader asked.  He’d seen Sub Rosa drop too.

I threw my arms around Mary in a hug.

“Careful,” she said.  “Don’t touch the wire.”

Wire.  Tying the knives together.  One knife in Sub Rosa, one in the light socket.

“Knife fell,” Gordon said.  “You’re safe.”

“Good,” Mary said.  “Let go of me, Sy.  She’s not dead.”

I let go of Mary as quickly as I’d grabbed her, backing away to give her exactly as much space as she needed.

A small flame appeared.

In a moment, there was a second flame.

I heard her throw it more than I saw it.  A small vial, hurled in Sub Rosa’s direction.

It didn’t hit Sub Rosa, but the wall above her.  Glass broke, and the liquid ignited before it landed on her, where it promptly spread out to cover a fair amount of surface.  We were soon treated to a view of Sub Rosa, midway through the process of finding her feet.

She didn’t scream.  That was the eeriest part.  It was an almost silent dance, thrashing, arms flailing, striking the wall with enough force that I could hear mechanisms rattling, wanting to kick into motion and seal this section off.

“Great,” I said.  Sub Rosa was stumbling around, largely blind at this point, but she managed to touch a wall, find some orientation and stagger toward us, while struggling to wipe away the flaming liquid with her hands.  She only partially succeeded, and her hands ignited.  “Now she’s on fire.”

“More fire?” Lillian asked.

She handed something to Mary.  Mary hucked it at Sub Rosa.

Whatever it was, it ignited marvelously.  It made Sub Rosa’s movements more frantic and crazed.

“Not helping!” I said.

“She’s not dying!” Mary observed.

“She can’t,” Jamie said.  “You’re looking at two lifeforms.  The cocoon and the woman.  The cocoon keeps everything going, no matter what.  Only way you can make her dead-dead is if you utterly destroy the medulla oblongata or utterly destroy the heart.”

“Tell us that sooner!” I said.

“You were busy electrocuting her and setting her on fire!”

She was close, now.

Gordon threw the pistol, tossing it over Sub Rosa’s shoulder.

The sound made her stop, twisting.

She began moving in the other direction.

“No!” the convict leader shouted.  “The little bastards are behind you!  Don’t be fooled!”

Sub Rosa twisted back around, but staggered, leaning against the wall.  I could smell the burned flesh, now.  There was an acrid undertone to it, something chemical.  One of the tubes of fluid that had been pumping in or out of her was emptying contents on to the floor.

I fixated on that.

“The tubes?” I asked.  “Weak point?”

“The fluids adjust chemical balances,” Jamie said.  “Without them, she’ll die.”

“Great!” I said.  “Mary-”

“In a few days or weeks.”

“Hell!” I said, frustrated.

The sound of our voices was getting her attention.  She was still burning, still in agony, largely blind and bleeding from open wounds in her skull.  She even had brain damage from the bullets, probably.  But she was lurching our way.

“Lillian?” I asked.

“I don’t- what?”

“Ideas!” I yelled at her.

“No!”  She said, a non-sequitur.  As if she was refusing to give them, rather than having none.

But, short of an actual idea, it was the best response she could give.  Short, sweet, and to the point, letting me move on to other options.

“Gladys!” I called out.  “If you know what she is-”

“I don’t!  I know who she is but I don’t understand any of this!”

“It’s your dad’s work!”

“Uncle’s!  My uncle’s work!  And we don’t talk!”

Useless!

“Helen?” I tried, though Helen was more about instinct than anything else.  “Anything?”

“Yes,” she said.  “But can’t just yet.  Gorger?  A hand?”

“Mm,” he said.

I realized he’d backed up a good ten feet.  I joined the others in making haste, working to put as much space between us and Sub Rosa as possible.

In the gloom, lit only by the fire that still licked Sub Rosa’s upper body, I could see Gorger twisting, revealing and then extending a meaty hand.  Helen hopped up to it.

“Up,” she said.  Gorger raised her up toward the ceiling.

I saw her reach up to pry at a ceiling panel that Gorger had just revealed.

Bring an entire block down on us?

Beside me, Mary whipped more knives at Sub Rosa.  It was pretty ineffectual.

“Gordon,” Helen said, very simply.  “Please help.”

Gordon did, abandoning his Shipman, stepping on Gorger’s face for a foothold before stepping onto Gorger’s arm, then moving up to the hand, standing beside Helen.

Sub Rosa was too close.

There was nothing predictable about her movements.  She was broken, not thinking clearly, if she was thinking at all.  Yet, if I was going to save the others, I had to take the gamble.  Not once, but twice.

In moments like this, I had to have a simple set of goals.  If I didn’t, I tended to overthink.

Goal one… don’t get hit.

“Keep at it!” I called out.

Then I dashed for Sub Rosa.

One long arm flailed, reaching low to the ground.  I saw it coming, but even then, there was precious little I could actually do about it.  I was fast on my feet, and it wasn’t an asset here.  To actually stop moving, I tried to drop low, sliding, but ended up flopping onto my back, my tailbone cracking hard against the floor.

The hand swept just above me.  She stepped closer, and her other hand came perilously close to touching me.

“Little bastard’s at your feet!” the convict leader howled.

I supposed I wasn’t his buddy anymore.

Sub Rosa was blind, but she could apparently hear.  She bent low, hands groping.  I rolled to one side, bumping up against the wall.

“Your right!” Baldy-beardy called out.

I scrambled back, toward my compatriots and the other scientists, as Sub Rosa fumbled toward me.

The flames were dying down, and her eyeball was revealed, bloodshot, oozing, but it didn’t look nearly as damaged as I’d hoped.  Poor woman, not being able to blink or close her eyes while her head and upper body were on fire.

I saw the eye move, focusing on me.

Another throwing knife struck Sub Rosa.  She twisted, looking away from me to see Mary.

I used that chance to dart close, moving past Sub Rosa, putting myself between her and the convicts.

Goal two: distract her, buy the others time.

I still had the knife I’d gotten from Mary.

Gripping the knife in both hands, swinging it from behind me, over my head, and forward, I slammed it into Sub Rosa’s back, near a point where it looked like things unfolded from.  Closer to her own tailbone.

I was already backing away, moving clear when she swung her hand my way.  Her hand hit the wall hard enough to leave cracks and do some substantial damage to her.

Goal three, optional: don’t die while seeing goal two through.

“Little bastard.  Lied to us, didn’t you?!” the convict leader bellowed.  “Killed Old Craig!”

That was Mary, not me.  Throwing her knife as we made our getaway.

But I made you look like a fool, you fool, and you can never forgive me for that.

“What I told you wasn’t all a lie!” I said.

I had to leap back to avoid Sub Rosa’s swipe.  She turned her back on the others while pursuing me.

Leaping back unfortunately put me closer to the convict leader and his three remaining cronies.  Baldy-Beardy, Shaggy-Beardy, and the woman convict, who looked especially wary and concerned.

“Remember everything I told you before!?” he roared.  “I’m going to do worse, you hear me!?”

“Then she continues her rampage, she kills you, and everyone dies!” I said.

“I don’t care!  I’m going to make it slow!  If I have to suffocate down here, I’m going to take my time with you!  You’ll crave the times I’m making you twitch with these spikes, because at least then I won’t be carving bits off you!”

Ticked off Academy experiment on one side of me, ticked off Academy experiments on the other side of me.

I backed out of the way of another swipe.

I saw the convict leader smile.  A mean, sadistic sort of grin.  A cat grin.  As much as the younger kids at the Orphanage liked to coo over kittens, I knew what cats really were.  I was aware that they were one of the rare species out there that killed and tormented other animals to death for their own amusement, be they barnyard cats or house cats.  One cat, left to its own devices for a few days, would chalk up scores of kills that it didn’t eat, and not all were vermin.

Cats were detestable, viewed objectively.

I could respect that side of cats.  I didn’t like seeing those same elements in a man three or four times my size, especially when that man was pissed off and using the Academy-designed weapons that had been built into his body.  Left to his own devices, I had no doubt he could amuse himself doing exactly what he’d threatened.

A tink sound marked the collision of one glass bottle against the ceiling.  It dinked off of Sub Rosa’s head and clattered to the floor, a few feet from me.

“It was supposed to break!” Mary called out.  “Is it broken!?”

“No!”

I only had a few feet of space, now.

The convict leader stopped, grinning at me, arms spread wide.

“Come on!” he said.  “Right into my waiting arms!”

I moved in the opposite direction, toward Sub Rosa and the fallen bottle.

I got a foot from the bottle when her arm came down, overhand.  I stopped just in time to avoid having it come down on my head.  I snatched for the bottle and missed.

“What are you doing!?” Mary called out.

“Trying to grab-”

“Don’t!”

I moved out of the way of Sub Rosa’s reaching arm, which meant throwing myself belly first into the long flaps of skin that surrounded her legs.  My head was only a short distance from the fire that still burned at her left breast.

Her arms came down to embrace me, wrists crossing behind me, hands reaching out to block my escape routes, or to clutch at me if I tried to slip by.

It was a smarter action than many of her actions had been recently.  Was she recovering?  Was she more able to think, now that she wasn’t on fire?

I stopped to think, to try and process a way out, and the conclusion I came to was that I might have managed it if I hadn’t stopped to think.

Mary hadn’t thrown another bottle or vial.

Something about this one, she’d hoped to use it.

I felt the fingers close around me.  In the split-second before I was heaved up off the ground, I kicked the bottle, sending it skittering along the stone floor, in Mary’s direction.

Sub Rosa hauled me up, her wrists uncrossing as she did, turning me upside down in the process.

I could have cut her face if I had the knife, but I’d left it embedded in her lower back.

Held aloft, I was face to face with her.  Well, face to upside-down face.  Or vice versa.

It hardly mattered.

“If you really want to hurt Shipman, I can tell you how,” I told her.

There was no response, no recognition.  She moved one hand to grab me by the ankle, then swung me back over her shoulder.  I realized where I was, fumbled for my knife, and didn’t find it.  She changed the angle she held me, and I realized what she was doing.

This is the part where she swings me into the ground and dashes my brains out.

That’s kind of fitting.

It was eerie, the quiet that came over my thoughts, even as my body was caught in the grips of almost pissing itself, hand scrabbling for a knife that I cognitively knew was out of reach, my heart pounding, breath catching in my throat in preparation to say something, or maybe to scream one last time.

For the first time in a very long time, my thoughts weren’t noisy or conflicted or stumbling over each other in a constant interweaving.  My brain was a spot of tranquility in a setting of fire, meat, blood, and chaos.  That world moved in slow motion.

I wanted to say something witty, but the words caught in my throat, because I didn’t have enough time, because I knew the others would take my words for more than they were supposed to be.

Instead, I let out a long sigh, and I felt my body find the stillness, or something approximating it.  I stopped searching for the knife.  My arms dangled.

I heard the crash.

I felt her tense, moving me, swinging me up and forward.

She released her grip.  In the end, I wound up doing a backflip or two before cracking my head on the floor.

I saw her move, her hands clutched into claws, back arching.  Foam was bubbling up where the liquid had landed.

She was covered in burns, and burns hurt.  Whatever Lillian had provided for Mary to throw, it was one of those things that stung like nothing else when poured over an injury.

I knew, because Lillian had used those ones on me when I’d spent the day annoying her and happened to get hurt in the field.

It had taken me a few times to catch on.

I lay there on the ground, belly up, staring at Sub Rosa.

“Move, you imbecile!” Gordon bellowed.

“Run!” Mary shrieked.

Oh.  Yeah.

With the passing of that endless quiet, I felt almost sick to my stomach.  My body felt disconnected, as if I were at the controls of some monstrosity of flesh and metal and something had jarred me, leading me to forget which lever moved which extremity.

I figured out the controls.  I flipped myself over, crawled, then ran away, while Sub Rosa was still standing there, twisting in place, as if there was some specific configuration of her body that she could discover that would make all the pain stop.

We just keep making her madder.

Gordon and Helen had opened up the ceiling.  Gladys, Helen, Jamie and the other scientists were already up, and Lillian was in the process of climbing up Gorger’s arm.

It struck me that the ceiling escape route wasn’t an escape route at all.  It wasn’t a ventilation tube or anything of the sort.

No.  That would be one of the channels that gas, water, or other sterilization measures would use to cleanse an area of any ongoing problems.

Sub Rosa knew the security measures.  She knew how to disable them, and it stood to reason she knew how to enable them.  I’d seen glimmers of residual intelligence in her.  However much damage those bullets had or hadn’t done, I didn’t like the gamble we were making here.

I hope Gorger can handle this, I thought.

Except Gorger is one of those measures.

Mary made her way up.  Gordon, ever the gentleman, averted his gaze as her skirt brushed past his head.

I still had to scale Gorger’s arm to reach the ceiling.  “Go!” I called up to him.  “Help me up when you’re up!”

He obeyed.  The moment Mary was clear, he hauled himself up.

Sub Rosa chased me, though it was hard to tell.  With the fire dying, the world around me was rendered in black and slices of a grey that was best described as almost-black.

Funny thing, when being chased, when one had to run toward the threat.  Much as Gordon had, I had to step on Gorger’s body to get up to his shoulder and arm, though I was a touch graceless in the process, dropping to all fours to find a surer grip.

Sub Rosa drew nearer.  A few feet away, reaching around the arm for me-

Gorger dropped his arm, swinging clumsily at her.  I nearly lost my balance, grabbed at his thumb, and when I felt myself nearly falling, all the same, I stuck a foot out, planting it on Sub Rosa’s face.

It made for a terrifying moment.

What drove me to move, the thing that set every nerve to firing well before Sub Rosa lashed out or before Gorger started raising me up toward the section of ceiling where the stone tile had been pulled free, was a horrible, core-of-my-being fear of that alluring quiet I had experienced.  I felt that uneasy sickness accompany my movements as I made my way up.

I found Gordon’s reaching hand, slapped my wrist into it, and gripped his wrist.  With his help from above and Gorger’s from below, I found my way into the shaft.

Looking back over my shoulder, I saw Sub Rosa backing off.

I saw her point.

“You’re kidding me,” the convict leader said.

Another point, a sharp gesture, pointing.

Oh.

They were her measure against Gorger.

I saw the convicts approach Gorger, spikes held out, jabbing, their movements uncertain.

I saw Sub Rosa turn, lurching down the other direction, to the far end of the hall.

We needed to get as much distance as possible from them before that measure worked.

“Sy.  Are you okay?” Jamie called back.

“Head hurts.  Tailbone hurts.  Body hurts.  I legitimately thought I’d die,” I said.

“You and us both, Sly,” Gordon said.

I thought of Mary.  Of how despondent she’d been.  She needed a win.  “Mary saved me there, I think.  Or Lillian did.  Or both.”

There was only silence.

“For the record, Gordon, you’ve officially lost the right to call me out on mistakes and bad calls.”

“We needed to save Gladys.”

“Right, because we’ve never had to deal with acceptable losses before.”

“Who are you?” Gladys Shipman asked.  “I know that girl interviewed me before, but none of this- What was all that?  What acceptable losses have you dealt with before?”

The channel was narrow, only about two and a half feet by two and a half feet.  Two of the others further up had some light, and it reflected off of moisture that clung to the walls and floor, giving me some illumination.

Of course, all I had to look at was Gordon’s butt.

I really hoped that Sub Rosa didn’t manage to activate the sterilization protocol we were presently navigating.  I didn’t want the last thing I saw before I died a fiery or drowning death to be Gordon’s butt.

Mary’s butt?  Maybe.

Lillian’s butt?  Now that would be my pick.  I imagined Lillian would hate it if she died knowing I was staring at her butt.

I felt giddy after my near slip from death, and the musings on butts of all things made me giggle a little.

“Gladys,” Gordon said.  “You said you knew her?”

“Yes.  Anyone who’s been down here for twelve or so years knows her.”

“How old are you?” Lillian asked.

“Sixteen.”

“Your uncle had you down here as a kid?” Helen asked.

“Yeah.  I heard the stories.”

“Who is she?” I asked, impatient.

“She’s the woman who built the Bowels,” Gladys said.  “She made the initial decisions on how to design Gorger, though she didn’t do the actual work.  Which is how she operated, really.  Or so I heard.”

“Not useful,” I said.  “Clarify, explain.”

“I am,” Gladys said, her voice sharp.

I was glad I didn’t have a view of her butt.

“She made this place, she designed the security, she designed Gorger,” Gordon said, voice calm, as if trying to guide by example.  “And when it all came down to it, she became an experiment?  That’s dedicated.”

“It’s… no,” Gladys said.

We stopped, and I managed to avoid headbutting Gordon.

“No,” Gladys said.  “She didn’t make this place.  She oversaw it all.  The deep excavation of the shaft and individual labs, she decided the protocols for security and what Gorger needed to be, and she decided who got to work in the Bowels.  She was the overseer more than anything.”

“But?” Jamie asked.

I snickered to myself.

“Ignore him,” Jamie said.  “What happened?”

“It’s a long story,” Gladys said.  “I only heard bits and pieces.  I remember seeing her as a kid.  I’ve seen pictures that are mounted in the stairways at Claret Hall.  She was a tyrant.  She demanded security protocols that nobody could follow, and canceled working projects when those protocols weren’t followed.  Everyone hated her, and it got… it got bad.  A lot of things that are wrong with Radham Academy today, they can be traced back to her.”

Helen managed to open the grate.  Easier from here than there, apparently.  Light flooded the shaft from the lit hallway below.

Helen dropped down.  We began to edge forward, each of us dropping down, one by one.  The adults would be able to catch the rest of us.

It was painfully slow, and I didn’t know what was going on with Gorger and the woman that had decided how he would work.

When I finally dropped down, Gladys was still explaining, “I didn’t put the pieces together until I saw her.  I knew she died down here… not so long ago.  More and more, as time went on, she became an administrator.  But she was always this horrible tyrant.  Things have been better since, less stringent, workable.”

According to your uncle, I thought.  It was a biased, one-sided story, and I didn’t like Gladys enough to take her side.

Still, I kept my mouth shut for Gordon’s sake.

“She died, and my uncle always said these cryptic things after…”

“He kept her alive,” Jamie said.

“Yes,” Gladys said.

“He kept her alive, eyes open, mouth clamped shut, trapped, with her brain mostly in working order,” I elaborated.

I saw the woman who’d worked with Gladys raise her hands to her mouth.

“Yes,” Gladys said, and it was a testament to her humanity that she sounded as upset as she did.  Her fingers clutched at her lab coat, right over her heart.

Gordon reached out to take her hands, reassuring.

I was right!  I cheered in my head.  Go, Gordon!

“Look,” Lillian said, pointing.

Ever the killjoy.

Gorger’s back.  He was retreating.

“We need to go,” Gordon said.

There was no disagreement.

But, being the last one down, furthest back from the direction we wanted to go, I also happened to have the best view of the group and our surroundings.

On Gordon’s back was a bug.

Looking down on me, I saw two.  Akin to a honeybee, but black from head to hind-end.

“Bugs,” I said, almost absently.

I saw Gladys turn, her eyes widening.

At the vent above us, more swarmed.

A scuffling sound echoed.  We were being followed.

The scuffling became a snuffling, a snort, a grunt, and then a nails-on-blackboard scrape of something against stone.

I saw one of the other scientists in our group blanch.

She’s letting everything out, now.

How fitting, that the woman who argued so fiercely for better security down here was the one exploiting it all.

We didn’t dare shout, for fear of agitating the swarm or luring something after us.

Silently, collectively, we ran.

Lips Sealed 3.7

Reaching the main shaft of the Academy’s dungeon-laboratories did remarkably little to quiet the creeping feeling of claustrophobia, if that was even the right word.

Before, the Bowels had been a deep, complicated hole, sealed tight, that just so happened to have hostile enemies in it.  I could process it as I would with any other place in Radham.  There were always dangers.  Sometimes less, sometimes more, and sure, a nine foot tall, undying killing machine with a deep understanding of how this place functioned was more, but it wasn’t too far from business as usual.

We immediately headed up, winding our way around the interior of the cylindrical shaft.  We had people of different sizes and ages, some old, and some, mainly us were young.

Short legs sucked.  I couldn’t wait until I grew.

The madness that spilled out of the corridor we’d left a few minutes ago was why I felt claustrophobic now.  The surroundings were actively hostile, and they were hostile in a way I couldn’t grasp yet.  It was already dark there, where Mary had destroyed the lightbulb, but the darkness now came alive.  The dark bodies of large bugs spread out to nearby stairs, railing, and wall, and they were soon followed by small humanoid figures.

The humanoid things were sleek and black, like eels, gaunt, the things crawled on the walls.  Where they touched a surface, earthworm-like tendrils snapped out, each tendril turning regularly at sharp right angles, never overlapping or coming too close to one another.  The walls beneath their hands and feet became maze-like patterns, snapping out into existence in a half-second, then disappearing just as fast as they moved forward.

I’d seen something like that in some sea creature.

Their eyes were as dark as their skin.  They snorted and snuffled, and they scampered along the walls with a surprising speed, more visible from the way the light caught on the tendrils than for their actual bodies.

I saw some pause and crane their heads around almost one hundred and eighty degrees to look back and up at us, as we continued to make our way upward.  Three of them immediately started moving directly up.

We were making our way up the spiral staircase, and by going straight up, they were able to reach the section of stairs we had yet to reach, further ahead of us.

“Who made those!?” Gordon asked.

“We did,” one of the scientists with us said.  He had an accent.  German, possibly, or Dutch.  Jamie would know, if I were to interrupt and ask.

“Explain!  In brief!” Gordon said.

“They’re weapons!”

Great.

“Less brief!”

“The tendrils are supposed to maximize surface area.  They saw into flesh on contact and on leaving, and they apply a contact poison.  It’s injected through the injury, and it breaks down the fat in the hypodermis.  It’s meant for night raids, Phobos and Deimos approach.”

“Lillian,” Gordon said.  “Translate.”

“Cuts skin into- um, into those patterns you see them making on the wall.  Breaks down the part under the skin, enough to make it slough off?”

“Yes,” the scientist said.

“Skin comes off in strips and squares?” Lillian said.

“Yes.”

The things had reached the stairs above us.  As they climbed on the underside and railing, the tendrils snapped around, forming a weird, geometric, spiderweb-like connection between the individual pieces of the railing, before they hauled themselves over.

Our forward progress slowed.  They were waiting for us, two of them climbing up the wall so they would be above us, the other standing on the stairs, tendrils wrapped around the railing.

“I can’t,” Lillian said.  “I can’t, I can’t.”

Mary seized her hand.

“The projects are down here.  They’re not done,” I said.  “Why?  Why haven’t you been able to finish these little bastards and give them to the academy?”

“The Academy-”

“No,” I cut him off.  “No dilly-dallying, no shifting blame, no ego.  What’s wrong with your work?  Be straight, be fast, or we might die.”

The doctor huffed.  “Control.  They go to the battlefield in boxes, yes?  We use pheromone, drive them away, they run, far, to enemy camp.  After time, or full belly, pheromone smell good, draws them back in.  Straight to cage.  Out, wait, back in.  Every night, until the enemy breaks.”

“But?”

“But too unpredictable, Academy says.  Do not move out in straight lines.  The weapon is not devastating enough to be worth using without ability to aim.”

The cloud of bugs below had stopped expanding, but they were now buzzing around in the darkness of the shaft, impossible to catch unless the light just happened to fall behind them in the right way.  I felt one land on me, and decided on the usual approach for bees.  Leave it alone and hope.

The small black creatures below us were crawling more aimlessly, grabbing and snapping for bugs.  Their gums were black, but their teeth and tongues weren’t.  The teeth weren’t white, though, but gnarled nubs, eroded, ill-cared for.  It made the stark pinkness of their tongues all the more alarming.

Above us, one of the creatures stuck out its tongue.  The member moved just like the tendrils did, snapping out, all right angles, without seeming rhyme or reason, clinging to a surface.  In this case, the surface was the creature’s face.

Those same tendrils would snap out all maze-like and unpredictable over their victim’s skin, they would cut, break down the exterior layer, and then recede, sawing in again.  Shortly after, their skin would fall off in pretty patterns.

“Got any of the stuff?  Pheromones?” Gordon asked.

“No.  It’s not like what you describe.”

The cloud below was growing thicker, drawing closer, and I was pretty sure some of the little bastards below us had realized we were above them.

The ones that had crawled onto the wall above us were inching closer, tentative.  Still, every little movement of their hands or feet prompted the tendrils to snap out and cling to the side of the wall.

“How.  Do.  You.  Kill.  Them?” Gordon asked.

“Fire.”

“We used all the fire.”

“Then, we don’t kill, we disable.  We… if we can get to room with something we might rub on skin, affect taste, smell…”

Mary gave Lillian a bit of a push.  It seemed to get Lillian moving where she’d been shutting down.

“H-Here,” Lillian said.

She set her bag down on the stair in front of her.  She fumbled her way through it, hands shaking so badly that she couldn’t even reliably grab anything.

The scientist who had been filling us in on the creatures pushed her aside and began rummaging through it.

“There isn’t much left,” Lillian said.

“No,” the man said.  “No, no… no.  I don’t see… no, not this, either.  Even if we crushed it-”

Helen moved, reaching out.  It wasn’t a fast movement, but it was sudden enough that it made me jump.

One of the things above us had pounced.  Its hands touched Helen’s arm, and the tendrils spread out, over and under the sleeve of her Academy jacket.

She caught it by the wrists, and pinned it down on the stairs beside her.  The tendrils retracted, then snaked out again, as if trying to find an appropriate grip.

It was only after the third retraction and reapplication that beads of blood began to form on Helen’s face, neck, hands, and bare legs, tracing fine lines in those maze-like patterns.

Gordon found his way past the others, leaving Gladys behind, to get close.  He raised his foot, prepared to step on the thing’s throat.

“No,” Helen whispered the word.

Gordon backed away, touching the railing.

Helen had the thing’s gaze, and brought her face closer.  She didn’t flinch as its tongue snapped out to cover her face.

Instead, she leaned closer, mouth opening too wide, teeth bared, and hissed.

Something in that flipped a primal switch in the black thing.  It struggled, flailing, tendrils retracted, and kicked to try and get away.  It squealed and snorted like a pig crossed with a baby all the while, a fear sound.

Helen ratcheted up the aggression, twisting the thing’s arms to inflict pain, her back arching, before she let it go.

It fled, and it fled with enough speed that its buddies joined it, our way now clear.

Helen composed herself as fast as she’d gone feral, one hand going to fix her hair at one side, where it had fallen across her face.  She looked at us, her face now running with blood, smiled, and made a pleased little half-giggle sound in her throat, before leading the way upstairs.

She was most definitely doing that routine on purpose, just to freak people out.

“Her skin,” the scientist said.  “If she moves too fast, too quickly-”

“Her skin is different,” Gordon said.  He helped Lillian gather up her bag and the contents that had been pulled out, then grabbed her arm, helping pull her forward.

“She’s different,” I said.  “Obviously enough.”

I didn’t miss the fractional hesitation before the others followed the Lambs on the way upstairs.  Logic dictated that we were less dangerous, but a trace of fear and concern had held them back for just a moment.

Far below us, Gorger was forced out of the tunnel.  He was a massive creature, and the stairs weren’t wide.  His grip on the railing was born of many years of practice, as he swung himself down.  He found some foothold and flung himself clear across the shaft, to plunge a hand into a handhold that was impossible for human eyes to make out in the darkness.

He hung there, a vague pale shape in the gloom, seemingly suspended by nothing.

Sub Rosa emerged from the corridor.  She was different.

Hunch-backed, she had two heads, and one of the metal spikes jutted out from the ‘sleeve’ of her robe, behind her actual hand.

“What the…” I breathed out the words.

She turned her head away from Gorger, scanning the surroundings.  Her face was still damaged.  She wasn’t healing any of the damage we’d done, though it looked like a clotted mess from a distance.  It was essentially what Jamie had said: whatever else happened, the Sub Rosa cocoon kept the brain more or less operational and the heart pumping.  If she could die of blood loss, she hadn’t yet.

“She’s sharing the suit,” Jamie said.  “Whatever she released killed her underlings, or left them unable to fight, so she made room.”

I looked again, noting the hump at her back.

But the arm… her arm was longer than it should have been, and yet, with the hump at her back, somehow the blade reached out that far?

She dislocated it.  Took it to pieces, stretched everything out, and then bound the hand to her wrist.

And just like the suit was keeping her alive, if the mechanisms or biological parts of what made the convicts electric were still in operation…

Poor bastard was probably alive in there.

“Bugs,” Mary said, interrupting my train of thought.  “I got bit, what’s going to happen?”

“Stung, not bit,” Gordon’s new beau replied.  “I don’t know.  The payloads are mild, for testing purposes with animals, but, I don’t know how to put this, you’re small?”

Gorger leaped across the considerable gap between the wall and the stair where Sub Rosa was.  He grabbed onto the frame of the gate that marked the entrance to the sixth floor tunnels, and avoided collapsing the stairs, sliding into the tunnel, an arm extended for Sub Rosa.

“A little toxin goes a little further,” Mary said.

A moment passed, and Gorger stumbled back, grunting in pain.

He could crush her so easily, if he could get to her, but… something was wrong.  The shock of the metal spike bypassed the rest of the immunities and protections he’d been built with.  His reaction seemed very human, a flinch, a recoiling.

We were rising high enough that I was losing my ability to pick out details.

“Yes.  If it forms a bump on your skin, it’s anaesthetic, it’ll numb, maybe partially paralyze.”

“If it doesn’t?”

“Then it’s tranquilizer,” Shipman’s partner told us.

“That’s good?” I asked.

“Bad,” Gladys Shipman told us.  “Tranquilizer, applied without adhering to the ratios?  One bug, a grown adult might feel woozy.  For you?  Or even the boy with the glasses there?  I’d be worried it might depress your heart rate too much.”

“Death,” I said.

“Possibly.  And there are an awful lot of the bugs around,” she said.

“So many years of work, scattered to the wind,” her partner said.

I’m more concerned about dying, I thought.

“How long?” Lillian asked.  “Before we see bumps, or effects?”

“Not long.  Minutes.”

Gordon seemed to make a decision, hearing that.  He pointed to the next set of tunnels.

We’ll get cornered again, I thought.

The thought had to be pushed aside.  I knew why he was suggesting it.  I didn’t argue.

We made our way into the tunnel, and then people gathered inside the first available lab.  Our ‘help’, including Gladys Shipman’s partner or supervisor.  Whoever the older woman was.

I could hear the furniture being moved before we reached our destination.  Two labs over, the door was ajar, the lab empty.  Us younger folk gathered inside.

We shut the door.

Time to see who gets knocked out, who dies, and maybe come up with a plan.

Lillian immediately set to looking after Helen, who cooperated remarkably little.  A wet cloth passed over her face, and came away crimson.

A lot of blood, but it wasn’t from one clear source.  It was beads of blood adding up to a veritable pool.

“We should all check each other over,” Shipman told us.  “Better to find out now than later.”

I nodded.

Removing my jacket, actually Jamie’s that he’d lent me, I draped it over the back of a chair.

I saw Jamie point.

Two marks at my elbow.

“It didn’t even hurt,” I said, quiet.

“We marketed them to the Academy as weapons, but we designed them to be a means of vaccinating people en masse,” Shipman said.  “It was supposed to be a good thing, or a neutral thing.  Help the people who needed it, without hurting them.  Are there bumps?”

“No,” I said.

“Wait.  Let’s hope,” she said.

I nodded.

But I nodded while secure in the knowledge that I’d been among the first the bugs had reached.  I’d been at the tail end of the group, the first available target.

The bumps had had enough time to appear.

There were parts of our bodies we couldn’t check ourselves.  Jamie looked me over, as I pulled my shirt up over my head, then lifted up my trouser legs, and found another on my thigh.  We finished by having him run his hands through my hair.

I finished and pulled my clothing back into place.  Gordon had been mirroring my actions, so Jamie could check us both at once, but the hair took more time.  The look seemed cursory, but I trusted Jamie’s eyes.

He was faster with Gordon than it had been with me.  Those eyes learned fast.

I could see how some parts of Gordon were ever so slightly different in tone.  Where most people saw, it was normal, impossible to notice, except for maybe a hair of difference in tone from one hand to the next.

Gordon had gotten off easy in that respect.  I had too, though I had suspicions.

Jamie, though…

I looked at him.  I expected a flinch, a downward glance, and I saw neither.

He nodded.

“If you want someone else,” I told him.  “That’s doable.  I won’t mind.  Lillian’s seen.”

“Lillian is busy with Helen,” he said, voice soft.

Lillian was powdering Helen’s skin with something she’d collected from the shelf.  It was tan in color and fine in grit.

“You really need better taste in makeup,” Helen was heard to comment.

“Shut up,” Lillian retorted, with a little more emphasis than necessary.  On edge, but she had something constructive to do.

“You’d rather have Sy?” Gordon asked.

Jamie nodded.

I worked quickly, my body positioned to block the view from the other side of the room.

He pulled up his shirt, and I saw the tracks of scars, the largest and deepest running in parallel with his spine.  Smaller ones reached out, like branches from a tree, gnarled, puckered, angry.

There was a knot at the base of his neck, gnarled, lopsided.

He turned around, and I saw how the scars reached around to embrace him, and the healing had been poor.  It had gotten infected, I knew, and there had been other priorities than getting the tissue to heal perfectly.

Helen had been grown from scratch.  Whatever she looked like, there was precious little in her that was exactly like the human equivalent, from her hair to her skin to her internal organs or muscular structure, or even the composition of her muscles.

Jamie had been born human, but they’d decided to make modifications.  It had involved removing part of his spine and brain, cloning the spine and brain with augmentations, and then replacing them.

While Gordon, Helen and I had been playing ‘naughty and nice’, getting to know each other, Jamie had been lying face down on a table in a sterile environment, conscious enough to converse, waiting to see if things would take when everything was put back into place, or if he’d be paralyzed and lobotomized, if he lived at all.

Helen was vat-grown, Jamie had received a graft.

Weeks.  Maybe months.  He’d never specified.

I pulled his shirt down for him, pulled at the back of his pants to check his rear, glancing at the second of the gnarled scar points at the tailbone, then replaced them.

“I can check my front,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

I ran my hand up the back of his neck, along the scar that his long hair helped hide, and into his hair.

Something told me the physical contact was important.  Maybe it was how he loosened the deathgrip on his book a fraction.

I combed his hair with my fingers, searching with my eyes.

“No stings,” I said, my hand still on his head, hair between my fingers.

He nodded against my hand.

I mussed up his hair, then pulled away.

“Thank you,” he said, the statement far enough removed from the deed that it had a different meaning.

“Of course,” I replied.

The girls were done faster than we were, but Helen required a fair bit of powder.  Lillian, showing that canniness that lurked beneath the surface, had done Helen’s legs and the parts that clothes covered, and had only the hands left.  Helen looked like a ghastly doll, now, the sort of doll that was left by the side of the road, scuffed by weather and being kicked around.  Paint flecking off, scuff marks buried under that same paint, covered in muck that was assuredly blood and dirt.

“Here we are,” Gordon said, as Lillian continued her ministrations.  “Sy’s stung.  So am I, but I think it’s mostly anaesthetic, and I’m pretty tough.”

“I’m stung too,” Mary said.  “Lillian’s already feeling woozy, but she’s knuckling through.  Gladys has two stings on the legs.”

Lillian nodded.  Her jaw was clenched.

“I’m fine,” Helen said.  “I don’t think they like me enough to sting me.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Too sweet for them.”

She flashed me a ghastly-doll smile.

“The situation is bad,” Gordon mused.  “Whatever Sy was telling the big guy, they aren’t going to open things up again until Gorger gives the signal, and I don’t think Gorger can.”

The memory of the tranquility I’d experienced at Sub Rosa’s hands was still uncomfortable, ominous, and alluring.  I’d already stated my concerns with being in a locked room, thinking that our escaped experiment could come through at any moment.  I wanted to be doing something proactive.

Talking and planning was good, but it wasn’t quite good enough.

“You said she deserved it,” Gordon said.

“The monster?”

“Yes.”

Gladys made a face.

“She’s to blame for the worst parts of the Academy?” I asked.

“It’s a long story,” Gladys said.  “I’m not sure we have time before things start taking effect.  I’m already…”

She paused.

“Start sooner,” I said.  Gordon scowled at me for that.

“It’s complicated, it’s not something I can sum up quickly,” Gladys said.

If I had my knife, I would hold it to your throat and make you talk, Gordon be damned.  Stop stalling!

I smiled, waiting patiently.

“She was rigorous.  Ruthless in deciding who got labs and who had their projects canceled early.  It was all about the end result.  Nothing to do with the process, didn’t matter if you were sick or had a death in the family, if your wife was in the delivery room, you were expected to give your all, or she would replace you with someone who would.”

Ah.

In a way, the foundation of the philosophy that had made us so hard to sell.

That philosophy had meant it had taken nearly four years for Hayle to get one of the failed Lamb projects restarted.

I hated Sub Rosa a little, now.

“I think, my uncle thinks-”

Thought.  She’d forgotten the details in the heat of the moment.  Death was like that.  We spent so long assuming people were alive.

“-That she liked having new projects.  Old projects, ones that were brought in from elsewhere, she pressured them.  Replaced them with things that were hers.  When she couldn’t do that anymore, she put pressure on everyone, demanded more results, faster.  She got them, which pleased the people in charge, but things down here reached a breaking point.”

“What broke?” Gordon asked.

“Standards.  Ethics.  People started taking shortcuts.  Cheating.  There was a month, when I was young, that my uncle was home for all of it.  Because some people got desperate, and they got test subjects from Radham.  Not the Academy, but-”

“The city,” Lillian said.

“Even children,” Gladys said.  “My uncle was so torn up about it… friends of his, they did it.  Starting with the elderly, but then…”

Gladys drifted, nearly nodding off.

“What happened in the end?” Mary asked.

“She fell over the railing, straight down to the bottom of the shaft.  She was on a lower level, but… it was enough.  Or almost enough.”

“Before we go further or run out of time, the bugs, same question we asked about the nightmare creatures,” Gordon said.  “Why isn’t it in use?”

“We were close.  We designed the mechanism, we were waiting on a breeding phase to see how effectively it carried across generations.”

Absently, my fingers brushed over the two red blotches on my arm.  No bumps.  I felt my leg, and didn’t feel any raised bump.

“No flaws?”

“Not enough for us to use, and I’ve been thinking about it.”

“Okay,” Gordon said.  He flashed her a smile.  “Good job, then.  Keep thinking.”

There was something in his expression that I might have taken for lovesickness, but he wasn’t that bad.  Even his plan to shoot Sub Rosa hadn’t been terrible.  We’d been particularly unlucky, that she hadn’t gone down with six bullets, and that Gorger had shown up.  Had either one been different, Gordon would have been the hero.

The hero that didn’t communicate, but eh.

“You’re acting drunk,” I told him.

“I’m just a little tranquilized,” he said.  “I’m feeling it, I’ll deal.”

I nodded.

“Gorger can’t do anything.  Jamie, can you think about any projects we could use?  Places we could go?”

Jamie shook his head.  “I’ve been trying, nothing springs to mind, and I have things pretty organized in my head for the job we’ve been doing down here.”

Gordon nodded.

A slow, lazy nod.

Worse than before.

I bit my tongue, watching the conversation continue.  Lillian was holding her hand, which had formed a palsied sort of fist, but she was drifting away too.

The conversation was sporadic, and it wasn’t my focus that was faltering.

“Cover your skin with something caustic,” Gladys was saying.  “Wasn’t a bad idea.  It’ll hurt, but it’ll keep the bugs off, but it’ll hurt…”

I watched in quiet silence as she faded away, slumbering.

When Lillian, Mary and Gladys nodded off entirely, I forced myself to face the reality.

I looked at Gordon, who was going down the same path.

“You-” he slurred the word.  “Damnashin.”

“We can’t stay here and wait and hope,” I told him.

“Yeah,” he said.  “Can’t fight eever.”

“Either,” Jamie corrected.

“Yush,” Gordon said.

And he was out.

A full minute passed in silence, Jamie, Helen and I with our sleeping companions.  I knew they were doing what I was doing.  Watching to make sure everyone kept breathing.

I found a handhold and helped myself to my feet.

“You were stung three times,” Jamie said.

“Yeah, probably,” I said.  “But my casefile was the Wyvern for a reason, and it’s not the parallel with my own name.”

“I know,” Jamie said, sounding a little annoyed.

“Let me have this,” I told him.

He snorted.

“The Wyvern is the dragon with a barbed tail.  I’ve been stung every month for years.  Everything under the sun put into my body.  I have tolerances.”

“Yeah,” he said.

We looked between us.

Helen, Jamie and I.

The three of us were probably the least well equipped to handle Sub Rosa, in the grand scheme of it all.

“Let’s find something to rub on ourselves to drive off the bugs, and see what we can do,” I said.  “Let’s hope things haven’t gotten too much worse while we’ve been distracted.”

Lips Sealed 3.8

“Depending on who was part of our trio here, I’d adjust my strategy,” I voiced my thoughts aloud.  “If it were Gordon and Mary, I’d talk to them about battle plans, where we could get weapons, stuff we could improvise.  I’d turn my own talents toward finding and putting together something that would buy the two of them an opportunity.  If it was Lillian that was part of the group, either of them, and me, I’d have Lillian use her knowledge of science stuff to do the finding, and I’d be a distraction, while Gordon could be point man.”

“Uh huh,” Jamie said.

The hallway was dark.  The bugs were everywhere, but they weren’t landing on us, as far as I could tell.  We also lacked any strange guests.  The wall-crawlers hadn’t followed us up this far.

“And with us?” Helen asked.

“You’re intimately familiar with the Bowels, Jamie remembers the past interviews we’ve done?”  I made it a question, directed at Jamie.

“I remember what I was told about.  I sat in on half the interviews we’ve done, I glanced over some of the files for the other half.  Seventy five percent?  Give or take?”

“How many labs is that, that you’re aware of?”

“Two hundred and two.”

“How many labs are you unfamiliar with?” I asked.

“Ninety eight.  Two were unoccupied.”

I nodded.  “We’re armed with knowledge.  The trick is to find out how to use that knowledge.”

“She’s armed with knowledge, too,” Helen said.  “She knows more than I do about this place.  I don’t think we can beat her that way.”

“No,” I said.  “But let’s keep our eyes open for opportunity.  I don’t suppose there’s anything we could access or cut that would let us shut down an area without actually being in that area?”

Helen shook her head.  “Things were built like they were built in case of invasion.  If the enemy or enemy agents came in and tried to get at some of the labs to obtain tools to use against the Academy, those within could drop the ceiling and seal things off.”

“What about the mechanisms upstairs, then?  They have to be able to raise the stone blocks after.”

“Teams of stitched at a wheel, and a switchboard,” Helen said.  “Need the right configuration on the board for a given tunnel, or it locks up when you order the stitched to turn the wheel, and only certain individuals can order the stitched.”

“One way to stop Sub Rosa for good would be to follow her into one of the hallways, get to one of the panels where she reworked the security, and undo that work.  Seal ourselves in with her.”

“No,” Jamie said.

“It’s an option,” I said.  “Depending on how Gorger is doing, we could do that, sacrifice one of us to remove her from play, then let Gorger clean up the bugs and the wall-crawlers.”

“No,” he said, more forcefully.  “Do I need to list reasons, Sy?  I know you’d want to be the one to sacrifice yourself for us, and I’m not willing to let you do that.  If one of us dies, we grow weaker as a group.  Whatever comes tomorrow, or next week, next month, next year… we need everyone.  I expect that every single one of us is preparing on some level for what you’ve talked about.  The expiration dates.  You most of all, Sly.”

“I don’t know if I’ve been preparing,” Helen said.  “But I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

“That’s what I meant,” Jamie said.  “Just like with any problem, when things start going south, we’ll each approach it from our individual angles, we’ll support each other’s strengths and shore up each other’s weaknesses.  But everyone, anyone that we lose, that weakens us.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I can see that.”

“We’re not losing anyone,” Jamie said, and his voice was tight.  “Not if there’s a chance of saving them.  You’re not sacrificing yourself for the sake of the rest of us.  Especially when it’s not guaranteed to work.”

His voice cracked a little, and I didn’t think it was puberty.

For once, I didn’t have a ready reply.  The emotion he was exhibiting, it made it hard to say something, when I wouldn’t be able to match it or acknowledge it.

It was Helen who leaned close and gave Jamie a peck on the cheek, leaving behind a kiss mark of the powder Lillian had used mixed with the chemicals we’d covered ourselves in.  A pale version of the mark lipstick might leave.  I saw the tightness disappear from his shoulders in response to that simple gesture.  The tension was broken, and I was free to comment and speak.

“What about manipulating some sap into doing it for us?” I asked.

“God, Sy, really?” he asked, incredulous.

But I was already cracking a grin.  I saw Jamie shake his head, but he allowed himself a smile.

I’d lightened things up a little.  That paved the way for more serious discussion.  Jamie was more sensitive than the rest of us.  He had the least blood on his hands, next to Lillian.

“You’ve been holding that in for a while,” I said, no longer poking fun at him.  “What you said before.”

“Just a little while,” he said.  “It’s been worse for the past bit.  Past hour, I guess.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Seeing you almost die?”

“I’ve almost died loads of times,” I said, cavalier.

“That’s not the first time you’ve said that,” he said.

“Uh huh.  Because it’s true.”

“It’s not the first time you’ve said it, and yet you said it differently here,” Jamie said.  “I just thought back to all the other times, your expression, your body language, your tone-”

“Geez!”

“You said it in a different way because you feel different about it.  This time was different, it was closer.  You know it, I know it.”

I chewed on that for a bit, as we headed to the stairs again.  When we reached the staircase itself, I stopped.  We needed to decide where to go and what to do, but with Jamie feeling emotional and the current topic of conversation, I doubted I could get him to let things lie.

No, that was a fib.  I could get him to let things be, but no matter how gently I did it, I would be dropping a conversation that was critically important to Jamie.  I would be acting evasive, and that would hurt him, given the situation.

“Yeah,” I admitted.  “I came closer than ever.  For a second or two, I knew there was nothing I could do, and I was okay with it.”

“I experience that moment sometimes,” Helen said.  “When I’m strangling someone to death, I see it in their eyes, I hear it in the noises they’re making, when they stop straining for breath.  I feel it in how they fight and twitch and struggle.”

“I don’t ever want to experience that moment again,” I said.  I looked at Jamie.  “Believe me.”

“I believe you,” he said.

I nodded.  I could have changed the topic, hurried us along, but…

“Our friends are unconscious, and I nearly died.  Is that why you’re wound so tight right now?”

Jamie made a face, raising a hand to fix his goggles.  It didn’t look like he was planning on responding.

“I told you my inner thoughts,” I prodded him.

“Yeah,” he said.  For a second, I wasn’t sure if he was admitting that he was wound tight, or if there was more to it.  There was more to it, apparently, because he said, “I didn’t recognize Sub Rosa.”

I frowned.

“I recognize everyone, Sy.  I’ve walked by that picture that Gladys mentioned…”

He trailed off.

“Jamie?” I asked, and I felt genuinely worried.  It was a weird place to stop talking, and he wasn’t immune to the stings.  Not that I was, but still.

“Sixteen times,” he said.  “I’ve walked by it sixteen times.  I looked Sub Rosa directly in the eyes, several times.  The connection didn’t happen.”

I nodded, putting a hand on his shoulder.

I wasn’t sure what to say.

“I haven’t talked about it before, because Gordon really doesn’t like it being brought up, but I do know how I probably expire.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’m supposed to remember things, Sy.  And now we’re down here, and I know I’m supposed to be thinking things through, sorting through all the maps and details about the labs, all the paperwork I glipmsed, to piece together a plan or find a way out, but all I can think about is… I’m supposed to remember things.”

My hand on his shoulder became a hug.  He was clutching his book, so he didn’t return it, his knuckles jabbing at my chest as I squeezed him as tight as he could bear.

When I pulled away, I saw that Helen was stroking his hair, patting him like a dog.

“Nothing we can do about that right now,” I said.

“I know.”

“We need to figure out a plan of attack,” I said.

“I know,” he said.  Helen nodded.

“Where are you at, in terms of thinking through the options with the labs you’ve seen or read about?”

“I’m going over it a second time, more in depth,” he said.  “I’m not finding much.”

“The paperwork, about Sub Rosa?  Do any people the creator has worked with work down here?  On similar projects, even?”

Jamie shook his head.

“Fast response.”

“I already considered it.”

“Damn,” I said.  “That leaves us three options.”

“What options?”

“Option one is that we knock on doors.  Visit all the labs you don’t remember reading about, hope there’s a weapon, tool, or threat there that we can use.”

“Shot in the dark,” Helen said.

I nodded.  “Option two is that we turn to you, Helen.  If this place was prepared for wartime, it’s not inconceivable that there could be secret tunnels, defenses, or stockpiles that might help in the event that the Bowels were attacked.”

“Not inconceivable,” Helen said.  “But if those things existed, Sub Rosa would know about them.  I don’t.”

I frowned.  That was a spooky thing to consider.  Sub Rosa with access to weapons and secret tunnels.

“What’s option three?” Jamie asked.

“Option three depends on you being a little less clever than you are,” I said.

“Less clever?” Jamie asked.

I nodded.

☙

“This isn’t going to go over well with the Academy,” Jamie commented.

“Probably not,” I agreed.

“It’s not even guaranteed to work.”

“No,” I agreed.  “No guarantees.”

I took the stairs two at a time.  Helen followed.  Jamie was a bit slower, relying on the railing to keep himself steady as he tried to match the pace.

A pack of wall-crawlers surrounded us, many on the walls, and we kept making our way up, helping to put more of them behind us.

“It’s a shame we didn’t have paint,” Helen commented.

“Paint?”

“Bright colors.  Most things know that you don’t eat the bright colored animals.  Bees, poisonous frogs, caterpillars…  We could have helped ourselves out by painting our skin.”

“Doesn’t help with stealth, and we might need to be sneaky,” I said.

“Might,” Helen agreed.  “But those things hurt.  I’d rather get caught and deal with that than have ten of them grab me.”

Ugh.

They dropped down around us, reaching out to grab the railings, and to grab us.

It stung like a hundred bee stings, and I stumbled, falling onto the stairs I’d been ascending.

But it stung the creature, too.  The tendrils didn’t cover much of my arm at all before they retracted, the creature pulling away, backing off, snorting and honking violently, like some bastard offspring of a goose, pig, and cow.

I screamed at it, a sound not nearly as good as Helen’s hiss earlier, but I wanted to drive the point home, bully these things.

The others were receiving the same reaction.  The creatures that had attacked them retreated, making an unearthly series of violent noises.

Helen lunged out, grabbing the one that had attacked her.  It struggled, tendrils automatically going out, then pulling back just as fast.  She heaved it toward the gap in the railing.

Tendrils surrounded the railing.

Helen kicked out, catching it in the stomach with her foot.  Its feet flailed, but it was just small enough it couldn’t find purchase.  It held on by the tendrils alone.

Helen screamed in its face, then pressed the back of her hand to the stem of the tendrils.

The creature made more noise, squealing, squawking, kicking harder.  Tendrils went out, touched her leg, and retreated.

When the pain became too much, it retracted the tendrils that were holding the railing.

Without hands or feet to grab with, it dropped down the length of the shaft.

All of the creatures near us backed away a fraction.

Helen turned her attention to a smaller one, probably looking to make another example, driving the point home.  But my focus was on the largest of them, the tension in its arms, and the way that it had retreated less than the others.

It wasn’t courage alone.  This one was the leader of the pack.  Or if it hadn’t been, it had been promoted with the demise of the one Helen had sent to the bottom floor.

“Helen,” I said.

“Yes, Sy?” she asked.  Her hands were out to her side, painted fingernails spread out.

“Three o’clock.”

No sooner were the words out of my mouth, than she reached out and grabbed the big one.

It fought harder than its predecessor had, legs catching the railing, hands flailing, striking out with both hands, neither one getting any particular surface area with the reflexive reaction to the chemicals.

Helen ducked down, grabbed its ankles, and hauled it down.  The tendrils resisted, holding on firmly.

I lunged forward, and slammed my left hand down on the tendrils, probably doing more damage to my hand than to the tendrils.

Still, the tendrils retracted, and Helen had her opportunity.  She hauled down on the leg, almost tearing the creature off, but it grabbed on with both hands, and snapped at her face.

She didn’t brook such nonsense.  She caught the thing around the neck, then twisted it back and around.

Once she had her grip on the necessary parts, it was essentially over.

The creature was pulled against the railing, genitalia sticking straight out, something resembling the inside of a conch shell, though it protruded.  Hermaphroditic.

It struggled.  Helen screamed at it, and briefly tightened her grip, twisting it further, then relaxed.

She held it like that.

I’d expected her to kill it.  But she wasn’t.  While she had the biggest of the group, the rest were holding back, waiting and watching.

She let it try struggling a few more times.  Each time, she screamed at it and twisted its limbs a little more.  On the third time, she bit it on the ribs, then hauled it off and away, heaving it over to the exterior wall to our left.

It started to scramble away.  She made a start toward it, screaming once, and it froze.

It looked at me, and she screamed at it.

It was all hunched over now, tendrils spread out about as far as it seemed they could go.

Helen bent low, one hand going automatically to her skirt, pressing it down, the polite way of avoiding flashing people when bending down, the other hand going around the creature’s throat.

It started to react, and it got another sharp screaming sound from Helen.  It stopped, all limbs touching ground, simply accepting having its throat held.

She had it firmly in her grip, and it was nothing to do with her muscles or hands.

She pointed, then shoved it down the stairs.  It didn’t tumble, but it did move.  The remainder of the pack moved in the same direction, and one got too close to Helen.  She made a lunging motion at it, screaming, and it scrambled over to the wall to get away, over, and to the remainder of its pack.

We started back up the stairs.  The wall-crawlers went in the other direction, down.

“I thought you were going to keep him for a pet,” I commented.

“I’m not allowed pets,” Helen said.

“I meant more in the sense that you’d take over the pack, then we’d have a few soldiers to use against Sub Rosa.”

“Wouldn’t work,” Helen said.  “Too slow, getting from here to there while trying to keep them in line.”

“Then why not toss him?”

“They’re social.  They communicate, I think.  It might help, having them communicating to the others, telling them we’re dangerous.”

“Hm,” Jamie said.

“Don’t you think so?” Helen asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Interesting that you’re thinking along those lines, though,” I told her.

She gave me a smile and a curtsey at that.  “To be interesting is the highest of compliments when coming from you, sir Sylvester.”

I smiled back.

“I’m bleeding,” Jamie said.  “You are too, Sy.”

I felt the back of my neck, where I’d been touched, and my fingers came away crimson.

“Here,” Helen said.  She handed me the jar of powder Lillian had been using.

Rather than use the dabbing sponge, I reached in, grabbed some, and slapped it on the general area where it was sore, before handing it to Jamie.

Onward, upward.

Third floor.

We made our way through, my eyes following the number of each lab.

Twenty-two, I thought.

We reached the lab, and I pounded on the door.  It swung lightly ajar at that.

“If this turns out badly, I’m going to be silently judging you,” Jamie said.  “While we die, anyway.”

“Noted,” I said.

I ventured into the lab, and scanned the surroundings.  A small size, as labs went, ten paces by ten paces in size.

The counter on one end of the room featured a glass tube, capped with metal at both ends, the two caps held together by a locking mechanism.  Crimson fluid swirled within.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Gas.  One more weapon for the Academy created weapons of war to use on the enemies of the Crown,” Jamie said.

I nodded.

“It won’t stop her.  It might distract or weaken her, but that’s only going to buy us a chance,” Jamie told me.

I nodded.

“And, I feel the need to stress this, we’re not immune.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.  I looked at the fluid.  “I get that.”

Jamie had been searching through every memory of paperwork and every interview he’d participated in, to figure out what we might be able to use against Sub Rosa.  Things that might hurt her or set her back.

But he was too clever a boy.  He searched through his head, but he did it with rules.  He didn’t allow himself to consider weapons that were as likely or more likely to hurt us than to hurt Sub Rosa.

This was one such weapon, the size of two paint cans, stacked one on top of the other.

While Jamie and I talked, Helen was going through cabinets.  I joined her in doing the same.

We found two more canisters, much like the first, but the fluids inside were crystal clear.

I looked to Jamie.

“Water,” he said.

My face fell.

“But we can use it,” he said.

I smiled.  “How?”

“It’s a dispersal system.  We’re filling the air with a thick gas, diluted with water vapor.  We use these, we dilute it further, but we make the cloud bigger.”

Decreasing the chance we miss.

The mental pictures were becoming clear in my mind’s eye.  This wouldn’t kill her, it wouldn’t even hurt her that badly.

If it touched us, if we screwed up, then it would hurt us badly, if it didn’t kill us outright.

My struggles with Sub Rosa thus far had been because she’d been implacable, unstoppable.

Now I had the means to push and pull.  I had the strings with which I could move Sub Rosa, for the briefest time.

But what play to enact with the puppet, for the greatest effect?

“What are you thinking?” Jamie asked.

“What exactly does this stuff do?”

“Flesh eating virus,” Jamie said.

“Really?”

“Essentially.”

I looked at the red tube with a newfound respect.

“Don’t drop it,” he said.

“I won’t.”

“You could.  In fact, I think I’ll take it, just to be sure.”

“I won’t drop it!”

“Let me have it.  You can hold my book.”

“No.  I wanna be the one to unleash the flesh-eating plague!”

“I’ll hand it over when it’s time, but I don’t want you unleashing it on us.”

“I won’t!”

“Not intentionally, but-”

“Boys,” Helen said.

Our heads turned.

“I’m taking it,” she said.  “I’m physically incapable of dropping it by accident.”

“But-” I started.

“Carry the other ones, please,” she told us.

“But…” I said, trailing off.  She met my puppy dog eyes with that infuriating, cute little smile of hers.

I walked to the cabinet with the canisters of water, then grabbed the first.

I was sweaty, and I had the powder on my hand, which hurt traction rather than helping it.  The glass case tipped over and clunked hard against the floor.

“Shut up,” I said.

“I didn’t say anything,” Jamie said, in the smuggest of tones.

“It didn’t break, anyway.”

“Uh huh,” Jamie said.

“Shut up,” I told him, again, before grabbing the thing and heaving it up and off the ground.

Jamie considered a moment, then left his book behind, taking the thing in both hands.

“We have the means of moving Sub Rosa the way we need her to move,” I said.  “We could bring her up.  With the right tools, we might even be able to send her down.  We can make her stand still…”

“But?”

“We don’t have the means of stopping her, when it comes down to it,” I said.

Therein lay the rub.

A person was only technically dead when their heart stopped, but even that definition was vague, because the Academy had kept people alive without hearts in their chests, using machines to pump.

Heart and brain.  When one or both ceased to function, Sub Rosa stopped.

We lacked the tools to destroy either.  There might be guns here and there, but that relied on luck.  Severing the brainstem, or striking the heart, through the armor-like layer of the cocoon.

“Ideas, Sy?” Jamie asked.

“Some,” I said.  “It depends on things.”

“That’s amazingly vague,” he said.

“I’m feeling inspired by some of the villains from the dime store novels,” I told him.  “We need to think big.”

“Okay.”

“How mad do you think Gordon would be if I used Shipman as bait?”

“He likes her,” Helen said.

“I don’t think he fully grasps it,” Jamie commented, “But yeah.”

“Yeah.  That’s why I’m asking,” I said.

Jamie nodded.  “He’d probably forgive you, but…”

“But he’d be mad,” I said.  And what we’re not saying is that time is limited.  Do I really want months or years of time with Gordon to be eaten up with him upset at me?

“Why?”

“It’s something Sub Rosa wants,” I said.  But we can work around it.  We should drop these off and scout.  See where she is and what she’s doing.”

There were nods from the two.

This felt doable.  The lack of a means to deliver a sure killing blow was a big hole in the plan, but one that could be worked around.

The possibilities that unfolded in my mind were good ones, fun ones.

Ones that people would remember.

We carried the glass canisters halfway down, to the fifth floor, and we left them at the exit of the hallway, just by the stairs.

Slowly, we crept down, past the swarm of bugs who refused to land on us, past the black wall crawlers, who snorted and honked, while refusing to draw near.  Warning sounds, I presumed, passed from one group to the next.

Social creatures.

Past the sixth floor.  A whole section of railing and stairway was broken.  From the fight between Sub Rosa and Gorger.

From the bodies in the hallway, though, I could assume that Gorger hadn’t gone into the hallway.  If he had, he would have scraped them against the floor.

Down another floor.  Seventh.  The way was locked, the door broken, but not broken away.  Gorger hadn’t gone there either, and I doubted he would have left Sub Rosa to her own devices.

Down to the eighth floor.

Bottom floor.

Sub Rosa was there.  People in lab coats were working to tear away wall panels, while she stood there, a metal spike extended in their general direction.  Another cluster of people in lab coats was gathered against the wall, huddled together.  Twenty, thirty, maybe forty.

Gorger lay against the opposite wall.  He breathed, but he was limp, the fight gone out of him.

He’d lost to Sub Rosa, who had been his father in a way.  Yes, she was female, but she’d had a fatherlike role in his creation, providing the seed and the means for the man to become the monster, and now she had struck him down.

We couldn’t use the gas like this.

“We need to use Shipman, to draw her up,” I whispered.

There was no response from either of the others.  They were studying the scene.

Are they making a way out?  Or is this like something I suggested to Helen?  A weapon cache?  A tunnel?  A last-ditch measure?

On the broad bottom of the shaft, a doctor happened to look up, and saw us.  I could just barely see the whites of her eyes.

She gestured.  Telling us to run, maybe.

Rescuing the children.

She gestured again.

“Let’s go,” I whispered.  My legs were already feeling like lead, from so much travel up and down stairs in short time.  I had the information I needed to put a plan in action.

But my memory wasn’t good.  Just to be safe, I looked back, ready to commit the scene to memory, so I could better move the pieces when it came down to it.

It was only that last glance that let me see the subtle events unfold.

The gesturing movement, urging us to run, it had been seen by others in the crowd.  Many of them looked up at us.

Sub Rosa, watching over the crowd out of the corner of her eye, turned.  Not all of the heads were fast to look away or distract.

She followed their gaze, and she saw us.

It seemed she was still angry.  She moved, as fast as she was able, ascending the stairs.

Chasing.

At least we won’t have a problem baiting her upstairs.

Problem was, I now had zero minutes to pull off a serious deathtrap I’d expected to take ten or twenty.

Lips Sealed 3.9

We weren’t going to get away this time.

She was taller, stronger, and as hurt as she was, she kept going without faltering.  Her face still had a gaping hole in the side of it where several bullets had hit, filled with what looked like a big blood clot, and she had other injuries she might have sustained doing battle with Gorger, but she wasn’t staggering anymore.

I’d expected that, even if we’d been seen, we could outrun her or match her pace.  She was healing, however, or she’d pulled herself together.  She was making good time.  Better than we were.

I was quick on my feet, and I had a good sense of where my body was and how to move.  Jamie and Helen weren’t runners.  Humans had evolved not to outrun prey, but to keep running.  Helen wasn’t human, and as fine a piece of craftsmanship as she was, there were tradeoffs when playing to different strengths.  Jamie just wasn’t quick or coordinated, he stumbled, I caught him, he faltered, and I pulled him onward.

She was going to catch us.  The next hallway was still a little ways up, the canisters of water vapor and plague more than a little ways up.  We wouldn’t reach it first.

Those people who had stared at us and warned us to run had doomed us.

I looked back, still running, and I saw Sub Rosa’s steady advance.  She kept one hand on the railing, hauled herself up with arm strength as well as strides.

I contemplated throwing myself toward her.  Ascending the stairs, there had to be a point where, with a push or a collision with a leaping eleven year old, that she’d tip over backward.

The fact that she was gripping the railing, hauling herself up, gripping it, hauling herself up, a steady pattern, it narrowed that window of opportunity.

What were the odds?  One in twenty?  One in fifty?

Wait for the right moment, pivot, leap.  It would barely inconvenience her, maybe break the glass cases attached to the body that she was using for the spike.  It would kill me, or she would kill me shortly after, yet the other two would have a chance at getting away.

An hour ago, I wouldn’t have waited to do it.  Jamie’s speech made me hesitate, want to be absolutely sure there was no other choice.  I glanced back, gauging distance, helped Jamie run, then checked again, to see how fast she was gaining on us.

In the spaces between where her lips were sealed together, the lips parted, sucking in and huffing out breath.  The fluid flew through the tubes that had been implanted in her.

I let go of Jamie’s hand.

Jamie seized my wrist a heartbeat later, and this time, he was the one that hauled me up and forward.  A second wind, or a surge of desperate strength.

I kept going, only because I didn’t want to slow him down by fighting him or lagging behind.  In my heart, I knew it wasn’t enough, but I couldn’t simply acknowledge the fact, accept it and carry on with the original plan when he was trying so damn hard.

Somewhere along the line, I failed to estimate things right.  I misjudged how much time had passed, or Sub Rosa had managed a second wind or burst of speed in the same way Jamie did.

Jamie startled, his uniform jacket pulled tight against his chest, and he let go of my wrist.

He looked at me, not Sub Rosa, in the moment before she swept him into the wall.  A swiping motion, right to left, but it had enough force to break him.  Two dozen individual parts of Jamie cracked and percussed against the wall all in one horrible sound, before his body slumped to the stairs at the base of the wall.  His book tumbled down the stairs, and it just kept going, end over end, opening, carrying down, then closing itself before sliding down another few steps.

I continued another few steps up on momentum alone, tripping and almost falling because I wasn’t looking where I was going, before reality caught up to me.  Sub Rosa had stopped, so I stopped and turned to confront her.

Jamie’s book came to rest, the hard cover bent.

Bugs swirled, the wall-crawlers continued their eerie movements along the surfaces around us, but we were still.  Sub Rosa was just a step away from being exactly in between me and Jamie.  Helen was further up the stairs, but only by a bit.

My blood pounded in my ears, my mind raced so much I wasn’t sure I trusted it, as I tried and failed to see a way forward, something that would help Jamie.

I couldn’t get by Sub Rosa, bait her downstairs, and keep her busy somehow while sending one of the doctors to help Jamie, assuming he was alive.  I wouldn’t make it.  I knew it.  I couldn’t outrun her, I didn’t have the tools, and the doctor wouldn’t risk Sub Rosa’s wrath by going.  She’d had them cowed, down there.  The dead bodies suggested how.

I couldn’t scream for them to come up and help him, again, because they wouldn’t go, because they wouldn’t hear.

I couldn’t go down and force one to come with me and help Jamie on pain of death, because that would mean Helen had to deal with Sub Rosa.

I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t.  The thoughts dissolved into a haze of couldn’ts and the haze was an angry one, the pounding of blood in my ears and eyes intense enough that I could see my heart beating, my field of vision throbbing.

It was the polar opposite of what I’d experienced in my moment of near death. My thoughts then had gone quiet.  I’d been able to stop thinking.  Right now they were anything but quiet.

My thought was crystal clear, and it was well modulated, not a scream or an incoherent shout.

This is what it’s like to see red, was my thought.  Which was odd, because things seemed more blue-green, as if we were underwater.

I wished it was more productive.  That my surge of emotion and the clarity for my most destructive thoughts could provide a way to end her right this moment.

“Sy,” Helen said, behind me.  She sounded so normal.

“Yes?” I asked, my voice just as everyday as hers.

“There’s nothing you can do.”

Sub Rosa wasn’t holding onto the railing anymore.  If I could knock her down the stairs, so she might fall like Jamie’s book had… no.  It wouldn’t hurt her enough.

“Sylvester,” Helen said, with more emphasis.

I want to tear those staples out of her mouth so she can talk, then challenge her, call her out, break the arrogant, insane bitch.

“I know,” I admitted, aloud.  “But Ja-”

I stopped, cleared my throat so I could speak more clearly, found no word came out, and only managed something on a third try, changing the affect of the word, making it flat, whisper-quiet.  “Jamie.”

“You know he doesn’t want you to.”

Doesn’t, not wouldn’t.  I looked at the body, my eyes automatically moving away from the broken form, then made myself look again.  I blinked, and my eyes stung with the sweat mingled with the stuff I’d rubbed on my skin and in my hair to keep the bugs off and make the wall crawlers less inclined to hold on to me.

He was breathing.

The relief was so profound I found myself grabbing the railing to steady myself.

Anger was replaced with fear.

Sub Rosa still had the spike extending from her left hand.  She was closer to Jamie.

“I’d like to talk,” I said.

She shook her head slowly.

“Sylvester,” Helen said.  “Jamie doesn’t want you to take the risk.  Let’s go.”

Jamie doesn’t want to die.  If we leave him with her, he’ll die.  If we leave him without getting him help, he’ll die.  We’re all supposed to live, aren’t we?

I couldn’t voice the words.  I needed to open a dialogue with Sub Rosa, find a chink in the armor, a weak point, or something.

Her attention moved to Jamie.  Helen’s fault.

“Supervisor,” I said, my voice firm, authoritative.  A desperate stab at evoking something from the days when she’d had a different sort of power.

It worked.  Her head turned a degree.

“Earlier, not long after we crossed paths, you stroked my hair.  The others, the people who remember, they’ve painted you as a monster, the person you once were and who you are now.  They laid the blame at your feet, saying you’re why the Academy is so strict and results-focused.”

I could see the tension in her face building with each statement I made.

“But a real monster doesn’t have that gentleness to them,” I told her.

My eyes strained to find a sign that I was getting through to her.  If there were any changes, I couldn’t be sure if I was really seeing them or if I wanted to.

I was usually so good about these things.

Just as I’d done against Mauer, I fell back on fundamentals.  ‘Us versus them’ was an approach that almost always worked, framing an enemy, making myself and the others out to be part of ‘us’.  But we’d betrayed that expectation when Gordon had shot her.

Something else, then.

Establishing a rapport, humanizing.  A good technique for a hostage to use against a hostage taker, it could mean a turnaround in a situation, being released, or it could buy a moment of hesitation.

In this case, the humanizing was anything but, because I had to talk about monstrous things.

“I know what the Academy does,” I said.  “I’m not like other children.  Neither is she, and neither is he, that much should be obvious.  Believe me when I say that we know the sort of pain you’ve experienced.”

Her hand went up, and it touched the wounded eye and side of her head, where the blood had congealed to a jellylike consistency, the overall structure of her face devastated and mostly caved in.

“I’m talking about the other kind of pain.  Being slowly and surely twisted for the agenda of others.”

Her body language was all the reply I needed.  Her hand was slow to drop away from the hole in her face, as if to say, but this isn’t forgotten, or you deceived me once.

She turned back to Jamie, and I felt a yawning hollowness inside at the realization that I probably couldn’t stop her, whatever happened next.

“You-” Jamie croaked the word.

Sub Rosa moved the point of the spike toward him.  I hated to think what convulsing might do when so many of his bones were probably broken.

“You have… a nephew,” he said.  Each word or pair of words was labored, forced.

She didn’t stab him or touch him with the spike.

“His name… Edward.  Year older… than me.”

There was no reaction on Sub Rosa’s part.  Her expression was already warped by the staples and the portion of the cocoon that was draped over and around her head.  A bug-eyed stare.

Behind us, one of the wall crawlers got a little close.  Helen hissed at it, scaring it off.

Sub Rosa didn’t need to hiss.  She was big and scary enough that she apparently didn’t look like prey to the wall crawlers.

“He… not…  Academy.  Works…”

Each word seemed more painful to get out.  He wasn’t twitching a muscle as he talked.

“Runs errands… passes on messages… for factory owner.  His uncle, named Baxter.”

The pieces fell into place with that.

Baxter was a known name.  The family was wealthy, well liked.  The job of assisting a factory owner was believable, but paralleled Sub Rosa’s own experience to a slight degree.  She was the supervisor, and it was obviously a core part of her identity.

Everything Jamie was doing was calculated using known variables.  Probably some I hadn’t considered or ones I wasn’t aware of, drawn from Jamie’s recollection, and some informed by my desperate stab at gaining sympathy or connecting to her better side.

I felt Helen touch my shoulder.  She’d drawn closer.

Everything he’s doing, including the plodding, speed of his every utterance.

Buying time.

There was no saying how long we had.  I feared it might be no time at all, that Sub Rosa’s anger might outweigh her attachment to family.  That, as Helen and I made a run for it, leaving Sub Rosa and Jamie behind, she might give chase, and that one of us might get caught and utterly destroyed in the same way Jamie had.

My hand found Helen’s.  As she stumbled, fatigue catching up with her, I caught her with my shoulder in her armpit, bracing her with my entire body, scraping a shin against a stair while the both of us recovered.

“Brave boy,” she said.  She wasn’t talking about me.

How long before Jamie ran out of things to say, or worse, said the wrong thing, and tipped Sub Rosa off to the fact that he was lying through his teeth?

Or even worse still, how long before he succumbed to his injuries?

We had some time, be it a minute or five, but I didn’t like trusting luck.  It was a fickle mistress, whatever that meant.

“What do we need?” Helen asked.

“Shipman,” I said.  “One or two adults from the next room, to carry her.  The glass cases.  I need to get back to the others.”

“I’ll get the adults and Shipman, you do that thing,” Helen said.  “What are we doing?”

“Fishing,” I said.

“I’ve never gone fishing,” she said.  She was breathing hard, but she wasn’t panting, either.  Different means of breathing.  “Harpoon?”

“Hook,” I said, meeting her eyes.

“How fun!” she said.

Something to bring up later, if I could figure out how to word it.  Yes, this was probably fun for her, and yes, I suspected she was worried for Jamie in her own peculiar way, but the nature and tone of the statement were at odds with the fact that we were in as bad a situation as we’d ever been.

Up the stairs, to where the others are.

My legs felt like lead.  I doubted I had another run in me.

This would have to be the final confrontation.  All or nothing.  If we screwed up on any level or if something went too wrong, there would be no more tools left to play.

We reached the others.  I pulled ahead of Helen, pounding on the door that hid the adults as I passed it.  I tried to give it a cadence that would sound less like the knock of an immortal abomination of nature and more like something people could open a door for, but I rushed it a bit in the process.

I let myself into the room where Lillian, Gordon, Mary and Gladys Shipman were.  Quickly, I stopped by each, checking that they were still warm and breathing.

Mary was the last.  I helped myself to knives, because knives were useful, and then I reached up her skirt and pulled the loop of wire free.

The fishing line.

I could hear Helen outside, talking to the people in the other room.  Two words.  “Please help.”

My attention fell on Gladys.

The bait.

I bent down and began winding wire around her ankles.

Gordon’s hand moved.  He barely had his eyes open, but he touched my elbow.

I kept winding.

His touch became a firm grip, hard.

“Jamie’s dying,” I said, very quiet, my voice as firm as his grip.

The hand fell away.  His eyes were closed, but there was an expression of deep concern on his face.

I was still working on the tie of thin wire when Helen came into the room with three of the male scientists.  Gladys’ partner, the older woman, was at the tail end of the group.

She saw what I was doing and pushed past the others.  I pushed back, hard.

“No,” she said.  “No! Whatever you’re doing-”

“I’m stopping that monster and getting every single one of us out of here alive,” I said.

I’m going to try, I revised my statement in my head.

“We are,” Helen said, in a very particular voice that was probably modulated and calculated to win the adults over.  Confident without being threatening.  “Please trust us.  Do as we say, and we should all get out of here alive.”

I almost believed her, before I remembered that she was basing that statement on her belief in me, and I knew I didn’t have that much trust in me or my own plan.

Helen knelt by me, then leaned close, “If you do it like that, the wire’s going to pull taut and cut her to the bone.  She’ll lose her feet.”

Maybe the blood will help, I thought.

“They can give her new feet later.  There’s no time,” I said.  Jamie was down there, doing everything he could.  He was probably dying, he could die if his concentration or consciousness faltered for a moment and he said the wrong thing, or if Sub Rosa figured out he was lying or tired of him.

“Here,” Helen said.  She took the wire from my hands.  “Ibbot hired a trainer to teach me to tie people up properly.”

“Why would tying people up be useful?” I asked.  “You tie people up with… you.”

She smiled.  “I know.  I do.  It’s for the end goal.  The me I’m supposed to end up as, a nice skill to have available.”

I thought about it.  Helen as the dangerous dame, using her attractiveness and appeal as a weapon to get close.  I blinked a few times.

“Now I’m even less sure why you’d need to tie someone up,” I said.

She didn’t answer, as she tugged at the wire, but she leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek, which only confused me more.

She slipped few metal tools into the gap between wire and leg so the sharp edge of the wire would press them against Shipman’s legs rather than cut into flesh.

She did the remainder of the tying up and knotting, probably faster in the end than I’d have been on my own, and the knot looked strong, the extra ropes hooked into, under and around Shipman’s shoulders and clothing.

I gauged the remaining length of the wire.  About twenty feet?

It would have to do.

“Carry her,” I said, to the adults.

One balked.  “How old are you?”

“I’m eleven,” I said.  “Almost twelve.  And we’ve killed more monsters than you’re even aware existed.  Carry her.”

I was anxious for Jamie, and my anxiety was transforming into a crazed anger and impatience.  If I had to let Gladys Shipman lose her feet or murder one of these idiots as an example to make this work, then I’d damn well do it.

“Please,” Helen offered, as an addition to my order.

They picked up Shipman.

“Gloves?” I asked, looking around  “Thick ones… they’ll need something.”

I didn’t see anything.  Fuck it.

We walked as a group, me in the lead, Helen a little behind me.

“I’m going ahead,” I said.  “You set up at the fourth floor.  Use your lab coats or something to protect your hands.  Tie the other end to the rail.  Lower her down.”

“What?” one of the men asked.  He was older.  “What are you talking about?”

“Sub Rosa only wants a few things.  That girl is one of them.  Sub Rosa spent a long time tearing down doors and making her way through the Bowels to reach her,” I said.  “We’re going to give her what she wants.”

“Like hell you will,” the woman said.  Gladys Shipman’s partner.

“Not in reality,” I said.  “But we need to position her right, to set the hook.”

I looked at Helen.

“She’s stronger than me,” Helen said.  “I don’t think I can hold her.”

“You don’t need to hold her for too long,” I said.

“Oh,” Helen said.  “Okay then.”

She took me at my word so easily.  Helen wasn’t, as far as I was aware, possessed of the capacity for frustration or exploration.  She had something she was good at, she knew her niche, and she was profoundly comfortable within that niche.  Ibbot had done some things right.

In the briefest possible terms, she trusted herself, and she trusted me.

I trusted her instincts.  There were a few ways this could go, which would require far much explanation to cover in detail without confusing matters, and that same explanation would probably upset the natives.

We reached the spiral stairs.  I grabbed the railing, holding on, and slipped under, leaning over as far as I was able to look down the circular shaft.  Gorger was a pale speck down at the bottom, and Sub Rosa was far from a speck, a considerable distance closer.

She’d left Jamie behind, and she was coming up.

I felt a sickness roiling in my stomach, a feeling that refused to clarify itself.

“Get in position,” I said, as I moved to do the same.  “Lower her when I whistle.”

I hurried, though my legs were too tired to properly run.

Here we were.  It was hard to know what to do, if Sub Rosa was even hostile, but the consequences for assuming she wasn’t hostile and then being wrong… I wasn’t willing to deal with them.

One way or another, this was the final confrontation.

Thanks for buying us time, Jamie, I thought.

I picked up the canister of plague with ginger care.  I felt a thrill of power, simply from holding it.

In a confidence game, one of the first things to do was to create a sense of urgency.  The second thing to do was to put the other party off balance.  Clever men who made their illicit living manipulating others didn’t tend to do it while keeping their targets clear headed and focused.

I sat down, then lay back, and flipped over until I was on my belly, before creeping forward, looking through the supports for the railing and down.

When Sub Rosa was directly beneath me, I threw the canister down at an angle, so it would hit the wall just above her.

It didn’t break on the initial contact, but it hit the stairs and cracked.

The pressurized contents exploded into a cloud far, far larger than I’d expected.  I scrambled to get up and back.

I had to hope it wouldn’t reach Jamie, who was a few floors down.  There were the people on the ground floor too, but Jamie.

I really hoped none of the wall crawlers appeared.  I was vulnerable like this.  They couldn’t kill me, but they could distract at a critical moment.

The cloud stopped billowing out.  With all her injuries, Sub Rosa probably wouldn’t like it, though it might not take effect immediately.

That’s for hurting him, I thought.

I headed further up the stairs.  I grabbed the thing with water inside, then advanced back down a little, watching and waiting.  Better to have another canister behind me if I needed to make a run for it.

If she went down, I could hopefully disturb her with this.  She didn’t know it was harmless, for one thing, and she didn’t know I only had the three.

With luck, I could convince her that the only way to deal with the problem was to come  up.

She didn’t go down.  She emerged from one end of the red-brown cloud, rubbing at her eye, snorting to breathe through her nose.

She managed to clear her vision enough to make me out, a full floor above her, and picked up her pace.

If she came up, angry and ready to kill, I had an option for that as well.

I threw the canister with the compressed water vapor inside, aiming for it to land between us, closer to me than to her.

Like the last, it cracked and released its contents, with glass flying everywhere, before a thick mist enveloped that part of the stairwell.

I saw Sub Rosa back out of the lower end of the cloud.

Can’t charge ahead recklessly, can’t ignore me.  Do what you’re so good at doing.  The steady and implacable advance.

I turned and  retreated further, to the entrance to the fifth floor hallway, where the last vial was.

This was more defensive than offensive.

I had to wait for the mist to clear.  My heart was beating so hard in my chest I thought I might throw up because of it.

Come on.  Come on.

It took time for the mist to clear.  I fidgeted, waiting.

When it had mostly cleared, Sub Rosa forged ahead, wiping again at her eyes and nose.  The edges looked red and inflamed.

I whistled, still considering everything I needed to do.  If Sub Rosa came for me…

I picked up the last glass container.  My just-in-case measure.

Dangling from her ankles, Shipman was lowered into view.  I saw Sub Rosa crane her neck to look up and see.  I noticed how she picked up the pace.

Sub Rosa came up, Shipman was lowered down, and I waited, tense.

“Let’s deal,” I told her.  “We want to live, you want revenge.  You don’t need to be able to talk to make this deal.  It’s as simple as these things get.”

“Revenge?” I heard one of the adults above asking.  They’d heard.

Sub Rosa continued her advance, not stopping.  I tightened my grip on the glass canister and backed up a step.

“If you come after me,” I said, “You don’t get her.  They’ll drop her.  She dies, never the wiser.  Hardly a revenge against anyone who did this to you.”

She slowed a touch.

“She knew,” I lied.  “She was there.  She knew what you were.  You saw the recognition in her eyes when you saw her on the sixth floor.  It would be ridiculous to think she wouldn’t know, with her uncle working down here.”

Sub Rosa looked at Shipman, who wasn’t being lowered anymore.

Were the adults too busy fighting and arguing?

We’d told them all they had to do was follow orders.

“She told me those things about you.  She was one of many who’ve taken your legacy and twisted it into something ugly.  Lies, and untruths.”

But Shipman was several feet out of reach, dangling, skirt closer to her ribcage than her knees, and I, unfortunately, was closer.

Sub Rosa drew nearer.

Damn it.

I raised the glass canister over my head.

Sub Rosa lunged forward, fast and hard enough that she couldn’t aim, and tapped me in the ribs with the spike.

My knees went out from under me as the shock rippled through me.  The glass canister slipped from my grip a moment too late, falling in the wrong direction, hitting the stairs above me.

No.

No.

I’d hoped to use the cloud of mist to beat a retreat, either into the hallway or up the stairs.  Let Sub Rosa have only Shipman in reach when the mist cleared.

But now I was at her mercy.

My breath caught as I tried to bring it into my lungs.  When I finally found air, I screamed, “Lower her!”

“Barely any wire left!” I heard back.

Sub Rosa stared down at me, her one visible eye clear.  A thick rash had already spread over her exposed skin.

The look in her eyes was a sad one, which caught me off guard.

On the other hand, her fist was clenched, her hand shaking.

Not enough mercy in her to spare me, not enough anger in her for her to go straight after Shipman.

I stood to be a casualty of the middle ground.

Shipman suddenly dropped another three feet.  The movement caught Sub Rosa’s eye.

The woman looked away from me, the spike pointed in my general direction.

She walked over to the railing, leaning forward and reaching up and out to seize Shipman by the collar.  She tugged, hard, and Shipman came free entirely, the wire from the grip or tie or whatever they’d done up above.

Hopefully Helen wasn’t too busy lowering Shipman to-

No.  Helen wasn’t too busy.  She appeared, hair and skirt fluttering as she dropped from the stairwell above, seizing Sub Rosa’s reaching arm and Shipman both.

My heart leaped.  This hadn’t quite been the plan.

Sub Rosa was strong, but leverage was leverage.  Helen had to weigh about seven stone.  Gladys maybe eight.  Both weights tugged down on Sub Rosa’s arm as she was reaching over the rail.

The top end of her went down, the other end went up and over the railing.

I found my faculties, and half-crawled, half-walked over to the ledge, praying that I wasn’t going to find out that I’d lost Jamie and Helen in the same day.

Staring down, I saw Helen another floor down.

If I or another human being had reached out and grabbed the railing after falling nearly thirty feet, I might have lost my fingers or my arm.  But Helen was built differently.  She hung there, her arm a few feet longer than it should’ve been, a limp Gladys Shipman dangling from her other hand.

At the bottom of the shaft was a dark blot that marked where Sub Rosa had hit ground.  The pale blob that was Gorger inched forward, until it reached her, and then consumed its meal.

Helen had made it.  Shipman too, maybe.  Sub Rosa was gone.

I wasted no time in heading to Jamie’s side.

Lips Sealed 3.10

I reached Helen.  She hung from one hand, still holding Gladys, looking abjectly unconcerned with the immense drop below her.  Wrist had dislocated from elbow, which had dislocated from shoulder.  The skin stretched, and muscles stood out in odd ways in the space between the bones.  Not that her bones were the usual sort.

Because of the way the arm and shoulder were stretched so thin, her face was contorted, the skin pulled down toward one side of her neck.

“Did we get her?”

“Exactly right,” I said, quiet, bending down.  “Line, hook, and sinker.”

I took hold of her wrist with both hands.

“You’re not strong enough, Sy,” she said.  She craned her head around.  “Help is coming.  They’ll help us up.”

The people who had lowered Gladys down, Gladys’ partner included, coming down the stairs from the level above.

“Bring them down to me and Jamie?” I asked.

“Okay, Sy,” Helen said.

I abandoned her.  Down the stairs.  My legs were tired, my brain was exhausted, my whole body ached from what had to be the lingering effects of getting shocked, and all of the pent-up emotions were dissolving into something approximating exhaustion.  My hair stuck to my forehead, my clothing stuck to my back.  My knees were rubbed raw from the way they’d rubbed against the sweat-damp uniform slacks.  My skin prickled where I’d rubbed it with the chemical stuff.

There was no big plot to focus on now.  I was Sylvester and nothing more.  I wanted every one of my fellow Lambs to be okay, and nothing more.

By the time I reached Jamie, some of the people from downstairs were already making their way up.  A few were clustered around him.  Others were standing at the ready, with improvised weapons in hand.  Shirts had been pulled off to double as headcovers, cloth was wrapped around hands, and still, they had to fight to keep the bugs off.

My thought processes and feelings were horribly confused as I wrapped my head around the scene.  They wouldn’t be doing that if he was dead, so he was okay.  Heart soaring.  But he was hurt.  Ugly feeling in my middle.  And, perhaps the hardest thing to process, I wanted to be the person by his side, helping him.  Resentment and anger.  The feelings mingled and it felt bad.

It must have shown on my face, because expressions changed as people saw me drawing nearer.

Jamie’s breathing was ragged, audible from several feet away.

If you idiots hadn’t tipped off the monster, Jamie would be okay, I thought.

“He’s a tough one,” a man told me.  He had his sweater and a shirt pulled up in such a way that only his eyes were visible, but the skin around those eyes was black.  His lab coat was buttoned up to the chin, cinched tight with a tie.  A black man in a lab coat – an oddity in the Academy.  “He’s breathing on his own, and that says something.”

I nodded, mute.

“You should cover up,” the man said, all business.

“I did,” I told him.  “Covered myself with kerosene.  Bugs don’t like it, neither do the, uh, things on the walls.”

“This boy too?”

“Yeah.”

“Him too?”

“Yeah.”

“Thought he smelled off.  You know kerosene will burn you, smeared on like that?”

“Diluted,” I lied.  Jamie’s had been diluted, Helen hadn’t cared at all about the strength of the stuff, and it was slow to really get to me.

“You look flushed.  If you-”

“I don’t care about me,” I cut him off, before adding, “Sir.”

I gave a pointed look to Jamie, to make it absolutely clear where my concerns were.

“Pupils are dilating.  He follows my finger with his eyes.  But his heartbeat isn’t strong, breathing is taking work.  The bleeding at the side of his head makes me worry about a cranial bleed.  Spiderweb crack of the skull, complete shoulder break, several rib, arm, and pelvis fractures.  His stomach is firm.”

“Firm is good?”

“Firm suggests internal bleeding.”

He had a stern, matter-of-fact way of delivering the bad news.  Combined with his skin color, and I could guess his history.  Black soldier, with duties of a field medic, possibly because of things he’d picked up from his father, or another family member.  When things had gone poorly, the medics had received advanced training.

Much as was the case with the women who’d worked at the Academy during wartime, the Academy had decided that even if someone was black, knowledge was knowledge.

That he was here in the Bowels now, that was notable.  That he was the one looking after Jamie, that was something else altogether.  People who’d had to fight for power so often set everything but their work aside, even decency and kindness.

Sub Rosa was one such person, I suspected.

“He’s going to need surgery,” the man said.  “I’m doing it right here.  I don’t like the idea of moving him, with this many breaks.”

I nodded.

In a very serious, low tone, he told me, “It isn’t going to be pretty.”

“I’ve seen worse,” I said, in that same tone.

“Sy?”

It was Jamie.

“She’s gone, Jamie.  Helen and I got her.”

That turned heads.  Fuck it.

“Sy.  I talked to her… I told her lies,” he said.  His voice was reedy.

“I know, Jamie.  I was there for the start of it.”

“No.  I… kept talking… wasn’t thinking… not straight… rambling… lies.”

“I’m not following.”

“Stupid lies… contradicting… myself… she knew… she listened… stroked my face…”

“She hurt you,” I said.

“Don’t think…” he said, but he didn’t find the word or the breath to finish the statement.

“She hurt you on purpose, Jamie.”

“I saw her fall…”

“I told you, Jamie, she’s gone.”

“Started out… telling her about… her dream… things she might have wanted… but after… was… ugh… hurts.”

“Words can wait, son,” the doctor who was sitting with Jamie said.

Jamie continued, oblivious.  “Was telling… her… about my dreams… things I wanted… things… never told… anyone.”

“You did good, Jamie.”

“She… was gentle.  Made me comfo… comfortable.  Without hurting…”

He was still on that?

The fingers of his good hand twitched.  I reached out to take it.

He panted, as if speaking had meant he lost more air than he took in, even with the ragged gasping breaths, and he needed to refill the reserves.

I thought back through what Jamie had said, trying to find the main thrust of it.

“You reached deep,” I murmured.  “To her, and inside yourself, in order to survive, and to help us survive.  You were hurting, your defenses were down.  The same thing happens with people who are kept as prisoners of war, or kidnapping victims.”

“No.  She was…”

“Sub Rosa was bad, Jamie.  She hurt an awful lot of people, and when it came down to it, she went after Shipman, and that was how we beat her.”

“Went… after?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Stabbed?”

“No,” I said.  Then I realized what Jamie was saying.  It wasn’t concern for Shipman’s welfare, or for Gordon, who liked the girl.

He was trying to gauge whether his estimation of Sub Rosa had been right or wrong.

I opened my mouth to revise my statement, to clarify, but Jamie cracked his eye open in that same moment.  It was barely open at all, squinting against light and pain, and it was so bloodshot it made me think of Sub Rosa’s eye socket, filled with clotted blood.

“Don’t… lie, Sy,” he told me.

Even in this state, he had enough of a sense of me to gauge that I was venturing into the territory of dishonesty.  For his sake, to soothe his conscience, but I’d been on the cliff.

I shut my mouth, holding back the lie, and gave his fingers a light squeeze.

We sat for a good minute.

I didn’t like how things sat.  Jamie was squirming more, and I wasn’t sure it was physical pain.  Much as I’d suggested, his defenses were low.  This, lying in a broken heap on the staircase, was Jamie laid bare.

I’d done nothing to assuage his worries.

“Down there, Sub Rosa killed people, right?”

“Yes,” the doctor said.

“What did she have you doing?”

“The wall came apart.  We were pulling out slabs.  There were crates at the back.”

“Crates?”

“Explosives.  Sticks of dynamite, stacked high, inside the wall.”

“Did she want to bring this whole place down?” I asked.

“Who knows?”

A bystander spoke up,  “I wouldn’t think it’s that easy.  There are mechanisms in place.  Sand, water.  There’d be damage, but…”

But she knows this place too well, I thought.  She would know the dynamite wouldn’t necessarily do the trick, and the Academy wouldn’t store enough dynamite to destroy the Bowels.

“Maybe blowing an escape route out of here,” I said.  “Or setting a trap for when they opened the seal and came down here.”

“No,” Jamie wheezed.

I looked at him.

“No.  Walled up… tunnel… I think.  Layout of… Academy, only…  one place… she could go… ow, ow.”

“One place?”

“This deep?… Radham’s monster…”

There were murmurs.

Jamie wasn’t being discreet, but he had an excuse, and I was beyond the point of caring.

Radham’s monster.  Sleeping away in a chamber beneath the Academy.

“Did she intend to wake it up and destroy Radham?  Or was she risking waking it up to get out?”

“Don’t… know.”

I watched Jamie breathing, worrying he might stop at any moment.  He was squirming less than before.  I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but I hoped that his conscience regarding Sub Rosa was clearer, and that he’d been reminded what she’d been.

Which wasn’t to say that who she was and what we’d faced weren’t entirely different things.

A fresh group of people began making their way up the stairs, carrying tools and kits.

“If you stay there, you can’t do anything, you can’t move, you cannot get in the way,” the black doctor told me.  “No matter how bad it looks, or how violent we seem to be acting.”

“Okay,” I said.  “I’ve seen worse, really.”

“Sy, was it?”

“Sylvester.  Sy or Sly to friends.”

“Sylvester, then.  Sit tight.  We’ll do what we can.”

I watched as they got all the tools ready, kit and kaboodle all laid out.  There were murmurs from the bystanders, all Academy trained, commenting on what should be done first, where the priorities were, approaches and methods.  Yet it was this man who’d stepped forward to help Jamie.

I wondered how much there was at play in that.  Was it the sort of thing where people thought that blame might be laid at the feet of a doctor who tried and failed to save Jamie?

There was a refuge in thinking about that sort of thing.  The mechanisms at work inside people’s heads.

This was a man who stood alone.

“Doctor,” I said.  “If you save him, you can call me Sy.”

He didn’t take his eyes off Jamie, but he murmured, “Willard D.”

I made a mental note, not that my mental notes were reliable.

I saw Willard’s hands go to the buttons at Jamie’s collar.

“Everyone else,” I said, “If you don’t have something to contribute, get lost.  It’s still dangerous, and enough stings from those bugs will stop your heart.  Go to your labs, close the doors, and block any openings.”

The warning was enough to scare most off.  Only a few lingered, out of ego or curiosity.

I watched as Jamie’s uniform was alternately unbuttoned and cut away.  The scars were on full display.

Willard looked up at me.

“Don’t cut across the scars,” I said.

“Can I ask what they are?”

“Classified,” I said.  “I don’t think you have permission to know.”

“Looks like I signed on for quite a task, then,” he said.

I watched him making the initial incisions in Jamie’s belly.  My eye didn’t leave that scalpel, until I felt a hand on my hair.

Helen, sitting on the stair above me.  She’d mostly fixed her arm, but the wrist hung limp and there were light bruises.

She stroked my hair again.

I returned my eyes to the scalpel, as if I could will it to be steady.

☙

The agreement had been to take turns watching Jamie.  When this had been decided, Gordon, Gladys, Lillian, and Mary had insisted that they be the ones to watch, as they’d slept through the finale with Sub Rosa.

I lay my side with a rolled up lab coat for a pillow, another lab coat draped over me, lying on the floor of the lab where the others had dozed off, now free to rest and recuperate, exhausted to the bone, but instead I’d spent hours watching the rise and fall of Jamie’s chest, and watching Mary.

Mary’s watch had been spent sharpening a knives, until Gordon muttered something rude at her.  After that, she’d taken to coiling the remainder of the razor wire, unwinding it, then fixing it, over and over.

I watched through half-lidded eyes as she suddenly rose, walked over to the clock on the desk, lit a fresh candle, positioned the case around the new candle to reduce the light, then went to rouse Lillian.  Without compunction, Mary took the space Lillian had been using to sleep, makeshift pillow and the fire blanket both.

Lillian didn’t fidget.  She didn’t read or pace or do much of anything.  A few times she rose from her seat, she checked on Jamie, then returned to her perch on the stool.

About thirty minutes in, I heard her making small sounds.

Thirty-five minutes in, I roused.  In the gloom, I approached her and put my arms around her.  She started squirming, trying to wipe away tears, but I shifted my grip to hug her tighter, holding her arms to her side.

“One of the worst things that could have happened to you happened yesterday,” I whispered in her ear.  “You made it, Lil.”

“Don’t-“

“Lil.  You made it, and you did well.“

“I didn’t.”

“I’d be the first person to tell you if you didn’t,” I said.  “Right?”

She made a small incoherent sound that might have been reluctant agreement.

“You did well.  Carry that with you.  You faced your worst fear… now leave it behind,” I told her, voice soft, with cadence, soothing.  “Today, you made great strides toward being the very awesome Lil-the-adult you’re going to become.”

She nodded, the back of her head rubbing against my chest.

“Come on,” I whispered.  “Over here.”

I led her to the spot where I’d been lying down.  She obeyed, wiping again at her face now that I wasn’t keeping her from doing it.  I’d meant it to be a kind of permission to keep crying, but she’d gone and stopped.  Silly.

“Lie down,” I whispered.

“I’m on watch,” she whispered, in an even quieter voice.

“I’m not sleeping anyway,” I said.  “Lie down, rest easy.  You’ll wake up tomorrow, and this whole thing with me being nice will have been a dream.”

She let out a hiccup of a giggle, then wiped at her face again, but she did lie down.

I helped her fix the lab coat blanket, then sat down, my back to her stomach, arms around my knees, watching Jamie.

For his part, he watched me.  He’d seen it all.

I’d chosen a position, unfortunately, that didn’t give me a good view of the clock on the desk.  I didn’t want to move for fear of disturbing Lillian, so I stayed where I was.

The hours passed in a vague, dreamlike way.  I didn’t once come close to nodding off, sitting there listening to the pattern of breathing from the six Lambs.

I sat there watching, as Gordon and Gladys roused together, taking a seat on the table opposite me, and spent a while watching together.  I gave him a little wave, to let him know I was awake, and he waved back.

I could have gone to sleep, knowing they were on watch, but I didn’t.  I might have done it or pretended to do it to give them privacy, but as much as I liked Gordon, I didn’t like Gladys enough to go to the trouble.  They talked amongst themselves, confiding, Gordon keeping the periodic chuckle quiet.

There was no way to track time, but by the movement of the candlelight and shadows, I might have guessed it was two or so hours later that we felt the tremor.

Every sleeping individual stirred awake as it built in intensity, making the room rumble.

Gordon stood, crossed the room, and flicked the light switch.  The lights that came on were the ordinary ones, not the emergency ones.

“Gorger passed on word, I guess,” Gordon said.  “Problem solved.  The released experiments have been caught or contained.  They’re letting us out.”

There were nods and people rubbing at eyes in response.

“We should wait, there are going to be a lot of people rushing to get out.” Helen said.  She looked far less disheveled than someone who had just been sleeping was supposed to look.  She had minimal bed hair, and her clothes weren’t even that much more wrinkled.

I could imagine the pushing and shoving at the top of the staircase.

“Still sitting tight,” I said.  I looked at the others, and saw Mary’s hair.  She did have messy hair.  I grinned and pointed.

She smiled back, and set to trying to fix it.  Apparently a comb and ribbons were part of her arsenal, tucked away on her person.

“It’s too bad,” he said.  “Feels like it’s been too long.  I’m looking forward to some fresh air.”

I wasn’t the only one to nod agreement.

There was a knock at the door.  Gordon, sitting by the door, opened it without rising from his perch.  When he saw who it was, he stood so he could open it wider.

“Gladys?” Gladys’ coworker asked.  “I’m going.  If you want to come?”

Gladys glanced at Gordon, then nodded at the woman.

“I’ll walk you to the edge of the crowd,” Gordon said, glancing back at us.  “And report back to these guys about how things look.”

“Sure,” Helen said, brightly.  “Have fun!”

Gordon smiled, then left with the two doctors.

I watched the door slowly swing closed.  Mary craned her neck, shifting over from her seat on the stool to match the movement of the door, looking, and I saw her eyes momentarily light up, legs kicking in excitement.

“What?” Lillian whispered.

Mary pursed her lips in a kiss, and I felt my heart sink.

As if to symbolize something, like entombment, the door shut with a woof of air, sealing by way of a tight fit and sheer weight.

“Not a fan,” I said.

“Of Gladys?” Mary asked, still smiling a little.

“Of them.  As a pair.  I don’t get it.”

“He got his moment as the knight in shining armor,” Helen said.  “I bet he’s the kind of boy that likes that idea.  But I think she’s more appreciative of the fact that he explained things after.  She seems like the type that’s ignored relationships in favor of work.  He must have found a chink in the armor, awakened that interest.”

“Are you miss Cupid now?” I asked.  “You pay attention to this sort of thing?”

“I prefer Aphrodite,” Helen said, still smiling.  “And I’m working on it.”

I shook my head.

“Grumpy this morning,” Jamie muttered.  He was awake, but he hadn’t roused.

“Jealous?” Mary asked.

I wheeled on her.

She grinned, showing me all of her tiny perfect white teeth.

“Uh, no,” I said.  “Definitely not.  Not on any level.  I’d take Sub Rosa on a date before I took Shipman, and I’m not jealous of her for having Gordon because I’m a guy and Gordon is most definitely not a girl.  No and nope.”

“But she’s taking him away from the group,” Lillian said, behind me.  “It’s okay to be jealous of that.”

“I’m not jealous!”

Jamie slowly, painfully reached out, his fingers and hand extending toward my foot.  I put the toe of my shoe further out in his direction.

He gave it a pat.  “There there.  There there.”

“I’d hit you if I wasn’t worried it would kill you.”

“There there.”

I shook my head, resolving to ignore Jamie.  “Is this a long term thing?  Him and her?  How does that work?”

“We’ll find out and we’ll figure it out,” Mary said.

“Ugh,” I said.  “You can.  I’m going to live in happy little Sylvestertown, where this isn’t a thing.”

“He’s growing up, our golden hero,” Helen said.

I shook my head.  “First one of us to reach that point, I guess.”

The moment of silence that followed the statement caught me off guard.

“Which point?” Mary asked.

“Liking someone?” I asked, back, a little confused.

“No,” Jamie said, softly, head down against his pillow, eyes closed.

“No,” Mary said.

“No?” Lillian said, uncertainly.

“Gordon’s a late bloomer, all things considered,” Helen said.

All eyes fell on me.  The latest of bloomers, it seemed.

“No,” I said.  “No way.  That’s not fair!”

“You’re one of the youngest of us, and you’re a boy,” Helen said.  “Don’t worry.  Your time will come.”

“You’re all a bunch of dirty liars, you’re doing this to mess with me!”

“He is grumpy,” Mary commented.

“There there,” Jamie said, patting my foot again.

I pulled it away, and mimed like I was going to kick him in the head.  It prompted the softest of laughs, which became a hacking coughing fit.

The door opened.  Gordon.  He gave Jamie a concerned look.

“Way is clear,” he reported.

We started getting ourselves pulled together, the people who’d slept without shoes pulling them on.  I hadn’t taken mine off, and helped Gordon with Jamie.  I was actually a better choice than some of the girls, because I was short enough that he could put an arm around my shoulders without reaching up and over.

Once we were all sorted, Gordon told the girls to go ahead and make sure nobody would jostle or bump us.

Our movement as a trio was excruciatingly slow, and I knew it would be worse once we reached the stairs.

As we hobbled and limped forward, trying not to jar Jamie too much, Jamie spoke up.  “Sy.”

“Hm?” I grunted.

“Based on recent events, I think you’re- ah!  You’re in good shape.”

“Mmf,” I grunted, again.  “How so?”

“I’ve seen the better side of you.  You don’t have anything to worry about.”

“Mm,” I grunted, bearing as much weight as I could while trying to keep Jamie from bobbing up and down.

“Her crying was annoying me,” I said.

“Hm?” Jamie made an inquisitive sound.  “Ah.  I’m sure.”

☙

As a group, Jamie now in a wheelchair, we met Hayle and Briggs.  Rather than going to them, we’d apparently earned the right to have them come to us, a short distance from the exit to the Bowels.

The leaves were bright, the rain light, and the sun even penetrated the clouds to a degree.

“Gorger communicated that you played a big role in this,” Briggs said.

“Sy, Helen, and Jamie, toward the end,” Gordon said.

“Jamie,” Briggs said.  He gave Jamie a once-over.  “There’s an operating room waiting.  You can go.  I’m sure the others will catch you up.”

“No,” Jamie said.

“You’d rather stay?”

“I…” Jamie made a face.  “I forgot something.  Missed something.  I need an appointment.”

I saw his hand shake as he moved it toward his book.

“I see.  Appointment first, then operation?”

Jamie nodded, a movement made jerky by nervousness and anxiety.

Rather than make him keep reaching, I stepped close.  I took the battered book I’d recovered while he’d been getting set up in his wheelchair and checked over.

Jamie smiled.

Briggs signaled someone, and they approached to wheel Jamie away.

I watched him go, a sick feeling in my middle.

His appointments were worse than mine, in a way.

“In his absence,” Briggs said, “I’d like written reports from each of you on the incident.”

There were a few suppressed groans, mine was one.

“It’s a third strike in the last year,” Briggs said.  “I’ve already been told there will be changes.  Radham Academy’s underground laboratories will be refurbished and redone entirely.  Radham Academy’s staff will be overhauled.”

I felt a note of alarm.  I looked in Hayle’s direction.

“Rest assured, Professor Hayle will retain his post,” Briggs said.  “However, I will not.”

My eyebrows went up.

“The sentiment across the Crown States is that there is something brewing, and apparently I am unfit to lead the Academy through it.  It may be right,” Briggs said.

I didn’t miss the hint of bitterness in his voice.

This was a demotion he would never recover from.

“Radham will be looked after by a Duke, I believe the man is sixteenth in line for the Crown, and he has led armies in war,” Hayle said, looking at me.  “If I actually have to convey to you why you are not to get on his bad side, I’ve failed on multiple levels.”

“I understand,” I said.

“I really hope you do,” he said.

“The transition period will be difficult,” Briggs said.  “At Professor Hayle’s recommendation, I’m assigning you a task in the meantime.  A task for which you’ll need these.”

He reached into a deep lab coat pocket and retrieved a small bottle.  He shook it, making the pills rattle.  Though the glass was thick, I could tell that the pills were a deep purple.

“This is the same material we feed into the rain and the drinking water,” he said.  “Without it, you’ll find yourself quickly sickening and dying.”

“We’re leaving Radham?” Gordon asked.

With a time limit, I thought.  Only so many pills.

“As soon as Jamie is out of the hospital and you’ve each had your appointments,” Hayle told us.

“What for?” Mary asked.

“This time, we’re dealing with a young woman on the run,” Briggs told us.  “She was one of several in line to become a professor, a young one, and a woman, no less.  When she didn’t get her position, we had to take measures, given the knowledge she’d picked up.  A brief incarceration, then work in the underground labs until an opportunity came up.”

“She was a prisoner,” Gordon said.

“With emphasis on ‘was’, Gordon,” Briggs said.  “She escaped, with the head of another prisoner.  Her name is Genevieve Fray, and she has a deep grudge against the Academy.”

“Okay,” Gordon said.  “We find her, we stop her.”

“I would very much like you to do that,” Briggs said, “But there’s another concern at play.”

He turned his eyes to me.

“What?” I asked, confused.

“To make sure everyone is on the same page,” Hayle said, “Mary, I know you don’t know the full details about the other projects, unless they’ve told you things they shouldn’t.”

We had.

“Sylvester was an extension of an existing project, one that used minute amounts of chemicals and poisons to maintain and stimulate brain liquidity.  Faster learning, faster adaptation, more connections.  Many students opt into this program, taking small amounts.  Sylvester was a stress test for the program, to discover the effective maximums and breaking point.”

I swallowed hard.

This wasn’t news to me, but…

“With his inclusion to the Lambs, we stopped pushing as hard as we were.  We left things be as they were, and another Academy took on the task of testing the limits of the Wyvern project,” Hayle said.

“Miss Fray was someone who benefited from what we thought were small doses.  Part of the reason for her loss of professorship was that she was manufacturing her own doses, for herself.  We discovered this, among other things, and thought her too dangerous.”

“When you say she’s manufacturing her own doses,” I said, “Is she taking as much as me, or…”

“We don’t know,” Hayle said.

“She’s angry at the Academy, her brain is working very much like yours does, Sylvester, and she’s running.  We have a dim idea of where she is, but she’s proven too evasive for Dog and Catcher.  You need to find her, and you need to do it fast.”

I nodded.

But my brain was only fixated on one thing.

I have a sister.

Enemy (Arc 3)

Winter

“Is Mr. Howell expecting you?” the stitched asked.

Warren stared.  There were so few of the stitched in Pontiac, and they were the sort of thing that was ignored and people who used them were looked down on.  Pontiac was still a city in the Crown’s dominion, but it was a good distance from any of the Academies and there wasn’t much love for the Academy’s work there.

Now he was home, and a dead man stood in his father’s entryway, dressed in a footman’s clothing.  Warren glanced back over his shoulder at his companion, Harry, who quirked an eyebrow in response.  Harry’s sandy-hair was tucked beneath a cap, and he wasn’t clean-shaven, unfortunately.  They’d stepped right off the train and made their way straight there.  Warren had decided to shave while braving the periodic bumps and jostles of the carriage, and had made out with only one nick at his jaw.

“I’m his son,” Warren finally managed, still a little dumbstruck.  “I sent a telegram ahead, he should be expecting me.”

“This way, sir,” he told me, stepping back and gesturing.

The stitched in Pontiac hadn’t been so well made.  They were haulers, dirty and covered up with heavy clothes and caps, they did the dangerous work until they overheated and fried.  Even before the overheating, though, they were rarely able to speak more than one slurred word at a time.  Warren had always avoided them.

It walked just a little bit stiffly.  Harry fell into step beside Warren, exaggerating the stitched’s gait.  Warren elbowed him, hard, and Harry resumed walking normally, still maintaining a shit-eating grin.

On a good day, Harry was such a character.  On a bad one, he was incorrigible.

Warren hoped Harry could lose the smirk soon.  The were just now approaching the sitting room.

The manservant opened the double doors, and Warren’s hopes were dashed.

The sitting room itself was as he remembered it.  There were three sets of arching double doors opening to the outside, partially made of glass, a large window, and more archways that hid slightly recessed bookshelves.  The hardcover books had gold lettering, some faded more than others.  The furniture was ornate, some of which had been antiques when his grandfather had been young.

His father and another man stood in the middle of the sitting room, beside what looked to be an eighteen year old girl in a state of undress from the waist up, only a brassiere covering her.

Warren’s father looked at him with a moment’s surprise, then smiled.  Harry’s grin was ear to ear, positively delighting in Warren’s situation.

“Father.”

“Warren!” his father said, approaching.  “So good to see you!”

Warren accepted the hug stiffly, not quite sure what to do.  His father was a tall man, but he’d dropped some weight, and felt surprisingly frail under Warren’s arms.  His father was from Cardiff, tall, dark, and surprisingly genial for how grim he could look.

His mother, not yet present, was short, but of brawny English-speaking German stock.  Warren had been blessed with the best traits of both, putting him above average in height and of a respectable solid build, and years at university had put some muscle on his frame.

“You look different,” his father said.

“I feel different,” Warren said, trying not to look at the elephant in the room.

His father smiled.

“It’s been a long time, Warren,” the other man in the room said.

Warren paid attention to him for the first time, an old man with a very thick beard and a white lab coat.

“Doctor Pegram?  You’re right.  It’s been forever.”

“Not since you were small.  I watched you grow up, and now your father tells me you’ve just finished your studies?”

“Halfway across the Crown States, Doctor, yes.  I’ve been learning about machines and machinery,” Warren said, feeling a little embarrassed at the admission.

“Good on you.  Not enough young people working with the hard sciences.  It’s all chemicals and biology, ratios and balances instead of numbers and calculations,” the doctor said, gesturing at himself.  “Why machines, Warren?”

“I, uh, always liked cars, sir,” Warren said.  His eye flickered toward the woman.

The doctor smiled.  “Don’t mind her.”

“It’s rather hard not to,” he admitted.

“Ah, of course,” his father said, “Wendy, get dressed, please.”

The woman moved, and immediately Warren recognized her as a stitched.  The movements were slightly off.  Her scars, however, were so faint that they only appeared in the right light, light pink and faintly reflective.

When she raised her hands up to pull her hair out from beneath her shirt, he saw how there was a piece of metal embedded into the side of her neck, back near the spine.

“She’s yours?”

“Yes.  She cleans and runs small errands.  She requires a little bit more care when instructions are given,

“I’ve been gone five years, and when I return, you’re employing stitched?”

“Times change, son.  All the arable land surrounding Radham is being co-opted by the Academy.  I manage the farms and farmers as best I can, to give them work, but the Academy grows bigger, stronger, better crops.  Blight doesn’t touch their plants, and they use stitched labor.  I have to make concessions if I want to compete.”

Warren glanced again at Harry, worried it was too sensitive a discussion when they had a guest.  Two, if Dr. Pegram was included.

“It’s alright, Warren.  There were a few bad years, but we’re managing well enough.  Using stitched for the field work was a hard choice, it meant turning some laborers away, but…”

The man sighed.

“No other choice?”

“No good ones.  I forgot what it might look like to someone coming at this from an objective standpoint, I don’t think of them as anything more than tools.”

Warren nodded.  He felt uncomfortable with the notion, but he couldn’t put his finger on why, or how he might fix it.  Instead, he changed the subject.

“I almost forgot.  Father, Dr. Pegram, this is Harry, my friend from school.  Harry, this is my father, Mr. Clifford Howell, and Dr. Pegram, the man who pulled me into this world and looked after me for the first ten or twelve years after that.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Howell, Dr. Pegram,” Harry said.  He stepped forward, hand extended.

“Is Harry only visiting Radham?” Warren’s father asked.

“I’m here to stay, as a matter of fact.  Warren and I are starting our own business, building and fixing up cars.”

“I was top of my class in the building,” Warren said.  “Harry’s grades were… less stellar, but he’s a salesman through and through, and he knows just where we can get started.”

“Excellent,” his father said.  “Might have some competition from the academy.  There’s something to be said for the carriages we’re all used to.”

“There’s something to be said for cars, too,” Harry said.

Warren half-turned as he saw a movement in the doorway.  His mother.  Smiling, he met her halfway and wrapped her in a hug.

She had to raise herself up on her toes to touch his face, and she put one hand on him to steady herself as she plucked the cap off his head.  “No hats indoors.”

“Sorry, mother,” Warren said, a little abashed to be talked to like a little boy while Harry was around.  He saw Harry snatch the cap from his own head, lightning quick.

“Sit, please,” his mother said.  “Wendy.”

The stitched girl turned.

“Fill the teapot with the boiling water from the stove, I’ve already got teabags in there.  And, let me see-”

“Don’t count me among your guests,” the doctor said.  “You’ve already been so hospitable, and I’m on my way out the door.”

“Four cups, then, Wendy.  Farewell, Doctor,” she said, giving the man a brief hug.

They settled themselves on armchairs and couches that had been positioned around the little coffee table.

The small talk never happened.  Warren’s father sat, giving him a peculiar look, then squinted.

“Father?”

“You look different, Warren.  I thought it might be your hair, or your brow, but…”

Warren felt his heart skip a beat as his father circled the table.  The grip on Warren’s chin was surprisingly strong and fierce as his father forced his head up at an angle, so he was looking up at the man.

No geniality now.  Only the grim.

“Your eyes.”

“Ah, heh,” Warren said.  “Harry convinced me.”

“It’s true, I did.”

“Blue?” his father asked, no humor in his tone.

“My vision is sharper, too.  The change in color from brown was purely cosmetic.”

“It looks wrong,” his father said, and there was something in his voice that made Warren feel deeply uncomfortable.

“Clifford,” his mother said.  “Don’t make mountains out of molehills.”

“This isn’t a molehill, if my suspicions are right.  Or are you going to tell me this will go away on its own.”

“It’s permanent, father.”

“It was a lark, sir,” Harry said.  “I convinced him it was cheaper to change his eyes than to buy eyeglasses every few years.”

“Changed how?” the man’s words had a hollowness to them.  “Torn out and swapped in with another man’s?”

“They rewrote the language that determines how my eyes should be,” Warren said.

Warren’s father let go of his chin as if he’d been burned.

“I know you’re more conservative, father, but if you’re employing stitched-”

“This and that are two very different things.”

“It’s a very minor change.”

Harry chimed in, “An attractive one.  I told him it would get him all the girls, an ice blue stare, but-”

“Please,” Warren’s father said, in the gentleman’s way of saying something polite while declaring that Harry might get struck if he kept talking.

Harry dutifully shut up.

“I’ve heard about this,” the older man said.  “Rewriting our very being.  I’ve heard the concerns.  It carries forward, Warren.  When you have a child, there is a very good chance it will have the same sort of eyes.  This alien blueness.”

“I… yes.  I’ve heard that,” Warren said.  The blueness was a remark on the deepness of the blue.  Most had a pale blue color to their eyes, but Warren had elected for a shade and hue that was closer to what might be found on a flower.

A moment’s decision, after drinking with Harry and several other friends.  A lark, as Harry had suggested.

“Clifford,” Warren’s mother said, standing and reaching out.  But the man was so filled with repressed anger that she seemed to hesitate to approach.

“Father,” Warren said, trying to use the moment, “It’s easily changed back.  Same process.  A needle in the arm, and a few weeks to adjust.”

“Oh?” his father asked.  “Do you have the, what do you call it, the language, the script of your eyes as they once were?  Or are you simply trying to mime the old color?  A guess on the part of whatever doctor you subject yourself to?  How is that different?”

“You make it sound like the end of the world!”

“It’s the end of us!” his father said, suddenly shouting.

The statement seemed to bring everything in the room to a standstill.

The stitched girl stood in the doorway with tea on a tray.  Her head was bowed, and the plates on the platter rattled as her hands shook.

Warren’s mother flew to the stitched girl’s side, to console and to take the tray, the murmured words indistinct.

“The end of us?” Warren asked.

“You’re the product of your mother and I, as we’re the product of those who came before.  But any child you have now will be a product of you, your wife, and the Academy’s work.  We don’t yet know how these little things will carry forward, or if there will be long term repercussions, for you or your children.  Such a stupid thing.”

The word was like a slap.  Stupid.

“It’s minor.  Nothing of importance in the grand scheme of it all,” Warren said, a little more obstinate now.

“It’s important to me.  Do you understand?  You’ve tainted the bloodline.  You’re not truly my son anymore, not in full.”

If the word ‘stupid’ had been a slap, this was a strike to the gut.  Warren felt all of the tension that had built up over the argument now seizing him.  In shock, he was no longer sure how to move or properly think.

“Warren,” Harry said, putting a reassuring hand on his shoulder.  “Perhaps we should go.”

“That might be a good idea,” Warren’s father said.

Warren nodded, dumb.  He looked at his mother, on the other side of the room, still consoling the stitched girl.

He and Harry left, Warren more stiff than either of the stitched had been.  Down the long hallway, past the stairs, and out the door, into bright sunlight.  Radham was just on the horizon, past the patchwork white-brown and white of snow-dusted farmland, ringed by buildings that spewed dark fumes into the air.  A perpetual raincloud hung over the city.

“Warren,” his mother said, behind him.

He turned.

She pressed a slip of paper into his hand.

He looked down at it, too caught up in a storm of emotion to process it.

“Money.  To get you off the ground and tide you over the first year or so, if you’re frugal.  It was intended as a graduation present from me to you.  It is a graduation present.”

“Thank you,” he said, but he still felt adrift, confused.

“I’ll talk to him, Warren.  He cares, but he’s had to adapt so much so quickly, this caught him off guard, so soon after he’d already made monumental sacrifices.  Send us another telegram so we know where you are, so I can reunite you two when he’s calmed down.”

“Will he?” Warren asked.

“He will,” she said.  She gave his arm a squeeze.

He nodded, but the wound still felt raw.

“Take Wendy and the carriage.  Go where you need to today, to get yourself situated and run any errands.  Wendy can help you, and she can do a surprising amount of carrying.  Send them back tomorrow, if you can.  She knows how to use the carriage and how to ask for directions if she needs them.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, eyeing the young stitched dubiously.

“She needs it, frankly.  Her disposition always improves after a good carriage ride.  It would be a favor.”

Warren nodded.  His mother was lying, but perhaps she wanted to keep an eye on him.  Not an entirely bad thing.

“Look after him, Wendy,” Warren’s mother said.  “Do as he asks, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Let’s go,” Harry said, a hand on Warren’s shoulder.  He used the hand to guide Warren into the horse-driven carriage.

Warren sat and stared blankly at the wall.  He blinked as Harry slammed the door, then again as Harry sat across from him.

“Let’s go,” Harry said.  “I think you’re in dire need of an unhealthy amount of drink.”

☙

Spring

Every morning, it was the same.  Replaying the discussion with his father, fragments of memory about the afternoon and evening that had followed.  Drinking, meeting Harry’s friends in Radham.

Some had altered themselves, more than very blue eyes.  A girl with horns, a young man who had added muscle to himself.  Among Warren and the other students in Pontiac, Harry had been the roughest around the edges, too clever for his own good, always a little disheveled.

Harry’s friends in Radham were a dozen long strides in that same direction.  Smart as a whip, all of them, but not in the academic sense.  Quick to insult, joke, jibe.  Warren hadn’t been able to keep up, especially as the drinks had added up.

He remembered blood, and he wrested his thoughts away from that particular sequence of events.

He tried to raise a hand to his face, and felt it move, felt the air against it, the shift of muscles.  But the sensation folded on itself, the sensations continuing onward in his psyche until they had dissolved into smoke.

Every morning, it was like this.  Discovering how badly things had gone, one way or another.

It was the movement in the corner of his eye that usually did it, or movement in front of him, sleep-bleary eyes making out the general shape of the surroundings.

Waking up like this might never become routine.  Perhaps because it was too far removed from the reality he understood.  Perhaps because he didn’t want to realize.  Waking up in confusion, with a dawning feeling of horror, that was better.  It was best, all things considered.  It hinted at how low his expectations should be.

There was no dawning feeling of horror in the pit of his stomach.

He didn’t feel sweat run down his back.

His hands didn’t clench.

His toes didn’t curl.

His heartbeat didn’t pick up in speed.

His blood didn’t run cold.

None of those things were, not anymore.

He turned his head, and it was difficult.  He had a limited amount of mobility, and the skin pulled tight with even a small turn.

The surroundings were dark, lit only by a slice of light that cut between curtains.  It looked to be a cellar or a basement.  One he had seen every morning for the last week.

It was the smallest of blessings that things changed locations once every week or two.  A change of scenery.

As his eyes focused, he saw the movements.  Shapes in his immediate peripheral vision, and in front of him.  Tubes, wires, and heads.

Heads without bodies, hair shorn, mounted on a piece of metal, tubes running into the spaces and mounts, giving blood, hydration and nutrients, drawing everything else out.

They moved, jaws opening wide, teeth clacking, the ones that weren’t asleep in the midst of a silent, mad rage.

He opened his mouth to speak, and the air didn’t come as he bid it.  The only tongue that moved was the one his mind conjured up, made of smoke.  His tongue had been removed a long while ago.  Too easy to bite it off and attempt to bleed out or choke.

The thought provoked the flurry of images he’d tried so hard to push out of his mind.

He remembered himself, partying with Harry and Harry’s friends.

He remembered seeing them talking among themselves, every time he came out of the washroom, or every time he found himself occupied with something or someone.  Furtive talks.  He’d imagined them discussing his situation at home, his father’s rage, and he’d deliberately ignored it, drinking more.

He remembered how, late in the evening, when it had been just them, Harry’s friends had grabbed him.

Harry had helped himself to the note that would let him access the money, then he had given the signal.

The group had lifted Warren up, then tipped him over.

He’d dropped several stories.  He remembered seeing Wendy on landing.  She and the carriage had been just outside the building.

When he’d woken up, it had been like this.

Body ruined, head salvaged, kept indefinitely on life support.

He stared through bleary eyes as a man pushed a curtain aside, where the curtain served in place of a door.  Disheveled, with a thick beard, the man wore no lab coat.  He looked more like someone who might be found sleeping at the side of the road, a bottle in hand.

“Tea,” the man said.  “The usual.  Then brush their hair and sponge them off.”

“Yes sir,” Wendy was heard to say.

Warren had only a glimpse of the stitched as she went about her day.  Left untended, she was fidgeting more, anxious.  Something about dealing with the heads left her more concerned each time, and her poor condition was part of it.

Had Warren been able to speak, he would have insisted she be taken care of, or sent back where she came from.

He doubted he would be heard.  No man that could do this had any mercy in him.

The man approached the table, and though he couldn’t breathe, Warren could smell the rank odor of the man.  He saw the man reach out and stroke the hair of one of the heads.

“Good morning, my pretties,” the man said.  He consulted a notebook.  “Thinking Machine project, version three, day… hm.  Day fifty-three.”

Warren stared.

It wasn’t the numbers that mattered, the number of days or even the implication that there had been two versions before this.

The horror that he experienced, a frustrated horror that had nowhere to go but his head, nothing to do but compound itself, was because of the words ‘good morning’.

Twelve to sixteen hours before sleep could claim him again.

Warren started screaming, twisting, face contorting, best as he was able, though no sound came out.

☙

Summer

Sweat ran down his brow.  He felt the coolness of the water as his scalp was gently dabbed.

Wendy fidgeted.  She’d been maintained, but it had been a rough job, and had left deep scars in her flesh, where before there had been only faint ones.  The ongoing damage to her strange psyche was something else altogether.

“I’m supposed to watch over you,” she said.  “Madam said so.  I very much look forward to going home, as soon as you give the word.  This place is dark and…”

She leaned close, as if to share a secret.

“…I don’t like the dark, sir.”

Warren did his best to nod, a sympathetic look on his face.

“I have a teddy bear I hug when it’s dark.  It was a gift.  I know I’m a young lady now, but it does make me feel better,” she said.

He nodded, though it made his jaw and neck hurt.  His brain felt fried.  Wires ran in and out of his skull, connecting to the others, and several times a day, the thinking machine was put in use.  The machine would play out a long stuttering series of clicks, the madman who’d put him down here would make a few notes, then take them with him as he walked into another part of the building, peering at them and scratching his head.

“I don’t think I know how to go back,” Wendy said.  “I’m supposed to get directions to the Ossuary, then I go down… I can’t remember the road.  Then… I can’t remember what comes next.”

Every day, she talked to him.  Most days, she said the same things.  When her pattern changed, it was because she was breaking down, running too hot.  What he hadn’t picked up from idle curiosity before, back in Pontiac, he’d learned from the madman’s occasional comments.

Warren held onto this, but he wasn’t sure why.  A part of him hoped she would snap, go crazy, and end all of this, or murder the madman.  Stitched did that, didn’t they?  Or was that rumor, heard in a city that didn’t like stitched?

A part of him hoped she would leave, forgetting that she had to look after him.

And, running contrary to that, a part of him feared her leaving, above all else.

He was supposed to have lost his mind by now.  He already had, to a degree, and the memories he pulled up now and again were too real, dreamlike, while his dreams were indistinguishable from memory, or they simply brought him back here.

He was being drugged, he suspected, to keep him from panicking or having a stroke, but he still panicked with regularity, his thoughts looping over and over.  Sometimes hours passed in the blink of an eye, like that, and sometimes what felt like hours of mad panic were only as long as it took the madman to leave, cook, eat, and return.

“I miss music,” Wendy said.  “There’s this tune, it plays in my head, and it goes, ba ba ba, ba ba, ba ba ba…”

A body with only a partial brain, and a head without a body, Warren still had the phantom sensations of movements or feelings his body might have experienced, and he’d learned that, unburied by fever and stress, Wendy had phantom traces of an identity, complete with memories.

Silently, with all the focus he could bring to bear, he scrawled promises on his brain with a permanence that he might use to etch words on stone tablets.

To make amends, to show gratitude, because he couldn’t bring himself to pray and he needed to do something of magnitude to have an iota of vision for the future, he promised her a teddy bear, he promised her her music…

☙

Autumn

The cell door slammed shut.  He stirred to wakefulness, blinking, though he hadn’t been asleep.  Reality and dream blended in together, now.

He was fantasizing, or dreaming.  The madman having his world turned upside down, screaming about the loss of his life’s work, the thinking machine.

Men of the law arresting the madman, then approaching the board, where three of the original nine heads were still functional, the number of wires tripled to compensate.

Fantasy?

No.  The smells and tastes and touches…

Wendy was standing beside him, stroking his hair.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said.

He didn’t dare hope.  Easier to think he was still in the basement, and that reality had slipped away entirely.

He realized that someone was staring at him.  The world seemed so distorted.  He was higher up than he was used to, almost five feet off the ground.

He’d once been six feet tall, he remembered.  That life felt so far away.

The person in the cell was a young woman, not much older than he was.  Or older than he’d been.  He wasn’t sure he was a he anymore.

His thoughts were rambling, he knew.

Her hair was black, a contrast to Wendy’s blonde hair, cut straight, and tucked behind one ear, while it obscured the other.  Her eyes were narrow and dark, her mouth curved in a light smile, painted crimson.

She wore a lab coat, he realized.

He looked away, bothered.  The science, the doctors, all of it, he’d seen what it came to, in the end.

Not just what he’d experienced, but Wendy.

So many horrors, so many lines crossed.

He couldn’t turn his head away, not really, but he averted his eyes, watching the officers patrolling the room.  Half of it was desks, half of it was cells, a single row with one occupant per cell.

He was good at letting time slip by, now.  He knew the techniques.  Count the cracks, count the bars.  Study the people.  The guards, their habits, their way of dress.

There were so many new sensations and things to experience that he wasn’t able to process it all.  He was free, but he wasn’t sure what that entailed.  He didn’t dare hope for one thing or the other, out of fear that if he hoped for death and got a second chance instead, or vice versa, it might break him.

The clang of the cell door opening was startling.  He’d been watching the people, but the people had taken action without him noticing.  There was a man in a grey coat in the cell in front of him, with guards gathered loosely around.

“You’ll be getting these injections twice a day for a week.  You know what these do, Ms. Fray.”

“You want to make me forget.”

“Yes.”

“Even if it does damage to other parts of my mind in the process.”

“Nothing has been proven on that front.”

She made a scoffing sound.  She sounded so cavalier.  Did she not realize what the Academy’s people were capable of doing?  Even without a lab coat, the madman and his thinking machine had been the Academy’s doing.

Warren had had enough time to puzzle that much out.

“If you do this, you can go to the underground laboratories, you can work on projects, live in dorms…”

“A half life.  I made my bid for professorship, I failed, and you take half of everything.”

“Some people would kill for this much.”

“Or carry out a crazed experiment in their basement with limited resources?  Trying to make nine heads think as one?” Ms. Fray asked.

“Even that.”

“No.  I’ll take a lifetime of imprisonment if it means keeping my brain.”

“You don’t get a choice, Ms. Fray.”

“I can tell you that I took a dose of the Wyvern formula just this morning.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Contraindicated.  Don’t tell me you got your grey coat without knowing what contraindicated means.”

“I know what it means.  I’ve never heard of the formula, and quite frankly, after having read your files, I suspect you’re lying, to delay the inevitable.”

“Ask Professor Hayle.  He’ll know.”

There was a pause.  Then, “Lock her up.  Watch her.  I’ll be back later this evening after I’ve confirmed.”

Warren watched as the guards and the doctor in the grey coat vacated the cell.  The door clanged shut, making Wendy flinch, and they went about their way, the grey-coat exiting through the door at the far end of the building.

Long minutes passed.  Ms. Fray paced, leaned against the bars to peer further into the building, and alternately watched Wendy, watched Warren, and studied the guards.

Some time had passed before she cleared her throat, standing straighter.

Within the cell, the woman raised a finger to crimson lips.

Wendy did the same, echoing the gesture.

The cell was equipped with a toilet behind a short barrier, intended for privacy.  Ms. Fray approached the toilet, then bent over it, hand going to her throat.

Warren still felt like this was all a dream.  Too surreal.

He saw Ms. Fray stand up, now with a writhing tentacle coming out of her mouth.  She gripped the tentacles, grunting and making choking sounds, as she hauled it out, excruciating inch by excruciating inch.

It took a minute and a half, by Warren’s estimation, before she’d retrieved the entire thing.  It coiled and uncoiled, tentacles reaching out and wrapping around her hands and forearms.

“What are you grunting and moaning about?” a guard asked.

But as the guard reached the cell, Ms. Fray was sitting on the toilet, the tentacled horror pinned between her back and the toilet’s tank, blocked from view by the barrier.

The guard shook her head, turned, and walked away.

Ms. Fray reached under her dress.

Warren averted his eyes, horrified.

He heard a titter.

When he looked up, she had what looked to be a large piece of glass.  No more tentacles.  From the speed with which she’d acted, he suspected it had been tucked into the band.

Again, she raised a finger to her mouth, the universal gesture for silence.  This time, however, she had a piece of glass in her hand, and the tentacle-thing held behind her back.

The second guard paced down the building, then headed back up toward Ms. Fray.

The moment he passed by the cell, she reached out, and the tentacles did as well, snaring him by the head and throat, pulling him tight against the bars.

“Feel that?” Ms. Fray asked.

“Mmph,” the guard said.

“Then don’t touch your pistol.”

The other guard had heard the crash of skull against bars.  The woman approached at a half-run from the far end of the building.

“Keys,” Ms. Fray said, calm.  “You can reach the door.  Work fast.  If she gets here before the door is open, I’m going to cut your throat so my pet is free to stop her.”

The guard fumbled, keys rattling.  He reached up, holding the keys at an awkward angle to see which one he was selecting.

The key went into the lock.  He turned it, and the door came open.

Ms. Fray hauled him in a touch deeper, then gripped the sliding door, hauling it open.  With the man’s head between the bars, the sliding door caught him in the side of the head or the neck.

Warren saw the other guard approaching at a swift run.

She rounded the corner, standing back this time, pistol raised.

Ms. Fray was crouched, the other guard’s pistol in hand, tentacles coiling at one side.

The woman guard had to take the time to figure out what was going on, the position of her target, and adjust before pulling, aiming between the bars.

Ms. Fray only had to pull the trigger as soon as the moving target came into view.

Three shots, in quick succession.

Covered in a light spattering of blood, Ms. Fray stepped out of her cell.

“You.  You saw what I just did,” she said.  “I’m going to keep doing it, over and over, in ways both dramatic and subtle.  You can come with me and help, or you can stay here and be at their mercy.”

“Me?” Wendy asked.

“Him.”

Warren blinked.

Mercy doesn’t exist.

“I’ve got to go.  They’ll have heard shots.  Yes or no, do you want revenge?”

He thought of Harry.

He thought of the Madman.

He nodded.

She reached out to scoop him up.  Wendy got in the way.

Warren rolled his eyes over to Wendy, then back to Ms. Fray, then to Wendy.

“You too, then.  Bring him.”

Wendy nodded.

Ms. Fray collected the keys.  She walked backward, facing Warren, pointing at the cells.

He looked.

A stranger.  Another stranger.  Empty.  A stranger.

The madman.

He must have given some tell.  Another shot from the pistol rang out.  The madman died, a shot through the head.

The gun twirled on Ms. Fray’s finger as she turned her back on Warren and his stitched friend, marching for the exit.

☙

Winter

The creature squealed as it died, crushed under a meaty fist.  Bird, bug and reptile blended together, it was the size of a large dog, and surprisingly hard to kill.

Warren stretched, then heaved out a heavy breath.

“Is it safe?” Ms. Fray asked.

“Yes,” Wendy said.

Ms. Fray opened the door and stepped out of the washroom.  She looked down at the stain in disgust.  “Whelps.  One of the Academy’s weapons.”

Warren nodded.

“If there’s one here, there’ll be more.  They have our scent.  We’re relocating.”

Warren nodded, again.

Ms. Fray led the way, but she usually did.  She always walked briskly, she rarely held back, if she was even capable, and she expected everyone else to keep up.

Not that Warren had much difficulty.  He was taller than he’d been with his original body, to the point he almost had to bend double to get through the door.

The city swirled with snow.  Mad creatures and doctors were everywhere, and he felt his head hurt as he glanced at each.  It wasn’t a pleasant place, this, but it was good for camouflage.  Ms. Fray and Warren looked entirely normal walking down the street.

“I keep expecting them to lose interest, but they up the ante each time.  Academy investigators, monsters, The Hangman, Dog and Catcher… now the Whelps.  They really, really want me,” she said.

Warren nodded.

He saw a movement out of the corner of his eye.

Stray cat.  He might not have seen it if it weren’t for his sharp eyes.

A second later, a fanged beak snapped out, consuming half of the cat.  A tongue snaked around the rest, and hauled it into the creature’s gullet.

Another whelp.

“I saw it too,” Genevieve said.  She gave him a pat on the arm, where his striped sweater was rolled up to the elbow.  His forearm was bigger around than her upper body, his fist large enough that when he held Wendy’s hand, it consumed the hand and most of her forearm.  “It won’t come out into the daylight.”

His strength and new body was of her design.  She’d asked what he’d wanted, and with a writing implement in his temporary hand, he’d scrawled out a simple word.  ‘Strength’.

He didn’t trust his sanity, but he trusted his mind.  It had always been sharp.  The only flaw had been that it had been too trusting.  No longer.

Now he had a body to match the mind.

They approached the train station, amid a light snowfall.  Ms. Fray led the way toward a side street.  If they were catching a train, they’d hitch a ride in a car carrying crates or hay, so witnesses wouldn’t be able to report on them.  It had bought them some time in the past.

She put a hand to his chest, stopping mid-stride.  He had to go to some effort to stop fast enough.  Had he been any slower, he might have forced her wrist or arm backward and snapped them.

She didn’t seem to notice or care.  Her eyes were on the train station across the street.

Passengers were getting off.  Young, old, many of them women and girls attending the local women’s Academy.  A small school, but popular.  Many a father conceded to his daughter’s wishes to study, but insisted on something like this.  A quiet, safe town and an unthreatening learning environment.

“There,” Genevieve said.  “They got off a few seconds ago.”

He watched.

“The Lambs,” she said.

He frowned, then realized she was talking about the children.  Just on the verge of adolescence, all six of them, they walked with purpose, working their way through the gaps in the crowd.

“They finally caught up,” she said.  “This is good.”

He glanced at her.

“Change of plans,” she said.  “We’re staying.”

Stitch in Time – 4.1

The stitched servant helped lift our bags out from the side of the train.  Mine had been the last one in, so it was the first one out.  Once I had it, wheels digging tracks into the thin layer of snow, I turned to survey the area.

Storybook.  Best label to apply to it all.  Things were quaint, but in a very controlled, calculated way.  The colors of the houses, the pleasant aesthetic, and the winding streets, many cobblestone with the beginnings of ruts carved into them, all planned and rigidly enforced.

It was fascinating.  The houses were like cabins, but the exteriors were well looked after, white, gray, or blue in color, and almost every single one had smoke coming out of the chimney.  The streets were gray cobblestone and lighter gray slabs of concrete, covered in white snow and the black grime the wagons and carriages had dredged up.  For every man, there were five women, aged eighteen to thirty, and of those five women, four had monsters with them.  Academy creations.

The subtle hideousness of Kensford was clearer as I looked at the trees and plants.  In the early winter, there were trees and shrubs bristling with leaves, all a blood crimson in color, the leaves barely visible under the snow that had piled several feet high on each bough, or the ice that clung to branches.

There were also meat trees, in the natural-growing-meat sense and the ‘gibbets and meathook’ sense.  Not too unusual, except they were ubiquitous.

The end result was, in the end, storybook.  A town that embraced the old fashioned.  But so many people romanticized history, and forgot how very bloody it was.  The city smelled like smoke and crematoriums, and it made me feel like I was about to venture into a world where every house was a gingerbread house in disguise, and every pretty young woman was really a witch, ready to thrust unwitting children into ovens.

The other Lambs, now hauling their luggage, joined me, the six of us forming a loose line, looking at the town of Kensford.  The only building that was taller than one story was the local Academy.  Though all things in Kensford centered around Dame Cicely’s in a symbolic sense, it sat at the back, bordered on two sides by thick forest, a Victorian-style building grown like a tumor might be, asymmetrical, with the odd bit here and there.  A tree had been literally grown from one side, closer to the forest, framing it all in a trimmed crescent of red leaves.

“So pretty!” Helen exclaimed.

“Did you ever want to come here?” Gordon asked.  He was asking Lillian.

“Oh…” Lillian said, sounding surprised at the question.  “No.  You need to be at least eighteen, I think.”

“But if you were?  Or when you are?”

“Gosh.  I’d be terrified.”

“Strict?” I asked.

“Yes, but that’s not why,” she said.  She looked around, and stepped closer to Gordon as a pair of young women walked on, a stitched in fine clothes hauling their luggage.  She lowered her voice and confided, “It’s so cutthroat.”

“A lot of Academies are,” I said.

“I don’t hear stories about other places like I hear stories about Dame Cicely’s Academy,” Lillian said.  “They intentionally fail out a certain percentage of each class, to cull and ensure they’re the best, or close to, because there’s Lady Eleanor’s-”

She drew quiet as more young ladies walked by, departing from the train.

“You scared of them?” I taunted her.

“I don’t want to say something that would stir up any rivalries,” she said.  “What was I saying?”

“You don’t hear stories about other places like you hear stories about here,” Jamie said.  “They intentionally fail a certain percentage of each class, to cull and-”

“Okay,” Lillian said, a little flustered.  “Okay.  Yes.  Thank you, Jamie.”

I caught the twinkle in Jamie’s eye and elbowed him.  He elbowed me back.

We continued back and forth like that as Lillian continued talking, “Most women who go to the Academies, they need permission and money from their parents, and from what I’ve seen and from what I’ve heard, most have to fight to hold on to their place.  If they mess up once, one year of bad gradings or lack of advancement, it’s done, it’s over.  Mom and dad cut off the funding and order you back home.  Then they introduce you to a nice fellow to marry, and that’s your life.”

“A lot of people with guillotine blades hanging over their necks,” Gordon remarked.

“It gets worse,” Lillian said.  “Put the two things together-”

I finished the statement, “-And you have a lot of classmates who know their peers are dancing on a razor’s edge.  Just a tiny bit of sabotage or cleverness, and there’s one less competitor for the remaining seats.”

Lillian nodded.  “Exactly.”

“I never liked the idea of working in a stuffy lab all day,” Mary said.  “I understand why people would, with it being the fastest path to greatness, but it didn’t feel like it was for me.”

“You like the idea of this?” I asked.

She smiled, “So much.”

“It’s nicer than the last few stops,” Gordon said, looking around.  “I felt itchy after we slept at the last guest house.  I’m still not convinced I don’t have something crawling on me.”

“Let’s not gripe,” I said.  “Please.  New place, fresh start.  It’s too easy to fall into old patterns.”

There were a few nods at that.

“Post office, then we find out where we’re sleeping,” Jamie said.

That was our cue to advance.  We carefully made our way through the crowd, weaving between the people who were walking and the clusters of people who had gathered in groups, talking.

None of the young ladies wore lab coats or uniforms.  Rather, the monsters in their company were their emblems and badges, fashion accessories crafted of meat and grey matter.  The better the work, the better the student.

Snow dusted us, drifting down in light amounts.  There was no rain here.  I was idly curious what the mechanism was for keeping the local experiments in line.

Perhaps the young ladies of Dame Cicely’s were managed carefully enough that there was no cause to worry about the experiments running off or causing trouble.

Jamie elbowed me for the hundredth time, but this one was to get my attention.  He’d done the same to Helen, who’d gotten Gordon’s attention.

I followed Jamie’s line of sight.  One of the houses had a set of stairs, and something dark moved in the space beneath the stairs.

“What?” I asked.

“Whelps are here.”

“Oh, that’s fun,” I remarked.  “Let’s hope they leave her intact enough for us to ask questions.”

“I’d rather hope we find her first,” Mary said.

Ah, crap.  For the second time in four minutes or so, we were stumbling on the same point.  We weren’t finding many leads, and to date, we’d only been able to arrive on the days after our quarry had disappeared to places unknown.  Half of the clues to her destination had been our finds, and the other half had been due to the work of others.  Dog and Catcher, Hangman, or a tip from someone who’d seen one of the wanted posters and recognized her face.

It was wearing thin, and some of us were wrestling with frustration.  There had been spats.

Rather than agree or disagree, I reached out and took Mary’s hand.

Then, in a majestically subtle manner, I declared, “This has been so damn fun.”

“Fun?” she said.

“You’re grumpy,” I noted.

“Yes.”

“Do you remember how much the interviews in the Bowels sucked?  This is the opposite of that, which means this is the furthest thing from suckage!  It’s the best thing ever to get out and away,” I said.

“We’re chasing that bit of fluff that dances away from your hand as you reach for it,” she said, immune to my enthusiasm.  “Tell a dog to jump for the stick, and it will.  The dog might really want that stick, but if you pull the stick away every time, the dog learns.  I’d really like to think I’m better than a dog on that front.”

“Huh,” I said.  “Fair, but didn’t expect to hear anything like that.  Where did it come from?”

“Percy.  He gave me lessons in training others.  I thought he meant dogs at first.  Then I thought he meant training my subordinates, when he’d created dozens upon dozens of clones.  I only later realized it was how he trained me.  He let me have my stick just often enough.”

Not the first time Mary’s mentioned Percy in recent days and weeks, I thought.

I didn’t bring it to anyone’s attention.  Instead, I commented, “Sometimes, when you’re chasing that bit of fluff, you have to hold out your hand and be patient.  Let it settle in on its own.”

“Mm hmm,” Mary murmured.  I suspected that she’d gotten the thrust of what I was trying to do, which was changing the course of the conversation.  She played along, looking around, “This place is neat.”

One and a half seconds after she said that, we passed a carriage, and Mary came face to face with a large, humanoid monster, built like an angel with wings of flesh, chest thrust out by a matter of design, chin high so that it looked down on everything around it.  It was naked, and its limp member dangled right at Mary’s eye level, bigger around than my leg and as hairless as a baby’s.

I heard a slight ‘eep‘ from Mary, which punched right past the latent tension and wonderings on my part and made me burst out into hysterical giggling.

The entire group soon followed, Mary included, tittering and laughing, the tension flowing away.

“You think so, Mary?” Gordon asked, “Neat?”

There were more giggles from the group.

“For shame, all of you,” Helen said, putting her hands on her hips.  “Laughing at that.  Imagine the poor woman who made that thing.  She must have been so lonely!”

The giggles became outright laughter.

Perfect.  Good.

This was the sort of thing we needed.

Helen politely asked a passerby for the location of the nearest post office, and we went on our way.

The street might have been a fifty-fifty split of residences and small businesses, but as we reached the center of it all, we found that virtually every building touching on the main street served some purpose.  including grocer’s stores that were no more than four paces by five paces across in size and a banking office just a little under twice that size.

Further down the way was the small post office.  We filed in.

Helen approached the counter.  “Hello sir.”

The polite young lady routine.

“Good morning, darling,” the man at the counter greeted her.  “What can I do for you?”

“We have a package?  It’s addressed Lambsbridge, it should have arrived here a few days ahead of us.”

The man at the counter found it quickly enough.  He placed the box on the counter.  “Stamp?”

Without looking or saying a word, Helen put her hand back.  Gordon passed her the stamp.  She uncapped it and put the mark on the top of the box, inside the circle.

The man at the counter squinted, examining the mark Helen had just made with the one that the sender had put on it, then gave us a curt nod.  “There you go.”

“You don’t have a line, I was hoping we could ask some questions, please?” Helen asked.

“You most certainly can.  I’d be happy to answer them.”

“Which direction to the, um…”

“Dormitories three hundred through three-fifty?” Jamie asked.

“Up the main street, turn right at the stitchworks.”

“Thank you,” she said, smiling.  “About the package, you didn’t have anyone come in here and ask about it?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Or about children?”

“No,” the man said, a small crease appearing between his eyebrows.

“You haven’t seen a woman, twenty or so, with black hair?  She would have had a head with her, or a monster with a head that didn’t match the body?  Also black-haired, with bright blue eyes?”

The man puffed out his cheeks, letting out a breath.  “I see someone like that every day.”

Every single one of us was suddenly at attention.

“You’ve seen her?” Gordon jumped in.

“Ah, no,” the man said.

“Then-”

“I mean, I see different young ladies who fit that general description on a regular basis,” the man said.  “Pretty young ladies, many with black hair, and many with experiments in their company.  Those experiments range from big to small, fat to thin, and they have heads and eyes of all type.”

“Wait,” Gordon said.  “Lillian, do you have it?  The poster?”

Lillian fished inside her bag.  She found a square of paper and unfolded it.

“She looks like this,” Gordon said.

The man slowly shook his head.  “Attractive young lady, but I couldn’t say.  The customers become a blur, unless I get to know their names.  This is the one you’re looking for?”

“Very similar,” Gordon said.  “Not the same person.”

The man frowned.  “I can’t say.”

“I see,” Helen said, slumping a bit.  She perked up all at once, “Thank you, sir!”

“You’re welcome.  If you’re looking for someone, I could keep an eye out, especially now that I’ve seen the picture.  Does that help?”

“Actually…” I said, pausing strategically.

“Yes?”

“We’re concerned that someone is keeping a look out for us.  We’re trying to surprise them, you see?”

The furrow in between his eyebrows was now as deep as it could get.

“Surprise party,” I told him.  “She’s rich as all-get-out, she’s from a powerful family, and it’s really hard to make a party something special for her.  So if she asks if you’ve seen us, could you keep quiet on that?  The surprise part is the only part that matters.”

“Ahh.  I think I understand,” the man said.  “I can stay quiet, don’t you worry.  Where are you all from?”

That he asked was something of an irony.  The less we told him, the better.  The moment Ms. Fray realized we were on her trail –if she was even here-, she would be in the wind.

“Outskirts of West York,” Gordon improvised, clearly thinking the same thing I was.

“Ah?  Ways away then.  What brings you here?”

The word escaped my mouth before I thought to say different.

“Family.”

I didn’t miss the glances that were shot my way.  Only Jamie didn’t.  His focus was elsewhere.

“Um,” Jamie said, waiting until he had eye contact with the man before continuing, “If it looks like the surprise party won’t happen, you can tell her whatever.”

“If it won’t happen?  You mean, if she finds out some other way?”

“You’ll know what I mean if it comes down to it,” Jamie said.  I gave him a curious look.

“Uh huh,” the man said, dragging out the sound, slowly processing it.

Someone came into the post office behind us, and Helen took that as a cue.  She waved, a little too dramatically, in a way that suited a smaller child.  “Goodbye, sir.  Thank you for everything!”

She was so good at becoming every adult’s favorite girl, so very quickly.  The man gave a little wave back.

We stepped back out onto the street, and I fixed my cap and scarf, hunching against the cold.

“She could be hiding in plain sight,” Gordon said.  “The man’s right.  She’s a needle, and this is a haystack.  It’s the perfect place for her to hide, maybe even lose our trail for good.”

“No leads,” Mary said.  “Just like yesterday, and the day before.”

I reached out and held her mittened hand with my gloved one, giving it a squeeze.

“What was that about, Jamie?” Gordon asked.

He cares too much.

“What was what?” Jamie asked.

“If the surprise party is spoiled?”

“It should make sense if Fray comes for him.  She’s left a few bodies in her wake, and we’ve found reasons for most of them, but if she comes after him, looking for any details on us,  I don’t want him upsetting her.”

“I’d rather have her upset and ignorant than the other way around,” Gordon said.

“So would I,” Jamie said.  “But if it came down to him getting hurt for nothing, I’d rather he talk.”

Gordon shook his head.

It was ironic.  All Ms. Fray had to really do to maximize the damage she did to us was to keep doing what she was doing and play keep away.

We’d spent months in the Bowels, with only Sub Rosa to deal with at the tail end of it, and that had been less of a team effort than the vast majority of our jobs.  Weeks on weeks of dreadfully dull interviews and interrogations, with little to show for it.

Now we were on the verge of another few months of something fruitless.  Chasing a woman who forever remained at least one step ahead of us.

There were countless factors playing into it all, but at the very core of it, we were entering into the dangerous years.  Important years for anyone, when boys became men and girls became women, but more important for us.

These were the years when we would be coming into our own.  We’d be forging our identities and adapting our fit in the group.

We were losing our edge, without opposition to keep us sharp, and without a practical test of our abilities, we couldn’t find a new configuration that made up for all the little changes.  It made for uncomfortable fits, little bits of bickering.

I’d hated the interviews in the Bowels, and as much as I was liked the chance to explore and stretch my legs, I didn’t think this was as constructive as what we collectively needed.

Mary was right.  We needed to sink our teeth into the stick, not to chase it endlessly.

The thought crossed my mind: If we don’t find an opportunity soon, I might well have to create a problem for the group to solve.  Even if it gets me into untold trouble.

At least this place seemed good for that.  A pressure cooker of an Academy, stocked with cutthroat young ladies.

I heard rattling, and saw Helen working to open the box, cutting at tape with a fingernail.

“We’re almost there,” Jamie remarked.

“I know,” Helen said.  “The box feels light.”

My heart sank at the same moment Mary breathed the words, “Don’t say that.”

Helen reached into the box and withdrew a small jar of pills.  They were purple, and they numbered-

“Fifteen, at a glance,” Jamie said.

Three days.

Gordon reached into the box, as Helen’s hands were full, and withdrew a folded letter.

“They want us back soon, so we can have our appointments,” Gordon said.  “It’s going to take us a day and a half to travel back to Radham.  Three pills each…”

Mary kicked a clump of ice that had fallen from a carriage, making it explode into icicles and shards.  Heads turned.  Mary crushed one of my hands in hers, her other hand clenched, a grim look on her face.

“Try to keep a low profile,” Jamie said.

I put my hand out to stop him.

“They’re giving up on us,” Mary said.

“They have enough faith in us to let us stay another day or two, follow up leads,” Jamie said.

“Yeah,” Mary said.  “And they sent the Whelps, and Dog and Catcher, and the Hangman.  And we know Catcher and the Hangman got closer to her than we did.”

“It’s not a competition,” Lillian said.  “What’s important is stopping her from hurting people.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

“I don’t think Mary’s saying that isn’t important,” I said.

“I’m not.”

“But it’s true,” I said.  “We’re chasing a ghost.  She’s smart.  It sucks.  We did so well on the last couple of jobs, proving the Lambs were worth something, now it feels like we’re backtracking.”

Mary nodded.  Jamie did too.

Rift mended, if just a little.

We turned onto a side street, at Jamie’s instruction.  The buildings here were a little more uniform.  It was possible that most of the quaint little cottage-houses were individual dormitory spaces, the rest occupied by people who supported the Academy town, like the postman, but these buildings lacked character.

“Look at this like an opportunity,” I said.  “This is a good thing.”

“Good?” Mary asked.

We quickly reached the dormitory where we were supposed to be staying, and we stopped as a group in front of the wrought-wood gate, taking shelter from the snowflakes under the canopy of a large evergreen with chains dangling from it.

In the summertime, the chains would have certain meats hung from them.  Those treated meats would keep the pest and vermin populations down in a city where the gutters and sewers might literally run red with bodily fluids during exam time.

They did in Radham, it wasn’t unbelievable for it to happen here.

“This is good because it forces our hand.  I don’t think any of us are going to relax or take shortcuts in the next twenty-four hours.”

“If you think I’m taking shortcuts-” Mary started.  I raised a hand.

“I know you don’t,” I said.  “Not really.  None of us do, exactly, but yeah.  Not what I meant.  It’s less about shortcuts, and more that we all get tired.  We get tired from different things and we get tired in different ways.  In a crisis, I know we pull ourselves together and give our all… but in a slog like this?  Every day, at least one of us isn’t at our best.”

There were a few nods.  Few would argue they were flawless.

“This is good because it’s a crisis,” I said.  “We can’t move on to another city, unless we have a damn good lead, so we focus our attention here.  It makes sense that she’s enjoying being the needle in the haystack, which gives us every reason to think she’s left the city, but that I’m even thinking that means she’s probably second guessed it.  I can usually play this game well, guess what people are doing when they aren’t even sure, but she plays it too.  Let’s use this opportunity to catch her off guard, do something she wasn’t necessarily expecting.  Change our approach.  One and a half days of the absolute best work we can do.”

“That sounds like a plan,” Gordon said.  “I think we should split up.  We operate in different ways, and we can cover more ground in different ways.”

No!

We need to bind the group together, find the right configuration!

And splitting up is always a bad idea!

Except I felt like saying that much aloud might ruin it.  If people were self conscious, or the fractures in the group became conscious and significant rather than subconscious and minor…

Jamie glanced at me.  The glance was an ask.  He wanted to know what I thought.

“Sure,” I said.  Then, as a subtle bit of manipulation, I added, “We go out in pairs.  We spend a duration doing our thing, then meet up, report in even if there’s nothing to report, touch base.”

Gordon nodded.  “Sy, with me?  Jamie and Mary together.  Helen and Lillian.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it makes sense,” he said, simply.

I frowned at him.  “That’s the worst answer you could’ve given.”

“If I give you more information, that’s slack you’ll use to hang me,” he said.

“Well yeah.”

“Come on,” he said.  He reached into Helen’s box and found a key, opened the door, and then dropped his luggage just inside.  He reached out for Jamie’s.  “If you can’t stand my company, we can rearrange things after our first meeting.  In one hour?  Here.”

There were nods.

I waited with him while he got everyone’s luggage organized inside and locked the door.  The others were already fanning out, heading in different directions.

“Why, really?” I asked, now that everyone was gone.

“The group is splintering,” he said.

“Yeah.  Not a lot, but-”

“It’s splintering,” he said.  “It can be fixed, but I think it’s best fixed at the ground level, the core.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Remember when it was just you, me, Jamie, and sometimes Helen?”

Two years ago.

“Yeah.”

“Let’s get back to basics.  You and I.  Like in the old days.”

I raised an eyebrow.  “You have something in mind?”

“Let’s go recruiting,” he said.

Stitch in Time – 4.2

All things had hearts.  All things had veins and arteries, tracks and paths which were carved through them as they acted out their role in life.  Even a rock had its weakness, a point where a chisel and a strong enough blow could destroy it, as points of stress gave way.

Yeah, there were faint exceptions, but overall, it applied to many things in life.

It was an idea that might have seemed spiritual, but that wasn’t really where my line of thinking was coming from or going.  Believing that all things had vulnerabilities was something central in my worldview, but I hesitated to call it faith.

The fact was, Kensford had a heart, and it had its arteries.  Unlike Radham, the heart wasn’t the local Academy, but the main street downtown.  Remove the Academy from the map, and the city would likely continue to function on a level, until the locals were called home by parents and patrons.  Impede the downtown area, and things would quickly die, forced to divert and reroute through the winding streets of quaint little cottage-houses.

Gordon and I made our way downtown, then we began our explorations, taking every wrong turn.  We found areas which hadn’t been kept up well, and places which helped keep Kensford alive: the local dump, teeming with lifeforms that would eat and live in the garbage, as well as boneyards, crematoriums, and warehouses.  The layout of the city was ingenious, keeping the buildings out of sight, using the rise of hills and the winding streets to hide these places.

We visited two, to no effect, and then made our way to the nearby third, squeezing between two dormitory houses and hopping onto a fence.  I walked along the top of the wooden fence, my hands in my pockets, while Gordon hopped up, walked three steps on the fence, then hopped down.

He wasn’t one for style and panache.

The third area, hidden by the positions of the buildings and the little walls that sectioned off parts of Kensford, turned out to be a mass grave.

This was where experiments went when they failed.  Humanoid, they were each distorted and misshapen, different features exaggerated or removed.  They were piled on top of one another, most but not all naked and bound with straps, keeping arms close to the body and legs together.  They had been dusted with some acid or lime or something in that vein, and flesh had melted, but only superficially, leaving the remains mummified.  A light snow masked the worst of the scarring, the snow so thin that a feather might have wiped a given forehead or belly clean of it.

I could see the tracks where the wagon had turned up and dumped the latest collection of bodies.  I suspected that one of the things I was smelling was that same batch of bodies.

“Want to give them a shot?” Gordon asked, drawing my attention to a group of girls who were sitting on a large box that might have held salt for the street or lime for the bodies.  They were just on the cusp of being proper adults, about nineteen, and their feet didn’t reach the ground.  Each had a cigarette.

“Let’s,” I said.

The girls made some surreptitious movements as we drew nearer, the rightmost girl taking something from the one in the middle, scooting closer to her friend, then reaching behind her back.

“Weapon?” Gordon asked.

“Drinking,” I said.  “Look at their body language.”

“Do we use it?”

“I don’t think we need to,” I said.

“Okay.  Do you want point?”

“I’ll back you,” I said, while thinking,  I’m more flexible, I can adapt to fill the gaps in your approach better than you can adapt for me.

Besides, I mentally revised, You were entirely right in saying the group was splintering some.  You and I aren’t any different.  I’m not sure I trust you.

I hated myself for even thinking it, but Gordon had acted differently when around Shipman, and he’d nearly gotten us killed at one point.  All of us were going to change to some degree as we entered into the next big segment of our lives, in body, mind, emotions, and how we fit into the group.

Or how we didn’t.

Gordon, for all his talk about helping, was in the most danger of slipping away from the rest of us.

He could talk.  I’d adapt.

“Little boy,” the girl to the left said.  “You looked a lot older from a distance.”

“Hi,” Gordon said.

“Hi,” the middle girl said, clearly curious about us.

The leftmost girl didn’t seem to register the greetings, and added, “You still have a bit of a baby face, don’t you?”

“And you have a drink hidden behind you,” he observed.  His voice was even, calm, and nonthreatening.  “I’m old enough to know that you’d get in trouble for that.”

That didn’t seem to go over well.  The attitude shifted, mouths in firmer lines, body language adjusting to be more aggressive, sitting up straighter.

Subtlety wasn’t Gordon’s strong point either.

“But,” Gordon said, “I’m not going to do that.  I’m looking for information.”

He’d upset them, but he wasn’t balancing it out with any bribe or possible reward.  If I was jumping in to make the threats like Gordon had, I would have offered something to gain, to pull them further into my grasp and ensure they would do what I wanted them to do.

“What information?” one of the girls asked.

“Wait, wait,” the leftmost girl said.  “Who are you, why are you here, and what are you doing?”

She was asking too many questions at once.  The alcohol had made the words too loose.

“I’m Gordon, that’s Sylvester.  We’re trying to find some people, and we’re trying to find some people.”

She looked momentarily confused.

“Hm,” the middle girl made a curious noise.  “I’ll take your bait.  Which people?”

“The other sort of people that go to spots like this.  Probably not students, either low-level laborers or the family of those laborers.  Shady types,” Gordon said.

“And what does a kid like you want with that type of person?” the rightmost girl asked.

“Point us in the right direction if you want to find out,” Gordon said, smiling.

If I had asked, she would have said no.

She smiled back.  “I am curious.”

Being attractive, being naturally smart, and naturally fit, Gordon had things easy.  He didn’t have to push as hard to achieve the same things.  People liked him.

“You might be looking for the Baths?” the middle girl asked.  “There are four brothers and a girl, they drive in the wagons with supplies, three times a week.  They get up to trouble.”

“How much trouble?” Gordon asked.

The leftmost girl of the group reached back, grabbed a bottle and held it up.

“Drinking, more drinking, the occasional fight, making a lot of noise, which is probably the worst thing they do, having so many students living in Kensford,” the middle girl clarified.

“And they do like the ladies,” the girl to the right said.  She took the bottle and tipped back a mouthful.

“There aren’t many young men around,” I observed.

The girl gave me a smile that was somewhere between smug and knowing.

Lucky guys, I supposed.

“Baths.  That’s a last name?” Gordon asked.  When he got a nod in response, he asked, “Are they serious about their work?”

“Mother Bath and Father Bath don’t mind what they do so long as the kids get the work done.  They do, they’re religious about it.  A day of work, a few hours a night of play.”

“It’s daytime right now,” Gordon observed.  “How long until they’re available?”

The girls murmured among one another for a few seconds, then each one gave different answers.

“Three hours.”

“Five hours.”

“Four hours.”

“That’s too late,” Gordon said.  “Who else?”

“Else?”

“Not the Bath family.  Anyone else?”

“There are others, independent, people everyone knows to avoid.  They’re not the sort of people kids like you should hang around.”

“Why?” I cut in, before Gordon could forge onward.

“They have a bit of a mean streak.  Picking on the weak,” the middle girl said.  “And you’re weak.”

“Where are they?” Gordon asked.

Again with the direct approach.  It wasn’t the sort of thing I could have done, but Gordon almost sounded like an adult as he asked, and he managed the right body language and expression to drive the point home.

“I can’t tell you that, not in good conscience.”

“Where are they?” he asked, again, more serious.

“The woods,” the girl on the left said.  The drunkest of the group.  Still having trouble holding her tongue.

“Where?” Gordon asked.

“Near-” the girl started to reply.  Her friend in the middle clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Near the school,” I guessed.  Most obvious possibility.

The looks on their faces told me I was right.

“A little to the west?” I tried.  With the school bordered on two sides by thick woodland, there were only two possible directions that weren’t ‘into the woods’.  Being right had the ‘wow’ factor, but I figured out the answer either way.  Probably.

Again, I was right.

I looked at Gordon.  “Let’s go.”

“How did you do that?” the drunk girl asked, behind me.

The second of the girls, the one from the middle, hopped down behind me.  I turned just in time to see her grab for my coat.  I tried to avoid her hand, and missed.

“You’re not going in the woods,” she said, voice firm.

I was betting she was an older sister.

Gordon started to approach, no doubt to break her hold.  For my part, I reached into my coat and withdrew a knife, raising it toward her wrist.

She let go of me as if I were on fire.

“We can handle ourselves,” Gordon said, in the same confident, mild manner of speaking he’d used to talk to them earlier.  “If you want to come and make sure we’re safe, feel free, but don’t get in the way.”

We circled around the mass grave, making our way toward the woods at the north end of Kensford, west of the Academy at the northeast corner of the town, and the girls didn’t follow.

When we were out of earshot, I commented, “That was a shame.  We could have used them.”

“They would have held us back, or complained.  They’re not what we’re looking for.”

“No,” I agreed.

People with a mean streak sounded good.

☙

We’d done this before.  Found a group of malcontents, then steered them in a given direction.  They worked well as distractions, as sources of information, or sources of tools, an extra set of hands for getting things done.

Gordon was generally good at getting their attention.  I was good when it came to the steering.

We hadn’t run into this before.

They were, by and large, girls.  They were eighteen to nineteen, dressed in winter clothes, they sat around a large bonfire, their backs to a shack that had another fire going in a stove or fireplace within.  A group of the girl’s pets were hacking away at trees, gathering more firewood for the bonfire.

At the center of it all was a girl with her hair in disarray, slouching forward on a log, elbows on her knees.  Her jacket looked like some kind of new fashion that had yet to take off; it sported a surprising number of black feathers around the collar.  She’d had some alterations done to her face and nails, giving one of her her cheekbones and eye sockets a peculiar sort of edge to them, her upper face looking like a stylized skull was trying to push its  way out and forward from one corner of her face.

She wasn’t the only one who had gone to an extreme and modified herself, and as a result, there was no particular sign she was special, going by appearance and attitude alone.  There was only the fact that, when we arrived, and the girls looked at each other in surprise, they looked to the black feathered woman for a response.

“You usually pick a fight and win,” I murmured.  “You want to fight them?”

“I’m not shy to fight a woman.  We can do this like we always do.  I propose a challenge, or see if they’re betting types.  Let them pick the contest, hope they pick fighting, for me, or a gambling game for you to cheat at, beat them, whatever they choose.  Use that to get them to listen.”

“No,” I agreed, “Difference is, you’re not going to ‘win’ if you win.  Nobody will respect a boy who beats a girl.”

“Hm,” he said.  “They might.“

“Nah.  Let me lead here?” I asked.

He gestured in my direction.

“Aren’t many kids hereabouts,” the woman with the black feathered coat said.  She was faking an Eastern-Crown accent, which I found very interesting.  It was all of the crispness of Crown English coupled with too much enunciating.  The fakery of it was obvious enough I suspected some of others in this group of hers knew it wasn’t how she really talked.

Why, then?

Image?

“We’re not from hereabouts,” I said.  “We’re visiting from Radham.”

“All the way from Radham to here?” she asked.  “Tots don’t often come to Kensford.  Less than ten in the city, I’d wager.  Children of shopkeeps or teachers.”

“There are a few more now,” I said.  My gaze passed over every person here, trying to piece the puzzle together.  Who were these young ladies, and why were they here?

Dark circles under eyes, scars in and on the webbing between fingers, a generally dejected, angry air, with some drastic personal modifications that were guaranteed to run afoul of the school, even without the dress code, and the proximity of this little encampment to the larger school was pretty telling.

The pieces snapped into place.

I had an idea of who they were and how they functioned, now.

But first things first…

“We’re looking for someone,” I said.  “She’s a criminal, and the very first thing I have to ask is whether anyone came to you and asked about children.”

“Which children?  Having children?” the woman in the black feathered coat asked.

“Looking for us,” I said.  It was cutting a little too close to the chase, but I was feeling impatient.

She didn’t respond, and only stared.

I knew this tactic.  I’d used this tactic.

Yet she’d played dumb, just a bit, she had baited an answer out of me, and now she was leaving me hanging.  That I hadn’t had a better response to each step of her play was grating.

You want to play that game?

“We haven’t been here for long,” I said.  I didn’t break eye contact as I talked, staring, “But I do know that Dame Cicely’s has a strict curriculum, with an awful lot of students who are willing to hurt or sabotage others if it means rising to the top.  I’m even betting that some of you have done it.  Except you failed.”

I saw the reactions, and I marked the faces in question, the black-feathered woman’s in particular.  The bullies, the vicious ones who’d hurt others.

“You collectively failed,” I said.  “You’re here because you’re not part of the school anymore.  You hit your limit, you didn’t get the grades, or you were dropped from the roster.  Maybe your parents don’t know.  Maybe they’re picking you up soon.  You have a limited time, and there aren’t many roads open to you.”

“I do think…” the woman in the black-feathered coat said, drawing out the words, pausing for effect, “…I’m done listening to you.  Scurry off, little one.  I’m feeling kind today.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” I told her.

“Feeling less kind, now,” she said.

Right.  Picking on the weak.

She stood from the log she was using as a bench, dusting snow off her backside.  She was fascinating to look at, in terms of the sheer analysis I could do.  All the girls and women I’d met had been told how to act and how to dress, how to say things and how to be.

Out of those girls and women, there had been scarce few who had broken from that mold.  Of those, there were a number of monsters, and there were a number of people who had been absolutely and totally broken.  Slaves, prisoners, and test subjects.

Then there were maybe one or two sexual inverts, but this woman didn’t strike me as one.

She’d been torn down, and she’d built herself back up, and it was a ramshackle, unwieldy sort of build, as her accent suggested.  She walked with less grace than many men I knew.

She drew nearer.  I didn’t move.

She reached for me, and Gordon moved to intercept, grabbing her wrist.

Looking at her palm, I saw something move.  Pink, tiny, and round, they looked like pimples, but they throbbed, skin stretching tighter as they moved.

I hurried in stepping to one side, while Gordon held her wrist to keep her hand from following me.

A pale mist spurted out to form a two-foot round cloud in front of her hand.  My head was well out of the way

She tore her wrist free of Gordon’s grip.

“Something about you two seems wrong,” she said.  “The way you talk, the way you move…”

That goes both ways, I thought.

“We’re talking about you, not us,” I told her, “You’re out of options, all of you.  You’re having a last hurrah before your families come to collect you or outright disown you.  You had one chance to make something of yourself that wasn’t being a teacher or a housewife, and you failed.”

“I’m still in a position to hurt you,” she threatened.

“I’m in a position to stop you,” Gordon said, behind her.

She stepped back to keep us all in view, while also making sure that we were between her and the others.  Gordon and I didn’t flinch.

Sore spot.  She wore the wound like a badge, and she was no doubt used to hurting anyone who prodded it.  Angry, spiteful, lashing out.  She wore it all right out in the open.

And, I imagined, the others flocked to her because they identified so heavily with it.

This wasn’t a group like Reverend Mauer had been trying to make, something that might have endured and carried on forever.  This was a group that would self destruct any day now.

It was beautiful in its bitterness.

“I’m going to keep this simple, and I’m going to keep it short,” Gordon said.  “We’re here because we want to offer you an opportunity.  You have very few opportunities.”

“Opportunities,” she said, sounding less than enthused.

Gordon shrugged.  “You became Academy students because it’s the fastest, easiest way to rise up in society and get out from under thumbs.  Now I’m going to offer you another way that’s fast and easy.  Money.”

“How much?” she asked, without wasting a heartbeat’s time.

I jumped in, wasting no time either, wording things so I had a half-second to think.  There were eight people in her little group. “Enough that, if you split it three ways, three people could buy houses in a decent enough town.  Split it more ways, it still buys some time to figure out a way forward.”

“Money makes the world go around,” Gordon said.  “And at the end of the day, even the Academy needs money and resources to keep going.”

The woman frowned, looking at each of us.  “And how are you going to get us that much money?”

“We’re looking for a person,” I said.  “And it’s tricky, because it’s a girl with a pet monster, and I do know there are a lot of girls with pet monsters around.  Her pet was a disembodied head, but we’re not sure what it is now, and she could have changed her appearance.”

“Does she have a bounty on her head?” she asked.

“Not officially, but she’s committed major offenses against the Crown in two of the Crown States.  That puts a certain price on her head.  You get her, dead or alive, and then you point out the rule, deliver the body, and you’re made.”

“Where do you come in?” she asked.  “Two little boys in the wrong place, doing and knowing things you shouldn’t.”

“We’re your salvation,” I said.  “We don’t need or want the money.  We want her caught, or we want her dead.  That’s all.”

“You’re going to say yes,” Gordon said.  “Do you want to keep pretending you won’t, or can we use this time to talk details, with Sylvester and me -I’m Gordon, by the by- telling you what little we know about her?”

“You think I’m going to say yes, because I don’t have anything better to do?  Maybe we’re done with people telling us how we should live our lives.”

“Maybe,” Gordon said.  “And maybe this is the last real choice.  Your last chance, ever, to choose the course of your own life.”

She ruminated for a long moment.

“Ronnie,” one of the other girls said.  “Please.”

Ronnie, the woman with the black feathered coat, bowed her head a little.

“You’re angry,” I said, my voice soft.  “Angry at the world.  This girl we’re after, she’s a good target for that anger.”

Was there really as much choice as we’d implied?

She nodded.

“How many people do you think you could round up?” Gordon asked.

“Twelve at least,” she said, raising her head.  “Twenty at most.”

Twenty is a good number.

“Okay.  Here’s what you need to know,” Gordon said.  “She’s not a student, and she probably doesn’t have student identification.  She has or had black hair, favors ruby red lipstick, was in the company of a young stitched woman and a head…”

☙

The others were waiting as Gordon and I met at the house.  I tried to gauge how the others were doing, if they were closer or further apart than they’d been before Gordon had grouped them up.

Helen and Lillian seemed fine.  Jamie and Mary far less so.

“Where do we stand?” Gordon asked.

“We talked to the faculty,” Lillian said.  “There have been thefts of supplies.  She set up a lab, and she might be reluctant to abandon it.”

“She’s set up others,” I said.  “She abandoned those.”

Lillian frowned.

“I recognized the equipment,” Helen said.  “Vat grown life, big and equipment necessary for working with microscopic life.”

“Together?” Gordon asked.

“I don’t know,” Helen said.

“Anything else?”

Helen shook her head.

“Jamie, Mary?”

“We looked through the crowds,” Jamie said.  “If she’s hiding in plain sight, she might be hiding among larger numbers.  If I can get a good look at her, I’ll be able to identify her.”

“This many pretty girls around,” Mary said, “Someone’s doing back-street work, touching up and prettifying.  That same someone might have changed Ms. Fray’s face or hair for her.  We asked around, I think we might keep it up.”

They didn’t stay together.

“You need to stay together as a pair,” Gordon said, voicing my thoughts aloud.

“We did, some,” Jamie said.  “We stayed close enough we could see each other, at least.”

“And if she comes after you in the crowd?” Gordon asked.

“That might not be how she operates,” I said.

“But it could be,” Gordon said.

I nodded in agreement.

“And you?” Mary asked.  “What did you manage?”

“We’ve got eighteen people on the ground,” I said.  “Malcontents and criminals.  We’re going to put word out with a few others.  Local thugs.  Every town has it’s common elements, and one of those elements is that there are people who aren’t happy, looking for an easy fix.  They’re covering the common exits from the city and making sure Fray can’t run, if she’s still here.”

“I know Gordon likes to do things the direct way,” Jamie said, “But you, Sy?  What’s the plot in your head right now?”

“Plotting?  I’m offended!”

Jamie didn’t even blink.

I sighed.  “The people we’re sending after Fray, they’re floundering, drowning, struggling to make it in life.  I’m interested to see how she interacts with them.  It’s very possible she might recruit them.”

“Which is good, somehow?” Mary guessed.

I nodded.  “Insert a weak link that we can then sever at the right time.  And those women are weak links.”

“Dangerous game,” Gordon said.  I detected a note of disapproval in his voice.

“It’s one I’m confident playing,” I said.  “At the very least, they’ll keep her on her back foot, make her deal with the people who are asking questions and cutting off her retreat.”

There were a few nods.

“We eat, hit the washrooms, change clothes if we need to, then move out again,” Gordon said.  He looked at Jamie and Mary.  “Same teams, please.”

Jamie and Mary nodded.

As we headed for the front door of the house, I inserted myself between Jamie and Mary.  Two of my favorite people, for very different reasons.  My oldest friend and my newest.

How to tie them closer together?

“You’re both methodical,” I said.  “What you do, you do perfectly, whether it’s sticking a knife in between someone’s ribs or remembering the exact text of a book you read a year ago.  Think about what puts the two of you on the same page.  Use that.”

“We’re both fond of you,” Jamie said.

“Well, that’s a cop out answer,” I said.  “We’re all fond of each other, aren’t we?”

Mary smiled at that.  The inclusion.  Even now, three quarters of a year after joining us, she needed the reminder that she was a dyed in the wool Lamb.

“We’re okay,” Jamie said.  “We were figuring it out.”

“I know,” I said.  “I only…”

I trailed off.

Gordon had opened the door.

He stepped back out of the way.

Our belongings were in ruins.  The luggage destroyed, the contents torn up and strewn around.  Entire sections of the little dormitory house had been torn up and ripped out, including the kitchen sink, by the looks of it.

But, worst of all, was the blood.  At least three whelps had been torn to pieces and the contents had been used to paint the hallway.

The bloody handprint on the wall was at least two feet across.

A message was written on the wall in blood.

I have your real pills.

-G. Fray

All things have hearts.  Even the Lambs.

“Oh gosh darn it!” Helen said.  She reached into a coat pocket and pulled out the bottle.  “Is there any way to tell?”

“Taste?” Jamie suggested.

“Taste it, then,” Gordon said.  “But there’s no guarantees.  We can’t afford to think we’re safe and be wrong.  She’s here, she’s challenging us…”

“And if she knows we’re staying here, then she’s been watching our every move from the beginning,” I said.

Stitch in Time – 4.3

“I’ll check the place,” Gordon said.

“I’ll come with,” Mary said.

“Thank you.”

It wasn’t a bad idea.  There was no guarantee that the assailant had already left.

“Watch that you don’t mess up any evidence,” Jamie said.

“We won’t,” Mary said.

Ah, evidence.  I liked where people’s thoughts were going.  Mary teaming up with Gordon, Jamie thinking about the next step.

I could have done without Jamie suggesting Gordon or Mary would have messed up, but this was a better course of things.

“Sorry, little guys,” Gordon said, under his breath, to our deceased comrades.  “You died for a good cause.  Your brothers will avenge you, hopefully.”

“It would be nice,” I said, crouching down to sit on my heels, prodding at one of the dead whelps.  It had a large beak and scaled body, it sported a long tail and narrow eyes.  The tongue trailed out of its open mouth.  I added, “My hopes aren’t high.  She’s been one step ahead for a while.  I doubt the Whelps are going to catch her off guard.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

I stroked the thing’s side.  It was small compared to the others, I gauged it at twenty pounds, give or take, though it was hard to gauge with the sheer damage it had sustained.  A runt like me.

I prodded the lolling tongue into its mouth, before closing the beak.

The mouth popped back open, and the tongue unfurled.

I tried.  Sorry, runt.

“Don’t get too much blood on your hands,” Jamie reminded me.

“I know.”

“I can give you something to clean your hands,” Lillian said.  Then she stopped.  “Or I could, but…”

But her bag was the biggest out of all of ours, and the contents were strewn about.

“I think I can find it.  Give me a second,” she said.

“Don’t,” I told her.  “If they possibly messed with the pills, we can’t rule out that they messed with the stuff they left on the floor.”

“But-”

“It’s okay,” Helen said, giving Lillian a pat on the shoulder.  “He was careful, and he didn’t get any blood on his hands.  The scent marker only works if they bleed on you.  Poor little fellas.”

“The Whelps know us anyway,” I added.  “Maybe not you, so much, and maybe not Mary, but they’re not about to come tearing after me.  You, maybe, but-”

“You already said that.”

“Repeating it for emphasis.”

She punched me in the arm, before dropping her arm to one side and looking down at the mess.

“We’re okay,” I said.

“I don’t think we are,” Lillian said, arms folded in a way that was hugging herself as much as it was defiance.  “Fray knows where we sleep.”

“We can go somewhere else,” Jamie said.

“If she followed us here-”

“She might follow us elsewhere,” I finished for Lillian.  “I know.  There’s no place we’re safe, and she has the upper hand.”

“Especially with the pills being an issue,” Gordon said, returning.

“There is that,” I said.

Mary made her way back, standing beside Gordon.  Between all of us, we’d formed a loose perimeter around the mess that had been left behind with the demise of the Whelps.

“Perimeter’s clear,” Mary said, a touch late.  Filling the silence rather than promptly reporting in.  “Nothing and nobody outside that I can tell.”

“Small building, fast check,” Gordon said.  “What are we thinking?”

“We’re dealing with a Sylvester that has a lot more general knowledge, less compunctions, and the upper hand,” Jamie said.

“She can’t pee standing up, so that’s a point for me,” I said.

Lillian punched me in the arm again.

“Ow!  Why?”

“This is serious.  Be serious,” she admonished me.

“There was no stamp on the parcel, she would have had to know there would be a parcel arriving by mail with a guard, and she would have had to fabricate any fake pills in advance,” Gordon said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“She would have had to know we were coming, or that someone was coming,” Jamie pointed out.

“Yeah,” I said, holding my tongue as I thought, the armed mail carriage wouldn’t have been the most subtle thing for a paranoid ex-Doctor, and she was expecting someone.

Helen held up the bottle of pills, so they caught the light.

“Sealed,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Gimme?” Jamie asked.

“If it’s poison-” I warned.

“Just gimme,” Jamie said.

Helen unsealed the bottle, removed the glass stopper, then reached in to get a pill.  She threw it to me.

I caught it and handed it to Jamie.

He popped it into his mouth.  “Tastes exactly the same.  Like chalk.”

“All signs point to it being nothing more than head games,” Gordon said.

“Yeah,” I said, for the fourth time.

The silence lingered.  Nobody was saying what we were all thinking.  We could say all we wanted, but our heads knew different.

Fray was smart, and she was clever, which were two very different things.  It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility, and when our lives were at stake…

I said it, because nobody else seemed willing to, “We’re not really in a position to take a leap of faith here.  Guessing wrong before we leap means a terminal fall.”

Nobody said anything to that.  It was sobering.

“Is that it?” Mary asked, indignant.  “We pack up, use the badges, and force our way onto the next train ride back?”

“It’s the safest option,” Gordon said.  “Lillian, you were briefed on the particulars of the drug, weren’t you?”

“They filled me in before we left.  What to expect when you showed symptoms, how to handle it.  If we left tonight, assuming a two hour train journey to Radham, one or two brief stops, I don’t think there would be any major symptoms.  You’d feel like you had the flu, at worst.  I could alleviate symptoms, which would delay the deterioration.”

“Dying,” I said.

“If you want to be blunt about it,” she said.  The look in her eyes when she looked at me was steely.  Her tone was cold, and she spoke with a kind of authority.

Our lives were in her hands, as they so often were, but right here, right now, with all of us in grave peril, well, this was Lillian’s moment.

She fixed the position of her bags, betraying the nervousness behind the guise.  “When you start throwing up, the other parts of you that are breaking down will tear and rip.  Your stomach and throat will bleed, your muscles will rip, and you’ll be incapacitated by cramps.  The blood that drains into your stomach will make you throw up more.  By that point in time, every hour that passes adds a month to the time it would take you to recover.  And that’s with Academy help, and it assumes you’re taking the pills again.”

Gordon looked at me.  “You ran away once.”

Mary’s ears perked up at that.

“Didn’t leave Radham.  Couldn’t.  Planned to, but the opportunities never came up.”

“What opportunities would that be?” Gordon asked, a half-smile on his face, “Were you going to get classified as a war machine so they wean you off the leash, and somehow pass yourself off without getting caught by Dog and Catcher?”

Helen tittered, “That’s a funny mental image.  Big hulking warbeast, check.  Big hulking warbeast, check.  Big hulking warbeast, check.  Then there’s Sy, standing in the stable, fake horns on his head.  Check.”

“Then the actual medication comes in,” I said, “In the form of a three gallon syringe, to be jabbed into my tiny ass.”

There were a few smiles at that, breaking the tension.

Good.

“In seriousness, my vampire bat plan was sort of like that,” I said.

The half-smile dropped off Gordon’s face.  “What?  You’re serious.”

“Sort of,” I said.  “I needed a good back-alley doctor to help me figure out the particulars, stuff to watch out for, get the tools, but if I stole the blood of something that was being weaned off and getting the drugs that eased the transition, then gave it to myself?”

“If you gave me a week, I couldn’t list all the reasons that wouldn’t work,” Lillian said.

“But,” I said, “I could get the drugs that way, if there wasn’t any other option, right?”

“You’d kill yourself.”

“But I’d have the drugs,” I said.

Lillian frowned.  “Yes.”

“Any war machine that’s getting weaned off the Academy’s leash-drugs isn’t going to put up much of a fight if I happened to slip into its enclosure.  Maybe I could have found someone to reverse engineer the drug.  Maybe there could be a filter.  Centrifuge thing, if the drug is heavy enough?”

“No, Sy,” Lillian said.  “I can’t imagine that working.”

I nodded.

“I didn’t know that you did that,” Mary commented, voice soft.

“I’m not proud of it,” I said.

“It’s very you.”

I nodded.

“You got caught, in the end?”

“I let myself get caught,” I said.  “Stayed in Radham, reached my limit, and when Dog and Catcher came sniffing around, I didn’t try to fight them.  Stayed put as Catcher came into the building, didn’t budge as Catcher came to cuff me.”

“Why?”

“Because,” I said.  “I missed the others.  Being with them on the Academy’s terms was better than being without, on mine.”

Mary nodded.  It was a reply she understood.  The others gave me small smiles or nods of understanding – Gordon, Helen, even Lillian.

Jamie was the only one who didn’t.  Who knew that I was telling a half truth.  Or, more correctly, I was telling half of the truth.

Yes, I had gone back for the others.

But I had also gone back for my appointments.  I had allowed the Academy to poison my brain once again, with my body suffering as a side effect, and I’d done it because I’d missed being sharp.

Two appointments in short succession.  It had been so difficult I very nearly hadn’t come back from it.

“Sy,” Gordon said.  “Vampire bat plan?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Was this one of multiple plans?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you have other plans you intended to use then, which might apply today?  Ways to prolong the deadline?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “One.  But it won’t make us any friends.”

“Share?” Mary asked.

“Simple.  We take someone else’s.”

“That depends on there being someone from Radham here, using an experiment,” Gordon said.  “Whelps don’t count.  They’re weaned.”

“I know,” I said.  “It’s a long shot.  But it’s a long shot in favor of having another shot at her, while she’s playing games with us.”

“I want to win,” Mary said.

“I’m with Mary on this one,” Gordon said.  “It’s a stupid trick, faking us out on the pills, but she’s out-predicted us a few too many times, staying ahead of the Lambs, Hangman and Dog and Catcher.  I don’t feel safe calling her on what seems to be a shitty bluff.  I’m angry, I want to win and rub it in her face.”

“I agree,” Jamie said.  He pushed his oversized glasses up his nose.  “But we do this safely.  If we have to catch a train tonight to get back in time, then we have until tonight.  That’s only a few more hours.  We need to find leads on Fray, figure out if there’s a way to get a legitimate source for pills, and watch our backs at the same time.”

“Easy peasy,” I said.

“I’m not so sure,” he said.  “But I’d like to give this a shot, at least.”

United in crisis.

We were on more solid footing than we had been.

It made me wonder.  If the positions were reversed, me in Fray’s shoes and vice-versa, would I have been able to get a good reading on my adversary?  Would I know that the Lambs were fractured and falling apart?  That attacking them directly would rally them, while running away for the Nth time threatened to break them?

Fray was an invisible woman.  I knew her only by the maneuvers she’d made against us, the cities she chose to flee to, and the way she fled.

Jamie stepped forward.  He traced his finger along the edge of the bloody handprint on the wall.

Gordon commented, “She wants us to come after her.  This is a trap.”

“So is going home,” I said.  “We leave, she probably won’t extend another invitation to us again.  Makes me think…”

I trailed off, uncomfortable.

“Think what?”  Gordon asked.

“Nothing,” I said.  “Incomplete thought.  I’ll speak up the moment it’s put together in my head.”

Gordon nodded.

“Going by handprint and footprint, I don’t think I’ve seen anything that would fit the size of this guy,” Jamie said.

“Guy?”

Jamie nodded.  He pointed at the marks on the floor.  Not at blood.  The attackers weren’t so messy.  But at scuff marks, dust, and spots where dust was mottled.  “Man.  He had a lot of snow on him.  Kicked up, and he’d been standing in the snow.  It fell off in clumps, hit the floor, dappled the texture of the dust there.  Our assailant.  The head, now with a body.”

The finger moved to the floor to one side.  “Hard to see now, because Mary walked on it, but I remember it as it was.  Young woman.  Lightweight.  Tall, slender, not heavily dressed.  Odd gait.  Limp.”

“The stitched woman,” Lillian said.

Jamie nodded.

“No Fray?” Gordon asked.

Jamie shook his head.

Interesting.

She sent her underlings on a mission, but what had she been doing in the meantime?

Why was she staying with us?

“It’s a starting point,” Gordon said.  “Now, I’ve really got to visit the little boy’s room.  Then we really should get going.  We’re working with a clock.”

I liked the looks on people’s faces as they transitioned from being children to being Lambs in their element.  Being more anxious, or less.  Expressions changing, minds switching gears.

Jamie elbowed me.  Then he pointed at the door.

I nodded.

We excused ourselves and stepped outside.  My eyes roved over the storybook town, looking to see if I could spy Fray spying on us.

“When you came back, you didn’t do it purely because of us,” Jamie murmured.

I bumped his arm with my shoulder.  “It’s weird when you do that.  Pick up a thread of conversation that we dropped a while back.”

“Sure,” he said.  “You’re dodging the question.”

“Statement, not a question, Mr. Perfect Memory.”

“Implied question, Mr. Tiny Ass.”

I stabbed a finger toward his face.  “Careful.”

“You’re still dodging.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.  “That wasn’t the only reason.”

“You’ve hinted at it before.  Do I have to say it, or will you admit it?”

I shrugged, “Same thing.”

“You came back because you wanted to be a Lamb, not a real boy.”

I nodded, not looking at him, but at all of the smoke pouring up from the chimneys of the oddly similar little buildings.

“What if Fray is the same?” Jamie asked.

“She wants to be a Lamb?”

“She wants the excitement.  She wants to have a brain that works differently than most, and she wants to test it.  She’s been running for so long, she’s getting bored.”

“No,” I said.  “I don’t buy it.”

“Serial killers do it.  They develop a pattern, based on who they are and how they function.  They test the limits, they get away with it, but as humans, we all have a drive to be appreciated and recognized.  We need stimulus.  I doubt Fray is going to sit down and read a book any more than you are.  She’s looking to us to satisfy a desire.”

“No, sorry,” I said.  “I respect that you’ve put a lot of thought into it, but…”

“But?”

“No.  It’s too convenient.  Her, suddenly developing a weakness, right here, when we need her to?  The thing with the pills, to throw us off balance?”

“You think it’s a trap.”

“I’d rather go up against her assuming that she didn’t have any weaknesses at all,” I said.  “I feel like anything else would be a mistake.”

Jamie nodded.  The snow continued to fall around us.  I heard Gordon coming down the stairs.

“Are you saying that,” Jamie said, with a careful sort of deliberation, “because you think Fray is that good?  Or are you saying it because you want to think she’s that good.”

“You think I need that stimulus you were just talking about?” I asked.

Jamie shrugged.

I bumped his arm with my shoulder.  He returned the favor, hard enough that I lost my footing, going wide off the stairs leading up to the front door and putting my foot into a bush.

I was only just managing to pull my foot free, cursing Jamie, when the others emerged.

All of the Lambs together and ready.

☙

A secondary source of pills disarmed Fray’s ruse.  It was something of a priority.  We moved as a group, now, holding something of a formation.  Jamie’s eyes scanned the crowd, Mary had one flank, Gordon had another, and Helen had the front of the group.

“Post office, three buildings down this street,” Jamie said.

“What’s the approach?” Gordon asked.

“We can do it quick, we can do it pretty, and we can do it careful,” I said.  “Pick two.”

“I’d prefer-” Gordon started.

“That was a rhetorical question,” I cut him off.

“You’re a jackass.”

“We do it quick, we do it careful.  We don’t want to waste time, and we’re going to watch our backs every step of the way.  We’re not making friends today.  We’ve already scattered a handful of delinquents around the town, and the only pretty way to get the pills we need is to go home.  I don’t think any of us want to go home, do we?”

There were a few grumbles and murmurs of agreement.

“I want to go home,” Lillian said.

“Too bad,” I said, before her mouth was closed. “Helen takes point on this one.  She’s pretty enough to make up for what we’re lacking.”

“Oh yay!” Helen said.  “And thank you!”

“Mary, get the back door.  Gordon, cover any bystanders, watch the front door.  Jamie, I think there was a window.”

“There was.”

“Watch for bystanders.  Keep an eye on the crowd.  Fray is going to want to watch what our next moves are, so soon after the little stunt she pulled.”

“And me?” Lillian asked.

“If we need your help, something’s gone horribly wrong,” I said.

I saw movement in one of the alleyways.  Whelps.  Three.  All larger than the runt I’d said hi to.

They were, as a weapon, a singular entity.  They weren’t joined by the brain or anything like that, but they were cloned, making them functionally identical, differing only in minor ways as their environment and exposure to food allowed.  One whelp alone could divide into two.  Left alone, they would stalk their prey from a distance, eat things that didn’t smell of human, including foodstuffs recently handled by humans, multiply, and then when they had built up sufficient numbers, they would attack en masse.  Those beaks would cut into flesh and flense it from bone.  Ten whelps could devour a man in less than a minute.

They had her scent, our delinquents had the exits covered.  By all rights, our quarry should have been cornered and under pressure.  I fully expected her to take down the delinquents with her…

“Oh guys,” I said, interrupting my own train of thought.

“What?” Jamie asked.

“Headsman?  For the head, now with body.”

“Ehhh,” Gordon said.

“It’s great!”

“Ehhhh,” he said, again.

“You lack taste,” I told him.

I picked up my own train of thought before it ran away from me.  Fray most definitely had the tools to take down any of the delinquents we’d put in her way.  My only hope was that there would be enough of a mess or commotion to clue us in to what she was doing.

Many of those delinquents had pets and creations of their own, after all.  It wasn’t likely to be tidy when she disposed of them.

We approached the post office.

“Mail would have come in with the train,” Jamie observed.  “Not all of it would have been picked up.  I can’t think of a better, faster way to check what we need to check.”

“Will you give me a boost, Mary?” Helen asked.

“Now?  Where?”

“In a few seconds, silly,” Helen said.  “Inside.“

“Um,” Mary said.

“Play along,” I encouraged her.

Gordon was taking long strides forward to beat us to the door.  Ever the gentleman, he held it for the ladies as they stepped inside first.

The building was empty.  Fortuitous.

“Ah, hello again,” the postman said.  “Little lady.”

“Hello!” Helen greeted him.  She gestured at Mary, who connected the dots just in time for Helen.  She offered two hands, fingers interlaced.  Helen stepped up onto the hands, then onto the counter of the post office.

“Excuse me!” the postman said, looking alarmed.

Helen simply strode forward, hooked an arm around his neck, swinging around behind him, and wrapped her legs around his arms, pinning them to his sides.

He struggled, and he was a big fellow, almost capable of freeing himself, but her grip on his neck tightened.  He backed up, slamming her against the wall and shelf behind them, but she simply redoubled her attack.

Mary and I both hopped over the counter, Mary’s skirt swishing around stockinged legs.  Gordon was locking the door, pulling down the blind above the glass pane, while Jamie stood by the window, peering out.  Mary went to the back door, locking it, while I started looking.

Behind the desk was a grid of mail slots, with mail stacked within each square subsection.  Mary joined me in rifling through the mail.

“Here,” Mary said, holding up an envelope.

“Yeah,” I said.  Three envelopes addressed to one person, each sent from ‘Radham Academy’.  I continued looking.

Helen looked through the packages under the desk.  Her search was shorter than ours.  Lillian was only just reaching the postman, checking he was only passed out and not actually dead.

We weren’t complete monsters.

“No packages from Radham,” Helen said, standing straight.

“Another two envelopes here,” I said, holding them up.  Helen snatched them, freeing my hand for more looking.

“One more,” Mary said.  “And…”

I saw her move over to look at more slots.

“I already checked that column of slots,” I said.

“Then I’m done.”

“And,” I checked the last two boxes, flipping through envelopes.  “So am I.  That makes four people who are in Kensford, with ties to Radham.  Anyone want to take bets on them having something?”

“No,” Gordon said.  “Don’t want to take that bet.  But it’s a chance.”

Jamie held out his hand as we rounded the corner.  We handed over the envelopes.

Gordon opened the door, and we let ourselves out.

Quick, careful.

I saw Jamie’s slight frown as he watched over the crowd.  He hadn’t seen anything yet, or he would have spoken up.

Fray was watching.  Now she knew we weren’t running.  Not yet, anyway.

☙

“No,” the man at the door said.

“Because we were told there was a brilliant researcher from Radham here,” Helen said, practically effervescent in attitude.  “We were so hoping to see his work.”

“That would not be me,” the man said.

“Would you know who it was?  We’re so short on time!”

“It’s not me, I don’t know who it would be, and you’re annoying,” he said.

The door slammed.

Helen turned around very slowly, almost dazed.

She hissed.

I gave her a very careful pat on the shoulder, from maximum arm’s length.  “You’re not annoying, Helen.”

She made a small, noncommittal sound.

“That’s three down.  One to go,” Gordon said.  “If this falls through, we need a new idea, or we need to plan to catch the next train out of here.”

Mary spat by the side of the road.  I was pretty sure I saw a bystander further down the street look horrified at the action.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Jamie,” Gordon said.  “Which way to the next place?”

Jamie had his back to us.  His attention was to the far side of the street.

“Jamie,” Gordon said.  “Which way?”

“Shh,” I said, raising a hand.

There was a long pause.  Jamie didn’t move.

I felt a pang of worry.

“Jamie,” I said, my voice soft.  “What are you seeing?”

“She’s changed clothes three times,” he said.  “The hair changed once.  The face stays the same.”

“Fray?” Mary asked.

He shook his head.

“The stitched,” I guessed.

He nodded, pointing a finger.  “She disappeared a second ago, heading east.  I was trying to see her through the crowd.  Blue dress, black jacket and shaw-“

I was already moving.  Mary was a step behind me, and Gordon a step behind her.

We ran, and I didn’t slow a fraction as I hurled myself at the thicker part of the crowd.  I turned my body sideways, I ducked low, I pushed.

She had a headstart, but she was lame.

I was spry, and I was small.

The chaos of the crowd was my medium.

Gordon and Mary were just behind me.  Gordon was bigger but stronger.  Mary was between us, but she had a natural grace.

I pulled ahead of the two, all the same.  A part of me wondered if I wanted it more, and pushed myself harder because of it.

Considering how badly Mary wanted it, that said a lot.

“Sy!” Gordon called out.  “Don’t get too far ahead!  We watch each other’s backs!”

I didn’t have the breath to spare to respond.

This might be our one chance, ever.

I saw the crowd, I watched their movements, faced the choice of an alleyway or main street.

A curious, confused glance from a bystander suggested that something in the alleyway had caught his attention.

I took the cue.

I thought of the whelps and how they had died.

I knew I could be running headlong into a trap.

But I also knew, much in the same way I knew Jamie had been wrong about Fray’s motivations, that it wasn’t something Fray seemed inclined to do.

She’d challenged us, baited us.  Simply ambushing me in an alley with the Headsman was… it was too crude.

“Sy!” Gordon called out.

He was just at the mouth of the alley.  I faced a fork in the path.

I listened, and I heard only Gordon’s pounding footsteps on snow-slick cobblestone.

Snow.  I looked at the ground.

There were a number of tracks in the snow, but one set was messier than others.

I wasn’t sure, so I pointed, told Gordon to go right.  I went down the left path.

Down the next branch of the alley, toward rushing water.

My footsteps slowed.  I stopped, panting.

The area was the sort of place that would be a garden in the spring.  There were stone boxes where plants would sprout, and a railing that looked down over a brook, bordered on both sides by stone walls.  A small, quaint stone bridge was a short distance to our left.

The stitched was there.  Steam rose off her, and she was huffing for breath too.  Not that she would get tired in the same way.

Planned.  To get this far ahead, she would have had to run the second Jamie saw her.

She’d been told to show her face.

By Fray, who was leaning over the railing, arms folded.

She turned her head to look at me, then spoke to the stitched.  “Wendy?”

“Yes, ma’am?” Wendy replied.

“Go meet Warren.  Take the other path.  Make noise, the others should hear you.  Warren will protect you if they catch up to you two.  I don’t expect a problem.”

“Yes ma’am,” Wendy said, nodding.  She drew in a deep breath, then sprinted off.

No limp.

Ms. Fray looked at me, and it was a calculating look.  She was analyzing me as I connected the dots.

She turned her back to me, and she beckoned.

“I’m glad it’s you,” she told me.  “Come talk, Sylvester.”

Stitch in Time – 4.4

I approached Miss Genevieve Fray.  Being as short as I was, I had to hop up onto a snow-dusted flower box to look over the railing.  It would have been ignoble to be staring through the bars while she looked over them, for one thing, and by stepping up, I was more on her level.

That felt important, somehow.

It was the style for well-to-do people, man and woman alike, to wear long coats.  Ms. Fray wore a short black coat, reaching only down to her belt.  It was a style that was reserved more for people who were more active and those who worked with their hands.  That wasn’t to say she looked poor.  Her hair was nice, though some of it was caught beneath a crimson scarf, as if the scarf had been put on as an afterthought.  She wore a black skirt short enough to reveal her knees, which were covered in patterned red stockings, and she was absentmindedly scuffing at the snow with the toe of one of her heeled black boots that didn’t look particularly good for running in.

She gave me a sidelong glance, suggesting she’d known I was studying her, or she’d expected me to be.  Her lips turned up in a slight smile.

“What are the terms?”  I asked.

“For?” she asked.

“This conversation.  We should negotiate how we’re doing this.”

“We can’t have a simple conversation?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Why not?” she asked, and she sounded disappointed.  I’d expected her to be more guarded, hiding her emotions, but she wasn’t.

“Because you keep responding with questions, keeping me on my back foot,” I said.

She smiled again.

I waited, letting her resume the conversation.  How she did would tell me a great deal.  If she took her time, that was more time for the others to address the other problem and find me.  They would be worried when I didn’t turn up, which wasn’t good, but it was helpful.

Below us, the water rippled.  At the very edges, where it wasn’t rushing as much, the water had frozen into a thin layer.  The back of a serpentine creature rose up, moved a short distance, and then sunk, making some of the more fragile ice at the sides break away.

“It’s sluggish,” Ms. Fray commented.  “Hm.”

Wasting time?  Idle chatter?  I wasn’t about to complain, up to a point.

“Winter.  Scales suggest cold blood.  It probably wants to be hibernating,” I suggested.

“I don’t think that’s it, Sylvester,” she said.

She didn’t finish the statement.  I wondered if she was baiting me to ask, to take control of the conversation.  Hayle did that a lot, I knew.  I opted to remain silent.

Win-win.  I wasn’t going to get so hungry for details on her that I let my guard down.  Better to compose myself, think everything through, and catch my breath after all the running.

She raised her hands to her face and blew on them, rubbing, before leaning on the railing with her elbows, hands clasped.  “I prefer this to having the Hangman or the Whelps after me.”

“Is that so?”

“It gets lonely, having the company of a voltaic maid and Warren.  I gave him his tongue back, but he doesn’t like talking.”

My face remained stoic, but my mind was shouting at her.  What in the world are you doing!?  Handing me details?  Expressing a vulnerability?  I would never do such a thing in your shoes!

“You contrived to bait me here to talk because you were lonely, of all things?”

“I didn’t know it would be you.  I was expecting Gordon, I think.  Or a group of you.”

“What were you going to do if it was a group of us?”

“Same thing I’m doing now.  Try to have a conversation,” she said.

Conversation.  It kept coming back to that.  Did she have a plan of attack?  A monster of a statement she could drop on me or us and use to disarm us?

“This is a lot of trouble to go to to have a conversation,” I noted.

“Yes.  But fugitives go to a lot of trouble doing anything.  You should know that much.”

I raised my eyebrows.  She turned her head away from the creek and the Kensford streets on the other side of the water to see my reaction.

“You’ve read my file.”

“I was striving to be a professor, but you’d know that much.  Toward the end, when they had whittled the number down to four candidates, they handed us some files.  Academy weapons, for Radham, and for the neighboring towns.”

“Neighboring towns?”

“There are strategically located villages and towns near Radham each have their own weapon and a caretaker or team.  You didn’t know that?”

I shook my head.

“You’ve been to the Academy’s dungeons?”

“I prefer to call that area the Bowels.”

She smiled.  “Yes.  The towns on the periphery are the same, but an opposite concept.  One weapon, Academy Doctors to manage it and keep things in working order, forever advancing or replacing it.  If something goes wrong, well, there’s a lot of open space and not too many people to get caught up in the resulting mess.  The Academy handed us files, on those towns, on the Academy’s resources, on you.  We were told to familiarize ourselves with them, and we were later surprised with questions.  Not to test our knowledge, but to test our abilities as potential professors.”

“‘What would you do differently’, that sort of thing?”

She nodded.  “That sort of thing.  Very dangerous questions, when one is dealing with the sort of people that become professors.  A test of our ability to be politicians as well as scholars.  How well did we use the time they gave us to prepare?  I know one man twice my age got removed from consideration because he only studied the material he was given.  I was asked to look at your files, I spent a lot of time dwelling on them.  On you.”

I thought over her statements for a little while: the minor revelation, the fact that she kept revealing things about herself without giving anything in return.

Was there a trap gathering around me as we spoke?  Did she have underlings or resources?  Creations?

The little alcove was silent and mostly still.  There was a path to the left, running along the side of the little river, with railing beside it, but it was straight, and I could see someone approaching from a mile away.  The other path, to the right, was where I’d come from.  It connected at an angle, making it hard to see down without walking over.  The building behind us was a small restaurant or coffee shop, which probably used this space as an outdoor patio for guests in warmer weather.  If I squinted and peered through the window, I could make out an older woman wiping down something like a counter or table, holding silverware in one hand.

Suspicious, but I had a hard time seeing her as a threat.  It was easier and more subtle to simply hide someone on either side of the window or door.

I wondered if she was waiting for something to take hold and incapacitate me, but I couldn’t imagine how I might be dosed.  It was just cold enough that there wouldn’t be any moisture in the air to hold vapors,I hadn’t ingested anything, and I hadn’t touched anything and then touched my face.

“It’s nice to put a face to the name,” she said.

“I feel the same way,” I told her, carefully.

“What did you think, the first time you heard about me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Answering a question with a question?” she asked, smiling. “I think you said something about that.”

I had, and the accusation was apt.

I wasn’t about to admit that my first thought had been about a possible connection.  That whoever she was, she was bound to be closer to me than any long lost sibling that turned up.

“I thought it would be fun,” I said.  Not a lie, but not the answer to her question.

“When they first picked you, the idea was to use the formula from the Wyvern files until they found a hard limit.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You knew,” she said, more to herself, as if it answered a question.  “I’d already been subjecting myself to more than the prescribed amount before I read your file.  I bartered for them, then started making my own.  Seeing that you’d survived gave me permission to increase the dosages.”

I nodded.

“The difference between us is that you’ve been dosed regularly since you were six.  I’ve been taking the doses for seven years, and have been matching or exceeding your doses for four of those years.  After reading your file, I thought about you regularly, especially during and after my injections.”

“What were you thinking?  Poor kid?”

“In a way.  I was envious, isn’t that strange?  You got to take the doses from an earlier point, you got to decide how you shaped yourself, more than anyone else.  Decide what to focus on, mold your being, decide what things you wanted to be good at and be excellent at those things.”

“Sure,” I said.  I was picking on every word, looking for manipulation.  Was this the trap, the attack?

“Don’t get me wrong, I hated the doses.  The headaches, the nosebleeds, the way my entire body seemed to want to shut down.  But I had a choice.  I thought about what it was like for you, quite a bit.  Whether they dragged you there, kicking and screaming.  But then I asked myself, if you really hated it, would you have gone back willingly, after running away?”

She had me pegged.

It bothered me.  It wasn’t that she’d gotten straight to the heart of a matter that only Jamie had managed to analyze me on, but that this was so lopsided.  The progression of the conversation wasn’t what I’d expected.  She revealed too much.  There was no back and forth, no innuendo, no traps that I’d been able to spot.

She was clearly capable, if she could connect the dots this accurately, bait me here like this and keep me from going for the throat.

“At the age of six, we believe, children start to break away from their parents.  Before six, we’re a sum total of our environments and our biology.  After six, we start to step away from that.  I wondered a great deal about whether being dosed would play into that, and which direction it would go.  It’s very exciting to meet you, after so much speculation.  I’m going to be thinking about this meeting for a long time.”

She was gushing a little.

An act?  Or genuine?

She was showing so many vulnerabilities, it was like she was baring her throat, jugular right at my fingertips.

“What do you think?”  I asked.  “Now that you’ve met me?”

“I’m dearly wishing I could have become a professor,” she said.  “I would have loved to meet you for tea and cookies, and have had long conversations.  I think that would have been nice.”

She reached out, and I reacted, twisting away, hand touching the inside of my jacket to find the knife Mary had given me.  In a moment, I was a step back, the point of the knife an inch from her hand and wrist.

“I was only going to stroke your hair,” she said.

“No thank you,” I replied, thinking of poisons and worse.

“Of course.  I’m sorry.”  A blue-ringed tentacle reached out from within her jacket sleeve, touched the flat of the blade, and pushed it down.  “Please?”

I let my arm slowly drop as she pushed, the blade still in my hand.  My eye noted her right hand, concealed between her stomach and the railing, with needles extended from the space between her fingers and nails.

When the knife was down, she relaxed, facing the railing again.  her right hand went up to fix her hair, and the needles weren’t there anymore.  She didn’t take her eye off me, though she faced the water.  She stared at me through the corner of her eye until I sheathed the knife, then relaxed.

“You were expecting to talk to Gordon, or the group,” I said.  “What were you expecting to talk about?”

Not quite asking what she wanted to talk to me about, but it might provide hints.

“With Gordon, I would ask him what he remembered of his time before he was a Lamb, and how he remembered it.  I would ask him what he plans to be, as someone who could be so very good at anything and everything.  I would ask him if he was living his life to the fullest, without actually asking him that.  Do you know, Sylvester?  Why I’d ask him that?”

“He’s going to die,” I said.

“I’m genuinely surprised they told you, or that he shared that information with you.  I didn’t imagine someone who would accept pity.”

They didn’t tell me.  He wouldn’t.  I kept my face still to avoid betraying the thoughts.  I wanted her to see right through me as I opened my mouth to reply.  “It’s reality.  Everyone dies.  Is this your plan of attack, Ms. Fray?  You confront us with facts we already knew and dealt with on our own?”

She shook her head.  “I don’t have a plan of attack, Sylvester.”

My eyes narrowed.  “Every conversation is an attack, in a way.  Everyone wants something, even if it’s to be understood or paid attention to.  To do that, we attack the other person, predict them, identify where they’re coming from, where they stand, and where they want to go.  Done well, it’s a dance.  Those are the best conversations.”

“Are we dancing?” she asked.

I frowned.

“Sylvester?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh.  I thought we were having a good conversation.”

“No,” I said, again.  I tried to articulate it.  “No, and I can’t tell if it’s because you’re terrible at this or if it’s because you’re that much better than me.”

“At?”

“This.  The standoff, dialogue with an enemy.  You brought me here for a reason, you had something you wanted to achieve, but you’re not fighting for it.  You’re making small talk.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“We’ve each been taking the Wyvern formula, roughly for the same durations.  We each decided on the strengths we wanted to highlight.  You highlighted yours to fill a need in your group.  The gap that Ashton was meant to fill.”

The name caught me off guard.  She seemed to notice.

“I read all the files, Sylvester.  The Lambs were supposed to have a counterpoint to Helen, your Galatea.  They would work as a team, each one with different social strengths, both actors beyond compare, a work by Ibott and a work by a team, derived from his first version of the Galatea.  Gordon is likeable by virtue of his attractiveness and keen social sense.  Helen is likeable because her personality was built to be such.  Ashton would have been likeable for entirely different reasons.  You’re filling the gap.  You’ve become adroit with the interpersonal.  You had to.”

“And you took the Wyvern formula, but you didn’t have to?  I don’t believe that.  You had to navigate the bureaucracy, you were just talking about the political side of being a professor.  You passed the test and answered the questions about what they were doing wrong without making enemies.  No, I don’t believe it at all.”

“Belief, you said it twice, ‘believe’.”

“And?”

“Nothing.  You sound upset.”

“You’re patronizing me.  That’s a peeve of mine.”

“I’m not patronizing you, Sylvester.  I did good work, I built up my skills working with experiments it would otherwise take whole teams to see to the end.  I did build up skills for the challenges outside of the lab, but negotiation and manipulation weren’t priorities.  Strategy and long term planning were.  I removed my enemies one by one, and ensured the weakest possible candidate was my opponent in the final selection.”

“And you failed.”

She smiled a little.  “It’s some consolation that they ended up with a poor professor.”

“You’re lying to my face, Genevieve Fray,” I said.  “You’ve killed.”

“You’re one to talk,” she retorted.  Her eyes were sparkling with emotion.  Excitement.

“You’re angry, you’ve been more brutal than necessary-”

“Again, the Lambs are no better or worse.”

“You’re working with an agenda.  You have a plan.  You could have gone to a lot of different places, but you came here, when you could have run to a place where the Academy didn’t have as strong of a grip.”

“What if I wanted the challenge?  Our brains were made pliable with the Wyvern formula, but pliability still means they need external stimuli to change.  Couldn’t it be that I would have stagnated in a place where there wasn’t a concrete threat?”

“Maybe,” I said.  “You’re not showing me your true face.  The face that you wore when you put weaponized needles under your fingernails, or ordered Whelps killed and a threat written in blood on the wall.”

She smiled.

“I think this is the side of you that acts smart, planning, smiling and acting nice, handling all of the day to day tasks.  But unless the head you stole away with ended up being very nasty, I think there’s a bloodthirsty part of Genevieve Fray you’re only barely holding back, a dangerous, barbaric side.”

She sighed.  Her breath formed a cloud in the air.

“I’m not going to show you that side of me just yet, Sylvester.”

“I’m glad.  I doubt I’d survive it,” I said.  My heart was pounding all of a sudden.  Excitement and fear.  “But can we at least stop pretending it doesn’t exist?  It’s insulting.”

“Alright,” she conceded.  “You made three mistakes in your assessment, though.  Very telling.”

“Is that so?”

“First of all, you said that this part of me is smart, the planner, methodical.”

“Yes.”

“I’m flattered, and I’d agree.  But in saying it like you did, you suggested the other side me isn’t smart.  You’re a planner, you’re careful because you’re weak, and you’re biased because of it.  You don’t respect instinct or ugliness.”

“Instinct and ugliness.”

She smiled.  “I wasn’t able to evade you this long because I used my head, Sylvester.”

“You used instinct?”

“No.  Ugliness.  A savage brute of a man who swings his weapon recklessly and unpredictably can be a worse enemy for a trained fighter than another trained combatant,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.  “I’ll take the bait.  What was the second mistake?”

“Implying that the first side of me, this side, isn’t dangerous.”

“Is this where you reveal that by simply being here, I’ve fallen into a trap?”

“No, Sylvester.  We’re here to have a conversation,” she said.

“You’re not denying there’s a trap.”

“You’re safe, Sylvester.  That won’t stay the case, I think we will find ourselves at each other’s throats eventually, but there is no greater plot at work, closing in on you as we speak.”

Assuming I believe you, I thought.  I studied her, trying to peer past the expression to see the more brutal side that lurked beneath the surface.

“Third.” she said, and it was a statement unto itself.  “This isn’t a duality.  I’m not one of the Balfour Academy soldiers, drinking a potion to become virile, ugly, and monstrously strong.  There isn’t a lever inside me that determines which of me you’re talking to at once.  A knife can cut or stab.  The label doesn’t change.  It’s still a knife.”

“And you’re still Genevieve,” I said.

“Yes.”

“So.  This is a declaration of war,” I said.  I saw her react, and quickly added, “And it’s a conversation.”

She smiled.  “You could take it that way.”

“You wanted to satiate your curiosity before you started acting against us in earnest.”

“That isn’t untrue, though my curiosity is hardly sated.”

“And if you’re doing that, then the gambit with the pills is nonsense.”

“I know the train schedule, I know how the pills work, I made them,” she said.  “I knew I had time to get some answers.”

She reached into an inside pocket, then held up a bottle.  It was very, very similar to the one Helen had had.  Filled with purple pills, again, subtly different.  I couldn’t tell at a glance whether they were different in a way that made them more similar to the pills I was used to or less.

My memory wasn’t that strong, and it didn’t help that the bottle was fogging up in the cold, so soon after being warmed and dampened by the heat radiating off of her body.

“I wondered if you were slave to them,” she said.  “If the regular injections from an early age froze you at a point where you couldn’t or wouldn’t rebel, and if you remained nothing more than the sum total of your environment and physical makeup.  Not to belittle you, of course.  You could be that and still be marvelously complex, given your experiences thus far.”

“Do you think I’m a slave, Genevieve?” I asked.

“I think you have other reasons.  So, right now, I’m going to tell you that I can provide the pills that would free you from Radham.  I can help you extend your lifespans.  Give me that challenge, and I will throw myself at it, wholeheartedly.  I’ve been dosing myself with the Wyvern formula, and it’s no trouble to double up the stock and provide you with a share if you want it.  I can spare Jamie from his appointments, and keep the rest in working order.  I’m not inclined to break people like Briggs is.”

“Ah, this is what you were getting to?” I asked.  “I’m a little disappointed.”

“Don’t be.  I already know you’re going to say no.  I’m hoping you tell me why.”

“Because that’s a death sentence, as sure as any the Academy bestowed on us.”

“We could handle anything they send at us, I think you know that.”

“I know that.”

“Then why?  I can give you more years.”

“But you wouldn’t give us hope.  Every day, the Academy learns things.  Journals and articles are shared from all over the world, from places the Crown operates.  Every month, at the very least, there’s a breakthrough, something that raises eyebrows.”

“You think a breakthrough will save you?”

“I believe in what Hayle is trying to do,” I said.

She nodded slowly.

“He wants to discover a better brain.  That brain will help uncover something even better, and so on down the line.  I believe in what humanity can accomplish, and I believe that there is an answer.”

“And in saying that, you give me yours,” she said.  She sighed again, then rubbed her hands, blowing on them.

“It breaks down to hope, I suppose,” I said.

“For someone who analyzes others so well, you don’t do very well with yourself, Sylvester.  I suppose that’s a matter of self preservation.”

“What do you think it is, then?”

“You said the word yourself.  Over and over.”

I frowned a little.  “My memory isn’t my strongest trait.”

“I know,” she said.  “It was in the file.”

We stood like that.  I watched as the thing in the water did a lazy somersault.  It stayed belly up for a few seconds too long, enough for me to wonder if it had died, starting to float belly up.

“I think it goes without saying, but if you ever decide to turn against the Academy, all you have to do is say the word,” she said.  “But you won’t.”

I remained silent.

“You asked me if I thought you were a slave,” she said.  “Your answer was a good one.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’m going to put you to sleep now,” she said.  “I know fighting isn’t your strongest trait, again, it was in the files.  Can we do this neatly, without too much mess?”

I tensed, freezing.  My hand was open, and the position of the knife flickered into my mind.

I reached for it, stepping back and to the side, to get behind her, buying time to act.

The tentacles reached out, catching my arm before I could get the best grip on the knife.

I twisted, trying a move I’d seen Gordon do.  I passed the knife to my other hand, nicking a finger on the blade as I caught the handle too high, then punched the knife at her midsection.

She stopped the blade with her other palm, and it went through.  I saw pain on her face.

She shoved her hand further toward me, impaling her hand more, and then coiled her fingers inward, a needle springing out to pierce the hand that held the knife.

One foot on my chest, kicking me back and away.  The tentacles were slow to let go, and I stumbled, collapsing against the railing.

I didn’t remember passing out, but when I woke up, I was propped up beneath the eaves of the little restaurant, I had a short black coat draped over me, and the cut on my finger was neatly bandaged.

Stitch in Time – 4.5

I tried to rise, and found my body’s movements sluggish.  I slumped down, my head against the wall, chin against my collarbone, arms in front of me, Genevieve’s coat draped over me, cap pulled down, scarf and collar protecting much of my face.

I stared at the mended cut on my finger.  I couldn’t move or call out, so I didn’t try.  I put my hand under the coat and pressed my hands between my thighs for warmth.

The tranquilizer’s effects were still heavy in my body.  Few drugs were potent and localized to one area, and any drug had to be potent to get past my Wyvern-given resistances.  She had put me out for long enough for her to move me, patch me up, maybe see to herself, and then make her exit.  Now I was feeling the side effects.  Fatigue lingered, and where it sat heavy in my stomach, I felt a growing need to heave out my stomach’s contents.

Considerate as she’d been, she hadn’t left me anything for the unsettled stomach.

Nothing left to do but wait and contemplate.

Contemplation over the discussion with Genevieve soon left a bad taste in my mouth that had nothing to do with my nausea.  Like the nausea, though, it was a vague feeling I couldn’t put my finger on.  The moment I did, and I suspected that it was a moment I wouldn’t have much control over, I knew I’d feel a lot worse.

She’d dictated where and how the conversation happened.  She’d told me remarkably little, and I knew that was entirely on purpose.  She had also achieved her goal, which was to get to know me, and perhaps to declare war.

The more I thought about it, the more vague and nebulous the cohesive whole seemed.

What she’d said and what she’d demonstrated in our interactions were at odds.  It wasn’t that she’d lied, but the presented Genevieve Fray was false.

False in a very specific way.

Why are you here, engaging with us?  You’re not bored, not exactly, and you wouldn’t be so passive if you were, you’d want to test that brain of yours against us.  You’re not pinned down, I refuse to believe that it would be so easy.

I felt a prick of pain and moved my hands to see.  A tiny bead of blood was squeezing out of the corner of the glued seam.  I’d been clenching my hand hard enough to push it out.

Time passed, my thoughts meandered, and I periodically tested my strength, finding it greater with time, even as I got colder.  I reached a point where I was fairly certain I could stand, but decided to stay sitting, so I wouldn’t get ill.

I did hitch myself backward so I was sitting up more against the wall, instead of having my head bent forward.  No reason to be more uncomfortable.

I was in that state, waiting for my stomach to settle down more than I was waiting for my strength to return, when Gordon appeared from the same direction I’d come.

“Sy!” he said.

He was halfway to me by the time I’d maneuvered my hand from beneath the coat and raised it in a small wave.

He looked agitated, and dropped to my side, caught between multiple actions.

“I’m okay,” I said.  “Get the others.”

He nodded, twisted around, raising two fingers to his lips, and let out a shrill whistle.

“What happened?” he asked.  “Trap?”

“No,” I said.  “I met Fray.”

“And?”

“And we talked, and then she drugged me, and then she left.”

“We’ve been looking for you for fifteen minutes, and we spent a bit running from Fray’s goon.”

“The Headsman.”

“I refuse to call him that,” Gordon said.  “You don’t get to name this one.”

“Jerk.”

“Moron.  You should have signaled us when you found her.”

“Should’ve, could’ve,” I said, sounding about as dejected as I felt.

“You talked to her, though?”

I nodded.

“Get anything?”

The eagerness in his eyes and voice was painful.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Better if you wait for the others before sharing,” he told me.

I nodded.  “But you can tell me what happened with you guys.”

“I could, but there isn’t much to it.  They feigned that they were defending a building, the goon cornered us, used a mix of something to fill the area with smoke, then came at us, full-barrel, heaving furniture and crashing through doors.  He could see us just a bit better than we could see him, but that bastard was massive, he didn’t need to see, he just barreled in, fists swinging.  Mary and me, we needed to see to be effective.  It put us on a back foot.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Yeah, funny how that works, isn’t it?  Felt like I was watching out for all the traps and tricks, everything I needed to do to keep Fray from getting the initiative, but when I look back on it, I don’t feel like I ever had it.”

Gordon gave me a curious look.

When he didn’t say or do anything, I raised an eyebrow as a way of questioning him.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m fantastic, as you can tell,” I said.

“You’re being sarcastic, so you can’t be that bad off,” he told me.  “Explain that part in more depth when you dish to all of us.”

I nodded, though I really didn’t feel like elaborating on that count.  Whatever.  “Your thing.  Keep going.”

“We tried to wait it out, waited for you, Helen and Mary climbed around to go after him and the stitched girl from above or behind, whichever.  The bastard said something about lighting a match, warning us to get away, because the smoke would catch fire.  We backed off, he struck the match.  We weren’t even close to the building, and the woof of flame knocked us all on our asses.  He went running off while we were still getting our bearings.  Jamie says he thinks the guy had the stitched in a box?”

“Fray’s plan, you think?” I asked.

“Don’t know enough to say,” Gordon told me.  He clenched his fist, gesturing inarticulately for a second before releasing it.  “I feel like we could have done better, but I can’t say anything to any of them because I know I could have done better.”

“Teamwork?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.  “I hate even saying it.  But if you’ve got something…”

“I’ve got something,” I said.

“Then it was worth it,” he said.  I could see the tension go out of his neck and shoulders.  His voice dropped as he murmured to himself, “That’s good.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Can you stand?” he asked.

“Be gentle,” I told him.  “Slow.  Unless you want me to heave all over the both of us.  Whatever she gave me is sitting bad.”

“Yeah,” he said.  “Of course.”

He was strong enough and I was small enough that he could pick me up, one arm under each armpit, and he could do it slowly, giving me time to get my feet under me, my hand on the wall behind me to steady myself.

When I was standing, one hand on his shoulder for support, he turned and gave another long, sharp whistle.

“In case they couldn’t figure out the direction,” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied.

Lillian appeared and rushed to my side.  Mary was with her.

“I told you it was the right direction,” Mary was saying, as they drew into earshot.

“Alright,” Lillian said.  “I wasn’t positive you were wrong, geez.”

“Geez,” Mary said, teasing.

“Don’t talk to me if you’re going to be grumpy,” Lillian said.

“I’m being grumpy?  You’re being grumpy,” Mary accused.

They reached us.  Lillian looked at us, clearly flustered, she looked between us.  “Sy?  You look-”

“Drugged,” Gordon interjected.

“-Awful.  Drugged?”

“By Fray,” I said.

I saw alarm on Lillian’s face in the same moment I saw hope on Mary’s.  Mary clasped her hands in front of her, almost in unconscious prayer.

“I need to look you over, everything, anything could be wrong, if she dosed you with something-”

“Did she say anything?  Did you find out-”

“Girls,” Gordon said.

“We should find a place to get Sy’s clothes off.  I should do a full checkup.  Do you feel nauseous?”

“Lillian,” Gordon said, stern.

“Yes,” I said.

“See?  Anything could be wrong, and there’s one big what-if that’s very likely, very dangerous, and needs immediate attention.  If she can recreate the pills, which we aren’t sure she can’t-”

“Let Lillian do what she needs and then talk.  Sylvester, if you keep me in suspense on this, I will draw a knife and give you a second belly button.”

“Does your stomach feel firm?” Lillian jumped in.

Gordon clapped a hand over Lillian’s mouth.  He reached for Mary’s, but she slapped his hand aside, backing up a half-step.  He settled for pointing at her, stern.

“I don’t want a second belly button,” I said, in a small voice, mostly to lighten the mood.

“Don’t you start,” he told me.

Lillian used both hands to pull Gordon’s hand down and away.  “You’ve each been impregnated with modified glucose chains.  It’s why you need the pills.  If she found a way to unravel them, which she could, if she has pills, he could be breaking down right now, bleeding on the inside.”

“I’m pregnant?” I asked.

Gordon slapped me across the head.  He turned, batted Lillian across the head, with considerably less force, then did the same to Mary, who furrowed her brow and bent her head to let it happen.  Probably for the sake of fairness and to be a part of things.

Then he turned and swatted me again.

“Hey!”

He held up his hand in warning.

“You did me twice, for no reason at all!”

He smacked me again.

I opened my mouth to protest further, and he drew his hand back.

I folded my arms.

“Sylvester was tranquilized,” Gordon said.  “Don’t rush to conclusions.”

“If he’s nauseous, we can’t ignore that,” Lillian said.

“You can get Sy naked and check him out as soon as we get someplace warm, and we can do that as soon as the others catch up.  They’re coming right now.  Until then, take his word for it when he says he’s feeling okay,” Gordon said, his finger pointed at Lillian.

“I never said naked,” she said.

The finger wagged in her direction.  She pressed her lips together.

Gordon was right, though; Jamie and Helen were halfway down the long, straight alley, opposite the end the others had come down.  Jamie looked like he’d been running a moment ago.

Gordon moved his finger to point to Mary.  “Sy can tell us what happened on the way, and while Lillian’s looking over him.  I’ve held back my curiosity this long, you can do the same.”

Mary made a ‘hmph’ sound, sticking her hands in her pockets.

He pointed at me.  “Be quiet.  I know you’re riling them up.”

“Then I shouldn’t mention the blood dripping out my pee hole, or the fact that Fray is-”

He smacked me, way harder than was necessary.  One of my eyes teared up.

“He was joking about the blood, right?” Lillian asked, cutting Mary off before Mary could say anything.

Gordon gave me a ‘see?’ look.

“Yes,” I said.  “Joking, joking.”

Helen and Jamie joined us.

“What’s this about getting Sylvester naked, warm and checking him out?” Jamie asked.  “I heard you from a distance, but I’m pretty sure that’s what you said.  Is there anything you need to tell us, Gordon?”

“Ha ha,” Gordon said, unamused.

“And Fray?” Jamie asked.  “You said her name?”

“Sy’s health takes priority,” Gordon said.  “We need to get indoors.”

I turned around, reached, and knocked on the window.

It took some time, but the woman who’d been cleaning tables inside appeared at the window, and she gave us a look.  I made a pleading gesture, hands pressed together, and she gave me a very unimpressed look.

She looked at Gordon, who was holding up a wallet, and relented.  The door that opened to the patio opened, and she let us inside.

“Are you open?” I asked her.

“No.  But you can order something.”

“We want to check my friend out for frostbite, can we get six of whatever you have that’s warm to drink?  And a bite to eat?  Cake or pie?”

“I have slices of cake and I have slices of pie, prices are on the board over the counter,” she said.  “Carrot, vanilla, and chocolate cake, meat pie, wildberry pie, apple pie, stone nut pie…”

“Cake,” I said.  “Chocolate, please?”

“I thought you were feeling sick?” Lillian asked, hands going to her hips.

“It’s chocolate cake,” I said.

She nodded, accepting that as fact.

“I’ll have a stone nut pie,” Gordon said.  “Thank you.”

“Wildberry pie, please,” Mary said.

“I would like a Vanilla cake, please,” Helen said.

“Carrot cake, please” Lillian said, hands dropping from her hips.

The woman’s arms folded as she looked at Jamie.

“Chocolate cake?” he asked, cringing a little.

“I just cleaned up, it’s late, and I’m not going to serve each of you something different,” the woman said.  “Decide on one thing.  Two at most.”

It took us ten seconds of quick haggling to hash it out.  Gordon spoke up, “Four slices of chocolate cake, and two slices of apple pie?”

The woman nodded, leaving to get our order.

Lillian wasted no time in beginning to pull my clothes off.

I would have made a joke, but I wanted to maintain my one-bellybutton status.

“Fray was waiting for me.  Or for any one of us.  I was the one who stumbled on her.  The rest of it was a distraction, to keep the rest of the group away so we wouldn’t mob her or whatever.  She invited me over for a chat.  I obliged.  We talked, she tranquilized me, Gordon found me a little while after I woke up.”

“What did you talk about?” Mary asked.  She was sitting on a chair, perched like she was going to leap over and create my new bellybutton if I wasn’t quick to answer.  Too much killer instinct, suppressed for too many weeks.

“My memory isn’t that good,” I started.  I was forced to pause, raising my arms to help Lillian pull off my sweater and shirt.

Mary didn’t leap on me, but a knife had appeared in one hand in the moment the sweater obscured my vision, the rest of her not having moved a hair, like a magician producing a card.  She toyed with it.  It wasn’t like she would really stab me, but her point was clear.  She was dead serious when it came to this.

“But we talked about the fact that she knew who we were.  She’s studied us, the Academy made her, and she has a sense of what we are and how we function.  We talked about the Wyvern formula, about the effects, the side effects, and how we each developed while using it.  She says she didn’t develop skills as a manipulator or a people reader, but I’m not sure that’s true.  She did develop skills as a strategist, to make her way in the upper echelons of the Academy, but I think we already knew that.”

The others were hanging on every word.  Lillian prodded my neck and chin.  I resumed speaking the moment I was free to.  “Fray mentioned Ashton, to give you a sense of how well she knows us.  She likes us, she’s interested in us, and I think… I’m revising my opinion of where we stand on the pill situation.”

“You don’t think she swapped out the pills.  It was a ruse,” Jamie said.

“I don’t think she swapped out the pills,” I said.

“How sure are you?” Gordon asked.

Eighty percent, I thought.  But if we fail here, if we go back to the Academy while it’s under new leadership, return to doing the interviews in the Bowels and other dreary activities, a black mark of failure on our records…

I’d already come to the conclusion while lying on the patio, waiting for the tranquilizer’s effects to subside.  We couldn’t afford to go back.  We couldn’t leave it at this and run.  It would destroy us as surely as our bodies breaking down on us.  It was just be more drawn out, less noble.

“Ninety five percent,” I said.

Gordon hissed in a breath through his teeth, long and slow, then exhaled.

“You’re not sure,” Jamie said.  “You think there’s a five percent chance you’re wrong.”

“I’m not.  If any of you have instincts telling you we should go home…”  I trailed off, almost hoping someone else would make the call and take the responsibility out of my hands.  Not entirely hoping, but almost; the thought of getting this wrong on either front made the sick feeling come back.

Nobody spoke up.  The burden was on my shoulders.

There was a variety of looks in their eyes, but there remained a moment where I could look at each of them and interpret their expressions as knowing, acknowledging exactly what I’d done and why I’d done it.

Eighty percent wasn’t enough of a certainty to make us stay.  We would’ve had to go, and we would have all known it was the wrong choice.

The lie was better, and maybe there was a mutual agreement that the lie existed.

Maybe I was imagining it, deceiving myself in believing the unspoken agreement existed.

“She made an offer.  To take us in, use her knowledge and skill to keep us in working order, as long as possible.  Give me my Wyvern formula, let Jamie stop his appointments, and so on down the line.  She would provide the pills we needed to survive away from the Academy.  There were other promises.”

“You said no?” Gordon asked.

“I said no, yeah,” I told him.

He nodded.

“She made it out to be about freedom from the shackles of the Academy, but that’s not how it works, is it?”

“No,” Mary said.  She paused as the woman from the little restaurant arrived with a tray of tea, cake, and plates.  Mary kept talking, though the woman was in earshot.  “I realized it early on.  There isn’t really any escape.  I went from Mr. Percy to you guys, and it’s better, but I’m not free.”

“I’ll pour the tea, miss,” Helen said.  “Thank you so much.”

Lillian handed me back my shirt.  I pulled it on in a second flat, then began untangling my sleeves from my sweater as Lillian found her seat.

“Don’t make a mess, I don’t want to spend any time cleaning up after you,” the woman warned.

Gordon handed her a fold of bills.  She stood there, counting, before walking to the counter, apparently satisfied.

The cake, pie, and tea was doled out.  I had little doubt everyone was weighing the heavy issues at hand even as we prepared for our little feast.

The conversation resumed in low voices.

“I love Professor Ibbott,” Helen said, with less inflection than I’d heard from her in a long while, “I don’t like him.  I wouldn’t be happy if I never saw him again, but I wouldn’t be sad either.  I do what he says and I’m good.  I’m a work of art and I do what he tells me to so I act like one too.  If we walked away from the Academy and I had someone else telling me what to be, it wouldn’t be any different.”

“Except we’d be in more danger,” Jamie said.  “The Academy would come after us.”

“Was that what you said?” Lillian asked.  “That you wouldn’t go because it would be the same?”

“That would have offended her, I think,” I replied.

“That doesn’t usually stop you,” Gordon said.  “You offend us.  Why not her?”

“In the time between when I woke up and when you found me, I did a lot of thinking,” I said.  “Couldn’t do much else.  I realized that I hadn’t been cutthroat enough.  That she played me.  She read me, she figured out what I wanted, and she came at me soft.  Gentle, friendly, vague, without threatening me at all.  She went out of her way to avoid challenging me, because she probably knew that I’d rise to the challenge, and I’d take that a step further to come after her.  I spent the entire time floundering and not realizing why,” I said.

The table was quiet.  The Lambs sipped tea, stared, or ate their pie and cake.

“I’ll admit it right here,” I said.  “I lost, back there.  I learned things about her, but she went out of her way to tell me only what she was willing to let me know.”

Mary’s gaze was the hardest to meet.  She took failure so personally, and I knew she’d been pinning hopes on me getting something out of our collective encounter with Fray and her people, so her loss against the Headsman would mean something.

“You said you found something out,” Gordon said.  “Was it only what Fray wanted you to know?  Or did you figure out something else?”

“I think I figured out something else,” I said.  “I asked her why she was here, challenging us.  Why didn’t she leave?  She never gave me a straight answer.  She presented only one side of herself, and she kept the violent, confrontational part of herself hidden.  She controlled how we encountered her, but there was no guarantee we wouldn’t be a little bit faster, that she wouldn’t be up against all of us at once.  That means she had an out.  Something she could have said or done that would have let her escape, if we came after her hard.”

I saw Helen steal a bit of Jamie’s cake, while Jamie’s attention was focused on me.  As thievery went, it was blatant, cutting the cake with the fork, then spearing a chunk the size of her fist.

“What are you thinking, Sy?” Gordon asked.

“I’m thinking we should contact the Academy.  If the pattern holds, they’re sending reinforcements here, to investigate and give chase, for when we go back for our appointments.  Maybe the Hangman, again, maybe Dog and Catcher.  Except all of this, it’s a massive distraction from what she’s really doing.”

“What?” Jamie asked.  “What is she supposed to be doing?”

“I don’t know exactly what.  But she has a plan in the works.  She’s not averse to killing, but she left us alive.  Let’s assume it’s not idle curiosity.  That she’s not some dime novel villain.  There’s a master plot at work, and we play a part.  Think, what logically follows from this?  What does she do by showing herself to me, then disappearing, maybe even staying here?”

“I don’t know,” Gordon said.  “I can’t guess how your mind works, or how hers does, for that matter.”

“She’s giving us hope.  Hope that she can be found and caught.  The Academy sends resources to assist, all the focus is on this place, this town.”

“And?” Mary asked.

“And we’re not looking where she’s been.  Fray isn’t running, or she is, but the running is a distraction, bait to lure us forward.  What we do is we tell them to send the people back, investigate all the past locations.”

“What are they looking for?”

“A weapon.  A catalyst.  Something catastrophic.  She’s hiding her fangs, but those fangs are there.  What we need to do is find her, find her fast, and we need to find out what it is she’s doing.  She’s brimming with fury against the Academy, and everyone is going to pay for it.”

“I can draw up a quick sketch of her monster and the stitched girl,” Jamie said.  “It’s a starting point.”

“Good,” I said.  “We also hit up any shops that sell coats or jackets.  She left hers with me,” I said, “But I doubt someone who travels as much as she does has more than one.  She’ll be buying one, I think.  Most importantly, she’s going to be baiting us, dropping hints to keep the Academy focused on her.”

“You’re sure?” Gordon asked.

I nodded.

“Let’s not waste any time then,” Gordon said.

Helen made a small whining sound, mouth full of cake.

“We finish our tea and cake first,” he said, with authority.

Helen emphatically nodded the affirmative.

“After cake, we move.  Our best bet is being aggressive when she expects us to be struggling or on the retreat.  We catch her off guard.”

There were nods all around.

We helped Helen finish her cake, to her protest, cleaned up, and were out the door in two minutes, some of us still chewing.  Gordon handed Jamie the coat to look over while we walked.

Gordon and I walked faster than the others.  Normally I might have waited up for the others, but he had a look on his face, stern, focused.

He saw me studying him, and he relented.

“I would have taken the offer,” he said.

“Ah,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Sorry.”

He shook his head, then threw an arm around my shoulders.  “Let’s go get ‘er.”

Stitch in Time – 4.6

The train whistle howled, echoing across snowy Kensford, and with it went our escape.  We’d made our call, and now we’d live with it.  It bothered me, more than I cared to admit.  If I was wrong, then we were going to get catastrophically ill, and we could very well die.

We were a squad, here.  Each of us had a discrete role.  Gordon and Mary were handling the front end of things, leading the group by a margin, scouting, peeking through windows of stores.  My role was to watch Jamie.  He had his book open in his arms, pen in hand, and was sketching.  Every time a bystander, obstacle, or someone’s monstrous pet got in our way, I led him out of the way, while his eyes stayed on the page.

“Lillian,” I said.

“Yes?”

“By all accounts, the stitched girl was falling to pieces when Fray got her and left the jail.  She wasn’t falling to pieces when she went to go distract you guys.”

“Yes?”

“She fixed it, or improved it.  How hard is that to do?”

“It’s easier to make one from scratched.  In terms of cost, unless there’s a shortage of bodies, most people make a new stitched instead of fixing up an old one, I think.”

I pulled Jamie out of the way of a gaunt stitched that looked like it incorporated some grafted features.  Sections of its chest and arms had been stretched over containers of bile yellow liquid, with tubes running out of the containers and into flesh.  Poison, probably.  It hissed.

Jamie continued drawing, oblivious.

“But how hard is it to do, Lil?” I asked.

“Don’t call me Lil!”

“Answer the question, then, dummy.”

“Butthead.  It’s hard.”

“Well, gee, thanks,” I told her.  “That clarifies things a bunch.”

“I don’t know what you want or why you’re asking!” she said.  “Making a stitched is easy, I’ve made a stitched, last year, for an exam.  But if you want to repair it, you have to diagnose and fix whatever’s broken, probably have to replace or undo any damage to major chunks and pieces, rip out the wires and chemical tanks, put in new ones, um-”

“Does that require tools?”

“Obviously.”

“Obviously,” I said, giving her an eye roll.  “Would she need access to a lab to do it?  Or could she do it using just the tools she’s packing in her bags?  Keep in mind that she’s very good.”

“She’d need a lab,” Lillian said.

“She would.  What about maintaining the thing?”

Lillian gave me a so-so gesture.

“Can’t say?”  I asked.  I pulled Jamie out of the way of a lamp post.

“You can cover your basic hygeine needs with a sponge and a sink, but it’s not fun, it gets old, and it takes time,” Lillian said.  “Doing it on a bad week?  You’d have to be pretty disciplined or have no other choice to take it in stride and not want to change it.”

“I like that analogy,” Jamie said, eyes still on his sketch.

“Thank you, Jamie,” she said.

“Part two of that same question, then,” I said.  “You saw her guy?  The head?”

“Yes.  From a distance, and I was mostly running, but yes.”

“How doable is that without a proper lab?”

“Not at all,” Lillian said.  “I’d be surprised, impressed and scared if she was able to do that while running from us.  She only ever stays in one place for a few days, if that long, and she’d need a lot of days to do that stuff.”

“Stolen work?” Jamie said, still sketching.  I steered him with my hand on his left elbow.

“It would be reported stolen,” I said.  “That, or there’s a missing or dead scholar out there.”

“Which we would have heard about,” Lillian said.  “I hope.”

“All signs point to the fact that she has a lab.  Probably a nice one, with resources.”

“Oh, goodie,” Lillian said.  “Let’s see, there are twenty thousand people enrolled here, some are rooming at Dame Cicely’s itself, but most are in dormitory houses, one to four people to a house, and each house has a small, private lab.  So… oh, maybe five thousand places to check.”

“Gold star for being on the ball,” Jamie said.  “Nice work, Lillian.”

“Thank you, Jamie,” she said, looking as pleased as I’d seen her.  “It’s nice of you to say so.”

I corrected his course when it looked like he might veer out into the street and the path of a horse or carriage.

“You’re doing that on purpose,” I muttered.

“Being nice to Lillian?  You should give it a try.”

“Walking into stuff,” I said.

The smile on his face suggested I was on target.

I let go of his elbow.  He looked up for the first time, getting his bearings, then resumed sketching.

“She has a lab, one she could pick up and leave from without a fuss,” I mused aloud.  “How many single-occupant dormitory houses?”

“About-” Lillian started.

“One thousand,” Jamie said.

“That sounds right,” Lillian said.

I nodded.  A hundred and sixty-five for each of us, if we split it up.

Not doable, but it was something to think about, putting the puzzle together and figuring out how she operated.

“Which raises questions of how she got access.  I doubt she enrolled.  Smart as she is, she has to risk getting noticed and caught every time she goes to get materials or tools from Dame Cicely’s Academy.  The work she’s doing is too good for a fugitive.”

Jamie looked up and over at me, paying attention now.

“I’ve been on the run, and the resource cost in terms of needing to find a place to sleep, watching your back, get food, acquire and spend money, it eats up whole chunks of your day.  But here we have someone putting in hours, even days into high quality projects.”

“She’s been taking the Wyvern formula,” Lillian said.

“She has to take the time to make the Wyvern formula, and she needs to take the time to recuperate after taking it.  That only furthers my point,” I said, getting more emphatic, more intense.

“What’s your line of thought here?” Jamie asked.

“Only that,” I said, deflating, all the emphasis and intensity flowing away.  I was left with a feeling of frustration.  “It’s all going a little too seamlessly for her.”

Gordon and Mary had stopped and were waiting for us.  Helen, trailing behind, watching our backs, caught up.

“Coat shop,” Gordon said.

“Ooh, pretty coats,” Helen said.

“One of the two I remembered,” Jamie said.

“And,” I said, pointing at the store across the street, “Hat shop!”

The rest of the group gave me funny looks.

“Wait one minute,” I said.  I checked for incoming horses and carts and then stopped, patting my pockets.

Gordon was extending the group’s wallet in my direction.  I grabbed it, but he didn’t let go.

“If you’re spending the group’s money on a hat…” he warned me, leaving the threat implied.

“No,” I promised.

He let go of the wallet, and I ran across the street.

I stepped into the store.

The older woman at the counter took one look at me and said, “No.”

It was so much like what I’d come to expect from Hayle and the Lambs that it caught me off guard.  “No?”

“A little boy like you?  You have no business here.  You can’t buy what I’m selling, you’re grubby, and even if you have a slip, I’m not entrusting my product to you to take back to whoever sent you.”

Grubby?

“I’d like a hatbox, please,” I said.

“I am not about to-”

“I’ll pay,” I said.

I saw the hesitation.

Money made the world turn.  Blood and sweat drove the world’s engines, but money bought blood and sweat.

“Six dollars,” I said.  “For an empty hatbox.”

“If you’re up to any mischief with this, hurting my reputation-”

“Not at all, ma’am.”

She made a face, like conceding and doing anything more than sending me out the door was horribly unpleasant and vaguely offensive.

I returned to the others, a nice little hatbox with a ribbon in my hands.

“I’m guessing that only a few of us can come and see what you’re actually trying to pull?” Gordon asked.

I thought of the sour woman in the hat shop, then shook my head.  We couldn’t waste time.  Better to use force of numbers.

“Follow my lead,” I said.  “We use the herd.”

We moved into the coat store as a mob.  The people at the counter were two men, possibly related, but not too closely, one with a thick mustache and a vest over his button-up shirt, the other clean-shaven, wearing a suit jacket that was closed up to the collarbone.

The store had a hardwood floor, one that had been grown, from the odd way it interconnected and flowed, with coats and suits on racks and dummies.  There were umbrellas and parasols mounted on one wall, and shoes on another.  A stitched stood by the dressing room, a coat draped over one arm.  A shop for top quality goods.

I approached the counter, hugging the box.  The others followed, close behind.  I liked that they read my body language, sensing the best way to follow suit, without my having to tell them.

We’d been missing that, lately.  Each of us had been a touch preoccupied with ourselves.

“I caught this box as it fell off a carriage,” I said.  “I think the driver forgot to put it inside before leaving.  We wanted to give it back to the woman.”

“Uhh,” Mr. Mustache said, “I don’t know that we could help you with that.”

“The box is from the shop across the street, and the woman there said the woman who bought it definitely came from your shop, and they had a new coat, but she hadn’t worn one coming in.  I think the one she bought was a long one?”

“Most of my coats are long,” Mr. Mustache said, sounding vaguely offended.

I nodded, vigorous, agreeing.  And she would change things up.  After having a short coat, she’d make a subtle change.  “She had a stitched with her, and there was a big fellow, but he might have stayed outside?”

“We ask all of the experiments to stay outside.  As for your young lady, I… no, I’m afraid that doesn’t ring any bells.”

“High quality work,” Lillian piped up.  “The stitched.  She’s very thin, very pretty, you wouldn’t even know she was one if you weren’t careful, but you’d know if she talked, probably.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

Jamie held up his book.  The sketches were strange, very scratchy, somehow not good art, but still a scarily accurate representation of the stitched girl and, I presumed, an accurate representation of the Headsman.

I saw no recognition on either of the men’s faces.

We’re looking for needles in a goddamn haystack, I thought.

“The other woman had a bandaged hand?” I tried.

Nothing.

“Why does it matter that much?” Mr. Mustache asked.

“We were…” I tried to look a little ashamed.

Gordon reached over and took the hatbox.  “He wanted reward money.  I convinced him it was the right thing to do.”

“Reward money would be nice,” I said, quiet.  “It’s a nice looking hat.  It probably cost a lot.”

I felt like we’d struck the right chord.  The men at the counter had been boys once.  Between Gordon and I, we’d struck the right balance, between my innocent greed and Gordon’s genuine desire to do the right thing.

Now, if I was gauging them right, we had them actually wanting us to succeed.

“Today?” Mustacheless asked.

“Yes sir.  Within the last hour.  Probably the last half-hour, I’d bet,” Gordon said.

That got a shake of the head.

“You’re sure?” Gordon asked.

“I’ve been at the counter for this entire afternoon.  I’m sure,” Mustacheless said.  Mr. Mustache nodded.

I saw the other Lambs react, shoulders dropping, disappointment clear in their body language.  We’d try the other shop, and then we’d be limited in where we could go next, if that didn’t work out.

My instincts, however, told me that the other shop would be a dead end.  It was too close to where the others had encountered the Headsman.  She would have had to double back, and she would have had to do it while avoiding the others.

It didn’t fit.  So many things here didn’t damn well fit.

“Why?” I asked, abrupt.  No ‘sir’ or anything of the sort.

“Why?” the man asked.

“Why are you sure?”

“I don’t remember seeing that girl, or anyone resembling her,” Mr. Mustache said.

“But we didn’t describe the girl we’re looking for, with the injured hand.”

“The young women don’t shop alone,” he said.  “The ones who do stand out.”

“What if someone came in, and looked like they were part of another group?” Helen asked.  “Isn’t that possible?”

“If that’s the case, I don’t know what I could tell you,” Mustacheless said.

Frustrated at every turn.

Except…

Change one paradigm, and all the little details that hadn’t added up started to make sense.  How did she get the dormitory?  How did she acquire the resources to do her work without getting caught?  How did she blend so effortlessly into the surroundings?

“She’s new in town,” I said.

He frowned.  “You know this how?”

“She’s new in town,” I said, more excited, ignoring him, “Did you see anyone, a new face, dark hair, spending time with someone that you’ve seen around?”

“I see a lot of young ladies, day to day,” he told me.  I got the impression that the line of questions was starting to test his patience.  This was dissonance at work.  He knew that things didn’t add up, and if I only stopped to give him a chance, he could start asking questions I couldn’t answer.

“I’m sure,” I said, not giving him that chance.  “But your clientele is exclusive.  People who can pay.  The stranger showed up, maybe with a borrowed coat, maybe without a coat at all, and the familiar face footed the bill.  There might have been an age difference, but they probably looked close.  You noticed, because it was different and it was new.”

The look in his eyes wasn’t nothing.  In fact, both men seemed to register something.

“You… you were doing something else, but you came to talk,” I said, to Mr. Mustache.  “Because you knew her, and she introduced you to her new friend.”

“Tutor,” Mr. Mustache said, absently.  His expression clarified into a curious stare.  “You sound like you know an awful lot more than someone who caught a box off the top of a carriage.”

“Yes,” I said.  “Tell us, what’s her name, and where can we find her?”

“We’re trying to find and stop a very bad person,” Gordon said.  “The young lady you know, she could be in grave danger.  A hostage, to an enemy of the Crown.”

“I…” Mustacheless said, and it was like his brain had momentarily broken, caught in a loop that left the sound drawling out of his mouth.

“Perhaps,” Mr. Mustache said, in what approximated a diplomatic tone, “I should contact the authorities?  It seems like the safest way forward.”

“No time,” I said.

“I’d rather be sure,” he said.

“No time,” I said, again, feeling frustrated.  A step closer, and now we were hitting a wall?”

“Bennoit, perhaps you could run next door to use their phone?  We-”

Exaperated, I gave the signal, the ‘go ahead’ to the others.

Let them have at it.

Helen and Mary were quickest, and best situated to get closer.

As the two girls rounded the corner, Mr. Mustache reached under the desk, and produced a short blade.

Mary slapped it aside with her hand, but rather than shred her flesh, produced a metal-on-metal sound.  The blade moved over the counter, she slapped it down, hard, so it struck the wooden countertop, and sent it flying to the ground.  She touched a blade to Mr. Mustache’s stomach.

The man’s partner, Benoit, froze, as he saw the blade draw close to Mr. Mustache.  Helen drew close, ordered, “Kneel,” and he did, with only a moment’s pause.  She stepped behind him and wrapped her fingers around his neck.

Gordon rounded the counter as well, to draw closer to them.  I checked on Lillian, and found that she was at the door, locking it.  Jamie watched the window, hugging his book.

I dug in my pockets and found the badge that Briggs had given me.  I slapped it down on the counter.

“We act in service to the Crown.  You haven’t heard of us, but-”

“The Radham children.”

I blinked a few times.

“There are stories,” he said.  “Ones that made the rounds anew when the post office was attacked.”

Our reputation is preceding us.  Not a great thing for a secret project.

“Then you have some idea of how we operate?”

“Some idea.  It’s not supposed to be public knowledge.”

“No.  You can give us what we want, stay quiet about everything that happened here, and the Crown may choose to reward you.  Or you can stay silent, and face the repercussions.”

“If we could contact the authorities-”

“No.  Time.”

He shook his head.  “If you’re dangerous enough to threaten us, I couldn’t send you after a proper young lady, knowing you might do the same to her.  A gentleman-”

“A gentleman without the ‘man’ part,” Mary murmured, moving the knife to lower regions, “Is only gentle.”

Helen giggled.

“This young lady would go right for the most sensitive part of you,” Gordon said.  “This is where she and I differ.  She’s merciless.  She goes right for the jugular.  She’s a killer.  Me?  I’m very good when it comes to breaking people.  I’ve learned from some of the worst of Radham.  People who learned to fight the way people who have nothing to lose fight.  I’ve learned from people who live every day knowing that Dog and Catcher or another monster could come after them because they do shady things, things that involve hurting other people, sometimes for hours out of every day.”

He picked up the little blade.

“I won’t mince words.  That’s his style, not mine,” he said, indicating me, twirling the blade in his hands.  “I know how to torture people.  I don’t want to, none of us do, but if you’re going to be so stupid as to get in our way when we’re trying to save a young woman’s life, well, the pieces will fall where they may.”

“Reassess those priorities,” I said.  “My friends there, they might seem a little scary.  But this is a scary meant for someone who threatens a well-to-do citizen of the Crown, and very possibly threatens Kensford as a whole.  The whole reason we’re doing this, right now, is because you’re twisting everything out of shape, taking the path of most resistance.  The moment you give way, relax, tell us what you’re supposed to tell us, then everything goes back to the way it’s supposed to be.  We work against enemies of the Crown, you go back to doing business, the young lady ends up safe, and you can feel like you did something right.”

No answer was immediately forthcoming.

A gentleman, I thought.

This was the obstacle that was in our way?

Gordon started toward Mr. Mustache.  Mustacheless opened his mouth, “Lady Claire.”

Gordon turned around.  He put the weapon on the counter.

“Lady Claire.  She stays at the Academy.  She has special accommodations, her family is related to the headmaster.  Her father and uncles are military, working heavily alongside the Academies.  She… she was so despondent, she was going to fail out, she couldn’t meet the requirements to keep her seat.  When the tutor appeared just yesterday, a pretty young someone from the country, Lady Claire looked so relieved.  She couldn’t stop babbling.”

“Thank you,” Gordon said.  “She lives at Dame Cicely’s Academy?”

The man nodded, looking fairly well crushed.  “The tutor, she’s really a threat to the girl?”

“Yes,” I said, suspecting I was lying.  “She’s killed.”

I looked at Jamie, who was making notes, all the information that the two men from the coat store had shared.

“If you talk, telling more tales about the Radham Children, you can expect another visit from us,” Mary said.

The man paused, the nodded.

Mary backed away, knife held up.  She collected the blade from the counter, then tossed it into the corner by the door, still backing up as she joined us.  Helen was far more casual, letting go and practically skipping to us.

We left, moving unanimously toward the Academy.  We put a fair bit of distance between ourselves and the store, disappearing amid the crowd, before we broke the silence.

“You weren’t really going to torture them, were you?” Lillian asked.

“No,” Gordon said.

I wasn’t sure if he was lying.

“Because that’s not right,” Lillian said.

“I know,” Gordon said.  “But the stakes are high, and time might be short.  If we can’t get her before we’re forced to go back to Radham, or if she slips away, then we might not get another chance to stop whatever it is she has planned.”

I spoke up, “She made a point of telling me about weapons buried beneath the small towns.  She’s been visiting small towns.  She might have collected something,” I said.  “Or she’s set things to go off, experiments get loose… turns the academy’s weapons against itself.  It would fit her style.”

“Put a drop of alcohol on a scorpion’s back, and it stings itself to death,” Mary said.

I raised an eyebrow.

“When your enemy is so geared toward violence, it doesn’t take much to make them destroy themselves,” she explained.

“Given how you all are acting,” Lillian said, “You’re hungry for this catch, and it scares me a little.  That line about the scorpion could apply to you all too.”

“Us all,” I said.  “Not you all.  You’re one of us.  If something happens to the Lambs, you’re included in it.”

She frowned.

“The Radham Children,” Jamie mused.

“That’s a problem too,” Gordon said.  “Didn’t expect that.”

“The scene with Mauer, the scholars who saw us dealing with Sub Rosa, someone talked.  Rumors got out,” Jamie said.  “Hayle talked to me about this, before.  He and Briggs have a plan.  In case we stop being so secret.”

“Really?” Mary asked.  “Is it a good plan?”

“It’s a Briggs plan,” I said.  “Let’s focus on the here and now.  Genevieve Fray has a patron.  She’s lied or conned her way to getting pay, lab space, resources, protection and company, and the patron might not know.  She’s keeping the company of someone she can use as a hostage.”

“It was a good catch, Sy,” Gordon said.

I nodded.  I just wished I’d connected to it earlier.

Dame Cicely’s was a nice building, pale, and the branches that grew out of it were more discrete.  The windows were ornate, not made of branches but thick wrought iron molded to look like wood, glass stretched between.   A sprawling  garden near the front had young women walking through it, talking in groups, with their monsters in their company, walking a few paces behind.  I was a little surprised that the gardens were so popular, when they were covered in snow, but I supposed it spoke to the need to get away.  Much like the delinquents with their campfire off to the side of the woods.

Jamie put out a hand, stopping Gordon.  With Gordon, the rest of us stopped in our tracks.

He pointed.

Three female figures, entering a side door.

“You sure?” Gordon asked.

“Ninety percent.”

“We have the drop on her, this time around,” I said.  I looked at each of the others.  I could see the hunger and the raw, unique sorts of danger that each posed, with Lillian as the exception.  “We do this right, and we do it as a group.  It may be our last chance to get her.”

Stitch in Time – 4.7

“Wish we were older,” I muttered, hands in my coat pockets, shoulders hunched forward, hood pulled down low.  “Kind of hard to disappear in the crowd when there’s like, fifty kids in a town of fifteen thousand.”

“Yup,” Gordon said.  He was perched on the window ledge, taking his tools out, two small, thin rods.  He put the two of them together into the lock at the outside of the window.  Wrought iron branches and glass.  A quick check on Gordon’s part had verified that the room was empty.

“I’ve counted at least sixty,” Jamie said.  “Sixty kids.  Your count is way off.”

“Oh lords, shut up, Jamie,” I said, groaning.

Jamie stuck out his tongue at me.  I reached out to grab it, only for it to disappear back into his mouth.  I settled for lightly swatting at his cheek instead.

“Where did you learn to do that?” Mary asked Gordon.

“Some rough types in Radham, professional thieves.”

“How hard is it?”

“I dunno,” Gordon said.  “I have a good sense of touch and fine dexterity, so I found it pretty easy.  Sy tried his hand at it too, but he doesn’t keep up the practice.”

Mary looked at me, looking vaguely offended at the idea.  I shrugged.

“How come?” she asked.

“I forget it.  I learn it, and it’s fast to pick up.  Then I don’t have an excuse to do it for a while, or something comes up, like an appointment, and I feel like I’m starting from scratch.”

“Sy can forget how to ride a bike,” Jamie said.

With that, I saw a bit of sympathy from Mary, rather than that vague accusation of before.

I shrugged, hands back in my pockets.

“And we’re in,” Gordon said, taking the attention off me.  He hopped down, and collected his stuff, before sliding the lockpicking kit between his pants and his underwear, hiding the clip behind his belt.

“I still have a few practice locks and some picks in my room back at Lambsbridge,” I said.  “Remind me, I’ll lend them to you,” I told Mary.

She gave me a winning smile at that.

Gordon finished setting up, looking up at the window, the windowsill a few feet up off the ground.

“I wish we were taller, now that I’m thinking about it,” I commented.  “Be nice to-”

Gordon then lunged up to the window ledge with no effort at all.  He caught it, then swung himself over in the next second.

“-Be able to get up there without a boost,” I finished.  He had needed help before, but I supposed one of his hands had been full with the lockpicks.

I moved beneath the window, knitting my fingers together to provide a step for the others.

“No,” Lillian said.  “We’ve gone over this.  If you’re down here while we go up, you’re going to look up our skirts.”

“Pshh,” I said.  “I’ll go up first, then.”

“And then you look down the front of my blouse when I’m climbing over,” Lillian said, accusatory.

“Your blouse?  Nah.”

Ah, the look on her face told me I’d struck home.  Indignation, the opiate of bastardly sorts the world over.  That was what she got for being annoying.

“Besides, it’s winter, there aren’t any necklines,” I said, changing the topic before she found the words to yell at me.

“Interesting that you’d take note of that so readily,” Jamie said, dry.

“It’s obvi-”

“Guys,” Gordon said, cutting me off.  He was looking down on us from up above, chest resting on the windowsill.  “Pay attention?  And maybe be a little quieter?”

“Boost?” I asked Jamie.

He gave me a hand.  I kipped up high enough that I could grab Gordon’s arm, and he hauled me up the rest of the way.

It made me think.  The difference in our sizes, the difference in our strength.  He was capable of hauling me up off the ground and leaving me dangling.  At thirteen, he looked closer to fifteen or sixteen.  He had a physique, rather than a child’s body that just happened to have fat on it, or minimal fat, as mine did.

While he caught Lillian’s bag and deposited it on the floor, I found myself measuring the difference in our heights.  He was almost ten inches taller than me, if I had to guess.  In the spring, it had been closer to three or four.

It wasn’t that he was growing that fast.  Well, he was growing with a surprising speed, but that wasn’t the whole of it.

My height hadn’t really changed, nor had my build.

I offered a hand in helping Lillian up, realized I was getting in the way more than I was helping, and backed off a little.

Together with her, I surveyed the surroundings.  We were in a dormitory bedroom, but it was nice.  The furniture looked like antiques, or something expensive that would be antique someday.  Four poster bed, a writing desk with leather-backed books on a shelf above it, a bookcase with more texts on it, and a wall-mounted blackboard with notations and formulas on one half, and a to-do list on the other.

Gordon helped Helen up.  She was more graceful than Lillian had been, planting a foot on the windowsill, holding onto Gordon’s hand, then stepping down and dropping to a crouch-come-curtsy on landing.  She gave me a winning smile as she straightened up.

“You’re ridiculous,” I said, my voice low.

“I’m in a good mood,” she said.  “Because we’re on the prowl.”

“You don’t have moods,” I said.

“I have biological imperatives, thank you very much,” she said, prim, hands clasped behind her back, “And one of those imperatives is to stalk and kill.  We’re stalking.  It’s nice.”

“I’m more inclined to blame the chocolate cake from earlier,” I told her.

“Hmph.  That’s one of my other biological imperatives.”

Lillian nodded as if this was the most sensible thing in the world.

“Are you actually developing a sense of humor?” I asked, a little stunned.

She winked at me, then spun around.  “Gordon, do you think we’ll be exiting this way?  Can I hide my coat?”

“Better to keep it,” he said.

“We’ll look more like we belong if we don’t have outdoor stuff on,” I said.

Gordon made a noncommittal grumbling noise.  He helped Jamie up, plucking the book from Jamie’s hands, handing it to me, then helping Jamie through.  I provided the book once Jamie’s boots were firmly on the hardwood floor.

Mary came up next.  No boost.  A short running start, from the sounds of it, stepping onto the wall, and grabbing Gordon’s hand.

As she hopped down, I found myself comparing our heights.

She was a few inches taller than me, but unlike Gordon, she hadn’t quite shaken off the gawkishness of being young.  She had little traces of femininity here and there, promises of what was to come, but she also had natural flourish and style, instilled in her by Mothmont and Percy both.  She was a lady, when she was of a mind to be.

Helen was the inverse, in some ways, a little shorter than Mary, but already taking shape as a young woman.  It was little surprise, but she was the fastest of the girls to develop hips and chest, and she was gradually altering her blonde ringlets to match, inching ever closer to a woman’s hairstyle over a young girl’s, a journey that would take just the right amount of time to complete.  Helen could be a lady, she could be a precocious child, and switched between the two at a whim.  As I knew her, though, there was a wildness to her, as if a genie had bottled up a predator in the guise of a child, and all of the growls and restless pacing was translated into sweet smiles and flourishes, and in stillness, waiting like the spider or the praying mantis, she conveyed nothing more or less than the young woman at ease.

Jamie, like me, still embraced the awkwardness of youth, in frame and face, but he had height.  He’d quietly embraced his own style, with the long blond hair and the glasses, the book forever in his arms, drawing up subtle walls between him and the world, while his eyes peered past, taking everything in.

And then Lillian.  Still young, shortest of the girls now, still awkward in youth and figure.  A step behind, in so many ways, but I respected how she’d come to find and earn her place among us.  She chose clothes carefully, and remained conscious and defensive of her girlishness in a way that Helen and Mary would never have to.

I wasn’t sure what I was doing, studying them, but it was some hybrid approach to measuring myself against them and defining the tools we had available to use against Fray.

This was dangerous territory.  All it took was one person to raise an alarm of sorts, asking questions about why such young children were in a school for young ladies already exiting or out of their adolescent years, and Fray might be able to react against us.

“Any thoughts on the coats?” I asked.

“Been thinking about it,” Gordon said.  “I say coats off.  If we’re traipsing around with this stuff on, they might be more likely to ask questions.  We need to look like we belong.”

“Even if we stick out like sore thumbs,” I said.

“Even if,” he said.

Mary nodded in agreement.  She was already removing her coat.  Lillian, Gordon, Helen and I were a step behind.

Halfway through pulling my stuff off, tightly folding the forest green scarf into a bundle I could put in a pocket, I saw that Jamie was standing by the bookcase, a book open in front of him.

“Jamie?” I asked.

“One second.”

I finished pulling all my stuff off, and handed it over to Gordon, who stuffed it under the bed.  I walked over to Jamie, and glanced over his elbow to see the book he was looking over.

Rows on rows of portraits, with names beneath.  He gave each page only a moment’s glance.

“Left arm,” I told him.

Without taking his eyes off the book, he held out his left arm.  I pulled his jacket free of the arm.

“Right arm.”

I pulled the coat free, then handed it to Gordon.  Like the rest, the coat disappeared beneath the bed.  Mary had already closed the window, and was busy with her sweater up around her ribs, tucking her shirt into her skirt in such a way that it wouldn’t hamper her access to the knife handles that only slightly stuck up from her beltline.

“Key things,” I said.  “Cover?  Anyone asks, we’re prospective students.”

“Girl’s only school,” Mary said.

“Jamie, Gordon and I will cross-dress,” I said.  I saw the annoyed looks, and I cracked a grin, “The school is going co-ed.”

“Nobody’s going to believe that,” Lillian said.  “The woman-only nature of the school is important.”

“Blame it on money and nobility,” I said.  “Some prat lord decided he wanted to go to the school with all the girls, set the wheels in motion.  Only the higher-ups and some important people know.  Anyone asks, we don’t say, but we imply we’re important enough to know.”

There were a few nods.

“Best to avoid being in a position where we have to justify anything,” Jamie said.

“Well yeah, obviously,” I agreed.

Gordon nodded.  “Okay.  That’s the story.  When you’re inventing yourselves, stick to points and names established during previous infiltration jobs.  If possible, let Jamie come up with the details.  He’s best at that.”

“Can do,” Jamie said.

I raised a finger,  “We need to find out what Fray is doing, disarm and disrupt her.  That means finding the lab, the room where she’s staying, or something.”

There were a few nods.

“Finally, Lady Claire.  We need to find her.  Through her, we have access to Fray, information, whatever else.  Depending on what’s going on, we might be able to get clues, or figure out a path of attack.”

“School hours are over,” Lillian said.  “It’s late afternoon, and if Dame Cicely’s is anything like Radham Academy, the girls are going to return to their rooms to change clothes for dinner sometime soon, if they aren’t already.  They’ll go to the dining hall to eat, if they don’t go into town, and then there’ll be a few hours of social activity and studying before people start settling in for the night.”

“Good,” Gordon said.  Lillian smiled at the praise.

“Fray is Lady Claire’s tutor,” I said.  “Claire is a poor student, and Fray is her savior.  That means Claire is devoted, indebted, probably disconnected from her peers.  I’m thinking they’re going to eat out, or eat in their rooms.  We find out where they’re working, try to mark her location, divide our attention between investigating whatever it is she’s doing and keeping track of her.  See if we can’t-”

The doorknob rattled, and I was immediately silent.  All six sets of eyes were now on the door.

A key scratched at the lock, then raked its way into the keyhole.

Just like that, Jamie, Helen, Lillian and I stepped back to the side of the bed, using it to conceal ourselves.  Gordon and Mary advanced, exchanging a brief set of hand signals.

Gordon pointed, formed a fist, jerking it toward his shoulder.  You.  Pull.  That second sign worked as ‘get’, ‘take’, or ‘hold’, depending.

Mary’s response was a ‘yes’.  Fist formed, pumped slightly in the air.

Gordon twisted, looking at Lillian.  A point, then another gesture, a hand waved over his face.

You.  Sleep.  The second sign could mean tired, drunk, it didn’t really matter.  Lillian made an alarmed sound, reaching for her bag, pulling it around in front of her so she could rummage within.  I had a glimpse of the contents, metal plates keeping things rigid and protecting bottles and syringes.

Gordon was already turning and grabbing the chair from beside the desk, approaching as the door swung open.

A young woman, eighteen or so, stepped into the room.  A little heavy, with a hairstyle that didn’t suit her round face, but not without her appeal.  A definite cute ‘girl next door’ type.

She looked at Gordon with shock, as Mary stepped in from the corner behind the door and gave her a hard shove.

The girl stumbled forward, and Gordon swung the top of the chair into her solar plexus.

Have they been practicing, or is this their natural dynamic? I wondered.

Lillian was still searching her bag as the woman crumpled to all fours on the floor, trying and failing to breathe.

Things weren’t so simple as all that.  The girls of Dame Cicely’s were never alone.  Each and every one had a pet, their status symbol, suggesting the kind of work they focused on, and the skills they were able to bring to bear.  The room’s occupant was no different.  It shouldered its way past the door that Mary had tried to close between it and its master.

It looked like a human with all the skin pulled off in a singular piece, bug-eyed without its eyelids, teeth too white against a backdrop of crimson.  The torso had been stretched, making it tall enough its head almost scraped the doorframe.  The arms had been removed and replaced with a row of insect limbs that extended from hip to shoulders, each of the limbs tipped with a wicked looking claw, thorn-like growths running down the length of each.

It noted its fallen mistress and made an alarmed noise.  The sound didn’t resemble anything human or insectile, guttural and wet, like someone in the end stages of pneumonia might make if they had to scream something to save their loved ones from an approaching killer.

It staggered forward, the slow, awkward gait of the body not matching the fluid, precise movement of the clawed arms, each arm drawing back, then stabbing.  Mary dropped low to the ground, started to retreat toward Gordon, but proved it to be a feint, dodging back behind the thing, shutting the door, sealing us in with it.

Gordon shoved the four legs of the chair at it, and two of the claws punched through the seat, no doubt at least an inch and a half of solid wood.  He wrenched his body, moving the chair to one side, and managed to block one more claw that had been trying to reach past the chair to stab at his side.

Lillian found what she was looking for, triumphantly holding up a bottle and needle.  She withdrew a dose, then rose, approaching from around the bed, hesitating a little at the sight of Gordon fighting the graft-monster.

“Here!” Mary called out.

“But-” Lillian started.  “Dose is for her.”

“Here!” Mary said, more insistent.  Her first shouted statement had drawn a glance from the creature.  Not having success against Gordon, seeing Mary with nary a chair to protect herself, it started to reorient, moving its arms in preparation to stab.

I saw Lillian look, pausing, not sure what to do, eyes on the space over the experiment’s shoulder that she needed to lob the needle through, knowing an errant throw could hit a wall or the ceiling, or that a moving arm could swat the thing aside.

I snatched the needle from her hand, then moved forward, ducking low to cast it along the hardwood floor.

Gordon, in a last-ditch effort to save Mary from being impaled on a half-dozen points, twisted the chair.  One or two arms were still caught in it, or caught between rungs and the seat of the chair, and the creature reacted, turning its attention back toward him.

Mary had the needle, and brought it up into the creature’s abdomen, pressing the syringe.  One free hand, then the other, went up to catch at three of the thing’s ‘elbows’, holding them at bay, to reduce it’s range of movement.

It took only a few seconds for the dose to work.  It collapsed, landing across its creator’s body, helping to pin her down.

The girl on the floor coughed, as if the cough could bring air into her lungs.

She couldn’t quite look at Gordon, who practically straddled her, or at Mary, who was behind, so she looked at us, alarmed and confused.

I looked away, my attention on the bag, pulling a free syringe from the spot where Lillian had taken the first, then grabbing the tranquilizer.  I pushed both into Lillian’s hands, distracting her from the young lady we’d just assaulted.

“It’s okay,” Helen said.  With Lillian now measuring a dose, me busy with the bag and Lillian, urging our medic forward, Helen was the only one left with our captive’s attention.  “You’re in no danger.  We just need you to sleep for the rest of the night.  You’ll wake up on the floor, safe and sound.”

The young woman opened her mouth to talk, and only wound up coughing again.

“Do you have friends that would come looking for you?” Gordon asked.  “If you’re missing at dinner?  Or after?”

The girl frowned, then after a pause, she nodded.

“Don’t lie,” I said.

She looked up at me, concerned, heaving in wheezy breaths.  I’d only been guessing, but her reaction to me calling her on it was telling.

“That’s a no,” I told Gordon.

He nodded.  “We have an escape route if we need it.  Place to hide out.”

Mary partially opened the door.  “One-sixteen.”

“Remember that,” Gordon said, to the rest of us.

Lillian approached our captive with a needle in hand.  I saw the girl tense up.

“Typhomine,” Lillian said.  “Thirty three point four milligrams, for a person that weighs eleven stone.”

Our captive took that in, then relaxed.

“On your side,” Lillian said, bending down, pushing at the girl’s shoulder.

The girl obeyed, twisting her upper body until she was lying on her side.

When Lillian reached out with the needle, a hand went up.  Gordon grabbed it, holding it down, and Lillian stuck the young woman in the stomach.

In moments, she was asleep.

Lillian grabbed a pillow from the bed and put it under the woman’s head, then another, propped behind her back.

Gordon looked impatient by the time she was done.  Lillian gave him a nod, as if to confirm that she was done.

Think what you want, Gordon, that would have been far harder without Lillian, I thought.  I handed her her bag.

Mary peeked out into the hall, then gave us the go-ahead.

The hall was largely empty.

We moved as a group.  Helen, Gordon, Mary, and I were quick to slip into our roles.  We walked comfortably, casually.  Stealth was good, staying out of sight and being quiet, but the next best thing was to look like we belonged.  Moving with purpose, briskly enough that it looked like we knew what we were doing.  If we looked lost, then others would want to give us direction, or question what we were doing.

“Turn right,” Jamie said.

“How the heck do you know where we’re going?” Gordon asked.

“Photos in the yearbook, outline of the school, what we saw from outside.  It feels like common sense,” Jamie said, quiet.

“That’s kind of scary,” Lillian said.  “I know you could pull out anything you’d seen, but connecting the pieces, now?”

“You have your thing, you practice it.  I have my thing,” Jamie said.  “Not that I’m positive, mind you.”

“Better than nothing,” Gordon said.  Then, not for the first time, he said, “Wish I had that brain of yours.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said, quiet.  “Maybe.”

Mary couldn’t have made the connection.  Even Lillian probably wouldn’t have remembered, it was so long ago I wasn’t even sure Lillian had been with us.

No, the very first time they’d had the exchange had been one of our earliest meetings.  When the Lambs had just made the move from being three to being four, Jamie joining our ranks, we had been learning what each of us were capable of.

I wish I had your brain.

I wish I had your body.

If I remembered the interplay of dialogue between Jamie and Gordon, then Jamie had to, right?

Odd, that he hadn’t brought it up or used the line.  He was acting odd in a few ways, as a matter of fact.  Jamie looked tense, and a side effect of that tension was that he was too stiff, not quite the casual air we needed.

I knew that this particular situation made him the fish out of water.  Improvising wasn’t his strong suit, because improvising required fast reactions and adaptation.  But shouldn’t that have made him more willing to lean on us, stick to the tried and true, the interplay, the jokes, the reminder that we were a team?

I poked him in the side.  He flinched, doubling over a little, then shot me a look.

I rolled my shoulders, then stretched, fingers together, arms over my head with palms up.

“Uh huh,” Jamie said.  He seemed to force himself to relax.

It solved the immediate problem, but it didn’t solve the rest of it.  I wasn’t sure what was up with him.

Double doors at the opposite end of the hallway banged open, a small herd of young ladies in fashionable clothing coming through.  Their hair was nicely done up, and the clothes were nice, high quality, though not loud or attention-getting.  They were fitting the atmosphere of the school, unconsciously adapting.

“More girls visiting their rooms before dinner,” Lillian said.  “Before long we’re going to be surrounded.”

“Being surrounded is bad.  It’s less chance for us to see Fray before she sees us,” I said.

“Yeah,” Gordon agreed.  “Let’s get out of sight.”

“Through the doors, hard right, then stairs, down,” Jamie said.

There was a heavy set of double doors just like the one the collection of Dame Cicely’s students had come through.  Gordon and I each pushed one of the doors open.  We rounded the corner.  There were more rooms to either side, but the hallway was short, and at the end of it were two sets of stairs, one leading down, the other leading up.

“What’s downstairs?” I asked.

“Labs.  They’re almost always downstairs,” Jamie said.  “I don’t know what the layout is, but I doubt they’re going to be too busy if people are going from class to their rooms for dinner.”

“No guarantees,” I said.

If Fray saw us and bolted-

Footsteps on the stairs marked someone or multiple someones coming down the stairs.  We were too far away to make a run for downstairs, too far forward to try and slip through the doors.

Immediately, as we’d done with the young woman in her dorm room, we looked for our exits.

Six of us, and four of us had the wherewithal to check nearby dorm rooms, hoping some were unlocked.

No luck on all four counts.  Stupid school with its scheming, paranoid students.

The girls came down the stairs, and I found myself saying a mantra in my head, as if I could will it to be true.  Don’t be Fray.  Don’t be Fray.  Don’t be Fray.  Especially don’t be Fray’s killer monster man.

The young women were in the company of their pet monsters and stitched, chattering with one another.  None were Fray.  Nor the monster.

But there was one more experiment than there were human girls.

The stitched girl from Fray’s entourage carried a tray of kettle, plates of tidbits and cups.  She saw us and stopped so suddenly that it startled the girls in her company, porcelain rattling on the tray, tea slopping over the side, threatening to spill.

It was a still tableau.

“It’s you!” she said, staring at us.

Stitch in Time – 4.8

This was, like the rattle of the doorknob, the kind of situation that demanded a coordinated response.  When the doorknob had rattled, it had been Mary and Gordon who’d stepped forward.

This was a different sort of rattle.

Helen, Gordon and I were on point.  Well, Gordon was always on point, there weren’t many active, immediate situations where he was bad.  Much like how there weren’t many situations where Jamie and Lillian were really supposed to step up and take charge.

“Hi!” Helen said, cheery.

Fray’s stitched alone wasn’t the biggest problem.  Her stitched being in the company of other women and monsters made for something more complicated.

“What are you doing here?” Fray’s stitched asked, looking confused and mildly alarmed.

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, I thought.  A cleverer person could be invited to dance, words playing off of words and the bystanders forever kept in the dark.  The stitched wasn’t so nuanced, and she’d chosen the single hardest question to answer directly.

“We’re taking a look at the school!” Helen said, matching the stitched girl in tone.  “It’s so pretty!”

She wasn’t lying, but even ignoring that part, it sounded so genuine I almost believed her.  The problem was that it left things open, it gave the stitched girl a moment to think.

“Careful,” I said, abruptly.  “The tray, don’t drop it.”

She startled a little, looking down at the tray.

“I don’t ever drop trays.  I’m careful,” she said, voice firm.  She hadn’t been close to dropping it, but she’d had to check.

Gordon seemed to sense what I was doing.  “How is Genevieve doing?”

“Oh.  Um,” the stitched said.  A furrow appeared between her eyebrows.  “She’s happy, and she’s working.  She’s with Claire right now.”

“We were going to go see Lady Claire,” one of the girls said.

“Yes,” I said, then I took a risk.  “We were too.”

“You know Miss Fray?” one of the girls in the group cut in.

Hadn’t expected that.  It was rude, sudden, and it didn’t fit into the flow of the conversation.

“We do,” Helen said.

Again, she was leaving things open-ended, letting the other person decide the next part of the conversation.  I had to have a talk with her about it.  A casualty of Helen being largely reactive in nature.

“How?” another girl asked.  Was her tone accusatory?

I wanted to defer to the other Lambs and let them control the flow of the conversation while I took a second to think, but I worried we were one mistake away from trouble.  Something about the collective tone and body language.

“She recommended the school to us,” I said, off the top of my head.  It tied things back to the backstory we’d already discussed.

“To you?” was the arch reply.  To a boy?

“We weren’t supposed to say, Sid,” Gordon admonished me.

I flinched, but I did catch a glimpse of the confusion on the girl’s faces.  This was a cutthroat school, one where it was every student for themselves.  Why then, did they look at each other for confirmation or feedback?

A tight-knit group, centered around Fray?

Or were they a tight-knit group, rallying against Fray?

Either way, I had a plan of attack now.  “Do you think she’s going to be angry at us?”

Gordon paused, not sure how to respond.  My mistake.

“I’m miffed at you,” the stitched girl called out.  Giving her an opening to say something was another mistake.

“You know her best,” Helen said, covering, and diverting focus.  It wasn’t much, but it was something.

I nodded.  “I guess.  She’ll be mad, but she won’t show it.  She’s better than that.”

“What are you talking about?” one of the girls asked.

“I can’t say,” I said.  I was sure to say it too quickly, pausing awkwardly, feigning discomfort in the moment of silence that followed.

“Miss Genevieve is nice,” Wendy said.  “You’re not making sense.”

If these girls liked Fray, we needed to counteract that impression.  If they disliked her, then I needed to play that up.

“That’s not a word I’ve heard people use to describe her,” I said.

With that, two of the girls broke away from the group, their monsters following.

“Um,” the stitched girl said, looking at them, bewildered.

“It’s okay, Wendy,” one of the girls that had stayed behind said, interrupting her.

Shift the bias of the conversation.  Recognizing that stitched tended to be slower to react or adjust in the same way Jamie was, I could override her, build up a story, and turn these girls into a weapon we could use against Fray.

“It’s very much not okay!  That one threw a knife at my head!” Wendy said, pointing at Mary.  “Be safe.  They’re dangerous!”

That brought everything to a screeching halt.

She was a little faster on the uptake than most, then.  Had to stop making assumptions when Fray was involved, even tangentially.

“Wendy,” I said.  “We’re not dangerous.  You’re mistaken.”

“We’ve talked about this,” Lillian said, piping up.  “You have residual memories.  What you’re remembering isn’t Martha, but someone very similar to Martha, from before.”

Clever Lillian.  Every stitched spent some time being trained and checked for residual memories and tics before they were cleared for their duties.  Lillian was helping to build something of a narrative, and she was helping to direct the conversation.  In the right direction, no less.

“No,” she said, stubborn.  “We haven’t talked about it and that isn’t one of my memories.  Miss Genevieve had me running all over to try and watch you and she said to be careful and then she threw a knife at my head and he pushed some bricks over so they almost fell on me, and-”

I wanted to slap a hand to my face.

“That sort of thing doesn’t happen in reality, Wendy,” Helen said, with the best gentle tone.

“It does and it did!”

I mused, We need to move the conversation to the right destination, even if we have this anchor holding us back and threatening to sink us.

Attack her stance, erode the other’s faith in her words, using the fact that she was a stitched?  Evade and distract, maybe?  Or approach things from an oblique angle?

I decided to play along.  I hated doing it, but I played the kid.

“We didn’t do that!” I said.  “We came here because she asked us to and she says we’re going to be able to go to school here later if everything works out, and-”

“What?” one of the girls cut me off.

“She’s… I wasn’t supposed to say that,” I said, for the second time.  By this time, their curiosity had to be killing them.

The girls who’d started to approach finished crossing the floor to reach us.  One of them dropped down to sit on her heels, reaching out to place a hand on my shoulder.  She smiled, “It’s okay.  You can tell us.”

I turned to look at Gordon, as if for reassurance.  He shrugged, which was perfect.

“She made friends with Lady Claire because Lady Claire knows someone who runs the Academy,” I said.  “She says, if everything works out, then this won’t be a girl’s school next year.  There’ll be men coming here, which means I can come.”

You want your precious seats?  How would you like more competition?

“That doesn’t make sense,” the girl in front of me said.  She was a pretty blonde with features that I was pretty sure had been adjusted with some Academy science.

“It’s true,” I said.  I could have used money to drive the point home, but money held more weight with people who weren’t used to wealth.  “She said that Lady Claire’s dad-”

“Uncle,” Jamie said, under his breath.

“Uncle, he’s noble, and he’s been offered a position, but the man offering the position has a daughter he doesn’t want to be studying any of this and she’s supposed to get a scholarship and-”

“Okay,” the girl cut off my ramble, which was very intentionally rambly.  Hit them with too many things they would want to ask questions about, all at once, leave them reeling.  Even if they pick apart the argument, the message underlying it all still penetrates.

Politics.  I was willing to bet they’d appreciate politics more than money.

It was a lie they could believe.

“I don’t know about any of that,” Wendy said.

I could have thrown out something in response to that, but I decided to let it sit.

Helen decided to pick it up, “It’s okay, honey.”

Damn it.

“No it’s not!  You tried to strangle Warren!”

“She keeps saying that stuff,” one of the girls said.  “Is she burning out?”

“I’m quite fine, thank you,” Wendy said, stamping a little in frustration.  The cups and saucers on the tray rattled.

“Maybe we should ask Miss Fray?”

Ugh.  That would be a disaster.

“Maybe,” said the girl, who was crouched in front of me.  “I always wondered where she came from.  It would be nice to know who I’m talking to, when I go down to see her.”

There were a hundred things I could have said, webs I could have spun, but with this proximity to the girl, I knew it would be too much, too fast.  We needed a subtler line, something to set the hook without giving our fish reason to struggle.  Besides, I was playing the kid, matching Wendy in the innocence angle.  I couldn’t deliver anything too cutting without drawing too much attention to me.

From Helen and Gordon’s silence, I suspected they sensed the same thing, and they were deferring to me.

It was the wrong hand signal, but I feigned fidgeting, putting my hands behind my back, knowing the others could all see it, and I extended two fingers, ‘walking’ them upside down.

The rabbit ears in the grass, the upside down man.  It was a sign that meant ‘sneak’.  Paired with another sign, it could mean ‘subtly’.  I pointed at my lower face.

Mary started to move around to the side, slowly.  I made a sudden gesture, clenching my fist, shifting my posture.  She stopped, and she watched as I emphasized mouth, not neck.

No, I didn’t want an ambush.

I wanted-

“I overheard my dad, once,” Jamie said, hesitant.  That wasn’t acting, it was just Jamie being Jamie, but it worked.  “He said, that lady isn’t someone you would ever want to marry or have as a business partner, but if you want to learn science and learn politics, there aren’t many people better to learn from.”

“Is that so?” the girl in front of me asked, her voice soft.

Jamie, I could kiss you right now.

He could be slow, but he was the furthest thing from stupid.  He understood how I thought.  All he needed, sometimes, was the time to get caught up and connect the dots.  When he got that, then he could be devastating.

With those words, he’d poisoned the waters.  So long as we maintained some semblance of cover, all future interactions between these girls and Fray would be colored by distrust and concern about being manipulated.

“We’re supposed to learn from her, this coming spring,” I said.  “Our parents all arranged it.”

“She’s Lady Claire’s tutor,” the other girl who’d approached us said.

“Uh, yeah,” I said.  “I guess we’ll be her students too?”

Take the bait, take the bait…

“Here?” the girl in front of me asked.

“In Radham,” I said, firmly enough to leave no doubt.

She reached out, and her monster, a man with armor-crusted skin, extended a hand for her to hold on to as she straightened up, standing.

It doesn’t make sense, does it?  How could she be a proper tutor for Lady Claire here and a tutor for us there?  Something doesn’t add up, and you’ve already suggested you’re suspicious of her.  You were vaguely hostile and almost predatory when you sussed out a connection to her, which suggests you don’t like her.  You’re willing to believe the worst.

She’s selling out the school, making it co-ed, she’s selling you all out, all in the name of politics.  To top it all off, she’s manipulating Lady Claire to make it happen.

This was the story we’d spun out.

“I’m very eager to talk to this woman now,” the blonde girl who’d talked to me said, her back to us.  She approached the stairs.  “Only thing that doesn’t add up is this stitched girl.”

“I add up!” Wendy said, indignant.

“Your story doesn’t.”

“Oh.  I thought you meant arithmetics.”

“Is she running hot?” the blonde asked.

Another girl reached out and put a hand on Wendy’s forehead.  “A little warm.  Not enough for a burn-out.”

“I just made tea,” Wendy said, very patiently,  “I’m holding tea.  It’s warm, because tea is hot.  I’m telling the truth.  They’re dangerous.  All six of them.  Miss Genevieve told me to be very careful with them.”

“It’s okay,” the girl said, withdrawing her hand from Wendy’s forehead.  “We can go and ask Miss Fray, and I think everything will become clear.”

“Yes,” the blonde agreed.  “I’m looking forward to the explanation.”

It wasn’t ideal – I’d hoped to have more time.  But we had a distraction, in the form of several angry girls, we had the element of surprise.  All we needed to do was corner her, then draw the net closed.

“If you say something about us to her, we’re going to get in trouble,” I said.

The blonde turned her attention briefly to me.  I liked the look of deep-seated concern on her face, as if I’d struck a blow to the core of her being, shaking her confidence.  This was someone proud, good at what she did, and with my lies, she was no longer sure that she knew what the future had in store for her.

“I’ll be discreet,” she said.  A lie, practically to my face.  She didn’t care.

The motivation that drove her now was stopping Fray and securing her future once again.

“Thank you,” I said, pretending to accept the lie.  I moved closer to the stairs as they started to gather, ready to move on Fray as a group.  I wondered if they’d be direct or subtle about it all.  I couldn’t tell from the body language or the murmured words they were exchanging.

The blonde one looked so much angrier.  She didn’t stride forward.  She stalked, her pet with its armored skin a step behind.

Conventional wisdom was that a lie was best kept simple.  Less conventional wisdom was that a lie could be trumped by a more complex one.

The Lambs and I were close.  My eyes were on Wendy, Fray’s stitched girl.  She was confused, she kept trying to talk, and nobody was listening.

I almost felt bad.

The group turned and moved as a unit, heading downstairs to where Genevieve Fray and Lady Claire supposedly were.

Like Jamie was so prone to be, the stitched girl found herself a step behind.

I lurched forward, hurrying, as she moved around the railing to head downstairs.  Pushing her down would be crude, but getting in her way-

She stumbled a little, the cups and saucers clattering once again.

“Excuse me!” she said.  “It’s already getting cold.  I’m in a hurry!”

“Sorry,” I said.  “Let me get out of your way.”

I faked right, then moved left.  She stumbled again, then stamped a foot, clearly frustrated.

At the base of the stairs, one of the girls called up, “Wendy, are you coming?  And Sid, was it?”

“Yes!” Wendy called back.  She shot me a glare.  “Excuse me.  I need to serve the tea, and I need to tell Miss Genevieve that you said things that weren’t true.”

“It’s okay,” Mary said, catching me off guard by speaking up.  “Sid?  It’s okay.”

I frowned, but I saw her smile.

I stepped out of Wendy’s way, freeing her to go down the stairs.

She took one step, then jerked to a halt.  Tea slopped out of the cups.

“Um,” the stitched girl said.  She tried to turn around, then stopped again.  “Um.”

Mary had tied her to the railing.

She looked at me, very clearly frustrated and maybe a little lost at this point.  “Would you please take the tray?”

I shook my head.

She tried to put it on the railing, balancing it, then gave up, taking hold of it again.  Several times, she tried to move, and found herself caught firm.

All she had to do was throw the tray, but, as she’d proudly told us, she didn’t drop trays.

“Um,” she said, looking more distressed.

Gordon reached out, putting a hand on her arm.  “It’s okay.”

“I can’t move,” she said, her voice small.  She sounded like she had regressed in age.

“It’s okay,” he said, again.  “I know.  Just wait.  Things will be okay.  You have to be patient.”

She tried to move again, then stopped short.  She went still, shoulders drawn in.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Gordon said.  “Stay here.  We’ll get you help, okay?”

She nodded.  “But the tea is going to get cold.”

I started down the stairs, several of the others with me.  Only Gordon hung back, consoling the stitched girl.

“You have the teapot, don’t you?” Gordon asked.  “They like second cups, after the first is done?”

“One teabag,” she said, “So it isn’t too strong when it’s time for the second cup.”

“Good remembering,” he said.  “Do you drink tea?”

“No.  It’s not very good for me.”

“Sid,” Gordon called out.

I’d just reached the bottom of the stairs, I turned around, and so did many of the others.

Gordon spoke, his voice carrying down the stairwell.  The school was quiet enough we could hear it, even with his low volume.  “Three cups.  One for Fray, one for Claire, and…”

“One for Fray’s monster,” Mary said.

“His name is Warren,” the stitched girl said.  “And he’s not a monster!  He’s a gentleman and I’m supposed to help him!”

“No,” I said.  “He’s down there with them?”

Nobody responded.  We were already moving on.  Gordon took the steps, two at a time, leaving the stitched girl behind.  We had a problem.  Fray’s man was a monster the rest of the gang hadn’t been able to take down in a square fight.

We moved carefully, checking before any movement, not daring to move in front of a door in case Genevieve Fray or someone else spotted us.

“Sent everyone down here,” Gordon said, under his breath.  “Why?  Couldn’t you have sent them away?”

“It was a gamble,” I said.  “Yes, I could have sent them elsewhere, but it wouldn’t have been easy.  They were already heading down there, it was the place to go for answers, and they definitely wanted some, with Wendy back there drawing a connection and raising big questions.”

“Mmm,” he said.

“Hoped her monster would be off on an errand, trying to deal with us, or getting maintenance, or something.”

“Sure things are better than gambles, Sy,” he said, under his breath.  “Better to step away and find a more concrete avenue of attack.  Keep it simple.  ”

“It was.  That was as simple as I do.  I considered everything and it made the most sense.  Put her on her heels, pressure her, find an opportunity to strike, when she isn’t expecting us.”

“Well, let’s hope it happens,” he said, and he said it in a way that made it sound like I’d failed somehow.

Jerk.  He’d just been talking to me about how the group needed to work together.

We creeped forward, and in the midst of it, I felt Mary bump my arm with her elbow.  She didn’t say or do anything, but we moved forward as a pair, arms touching.

Solidarity.

When we drew closer to the end of the hall, we heard the voices, along with the sound of rushing water.

“She’s conning you, Claire.  Can’t you understand that?”

“She’s saving me.  She’s a fantastic teacher, she’s-”

“Lying to you.  Or are you saying she hasn’t contrived to meet your dad?”

“Contrived is the wrong word-”

“It’s true,” Fray said.

There was a moment of shocked silence.

“It’s not like you’ve been led to believe.  Dame Cicely’s Academy isn’t anything I’m after, and I don’t know anything about it wanting to allow men in.”

“Don’t know anything?  I don’t believe you.”

“I did approach Lady Claire as a means to an end, but that was temporary.  I became her friend in a genuine way.”

A pause.  I was sure that if I looked, I could see Fray putting on a show.

“You became her so-called friend, and you’re leaving, just like that.”

“I- yes.  Sooner than I’d like.  But that’s not an entirely bad thing, Joan.  I know you have a great admiration-” a brief but meaningful pause, “For Lady Claire.  I would be delighted to invite you into one of our study sessions, so you could take over for me when I’m done.”

“I- What were your ulterior motives, Genevieve?”

“Ah, that.  It’s complicated.”

What to do?  We had her cornered.  She was busy defending herself.  But she also had her pet in there with her.  A brute of a man with keen enough instincts to stay ahead of the rest of the Lambs.

Mary was next to me, back pressed to the wall, much as mine was.  I reached over, and I tapped the side of her leg, touching the blade that her skirt hid.  I touched my throat, then jerked a thumb in the direction of the room.

She made a so-so gesture.

Not confident?

I stepped away from the wall, pulling on her sleeve, swapping positions with her and gestured for her to wait.

Better if she was closer to the door, in case something happened.

“I wanted access,” Fray said.  “Something I’ve been lacking since I lost the Academy’s favor.  That’s why I first approached Lady Claire.  The nobility and upper class offer that access.  I thought I could play the game, work my way to a secure position.  But I’ve always had a weakness for people.  I’m bad at reducing them to simple numbers or abstracts.  I get too close to them.  Friend or foe.”

“I hope I’m a friend,” someone said.  Lady Claire, most likely.

“Most definitely,” Fray said.

Nothing suggested she was lying, prompting me to wonder, what did you want access for?  Or to?

“I almost believe you,” said the blonde.  Joan, if I was guessing right.  “Those children you’ve worked with-”

My heart sank.  I saw Mary tense, a throwing knife in hand.

“More people I’ve gotten too close to.  Or they’ve gotten too close to me,” Fray said.  “I think they’re upset with me.  They’re distorting the truth.  I don’t know if they realize how much they’re doing it.  Isn’t that right, Sylvester?”

My blood ran cold.

“Sylvester?” Lady Claire asked.

“One of the children.  I’d lay good money on the fact that he’s out in the hallway, listening.  Messy black hair, small, sharp eyes?”

“He was called Sid by one of the others.”

“A fake name.”

“Says the fugitive from the Crown,” I called out.  “You used your real name?”

“I lose track if I lie,” she said.  “I’m no good at that.”

“Fugitive?” this from one of the young women.  She sounded alarmed.

I didn’t like flying blind.  I put a hand on Mary’s shoulder, then stepped out into the doorway.

The lab was stone walled and stone floored, lit by voltaic lights that flickered just a touch.  Biologic power often did that.  Fish or something else that could be fed and produce the power.  The floor was thick glass, and water moved below, churning and frothing.  The light reflected off the floor and the water to make it look like the entire room was underwater.

I saw Fray’s monster.  Eight feet tall, his shoulders so broad I could have draped myself over them and still not covered the breadth.  All muscle, exaggerated, with pressed clothes that had no doubt been tailored to his specific shape.

Fray was there, with the girls we’d just been talking to.

“Your friends are there too, I assume?” Fray asked.

“They went to go do something else,” I lied.  “Think about it.”

“I am thinking about it, Sylvester, but I don’t think I believe you.”

“Before, when we talked, I found myself wondering what you’d do if we all came after you, if Wendy’s distraction attempt had failed, or if we’d organized differently.  I don’t suppose this is where I get to find out?”

“Fugitive?” Lady Claire asked, a little louder, repeating herself.

“Murderer and terrorist,” I said.  I pulled out my badge.  “We’re tracking her down.  For convenience’s sake, you can imagine we’re adults in the bodies of children, for the sake of sneaking around, going unnoticed, or being discreet.”

“But you aren’t,” Fray said.

“Convenience’s sake,” I said.  I looked at the other girls, and the monsters they’d brought with.  “If she sends her monster over there after us, I highly recommend using your monsters to disable or kill her.  Be careful, she’s got retractable syringes in her fingers and a tentacled monster hidden inside her clothing.  You don’t want to be too close to her.”

I saw Lady Claire back away a step.

“Everything I told you was the truth, Claire,” Fray said, her head bowing a little.  “If you think about it, a great deal of what I told you will make more sense, in retrospect.”

“You’re really a killer,” Claire said.  She backed away again, startling a little as Joan put hands on her shoulders.

Genevieve Fray didn’t answer the question.  She turned her attention to me.

“Sylvester.”

“Fray.”

“To sate that idle curiosity of yours, I’ll tell you.  Had everyone turned up on the patio outside the cafe, and if conversation had seemed impossible, I would have told you what it is I’m aiming to do.”

“Uh huh,” I said.  “This is where you tell me, then?  Send us off to go stop your dastardly plan?”

“No,” she said, quiet, sounding almost offended.  “No.  First of all, I have this situation well in hand.”

The girls backed away a little more.  They were mindful of Fray’s monster, with its eerie blue eyes and massive frame.

“Second of all, I don’t intend to give anyone a chance to stop me.  I started and concluded my greater plot some time ago.  Anything I do now just extends its effects and gravity.  All the same, I think you and the other Lambs would feel compelled to run damage control.”

“You’ve already done what you set out to do?” I asked.

“I did after my first stop, but I’m taking the time to secure it, make sure it does what I mean it to.  Much like I’ve already decided this confrontation, and all the time we take talking is securing my position.”

I tore my eyes off her, studying the room.

I’d thought, not daring to look away, that the girls with the monsters were crouching.  But they were sagging.

Gas.  Or some concoction, or something.

She and I were resistant to it, by virtue of the Wyvern formula, and she’d treated her creature, too.  The rest weren’t so lucky.

Without the monsters to threaten her, there was nothing to stop the monster with the blue eyes.

“Warren,” Fray said, sounding genuinely disappointed.  “Go.”

Stitch in Time – 4.9

I threw myself back out of the doorway, Mary moving in the opposite direction, her shoulder bumping mine.  She threw a knife, then twisted around, her still-wet boots skidding on the floor.  She grabbed the door and my offered hand to catch herself, than ran with the rest of us, her hand in mine.

We hurried down the hall, and I heard the briefest scraping sound.

I half-turned to see him stepping out into the hallway, a stool dangling from his hand.  When he threw it, he didn’t bring his arm back for more distance or wind-up.  It was a motion of the elbow and the wrist, a hard snap.

It took me a fraction of a second to see the trajectory.  I hauled on Mary’s arm, to pull her away, and I wasn’t strong enough.  The stool hit her and splintered against the wall in the same moment.  Her grip tightened on my hand, and she twisted my wrist as she stumbled into Helen, who was a step ahead of her.  Mary, Helen and I went down in a heap.

I flipped over, avoiding relying on my hand as I shifted positions to more of a crouch, my attention on Warren.  Mary’s throwing knife glinted in the light, sticking out of his chest, a few inches deep into his chest.  She had nailed her throw.  Right over the heart.

Could I call that irony?  The whole reason the Lambs even exist is that the Crown got this far, and the Crown only got this far because the Academies started making monsters that were harder to kill than conventional weapons were able to.  By the time weapons caught up, the Academies were producing other weapons, plagues and parasites, causing the sort of problems for their enemies that only the Academies could fix.

It was that cycle and the drive to stay ahead that drove so much of the Academy’s psychology.  Now we were, in our little skirmish here, a reversal of the dynamic the Academies had imposed.

Warren’s eyes stared as he approached.  He didn’t run, but he took long strides.  He was slower than us, but he didn’t seem concerned with that.

Gordon gave me and Helen a hand.  Lillian went straight to Mary.

It had been a hard hit.  A solid wood piece of furniture had been dashed to pieces, and something that could do that could have broken something important in Mary.

“Warren!”  Jamie called out.  With Helen, Mary and I still recovering, and both Gordon and Lillian helping us, it seemed like he was on point.  “Your father wants you to know he’s sorry!”

The musclebound man slowed, then stopped.  He was halfway down the hallway, hunched over.  His facial features were very normal, but he held his head at an angle that cast his eyes in shadow, the flickering light outlining his massive frame.  As he looked at Jamie, he raised his head, and for an instant, there was less shadow.

“He knows what happened to you,” Jamie said.  “It nearly killed your mother, hearing.”

The man that was facing us down reacted to that, hunching over more, recoiling from the words.  One fist clenched.

“Your father let things slide, with the farms.  He almost gave up, almost sold the farm.  Almost.  Your neighbors stepped in.  The Crowleys, the Behrs.  They’re rotating out, their adult kids have been volunteering, spending time with your dad, looking after things.”

Jamie was lying through his teeth, of course.  We’d stopped by, but the parents hadn’t talked to us, and they hadn’t been getting help, but they hadn’t been in dire shape either.  Not happy, for sure, but not dire.  They were a tough lot, and that unfortunately extended to Warren too.  Probably.

Lillian said something I didn’t hear, and Gordon helped haul Mary to her feet.  Every single inch of Mary conveyed agony on some level, with some blood here and there, the tension of her muscles, the look on her face, the tears in her eyes.  She also looked angry, and I had to chalk that up to anger at herself more than anything else.

“Frances Behrs was there when we stopped in to ask about you, gathering information so we could track you all down.  You were friends back when you were our age, right?”

The question got a slow nod in response.

Was Warren there mute?

There was a pause, and I saw Jamie look my way.  A glance, a check, and it wasn’t intended to see how hurt I might have been as it was something else.

My turn, then?

I drew in a deep breath, and I let go of my wrist, which was throbbing.  Holding hands in front, folding arms, and crossed legs were all signs of defensiveness.  The signals were subtle, but even the most untrained eye would read something into it.  Holding my wrist would do so twice over because I’d be subtly reminding him of pain.

“I know that it feels like going back is impossible.  Everything is different, and you’ve changed, in mind, body, and personality.  There’s a lot there you clearly wouldn’t want to take back home.  But your family survived this much, and they want you back, more than you know.”

“The door is open, Warren,” Jamie said.  “You can go back.”

I felt a hand touch my back.

A signal.  Were Gordon and Mary good to go?

“You should go back.”

Warren turned, then stepped to one side, revealing Fray, who was a short distance behind him.  She’d approached with his body blocking our view of her.

We backed away a little, and Warren and the woman advanced to match the distance.

“Cover your mouths,” Lillian whispered.  In case of more gas.

Fray spoke, “If I had to weigh in and say what was best for you, Warren, I’d say you should go.  Keep them out of my hair for two hours, we can consider your part of our bargain done.  Get a new body, see your family, piece your life back together.”

She was doing it again.  Denying me the footholds I needed to get a leg up on her.  How was I supposed to fight her manipulations when she was agreeing with me?

Warren’s head bowed.  The shadows covered his eyes, leaving only the blue reflections of the irises themselves.  I could read it all, the body language, the hunched shoulders, the tension that seemed to settle in him.

“You’re not going to, are you?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Can’t help someone until they want to be helped,” Fray said.  “For now, I’ll give you the support you need, Warren…”

Warren reached out without looking, and he slammed his hand into the door nearest him.  He didn’t blink as splinters flew out to decorate his custom-made outfit.

He tore out a section of the door.  An improvised weapon.

“…Even if what he needs is a good target to spend his anger on,” Fray said, quietly.

“You’re a better person than that, Warren,” Jamie said.  “Kids?”

Fray said.  “As far as I understand it, and he’s a hard man to read, when he doesn’t speak, but this is my read on it… he sees you as symbols of the Academy, and Academy science, which is where the fault lies for what happened to him.”

Warren nodded.

“And you pretend you’re not good at being manipulative,” I said.  “Pushing him to go with us, knowing that the push would make him resist, push back, back into your fold.  Then you speak for him, you interpret things, and shape his thoughts in the process.”

“I’m not trying to manipulate him at all, Sylvester,” Fray said, still quiet.

I didn’t say or do anything in response to that.  There wasn’t much that I could do, in terms of options.  I’d been planting the seed for Warren’s benefit, but nothing suggested it had even gotten through to him.  The truth of the matter was, I believed her.  If she was manipulating him, it was by accident.

I studied her, watching.  She was oddly juxtaposed with the massive brute of a man, a young woman in a sweater and skirt, with high boots, relatively soft spoken, but sharp in dress, with the crimson lipstick and hair most likely styled by Lady Claire’s best.  He, by contrast, was loud in his silence, his body language and the threat of another flung weapon capturing my attention, dragging it away from anything else I might look at.

By the simple act of breathing, he made me watch him.

The antithesis of what the Lambs were.  We were a group, a network, and he was utterly alone.  We were brains, and he was brawn.

But, when I looked into those eyes and saw them watching, when I considered that he’d effectively taken Mary out of the fight with his first maneuver, I couldn’t think of him as brainless.  Not like Sub Rosa.

They advanced, we retreated.

“You portray yourself as nice, gentle.  You truly care about everyone you meet,” I said.

“I do.  I grow attached too easily.  The barriers got worn away by my Wyvern doses, along with my long-term recall.”

“But you’re going to make him hurt us?  So he can have the release he needs?”

“I’m going to let him hurt you because I don’t believe there’s anything else I can say or do that’s going to slow you down or make you stop chasing us, and you’ve clearly reached the point where you can catch up with us.”

Warren advanced a step.  Not because he was matching the speed of our slow retreat, but because he was closing the distance.

Gordon’s hand on my back moved, he grabbed my arm, and he jerked me to the side.  A knife flew through the space my head had been, sailing through the air, and passed within a foot of Warren’s head.  Ms. Fray stepped away from the projectile, though it was already pretty clearly going to miss.

“Ah,” Fray said.

Warren started forward, moving faster, and we ran.

Turning around, I had a view of the group.  Mary was hurt, and was relying on Gordon for support.  Something had stabbed through her sweater, and she was bleeding.  Again, we were faster than him.  Even Jamie.  Would have been why Fray used the stitched girl to bait us instead of Warren, now that I thought on it.

But, much as he’d done before, he made up for the lack of speed with his raw natural ability.  He hurled the piece of door he’d collected.  Gordon and I were watching, and the rest of the group was ready.  The section of door hit the ground in the middle of our group, bounced, and clipped Gordon, who nearly dropped Mary.  I put myself under her for support, my arms around her stomach, and my wrist seized up in pain as I put too much pressure on it.

Gordon recovered, I pulled away, watching over my shoulder.

No, correction, it wasn’t that he was slower than us.  It just took him time to build up steam.  He was matching our speed, finding a comfortable running pace.  The lights flickered, as they were wont to do, and there was a brief moment where only his eyes were visible.

He could see in the dark, I suspected.

“Have to slow him down,” I said.  “Mary-”

“Can’t throw.”

“Give me your knives,” I said.

She shot me a look, one that should have been reserved only for the worst class of people, like baby murderers or puppy-kickers.

There was a crashing sound behind us as Warren collected something else to throw.

“Give!” I said, more intently.

She reached under her shirt to her stomach and drew her hand away with three knives.

Extra knives in left hand, knife to be thrown in my right.  Sucked, when I was a leftie, but I’d twisted it or sprained it, but I had to make do.

I spun around and hurled the first knife, hard as I could.  The whole of my attention was on the movement, remembering what I was doing.  Focus, track, visualize… throw.

The knife chipped off the ceiling above Warren’s head.

I took a second to run and catch back up with the others, while doing my best to figure out what I’d done wrong.  Later point of release, then.

I turned around, saw Warren holding a section of door in both hands, ready to hurl it horizontally, and shouted a warning, “Down!”

The rest of the group ducked, some stumbling, while Gordon shielded Mary with his body.  I threw myself to the side as the spinning section of door flew past us, then went through the motions, throwing with a later point of release.

He raised his hand to ward off his face, but the knife sailed harmlessly past him, a few feet to the left.

With me stopping outright to throw and the rest of the group stumbling, he covered a lot of the distance between us.  I could see everything that was liable to unfold, whether we ran or whether we stayed and fought, and nothing looked good.

“Should have given the knives to Jamie,” Mary said, a few feet behind me, speaking under her breath.  “At least he might have hit something.”

“Resent that!” I said, my voice tense.

“Ditto!” Jamie said.

I passed the third knife to my good hand and took a fraction of a second to remind myself of what I’d done wrong.  The movements were fresh in my muscle memory and mind both.

If you miss, he’s going to hurt my friends.  Make it count, Sy.

I hurled the knife.

It sailed past him at eye level, a few feet to the right.

A knife slashed past Warren’s face, close to the eye, and he stumbled.

I looked, and saw Gordon.  He’d let Mary drop to the floor of the corridor, and was taking the knives she offered as fast as she could retrieve them.

Gordon’s second knife flew past Warren’s head.  Warren raised a hand to protect his face, palm outward, and Gordon seized advantage.  Two throws, one knife sinking into each palm.  Not that they were small targets.  Someone could have taken the torsos of any two lambs and stuck them together and the weight and general dimensions would have matched one of those mittens.

Two more knives.  One miss.  Another into the webbing between two fingers.  They were all sinking as deep as the hilts, when they hit.

Warren was advancing, Gordon took more weapons, and hurled them.  One knife bounced off, flying through a gap between Warren’s reaching hands and striking handle-first, the next slashed a thumb and went flying off to clatter to the floor, and the third sank into one of Warren’s palms, again.

Warren didn’t stop.  He drew closer, and we weren’t in a position to run, with Mary on the ground and Lillian leaning over her bag, with contents strewn all over the floor.

He’s protective of his head.  It’s the last part of him that’s still intact.

Mary had another two knives, but as Gordon reached for one, Lillian lunged forward, knocking Mary’s hand away, pushing a bottle into place.

“Head!” I shouted, as Gordon moved to throw.

The man’s hands were a wall in front of his face, and he wasn’t letting anything slip through.

Instead, Gordon tossed the bottle into the air, slightly forward, so it would hit the ground in front of him, snatched a knife from Mary’s hand, and then lunged forward, a full-body hurl of the knife, aimed for Warren’s groin.  It hit with the blunt side, but it was still a hard throw.

Warren, it seemed, didn’t have a particular vulnerability to strikes between the legs.  That said, no man alive wouldn’t instinctually flinch in response to that.

Gordon reached behind his back and past his shoulder, catching the bottle so it was behind him, then completed a throwing motion without ever having to stop and draw his arm back.

The bottle smashed against Warren’s face.  The man stumbled, hands pawing at his face, and then dropped to his knees.

“Won’t last long,” Lillian said.

Which was all the indicator we needed.

We turned, working together to pick up and support Mary, and then we ran, leaving Warren to paw at a door, his knife-embedded palms and fingers limiting his ability to grip.

“I would’ve hit him,” I said, a little bitter that my moment of glory had been stolen.

“We don’t have a week for you to learn, Sy,” Gordon said.

“Three more throws, I could have done it,” I said.

“If you’d taken three more throws, we would’ve been creamed,” Gordon said.

I didn’t have a response to that.

Glancing back, I saw past Warren, to the end of the hallway, where Fray stood.  She didn’t chase.  She didn’t give any sign of being alarmed, concerned, or bothered.  She simply stood there.

She had told us that she’d already completed her plan.  She was embellishing it, or extending its reach.  Seeing this, how she’d treated this as a whole, I believed her.

I believed that, barring exceptional circumstance, we wouldn’t catch her like this again.  She had a hostage, with Lady Claire, and she wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

We’d lost.  We’d reached too far, too fast, we’d been caught off guard by the sudden appearance of the stitched girl, and everything else had flowed from there.  We were fighting blind, because we didn’t know what our enemy was doing.

We needed a win, on so many levels, in so many ways.

I switched mental gears, away from Fray, away from Warren.

We carried on to the end of the hall, and we reached the stairs.  A number of students were gathered around the distressed stitched girl, who was still tied to the railing.

“You!” she said, with much the same inflection she’d used when she had recognized us earlier.

“Hi,” I said, panting for breath.

“Escaped experiments on the loose,” Gordon addressed the gathered students, panting less.  “Students hurt.  Get clear!”

I saw a flash of expectation or excitement in the eyes of the young women who had gathered around Wendy.  Competition removed, more seats free, and maybe a little something beyond that.  Had Dame Cicely’s bred some sadistic streaks into the student body?  Were they that gleeful over someone getting punished, or the spectacle that might surround such?

But they did scatter.

In the midst of our running, I’d pulled ahead to the front of the group, my attention forward, on what came next, the plan.  Now, as we reached the top of the stairwell, I slowed, and the others made noises of distress and annoyance.

“Wendy,” I said.

“You,” she said, in that same inflection as before.

“Yes,” I said.  “Us.  We’re going to cut you loose in just a second, okay?”

“Okay,” she said.  Then she added, “The tea is cold.”

“What are you doing, Sy?” Gordon asked.

“Talking to Wendy.”

“Warren is comi-”

“Warren is the reason I’m talking to Wendy,” I said.

Wendy frowned at me.

“You told us you were supposed to help Warren,” I said.

“Madam Howell told me to,” she said.

I glanced back at Jamie.  He looked as surprised as I was.  We hadn’t actually had all the information there.

“That’s your job?” I asked.

“That’s my job.”

“Okay,” I said.

I reached out to Mary, and she gave me another look, but she handed me a knife.

I cut the string that bound Wendy to the railing.

“Thank you,” she said, very prim, “And you’re mean.  All of you.  You’re terrible.  Excuse me for saying so.”

“We’re very terrible,” I admitted.

“Sy,” Lillian said, “I hear footsteps.  He’s coming.”

“I know, it’s fine,” I said.

“Me, hurt.  I’m not fine,” Mary said.  “I think something snapped.”

“Lillian will fix you,” I said.  “Right now, our concern is Warren.”

That was all it took to get Wendy’s attention.

“Wendy,” I said, patiently, speaking very clearly.  “I’m sorry we left you tied up here.”

She stared at me, concern still clear on her face.

“But we did it for your safety.  Kind of.  People ended up getting hurt.  There was fighting.  Mary got hurt, and Warren did too.”

“Oh no.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“He’s going to be okay.  Because Miss Genevieve did such good work, didn’t she?”

“She fixed me up so nicely!  Some of the big scratches, they’re gone now!”

“We were talking about how good her work on you was.  And she gave Warren a body, didn’t she?”

Wendy nodded.

“Sylvester,” Mary said.  Her use of my full name was telling.  The pain in her voice said a lot, too.

I could hear the running footsteps.  Our pursuer wasn’t far, and he was most definitely coming after us.

I addressed Wendy, “I have something to ask you, and I want you to think very long and hard about this, okay?”

“Maybe not so long?” Gordon suggested, putting one hand on my arm.  I shrugged free.

I glanced at Gordon.  Jamie was standing behind him, and Jamie was keeping his mouth shut.  He looked spooked, but he wasn’t reminding me of stuff I already knew.

I had his trust, at least.

“Alright,” Wendy said, looking like she was prepared to give the next bout of thinking her full, concerted effort.

“Is Warren happy?”

“Happy?”

“Does he smile, does he laugh?  Is this… is this life good for him?”

Wendy’s expression faltered.

Warren was so close, now.

“We go, now,” Gordon ordered, grabbing me.

“You go, I stay,” I said.  “This is important.”

“You being with us is important!”

I looked to Mary for support, but her head hung, she was having trouble breathing, and blood was soaking through her clothes, running down her skirt.  She wasn’t with us.

Lillian was too scared.  Helen was Helen.

I looked to Jamie.

“I’m staying too,” he said.

That’s not necessary, I thought, but I couldn’t argue, because he was backing me up.

“Damn both of you,” Gordon said.  “Mary, give me some knives.”

“No!” I said.  “No.  Just… take Mary, get a bit of a head start, head for the room.  Jamie, you should go too, you’re not a fast runner.  Leave me here.  With Wendy.  We’ll manage.”

Gordon stared at me.

“Please,” I said.

He turned to go.

I looked at Wendy, and I reached up, taking the tray, before putting it on the ground.  She looked flustered at that, but visibly calmed down as I took her hand.

“What’s going on?” she asked, her voice small.

“We wait for Warren.  Just a few more seconds,” I said.

I would have been lying if I said my mouth wasn’t as dry as a bone, adrenalin thrumming through my veins.

Warren caught up, reaching the bottom of the stairs.  He’d pulled the weapons free of his palms, and blood had been smeared from the wounds onto his clothes.  He saw Wendy and I and he stopped.

“Is he happy?” I asked.

“He’s unhappy because of you.”

“Is he really?” I asked.  “If I was gone, if you held me here and let him take me, would he be the same happy boy Mrs. Howell asked you to protect?”

“He wasn’t very happy then either,” she said.  “At the start, maybe.”

I knew Warren could hear us.  He didn’t move, just staring.  His reaction was more like I had a knife to the stitched woman’s throat, holding her hostage.

“I wasn’t dressed, then,” she remarked.

I shot her a look, then shook my head, “Do you think he would become as happy as he was at the start, if you gave me to him?”

“I don’t think,” she said, softly.  “I’m not very good at it.  I do what I’m told.”

“You were told to protect him.  Maybe that means protecting him from himself.”

“Complicated,” she said.  It was a negation, a stubborn refusal to understand.

“If he walks up here and hurts me, hurts my friends, I don’t think he’ll ever be happy again.  It’s crossing a line, and he may never come back.”

“Complicated,” she said, again, her voice tight.

“He’s not the sort of man that hurts children, is he?” I asked.

She shook her head.  “He’s nice.”

“You can’t let him become someone mean, right?  Mrs. Howell wouldn’t want that.”

“No,” she said, “She wouldn’t.”

He cares about you.  I can see it, looking at him.  So long as you’re around, he’s just a little more human.  He can’t cross the line and maim or kill if you’re here, watching.

“All you have to do to protect him from that, is come with us,” I said.

Something tells me he won’t leave you behind.  He’ll make Fray stay close, or she’ll have to abandon him.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

Warren started, taking a step up the stairs.

“This is the best thing for him and for you,” I said, and I actually meant it.  “Come.  Let’s run.”

I tugged on her arm, and she didn’t move.  I did it again, with no luck.

On the third tug, something seemed to fall into place.  She connected, or she pulled it together.

We ran, and Warren chased.

But at the top of the stairs, he stopped.

The shout at our backs was ragged and loud.

“Wendy!”

Stitch in Time – 4.10

Warren didn’t give chase.  Wendy and I made our way to the room with the coats.  The room’s resident and her monster were still unconscious, but the others were already outside, standing a few feet away from the open window, a vantage point where they could see within.  The snow was falling all around them, it was dark, and the little light around the place cast long shadows.

There wasn’t any commentary as I reached under the bed, grabbed my jacket, scarf, cap, and gloves, and pulled everything on.

I glanced at Wendy, who looked like a ghost in more ways than one.  Fine, pale hair, a haunted expression on her face.  She wore a calf-length dress that was crisp and tidy enough it was almost a uniform, complete with a smock, and her hair was tied back.  I could see subtle differences in the color and texture of it, suggesting that hair had been transplanted – a stitched’s hair didn’t tend to grow, or it fell out faster than it grew in, and it was telling that she’d been looked after in that regard.

“You need a coat,” I told her.

“I don’t,” she said.  “I’m always hot, I-”

“You need a coat,” I said.  “You’re always hot because it keeps you healthy.  If you’re out in the cold, your body will have to work harder to stay hot, and you might run out of energy too quickly.”

I walked past her, stepping past the monster on the floor to get to the wardrobe by the door.  I popped it open, then rifled through the hanging garments until I found something suitable, a long coat of black, lab-grown wool.  I handed it to Wendy, and watched as she put it on.  Her movements were stiff, and once or twice she paused, as if she had to remember or puzzle out the next sequence of movements to put her arms in the sleeves.  I stepped in to grab the jacket and help it over her shoulder.

“It’s big,” she said.  It was true.  Two of her could have fit in the jacket.

I grabbed a long scarf from the closet, then wound it around her waist, cinching the coat closer to her body.

“Come on,” I said.  I saw her look back, the doubt on her face, and grabbed her hand, pulling her along.  It was a strange inversion of adult and child, the child leading the adult by the hand, but in reality, she was the innocent.  She was the key to all of this, our last hope in figuring out how we were going to address the Fray situation.

“Through the window,” I said.

I gave her a hand in making her way down, and the others moved to the base of the window to help her down.  She was a little heavier than someone her size should have been, and her movements were stiff.  I’d interacted with stitched in general to know that sometimes patience was required.

She’s not so different from me.  We lose what we don’t hold on to.

Except it was poisons that had eroded my faculties, and it was death that had eroded hers.

I wondered if Fray had made the same connection.

“Here we go,” Helen said.  “That’s it.  Lower your left foot just a little bit.  That’s your right.  There.  Good job.”

Good work, Helen, I thought.  I’d brought her here, but I wasn’t necessarily the person to keep her, if that was even possible in the long run.  Wendy would feel more comfortable in Helen’s company than anything else.  Gordon was a possibility as well, and Lillian likely had as much passing experience with the stitched as any of us.

Once Wendy was down from the window, I climbed out onto the snow-dusted windowsill and pulled the window shut.  I dropped into the grass at the base of the window.

The evening was cooler, which contributed to the heavier snowfall, but it still wasn’t enough to cover the grass completely, nor to do more than layer the trees.  With the sky getting dark, the odd and unusual trees of Kensford took on a more haunting appearance, jagged black lightning bolts with highlights of white here and there.  The cottage-like dormitory houses were lighting up within, and they were small enough that each little window of orange flame or flickering voltaic power had silhouettes moving within.  Young women were moving down the main streets in groups, accompanied by their monsters, but the sounds of conversation and footfalls didn’t reach us.

“I have questions, but it’s hard to ask them, given present company,” Mary said.  She was scuffed up, but Lillian had applied bandages and applied a shot of something.

Wendy was looking around, oblivious.  She seemed anxious, but not out of any concern for her personal safety.  When Gordon took her hand, she wasn’t surprised or spooked.  She took his hand and held it firm, not even questioning it.

Some stitched were made for battle.  Wendy wasn’t one of those stitched.  Someone could likely have come after her with a weapon and she wouldn’t have defended herself.  On much the same level, an enemy might be able to give her a hug without her even thinking of resisting.  There were vital parts of her psychology that were missing.

But Gordon being the one holding her hand helped.  He had always had an affinity for other experiments.  There were maybe four people who could communicate with Dog, despite Dog’s general inability to vocalize; Catcher was one, two scientists who maintained and looked after Dog were another couple, and Gordon was a fourth.

There were even some Whelps that he could pet without getting his hand bitten off, and the Academy doctors who worked on the Whelps weren’t even capable of doing that.

Gordon saw me looking at him and asked, “We aren’t being followed?”

“No,” I said, simply.  No use agitating Wendy.

“We can’t go back to the dormitory house with our stuff.  If Fray has any brains at all, she’ll send Warren that way.”

“It’s possible,” I said, but I wasn’t convinced.

“It’s possible, but you don’t sound confident,” he said.

“No,” I replied.

“Why?”

“It’s what you’d do in her shoes, but that’s not who she is.  She’s indirect.  She just revealed the big plan to us, she did it for a reason.  We got close, and if Warren doesn’t stop us, she wants us distracted, dealing with it.  It was always part of her strategy.  If we cornered her, she would distract us.  She doesn’t do the ‘direct attack’ thing.”

“She sent… you know who after us,” Jamie remarked.  “Twice.”

“Who?” Wendy asked, looking concerned.

“It’s okay,” Helen said, giving Wendy’s hand a squeeze.  “Can you hold my hands between yours?  They’re toasty.”

“Oh, okay,” Wendy said.  She looked happy to do it, and Helen’s smile brought out a smile on her face.

“The first time was indirect,” I told Gordon.  “She was trying to divert us, and it worked.  We had to deal with the medicine angle, we were distracted, led to chase her, and it gave her an opportunity to have a discussion with one of us.  This time…”

“This time?” Gordon asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “We caught her off guard.  This time, she didn’t expect us.”

“A cornered rat bites,” Mary commented, under her breath.

There were a few nods from the group at that.  Mary had been bitten as hard as any of us.

“I don’t like rats,” Wendy said.  “Not unless they’re the clean white ones in the labs.  Those can be cute.”

“Can’t they!?” Helen gushed.  “Did Miss Genevieve have any?”

“Any…?”

“Did she have white rats to help her in the lab?”

“Yes, she did.  I liked them.  There was one and it would crawl on my hand and I would pet it.  But I had to be gentle.”

“Of course,” Helen said.  “You’re so lucky, having hands as warm as yours.”

It was a silly, stupid compliment, but Wendy seemed to like it.

The rest of us were silent, watching and listening intently.

“She wasn’t mean to them, was she?” Helen asked.

Wendy shook her head.

“She didn’t give them medicine to make them sick or stick them with syringes?”

Wendy kept shaking her head.

“But she was paying a lot of attention to the rats?”

“No, not a lot.  But some.”

“Some?” Gordon asked.

“Some,” Wendy said, as if that was a complete idea.

“When you say some, do you mean it was once in a while, or were there other things she was more focused on?” Helen asked.

Wendy didn’t answer, raising her hand to her mouth, as if she were going to bite her nails, then pulled it away.  She looked between us, as if she was completely lost.

“You don’t understand, do you?” Gordon asked.

Wendy shook her head.

“It’s okay,” he said.  He reached out and put his hands around hers, which still held Helen’s.  “Do you remember what we were saying about the white rats?”

“We were talking about rats?” she asked.  I couldn’t tell if it was a question or if it was a statement she wasn’t entirely sure about.

She felt emotions, and the spectrum of emotions might well have been limited or more riddled with bumps and messiness, but that part of the brain was still intact.  She could think and reason and perform set tasks, but her faculties outside of the tasks she was meant to perform were hampered.  When it came to logic and interpretation, well, this very conversation had evidenced that a single stumble could take us back to square one.

No, I realized, looking at her.  A step back from square one.  She was anxious now, bothered.  She didn’t like being lost, and the combined efforts of Gordon and Helen weren’t enough to reassure her.

She was our sole source of information, but an interrogation couldn’t proceed like this.  We had to move slowly, carefully, and as gently as humanly possible, and we had to do it knowing that Fray was very possibly working on her next move.

“Let’s give her a few minutes,” Gordon said.

No!  I thought.

Then I reminded myself that his instincts were very often good ones, when it came to dealing with experiments.

“Okay,” I said.  “But let’s do something productive in the meantime.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking we need to slow our adversary down,” I said, keeping my voice quiet and calm for the benefit of our stitched guest, “She knows we have the means of figuring out what she’s doing.  She dropped hints.  She’s ready.  If there’s a catalyst she needs to enter into the dynamic, or if there’s a switch that has to be pulled, a person that needs to be contacted, we need to get in the way of that.”

Talking in abstract terms and long words wasn’t helping matters.  Wendy looked more confused and alarmed than before.

Bring things back, Sy.  Connect it to something she understands.

“Our goal,” I said, talking more slowly, not looking directly at Wendy, even as I recapped things for her benefit, “Is to keep people safe.  We want to find Genevieve, we want to find and help Warren.”

I put emphasis on that last part, so the others could know just why Wendy was here.

“That’s doable,” Gordon said.

I saw a smile find its way to Wendy’s face.

“First instinct, each of you,” Gordon said.  “How can we accomplish this?”

“I go hunt,” Mary said.  “I can stay out of Warren’s way.  Maybe catch Fray off guard.”

Gordon and I exchanged glances.  I could see the doubt and concern.

A lack of trust.  Mary was hurt, and she wasn’t immune to making mistakes.

I gave him a nod.  We needed to do this, if only because Mary’s pride couldn’t take anything else.

“Okay,” he said.  “If in doubt, favor scouting over trying something.”

She nodded.

“Helen?”

“I’ll stay with Wendy.  We can go to the campfire, where you met the girls,” Helen said.  “We took the time to recruit them, we should use them.”

“Good.  I’ll either come with you or meet up with you shortly, we’ll have a good chat with Wendy.  Jamie?”

“Infrastructure.  The school.  They have to have measures in place in case of trouble.  Even if they aren’t obvious.  We just need to ask the head of Dame Cicely’s, or someone else in a position to know.  I know most of the faculty’s names-”

“From the book in the room,” I said.

“Yes.  I might be a little out of date, but I can get something in motion.  Soldiers, security measures, quarantine…”

“Too dangerous,” Gordon said.  “You’d have to go through the school, and you could run into Warren.”

“I was thinking we could knock on doors for the larger homes near the Academy,” Jamie said.  “Where the staff probably live.”

Gordon looked where Jamie was pointing.  The houses in that general direction weren’t taller, but they sprawled more, many had multiple trees on the property, and if memory served, they’d had more extensive gardens.

“Makes sense,” he said.  “Lillian, go with him.  You can fill in the gaps, you have the knowledge to know what the quarantine measures might involve.”

Lillian nodded.

“I’ll rally some of the people who we recruited before,” Gordon said.  “We can maneuver to limit her range of movement, now that we know where she is.  If there’s anything in the building that she can’t leave behind, then she’ll have to hang back-”

“No,” I cut Gordon off.  “It doesn’t work like that.  She said she already put it into motion.  It’s not something like that, and it can’t be something she needs to pack up, because she’s been moving too fast and too far.  She met Lady Claire and she made a connection, and then she moved in.  That’s a lot harder to do if you’re bringing a small lab with you.”

“You’re assuming she’s telling the truth,” Gordon said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Yeah, I am.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think she thinks lying would serve any purpose,” I said, simply.

Gordon frowned.  “You’re romanticizing her.”

“I’m figuring her out,” I said, a little testily.  “Genevieve Fray is putting up a front, one that she buys into, at least a little.  That she’s doing the right thing, that she’s being fair, and being nice.  Anyone that gets in her way is the bad guy.  If and when she runs into trouble or if the plans fall through, or if push comes to shove, she gets to feel justified because she played fair, she was honest, and the bad guys were the ones who crossed the line.  That idea is worth more than whatever ground she might gain by outright lying.”

“Uh huh,” Gordon said.

“Which doesn’t reveal much of anything about the person behind that front, who might not be a good person at all, and who would feel no need to pretend,” I added, as an afterthought.  “But the Genevieve Fray I’ve talked to puts a lot of stock in being straightforward.”

“Uh huh,” he said, again.  “We need to talk, later.”

“Sure,” I said.

“For now, we go with your instincts.  We assume she isn’t lying.”

I nodded.

“Everyone knows where they’re going, then?” Gordon asked.  “We meet at the fire where the failed students hang out.  Mary, keep an eye on Jamie and Lillian.  I know it’ll be hard as you get further away, but do what you can to keep an eye on each other.”

Mary nodded.

It was good.  Telling Mary that in a way that let Lillian and Jamie know that the inverse was also true.  Keep an eye on Mary.

“Let’s move.  Close the net, let’s help Warren, best as we can,” Gordon said, echoing me, though the look in his eye was telling.

Fray is going to make a move, I thought.  I doubted we could stop it.  She was the iron fist in the velvet glove, gentleness and passivity on the surface, but force and determination lurking within.  The moment we had an edge, well, most fists came in pairs, and there was no velvet where Warren was concerned.

I looked at Wendy, and I could imagine Warren as the inverse of Fray.  He wasn’t lost or completely given over to his monstrous, brutish nature.  There was something gentle at the core.  Velvet was the wrong word for it, though.

We broke away from the other group, entering the edges of the woods that encircled the upper half of Kensford and Dame Cicely’s.

This was a route that Jamie would have been better equipped to navigate.  Without much light to go by and with very few landmarks, we were largely in the dark.

But the campfire was a place where the fire was almost perpetually burning.  These weren’t students who slept.  They were people without futures, or people who thought they lacked futures, and people like that didn’t sleep easy.  Even if death was metaphorical, a loss of all choice and greater hope, one didn’t want to squander their remaining days or months sleeping.

‘Ronnie’ was there, sitting by the fire, with a few monsters and two young women, less than had been here before.  Her surgically modified face stared down into the flames.

“You’re here,” Gordon observed.

“I’m managing things,” she said.  “Telling people where to go, covering important spots.”

“We need you to manage things in another direction.  We found her,” Gordon said.

Ronnie sat up, but the look of surprise on her face wasn’t a look of pleasant surprise.  She looked upset, offended.

“We’re not going to take this chance from you,” I said, quiet.

“You’re creepy little ones, eh?” Ronnie asked, in her odd accent, before settling back down.  “Stepping out of the shadows, talking about big things, like you know me somehow.”

You’re easy to read.  Everyone, deep down inside, they want something, they fear something, they feel hungers.  The amounts and the flavors of these things vary, but you wear it on your face.

“We don’t have time to dally,” Gordon said.  “How fast can you get the others to Dame Cicely’s?  She was in the basement labs, she’s leaving right this second.”

“She’s leaving.  Was she ever real?”

“Genevieve Fray was real,” I said.

“She was real,” Wendy echoed me.

Ronnie’s eyes narrowed.

“Do this, we put in a good word with people that count,” I said.  “Not for all of you, but for you, and the ones you care the most about.  I know you have some who are here just because, and you have some who are here, who truly belong, your allies.  Genuinely help us, succeed or fail, and I promise you you’ll get what you need.”

“Big promises,” she said.  She didn’t sound convinced.

“Your call,” Gordon said.

Ronnie frowned, then she looked at the girls sitting next to her, first one, then the other, talking under her breath.

They broke off into a run.  One hopped onto the back of the creature that had been slumbering behind her, hugging its back with her hood up and her head down by its shoulder as it darted off into the brush.  The other proceeded on foot, her pet lumbering behind her.

“Let’s go sit by the fire, honey,” Helen said.  “Warm you up.”

“I’m already warm.”

“We’ll make it easier to be warm,” Helen coaxed.

We gathered on the bench, while Ronnie remained where she was, watching intently.

I looked at the girl and raised a finger to my lips.  She didn’t give any indication that she’d seen.

“Genevieve was working on something, wasn’t she?” Gordon asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you know what she was working on?”

Wendy shook her head.

“What sort of things was she doing?” he asked.

“Things?”

“When she was in the lab.  Was there anything she focused on?  Things she paid more attention to?”

“I don’t- I don’t-”

“Okay,” Gordon hurried to say.  “Okay.  That’s fine.”

Too complicated.

She’d died.  Her old memories were gone, her faculties more limited.  Even if the brain was rescued promptly after death, death was death.  There was always some damage.

“Did she ever talk about viruses?” Helen asked.

Wendy shook her head.

“Bacteria?  Parasites?”

A pause, a frown, a few seconds thought.  Then, once again, a shake of the head.

I thought of something Fray had mentioned, then jumped in, “There are monsters in every town.  Did she talk about those?  About paying visits to anyone or anything in particular?”

The frown was deeper.  I saw the fidgeting.

I could have interrupted, before her thoughts worked themselves into a corner and something gave, but this one was important.  We had some basis in fact.  Much as I’d described to Gordon, Fray was obvious, she was direct.

“I want Warren,” Wendy said.

“I know,” Helen said, gentle.  She gave Wendy a pat on the shoulder.

“I want Warren,” Wendy said, monotone.

Repetition.  Regression.  I was getting anxious now, frustrated.  I understood, she wasn’t the first or the fifth or the fiftieth stitched I’d ever talked to, but we were facing a crunch, and now she was backsliding, falling back to safer mental processes and emotions.  We might not get anywhere at this rate.

“I know,” Helen murmured, again.  “I know, honey.”

“Look, Wendy, look at me.  Come on… there you go,” Gordon said.  He was pulling his jacket off, and then he rolled up his sleeve.  He extended his arm.  “I don’t know if you can see in the firelight, but-”

“Two colors,” Wendy said.  “My eyes aren’t very good, especially this eye, but you’re patchy.  Like me, a little.”

“I’m patchy, yeah,” Gordon said.  He offered a smile.  “You and I, we aren’t so different.  I’m kind of like a stitched.  Not really, but kind of.”

She nodded, paying rapt attention.  Her eyes didn’t leave his arm.  There were stretches that were slightly more tan than others.  Most of him, it wasn’t obvious, but on this part of the arm there was a length where a straight line marked the difference between two very different sorts of skin.  No scars, no stitches, just one kind of skin blending into the next.

“I really care about these guys.  Just like you care about Warren, okay?  I know exactly how you feel.  We’re similar like that, too.”

She nodded slowly.

“We had someone join our group, almost a year ago now.  Mary.  It was pretty obvious from the start that she fit in.  Not a perfect fit, but a good enough one.  She was different.  I don’t think you’re supposed to stay with us.  I don’t think you feel like you’re supposed to stay with us.”

Gordon made a point of looking over at me and Helen.  He was saying that to us as much as he was saying it to Wendy.

“I miss Warren,” Wendy said, again.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “You’re going to go back to him soon, alright?  We’re going to make that happen.  That’s where you belong.”

Wendy nodded, more vigorously this time.

“But we need to help him first,” Gordon said.  “We need your help to help him.”

Wendy nodded.

“What sort of things did Genevieve talk about, when she was working?”

“Chemicals,” Wendy said.  “I don’t remember the names.”

“Okay, what else?  What sort of things did she talk about when Lady Claire wasn’t around?”

“No,” Wendy said.

“Try again, Wendy.  What sort of things?”

“Lady Claire was always around.”

Gordon frowned.  “Okay.  Back to the beginning.  Things she talked about.  She talked about chemicals?”

“Yes.”

“What about ratios?”

“Sometimes?”

“Poisons?”

A head shake.  No.

No.  Lady Claire hadn’t been a true rebel.  She’d been surprised to find out what Fray was.

“Were they working on something to help people?” I asked.

The stitched girl snapped her head around to look at me, but didn’t give a response.

“A big project, something that would prove that Lady Claire deserved to continue being a student?”

“No?  Yes?  Sort of?”

“It’s okay,” Helen coaxed.  “Just say what you’re thinking.”

“I don’t- I’m not… not good at thinking.”

“Christ,” Ronnie said, under her breath, the accent slipping, “I haven’t seen many stitched like that one.”

I raised my finger to my mouth again, to remind the girl.

“She’s well made,” Helen said.

The frustration was getting to be too much.  I stood from my seat.  Fray knew we would zero in on what she was doing, the moment Warren conveyed that we’d gotten our hands on Wendy.  She’d put her plan into motion, to maximize the damage.

I paced a little.

Whatever it was, it was going to be disastrous.  Not a monster, not a plague, not a parasite…

“She said, she said that she was going to help the Academy,” Wendy said.

Helen, Gordon and I looked at Wendy.

“Help?” Gordon asked.

“That’s… that’s what she said.  It was a big job, and Lady Claire was going to get credit.”

“But you don’t know what?” Gordon asked.

A noise in the bushes startled us.  A group of girls had arrived through the woods.  Some held lanterns.  The lights danced unpredictably, the shadows swaying this way and that.

A dark night.  The wind was picking up.

“Carriage just past the woods,” one girl said.  “What do you need?”

“Dame Cicely’s,” Ronnie said.  “Surround the school.  If there are any doors you can knock on or anyone you can pull from the lunch room, acquaintances, people you think might listen to you, do it.”

“Spread word,” I said.  “Let people know there’s someone dangerous inside, and tell them there’s reward money.”

“Big guy and a woman with crimson lipstick,” Gordon said.  “Search the woods beyond the school, and patrol the streets.  The big guy is hard to miss, and he’s lightly injured.”

“If you see a girl with ribbons in her hair, and it doesn’t look like she’s hiding, do what she says,” I added.

“Whatever they said,” Ronnie said.  “Go, and hurry.”

The girls turned and hurried back through the woods.

I hoped Jamie and Lillian were having more luck rallying help, or that Mary had an eye on Fray.

“You’re doing well,” Gordon reassured Wendy.  “You don’t know what it was that Genevieve and Lady Claire were going to do?  To help the Academy?”

Wendy shook her head.

It was so little.  Cryptic.

I thought of my earlier idea, of the monsters hidden within each small town in the periphery of the big ones.

Would she help the Academy by releasing one of the monsters?

Hard to justify, hard to explain.  Lady Claire wouldn’t buy into that so easily.

Something more benign, something that could fit into a lie.

“My head hurts,” Wendy said.  Her breath didn’t fog up in the cold, but there was a light haze rising from her body.

“Come here,” Helen said.  “Lie down.  Head down here, and get just a little way away from the fire.  I think you’re toasty enough.”

Wendy nodded, lying down with her head in Helen’s lap.

Was that all we were going to get out of her?  She still served as a hostage, in an abstract way.  It was amusing.  The Lambs, myself included, would put a human in the line of fire if we needed a hostage or if we needed to hurt someone to get a step closer in our goals.  It was somehow harder to do with someone or something like Wendy.

Not impossible.  Simply harder.

Better to use her as a negotiation chip, and a way to tether Fray.  Warren wouldn’t leave without Wendy, and Fray most likely wouldn’t leave without Warren.

“I don’t know,” I finally said.

“No,” Gordon agreed.

“No,” Helen said, softly, brushing at Wendy’s hair with her fingers.  Odd, that she was so gentle, but I had little doubt she’d be fastest to act if she needed to hurt Wendy to further our goals.

Well, going from gentle sweetness to murder at a moment’s notice was what she had been made for, in a way.

We sat in silence for a little while.

“We should go find the others,” Gordon said.  “Helen, you stay.  I doubt Fray is going to find you here, and we need to keep her stitched away from her.”

He was thinking along the same lines I was.

Helen nodded.

He and I stood, and we started on our way through the woods, back to the others.

“You wanted to talk about something,” I said.  “Me and Fray?”

“Are you thinking straight?” he asked.

“Do I ever?”

“You’re more capable of thinking straight than you let on, yeah,” he said.

We pushed our way through a thicket of branches between a set of trees.

“I want to beat her so badly,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.  “A part of me wonders, though.”

“Wonders?”

“If you’d let her go, so you could have the challenge.  If, should the situation come down to it, you’d just miss, or make a mistake.”

I nearly tripped over something hidden under leaves and snow.  I caught myself.

“No,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” I said.  “Maybe with Mauer, I might, but not Fray.”

“Why?  What’s the difference?”

“Why are you even asking?”

“Because I don’t get you, Sy,” he said, tense.  “I try, I can put my mind to it and I can see how you think, with the angles and weirdness, but seeing you in the midst of this, your thoughts are ranging too far afield, I can’t track them.  We were complaining about the way the team wasn’t holding together, but you’ve unhitched the horse from the wagon here.”

“The horse is still hitched to the wagon, Gordon,” I said.  “And I’m sort of pissed you’re implying different.”

“Nah,” he said.

“Nah?”

“I’ll take your word for it,” he said.

“That doesn’t sound like you believe me.”

“Sy, relax.”

“The hell?  How am I supposed to relax when you’re questioning me and coming after me and suggesting I’d help her before I helped you guys?”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do.”

“You’re being a dick.”

“I’m-” he started, then he stopped.  “Hold on.”

I bit my tongue.  We moved in near-silence for a minute, pushing through frosted vegetation in the dark, the occasional leaf or twig crunching underfoot.  We were close enough to see the lights.  The entire Academy was alight.

It wasn’t that late, all things told, but it was winter, we were a little ways up North, and the days were short.  People would be at dinner.

“Jamie and Mary didn’t get along, when I paired them up earlier, remember?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Helen and Lillian, they’re not much of a match either, you know?  Lillian’s a little scared to work on Helen, even, after Ibott blew up at her a few times.  But they don’t play off each other well, either.”

“They handled the Sub Rosa thing pretty well.”

“Pretty well,” Gordon admitted.  “But what I’m getting at, is you and I…  I like you, Sy, I admire you, but we’re pretty diametrically opposed in how we approach things.”

I nodded.  He could pick up something and be good at it from the outset.  I could focus on something and get very, very good at it, given time.  He was maturing fastest, he was most physically fit.  I was lagging behind to an alarming degree, and I couldn’t even fare that well against Jamie in a mock fight, anymore.  Jamie, of all people.

“That’s not a bad thing,” I said.  “Being different.”

“No.  No it isn’t.  We thrive in diversity.  I think that’s one of the Academy mottoes.  But that doesn’t mean there aren’t issues.”

“Fair,” I said.

“Tell me what you’re thinking, Sy,” he said.  “About Fray.  Because you seem to think you have a sense of her, and I’m not feeling it.  You’re making little mistakes, and that tells me you’re not as right as you think you are.”

I bristled at that.

“You can’t be a hundred percent right with her,” I said.  I thought for a second, trying to find the words with which to explain.  “She’s… she has no aggression, she doesn’t let aggression touch her.  If you hit her head on, she doesn’t fly back.  She just diffuses the impact, makes it wasted effort.  She shows something on the surface, but there’s a depth there she’s hiding.”

“You’ve got a look on your face,” Gordon said.  “Like you’re concentrating really hard.”

“I’m…” I said, but he wasn’t wrong.  I had all the thoughts and puzzle pieces in my head, the mystery that was Fray and what Fray was doing.  Wendy’s commentary was a big factor in making the connections.  Even behind the scenes, there hadn’t been an iron fist within the velvet glove.

I was feeling like I was on the cusp of something, just about ready to have the explanation fall off my tongue.

“She’s transparent,” I said.  “I keep coming back to water imagery.”

“Water.”

I nodded.

I thought of the sea monster within the river, that I had watched with Fray.  It had been sluggish, sick.

She had showed me, right from the outset.

The lab in the basement of Dame Cicely’s.  The water had been running beneath the school, fueling its projects.  She had access.

Water was the source of all life.

“She did something to the water supply,” I realized, aloud.  I pushed harder through the branches, now.

“What?  Hell, Sy, this school has the daughters of some of the Crown’s elite in attendance!”

“Something subtle, whatever it is, they’ve all already been dosed, damn it!” I said, almost running now, not caring about the branches that scraped me.  “And people are going to find out, because she’s going to inform them, and it’s going to be catastrophic!  We need to find the people in charge and we need to start running damage control right away!”

We reached the edge of the forest.  Wendy and Helen were safe in a hiding spot that Fray wasn’t likely to find.  Our eyes fell on a group of girls who were standing around the school, one of them was someone we’d seen at the fire.

“Tell the other girls.  They have to find the faculty, tell them to meet us out here, it’s an emergency,” I told them.  I passed the girl my badge.  “Show them this, they should understand.”

“You want to let the woman go?”

It was a good question.  We were playing directly into Fray’s hands, creating gaps in the perimeter.  Fray had known we would have to.

I couldn’t give the answer.  Doing it would prove Gordon right.  I looked to him to make the call, to decide.

Had I communicated well enough about Fray for him to understand this?

“If you have to,” he said.  “Prioritize warning people.”

Stitch in Time – 4.11

The faculty of Dame Cicely’s Academy had a cushy setup.  The furniture looked like masterwork, the chairs were all padded and upholstered in Academy-created leathers, and the walls were alternately large windows with draping curtains in fine fabric and large ostentatious pictures with ostentatious frames.  Blue and silver were common themes to the room, and even the covers for the fireplace at the back and the lamps on the walls were stained glass.

There were ten members of the faculty in attendance, and several stitched servants, not unlike Wendy in quality and class.  Two young women were standing by, and one was the one who I’d given my badge to, with orders to collect the faculty.

All of us were present, with the exception of Helen, who was with Wendy still.  Mary stood on my right, Jamie on my left.  Lillian and Gordon had the lead, here.  Gordon was doing okay, but the rest of us were breathing hard; Mary was hurt, and the rest of us were tired from running around, trying to coordinate.

Fray was gone, and Mary hadn’t been up to a prolonged chase.

“Is this a joke?” the headmaster asked.  He was an older man, and he’d altered his hair so it grew in white, which was the fashion in places.  When seemingly perpetual youth became too ordinary among the elderly of the elite, a calculated sort of aging had taken over.  Unfortunately, the white of his hair had come in more like skunk stripes than salt and peppering.  His suit jacket fit too closely at the waist and his slacks were too narrow.  What drew the eye, however, was the androgynous face with the calculating stare, forever looking down on the people around him.

“The water supply was tainted,” Gordon said.  “And it was done from within Dame Cicely’s walls.  We just sent someone to go run tests on it.  The person who committed the act is going to inform the public and shift the blame.  You have a disaster on your hands, this is your advance warning.”

“You’re children,” the headmaster said, at the same time a bald faculty member in a heavy coat asked, “You’re sure?”

The headmaster shot the bald man a stern look.

“Yes, we are,” Gordon said, “And yes, we’re sure.”

I appreciated that he hadn’t felt the need to double check with me.  I wondered if he’d been as confident as he had because he really trusted me, or if he thought he couldn’t show doubt to our audience in this situation.

“You saw the badge,” I said, stepping around Lillian to make myself more visible.  Being in the middle of the second row made me easy to overlook.

“I saw a badge, but I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean,” the headmaster said.  He held up the badge.  “Radham Academy.  Your problems are becoming our problems?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Gordon said.  “Your entire student body may have been drugged.  We don’t know what with.”

“Suggesting it could be a hoax.”

“It could be a death sentence,” I said. “For all of your students, and for Dame Cicely’s as an institution.  If you misstep here, then there’s no recovering from it.  Your career is over.  There are too many powerful people with daughters and nieces here.”

“If I claim an emergency at the word of children and find out it’s a hoax, I lose all reputation.”

“You were alerted about Genevieve Fray,” Gordon said.  “The notice should have gone out to every police station and Academy.”

“Yes,” the headmaster said.

“Are you saying you weren’t aware that Genevieve Fray was tutoring your daughter?  Using her as an accomplice in her plan?”

“I wasn’t aware,” the headmaster lied, staring at us.

That shook my confidence more than anything.  The brazenness of the way he said it, almost sarcastically, mocking us.  Declaring to us that he, on the most basic level, didn’t care at all whether we took him at his word.  His gaze was cool and controlled as he met my eyes.  He had no shame, no guilt, and no doubts.

He knows full well what Fray was doing.

“This is a waste of time,” I said, to Gordon.  “We’re better off focusing elsewhere.”

“Where?” he asked, murmuring.

“Finding Fray?  Getting ahead of things on the ground level.  If we can figure out how she’s going to communicate to the citizens of Kensford, or if we assume she’s going to reach out to the other cities she’s been to-”

“Phone?” Gordon asked.  “A city as big as Radham has maybe twenty, a city this size can’t have more than five.”

“It’s a good starting point,” I said.

“What about birds?” Lillian asked.  “No matter how fast we travel, we can’t-”

“Children,” the headmaster said.

We fell silent, looking at the dandy of a man.  I eyed the badge he still held.

“You invited us here, you brought up a threat with no proof or details of what the threat specifically entails, it’s strange.”

“With all due respect,” Gordon said.  “The entire situation-”

“I’m due more respect than that,” the headmaster said, cutting Gordon off.  He strode forward, until he was close enough to Gordon that Gordon had to strain to look up.  “My students call me sir.”

“Sir-” Gordon said.  He was cut off before he got any further.

“I was talking, as a matter of fact,” the headmaster said.  “About the oddity of all of this.”

He’s stalling.  He knows Fray, he knows the plan.

Why?  What’s he doing?

“When I teach my students, I try to instill them with a certain mindset.  Wherever they go, whoever they deal with, they can benefit from what Dame Cicely’s Academy can teach them.  That, much as in the rule of the species, we are in constant competition-”

War?  Was he trying to defeat an opponent, or defend himself?

“-and we wage this competition on all levels.  For partners, for status, for reputation, for wealth-”

Commerce?  Was there a hidden profit in this?

“-and for more abstract things.”

Ideology?  Was he trying to prove something?

“Radham may be an Academy, it may serve the same Crown we do, but when the Crown’s book-keepers sit down and figure out who is contributing the most, well, let’s just say that Radham might well see something to gain in coming here to sabotage us on a small level.  Nothing too dramatic, because that could be considered treasonous, but an embarrassment?  Oh, imagine that.”

Politics.

It was politics.  I’d gotten through to Lady Claire by raising the topic, and Lady Claire was this man’s niece.  He was angling for something, with the idea of raising Kensford up and bringing others down.

The irony of his words.  He knew, and he was here, sabotaging us, by making us wait, keeping us from working against the problem.  He was the one aligning for political gain in the grand scheme of things.

He’d worked with Fray to do it.

I had a very clear mental image of this man, Fray, Warren, and Lady Claire all sitting at the table, having a conversation, about what the future held.

Was Lady Claire the pawn in it all?

“We should go,” Mary said.

“Maybe I wasn’t clear enough, I’ll try to explain at a level more appropriate to your age,” the headmaster said, without a trace of irony.  “I’m suggesting that you’re spreading lies to hurt this school.  It would be a very bad idea if we simply let you leave.  We’d be giving you free reign to continue spreading those lies.”

“What if we’re right?” Gordon asked.  “What happens then?”

The man smiled, and he lied again, “I don’t think you’re right.”

I stopped paying attention to the man, and started paying attention to the faculty around the room.  Seven women and three men, and their collective attention was fixed on the headmaster, not on the strangers in the room who were supposedly spreading propaganda.

He had them in the palm of his hand.  If he told them to lie, they would lie.  If he told them this conversation never happened, then it would be our say-so against his, and he had clout.

A curious feeling, realizing just how busy Genevieve Fray had been.  Had she known him from the outset?  Had that been how she’d got her foot in the door, found the person she would tutor, with room and board?  Fray had a powerful ally in the headmaster, and I had little doubt she’d established others at different points along the line.

“We’re going,” Gordon said.  He turned around, and started toward the door.

“You’re not going anywhere,” the headmaster said.  He snapped his fingers, and stitched manservants headed in our direction.  The headmaster added a quick order.  “Keep the door closed.”

“Yeah, we’re not going anywhere,” I said, not budging.

I saw Gordon hesitate, and in that moment, the stitched closed the distance and pushed the doors closed, before standing in the way.  Gordon backed away and shot me a dirty look.

“He still has my badge,” I said, simply, pointing at the headmaster.

“One of these days, I’m going to leave you behind,” Gordon said.  “Let you face the consequences your own damn self.”

“You know they can make another?” Jamie asked.

“They could, but that one is mine.  It belongs to me, not him,” I said.

“Of course it does,” Jamie said.

“We could have walked out,” Gordon muttered, as he turned to face the headmaster once again.

“No we couldn’t,” I murmured under my breath.  “They would have given chase, and you and I are the only ones who can run fast enough to get away.”

Gordon made an annoyed sound, but he didn’t actively disagree.

He was probably thinking we could have put up a fight, and that it would have been worth the risk, given what was at stake.

“We have a space downstairs where we can hold them,” the headmaster said, “at least until a guardian or a representative from Radham comes to claim them.  If we-”

“Can we drop the charade?” I asked, cutting him off.

It was rude, and it was intentionally rude.  We were dealing with a man who had power and was used to power, he commanded the respect of everyone in Kensford and the surrounding area, probably, and he considered himself invulnerable.  Cutting a man like him off would get attention, and if I was lucky, I might be able to provoke a reaction.

He didn’t flinch.  The man raised his eyebrows.  “Charade?”

“Guess not,” I said.  “Then you keep pretending, and I’m going to stand here and talk and look like a crazy person.  You’re going to let us go, you’re not going to kick up a fuss, and you’re going to let us run damage control.”

Gordon, Mary, Jamie, and Lillian half-turned, to watch me as I talked.  The headmaster had his allies, and he had more, but I had the Lambs.

“Is this where the threats to my life start?” he asked.

“I’m threatening your livelihood.  If you want to make this a contest between Radham and Dame Cicely’s Academy, then we’re content playing hardball.  Let me see if I’ve got this right.  Fray tells you that she’s got a plan.  She’s already laid the groundwork in other cities.  You facilitate her activities, you connect her to Claire, under the guise of Fray manipulating your niece, clearing your niece of blame, and Fray puts her plan into motion here.”

He had a good poker face.  It was somewhat infuriating.  I wanted to hurt him, if only to break the facade.  My frustration at having to let Fray go might have been coloring my perceptions.

“She told Lady Claire that she was going to help the Academy… and the only way that makes sense is if it’s the Academy’s plan.  The Academy’s formula or strategy or whatever else, and it’s not a thing that the common people are going to be happy with.  When the people rise up, Radham suffers, but your locals, they have money, or they have parents with money.  The problem gets fixed.  You come up looking like roses, and many of the other Academies struggle.  Your competitors struggle.”

He shifted position slightly, a faint rise of his chin, to look down on me more.

There were tells that were blatant, the folding of arms when a person felt attacked, and there were tells that stood out because a person who knew the art of body language and deception was trying so very hard to avoid giving a tell that they moved in the opposite direction.  This was the latter.

“Your mistake is thinking we’re going to blame Fray for this,” I said.  This time, I lied, and I was a far more committed liar than him.  “We’ve already put out word to various institutions to say that we don’t want anyone to raise an alert over Fray.  We’re keeping things on the down-low, because she almost certainly has some spies and moles in the Academy, tipping her off.  She’s a non-entity, and it’s easier to pretend she doesn’t exist than it is to spread word of her.  If this happens, Radham puts the blame squarely at your feet.”

“You’d let a fugitive get away with this hypothetical mass-poisoning, simply to make my life a little more inconvenient?” the headmaster asked.

“Damn straight,” I said.  Mary nodded, beside me.

Gordon nodded.  “She’s already slipped away, and this frankly fits her pattern.  I’d lay odds she wants you to take the hit.”

“I don’t believe you,” the man said.

Typical.  Person in power, so used to having his way, he can’t conceive of a world where things don’t go the way he wants them to.

I shook my head, “I don’t believe that a person can be in your position and not appreciate the human capacity for spite.  If we tell Radham that you did this at their expense, they’ll come after you.  You might be small with some real clout, but Radham is big.  They’ll destroy your reputation, and then they’ll come after your subordinates, and then they’ll come after your school, your legacy.”

“But if you want to try us,” Gordon said, folding his arms, “Arrest us.  Let’s wait this out.”

We stood there, waiting.

The man didn’t flinch, he didn’t show a sign of doubt.

I started to wonder if he’d physically altered his face or nerves to have better control over it all, to hide his tells and more precisely manage the face he presented to the world.

A full minute passed, and he didn’t give the order to arrest us.

I’d brought up his subordinates for a reason.  I knew he was aware of their gaze, their worries.  He had control over them, but he didn’t necessarily have their trust.  They would help him commit an atrocity, and cover up the fact that he’d worked with a terrorist to do it, but when push came to shove, they couldn’t trust him to genuinely care about them.

Or so I hoped.  More to the point, I hoped that he was insecure about whether they trusted him.

“Arresting you would be a hassle, honestly,” the man said.  “But I don’t want you here any longer.  I was kind enough to provide accommodations, with the idea that you would be passing through.  Please… pass through.”

He gestured, and the stitched at the door moved away.

Gordon hauled the doors open.  I remained where I was.

“My badge,” I said.

“Sy,” Gordon said.  “I swear, if you don’t get moving, I’m going to run you up a flagpole and leave you hanging.”

“The badge, headmaster,” I said.  When he didn’t make a sign of moving, I added, “We’ve established that spite isn’t any small thing.  Don’t make unnecessary enemies.  You’re a very short distance from being on everyone’s bad side.  Fray’s scapegoat, the person who let down your Academy, the person who sold out his niece, and Radham’s whipping boy.”

“You have what you want, free reign to leave.  Are you throwing it away to offend my pride?”

“The badge,” I said, not budging.

He tossed the badge at me, so it would fall just short.  I stepped forward and caught it, all the same.  I liked the weight of it in my hand, and took a second to flip it closed and slip it into a pocket.

We turned and left, striding through the school.  Mary leaned heavily on my shoulder, which wasn’t welcome, though it was understandable.

“You have an idea of what Fray is doing?” Jamie asked.

“Some,” I said.

“Do share,” Gordon said.  He sounded a little miffed.

“Like I said, it’s something Kensford can bounce back from, because Kensford has money.  It’s something that’s going to enrage people, and it’s going to hit places that aren’t Kensford hard.  It’s going to hurt, given Fray’s feelings toward the Academy, and at the end of the day, it was something the Academy was planning to do anyway.”

“What is it?” Gordon asked.

“Control,” I said, simply.  “It’s what any power wants, in the end.  Control of everything.”

There was no need to elaborate.  We all knew about the Academy’s methods of control.

“Where?” Gordon asked.  “Where does she go to spread the word?”

“The dining hall,” Lillian said.  “Everyone’s eating dinner.  Everyone’s talking as a group.”

It hadn’t been my first instinct, with so many people around, but Fray was a bird of a feather here, a needle in a haystack.

If it was the dining hall, then it might well be too late.

Our brisk walk became a run.  Jamie gave directions.  When our battered Mary proved too slow, then he took over, willingly lagging behind, while Gordon, Lillian and I headed to the room.

The hubub of conversation had a tone.  Quiet, subdued, and concerned.  Even horrified.

The girls were gathered in groups, one or two to a table, huddled, talking, their focus on pieces of paper, one or two papers to a group.

This was the heart of the city.  All things flowed to and from it.  The substance that had been put into the water, the people, and now information.

That information was as damning as anything else.

Gordon approached a group, and he took one of the pieces of paper.  He read some of it as he approached us, handing it over to share.  It had been printed in large numbers by way of a printing press.  Something Fray had seen to in a previous city, no doubt.

Control.  An attack on two fronts, both things the Academy had planned over the long term, no doubt things that had been intended to be slipped past the public’s notice when the time was right, when distractions were imminent, or an excuse available.

The papers described the process by which men and women who imbibed the chemical would be rendered sterile.

Control over reproduction and population.

The process would be reversible, but those were keys that the Academy held, to be provided on a case-by-case basis.

The other form of attack was one we were too familiar with.  We’d been subjected to it, once upon a time.  For most of the population, the effect would be minor – Fray hadn’t had the time to give them too heavy a dose, but some of the fat chains that made up the cell walls would be composed of the modified kind, found in the water.  Left alone, they would collapse, and cells would die.  Sensitive tissues of the brain, lungs, stomach and mucous membranes would the first to go.  Symptoms would progress through pain, full-body bruising, system failure, internal bleeding, fatigue and weakness, and eventually lead to an unpleasant, undignified death.

The symptoms would be staved off by continuing to drink the water, but continuing to drink the water would perpetuate the problem.

“I don’t understand,” Mary said.  “The Academy can’t fix it?”

“They can,” I said.  “They won’t.”

“It’s too much.  People aren’t going to take it lying down,” Mary said.  “The Academy has a way to stop it, to cure the effects, don’t they?  They just say Fray did it, and they put out a fix, and-”

“They won’t,” I said, again.

“You can’t say that for sure,” Mary said.

My eyes roved over the crowd.  The horror, the anger.  I could already see distinctions forming.  Different groups with different reactions.  Some were shocked, as anyone might be, but they weren’t scared.  People with money, raised to believe that any problem could be fixed.  Especially those of the human body.

But there were others.  People who didn’t have as much money, those who weren’t sure they were in a position to buy a solution to the problem, buy the ability to have children and a way to move freely.  A way to move freely that likely involved bottles of purple pills.  These members of Dame Cicely’s student body were closer to the population on the ground, the farmers and craftsmen, the wagon-drivers and grocers.  They were angrier, more frightened, louder.

She told us, I thought.  Fray teased us with the pills.  All along, it was her plan.

There was an undercurrent of disbelief, as if this were a joke in particularly bad taste.

That would change.  This was a school of students.  Those students would do tests, and they would verify this for themselves.  The reaction after that would be terrible to behold.

Things would be bad here, but Radham…

Subjecting the regular population to the chemical leash, not just the experiments?  Denying a small city’s residents the ability to have children without the permission of the Academy and the Crown?

“Did she do this in Radham?” I asked.

“Probably,” Jamie said.  “She would have done it everywhere.”

“That means we have to go back,” Gordon said.  “Soon.  This is too big, and there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to get back if we wait.”

The train drivers drank the water too.

The ramifications were too broad.  I clenched my fist.  It was true.  At any point in time, Fray could have simply told us, and we would have had no choice but to go back.

When none of us spoke, Gordon added, gently, “There’s nothing more we can do here.”

“You’re right,” Jamie said.  “Let’s go.”

We left the dining hall much as we’d entered, at a brisk pace.

There were things to take care of.  We needed Helen, of course, and then there was Wendy.

We stepped outdoors.  A whole crowd of students was heading toward the school.

They’d heard.  They were coming to read those same papers.

We headed in a different direction, before they could trample us.  One out of every four faces was haunted, they’d heard, they knew how the Academy operated, and they grasped the ramifications.

It would sink in with the rest soon.  They would contact their parents, and the rich and powerful who had sent their daughters to Dame Cicely’s would take issue.  The headmaster would pacify and massage his way back into good graces with promises of fixes or temporary solutions.

It wouldn’t be pretty, but he’d come out looking good.

“What was the guy’s name?” I asked.  “The headmaster?”

We crossed a road, and our heads collectively turned to look further down the street, where a number of people who most definitely weren’t students were gathered outside a church.  The shouts were audible, the anger apparent.

“He told you his name,” Jamie said.  “Headmaster Edmund Foss.”

“Don’t remember that,” I admitted.

The shouts rose in volume.

I looked, studying the crowd, but I didn’t see Reverend Mauer.  Churches were bastions of community, and in the midst of this growing crisis, they were becoming rallying points.  Not an idea exclusive to Mauer.

“Christ,” Gordon said.  “This is only just starting?”

“There’s going to be war,” Mary said.

War.

She was right.  Mauer had tapped into the public’s fears and resentment, but this was something else altogether.  The man would be having a field day, wherever he was.

War, the people against the Academy, with everything that entailed.  The weapons, the monsters, the crude attempts at handling the finer, more delicate matters.

How odd, now that I thought about it.  With the chemicals in the water, adjusted to affect everyone, we would have free reign.  The leash had been given a considerable amount of slack, and it was thanks to Fray.

Gordon slowed.  I spotted the reason why.

Further down the street, the giant of a man with incredible blue eyes.  Warren.

He didn’t charge, and he didn’t attack.

He was so close.  Did he know where Helen and Wendy were?

How odd, that he looked so calm, standing in the snow, as the rest of the city grew so heated and noisome.

“You want your stitched friend,” Gordon said.

Warren nodded, the blue eyes bobbing in the dark.

“We can negotiate,” Gordon said, and his smile was a grim one.

Again, Warren nodded.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Stitch in Time – 4.12

Just an hour or so ago, Fray had been giving the order for Warren to attack us, to kill or maim.  Now we were following Warren to where Fray was waiting.  A little upriver from where we’d had our first discussion, near the edge of Kensford, where it bordered the woods.

There was a crowd further down the street.  They were moving toward the Academy with purpose, and we could hear the shouts, though I couldn’t make out the words.

Fray looked genuinely surprised when we turned up.  More surprised than she’d been when we’d turned up near her lab.  She raised one hand to move her hair away from her face, as the wind blew it forcefully in the most inconvenient direction.

It took her a second.  Something fell into place, and she nodded a little.  “You found them, Warren, and you brought them here, because of Wendy.”

Warren nodded.

“If you don’t catch a train soon, you’re going to be stuck here,” Fray informed us.

“Now you’re being manipulative,” I said, walking up with my hands in my coat pockets.  I separated from the group and found a tree with a short stone wall built around it to contain the dirt, taking a seat on the corner of the wall, one foot propped up, the other on the ground.  “Setting a time limit?  That’s number one in the manipulation textbook.”

She shook her head.  “What is it they say about a thief being wariest of theft?”

“I never liked that saying.  Thieves deal with thieves as a matter of course.  If I’m going to steal, I’m going to steal from a thief who can’t go to authorities to complain.  It stands to reason that a thief is well justified in being wary.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“I get the point.  I’m a manipulator dealing with manipulators.  And a manipulator is particularly vulnerable to the predations of their cannier counterparts.  But okay, if you want to pretend you’re not setting an artificial time limit to put pressure on us and position yourself better for getting Wendy back, I can play along.”

The other Lambs were taking my lead, spreading out, very casually.  This encounter with Fray was very different from the last one, and very different from my first encounter with her.  We’d lost.  She’d dropped her bombshell, and now, oddly enough, we could relax.

The shouts and screams further down the street rose in volume.  People had torches, which was almost laughable.  It was so iconic for the angry mob, but now that I saw it, I wondered if they intended to set fires, or if they simply needed the light.  How did that even happen?  Did someone have a supply of torches on hand, or did one guy just pipe up and say ‘I know how to make torches!  Just give me a few minutes!’

“You’re smiling,” Fray spoke to me.

I raised my eyebrows, the smile disappearing.

“Do you have a plan, Sylvester?  A way to snare me?  One of you is missing.”

It was Gordon who replied.  “No plan to capture, no snare.  Whatever we did, you have Warren, and he could hurt or kill several of us in retaliation for whatever we did to you.  Not worth it.”

Fray nodded.  It was common sense, really – Warren wouldn’t have brought us if he thought it would hurt Fray.  It said something, though, that she’d asked, bringing things up to sound it out and gauge our reactions.  A hint of insecurity.

If I had to reason it out, I suspected we’d shocked her a little by appearing in the school and forcing her hand.  Forcing her to use Warren, and forcing her to put her plan into action.

“Are you satisfied?” Lillian asked.

“We’ll see,” Fray said, leaning back against the railing that overlooked the river.  “I’m more interested in the long-term.”

“You’ve been at this since you left the detainment center with Warren and Wendy,” I said.

She smiled.  “Have I?”

Gordon spoke, saying, “It’s done.  You won, you don’t have to be coy.”

“I can’t just outright tell you the particulars.  I could lie, but I don’t like doing that.  We’ll both see how far the ripples extend in the coming weeks and months.”

“War,” Mary said, quiet.  “There has to be.”

“I think so,” Fray agreed.  “The Academy crossed lines.  I wanted to change it from within, that didn’t work, so I’m going to force a change from the outside.  War is one way.  Changing minds is another.  There are weak points in the economic backbone, there are weaknesses in the foundations of the Academy’s work… that last one might be a weakness I’m not clever enough to exploit, I have to admit.”

“And you tell us all this with the idea that we’re going to go back and tell Radham Academy what you said, down to the word,” Jamie said.

“I expect you will, Jamie,” Fray said.

“But you’re leaving out the next part.  You’re only getting started,” I said.  “Your real method of attack isn’t one of the ones you just described.  You want us to go and we tell Hayle or Briggs what you said-”

“You mean the duke, not Briggs,” Fray said.

I raised my eyebrows.  “Funny that you know that.”

“It’s not exactly a secret,” she said.

“Sure,” I said, smiling.  “You want us to go to Hayle or the duke, listing off all those different ways you could hurt the Academy, and when they’ve busied themselves frantically working to cover all the bases, you attack us from another angle.”

She shook her head, “Or I expect you’ll say that and I use one of the methods I just named.  The Academy is too big.  Something has to give.  You know full well that you each have expiration dates – Sy wasn’t surprised when I brought it up.  The Academies are an experiment of sorts too.  Just as they’ve done with you, they’re going to keep pushing until something breaks, and then they’ll change things, approach anew with learned lessons fresh in their minds.  I’m not saying this is a dragon that can be slain.  I am saying that it can be trained.  Even if we’re on opposite sides, you can’t disagree with me on that score.”

“Want to try us?” Mary asked.

Man, Mary was in a bad mood.

Odd, considering the fact that I felt fantastic.  I wasn’t happy, exactly, but I’d become caught up in Fray’s flow.  Stagnation was the worst thing, and change was something thrilling.

“You’re smiling again, Sylvester,” Genevieve Fray told me.  “My mental picture of you told me you’d be more upset.”

“Can’t cry over spilled milk,” I said.  “There are better things to occupy my thoughts with.”

“The forced sterilization and enslavement of tens or hundreds of thousands is spilled milk?” Lillian asked, quiet.

“Close enough,” I said.  “We went into this a step behind.  You had the files on us, Fray, you knew who you were dealing with.  You have moles on the inside who are feeding you information and telling you we’re coming.”

“Someone could read that as you being a sore loser, Sylvester,” Fray said.  “We eluded you, so there must be a mole?”

“I’m thinking you know entirely too much, and you know far too much that’s up to date, like about the Duke and the fact that Mary is a Lamb.”

“She was a Lamb in the spring, when I was introduced to your file.”

“A new Lamb, with no guarantee she would work out.  You didn’t know her full capabilities, but you weren’t surprised when she turned up or demonstrated her abilities.  Everything fits better if I assume you have someone in the Academy, passing on details.  An ex-classmate or teacher?  There are a lot of possibilities, especially for a would-be professor.”

“Have to make connections to make it up the ladder,” Gordon said.

“And you told me you took the Wyvern formula to build up your ability to play the political game.  You’re telling me you didn’t cover that base?  Come on,” I said.

Fray shrugged, smiling some.

“You had this decided long before we arrived,” I said, feeling very at ease.  “You had the information on us, and we didn’t have the information on you.”

“They would have showed you my file.”

“The file that doesn’t even mention that you were taking the Wyvern formula until it comes up in the your record of termination?” Jamie asked.  “Your files on us were better than our files on you.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” I said, “This was an introduction.  We’ve said our hellos, we’ve gotten to know each other, just a little bit, Fray, Warren and Wendy meeting the Lambs, and we’re going to meet again.”

“I hope it’s soon,” Fray said.  “The offer for conversation and tea stands.  So does the offer to leave the Academy.  We can work on the expiration dates, I can save Jamie-”

“Stop,” Gordon said, voice hard.  Jamie flinched – I wasn’t sure if it was because of Fray’s words or Gordon’s reaction.

“And I obviously have the means to free you from the chemical leash,” she finished, as if she hadn’t been interrupted.  “I feel like I have to ask again, with most of you present, in light of recent events.”

“Now that you’ve ‘won’,” Mary said.  “You’re offering us a spot on the winning side?”

“I wouldn’t phrase it like that, but yes.”

There was a long pause.  Warren shifted position uncomfortably.  The shouting further down the street was coming and going, but it wasn’t the same group – people were migrating en-masse, either to Dame Cicely’s or away from it.

Odd that people could be going in such different directions and be so similar in how they were thinking.

That thought in mind, I spoke up, simply to say, “I’ve already given you my answer.  No.”

“You’re a believer,” Fray said.  “I’m a skeptic.”

“Something like that,” I said.

“I can’t entice you by saying that my way is the harder road?” she asked, smiling.  “It’s more interesting.”

“Hearing you say that is pretty telling,” I said.  “I almost believe you now when you say that you’re not good at manipulating people.”

“Ah well.”

“I’m staying with the Academy,” Jamie said.

Fray nodded, accepting that, but she spoke, “Even knowing that you might never get another chance to leave?”

I saw Jamie tense at that.  Even with his winter clothes on, mittened hands holding his book, I could see the subtle change in body language.

Lillian looked anxious.  She kept looking back between Jamie and Genevieve Fray.

“That’s how it works, isn’t it?” she asked.  “Sooner or later, you can’t know for sure when, they’ll keep what you give them.”

I clenched my hands in my pockets.  This was more convincing than anything she had said to me, specifically.  This was Jamie.  She was completely and utterly right.

Jamie couldn’t be saved, not exactly, but instead of having another year or two with him, I could have six.  Or ten.

“If any of us leave, they take someone else and replace us.  Same idea, another child,” Jamie said, his voice soft.

Fray nodded.  She smiled a little.  “It’s so nice to finally meet you.  I hadn’t imagined you’d be the compassionate sort.  I thought you’d be more stiff.”

Jamie shook his head, but he didn’t say anything.

“Mary?” Fray asked.

“No.”

“No rationale, no points to debate?” Fray asked.

“No.  You disgust me, I don’t like you.  I don’t like standing here, being in your company.  I can’t imagine staying with you for a while on purpose, unless it’s to take you somewhere where they can put you down,” Mary said.

“Oh my.”

“I’m a Lamb,” Mary said.

Fray nodded.  “Gordon?  Lillian?”

Lillian was the one who answered.  “You have nothing to give me.”

“I could teach you.”

“So can they,” Lillian said.  Simple, firm.

“One-on-one, dedicated-” Fray started.  She stopped as she saw Lillian shaking her head.  “No?”

“I saw what you did with Lady Claire,” Lillian said.  “You have nothing to offer that I’d want to take.  I don’t think you even understand the ramifications of what you did.  People are going to die.  Lots of them, innocents.  People who drank this water and left the city?  Those who were just passing through?”

“People will get hurt,” Fray said.  “But the effects are diluted, they’ll have a few days.  The Academy will respond and get a stopgap measure into place.  Crateloads of pills or train cars of the fluids will go out in every direction.”

“People will die,” Lillian said.  “You said it yourself, there are no guarantees the trains will keep running.”

“The Academy can’t fix the problem.  A simple remedy for the effects of sterilization and the controlling agent would go against their very ethos.  They have to take control where it’s offered.  To survive this, they have to minimize the casualties.  I guarantee you, Lillian, the Academy will find a way to distribute a stopgap measure.  One that lets them keep this system of control in place, however much it hurts them to keep hold of the reins.”

Lillian shook her head.

I thought the debate between the two of them might have continued, but Gordon jumped in, and when he did, my heart skipped a beat.

I could read his body language.

“I talked to Sy about it earlier,” he said.

No, Gordon.

“I told him, if you made the offer to me, I’d accept.”

My heart leaped into my throat.

No.  I was not prepared to lose a Lamb like this.  Not so soon.

As Lillian had done earlier, I looked between Fray and Gordon, suddenly alarmed.

I saw the shock on Fray’s face, too, fleeting, before she masked it.  As Gordon was wont to do, he’d put her off balance.  He had a way of hitting where it hurt.

I saw the brief communication of ideas between them.  Him reading her body language, her reading his.

“That’s changed, I think,” Gordon finally said.  “The way you did this… it’s not a fight I’d want to participate in.  I don’t think I’d- when it comes to you, I don’t think-”

She found the words he was reaching for.  “You don’t think you’d have faith in me?”

“Not after this,” Gordon said, very simply.  I could hear the lie in the words.

“It goes both ways.  If only one Lamb joined me, I feel like it would have to be a double-cross,” she said.

“And it wouldn’t if all of us joined you?” Mary asked.

“If you were in a position to do that, it would be closer to an ambush than a double-cross,” Fray said.

She was distracting, turning the subject away from Gordon.  I could see him staring at her.

The two of them had communicated so much in mere moments.  He’d seen that she wasn’t ready.  Maybe she expected me to jump on board, or she had ideas on how to use Jamie.  Or maybe she had anticipated that when one domino toppled, the rest would, and the Lambs would join her wholesale.  If we were all on board, then we’d stay on board to stay together.  Our earlier discussion on the subject had suggested that we were a package deal, after all.

I couldn’t know for sure.  The interplay had been between them alone.

I wanted to say something, to joke, to step in between them.  I found my throat tight, the words didn’t come.

“Let’s talk about Wendy,” Fray said.

“Let’s,” Gordon said.  “I think we have a train to catch, so let’s not drag this out.”

I saw Warren shift position.

“You have something in mind?” Fray asked.  “I’m not going to turn myself in.”

“No,” Gordon said.  “I’ve been thinking about it, what we could do in the way of transactions, things you might agree to.  My first thought was that you should dismiss Warren.  Let the guy get some help.  He can have Wendy back, it’s clear they care about each other, he can heal.”

“And I’m left without my friend?” Fray asked us.

I found words, though I had to clear my throat to get them through.  “If you refuse, you might lose him anyway.”

Warren folded his arms, drawing attention to him.  He shook his head in a slow, dramatic fashion.

Or not.

“The second option, and this is one I think you could agree to, while keeping it meaningful,” Gordon said, “You take a time out.”

“A time out?”

“One year, you don’t pull anything else.  You don’t attack the Academies, you don’t perpetuate your plans, you don’t form allies, you don’t research for your next scheme.”

Fray frowned.  “That kind of adjustment was not in the cards.  It’s unreasonable.”

“Does Warren think so?” Mary asked.  She’d been watching the big guy.  I imagined she was thinking a lot about what she might be able to do if he picked a fight with us.

Warren didn’t budge.  He was frozen.  Not offering any tells was a tell in this case.

He didn’t see it as unreasonable.

“Three months,” Fray said.  “I don’t attack anyone or unleash anything.  I can gather allies and do research.  I have to, frankly, it would be disingenuous to say otherwise.”

“Six months,” Gordon said.

Fray didn’t look that happy with the idea.  “Four months.”

“Six,” Gordon said.

“A good compromise is something that makes everyone unhappy,” I said.

Fray gave me an unimpressed look.

She had plans.  This throws a wrench into them.  It gives the Academy a chance to recover…

Not much, not enough to undo what she did.  Not with possible civil war on the horizon.

But enough to hurt her.

“A stitched in exchange for time,” Fray said.

“Something like that,” Gordon said.

“I’d offer a handshake to seal the deal,” Fray said, “But I’m not positive you wouldn’t break my leg if I let you get that close.”

“I know about your retractable needles,” Gordon said.  “Sy recapped.  Let’s do without the handshake.”

She nodded.  “Until we meet again, then.”

“Until we meet again,” I said, before Gordon could say it.

I turned to leave, with only Jamie in my field of vision, only Jamie able to see my expression.

Gordon had been willing to go.  It hadn’t been a trick, no joke, no double-cross.  He was the most mature and independent of us, he was the one who felt his mortality, and apparently that outweighed his loyalty to us.

If he’d replied to say something about their next meeting, I wasn’t sure if I could have kept from reacting or saying something.

The next time they met, if something drastic didn’t change, Gordon would go with her.

I twisted around, avoiding looking at Gordon, instead fixating on the woman who was still leaning against the railing, rubbing her hands to keep them warm.

“Go,” she said.  “I’ll be here.  Send Wendy down this street.  But you should leave soon.  If the proverbial fires don’t ignite, then I’m going to start some, and you won’t want to be here.”

“Is the headmaster going to be okay with you starting fires?” Jamie asked.

Genevieve offered him a coy smile.

Bastard deserves what he gets, then.

We left to go get Helen and take our leave from Kensford.

☙

The train came to a stop.  Not Radham, a smaller town.  I watched out the window as the conductor made his way down the steps to approach a man.  My eye traveled to a number of stitched guards at the entrance to the train station.  A surprisingly large number.

Was that smoke coming from within the town?  Were actual fires being started?

The conductor hurried up the stairs.  He addressed the crowd of people at the end of the train car, who were just collecting bags from the rack, or bidding stitched servants to do the collecting.  There was a murmur of conversation, hushed and tense.

Among the Lambs, we exchanged glances.  I averted my eyes from Gordon alone.

Only half of the passengers left.  We watched and waited as the others went to return to their seats, looking anxious.

We were silent even as the conductor approached us, bending down low in that way adults so often did with children.  His voice was low.  “A few problems have come up.  You were getting off at Radham, I believe?”

We nodded as a group.

“The man at the station says that word has come down the wire that a few of the cities and towns along our route are in crisis.  Do you know what that means?”

“We know what that means,” Jamie said.

“Yes, well…” the conductor paused.  “Pinesam, Evensroy, Radham and Berricksville are rioting, on fire, experiments were unleashed, or a combination of the three.  If you’d like, we’ll drop you off somewhere safer, the railroad will help you make accommodations and get in touch with anyone vital.”

“There’s no need,” Gordon said.  “We have to get off at Radham.”

“If you’re sure?  The situation sounds dire.”

“We’re sure,” Gordon said, in a way that brooked no argument.

“Take care, children,” the conductor said.

A moment later, he had moved on to the next grouping of seats.  He recited the same list of cities, informing passengers about the situation.

A full minute passed before Lillian spoke up, “Am I just crazy, or-“

“She didn’t visit Pinesam or Evensroy,” Jamie said.

“Are we sure?  Because-“

“She didn’t,” Jamie said.

Mary was turning a knife over in her hands.  I double checked that none of the train staff or other passengers were in a position to see, then left her to it.  We all had little quirks when we were stressed.

“We already knew she made friends along the way,” I said.

☙

When we returned to Radham, it took a full fifteen minutes for them to let us in the front door.  It hadn’t been easy, with all the people pressing to get in, pushing and shoving to get us out of the way and be the ones to voice their rage and sorrow.

Five minutes of walking to get to the head office.  Lonely, with almost no souls out and about.  Everyone who was awake was elsewhere, working or hiding.

Once we’d reached it, we were left to wait for a full thirty minutes.  The ominous ticking of a clock further down the hallway helped to mark the passage of time.  It was very orderly, stiff, and calm.

In stark contrast, we had a view over the Academy walls, looking out on the sprawl of Radham.  Fires burned here and there, and bodies moved throughout the streets, black and red in contrast to a city that otherwise gleamed the silver-blue of a city in winter.  The sun was only beginning to rise, now.

We were given glasses of water by a student, and I stared long and hard at it before drinking.  I thought of Fray.

I still couldn’t look at Gordon, and I knew he’d noticed.  He knew me and I knew him well enough that we both knew why.  We could communicate on that level just like he could with Fray.  In my restlessness, I’d stood and paced away from the others, walked down the hall to look out other windows and see my city on fire from a variety of angles.

Gordon could have stood and approached, he could have said something, made excuses, shared his thoughts, and I might have forgiven him.

So ironic, considering he’d been the one to spout words about the cohesion of the team.

The rest of us were better now.  We’d reaffirmed our bonds in standing against Fray.  Any fractures were better.  Except for Gordon.

It made me feel sick, it made me angry, it made me feel helpless, and I hated feeling helpless.

When Hayle finally stepped out of the room, I practically wheeled on him, as if I was ready to attack.

“See to your appointments,” he said.  “I’ll debrief you individually, before, during, or after you’ve been looked to.  I have other things to focus on.  Helen?  You’ll find Ibbott in the Bowels.  Lillian, go get some rest.  I’ll send someone to let you know where you’re needed.”

With that, he closed the door in our faces.

It was, coming from a man who had a way of being composed, something of a shock.

We broke away, Lillian and Helen breaking away.

Gordon walked alone, not with us, and he walked faster, leaving us behind.

I exchanged looks with Mary and Jamie.

“What happened?” Mary asked quiet.  “Did I-”

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“It wasn’t you,” I said.

“We failed.  I failed.  If I hadn’t gotten hurt, if I could have gotten the drop on them, or hunted them after-”

“Like I told Fray, this was our introduction.  We’ll see her again.  This time we know who and what she is.”

Mary nodded.

“You’re going to be okay?  With your appointment?” she asked.

I nodded.  I felt less apprehensive about it than ever, oddly enough.  Dealing with Fray had changed my perspective in some small ways.

“I don’t want to go,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow.  Mary didn’t want to go, when she loved her appointments.  They were a chance to show off, to show her coordination, skill retention, fitness…

“Would it be better if you were in a room near ours?” Jamie asked.

Mary, as a new addition, had her appointments in the tower, but she was on a different floor than we were.

She nodded.  “Feels dumb when you say it out loud, though.”

“Hur hur,” Jamie said, speaking in a ‘dumb’ deeper voice.

She reached past me to give him a playful shove, bumping me in the process.

She’s lonely, and she doesn’t like a ‘loss’.  She senses something’s wrong, and she wants to be part of the group, in the midst of it.

She was a Lamb, through and through.

When she reached past me to swat at Jamie’s ponytail, or to pull the string from around the base, I put an arm around her.  She stopped, a little confused.

“It’s a hug, dum-dum,” I said.  “Half of one, anyway.”

“I have knives, Sy,” she said, “You don’t get to call someone dum-dum when they have knives.”

But she was smiling.  She messed up my hair.

Jamie and I watched as she took the side hallway, heading to her lab.  Jamie gave her a wave.

I saw how Jamie walked, the way he held his book.

“She didn’t ask how you felt about your appointment,” I noted.

“Nope.  It’s not being poisoned, though.”

I nodded.  “Do you want me to sit and wait?”

He didn’t respond right away, but I did see a nod out of the corner of my eye.

“I can do that,” I said.

Fray got to him.  Talking about the dangers.

We reached Jamie’s laboratory.  Project Caterpillar.

I took the book as he handed it to me.

The doctors were already waiting, and they flocked to him as he entered the room.  I remained in the doorway, watching, too far away to make out words in the jumble of voices, hugging his book to my chest

Jamie disrobed.  He pulled off his sweater and the shirt beneath, then unbuttoned his belt.  It wasn’t that he felt so casual about his nudity here, but more that there was no choice.

The scars and the ridges carried down his entire body.  They were more pronounced along his spine and between his legs, to the point that there was nothing left that was even remotely recognizable.

He half-turned, seeing me looking, and he didn’t flinch, he didn’t hide.  He handed one doctor his glasses, and undid his ponytail.

Switches were flicked.  Lights went on around the room.  Large glass containers were lit up, with gray-pink blobs within.  Brains, the largest as big around as I was tall.  Each one was connected to the next, a chain.

A caterpillar, in a way.  Segmented, promising a future transformation.  Just what that would be remained to be seen, but all I knew was that there wouldn’t be a caterpillar anymore.

Jamie made his way up a slight dias to his throne.  The chair had machinery worked into it, metal blades that weren’t sharp, with bundles of wires running from them, into the first glass tank.

I looked away as they started plugging the individual blades into the slots and gaps in Jamie’s modified, extended spine, along his arms, and beneath his hairline.

I flinched as the switch was thrown, and the lights flickered.

He was giving them all of the information he had gathered, storing it in the tanks.  They would, fingers crossed, give it back, helping him to organize, consolidate, and structure it.

One day, as Fray had said, they wouldn’t be able to give it back.

I turned my back on the scene, my eyes on the fires and the crowds, but I did stay with him for the remainder of the appointment.

Enemy (Arc 4)

The old man stared out the window as he talked.  The rain was coming down hard.  Cups clinked softly as tea was poured, while the rain beat a drum on the roof.  The entire building creaked with the way the wind blew the branches that extended from the outside.

“We need soldiers,” he said.

“We have soldiers,” Cynthia replied.  She was dressed in the latest fashion, with a shorter dress and a long jacket that hugged her body, corset-like bindings closing it at the front.  “We have three men for every one the Academy is prepared to field.”

Avis shook her head, “They have experiments, and regiments of stitched prepared for war.  Even with the sabotage, one stitched is worth ten soldiers.”

“I’d argue that,” Louis said.  He was seeing to the tea.  He looked like a proper hunter, with a plaid print to his jacket, the red and the black matching to his maroon slacks and fine leather boots.  He was an odd pair, put next to Percy.  Louis’ build was barrel-chested and muscular, he was clean-shaven, and his ginger hair was wavy, though cut in a flattering way.  Percy was narrow, pale in complexion, with his straight black hair slicked back from a widow’s peak, his beard combed and mustache waxed, an early gray at the temples and corners of the mouth.

The old man favored a more moderate approach.  Louis attracted attention because he was a manly sort, Percy because he was a scholar, likely the sort of teacher many schoolgirls had been enamored with, before the touch of grey reached his hair.  The old man walked a middle ground, where he could go unnoticed in virtually any place in Radham.

“I’m sorry, Louis, but I agree with Avis,” Percy said, picking up one cup of tea and walking over to hand it to Avis.

One or two members of the group snuck looks at the old man.  He could see out of the corner of his eye.

“Avis is right,” the old man said.

Tea in hand, smiling, Avis took a seat in the corner, dropping down with enough force that the birdcage next to her rocked, the occupants protesting shrilly.  She put out one hand out to steady the cage, then set her tea down, one ankle folding over the other.  Her dress was ten years out of fashion, following the lines of her body down to the ankle, a vest keeping the ruffles contained to the collar and the sleeves, but her hair and horn-rimmed glasses were in vogue.

“You’ll have to say why,” Cynthia suggested.

“Avis can explain,” the old man said.  He was more than capable, but he needed to curry favor where he could, and this would be one of the last times he interacted directly with the woman.  Avis was too important.  She was only one step away from being in complete control of all communications within Radham Academy, and she was charged with many of the more covert ones, the ones that necessitated flying messengers.

Avis liked to take her time before making a statement, which was a predilection that matched her other job well.   Everyone in the room waited, some patiently, some impatiently, for the woman to speak.

The old man quietly thanked Percy as tea appeared on the small table by the window.

“Have you ever seen a real fight, Cynthia?” Avis asked, sounding more than a little arrogant.

“I’ve been in more real fights than I could count.  It is, in fact, a large part of what Louis and I do here.”

“I’ll rephrase.  Have you seen a battlefield?  War?”

Cynthia shook her head.

“I have,” Louis said.

“With humans?” Avis pressed.

“I was one of those humans.  You know this.”

“From my experience on battlefields, I know that when you send men into a fight, they’re scared.  If you tell them they have to shoot or be shot, many will not shoot.  Humans naturally trend toward wanting to survive and being part of a group.”

“And war doesn’t support either of the two?” Cynthia asked.

“War most definitely supports both,” Avis said.  “However, it should be stressed that fighting in a war doesn’t.  The difference feeds the endless restlessness between the nobility and the people.”

“How very clever,” Cynthia said, in a droll tone.

“In an actual war, you’ll see two or more groups of people trying to poke their head up out of cover, work up the courage to aim their weapon and then pull the trigger to kill the other person.  You have to twist their arms to make them go over the breach, you play on ideology, or you convince them, and I do very much mean convince them, that they have no other choice.  A stitched has no such reservations.  A stitched doesn’t tend to stop and turn tail when his friend next to him gets gunned down.”

“That’s not necessarily a good thing,” Louis said.  “It’s easy to lose an entire regiment to the same machine gun, if the man giving orders isn’t prepared.  There are tradeoffs.  The Academy needs infrastructure.  While the war is ongoing, they won’t have it.”

Avis sipped at her tea, then said, “We agree there.  The logistics of it all… so long as we have the roads blockaded and bombed, they can’t move from A to B.  Without the trains and wagons coming in from the farms on the outskirts, they can’t eat or feed their experiments.”

“But,” Cynthia said, “you said we need soldiers, Godwin?  You’re not confident?”

It was a question she asked while already knowing the answer.  She was very much in his camp, and she was informed.  He had talked to her about this before.

Godwin took the question as his excuse to turn and face the occupants of the room.  “No, I’m not confident.  Things are still preliminary, the people are on our side, but we’re not moving forward, and the Academy is figuring out solutions.  It’s what they do.  The Academy retook Westmoreland.”

“The mountains of Columbia are the Academy’s primary mining operation in the west,” Cynthia said, for the benefit of the others present.  “Westmoreland, Columbia is the second highest producer of weapons for the Crown States.  For as long as they have it operational, they’re going to be armed.”

Godwin nodded.  “It’s a coup for them.  They’re going to start retaking ground.  On the large scale, with Westmoreland, and on the small scale, here.  They’re nosing around, looking for us, specifically, and they’re getting close.  There were advantages to being in Radham, our close contact with Avis foremost among them-”

“Thank you,” Avis said, preening.

“-But the risks are too great.  We were able to lead things in the abstract, now we need to be more direct.  We’ll need to split up.  Each of us in a different city.  To be effective whilst we’re doing that, we’ll need soldiers.”

“And the regular rank and file won’t do?” Louis asked.

“Those are men.  I believe we need more capable individuals.  As of right now, odd as it may sound, Academy dropouts and individuals like Mr. Percy here are in higher demand than the best the Academy has to offer.  The Academy’s people currently have no other choice but to work for the Academy, but the people who have the knowledge and lack the loyalty… they can be swayed to either side, and they’re favoring ours.”

He had the rapt attention of everyone present.  Louis seemed most comfortable hearing all of this, and was busy pouring himself another cup of tea.

“I’ll reach out, speak to some people, and I’ll have the money.  What I need you to do right now is find the people with the necessary skills.  The Academy has been quietly removing quite a number of them.  Mr. Percy was one close call in that respect.  We’ll find them and make them offers they can’t refuse.  If the money doesn’t sway, quietly let them know we have the knowledge, and if you feel they’re worth the risk, we’ll go a step further and actually tell them who we are, inviting them to the inner circle.”

The others nodded.

“I’ll miss this,” Cynthia said.  “Losing the more intimate setting, having a voice without shouting.”

“I can’t imagine you shouting,” Percy said.

Cynthia smiled at that.

“For the time being, focus on staying safe, make sure you aren’t being followed, particularly by Dogs.”

“Or little children,” Percy said, frowning.

“Especially little children,” Godwin agreed.  “Louis.  A man named Reverend Mauer is managing one of the larger and more successful revolutionary groups.  I think you and he would complement each other nicely.  Would you reach out?”

“I can.”

“And Cynthia, we’ve already discussed it-”

“Already doing what I can.  They’re slippery, and they don’t want to be found.”

Godwin nodded.  “Percy?  Keep doing what you’re doing.”

“I’d like to think I’m making soldiers rather than recruiting them,” Percy said.

“You are, indeed,” Godwin said.  He took a sip of his tea.  “The most dangerous time and place for you is when you’re on your way from Radham to your new accommodations.”

“Which are where?” Avis asked.

“I’ll let you know in private,” Godwin said.  He frowned.  “From here on out, we’re operating in cells.  I trust each of you.  Do as you deem appropriate.  You’ll each be in touch with one other cell.  If you find you can’t reach them, then and only then should you reach out to me or Avis.  Make preparations.  We’ll meet in the morning, I’ll let you know particulars, and you’ll each leave.”

“So soon,” Cynthia said.

“Right now, we’re safe, we’re free, we have control of the roads and the railroad.  In two days, that might change,” Godwin said.

Cynthia frowned, but she didn’t argue.

The others were already standing, and the ones who weren’t wearing jackets pulled some on, with many getting umbrellas.  Cynthia lagged behind the rest.

“Thank you, by the by, for the tea, Louis,” Godwin said.  “I enjoyed that one.”

“You’re very welcome,” Louis said.  “I left you a small box of the teabags.”

“Good lad,” Godwin said.

Percy and Louis left together, with Avis a few paces behind.

The door clicked shut.

Cynthia took a moment to pick up the scattered saucers and teacups, holding two in each hand on her way to the little sink.

“Something on your mind?” Godwin asked.

“Percy.”

“Ah.”

“We told him that all of his creations were destroyed by the Lambs.  If he discovers that they recruited one of them…”

“He’s very passionate, whatever he expresses on the surface.”

“He is.”

“What a very inconvenient man.”

“A very good way of putting it,” she said.

“I’d hoped to discard him, but he has a damnable way of making himself essential.”

“I’ll watch him,” she said.  “I just wondered if you had any thoughts.”

He went through the little building and extinguished lights, then pulled on his raincloak.  He joined her in exiting the building.

They were joined by the pair of experiments that had been standing in the hallway.  Cynthia’s.  The things were tall, narrower around than even the lithe Cynthia, and draped in rain cloaks that dragged on the ground.  Each had large eyes and bat’s ears placed on otherwise underformed and unadorned faces.  Chinless, noseless, the mouths frozen in a perpetual expression of a child that had just put a ball through a stained glass window.  Neither blinked as rainwater ran down from their too-short foreheads and over the balls of the eyes, or even bounced off the orbs themselves.

Radham glowed, even at night.  Temporary lamps with flickering bioluminescent lights within were placed at regular intervals between the regular lights, giving the patroling squadrons of stitched soldiers a better view of the surroundings.  It was only approaching sundown, but the rain came down hard, and the gloom gave the impression of a later hour than it really was.  Bridging the gap between winter and spring, it was an especially cold rain, cutting right through the raincloak, flesh and muscle to dig into the bone.

The eyes of a dozen stitched soldiers watched as the two of them walked down the length of the street, unblinking.  The heads of the stitched moved slowly to track them, each of them moving in unison.

The riots had been quelled, but the fact that Radham needed to keep a boot on the throat of this downed enemy was a win.  It bred resentment, and it limited how freely Radham could move.

Cynthia spoke up, when they were out of earshot of the stitched.  “I was thinking.  Lambert Academy, in Greysolon?”

Godwin casually looked around to make sure they were alone.  It was probably safer than being indoors, he had to admit.  The bat-eared experiments were on the alert, and the rain made for a lot of cover.

“A win for us, as much as Westmoreland was a win for them.”

“A win might be understating it.  Lambert academy burned, the people that weren’t burned alive were rounded up, made to kneel, and put to the knife.  It was symbolic, something the other revolutions could aspire toward.”

Godwin grimaced.  “Bullets would have been kinder.”

“Bullets are precious to some.”

“What got you thinking about Lambert?”

“Most burned or faced the knife, but not all.  There have been rumors about a set of Lambert’s experiments roaming around.  I asked Avis, and she doesn’t think they’ve been in touch with any of the other Academies.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking they might not be particularly attached to the other Academies.  They’re almost human, they’re functional, they can work and earn food and shelter, but I can’t imagine it’s easy for them.  It’s not what they’re meant to do.”

“What are they?”

“Lambert’s clean-up.  Lambert doesn’t have enough work, so it sends them out here and there.  They’re more about the kill than the capture.  Four individuals.”

“What’s the difficulty?”

“If I’m wrong and I reach out, they’ll come after me.”

“You’ve dealt with worse, Cynthia.”

There was a pause.

“No?” he asked.

“If they came after me, I’m not certain I could survive it.”

“Then play it safe.”

“You’re sure?”

“You don’t sound convinced they could be swayed.”

She shook her head, shifting her umbrella to her other hand, “I’m not.”

There was another group of stitched at the end of the block.  They were accompanied by a creature that stood twice as tall as a man.  Even from the other side of the street, Godwin could smell it.  A chemical smell.

“Curfew,” one stitched called out, sounding more like he was imitating the way it sounded than actually uttering the word.

Cynthia offered a little bow and flourish in response.

“Curfew!” the stitched hollered the word, emphasizing the wrong syllable, raising his voice to be heard as they continued walking, the stitched falling behind them now.  “Soon!  Bell tolls!”

Too dumb to realize she had been acknowledging it.

He felt uncomfortable and unhappy, the words ringing in his ears.

“I long for simpler times,” he said, abstractly.

“You’re not quite that old,” Cynthia said, patting his arm.  “There were stitched when you were born.”

“Not so many.  I’ve watched it all unfold.  The rate of growth has been startling.  I worry sometimes that you and the others don’t understand just what you’re facing.  The cost, if we don’t get ahead of this.”

“We value your pessimism,” she said.

He smiled.  “It’s saved us once or twice.”

“We all have reasons for doing this,” she said.  “Greater ones and personal ones.”

“You have your personal reasons,” he said.

“I do?” she made it a question.  Not because she wasn’t sure, but because she was wondering why he’d brought it up.

“Will that be a problem, if your search proves successful?  Will you be able to understand someone with greater ones?”

“The woman that provoked the war?  We’ll have to see,” Cynthia said.

“I worry,” he said.  “If this was her first move, what is the next one?”

“And will we be caught up in it?  I’ll look for her, Godwin.”

He smiled.

They’d reached his building, which was large but a touch ramshackle, in a less than stellar neighborhood.  The important thing was that it was unassuming.  Cynthia waited and watched, her pets standing there, heads slowly turning left and right, ears up and out, listening to every raindrop.

He opened the door, and stepped inside.  Experiments stood on either side of the doorway.  Cynthia’s, again.  Sentries, knights clad in armor that grew like a bug’s exoskeleton.

He didn’t like it, but some things were necessary.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he said.

Cynthia smiled and waved, leaving, her pets following behind.

To all appearances, a coquette.  Louis was a soldier’s son, the man had moved on to active military service, lying about his age to get in sooner.  Cynthia was different, almost the opposite.  She had had no family, no guidance, and she had raised herself on ugly streets overseas, where gutters had literally run red with blood, and where experiments had been piled so carelessly on trash heaps beneath the Academies that they overflowed into the city, some still alive, others dangerous despite being dead.

All she had needed was a little refining.

He walked through the house, casually moving past the myriad traps that he and Cynthia had placed.  He was here so rarely, the minor inconvenience hardly mattered.  More sentries were stationed throughout the house, many shuffling faintly as they sensed the activity and exited their hibernation states.

He walked into the washroom and stared at himself in the mirror.

Cynthia knew him better than anyone else, she knew how he thought.  The inverse was also true – he knew Cynthia better than anyone else.  Yet he hadn’t spoken up and said the truth.

The war would get far worse before it got better.  The Academy was retaking control, but the rebellions were still underway, and the Academy’s efforts weren’t quelling so much as they were holding things at bay.

Sooner or later, things would reach a tipping point.  To retake control, the Academy would need to do something significant.  Institutions of this scale had only so many ways they could achieve that kind of control.

Fear was one, and he didn’t want to think about what the Academy might do to generate such a widespread fear.

The only way forward would be to beat them to the punch.

To do something horrific.

For that, he needed the woman who had started the war.  He needed those talents, and he needed to be absolutely sure that she wasn’t already doing the exact same thing.  Because if his group and her group both acted at the same time…

He couldn’t let that happen.

He bent down to wash his face, scrubbing, feeling old for the first time in a long time.

When he stood straight, he had company.

The man’s skin had been flayed away and reattached, overlapping strips, like the weave of a basket, head to toe, leaving every feature masked, but for a space for a toothless, tongueless mouth and two milky white eyes.  The flesh around the edges of each strip of skin was scarred and flaky.

A mummy, wrapped in his own flesh, almost a straightjacket, but not quite.  Two oversized hands were already reaching out.

Hangman.

They found me.

Godwin reached for his razor.  He was jerked back before he had it, his finger running along the length of the handle.

Long fingers of two hands wrapped around his neck, one after the other.  As the fingers fell neatly into place, interlacing, his neck was elongated, vertebrae popping.  His fingers scrabbled for purchase on the sink, his legs kicked, but it was to no avail.

Another pop, a flash of pain filling his lower body, and then it all fell to pieces.  The nervous impulses ran away from him, signaling motions he wasn’t making, pain and sensations he shouldn’t be feeling, all with a pressure that suggested his entire body had been crushed beneath a one-ton stone.

In the mirror, his arms and legs dropped, limp.  He huffed out a breath and didn’t take another one.

The Hangman had dislocated his neck.  He was lowered almost dismissively to the ground, as if forgotten, as the Hangman dropped one hand to its side and then let go, letting him fall to the floor, his head cracking against the tile.

He had a view, albeit one that had darkness swiftly flowing in from the edges, of the Hangman leaving much the way it had come in.  It touched the door and hauled itself up to the top of the doorframe, as if it weighed no more than an equivalent amount of loose paper.  It reached the ceiling, fingers bracing it against the walls on either side of the hallway, and then it was gone, whispering against the ceiling, past the sentries and defenses.

Godwin’s last thoughts were of Cynthia, his last sentiment a quiet horror at the idea that Cynthia might well think along the same lines he had… without the consideration to what disasters Genevieve Fray might have planned.

☙

The hall had an upper stage that overlooked the lower floor, and Cynthia stood astride it, arms on the railing, watching.  Her pets flanked her.

From the bottom to the top, she thought.  She was with the upper class.  The true upper class, she might say.  These weren’t nobles, but businessmen, clergy, and pillars of the community.  They were people with money who had earned that money, by and large.  Those who had been born to money were already beholden to the Academy, hooks long set in.

Men and women in fine dress.

Potential allies.

If they were going to retake Westmore, these were allies they would need.  It meant the difference between the Academy having a gun for every soldier or having to do without.

One of her pets reacted, bat-ears twitching as it made a small sound.  She wheeled around.

Nervous, since Godwin’s death.

Four individuals.  Three men and a woman, standing in the shadows.

She almost regretted hiring them.  The mercenaries.  They’d turned out to be on her side, but they were… unpleasant, both in methodology and in personality.

“I thought I was alone up here,” she said.

The one in the lead shook his head.  He had bug eyes and a custom gun slung over one shoulder.

Choleric, she reminded herself.

“What is it?”

“General Ames just arrived,” Melancholy said.  Long hair covered her eyes, and she had a too-wide mouth.  Of the four, Melancholy was the only one that Cynthia wasn’t sure about.  The woman’s favored murder weapon wasn’t on display.  No knife, no gun, no vials.

Cynthia turned to look.

Ames was a big man, in many senses.  Proud, boisterous, fat, ruddy-cheeked, with blond hair.  He was perspiring.  More than normal.  He was with his wife and child.

“What about him?”

“The girl,” Melancholy said.

It took a moment before Cynthia could see through the crowd.  A young lady, beautiful, wearing an evening dress in miniature.  A little blonde that promised to be a great beauty at some point in the future.

When Melancholy spoke again, it was in Cynthia’s ear.  Cynthia hadn’t heard the woman approach.  “She doesn’t smell like she’s his.”

Cynthia looked, frowning.  The girl looked like any young lady should, bouncing with excitement at the fancy dress party.  She was saying something, and her father was having trouble keeping up.

“What is she?”

“Not human,” Melancholy said.  “She smells like blood.”

Cynthia nodded slowly.

“She smells like other children,” Melancholy said.

Cynthia’s eyes scanned the crowd.  She didn’t see any others.

“You know what to do,” she said.

“Mm,” Melancholy said.

Cynthia smiled.  She knew as she turned around that the four wouldn’t be there.  In four paces, she crossed the room to pick up her gun, slipping it through a hidden pocket of her dress.

She wasn’t excited, she wasn’t proud or arrogant.  She knew exactly what she was up against.

She’d come here to fight.

This, surrounded with people she couldn’t trust, was her medium.

Every time she’d faced this kind of situation in the past, everyone else had ended up bleeding or dead.

Esprit de Corpse – 5.1

I slowed in my run as I saw a man forced to kneel by a pole.  His arms were already bound behind his back, his raincoat was open at the front, and there were smears of blood on his shirt.  He fought, struggled, and was overpowered by the four men in similar outfits.  Not quite uniforms, exactly, but they were close.

They lashed him to the pole, cords encircling the space where a crude knotted gag covered his his mouth.  The cords were cinched tight enough that skin split, blood seeping out past the gag to touch his chin.

Hands behind his back, ankles and head bound to the pole, he was unable to do more than wriggle as a haggard Chinese man approached.  One syringe penetrated one side of the throat, another penetrated the other.

Blood drained out, other fluids flowed in.  The new fluids would reduce the shock to the system when the man died.  The blood would be used for other things, if they didn’t return it to him to make him a stitched.

The pole was one among many, all in a row by the outside wall.  The ground had once been hard packed earth, but water collecting around and beneath the people who had been bound to the poles had made the base of each pole a mud pit.  The mud probably consisted of more things than dirt and water.

A minute into being drained to death, the man started convulsing.  The violent jerks made the cords bite deeper into the corners of his mouth.

A man in a uniform similar to the dying man approached, head bent low so his hood could help protect his pipe.  He took shelter under the same awning I was occupying, experimentally puffing before letting himself be at ease.  His hood was down, his hair and glorious mustache both wet, small eyes nearly hidden beneath heavy eyebrows.

A rifle with a bayonet hung behind his back.  I’d heard people refer to the particular brand of rifles as ‘exorcists’.  They were single-shot, heavy, ugly weapons, but they made big holes, they were easy to reload, they were reliable, and they were well made.  The name ‘exorcist’ had probably come up because they were supposed to put spirits to rest.  Or was it because they were supposed to help the little guys stop the real devils of the battlefields?

I watched the convulsions slow.  The man seemed at least dimly aware as he raised his eyes to stare through me.

The head sagged.  The Chinese man noticed, craning his head to look, but kept doing what he was doing, fiddling over at a table.  He gave an order to an assistant, who cleared things off the table.

If he wasn’t dead, the man at the pole would be dead soon.  Within the hour, he would be up and walking again.

“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” the man with the pipe asked me.  He gestured the bag that hung at my side.

“Waiting for the rain to let up,” I said, adding a belated, “Sir.”

“It won’t.  Git.”

I didn’t ‘git’.  I watched the dying man rouse, then sag a bit.  “What did he do?”

“He didn’t listen to a superior officer,” the man with the pipe said.

“You’re not my superior officer,” I said.  “I don’t have any.”

“You’re on a military base, I’m militia.  You do what I say,” he told me.

“Oh,” I said, feigning ignorance.  Being smaller and appearing younger than I was proved to be a small asset here.  I could play dumb.  “What did he do, really?”

“Traitor,” the man with the pipe said, puffing.  “Tried to help the Crown.  Stupid bastard.”

“Why would he do that?” I asked.  “The Crown is bad.”

The man puffed on his pipe.  “Greed, maybe, or he thought he’d be on the winning side, whatever happened.”

“But our side is going to win, isn’t it?” I asked.

Another puff.  “Not about winning.”

“Isn’t it?  I don’t really understand about what they did to the water, but shouldn’t we stop them?”

“Can’t stop something as big as that.  People wouldn’t have it.  We do this right, let them know there are consequences, make them change how they do things.”

The rain continued to pour down.  The Chinese man approached the man at the pole, taking a knife to the ropes that bound him.  A soldier joined him in hauling the body to the table, each of them holding one of the bags that had been plugged into the man’s throat, one nearly empty, the other half-filled with blood.

It was a better answer to his statement than I could have come up with on my own.

“Don’t you have a place to be?” the man with the pipe sounded annoyed as he addressed me, and his tone suggested he might give me a smack if I didn’t take the hint.

I moved on, pulling my hood down to avoid the worst of the rain.

The soldiers didn’t match, but all of them had exorcists, and the clothing was of the same general style, even if little details differed.  I passed one man who wore no coat or jacket, with only an undershirt on.  His chest, shoulders, and face were mottled, covered in pustules, and his lower face had a glass mask fit to it, with a tube running off one side, over his shoulder and down to his belt, where he had a small tank in place.  His eyes were closed, his face turned upward.

I was seeing a lot like him, with increasing frequency, and I hadn’t gotten any good answers as to what they were or where they came from.  People simultaneously avoided them and kept mum when it came to the subject.  There were benefits to being young, but there were drawbacks too.

My route took me down a side path.  The town was a small one, more quaint than anything, but blockades had been erected, there were as many open flames as people could sustain, lighting the surroundings, and every open space that wasn’t already occupied by buildings was now home to tents, piles of crates, or collections of people.  The number of people in this lazy little town had dectupled, easily.  It wasn’t weathering the extra presence well.  Plants were dying, there was trash in the water that flowed along the gutters, and the aroma of the town was of faint human offal and less faint blood, sweat.  It was all laced with the smell of the cheap, mass-produced foodstuff that probably wasn’t fit for proper humans.  Starchy, nutrient-packed beans or some such.

I found a house with a makeshift fence erected around the front portion, the gate locked.  Looking past the fence and into the window suggested a whole gaggle of kids.  They ran around and played.  Only a few had ventured outside, their raincoats and rainboots on.

I approached a girl who stood at the corner of the fence, a flower in her hand.  She was picking it to pieces.

She didn’t look up as I came to stand beside her, my shoulder touching hers through the fence.  A few petals disappeared, drifting down into the water.  It looked like the same kind of flower that was growing off of the tree above.  A parasitic species, if I remembered right.

“Worst job yet,” Lillian said.

“Really?” I asked.  “Worse than the whole interviewing thing before Sub Rosa?”

“Worse.”

“Worse than when we had to deal with the creeping mimis?”

“The creeping mimis were interesting,” Lillian told me.

“They were a pain in the ass, crawling on the walls and ceiling, and the parents were screaming, and then one got the family dog, and… ugh.”

“I liked their design, if nothing else,” Lillian said.  “And it was my third job with you guys?  It has some sentimental value.”

“Sure,” I told her.  “I guess I get that.”

She huffed out a sigh, and shot me a death-glare that wasn’t intended for me.  It was just Lillian being an unhappy Lillian.  “Rescue me.”

“They want you in there.”

“Please.  I got into an advanced stream and I still know more than the teachers, Sy.”

“That’s perfect,” I said, upbeat, just to annoy her.

“Sy,” she said.  She reached through the bars of the railing to grip me by the front of my coat.  “Please.”

She used her grip on my coat to shake me.  I let my head loll back and forth for a moment.

She abruptly hauled me in her direction, and my forehead banged the bars of the railing.

“Ow.”

“I’m not joking, Sy.  Please.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do.”

“Start something.  Set the town on fire.  Spread a plague.  Murder somebody important.”

“Shhh,” I said, “Keep your voice down.”

“The teacher had to look in the books to remember how the second ratio worked, Sy,” she said, almost moaning.  “Please, please.  Rescue me, and I’ll do whatever your twisted little mind can conceive of.  I will be in your debt, and you can lord it over me for as long as you know me.”

“You’re getting better at negotiating.  That’s tempting.  But no.  The job comes first.”

Her forehead banged the bars just above mine.

She remained like that, her eyes scanning the surroundings, then surreptitiously reached into her jacket and withdrew an envelope.

I checked behind her.  “The kids in the window are watching.  They can’t see the paper, but they’re watching”

“They saw you come before.  They think you’re here because you like me.”

I scoffed.

“Laugh all you want,” she said.  “You have to kiss me.”

“What?  No I don’t.”

“If we don’t sate their curiosity, it’s going to run wild, they’ll start talking.  Teachers hear talk, and they’re ridiculously overprotective of the outdated books and half-complete knowledge they’ve put together there.  Give our audience what we want, and they’ll stop wondering.  I can take a little bit of teasing.”

“Ew,” I said.  I started to back up, but she had a grip on my jacket, still, and she was stronger than I was.  Enough that it mattered.

That was an unhappy realization.

“Yeah.  Ew.  Suck it up.”

“I don’t think you should suck anything up while kissing.  I mean, you can, but-”

She gave me a look, a ‘get serious’ one.

I gripped the bars, and then my face as far as it would go between them, giving her a peck on the lips.  She tightened her grip on my collar, holding me there, turning it from a peck to something else.

She let go, leaving me to stumble back.

The hoots and cheers from within the building reached a volume we could hear outside.

Lillian was pink in the face as she glared at me.

“Happy?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, sounding anything but.  She hadn’t dropped the glare.  “Everything’s in the note.  How far along the students are, the quality of the teaching, the texts, my observations of other projects I’ve seen around town, not that they let us out of here that often…  Keeping us out of the way, they say.”

“Got it.  Will pass it on.”

“Rescue me,” she ordered.  “Every time you come, now, you’re going to have to steal a kiss.  Until this is over with.”

“That was my first kiss, you know,” I told her.

She didn’t budge an inch.  She was trying so hard not to convey a tell that she gave me one.

“I can see why people like it,” I said, to needle her.

“Shut up,” she said, with venom, face going pinker.  “Get me out of here.  I don’t care how.  But don’t leave me here.  I can’t take another week.”

“But you gave me so much fuel for teasing you,” I said, grinning ear to ear.  “You can look forward to the next time you see me, when you con me into kissing you again, over and over-”

“Go get caught and die,” she said.

“Or, or!”

“Sy-”

“I could tell the others.  ‘Oh, did you know, Lillian apparently gets lonely for the company of boys when she’s bored.”

“I did it for the sake of the job,” she said, voice firm.  “The kids were already speculating it was something romantic, it was the easiest route.”

“The moment your face turns that pink when I mention it in front of the others, they’ll see right through-”

She raised her hand between us, a gesture.

Incoming.

I shut my mouth, brain switching gears.  She flicked her eyes to the right, and I turned, as casually as possible, looking.

I didn’t see anyone.  I turned a few times, searching for possible threats.

When I turned back, Lillian was fleeing back to the improvised schoolhouse.  The gesture she gave me as she stalked off was anything but a secret one.

“That’s not allowed!” I called after her.

The finger remained raised as she hauled the front door open with one hand and closed it firmly behind her.

I grinned.

It was a short distance from the schoolhouse to the main street, and I arrived with much of the midday traffic.  Carts were being checked thoroughly by squads and sniffer dogs, and the barking was incessant.

My eyes roved over the carts, looking over the people…

Nothing.  Gordon wasn’t here yet.

I picked up my pace to get out of the way of a regular old horse that was pulling a cart, reached the other side of the street and inadvertently chose a path that saw rain pouring off in curtains off a tent-top.  I squinted as the water spattered me.

I heard a whistle, and I saw Mary with Gladys Shipman, standing under a tent, with a counter and register in front of them, unpacked crates arranged around them.  A heavyset man was lifting crates down from the bed of a wagon with a stitched helper.  Mary whipped an apple at my head, and I caught it.

“He’s late,” Mary said.  She looked more concerned than Shipman did.

“That happens.  Lots of rain.  Wagons get stuck in mud.”

“No mud between here and there,” Mary said.

“I’ll see about swinging back this way,” I said, flashing her a smile before I took a bite out of the apple.

“You look like you’re having a merry time,” Shipman said.

“Lillian kissed me,” I said, grinning.  “Well, she told me to kiss her.”

Mary’s eyebrows went up.  Her expression was interesting.  More curious than anything.

“She’s really bored, apparently,” I said.  “Nah.  We had to, the other kids were starting to get curious about her and me meeting up.  Might as well, you know?”

Mary nodded at that, eyebrows going down.  “Is she okay?  Other than being bored?”

“She’s worried about the teachers,” I said.  “Watchful eye and all that.”

“When I last saw her, she had a lot of names for them.  Watchful wasn’t one of those names.  Bumbling, incompetent, depressing…” Mary said.

“It would be ironic if-” I started, I stopped as footsteps splashed behind me.  In a low voice, I finished, “If those buffoons were the undoing of us all.”

“Not funny,” Shipman said, terse.

Such a sourpuss.

“I gotta get going, or people are going to wonder,” I said.  Then I reminded her, “I’ll swing back.”

The two of them nodded.

My path zig-zagged between buildings.  Someone larger might have had trouble, given how little space there was at times, and someone less nimble might have struggled with the crates and other supplies that were piled up in the spaces, protected by the overhanging roofs, but I was perfectly suited.

The moment I was out of sight of people, I pulled on the stem of the apple.  It popped out like a cork, and I stuck a finger into the tight hole where the core had been removed.  When I withdrew it, there was a roll of paper around my fingertip.  I unrolled it.

Boxes beneath 16 houses. – M

Up from nine, yesterday.

Gladys’ note was very similar to what Lillian was providing, but she had eyes on the market.  Her handwriting was meticulous, legible even when written at a quarter the scale I could have managed.  She packed a great deal of information about her observations about the town’s grasp of Academy tech onto a single slip of paper, with a fair bit of shorthand.  The backside of the paper discussed the contents of the boxes in brief.  Good health on arrival, high toxicity, slightly dehydrated.  One box sealed too tight, contents D.O.A.

I made a mental note, then replaced the papers, folding Lillian’s envelope in half before coiling it up and slipping it inside.  I popped the cork back in place.

I could hold on to the apple for a little while longer.

As I exited the space between two buildings, I saw a trio of men, their skin pocked and scarred, boils here and there.  Unlike the one I’d seen earlier, they didn’t have masks.  They looked like plague victims, but each was eerily calm, the expressions on their faces severe.  Each wore the same uniforms as the men I’d seen earlier, and each carried an exorcist and a handgun.

They didn’t talk, and simply watched as I walked by.

I hated not knowing things.

The city hall.

I approached the door, lifting the apple to my mouth to bite into it, like a pig on the dinner table, before raising my hands over my head.

The guard at the door bent down low, patting me down.  He took the satchel-bag from me, then opened it.  I didn’t miss the slight puff of air from within.

He went through every piece of paper within, one after another, meticulous.

Wordless, he returned the bag to me, and I hurried inside, raising a hand to the apple to leverage it and tear off another big bite.

The entrance was a big hallway, and where it might normally have made for a nice view and perhaps a place for the mayor to give a speech, it was now crowded, a makeshift war room.  Tables with maps, soldiers, mobile fences erected around boxes of weapons, and three different experiments were all present, each one leashed out of the way.

I moved throughout the room, grabbing envelopes from the satchel and delivering them to the right people.

Every single one of them paid very close attention to the wax seals.  I already knew the reasons.  The wax responded to oxygen.  I was given sealed satchels, and from the moment the bag was opened, which was supposed to be at the front door, microbes on or in the wax started reacting to the air, altering in color.

One soldier, a captain, used a knife to remove the seal.  I noticed how he put it off to one side on his desk.  He’d watch the color change over time, just to make sure it wasn’t a false one.

It would be a big win if I could snatch that up, supplying it to the Academy’s people so they could figure it out and produce something equivalent, but I didn’t dare take the risk.  I had a cushy gig.

“You, boy,” one man said.

I stopped in my tracks.

“You’re done.  You don’t come back tomorrow, you hear?”

I blinked.  “What?”

“New person in charge.  Says no children.”

“But…” I said.  There were a lot of clever things I could have said, biting retorts, making excuses, asking questions.  But in terms of being a bewildered kid, staying silent was the best option.

“You’ll get paid, don’t worry,” he said.

I nodded, but I wasn’t happy and I let the emotion show on my face.  I headed up the short set of stairs to the Mayor’s office.  A double set of doors, ornate.  Academy-provided wood.  Amusing, given the general lean of this place.  This town was one holdout in the rebellion against the crown.

When the doors were shut, I knocked, a set pattern.

Jamie emerged from another room, a book in hand.  It wasn’t his notebook.

“I just got told I couldn’t come back,” I said.

“I know,” Jamie said.  “I heard when the order first came in.  New person in town, and a lot of the leaders are listening to her.  She handed out something or other, and told them to find strays, dose them, and release them again.”

“Countermeasure against Whelps?”

Jamie nodded.

“She might know about us, then,” I said.

“The way things are going, this might be our last undercover job,” Jamie said.  “The Lambs are a known element.”

I frowned.

“Sucks, but there’s no getting around it,” he said.  “Hayle brought up an idea of how to use it, still preliminary.  Propaganda.  I already have notes, they’ll give me a writer to ensure it’s readable, though I always was good with a pen and paper.  We release a more palatable version of the Lambs’ previous files, win over the public.”

I scowled.

“No?”

I shook my head.

“I sort of like the idea.  But maybe that’s because I don’t get many chances to show off, compared to the rest of you,” Jamie said.

He put his book down.  I angled my head to get a look at the cover.  “Local herbs.”

“By the mayor’s uncle.”

“Do you really need information on the Mayor?  He’s a non-entity.  Ames is in charge.”

“I’m picking up everything I can.  All I can do here is manage Ames and read.”

“Lonely?” I asked.

“More than a little,” he admitted, half-sitting on the desk, one leg down, toe just barely touching the floor.

I hopped up next to him, roughly the same position, and my legs didn’t reach the ground.  He leaned over to bump my shoulder with his, and I did the same to him.

I thought about telling him about my earlier meeting with Lillian, then decided against it.  I wasn’t exactly sure why.

“Fourteen boxes, under the houses,” I said.

“Fourteen?” Jamie asked, giving me a curious look.

“Something like that,” I said.  I removed the cork from the apple and dug out the notes.  I smoothed them out on my knee, my foot braced against the front of the heavy wooden desk.

“Sixteen,” Jamie said, “Yeah, that fits.  I was wondering if Mary got hurt or if she almost got caught.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have the nerves to do that,” he said.  “Every night?  One mistake getting you caught?”

“Do you know if we’re close?  Lillian is getting a little stir-crazy.”

“We’re close,” he said.  “But you don’t have a reason to be running around, and if they’re being wary of kids, then the others are going to come under some scrutiny at some point.”

I nodded slowly.

“While you’re at it, tell the others that the new leader of this particular branch of the rebellion hired people.  Mercenaries.”

I frowned.  “Show me?”

Jamie hopped down from the desk.  I followed.

He led me through and around, to a separate room.  There were stacks of books by an armchair.  He found his notebook, opened it, flipped to the right page, and then handed it to me.

“Secondhand,” he said.  “I grilled Ames as best as I could, even used some of the retention techniques I was taught, but…”

But it was still damn good.  Not that Jamie could really grasp that.  He was a perfectionist in many of the same ways Mary was.

“She arrived, and immediately started laying down the law,” I said.

“Yes.”

“No kids was, hm, the fifth or sixth thing she mentioned.  She’s expecting trouble.”

“Rightly so.  We beat her here, though.”

“And the mercenaries were on the tail end of that,” I said, “Before she moved on to a new topic, restructuring things.”

“It could be attached to that idea.  Bring in mercenaries, change who’s in charge…”

“Why would she want to do that, unless she wanted to make enemies?  It’d be unconscious,” I said.  “Mercenaries are a countermeasure as much as the ‘no kids’ rule and the poison she’s leaving for the whelps.”

“Huh,” Jamie said.

“I’m in a bad position until I can find a job,” I said.  “You don’t figure Ames can find a role for me?”

Jamie shook his head.  “He’s on thin ice already.  He lost an important battle before coming here.  Got ahead of the news of his failure, got established, but now the new leader is here and it’s catching up with him.”

“Are you okay, then?  Is Helen?”  I asked.  We’d managed to ‘convince’ General Ames to give Jamie shelter and a spot to eavesdrop from, with full access to everything that passed Ames’ desk, but it looked like that setup was starting to wear thin.

“I’m okay.  She’s not kicking him out, and he still has a command-”

A trump card we can only use once, before they remove him from service.

“-and she’s set up elsewhere.  She doesn’t want to interfere with the military types.”

I thought about that.

“Where is she?”

“The theater.  There’s an event going on right this moment.  A luncheon.  Everyone’s invited, and it lets her meet and greet.”

“Helen’s there?”

“With Ames.  You’re going, aren’t you?  You’re spying on her?”

“Of course.”

“I’m coming with,” Jamie said.  “If I read one more book, I don’t think I’ll be able to read for a year after this job is done.”

I offered him a mock gasp.  He jabbed me in the stomach.

“Worst case scenario, you’re too slow, we get caught, we fuck everything up, and we start a war,” I said.  “Not so bad.”

“Not so bad?” he asked, pulling on a raincoat.

“If I give Lillian an excuse to leave her position, I get to lord it over her forever.  She said so.”

“Ah, uh huh,” he said, smiling.  “Window?  It’s not exactly common knowledge I’m here.”

“Window,” I agreed.

The banter and jokes continued as we made our exit.

Esprit de Corpse – 5.2

Even on the best of days, Jamie was something of an odd bird.  The glasses, the book he carted around with him, and the longer, dirty-blond hair, currently tied back into a sailor’s ponytail, they added up to a strange picture.  He had a way of looking uncomfortable in any clothes he wore, as if they were someone else’s and he was just borrowing them.  He tended to be quieter than the others, with Helen excepted in most situations.  He was probably the worst of us when it came to a fight, myself excepted, and the slowest of us to react when it came to a non-fight crisis.

With all those things put together, he should have and could have been a shadow of a person, the low man on the totem pole, the gawky, awkward one, the bookworm.  But he walked and spoke with confidence.  His book was inside a waterproof backpack, slung over one shoulder, and he spoke without looking at me, eyes roving over the surroundings.

I’d spent five hours in this town for every hour Jamie had, but he was the one who knew his way around.  He led the way to the theater, and we took the main roads.

“Can’t wait until it gets warmer,” I commented.

“It won’t,” Jamie said.

“You know that for sure?”

“Pretty sure.  I read the farmer’s almanac.”

“Of course you did.”

He pointed at the mountains that overlooked the town, one mountain on each side, with more beyond.  The town had been planted in the valley between the two.  “Cold air sweeps down the sides of the mountains.  Constant wind, which is probably why we’re getting the constant rain from the direction of Westmore.”

“Where the Academy is making its usual rainclouds.”

Jamie nodded.

“Well, bully for us, then,” I said.

“Bully for us,” Jamie said, smiling a little.  The smile faded, “Until they figure out we’re getting rained on and lace the clouds with something.”

I startled a little at that.  “You’re joking.”

Jamie smiled again.  “Yeah.  If they could have, they would have.  The rain is too diluted, this far away, and after what Fray did, everyone is being careful about the water supply.”

I hit him in the arm.  “Jerk.”

“Are your punches getting weaker?” he teased me.

I hit him in the arm again, this time with more force.

“Guess not,” he said.

Whitney was an important location on a few fronts.  The location was the first one, and one so obvious that it was known to anyone who had looked at a map of the area.  It sat in a mountain pass, and it remained the closest location to Westmore that the Academy didn’t have control over.  Even for the Academy, it wasn’t cost effective to push through an area with limited mobility, ground too hard to dig trenches in.

The Academy had been divided on how important the little town of Whitney was.  Hayle had been among the contingent that had believed Whitney held value, and had volunteered us.

The actual information gathering had proven dull, for some more than others, but it had been enjoyable if only for the fact that we were in constant danger, every action potentially outing us and setting the entire town against us.

It marked, perhaps, the first job where we’d been let off our leashes and told to do as we saw fit.  Gordon had asked for Shipman, and he’d gotten her.  Mary, Gordon, and Shipman had discussed the need for a discreet weapon they might be able to use to cripple the town of Whitney, and regular shipments had been arranged for just that.

It was a shocking amount of leeway, but the fact that the Academy was barely paying attention to us was tempered by the fact that, well, they were were barely paying attention to us.  If things turned sour, we were more or less on our own.

I noted the presence of more of the scarred, pocked men.  A group of five.  They all wore the informal military clothing we were seeing everywhere, and they all carried exorcists.

“Them,” I said, alerting Jamie before the men could disappear.

“The men with the boils?”

“What do you know?” I asked.

Jamie shook his head.  “I was going to ask you.  I saw one with worms under his skin.  I could see them moving by the way the bumps and ridges appeared and disappeared.  One of those we just saw had them.”

“I asked Lillian the other day, she promised she’d tell me if something came up,” I said.  “She didn’t bring it up this time, and I forgot to ask.  Mary, Gordon, and Shipman don’t seem to know either.”

“I’m as in the dark as you are,” Jamie said.

“Being in the dark sucks,” I replied.  I lowered my voice, “Especially when we’re pulling something, and an unknown factor could throw everything out of sync.”

Jamie nodded, but he didn’t have anything to offer me.  We were at a disadvantage in that sense, and until we found out what we needed to find out, that would remain the case.

The pair of us reached the market, and I saw that Gordon was sitting on the end of the wagon, sitting far enough back that only his knees and calves were getting wet.  The man who was working with Mary and Shipman was doing the heavy lifting, when it was really supposed to be Gordon’s job.

I caught his eye, waving briefly.  He raised a hand in a halfhearted wave.

It was out of character for him, and it had nothing to do with the small rift that had formed after our last encounter with Fray.  He’d been okay since, not quite acting normal, but at least he’d been putting on a brave face.

He said something to Shipman, noticed I was still looking, and craned his head to look at Jamie and I.

I offered him a one shoulder shrug, hand raised.

He waved his hand a little, fingers horizontal to the ground.

It was a gesture that meant fine, neutral, or no problem.  The sort of gesture reserved for when there was a sudden noise and we realized it was just a rat or something.

Frankly, his body language couldn’t have been less convincing.

“Come on,” Jamie murmured.

There were only so many gestures we could make before people started wondering.  I gave them a wave goodbye, and we left them behind.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“Which?”

“Gordon being down and out?”

“Wasn’t his usual.”

“No idea, then?”

Jamie shook his head.  Little droplets of water flew off the bill of his hood.

“That reminds me.  I’ve been meaning to ask, you do a lot of book reading, but how’s your reading of people going?”

“People?”

“You remember just about everything.  If I say something, can’t you compare it to everything I’ve said before and figure out what tone I’m using and why?”

“You’re assuming I know why you were using the tone back then.”

“Context?  You could figure it out.”

“I could.  I can.  I’m doing that anyway, all the time,” Jamie said.  “Sometimes I get there.  There’s a lot of things to look through and figure out before I can say for sure, and by the time that happens, things are usually done with or they’re moving forward, and then I’m left playing catch-up, and there’s no time to bring it up.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Maybe after I get better at all of this,” he said.

“Maybe,” I said.  “Don’t ever feel weird if you want to say something after the conversation’s moved on, okay?  At least with me?  I like figuring people out.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Good,” I said.

“Great,” he said.

“Fantastic,” I added.

“Ace,” he said, smiling a little.

“Bully.”

“Um, marvelous.”

“Superb,” I said, not missing a beat.  I was already queuing up some more words.

He paused, clearly trying to think of one.

I poked him in the side, interrupting his line of thinking.  When he didn’t react, I poked him harder.

“If I don’t get a chance to think, then I’m obviously going to lose,” he said.

“If you do get a chance to think, then I’m going to lose,” I retorted.  “God, we’re like, the worst two people to play word games with.”

“Mrs. Earles met someone,” Jamie said, all of a sudden.  “First person in a while, since her husband.”

I blinked.  The woman who ran Lambsbridge.  A mother figure, but not a mother.

“She changed the words she uses, how she dresses, and I think she’s worried, she wants a relationship and she doesn’t want it tied in with us.”

“She’s acted relieved when we go,” I said.

Jamie nodded, showing more animation than his usual.  “So I’m not overthinking it.”

“I didn’t quite mean bringing stuff up from that far back,” I said.  “It’s been half a year since we spent two straight nights in the orphanage.  Not that I’m complaining about you sharing and exploring.”

“I just brought it up because the little things added up, and I started wondering if she was a double agent, but the pieces didn’t fit, but I wasn’t sure they didn’t fit?” he made it a question.

“No,” I agreed.  “The pieces don’t fit.”

Jamie nodded.  He didn’t seem relieved, which was odd.  I found myself debating whether he was being very analytical, asking about things he already had the answer to, or if he was more anxious than he was letting on.

“Are you asking just to confirm, or was that bugging you?” I asked.  Might as well.

“Confirming,” Jamie said.

I threw my arm around him.  He reached an arm around me and mussed up my hair, pulling me off balance.

“You smell like Lillian,” he said.

“Do I?”

“Just a bit.”

“You and that nose of yours,” I said.

“You could learn to use yours, too.  Most underutilized sense.  All it takes is a little attention.”

“Sure, Jamie,” I said.

“I’ll teach you, if you teach me about people?”

I smiled.

“I notice you dodged the question.”

“Yep.”

“You’re a brat,” he said.  “And this is the theater, coming up.  The person running the event is the same person that said ‘no children’.  This isn’t as simple as walking in.”

“Is the event catered?”

“Of course.”

“Then we go in through the back door and the kitchen,” I said.  “Let’s bank on her not having told the kitchen staff what she told the others.”

“Uhh,” Jamie said, suddenly sounding like he had doubts.

“Play along,” I said.  “All you have to do is act like you belong.”

“I’m regretting coming along.  I have trouble looking like I belong when I’m being Jamie.”

“Nah,” I said, as we circled around toward the back of the building.  “You fit in with the rest of us.”

“I wonder,” he said.

“Do you?  What do you wonder?”

“What happens later, where we fit in, how we adapt, the calls we end up making…”

“Vague.”

“It’s a vague sort of wondering,” he said.

“Are you thinking you wanted to go with Fray?”

“No,” he said, without a moment’s pause.  “No.”

I nodded.  He wasn’t volunteering, and I didn’t pry, just like he hadn’t pried when he’d realized I’d been evasive about the topic of Lillian.  The reason we could even talk to each other like this was that we had a good sense of each other.  We didn’t have to be on guard, we could experiment and share.

I liked that.

I saw a man standing outside the back door, a little wrinkled, long hair slicked back with damp, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, a cigarette in hand.  White shirt, black pants.  He looked like staff.

“What color shirt do you have on?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“Under your jacket.”

“White.”

“With buttons?”

“Yeah.”

“Follow my lead.  Eyes forward, chin up.  You’re proud to be doing this job.”

Jamie nodded.

We approached the man at the back door, and I pulled off my raincoat as soon as I was under the eaves and out of the rain.  I draped it over a box to one side.  The apple had been devoured and abandoned, the messages left in the inside breast pocket.  I withdrew them and held them so Shipman’s note was the one on top.  A little less rumpled – it conveyed a better image.

Jamie was already removing his raincoat, the backpack sitting on the crate by mine.

“Is the door locked?” I asked.

“Who’s asking?”

“We’re supposed to drop off a message and a package,” I said, holding up the papers.  I pulled them away from his reaching fingers as he moved to investigate my claim.  “We were told to use the back door, because we’d get seen if we went through the front?”

The man frowned.  He gave us a once-over.  Two boys in white button-up shirts and black pants, albeit with boots on.  I’d been wearing the outfit because I’d been acting out my role as a messenger and young mail deliverer, Jamie had been wearing it because it was his style.

We didn’t look like urchins, and that was the important part.  We were boys with a job to be done.

“Door’s unlocked,” he said, before reaching over and opening it partway.  He didn’t seem willing to expend enough effort to move from where he stood, so it was only opened a half-foot.  I grabbed it and hauled it open.

We entered into a kitchen, the air thick with the smell of smoke and cheeses.  Several stoves were going, and it looked like virtually all of the food was being made available in quantities no larger than my fist.  Some of it looked expensive – including things that looked like seahorses crossed with snails, all soft pronged bits and questionably defined shapes, all tinged in brilliant sunset reds, where they weren’t white and vaguely translucent.

Because frog legs, snails and fish eggs got to be too mundane, they had to invent obscure new things to eat.

I chose a route through the kitchen that would keep us out of the way of the more important members of the kitchen – the guy that seemed to be quietly giving instructions to everyone present, the chefs, and a man handing bottles to a well-dressed young lady, possibly a sommelier.

The chef’s assistants and the waiters who were venturing into the kitchen didn’t say a word, though the young, black men and women gave us curious looks.  When people lacked agency or authority, it could be hard for them to call out others on the same.  They were cogs in a very organic machine, they had a role, and right now that role was taking up all their focus.  Stopping and drawing attention to themselves wasn’t in the cards.

I liked places like this.  Places where humans had a system and became eminently predictable.  The box didn’t need to be disturbed.

I pointed at a little window which allowed the kitchen a partial view of the room beyond.  It was well above our heads, running over a countertop.  I stepped up onto a stool, then took a seat on the counter, the window to my right.

That seemed to get attention.  I watched people glancing at me as they went about their business, all rush, hustle and bustle.  Jamie climbed up to sit beside me, and I scooted over to give him a better view.

Through the window, we could see the luncheon, though it looked more like a party.  There were tables for sitting down at, but there was a band and a singer, and most people were mingling.

Something felt off.  I glanced over the room to try and figure out what it might be.

“You,” a chef spoke to us.  He had a towel around his shoulders, and was dabbing at his forehead with one corner.  “What are you doing?”

“We were told to come in here and wait,” I said.  I tapped Jamie’s bag.  “Parcel for delivery, has to pass from our hands to theirs.  If we’re in your way, please let us know so we can move.”

The man that had been barking orders was talking to someone, but he was glancing up at us and the chef we were talking to.

“Why does it have to be here?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I’m just doing what I was told, sir.”

He seemed to consider.  He didn’t have much excuse to kick us out.

There’s always a hierarchy.  It’s a very simple game when you get down to it.  Chefs were a trickier bunch than some, I knew.  Even Mrs. Earles wasn’t to be messed with when she was cooking.  Chefs were artists in temperament and they worked long enough hours that they lacked any patience.  If something was going to go wrong, it could very well be this.

“Don’t get underfoot,” he conceded.

“I wouldn’t dare,” I said.  “This is your kitchen.”

He made a face.  Subtly, he indicated the man that was giving orders.  “His kitchen.”

“Then why were you the one who came to talk to us?” I asked.

“He’s busy.”

“Or,” I said, “you’re the one that really runs things here.  I know how this sort of thing works, sir.  He does too.  Without you and the other chefs, there would be nothing.  Without him, there’d be another manager.”

“You think so, huh?” the chef asked.

I nodded somberly.

“Don’t cause trouble,” he said, before getting back to work.  As the manager looked over in our direction, the chef waved dismissively, a gesture not unlike Gordon’s.

Not a problem.  Ignore, I thought, filling in the blanks.

Jamie and I turned to watch through the window.  The glass was thick and it wasn’t smooth, which made for a warped picture.  I found a position where I could see through without too much difficulty.  Jamie set his chin on my shoulder, his eyes on another such patch.

“Not like you,” Jamie said.

“Not like me?”

“To be nice.  Fluff up someone’s ego.  I know you could have done that differently.  You have done things differently.  I remember.”  His chin drove into my shoulder a little each time he opened his mouth to make a sound.

“You remember me talking about the bug box?”

“Sure,” he said, his chin jabbing my shoulder again.  I moved it to force him to reposition.

“This is a bug box.  Except there’s no shaking needed.  They’re already at each other’s throats.  I guarantee you there’s more drama in here than in any classroom at Dame Cicely’s.  People are easiest to manipulate when it’s ‘us versus them’, and in here, it’s him versus the manager.  Which is, hm, the second most important reason I did that.”

“Second?”

“Second.”

“Am I supposed to guess the first?”

“No.  I’m waiting for the dramatic moment when I get to show the first.  We are in a theater, after all.  Drama is important.”

Jamie nodded, his chin rubbing my shoulder.  I moved it again.

“Something’s really interesting about this scene,” I said.  “On a few levels.  Awful lot of rich-looking people, for one.”

“Whitney used to be a place where the wealthy had their second or third vacation homes.  Not for summertime, but for winters.  When they needed to get away from the city, they’d come here, do some hunting or ice fishing.  Or hole up in a cabin with a fire, enjoy a little distance from the rest of the world.”

“Escaping the mess and smells of the city, only to kill something and experience the smell of blood, guts, and their own sweat,” I said.  “That sounds self-defeating.”

“It’s easy to be self-defeating when you have that kind of wealth and power,” Jamie said.  “Some of the houses have permanent residents now, but some are still vacation homes.  Either way, it’s a place a lot of people know how to get to.”

I nodded.

Men in suits and women in dresses, with waiters in simple white shirts and black slacks moving between them, holding trays.  The singer on the stage was a black woman with a blue silk wrap around her head and a sleek silk full-length dress.

She was good, from what I could make out of her singing.  It came in fits and starts, as staff entered and left through the door.

“I spy a Helen,” Jamie murmured.  “And our General Ames.”

I looked, and Jamie pointed a finger, helping me to look in the right direction.  Helen was playing her part, the dutiful daughter.  Ames looked uncomfortable.  A man caught between a rock and a hard place.

It was good to know he was still behaving.  A large part of what we’d been working on to this point was ensuring our grip on him wasn’t going to falter.

“Good for her,” I said.  “Out of all of us, she’s probably eating the best.”

“And she doesn’t even enjoy food in the same way we do,” Jamie commented.  “There’s something really sad about that.”

“Mm,” I agreed.

We watched for another few moments.  Approaching footsteps made me turn my head.

The chef I’d talked to earlier was approaching yet again.  Wordless, he set down a plate, stacked with appetizers and tiny cakes.

“Wow!  Thank you, sir!” I said, trying to sound surprised.

He didn’t respond, only turning to leave.

I picked up one of the seahorse-slug things and viciously bit its head off.  It tasted like undercooked bacon, but a longer-lasting aftertaste that made the initial texture worth it.

“You’re allowed to gloat,” Jamie whispered to me.  “This was the first priority, wasn’t it?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I whispered back, smiling.

“Brat,” he said.  Then, distracted, he turned to the window, “Oh!  I recognize that face.”

“Which?”

Jamie indicated a man.  Even though most of the guests had removed their long coats, this one wore his.  He had long hair and glasses, but the hair was black, and the man was old enough to have white-and-black stubble on his cheeks.  He walked with his hands clasped in front of him, milling aimlessly until a woman in a deep blue dress approached, catching him in conversation.

“Cynthia,” Jamie said.

“The man’s name is Cynthia?”

“The woman in the dress is Cynthia.  She’s taking charge of the rebellion here, and she’s the one throwing this little lunch party,” Jamie said.

“Who’s the man?”

“Louis Peralta.  Ex-New Spaniard, removed from Radham Academy three years ago, he studied the science of pain.  How we experience it, how to remove it, how to inflict it.”

“Sounds like a lovely chap,” I commented.

“The loveliest.  When he walks down the road, children and small woodland creatures flock around him.”

“Anyone else?” I asked.  “I can’t help but notice that there’s a distinct lack of stitched here.”

“That’s true.  Most are probably off fighting.”

“Or there’s a certain kind of status to being able to hire actual people, instead of using dead ones,” I said.  “Or they’re playing up to a certain audience.  If you’re demonizing the Academy, using the Academy’s tools in the background looks bad.”

“True,” Jamie said.

“Question is,” I said.  “There are monsters in the audience.  Past Helen, the two tall women at the far end there, on either side of the man?”

“Oh.  He’s Mr. Pock.  Think Ibbott, but he likes to make sets, he’s only about half as arrogant, and only a third as good.”

I nodded.

“There’s Edwin Grahl.  He was innovating new ways of doing stitched when something political behind the scenes at one of the Academies got him upset.  He left in a huff, found a patron, and continued his work.  The Academy put out a warrant for unlicensed use of the Academy’s knowledge.  He went into hiding.”

“There are a lot of these guys,” I said.

Now that Jamie was pointing them out, I was getting a better sense of things.   It wasn’t always easy to identify the Academy educated.  Sometimes it was, sometimes they had the wild hair or the coats or tools on hand, but more than half of them blended in with the crowd.

“John Durant.  He got removed from the Academy when he helped make a superweapon, but failed to leash it right.  People got killed.  There are very few people I can think of who are as volatile as he is.  Angry, works on projects bigger than he can handle.  He could be as dangerous to their side as he might be to ours.”

“A lot of people that left the Academy, one way or another,” I said.  “Not all Academy trained, but close enough to have something to offer.”

“That’s essentially it,” Jamie murmured.  “She’s gathering her forces.”

The way Cynthia was doing it was interesting, too.  I saw how she took the arm of Dr. Peralta and led the man to a group of the high-society types.

What was the plan there?  Building connections?  Convincing the people with the money and the resources that this was a battle that could be won?

“There,” Jamie said.  “Man with the red tie?”

I looked and saw a man, blond haired, with a jaw prominent enough that it looked like it had been surgically modified.

“Nobility,” Jamie said.

“Here?” I asked.  A two-legged cat might have had as much sense to walk into a wolf’s den.

“He’s illegitimate.  Of everyone here that might hate the Crown and the people that fall under its umbrella, he probably hates the Crown the most.”

“Tall order,” I said.  I grabbed a tiny cake.

“Tall order,” Jamie agreed.  He grabbed a little bacon-and-pastry affair, then offered it to me.  On a whim, we touched cake to pastry as if we were toasting a drink.

He popped his treat into his mouth.  I started, then stopped.

Someone had come in the back door.  A woman, with thick black hair falling across her eyes, parted so that only her nose and a wide mouth were visible.  She wore a military uniform, just as the scarred people and the countless soldiers in Whitney did.

A woman in uniform wasn’t the most unusual thing in the world.  But a woman that entered a room and sniffed, rather than looking around?

Entering through the back door?

With our raincoats clenched in one hand?

Her head turned in our direction.

“Go,” I said, hopping down from the counter, hauling Jamie down with me.  He only just managed to collect his backpack before I hauled him along.

There weren’t many escape routes.  There was a door to one side, which might have led to the kitchen manager’s office, but I wasn’t willing to gamble that the manager’s office would have a door or a window to the outside.

The woman moved toward us, with long, brisk strides, and one hundred percent conviction.  When a waiter got in her way, she grabbed him with two hands and shoved him forcefully into the nearest counter.  She barely slowed an iota in the process.

There were two surefire exits from the room.  There was one that she’d just used to enter the kitchen, and there was one that led from the kitchen to the floor of the theater.

Weighing our options, this one strange individual against a room filled with people who had been warned about our existence, I chose the room.

With Jamie lagging behind me, I pushed past the free-swinging set of door to enter the party.

Esprit de Corpse – 5.3

We weren’t walking through a kitchen, wearing clothing that resembled that of the staff, not anymore.  The pair of us stood out like sore thumbs, our hair a little damp from being under our hoods in the humid outdoors.  We wore dirty boots, not shiny black shoes.  Jamie carried a backpack.

We attracted attention, tramping through people twice our size, who were all wearing their finest.  Women had their hair done up, nice dresses on, and the men wore suits with long jackets.  There were very few children in attendance, making us stand out all the more.

I peered through the crowd, noting the location of everyone important.  The kitchen door was in the southeast corner, the stage with the singer to the southwest, and a hundred and fifty feet of banquet hall stretched the distance to the north end, where the front door was.  Covered tables dotted the space off to the sides, standing on carpet, while the center remained clear, hardwood, ostensibly for dancing during different events.

The ceiling arched above, and a kind of extended balcony ran down either side, with fancy iron-wrought railings, with a number of figures gathered and looking down on the affair from above.  Some stood and talked on the stairs that led up from either side of the front door.

The rebellion here had brought in a lot of ex-Academy types, and those individuals had each attracted crowds, many staying toward the edges of the hall.  The middle had more clusters, but it also had more elbow room and empty space.

No matter how we moved through the empty spaces, we would either stand out like sore thumbs, walking in a straight line, or we would look evasive, zig-zagging to break line of sight.

The tables offered a little bit of cover, blocking others’ view of us, and the densely packed people would be something of a benefit in the same way.  That said, there was a bit of a caveat to that.  There was nothing stopping someone from grabbing one of us.

I was counting on a given person leaving us alone because others had left us alone.  The mentality of the herd of sheep.  It made the initial batch of people more important, as we approached.

That in mind, I led the way toward people who looked more actively engaged on conversation.

So much planning for the simple act of walking into a crowd.

Then again, there was the corollary that we were walking into a crowd of people that would imprison us if they knew we were working for the Crown, and probably shoot us on the spot if they knew what we really were.

It was sobering.

Jamie and I passed just behind a cluster of the group of chattering ladies, into the thick of the crowd.  I brought my chin down, ducking down as if begging excuse, and walked at a consistent speed.

The pair of us passed behind the core members of the gaggle of chattering women without drawing notice.

I was put in mind of one of the covers of Jamie’s books.  The heroine of the haunted forest, every tree hostile but dormant.  This was that forest.  The ‘trees’ dwarfed us, they outnumbered us to an extent that I couldn’t guess at, and if they turned on us, I couldn’t even guess at what they’d do to us.

Countless sets of eyes watched us, judging, prying, thinking about doing something.  But it took a special kind of courage to break away from the herd and do something like that.  I was watching people, studying them, trying to figure out who might have that courage.  It wasn’t always obvious.  A well dressed man in unique colors, my instinct was that he could be left alone.  He tried too hard to impress, by body language alone.

An older man, one that looked too frail to kill a fly if he swatted it, I knew he was dangerous by the wide berth others gave him, and the way they reacted when he moved his hands, gesturing.  I’d known professors who moved like he did, swatting students that weren’t attentive enough, not caring what others thought about them.

Once I was pretty sure the coast was clear, I allowed myself a glance back toward the kitchen.  The sniffing woman hadn’t followed us past the kitchen door.  I noted that the hostess of the party, Cynthia, stood near the stage, the center of attention for her own small cluster.  Jamie, just behind me, looked deeply concerned, one of his hands gripping mine, the other holding the strap of his bag.

I saw his eyes flick in one direction.  Casually, head turning back to face forward, I looked out of the corner of my eye.

The extended balcony on the far left of the room had groups of people talking, just like everywhere else in the banquet hall, but a lone figure stood alone.  Bald, he had a scarf covering the lower half of his face, a heavy cast to his forehead, almost neanderthal, and the hands that gripped the railing had long fingers.  Knives glinted on the strap that ran diagonally across his chest.

He was watching us, his head moving to follow as we made forward progress.

I thought I’d lose track of him as I moved too far head to track him in my peripheral vision, but he turned, and he started walking in the same direction we were, along the length of the balcony, making progress toward the front door.

Two of them.

Good eye, Jamie.

I had to wonder where the woman from the kitchen was.  She wasn’t following us, which was curious.  It raised questions.  Why not stir up the crowd, call something out and have people mob us or grab us?

The first possibility was that her hands were tied.  Maybe she couldn’t speak.  Maybe she could, but wasn’t willing to cause trouble with this event being more important than it looked.

The second possibility was that she hadn’t come after us because she didn’t need to come after us.  We were already caught.

Three quarters of the way.  The last quarter of the hallway stretched before us.

The man with the scarf started moving faster, one long finger tracing the top of the railing.  He was a little more eager than the woman had been, and the speed he was moving suggested he’d make it down the stairs and beat us to the front door.

I looked, and I didn’t see windows.  There were side doors, likely leading to the theaters, but they weren’t accessible side doors.  The crowds of people around the various scientists and experimenters made it look pretty dire.

I picked up the pace a little, my hand tugging on Jamie’s.

All at once, the man that was above us stopped, turning, gripping the railing with long fingers.  I allowed myself to look, momentarily making eye contact.

A moment later, Jamie’s hand hauled back on mine.  My stride was broken, and eyes that had been glancing our way now stared.

Jamie had been grabbed.

I supposed it had always been a ‘when’ we got grabbed, not ‘if’.

He looked shocked, and he didn’t know what to do.  The man that had him was a military sort, with massive mutton chops, badges on his lapel and an odd amount of jewelry on the hand he’d used to grab Jamie.  A very ostentatious wedding band, and a ring that probably signified something military-related.  Membership of an important group.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked, his voice deep.  More heads turned.

The attention we were getting was so oppressive I almost couldn’t breathe.  Jamie looked stricken.

Cynthia was looking, but I wasn’t sure she could see us, specifically.  The man at the railing remained where he was, watching, fingers rising and falling like a line of something or others was squirming between them and the railing.

He’d probably seen the man turn and come after us.

I couldn’t let the fear show in my face.  Fear would doom us.

I smiled, knowing that my fake smile was being studied by merchants and politicians, people who had made livings off of using or identifying fakery.

“Love,” I said, not looking at the jewelry on his fingers, while remaining acutely aware of it.

The man harumphed.  “Love?”

“Brotherly love.  This guy and me, we’re the fastest friends you ever saw, sir.  There’s a girl he likes, I told him, no matter what, he needed to tell her.”

“T-told you, Simon, y-you really didn’t have to do that,” Jamie said, voice shaking a bit.  He was drawing on his nervousness, using it.

Simon.  It was my first fake name.  Nostalgic.

Even my nickname, Sy, it was taken more from Simon than Sylvester.

I told myself it was a good omen, and didn’t allow myself to consider that it might be the last fake name I ever used.

“We never thought we’d see her again.  Then we saw her coming here, he’s dressed nice, we thought- well, I thought and I told him, he’s gotta say.  Before he loses the chance.”

The man didn’t show any sign of relenting.  His face was like stone.  Stone with massive muttonchops, but stone all the same.

I was still counting on the sheep mentality.  That if we stopped this man, convinced him, the rest would let us be.  Even managing that would be hard.  It depended on Cynthia not coming to see what the commotion was about, and the man at the railing above us staying where he was.

A lot of dependings, there.

Foremost among them was Muttonchops here.

The rings.  The way he so proudly displayed the badges.  I was counting on him being a romantic at heart.

“Girl, hm?” he asked.  He sounded skeptical.

“She was over there,” I said, pointing into the crowd.

Like magic, the observers parted, stepping away from the path of my fingertip.  The only ones who didn’t were Mr. Ames and our dear Helen.

Ames looked like he was going to suffer heart failure.  He had already been sweating bullets, and now a full third of the room was now focusing its attention on him and Helen.  He couldn’t have looked more stricken if someone shoved an icicle up his rear end.

I shifted my grip on Jamie, circling around him, so I stood between him and Muttonchops.  One hand on each of Jamie’s shoulders, I pushed.

The muttonchops, the flash, the display.  Not just a romantic.  Muttonchops believed in the show.

This was for his sake, something gaudy, obvious, impossible to ignore.

I believed, wholeheartedly, that he couldn’t maintain his hold on Jamie without becoming the bad guy, without standing in the way of a boy and his love.  Jamie wasn’t even to blame.  It was my fault, I was the one who had dragged him along.

The hand dropped away.  I pushed Jamie along, and he made a faint show of resisting.

We drew closer to the front door.  Fifteen percent of the way left.  Ten.  Five.

We reached Helen and Ames.  The last few paces to the door were an impossible journey, now.

I crossed my left set of fingers, tapping them on Jamie’s shoulder, to get Helen’s attention, then shifted my grip.

It was a gesture that meant risk.

Shifting my grip to the left, to indicate the general direction of the man with the scarf.  He’d moved when I wasn’t looking, and stood on the stairs.

Damn it.

I couldn’t even see Cynthia, but the singer at the far corner of the banquet hall was watching us even as she sang.  If Cynthia made it this far, we were doomed.

Too many factors to consider.  Everything in my perception condensed to this particular moment and scene.  I was hyperaware, my every sense pitched to an almost painful degree.  We were walking a tightrope.

“I don’t know what to say,” Jamie said, to Helen.

Helen’s hand moved to her hair.  A gesture was hidden in the action.  A question mark without a question to precede it.  She was as lost as Jamie.  Her voice and attitude didn’t betray it, either way.

“I’ve seen you around,” she said, smiling in a way that probably every man here was familiar with, thinking back on their first loves.  “You’re usually writing something in a big book, aren’t you?”

Jamie nodded, swallowing hard.

I’m so sorry, I thought.  Very sorry, Jamie, putting you on the spot.

It was Ames that spoke, and I felt a moment’s terror as the heavyset man opened his big fat cannot-act-worth-a-damn mouth.  “What do you think you’re doing?”

The terror wasn’t substantiated.  It came from a very real, very spooked place.  He was as terrified as any of us.  It was real.

His inability to act was a saving grace, almost.  The people that knew him would know he was speaking from a genuine place.

“I-I really like your daughter, sir,” Jamie said.  “You-”

“No,” Ames boomed.  “You’re making a spectacle of her, and you’re making a spectacle of me.  I will not stand for this.”

I stared, watching in fascination.  Was this man actually saving us?

He looked genuinely angry.  Just like his fear, it came from a real place.  We’d brought the shit to his doorstep, we’d brought it to people’s attention, and he wasn’t happy about any of it.

“I’m sorry,” Jamie said, sounding terrified.  “I’ll leave right away.  I’m sorry, sir.”

“You most certainly will,” Ames said.  He paused, dramatic.  Then, in a less ominous tone, he said, “If you wish to see the girl, you can call on her at her home.  We live next to the city hall.”

Playing to the crowd.  He was willing to be the bad guy that Muttonchops hadn’t, but not entirely.  He had probably won some people over with that little display.

Jamie nodded, a little too quickly.  This time, it was Jamie who tugged me in the direction of the front door.  I was more than happy to oblige, very aware of the man with the scarf and the knives who was now walking at a casual pace down the stairs.

We were two steps from the exit when a hand slapped the heavy wood.  I didn’t recognize the man, but he wore one of the unconventional uniforms, with a mustache so thin it looked like it was drawn on with a scratch of a quill.  The slap on the wood made a dull booming noise, and it drew more attention.  I noted that several of the special guests looked annoyed at the focus that was being drawn away from them.

“We’re leaving,” I said.  “We don’t want any trouble.”

“I’d like to stop you right there,” the man said, his voice soft.  “I’m sorry, but I know I wasn’t the only one here that was instructed to assume that anything a young child says is an outright lie, until proven otherwise.”

Oh no.

No, no, no.

It went a step beyond paranoia and general knowledge of us.

The damn woman had known we were here.  She had warned people.

I looked, and I saw people in the crowd looking a little abashed that they hadn’t been the ones to say the very same thing.  Others that had been given the same instruction.

I also saw Cynthia approaching, weaving her way through the crowd, gently excusing herself to get past others.  She was roughly the same distance from the door that we’d been when Jamie had been grabbed.  Thirty or forty feet from the door, albeit with a dense thicket of people between here and there.

The man with the scarf hadn’t budged.

Why.  He and the woman in the kitchen-

No, there were more important things to focus on.  I couldn’t fuck up here like I did in so many of the actual fights.

“Lying about what?” I asked.

“The story.  Your reason for being here,” the man with the thin mustache said.  “To get here in the first place, you had to come from one of the theaters, or you came from the kitchen.  Is it unfair of us to worry that the Academy might be low enough to use young children to deliver poison to an entire banquet?”

Oh.  Well, had to give the man points for imagination.

Even I was at a loss for words there.

I pulled my hand away from Jamie, the hand between me and the exterior wall gesturing before clenching into a fist.

The only person who could see it and translate the gesture’s meaning was Helen.

Help.

I couldn’t know how she managed it without opening her mouth, but our dear, glorious Helen directed Ames our way.

“You’re accusing this girl of poisoning food?” Ames asked, voice rising.

“That is not what I’m saying,” the man at the door said.

“You’re accusing me of being a traitor?” Ames asked, even louder.

I am so very glad nobody said yes to that question, I thought.

“No,” the man said, patiently.  “I’m saying we don’t know for sure where these boys are from, or if the story about the romance-”

“It’s true!” I said, cutting him off.  Ames was acting the outraged parent, but he apparently didn’t know how important it was to keep our opponent from getting his balance, or keeping the man from getting a full sentence out.  Playing dirty was absolutely vital here.  “He likes her, he does!”

“You’re raising nonsense about poison here, laying accusations, scaring good people,” Ames said, getting more into it.  I worried he didn’t know where he was going, or that he’d run out of steam and abruptly stop, leaving us flailing.

“I’m following orders!” the man said.

Cynthia was getting closer.  If she verified those orders-

“He’s got a picture,” I said.  Without waiting for Jamie to do it, I pulled the rain-flap of his backpack away, reached inside, and hauled out the book.  He took it from me the moment I had it, and turned pages.  “Why would he have a picture if he’s lying?”

Jamie held the book up, a half-done sketch of Helen displayed.

It was a little dark and scratchy, heavy on the ink.  Not quite the picture a boy in love might draw, by my estimation, but it was a picture of Helen, and it was pretty damn accurate.

There were murmurs from the crowd that could see the book.

“That’s enough,” Ames said.  He approached us, “It’s clear you like her.”

“Yes sir,” Jamie said.

Cynthia was close enough to be in earshot, now.  She was looking at the man with the scarf and the knives, but he wasn’t moving.

That somehow spooked me more than if he’d suddenly lunged for us.

Ames put a hand on Jamie’s shoulder.  “Come.  Let’s talk, away from all this.  I don’t like the spectacle.  You can come to our place, for tea and cake, if the girl agrees.”

“I’d like that,” Helen said, just behind me.

His other hand touched the door handle, a few feet below where the man with the thin mustache had slammed his own hand against the wood.

The man wasn’t budging, even with Ames up close and personal, the book as proof.

Damnation, someone actually competent, who listened to orders.

Ames hauled the door open, ignoring the hand.  His strength contested the man’s, and Ames won.

The man looked over in Cynthia’s direction, and I did too.

She’d stopped moving.  She watched.

Ames passed through the door with Jamie.  Helen caught up, and joined me in leaving.

I felt ill at ease, well aware that I didn’t have the full picture.

The front of the theater was covered.  The rain poured beyond, flowing between the stones of the slightly domed street and into the gutters.

The door closed behind us.  We headed in the direction of the small adjunct building.  Two black men on either side of the double doors opened the way.  We stepped into the coat room, Ames and Helen found coats and pulled them on.  Jamie found a smaller cloak and donned it.  I searched and didn’t find anything small enough for me.

The sniffing woman had my coat.

Jamie found an umbrella and handed it to me.

“What was that?” Ames murmured, once we were out and walking in the rain, out of earshot.

“You know that whole blackmail thing we had going on?” I asked, twisting around to check behind us.

“I believe I know what you’re talking about,” Ames said, with a heavy lathering of sarcasm and a little bit of loathing.

“You’re done,” I said.  “It’s over.  All that you have left to do is keep quiet, and nobody finds out about the… less decorous parts of your military background.”

A lifetime ago, he’d gone to a black market doctor and found a way to avoid attending a major battle in service to the Academy, a wounded leg and a bad infection.  He’d survived when many of his colleagues hadn’t, had then been able to boast a rare level of experience, when so many who had fought in the battles he had had died.  Now he was here, and he’d sided with the rebellion.

In trying to meet and buy off some of the ex-students of the Academy, we’d found out about that bit of leverage, and played it out into our whole scheme here.  One of the higher-ups in the local rebellion became our pawn, a means of Jamie getting access to important paperwork and a hiding spot, while Helen could be the daughter returned home after a long time away.

“You’ve ruined me,” he said.  “People will put the pieces together.”

“People would have found out eventually,” I said.  “The doctor who injured your leg knew exactly what he was doing when he named you.  The moment he was caught, or the moment he was brought into the rebellion, he was ready to name you for his personal gain.”

He shook his head, but he didn’t have anything to say.

“If we’re done, does that mean there’s no tea?” Helen asked.  With a slightly different inflection, she added, “And no cake?”

“No tea, no cake,” I said.  “Mr. Ames-”

“General Ames,” Ames corrected.

I’d goaded him about the fact that his title wasn’t truly earned, but I had to admit he’d done a lot to help us just now.

“General Ames,” I amended my statement.  “Our business relationship with you is done.”

“I’m done with her, then?” he asked, indicating Helen.

“Was I so bad?” she asked.

“You disturb me,” he said, with a measure of disgust.

Helen pouted.

“Go home, figure out what to do next,” I told Ames.  “I advise leaving.  Just to be safe.  Put some distance between yourself and the rest of this.  Maybe play up how embarrassed you were with your treatment in there.”

He shook his head, jowls wobbling.

All at once, he turned, breaking away from us, as if he couldn’t bear to be in our company any longer.

Jamie, Helen and I walked through the rain.  We passed several people.  The rain was thick enough it was hard to identify details.  I might have imagined vaguely monstrous details about anyone we passed, except many of them were monsters, or stitched, or something-or-others.

Was the sniffing woman out here?  Or did the rain keep her from tracking us like she had with the coats and following us into the kitchen?

“Well, I didn’t expect any of that,” Helen said.  “I thought I’d be busy for a little while yet.”

“We’re going to be busy,” I said, “Just doing something different than we were.”

I continued to examine each of the people out on the street.  Were any watching us?

“Getting cake can be on the list,” Jamie said, “I’m sure Sy didn’t mean to tease.”

Helen reached out to give Jamie a pat on the cheek.

“I always mean to tease,” I said.  “Except then.  No, I didn’t mean to there.”

“You’re the best boys,” Helen said.  “What about the other boy?  And our girls?”

“That,” I said, “remains a very good question.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Cynthia back there, she wanted us.  She was coming after us, she had the ability to give the order, and I think she probably would have been listened to.  Now, there’s a dim possibility that she changed her mind, bought the story…”

“But you don’t think so,” Jamie said.  “She changed her mind for another reason.”

“The man with the scarf on the stairs, he gave her some signal, or he communicated something, and she deferred to him.  I’m guessing they don’t believe three birds in the hand are worth however many are in the bush.”

“They’re using us,” Jamie said.

“We’re being watched, right this second,” I murmured.  “Guarantee it.  They want us to lead them to the others before they make a move.  Let’s get Helen her cake-”

“Yay.”

“-and figure out our next move.  Because we’re stuck.  We can’t communicate with or meet up with the others without putting them and ourselves in danger.  We have a tail to shake, and the moment Mr. Scarf finishes discussing a strategy with Mrs. Cynthia, we’re going to have an entire city’s worth of hostile forces collapsing in on us.”

“And Mary, Lillian, and Gordon might too, except they won’t have any warning at all,” Jamie said.

“Let’s do what we can about that,” I said.

Esprit de Corpse – 5.4

“Two big issues,” I said.

“More than two,” Helen observed.

“Two big ones,” I reaffirmed.  “We need to get out of this with our skin intact, and we need to help the others.  Only reason they haven’t come after us is they probably aren’t sure they can find the others once we’re dead.”

“They could torture us,” Jamie said, under his breath.

“Sure,” I said.  “Yeah, that’s probably in the cards, if they don’t get the results they want by waiting.”

“Great,” Jamie said.

“They’re not going to come after us here,” I said, “If they’re patient enough to let things get this far, they’re patient enough to let us have a bite to eat.  We bide our time, we make them wait, we see if they make a mistake.”

“We’re giving them time to get in position,” Jamie said.

“Sure,” I said.  “That’s fine.”

“Fine?”

I gave him my best winning smile.  “It’s fine.  Really.  They’re not going to close in on the others that fast.  We wait.”

“Alright,” he said.  “I’m going to assume you have a plan.”

“I-”

“-And,” he said, cutting me off, “Don’t correct me.  Let me have this.”

I smiled, shutting my mouth.

We reached the building, and we were mute as we waited in a long line.  We ended up settling in at the corner, where the path to a restroom and a length of counter at one end of the kitchen gave us some more privacy than we might otherwise have, putting us another pace or two from the nearest tables.  I took a seat by the window, so I had a glimpse of the street outside.  Jamie did the same, sitting across from me, while Helen took the aisle seat, next to Jamie.

Jamie and I looked out on the rain-stricken city, and the two of us saw the world in very different ways.  It was handy, when we were on the lookout together.

I liked that, really.  With our group being as diverse as it was, there were people who were more different from certain others.  Gordon and I were one example.  Could we work well together?  Sure.  But even while I’d trust Gordon to hold my still-beating heart in his hand and treat it with the care it deserved, I knew that we were very different in how we saw the world and how we approached a situation.  We were polar opposites in terms of our abilities, strengths, and weaknesses.

Put Mary and Gordon on the same task, and they matched each other’s stride well.  Gordon and Helen, same thing.

Jamie and I should have been opposites.  We should have run counter to one another.  I was the chaos that stood in contrast to his order, the haste to his slow and steady pace.  He was gentler than I was.  We worked together better than any of the other opposing elements among the Lambs.

That seemed important to me.  As if somehow it would hold things together in a pinch.

The waitress came by, we made our order, and promptly delivered it.

I left Jamie to continue studying the outside, and turned my attention to the interior.

The tea house was a sad little affair.  It was the sort of location where the youth might congregate in better times, boys and girls could meet for first dates, children could gather and cluster into booths, and the elderly might sit for hours at a time, enjoying the good weather if there was any to be had.  A glass display window protected and showed off an assortment of sandwiches and baked goods, and kettles were perpetually boiling behind the counter.

But there were no youths besides us, there were no elderly.  Whitney was a small town with a large town population in it, now, and that population consisted of soldiers and rebels, with a lot of angry people.  The staff of the tea house was having trouble keeping up, and the food behind the display window was dwindling, with new food being placed within on a regular basis, only to be dismantled by the next collection of guests.  It was less of an elegant, artistic construction than a wall being torn down a hair faster than it could be rebuilt.  If the staff worked hard enough, they would manage to keep going until the day was done, then collapse from exhaustion before doing what they could to get ready for the next day.  If they failed, then they would have to deal with wave after wave of disgruntled customers, men with a lot of repressed fear and anger due to the ongoing war.

The constant rain meant mud was constantly being tracked in,  and the floor was only partially swept before something demanded the attention of the staff.  The result was that dirt and debris collected in corners and at the edges of the floor, where the mops and brooms couldn’t quite reach.  The staff wasn’t used to this kind of environment, and it was clearly getting to them.  They were used to a relaxed atmosphere, one where they could chat with their more innocent customers, not a crowd of unsmiling men who gathered at the door, shuffling their feet and murmuring among each other until a table vacated or the line reached the counter.

“Miss,” Helen said.  “Miss?”

Helen succeeded in getting the attention of the waitress.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Helen said.

“It’s alright,” the woman said, offering Helen a tired smile that suggested it wasn’t.

Helen’s demeanor was bright as she talked, pointing at her cake with her spoon.  “I just wanted to say this is really very good.  Would you pass my compliments on to whoever made it?”

The woman seemed to shed five years of age as she relaxed muscles in her face, neck, and shoulders.  I really wondered if she might cry.  She nodded, a little too quickly, and then said, “I will.”

“Thank you!” Helen said, almost sing-song, to the waitresses’ back.

I broke my cookie in half before washing it down with a bit of tea.  “I don’t know how I get the reputation as the most evil member of the bunch.”

“Hm?” Jamie asked.

“Just saying,” I said.

“What Helen said was nice,” Jamie said, jabbing me in the arm with his spoon.

I shook my head, very slowly.  “Nope.”

“Nope?”

“I’m a student of the way humans work, and , and I think what Helen just did was worse than anything I’ve done in the last while.”

Helen hummed happily, rocking left and right a bit as her legs kicked idly under the table.  Jamie gave me a look.

“Could be what they need to keep going,” Jamie murmured.

“But it’s not.  They’re finding their own ways to keep going.  When you lift someone up, you have to let go of them.  They might not have the strength to land on their feet when they get dropped,” I said.  “I don’t think these people have that strength.”

“That’s a very dark view,” Jamie said.

“It would have been better to leave them alone than to remind them of what they don’t have,” I said.

“That’s an even darker view,” Jamie said.  “I don’t want to live in a world where everyone acts that way.”

That stung, more than I cared to admit.  “Not everyone, not always.”

“But sometimes?  Sometimes can’t say something nice and be kind?”

“I don’t see why this is a point of contention,” I said.

“What’s your perfect world, Simon?” Jamie asked, using the fake name he’d stuck me with.  I wondered if he’d chosen it for a reason.  Harkening back to the old days.  “If the big problems were fixed and everything was working the way it should?”

“That has nothing to do with it,” I said.

“But?  What’s your perfect world?”

I sighed.  “A world where everyone is surrounded by people who are striving to be their best, because we only grow as people when we’re around people who are equal to or better than us in intelligence, skill, and industry.  It’s in stupidity and stagnation that we fail as a species.”

“But ethically?  Morally?” he prodded.

“I just gave my answer.  In a perfect world, we’re all different, ethically and morally.  We argue, we challenge each other, and everyone is working to make their ideas better and more… more.”

“A lot of hostility, arguments, competition.”

“Nothing good awaiting us as a species if we lose that,” I said.  I broke off a small bit of my oversized cookie and popped it into my mouth.  I chewed and swallowed.  “Stagnation.”

“I can’t help but notice you haven’t mentioned anything about the positive human relationships,” Jamie said.  “Only the confrontational ones.”

“Humans are a social species.  Push us, pressure us, challenge us, and the weak elements will break apart, the stronger elements will band together,” I said.

“Wallace’s law, applied to a group,” Jamie said.

“Don’t get me wrong,” I said.  “I’m not proposing something where we’re all supposed to act like animals, or that we should model ourselves after them.  I’m saying humans are humans, and being human means struggling.  In the course of those struggles, we form the strongest bonds.  Could be us and a life and death struggle with a pair of people who want to stalk and kill us, or two people working in a tea shop in a town that’s gotten embroiled in a civil war.”

“Seems like your worldview is a little bit, uh,” Jamie said, “Conveniently you?”

“Of course it is,” I said.  “I’m eleven.  Ish.”

Jamie rolled his eyes.

“What’s your worldview?” I asked.  “Don’t let my answer bias you.”

“I wouldn’t,” he said, staring out the window.  “But world peace would be nice.”

“World peace would destroy humanity,” I said.  “Do I need to get into how?  Because-”

“You don’t need to get into how,” Jamie said.  “I get it.  I really do.  I agree with you on a lot of things, believe it or not.  That we need the challenge, that we have to surround ourselves with people that as as bright and talented as we are, if not better.  I like the differences in people, ethically or otherwise- I wouldn’t be able to stand you if I didn’t.”

I kicked him lightly in the shin under the table.  He kicked me, harder.  I pinned his foot down with mine, and he relented rather than fighting to get it free, content with a one-for-one.

He spoke, adding, “But if it came down to it, I’d rather have peace than war.  Both would do us a lot of harm, but I’d rather the sleepy, apathetic sort of ruin to the violent sort.  Especially if it means we can be gentle and kind and not worry about the damage you somehow do by acting nice.”

I sighed.

“I know,” Jamie said.  “We’re different people like that.”

“You’re a boring person.  The most boring.”

He stuck his tongue out at me.

“Stick out your tongue all you want, you’re still boring.”

He ignored me,  turning to Helen.  “What about you, Helen?  Worldview?”

“I was hoping that being nice would get me another bit of dessert,” she said, looking in the general direction of the wait-staff.

“If you timed it differently, you might have,” I said.  “But there isn’t much behind the display.  Stuff is in the oven.  They’re short, so it’s hard to justify.  By the time the stuff comes out of the oven, they’ll be too busy, the comment will be mostly forgotten.”

“Dang it,” Helen said.

“Have to say, that’s not a worldview,” Jamie muttered.

“It is so,” Helen said, sounding offended.  “Ethics, morals?  Everyone acts in certain ways because it gets us things.  Some things are more basic than others.  People want to eat, they want shelter, they want to be around other people…”

Jamie and I nodded.  Helen was the most alien of us, and it was interesting to hear where she came from.

“We act a certain way because it gets us those things.  If we can’t act nice then nobody wants to give us those basics, like food.”

“You keep coming back to that,” Jamie murmured.  “Food.”

Jamie and Helen were at odds, in a way, now that I thought about it.

“We build up this image and it’s all based around getting what we want.  Everyone does it, they play along, and in a roundabout, complicated way, selfishness breeds connectedness,” she said.

I nodded.  Jamie leaned over.  “And your perfect world?”

“Mmm,” Helen smiled.  “Perfect is complicated.  Hard to explain.”

“Give it a shot,” I prodded her.

“It’s… beautiful is the best word to describe it,” she said.

Jamie and I nodded.

“Everything that isn’t necessary to getting what we want is gone,” she said, eyes closing, as if she was vividly imagining.  “There’s an abundance of it all, thanks to science.  Food is everywhere and it overflows and there’s nothing to worry about because we have and we want and we take.  We’re, and by we I mean people, we’re everywhere and we spill over into one another and we’re all knit together, physically and mentally.  It’s an exquisite landscape of things that don’t ever run out to see and touches and tastes and smells and mating and eating and mindless fighting and eating-mating and fighting-eating and fighting-”

“Okay,” I said, interrupting.  I paused, then when I couldn’t think of what to say. “Okay.”

Helen reached down to her plate, used a fingertip to wipe up a bit of frosting, and popped it into her mouth, sucking it off.

“Okay,” I said, still at a bit of a loss for words.

“That’s a mental image that’s going to be with me forever,” Jamie said, dropping his head down until his face was in his hands.

“I don’t see where ethics come into that world,” I said, more to see Jamie’s reaction than out of curiosity.

“No,” Jamie said.  “Don’t-”

“The closer you get to perfection, the further you get from ethics,” Helen said, as if it was common sense.

“Can we drop this?” Jamie asked.

“Sounds like something Ibott would say,” I commented.

“Um,” Jamie cut in, before Helen could answer, putting a hand over her mouth.  “Can we drop the topic?  Please?  I’m sorry I brought it up.  Let’s talk about the threats on our lives?  The others?”

I nodded.  “We can do that.  Mustn’t break our Jamie, right Hel?”

She nodded, and Jamie dropped his hand.  Helen smiled, leaned over, and gave Jamie a kiss on the cheek.  Jamie didn’t react, except to glare at me, as if I was somehow to blame.

“Alright,” I said, leaning back.  “Changing the subject for Jamie’s sake.”

“Won’t help.  I can’t forget it, as long as I live.”

With emphasis on the I, not live, the thought struck me.

Damn it, was my next thought.  Now I’m in a bad mood.

“Two of them.  They clearly operate as a unit.  One to flush us out, another to keep us moving.  I’m betting the one in the kitchen left and circled around so she could track us.  It’s a very Dog-and-Catcher vibe.”

“Hard to do in the rain,” Jamie said.  “She was sniffing.  The rain would make tracking us by smell harder.”

“But not impossible, depending,” I said.  “I’m going to assume it at least means she can’t track our trail all the way back to the others, because they wouldn’t be leaving us alive if she could.”

“Makes sense,” Jamie said.

“We’re not well equipped to fight, and I don’t like the knives the man had,” I said.  “If we get in a bad situation, we run, we try to bait them into a situation where we can turn the tables, or we run.”

“You said that twice,” Helen pointed out.

“I meant it twice.  Very important,” I said.  “If they know who we are, they know who Helen is.  The woman didn’t have a gun, and the man seems to prefer knives.  That suggests they prefer close quarters.”

“They had a very feral vibe,” Jamie said.  “He had a heavy forehead, brutish, she had the mouth, the sniffing, and the hair…”

“Yes.  Good, I like that line of thinking,” I said.

“If I can get my hands on one of them, I can probably win,” Helen said.  “I’d prefer no knives, because some people are double-jointed, but I can probably win.”

“Then we have a strategy,” I said.  “We’re going to leave, and we cut through the spaces between buildings.  I’ve done it a bit, I know the best shortcuts, we break away from them, bait them in, trap them if we can, sic Helen on them.”

“Woof,” Helen said.

“Trouble is if they move as a pair, or one comes to relieve the other.  You’ll have to work fast, Hel.”

She pouted a little.

“We need to find a means of communicating with the others.  Objects can hold trace smells, allowing the sniffing woman to find us.  That means our best bet is to use people.”

“People?” Helen asked.

“Messengers.  Ones that won’t have to go to them, specifically, and who can’t be effective witnesses.”

“That’s vague,” Jamie said.

“That’s my job.  But I need elbow room to do it.  That means putting a bit of space between us and them before I act.”

“Which is also good for our lifespans,” Jamie murmured.

I nodded.  “As for you, Jamie…”

“What can I do?”

“Information.  Anything you can figure out.  If we’re going to actively turn this around, instead of just dodging them, then we need to figure them out.  We should figure out the people with the scars and boils on their bodies, and we need to know who Cynthia is.  You’re our best bet at figuring this out, connecting the dots.”

Jamie leaned forward, arms folded on the table, and scooted his chair up.  “On that subject, you’ve reminded me, I think they’ve got a trump card.”

“In what sense?”

“My focus up until now has been on the strategy, the war overall, troops, who they’re sending, and where.  Ames was a good source of information, but they started giving different people different details,” Jamie said.  “Trying to catch us out by narrowing down the field.  I caught on to it when details didn’t add up.  They’re not scared enough, Sy.  Westmore is a half day away, fully occupied by the Academy, and the people in charge here aren’t spooked about it.  If you want to count stuff we should figure out and figure out soon, I’d put that on the list.”

“Is it possible the scarred people are the trump card?”

“Don’t know,” Jamie said.  “It didn’t look like it mattered, with Mary and Gordon placing the bugs, we were going to resolve the situation before anything happened.  Now that we’re in a tighter spot…”

“Yeah,” I said.  I looked out the window.

“Are we going, then?” Helen asked, weirdly insistent.

“It doesn’t look like they’re showing up.  I was hoping they’d turn up and try to pressure us, force a move.  Yeah, we’re going.”

“What would the plan be, if it came to that?” Jamie asked.

“Helen asks the waitress for help, we appeal to genuine human nature, duck out through the back,” I said.  “With this many people in here, we could lose them, because they can’t track us effectively with this crowd.  Buy ourselves a small head start.  If we could find the other one while we did it and keep an eye on them, we could see how they communicated.  Their dynamic, and so on.”

Jamie nodded.

Helen was already standing, and she reached for my plate, stacking it with hers and Jamie’s before gathering the silverware.  She gathered the teacups as well.

While Jamie got his backpack and slung it over one shoulder, she took the plates to the counter, placing them in the bucket that was over the sink.  She seemed too enthusiastic, bouncing in place, which was cause for me to watch her, even as Jamie and I headed for the door.

I saw her lean forward, talking to the server at the ovens.  The woman smiled, grabbed a cookie, and put it into a bag, before handing it to Helen.

She’d waited until the ovens were done before asking if we were going.

I looked at Jamie and rolled my eyes.  We’d slowed as we approached the cluster of men at the door.  Most had rifles, some had Exorcists, many had pistols as secondary weapons, or belts with canisters dangling from them.  Countermeasures against stitched and other experiments, I imagined.

I would have liked to grab the canisters, in hopes of getting something incendiary or something that might irritate the sniffing woman’s nose, but I wasn’t sure what the labels were supposed to mean, and I wasn’t sure how to unhook them.  Uncertainty was the spice of life, so to say, but people didn’t tend to use phrasings like that when referring to that which prolonged life expectancy.

Helen caught up at a skip and a run, throwing her arms out to catch us around the shoulders.  I was smaller, and I took the brunt of it.

My eye fell on one man in front of me.  Boots were common, but boots with a sidearm clipped to the one side-

I let myself fall onto my hands and knees, driving one shoulder into the man’s calf.

“Sorry!” I said.  “Sorry, sorry, sorry!”

I gave him my best ‘scared to death’ look, as he winced, backing away.  I clambered to my feet, accepting Helen’s assistance.

As we exited the tea shop, I raised my umbrella.

There was a figure on the roof of a tool shop, hood up, face barely visible.  By his frame, he was the man with the scarf.  I pretended I didn’t see him and gestured to the others, indicating a hard right turn.

Make it as hard for them to follow as we can.

I walked between Helen and Jamie, my eyes peeled.  When I was sure we weren’t being observed, I pulled the pistol from under my shirt and handed it to Jamie, slipping it into a large raincoat pocket.  He didn’t react, but he had to have felt the weight.

Better that he had a weapon than me, if it came down to it.  It wasn’t that I was a bad shot, but my tendency to overthink and self-sabotage in the process carried over to guns too.  I could hit eleven out of twelve bottles from the big tree behind the Orphanage, using one of Gordon’s practice guns, but Jamie had a better record than I did when it came to actually shooting anyone.  Reaction times could be better, but there were worse things.

Helen had a slim chance if it came down to a hand to hand fight.  Jamie could use a gun.

It meant I didn’t have to worry so much about them.

“One on the right is pursuing,” Jamie said.

“Noted,” I responded.  “How far away is she?”

“He,” Jamie said.  “The man from the upper floor in the banquet hall?”

He.

“There was one on the roof, opposite the front door of the tea house,” I said.  “Male.  We’re up against three.”

“Unless someone felt like spending some time on the roof,” Helen said, brightly.

“She brings up a good point.  It seems obvious,” Jamie said.  “Was he deliberately showing himself?”

Was he?

I frowned.  It could have been part of their plan.  Hang out in a spot where he wouldn’t be seen unless we were actively looking for people in unusual places.  If we changed course…

Damn it.  I’d expected two.  But they were herding us.  Closing the net.

“We can’t let them herd us,” I murmured.  “If we react to them, then we’re tipping them off.”

“If we don’t react to them, then we’re playing into their hands,” Jamie said.

“Yeah, well, they’re probably specialists when it comes to this,” I said.  “We need to change things up, adapt our plan.”

“How?” Jamie asked.

That’s a good question.

Give ourselves a headstart, pass a message to the others without getting caught, escape, reunite with the others.  In an ideal world, we’d be able to gather information on this new enemy, and still put Mary and Gordon’s plan into action.  Shipman’s weapon.  Disable Whitney and whatever trump card they had.

I felt Jamie’s hand on my arm tighten.  I wasn’t as fast to see what he saw, but it was a question of my being an inch or two shorter than him.

A man on the far side of the street, approaching.

He held his head at a strange angle, like his neck was broken, and a earlobes on already large ear dangled, a weight pinned to the bottom.  He had unkempt black hair, an unkempt beard, and strangely spaced out features on his face, as if someone had grabbed the back of his head and pulled, everything back out of the way, eyes to either side, mouth down, nose flattened and broadened.  He wore a soldier’s uniform, and he was weighed down with canisters.  A length of chain was wound his right wrist and hand, and something that looked like a lantern dangled from the end of that chain, nearly touching the ground by his right foot, with spikes radiating from it.

Plumes of something were puffing out from the end, as it swung in time with each step of his left foot.

My arm at my side, I reached over, tapping the gun in Jamie’s pocket.

The three of us walked, eyes forward, pretending not to have noticed.

As carts and carriages passed up and down the street, a group of people blocked our view of the man for a few long seconds.

When they moved out of the way, he was gone.  I felt Jamie’s grip tighten, but he wasn’t indicating anything in particular.

Just worry.

Helen reached for her bag and broke the cookie in half.  She broke one half into two quarters, and held them out for Jamie and I.

Jamie took his bit of cookie, letting go of my arm.

I saw the man walking in the midst of a group of woodcutters, his hair and beard almost camouflaged among theirs, only his features standing out, and only barely then.  Helen pushed the cookie at my mouth.  I opened up and accepted it.  The damn cookie was good, but I’d have to talk to her about things, after.

“Good cookie,” Helen said, as the man came to be about five paces away.  Four.  Three.  “I really like-”

She didn’t stop talking so much as segue.  Switching modes, fast enough it caught me off guard, let alone our assailant.  She ducked low, lunging at the man in the same instant he shoved the two men in front of him out of the way.  He had the smoking lantern thing in one hand, clutched with spikes radiating out between fingertips, and was already swinging for Helen’s face- except she wasn’t there anymore.

Jamie didn’t miss a beat.  He fired.

It was loud.  People screamed, and they scattered.  The lumberjacks around us backed away, ducking.

They realized we knew.  They communicate without words, just as well as we do.

Helen grabbed his arm, keeping it back and out of the way as he dropped to one knee.  Jamie fired again, placing each shot into the center of the man’s body mass, carefully enough to avoid hitting Helen and I.

Jamie was slow, he lagged behind the rest of the world as he processed and studied everything.  But with forewarning- well, he was keeping up.

A canister hanging off the man’s body took a bullet from Jamie’s gun and went spinning off.  Thick black-grey smoke expanded out in the middle of the street.

I turned my attention to the others.  Figuring out where the knife man and the one on the rooftop might have gone.  I spotted the knife man with the scarf, approaching at a run.

“Go,” I said.  “Nearest alley, go, go!”

Achieved what we needed to achieve, I thought.  Slowing them down, passing on word to the others.  When they heard that children had been involved in a gunfight, they’d know something was wrong.

It wasn’t elegant, but it was us.

Damn all the other parts of the plan.  It was worth nothing at all if the Lambs didn’t make it out okay.

The moment that thought was through my head, something struck me in the side, with surprising force.  It felt big, like I’d been kicked by an oversized horse.  My hand slipped from Jamie’s arm, and I felt Helen grab me, failing to stop me from falling belly first to the street.

“Sy!” Jamie called out.  “No, no!”

The two of them grabbed me, trying to help me stand.  I didn’t grasp why it was so hard, until I felt the pain in my side.  A burning point of light, deep inside, a small pain.

Helen made a noise, and shoved Jamie to the ground before ducking low.  Something struck the wall with a surprising crack.

I stared at the smoke in the middle of the street, at the pouring rain that had to have obscured the view.  So far away I hadn’t even heard the shot.

The man on the roof.  He shot me.

“Sy,” Jamie said.

Ow.  Oh man, it was really starting to hurt.

I found my feet with their help, I stumbled, and nearly fell again.  The two of them had me, almost dragging me.

Two of our slowest runners, and me with a bullet in my midsection.  The knife wielder was close.  We had the alley, and we hopefully had cover.

But we were surrounded, with one of them missing, no doubt waiting in the wings.  They had no reason not to call the local soldiers in and draw the net closed.

“If you don’t move faster, gunshot or no, I’m never speaking to you again,” Jamie said.

I couldn’t have Jamie refusing to speak to me.

No way, no how.

I did my best.

Esprit de Corpse – 5.5

I watched Helen and Gordon chatter, joining in now and again with a comment.  The topic was our etiquette and presentation class.  It still put me off, having known Helen for a few months, how she could switch from eerie deadpan to animated and normal, demonstrating the very subjects that Gordon was bringing up.  The two of us gave her tips, and she demonstrated each of them with an uncanny accuracy, shaping and refining her body language, tone, and overall presentation.

They were as different as night and day, at the fundamental level, human and inhuman, but they had still found a connection.

I realized we had a fourth member present.  The new kid.  Quiet.

“Have you had the class yet?” I asked him, to make conversation.

He shook his head, then raised a hand to push the glasses up his nose.

“They make us do it, so we can fit into more situations, and so we don’t embarrass Mr. Hayle, I think,” I said.

“Seems like Helen and Gordon took it to heart,” the boy said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “They know their stuff.”

“You don’t?  I’m still trying to figure everyone out.  I think I understand them, Gordon more than Helen, but she’s-“

“An experiment,” I finished.

He nodded, looking guilty for even saying it.

“To answer your question, I think they’re trying to decide if I should keep going or if I’m a lost cause.”

“Oh,” he said.

I cracked a smile.  “I’m more interested in the professors than anything.  They find really interesting people, four so far, and I’ve made it a challenge for myself to see how fast I can get under their skin.”

“I’m starting to get the picture,” he said.

I smiled wider.

“I still feel so lost,” he said.  “And I’m not catching up.  I sleep sixteen hours a day, I have more appointments than anyone, I have less time in class, less time with the rest of you, it’s not helping.  They say it’s going to get better, but…”

He trailed off.

“Whatever happens, we’ll help,” I said.  “We’ll understand.  Honest.”

He probably wasn’t aware how much doubt came across on his face.

There was something he wasn’t telling me.

“I’ll start,” I said, smiling.  “I’ve completely forgotten your name.”

“I’ve told you four times.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “What is it, again?”

“Jamie.”

“Jamie,” I said.  I closed my eyes and tried to commit it to memory.  “They tell me this will get better too, as they fix the dosages.  And it is.  But right now it sucks.  I know what it’s like to feel like you’re falling behind.”

“Speaking of,” he said, “I think I’m dozing off.  I can barely keep my eyes awake.  Those two talking is putting me under.”

“Then sleep,” I said.  “I don’t mind.”

“I’m afraid to sleep, sometimes,” he said, his voice soft, still watching them.  The sudden onset of fatigue was obvious.

“Why?”

“Sometimes, I fall asleep, and when I wake up, they’ve got me hooked up, and there’s nothing I can do before they throw the switch.”

I remembered the chair, the cloth-covered tanks.  I’d snooped.  I’d met Ashton and Evette, in a way.  I’d seen the aftermath, the labs where their remains were interred.  Evette dead before she even awoke, Ashton an effective abortion, left in a tank that now smelled of formaldehyde.  On bad days I’d slept on the floor in their rooms, or stayed up all night with them, talking to them, knowing they couldn’t ever respond.

That thought on my mind, I spoke without thinking, “Whatever happens, as long as I can help it, and I can help a lot of things, I will not let them do that again.  At the very least, I’ll wake you up before they take you.”

He smiled for the first time.  A real smile, anyway.  “You sound so serious.”

I reached out and took his hand, squeezing it hard enough that it made my own hand hurt.  When that wasn’t enough, I grabbed it with my other hand, squeezing his between the two of mine.  “I am.  I’m promising.”

“I owe you for one good nap, then,” he told me.

“You don’t owe me anything.  That’s not how we do this.”

“I stand corrected.”

“And that’s a promise that applies to every nap, every time you sleep.”

He frowned a little, eyes opening more as he studied me.

“We’re going to go live somewhere else starting this summer.  Until then, I know how to get out of my room.  I know where your room is.”

“It’s not that important.  You’ll get in trouble.”

“It is important,” I said.  “I’ve promised, and I can’t break my first ever promise to you.  Not when we’re all going to be together for the rest of our lives.”

He nodded slowly.  I thought for a second that he was nodding off.

“Who were you, before?” he asked me.

“Before all this?  Don’t remember.”

“I can’t imagine that.  Isn’t it scary, not knowing?”

“I found my file, I read it.  I know they didn’t expect me to look for it, so I don’t think it was a trick,” I said.  “I wasn’t anybody special.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

I shot him a look.  “That line is so lame.  Oh, I don’t even have words-“

“Stop.”

“So lame!”

He gave me a light push.

“Unforgivably lame!”

He pushed me harder.  I nearly fell from the edge of the table I was sitting on.

I settled down, still laughing, dragging my fingers down one side of my face.  Gordon and Helen were staring now, but I hadn’t distracted them sufficiently to break the stride of their conversation.

“What can I do for you?” he asked me.

“Never say-“

“Forget what I said!  Really.  What can I do?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“It’s okay if you can’t do what you said.  I’ll understand-“

“-I’ll do it.  I promised.”

“Then I want to know what I can do to help you.  I’m going to find a way to help you, Sylvester.”

I shrugged, shaking my head.

“Nothing bothers you?  Nowhere you need help?  When I first met Gordon, he said you have a hard time after your appointments?”

“Oh, did he?  Yeah, I guess.”

“Why?”

“It hurts,” I said.  “It hurts so much it makes me feel like there’s nothing else.  After, I feel like less of a person.  More like I’m a piece of metal, thrust into the fire, over and over.”

“And they’re hammering you into shape?”

“No,” I confessed.  “Mostly, I get to hold the hammer.  There’s that, at least.”

He was nodding off, now.  Slumping forward.

I could see the ridged scar running up from the collar of his shirt to the nape of his neck.  His head had been shaved for the last surgery.  It was still so short that I could see his scalp.

“Wish I could help, somehow,” he murmured.  I gave his shoulder a push, and he roused enough to shift position, leaning back against the wall, the ends of each leg dangling off the edge of the table.

“Nothing you can do to help,” I said.  I didn’t speak my thoughts aloud.  Except maybe talk.  Beats talking to Ashton or Evette, at least.

He was already out.  He’d fought it and lost.

Now it was more like talking to Ashton.  I murmured to myself, “It’s up to me.  I’ve got to get used to it somehow, make friends with the pain.”

☙

I nearly fell as the other two urged me through the door.  Jamie let go of me to close the door, very softly, and Helen wasn’t strong enough to hold me up.  She did what she could to ease my collapse to the floor.

Pain.  I’d thought I’d achieved a serious tolerance to it over the years, but the very real imagery suggested a lapse.  I’d nearly passed out, drifting into memories.

Was this what it meant to see my life flashing before my eyes?  It was as good a starting point as anything else.  I didn’t have many memories of things that came before.  Some games with Helen and Gordon, some antics after I broke out of my room, time with Evette and Ashton.  Less meaningful things.

“You with us, Sy?” Jamie asked.

“Yup,” I said, putting all my effort into sounding casual as I let my head sink back to the floor.  I was in a kitchen, I realized.  Checkered drapes at the window.

The small pinpoint of pain had spread and expanded until it felt like my stomach was three times the size, filled with agony.  It wasn’t swollen, though.  It was a regular, too-skinny tummy with a hole in it and a lot of blood leaking around it, into my shirt and the top of my pants.  I had blood that had dripped around the side of my body and into my butt crack.

This kind of agony was something I was used to, though it limited how I could move and pull my thoughts together.  Blood in my butt crack somehow drove the point home better than my life flashing before my eyes.  It was a signal that things were horribly, horribly wrong.

People should never ever have blood in their buttcrack.

“They’re close,” Helen said.

“I know,” Jamie replied.  He stared down at me.  “I’m going to find a way to help you, Sy.”

I nodded.  I winced as I inhaled and swallowed at the same time and that somehow made the wrong thing move, touching on the area where I’d been shot.  “We should go.”

“We should,” Jamie said, “But we need to stop the bleeding, at the very least.”

“Need Lillian, but she’s too far away,” I said.  I blinked with more force than was needed, because I didn’t want to have my eyes close and stay closed.

A very deep, male voice cut in, “Who’s Lillian, and what the hell are you doing?”

I saw Jamie go limp, his head bowing.  Defeat.

Helen, of course, was Helen.  I looked over in the direction she was staring, and I saw a man in the doorway of the kitchen, a wife and child behind him, staring.

I looked back to Helen, and tears were falling down her cheeks.  Crying on command.

I met Jamie’s eyes, then spoke, “The Academy’s attacking.”

I watched the expression on the man and woman’s faces.  The wide eyes of the child, who was young enough to be of indeterminate gender.  The man was young.  He’d probably had the child in or just after his teens.  He was like an older Gordon, if Gordon had a weak chin.  His expression changed as he wrestled with fear and trying to summon his courage.

He only needed a push.

“Help me,” I said.  My ability to almost take the pain in stride made it more difficult to find the piteous tone I needed.

He rushed to my side, twisted around, and told his wife, “The kit!  It’s under the sink!”

The woman took the little kid with her as she left.  Hopefully to get the ‘kit’.

“They attacked in the street,” Jamie said.  “You heard the gunshots?”

The man nodded.  “We were looking out the window at the other side of the house.”

I spoke, wincing as I did, “They looked like the resistance members.  Black coats, black shirts, those rifles-“

“Exorcists,” Jamie said.

“I saw one standing there.  His face changed, eyes and nose and mouth and ears going all wonky,” I said.  “Then he saw that I’d seen him, he shouted something, a signal, and then he shot me, before he started shooting at the crowd.”

Tension lines stood out in the man’s face and neck.  He didn’t move his eyes from the bloody hands that were pressing down on my wound.  It damn well hurt, but I could push through the pain, I could find the presence of mind to lie.

Might as well foster paranoia and propaganda while I’m lying here bleeding.

“They looked normal?”

“Yes,” Helen said, still crying.  “It scared me.”

The man didn’t budge.  I could imagine he was processing, trying to grasp the situation, and what the course of action should be.

His wife came down, with a large kit and no child trailing behind.

“I don’t know what to do,” the man said.

“I do,” Jamie said.

He did?

I watched as Jamie opened the kit.  I could see the label on the lid.  It was the sign of some Academy or another, ironically enough.  A full kit for medics.  Many had been sold to the public after the last war.  By the time another war rolled around -this one, as it happened- there would be better kits, with better tools and components.

He moved with a quiet assuredness as he picked through the various things.  I watched him, periodically blinking with more force than was necessary, breathing shallow breaths to keep my stomach from hurting.  He gathered special pliers and a long syringe with two handles, powders, and metal clamps.

He met my eyes, and there was an awful lot communicated in that look.

Among them was an unspoken agreement.

Had I let slip that he was trying to figure out Latin, after our little trip down to the Dungeons with Sub Rosa, Jamie would have gotten in serious trouble.

This was something else entirely.

“Never done this before,” he murmured.

“You said-” the man of the house started.

“My dad is a doctor,” Jamie lied.  Then he told the truth, saying, “I’ve watched and learned.”

“If you’re not sure-“

“I’m sure,” Jamie lied, again.  He lied for a third time as he said, “I was talked through procedures worse than this.”

You’ve seen, you remember, you piece it together, I thought.

“The powder smells different,” Jamie said.

“Could be old,” the man said.

Jamie made a face, then tossed the powder.  He rifled through the kit until he found a liquid, instead.  He set a match on my chest.

“Uh,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said.  “Going to have to do it like it’s done on the battlefield.”

“You’ve never seen a battlefield, you butt!”

“I’ve heard,” he said.  He didn’t respond to the insult.  I realized how scared he was.

The problem with this piecemeal knowledge.  He knew the moves he needed to make, but he didn’t have a foundation.  One day, all going according to plan, he could have that foundation.  He couldn’t trust a medicine that smelled different.  But that he could even figure out the right tools, that he was this far along, and he’d kept it a secret?

The Academy couldn’t know.  We were forbidden.

The man moved his hands.  Jamie took the scalpel to my injury, opening it up enough for the pliers to go in.

He looked so terrified I couldn’t bear to look at him.  My head dropped to the floor, and I reached out to pat his knee, grunting and gasping now and then as the pliers moved.  A small sound escaped my throat as I held my breath.

“Isn’t there something you can give him?” the man asked.

“No,” I said, a moment before Jamie said, “No.”

“But-“

“There!” I jumped in, and the volume and suddenness with which I’d spoken made the pain explode through my abdomen.  I groaned, long and loud, clenching my fist and squeezing Jamie’s knee hard, making little sounds with every pant.

“Easy,” Helen said.  She gave my forehead a pat, and pushed hair out of my eyes.  It was sweaty, and stayed out of the way.

“Talk to me,” Jamie said.  “I’m not good enough to find it on my own.”

The man spoke up, “You can’t possibly-“

“Close,” I said.  “No, other direction.”

“I feel it.”

He found it, he got a grip on it, locked the pliers’ grip, and he pulled the modified pliers free, a bullet the size of a grape held in the prongs.

I wasn’t privy to the particulars of the clean up job, but he dumped the contents of the bottle in, daubed it around with a swab to get the parts the match couldn’t reach, then seared the bleedy bits with the match.

“Now I’m hungry,” I murmured, as I smelled the seared flesh.

“But we just ate,” Helen said.  “We had treats!”

“I was joking.”

She gave me a disapproving look.  The tears had dried up, and she was smiling a little.  All an act, of course.

He glued me together and closed me up, using the clamps to hold things in place until the glue could set.

“I’m not sure how much blood you’ve already lost,” Jamie said.  “There’s no aqua nucifera, and I wouldn’t trust it if there was.”

I nodded.

“Don’t move too quickly,” he said.  “You’re going to be weak.”

“Like that’s anything new,’ I said.

He put the tools aside, leaving a bit of a mess.  The man looked a little concerned, as if things didn’t add up, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

Helen gave me a hand in getting to my feet.  The man and Jamie moved to the kitchen sink to wash their hands.

I still had blood in my butt crack.  I probably looked like a wreck.

“There haven’t been more gunshots,” the man observed.

“There was one with a knife,” I said.  “One with claws, and one with some weapon on a chain.”

“A censer,” Jamie said, looking over at me.

I gestured for him to ease up a bit.  I saw him nod.

Riding a high.  He did what he wasn’t supposed to do, he even succeeded and saved me, hopefully.  Whatever special kind of person Jamie might’ve been, he was still a person.  He got a rush of adrenaline from a success like that.

It didn’t show that much, though.  Jamie was quiet and reserved at the best of times.  He cleaned himself up, leaving his sleeves still rolled up, and grabbed his bag.

“I should go,” the man said.  He turned to his wife.  “If we’re under attack, I need to do something.”

“But-”

“They attacked a child,” he said.  “If we’d been out instead of here with Edmund-”

She nodded, spooked.

I let the drama play out while I gently prodded my stomach.  I pulled clothing back into place, wincing at the pain, took a cloth from beside the sink and began to wipe at my shirt where it was all bloody.  Jamie handed me my jacket, then helped me pull it on.

I was well and truly ready to take something for the pain now, now that Jamie didn’t need help to find his way to the bullet.

The man went to a cabinet, and came back with a gun.  He took a moment to put it together, checking for various components, most definitely not a person with more than a few hours of practice, and then gave his wife a kiss.

“Be healthy,” he told me, “Thank you for the warning about the attacks.  Will you look after my wife?”

“Of course,” Jamie said.

“Good man,” the soldier said.

“Sir!” I cut in, before he could head out, gun in hand.  He paused, and I told him, “Warn others.”

He nodded, then headed out the door.

I pointed, and the others nodded.  As the wife stepped over to the door to lock it, peering out the window to watch her husband, we headed out the front door.

There was nowhere to go but forward and out.  The residential road had people gathered in clusters, talking, and we used them for cover, watching.

“Stop,” Helen said, but it was less the order and more than fact that she grabbed us and hauled us back that stopped us.  Breaking our forward momentum.  I jerked, and my stomach clenched inadvertently.  I bit back a gasp of pain.

The crack marked a bullet striking something hard.  I didn’t see where.

“Go!”  I called out, “Go, go!”

We hurried as much as we were able, with me hurting and sucking at everything.  An alley offered cover from the gunshots.

They had a gunman that could see well enough through the rain to target us.  He was sharp enough to notice us just moments after we’d emerged from the house.

“Jamie,” I said.  “Where is he?”

“Don’t know.”

“You know where he was?  First shot?  The one that hit me?”

“Some idea.”

“And the shot just now?”

“Less that I know where he was, more… I can eliminate possibilities.”

“Eliminate,” I said.  We hurried down the alleyway.  There were people there, more clusters.  I studied each group, watching for potential trouble.

The others had to have heard about the gunshot.  They’d look after Lillian, if Lillian was even in danger.  She was well camouflaged.  Short of them killing every child in the town of Whitney… which wasn’t impossible…

“Fuck,” I said.

“Are you okay?” Jamie asked.

“Not that,” I said.  I knew my voice sounded more tense than it usually did.  “We’re stuck.”

“We’ve been stuck before.”

“We need to get out, rendezvous with the others.  We can’t do that without stepping into an open area.  If we stay put, the other two might track us down.”

The rain was coming down harder now.  I wasn’t quite able to hope that it was making life harder on our enemies.

“If we think about the things that make them stand out,” I murmured, “Nose, eyes, the guy with the scarf might just be fingers, touch, and the guy Jamie shot is probably ears.”

“Was,” Helen said.  “Past tense.”

“I’m not willing to bet anything,” I said.  “There might be a fifth, taste, and I’m going to assume the one Jamie shot is alive until we see him dismantled on some Academy autopsy table.”

“Five,” Jamie said.

“There are more than five senses,” Helen said.  “Balance, sense of one’s own physical state…”

“It’s possible,” I said.  “But these buttheads aren’t even supposed to have three pieces of work this good, let alone four or five.  Experienced soldiers, each with custom modifications?”

“Academy work,” Jamie said.

“Traitors,’ Helen said.

I nodded slowly.  “That changes things.  I don’t feel so good about Helen going after one.”

“I can do it,” Helen said.

“Probably.  And you’re going to have to,” I said.  “But I don’t feel good about it.”

She nodded.  She was holding herself in a way that I was pretty sure was Helen for ‘anticipation’.  Her expression was still normal, smiling, but her body was ready for the attack.

“Let’s head in Lillian’s general direction,” I said.  “In case the others can’t cover her.  And because it’s the direction they’re liable to be going in.  We assess the situation, then we go in.  If we spot one, we bait.”

The two nodded.

We moved.

Through winding alleys, awareness of our surroundings pitched to a painful degree.  I wasn’t at my best, and I was focusing my thoughts and my own un-altered senses on every gap, readying myself for an attack at any moment, knowing it was futile even if I was fast enough to react.

We paused at a pile of debris, while Jamie turned his attention to figuring out a plan that worked, then went down a side-alley.  The street was packed with soldiers.  Another side alley was mostly empty, wagons that were usually there now cleared away.  No cover to hide behind.

As we returned to the four-way intersection, the woman appeared.

Helen indicated, and the three of us crawled into a space beneath a house, belly deep in mud.  I used one hand to hold Jamie’s raincoat down over the injury so it wouldn’t get too dirty.

We were as good as caught.  She had the ability to smell.

I signaled.  We collectively abandoned our attempt at staying silent, and crawled for the other side of the space.  The floor above us scraped our shoulderblades as the ground rose to meet it.  Jamie squirmed out of his backpack.

“Children,” the woman spoke, from just in front of us.

She’d circled around.  She could do it again, as fast as we could crawl.

“You killed Phlegm,” she called out to us.  “My brother.”

Jamie reacted to the name.  He’d connected two dots.

He didn’t seem to have a ready answer.

“I have his belt,” the woman said.

The cans of gas.

Esprit de Corpse – 5.6

The only sound was the rain coming down, and the periodic sucking noise of mud as Helen, Jamie or I shifted position.

“You have the canisters Mr. Phlegm had on his belt,” Jamie said.

“Not my preferred weapon,” the woman said.  “But it’s somehow poetic that Phlegm might get a last laugh.  Not that he is the laughing type.  Was.”

She made a noise like she was spitting.

Also poetic, all things considered.

I swallowed, then spoke.  My side was still hurting like nothing else, even after being patched up, and my voice faltered at the start, the strength to get the air past my lips not there when I reached for it.  “What’s your name?”

“Not telling,” she said.  “Goodbye.”

“Wait!” I said, raising my voice.  My stomach rewarded me by cramping up in new sorts of pain, clutching like a fist around all the hurt.

She didn’t use the canister.

To my left, Helen crawled forward, not with her arms and legs, but fingers and feet, pushing and pulling herself by painstaking half-inches, periodically reaching up to grab onto the roof and use that to slide herself forward.  The lack of speed was balanced by the fact that she was nearly silent.  I was right next to her and even I couldn’t hear her raincoat scrape against small stones and mud.

She’d been wearing a nice dress for the event.  Now it was ruined.  What a shame.

“We used to be on the same side, didn’t we?” I asked.

“I’m not the laughing type either, little boy, especially not with Phlegm dead,” the woman said.  “You’re wasting my time if you’re making jokes.”

“You were Academy,” I said, not because I knew, but because I had no choice but to follow the same track.  I couldn’t change the subject without her deciding I was stalling and deciding to off us.  Or whatever that canister did.

“Yes.  But that’s different from what you said before,” she said.

I noticed how she was walking.  She was lingering more at the places where posts held the house up off the ground, which kept her out of sight and protected her ankles from any further gunshots.

Not stupid.

“We’re related,” I said.  “We’re family.  We’re experiments, we’re conn-”

She cut me off.  “We’re alone, little boy.  Everyone is.  The act of being born is a separation, so is dying.  For experiments more than anything else.  At least they get to have doctors use sterile scissors to snip their connection to their mother, after they’re squeezed out into the world, covered in blood and landing in shit.  Us, we’re made, or we’re born like they are and then we’re reborn on a table or in a vat.”

“That’s an experience we share, it’s-”

“It creates a gulf between us.  You can pretend to have some greater connection to the world, but that’s a child’s fantasy.  We’re as different from them as a cat is from a dog, at least.  Compare a cat to a dog and a dog to a lizard and you’re not going to find a connection between the cat and the lizard.  They’re a social species, but we’re all species of one, or of two, or of four.”

Helen, our lizard, crawled forward.  She was crawling across from me, now, her body in front of my face.

“A year and nine days ago, our species of four added one more to our ranks.  In the next couple of years, we’re going to have a sixth.”

“Twelve days,” Jamie murmured.  “A year and twelve days.”

“Shut up,” I whispered.  Louder, I said,  “Listen, I think we’re similar in how we approach the world.  The differences, the focus on the team, even if my idea of what the ‘team’ is happens to be different-”

“One of my colleagues, you’ve crossed paths with him, he keeps a tiny black notebook filled with tickmarks, you know.  He counts the number of times people try the ‘we’re the same’ line on him.  A different line or phrase or word for every page.”

Drat.

“I’m betting he has whole pages dedicated to ‘please!’ or ‘god, no!’,” I remarked.

She was silent.

“Was I on target?” I tried.  Her being silent and taking time before she offed us was fantastic, but talking and hurrying things along was better than three seconds of silence followed by her deciding to kill us.

“No,” she said.  “Not quite.  You made me think of Phlegm.”

Double damn and dang-blast it.  The thought crossed my mind, but I held the emotion at bay.  My focus was on her and on our conversation.

“Alone,” she said.

“If you’re alone, it’s by your own choice, your own way of looking at things.”

“I’m more alone than I was since you killed my partner,” she said.  There was a pause.  “I’m done entertaining you.”

Helen was a few feet away.  She wasn’t picking up speed, even with that announcement.  Still the slithering crawl through the mud.  She had to be getting it in her mouth, her nose, even with her lips closed, but she was calm, glacially slow, and eerily focused.

We had one option.  It was one I hated to use.

“You can’t afford to take the time to do that,” I said.

I heard something snap or crack from the woman’s direction.  My hopes that she’d been attacked were dashed when she shifted her footing.  She was getting something from the belt.

“In less than an hour, you’re going to need all of the cans you can get,” I told her.  “All of the bullets too.”

I’m sorry, Gordon, Mary, I thought.

“That so?”

“The reason we went to go pick up our girl here was because we’re done.  The traps are placed, boxes under half the houses in Whitney.  Soon, really soon, the things occupying the box are going to wake up.  The city falls, and if you’re here, if your buddies are here, then you get to watch them die, maybe, and then you die alone.”

“Assuming you’re telling the truth, what’s in the boxes?” she asked.

“I think they started with spiders,” I said.

Jamie added, “But, like you said, they’re as comparable to spiders as cats are to dogs.”

There was a pause.

“Look under the house on the other side of the alley,” I said.  “Chances are pretty good.”

Between the rain, the distance, and the lack of lighting, I couldn’t see under the house across the little alley.

The chances weren’t good at all.  My heart pounded.

Helen crept further.  She was about a foot from being able to lunge for the woman’s ankles.  A crocodile in the mud, with styled hair, at least to a point.  It was thick with muck after a certain length.

The angle of the woman’s legs changed.  She was looking.

“Hm,” she said.  Noncommittal.  Leaving me in the dark.

“Those cans, whatever they are, they’re bound to be helpful.  If you don’t want to grab your buddies and get out of dodge.”

“No, not at all,” she said.  “I’ve decided I can spare one of these.”

She shifted her stance, and I tensed.

Helen reached, lunging.

The woman was quick, and Helen was forced to change her target.  One of Helen’s hands reached out for the woman’s, a metal can already smoking in her pale grip.  When the can went airborne, the wrist Helen was reaching for now disappearing, Helen shifter her weight, reaching up and out with her other hand.

She slapped the can down, and Jamie lunged, bringing his backpack down on top of the thing.

The smoke was still rising.  The mud bubbled, and when the bubbles popped, a yellow-green smoke rose.

“Out,” I said, “Out!”

Right into her waiting clutches.

I wasn’t wholly right, but I wasn’t wrong either.

She was waiting, but she wasn’t clutching.  She’d covered a lot of ground without her feet being visible as I crawled.  Agile.  She’d walked or leaped off of the side of the building, or stepped on the tops of the posts.  Now she faced us, the belt held in both hands.  She was ready to step around the corner at a moment’s notice.  Still wary of the gun that had downed Phlegm.

She raised the belt to her mouth, and she bared her teeth.  Muscles stood out in strange places as she bit clean through the thick leather of the belt.  She brought her hands together, and flung one end of it at us.  Three or four canisters were hooked to it, and all were smoking.  She’d grabbed the keys with one hand and pulled them out as she threw with the other.

I didn’t want to know how good Phlegm had been with this crap, if his sister here was this quick on the draw.

The belt flew through the air, plumes following it, and it was Helen who stepped forward to catch it.

Our Helen tried to throw it back and failed.

It took a few seconds, as Helen tried to fling the belt and failed to remove it.  I could see it in how her hair moved, the sheen that appeared on her raincoat, scintillating points of light, rainbow hued, like some chemicals made in water, but the droplets were small and clustered together.  Whatever it was, it had made the belt and canisters sticky, and was doing the same thing to Helen’s skin, her hair, and her raincoat.

The woman with the belt stared at us, watching as Helen flailed, almost invisible in the midst of the multicolored smoke.  Each little canister was something different.

Helen made a frustrated sound, stumbling and falling to one knee in the mud.  The woman turned and left, disappearing around the corner.

Helen.

I took a step forward.  Jamie’s hand blocked me.

“We have to-” I started, my tone much more like a child’s than I normally liked.

“Tell me what to do,” he said.  He was already striding forward.  “You’re too slow like that.”

“Her coat,” I said.  “Pull it over her head.”

Jamie was muddy, and he’d given me his raincoat.  He was wearing the white shirt, but it was soaked through.  I could see the scars, and I could see his narrow chest expand as he drew in a breath, prior to entering the cloud.

“Use the coat to grab the belt,” I said.  I couldn’t see him anymore, and I couldn’t see her.

Jamie would use the coat, he would pull it away-

Then what?  It would be stuck to him, or stuck to Helen.

I turned, looking.  The street was empty, people had fled the initial gunshots.

“Then come to me!” I called, still searching.  “As fast as you can!”

The umbrella-

Jamie had left it behind, while crawling through the mud.

Something else.

A thin bit of wood framed the bottom of the nearest building, so it didn’t just end, but had some decorative flair, even if it was a strip of painted wood, an inch and a half across.

I braced myself, knowing how much this would suck.

Kicking the little strip of wood was painful enough that I nearly forgot what I was doing.  My focus was dashed, I very nearly threw up, and only managed to stop with the realization that throwing up would make my stomach hurt more.  It was a primal realization, one that reached all the way to my reptile brain, that little bundle of instincts and impulses.  Through that mechanism, I managed to keep myself from heaving my meager breakfast and bit of apple onto the muddy span between the two buildings.

I found myself staring at the wood, still affixed to the wall.  Maybe looser than it had been.

I thought of Ashton.  I thought of Evette.  My promise to Jamie, to guard him while he slept, which I’d kept up since I’d met him, and I thought of that horrible calm that had overcome me when I’d been in Sub Rosa’s clutches.

Calm, away from the noise, away from the expectations and the people and the demands.

It was, much as the sniffing woman had said, a very alone sort of calm.

I made myself kick again.

The agony in my middle was worse, but somehow I found it easier to deal with.

Pain punctuated my existence.  I threw myself into danger.  I got hurt for the others.  I had pain inflicted on my body and mind on a rote schedule, with checkmarks on paper and doctor’s signatures.

Pain was only pain.  Pain meant I was alive.

Another kick.  This time something came free.

Jamie was stumbling toward me.  Apparently blind, his skin raw and bleeding, clothes crumpled and stiff, he had the bundle of raincoat, which was still billowing with gas.

I grabbed the strip of wood and heaved.  I landed on my ass, but with a spear of wood in my hand.  Seeing Jamie suffering lit a fire in me, and I found it in me to swing the end of my spear at Jamie and catch the bundle of raincoat and canisters.

It didn’t take much doing to knock Jamie to the ground, pushing with the spear as I found my feet.  He almost willingly went, as if the strength was gone from him.

“Stand,” I said, still sounding far too young.  No confidence, no bravado.  “Jamie.”

He struggled, and I gave my all to simply pinning the bundle down, my face and head turned away so my hood might delay the moment when that growing cloud of smoke reached my face.

He found his feet, but couldn’t let go of the bundle.  He tugged, pulled, but didn’t have the strength or the range of movement to break the bond.

“Break free,” I said.  “I’ve got it pinned down, just- please, Jamie.”

Again, he tried.  Again, he failed.

It was Helen who came down the alleyway, stumbling at a running pace, more or less blind by definition herself.  She had her arms out to either side, bridging much of the alleyway.  She caught Jamie in the crook of one arm, embraced him, tackling him, and tore him away from the bundle.  The skin of his hands was left behind, I suspected.

The two of them landed dangerously close to the opening of the alley.  I thought of the gunman, perched on a building.

I heaved my bundle-on-a-stick, only to have my stomach nearly give out.  I switched my grip and swung instead of bringing it up.  It wasn’t too heavy, only unwieldy, and I managed to toss it out into the street, off to one side.

The gas continued to billow.  I could only hope it would break the man’s line of sight.

Jamie and Helen were mostly blind, though Jamie a little less than Helen, thanks to his glasses, and both of them were blistered and bleeding, though Helen had gotten the better end of the deal, despite far more exposure.  Her skin wasn’t really skin, I supposed.

I watched them, saw them lying there, then looked at the cloud of smoke.

My stomach was bleeding, I could feel it at my shirtfront.  I’d need more medical care.

Still, I went under the building.  I checked that the first canister wasn’t producing any more gas, then collected Jamie’s bag.

His book.  It was important.

As I crawled forward, pausing before I tried to find the strength to stand, I looked under the house opposite.

Mary’s box wasn’t there.  There was something that might have been a toolbox or a tackle box at the far corner.

It had been enough to convince her.  She was on her way to warn the others, to make alternate plans.

Gordon and Mary were going to be upset.

“Come on, you two,” I said.  My voice felt too light and feathery, mingled worry and relief.  “We can’t afford to laze around.”

Jamie pulled his lips open, and the skin bled where the lips had bonded together, the airborne resin or whatever had collected there, as well as on his eyes and in his hair.  “You’re a jackass.”

I’m a jackass with a gunshot wound.  I’m allowed to be flippant,” I said.  “But seriously, we can’t waste time.”

He nodded.  I handed him his bag, which he felt around until he had the shape of it.  After he clung it to his chest, I grabbed the straps and hauled.  I’d already re-opened my wound, I couldn’t make it worse, right?

Helen found her feet on her own, one hand on the side of the building.

With only the hope that the gas would block the gunman’s view of us, or that he was busy relocating to another perch, I led the others into the street.  Helen could hear the gunshots, the sound apparently traveling faster than the bullets did, but I wasn’t so lucky.

Haggard, hurting, and lost, we made our way to Lillian’s.

“She had an influence on you,” Jamie said.

I thought about joking, remarking on the sniffing woman.

But Jamie wasn’t talking about the sniffing woman.  Jamie was talking about the ploy I’d used to try and buy us time.

“Doesn’t everyone?” I asked.

He made a sound that might have been a laugh, but came out more as a heavier breath.  He coughed.

“You didn’t breathe that shit in, did you?”

“No,” he said.

“No,” Helen said.

“I know you didn’t,” I told her.  I saw her give me a smile, and it was odd to see her actually face the right direction as she did it.  Good ears.

“One day,” Helen said, “You’re going to make a girl very miserable.”

“Well we all knew that already,” I said.  “Not sure why you’re bringing that up now.”

“Not you-you,” she said.  “You two.”

I looked at Jamie, a part of me expecting to exchange a shared glance, except he was blind.  It sucked a little, driving the situation home.

“Don’t give a girl any hope if you can’t put her before Jamie,” Helen said.  “As you are right now, I don’t think you can.”

“You’re bleeding in fifty different ways, you’re blind, and you’re judging me?” I asked.

“Always,” Jamie said.  He laughed a little, then coughed again, harder.  “Always judging you.”

I didn’t like that cough.

Without Jamie’s eyes, I was left to do all of the looking out on my own, while making sure I was leading them properly, Jamie holding on to the raincoat at one elbow, and Helen holding on to my other forearm.  Another chance encounter with any of Phlegm’s buddies might not go so well.

“It’s a good thing I don’t like girls then,” I mused, trying to take my mind off of the open wound in my side, the danger, and the others.

“You do,” Jamie said.

“Yes,” Helen said.

“Right.  You know me better than I know myself?”

“We do.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to leave you guys behind if you keep that up.  Besides, there aren’t any girls out there for me.  Gordon can do the thing with Shipman, but-”

“There’s Mary,” Jamie said, quiet.  “Lillian too.”

“Lillian isn’t one of us.  Well, she is, but she isn’t.  She-”

“She what?” Helen asked.

“Doesn’t seem fair, or real?  Real’s not the word, but expecting a girl to like me, when I’m not guaranteed to live that long.”

There was no response.  Jamie and Helen were silent.  The rain was washing away the thin trickles of blood where the skin had been eaten away or had blistered and the resin had pulled on the blisters to open them, and diluting the mud, so it slid off in handfuls.  Their clothing was being stained, where the mud hadn’t already caked it and turned it a dark brown-black.

I turned around, and moved my elbow accidentally, leading Helen to think I was turning.  She stumbled a bit.  I couldn’t see any buildings through the downpour, now, which I hoped was cause to believe that the gunman couldn’t see us, over the top of the cloud of smoke.

“You’re too nice a guy, Sy,” Jamie said, finally.

It was dark, wet, and cold, the rain was an outright storm, now, and the clusters of people were hard to make out.  Each one we approached had the potential to be a threat.  We were far enough away from where the gunshots had been that people weren’t actively hiding or fleeing, but close enough that they were concerned, huddling, trying to puzzle out the situation.

Heads turned.  People started to approach.

It was more harm than good, potentially.  If people crowded around us, the man with the scarf could slip in close, use one of those knives…

“Stay away,” I said, as they got closer.  “Don’t touch them.  Don’t touch me.”

Then I said the magic word.

“Disease.”

The word repeated itself through the crowd.

The way opened before us.

“We’ve been told where to go,” I said.  I kept talking only because we couldn’t afford questions.  “Rebellion members turned on each other, or they’re Academy plants, or there’s a parasite, I don’t know.  But Whitney is under attack.  Spread the word.”

Phobos and Deimos.  Fear and Panic.

Nebulous ideas, nothing certain.

But a point that was driven home with a few key words, and the imagery of small children, hurt, bleeding, and impossible to help.

Lillian wasn’t so impossibly far away, but we were moving so slowly.

As it turned out, we didn’t need to get that far.

Gordon, Mary, Lillian, and Shipman all appeared, a distance down the street.  They picked up speed, approaching.

The looks on their faces.  It was a fluttery, uncertain expression, much as my voice had been earlier.

“We’ve been discovered,” I said.  “They know, they sent assassins, three or four left.  We can’t stay.”

“We’re not done,” Shipman said.

“We’re done,” I said, my voice low.

“Are you okay?” Lillian asked, cutting in.

“Not very, gunshot,” I said.  “They’re bad too.  They need help.  Three gases, from one of the assassins.  Glue, don’t touch them, something flesh-eating, definitely don’t touch them, and a third.  Might be poison.  Jamie’s coughing.”

“Because blood keeps dripping down the back of my throat from my nose,” Jamie said.

“They need help,” Lillian agreed.

“Coach,” Gordon said.  “There was one-”

He stopped, craning his head.  “Come on!”

We moved as fast as we were able, but at least I was able to let the others look after Jamie and Helen, while I stumbled along on my lonesome.

Gordon was talking to a coach driver.  As we approached, the man opened the side door.

As a group, we climbed inside.

“Hospital it is,” the man said, before closing the door.  The latch clicked.

“How do we activate your project?” I asked.

“We’re not,” Shipman said.  “It’s too early.”

“You were supposed to be nearly done.”

“We are,” the sourpuss told me.  “But for this to work, we need to reach a certain critical point.  We gauged how fast their response time would be, their resources here, the scientists in the area.  If we start it too early, they’ll be able to counteract it before it becomes a real issue.  It’s too early.”

“The other side of it,” Gordon said, his voice level, “Is that we were supposed to signal the Academy, so they could time the activation with an attack.  Something clean and simple, while they can’t put up a fight.”

“Minimum deaths,” Shipman said.

Minimum deaths.  She cared about that sort of thing?

Surprising.  I hadn’t expected that to be one of her priorities.

“Mm,” Jamie murmured.  He pulled his lips apart slowly, but there was still tearing and bleeding.  Lillian was rummaging in her bag, trying to find things.

“What is it?” Mary asked.

“We’re approaching turn toward hospital.  Sy’s right.  We can’t stay.”

“Which way is the turn?” Mary asked, turning to try and look through the front window, which as barely the size of an envelope.

“He’ll turn right.  We want to leave.  Turn left.”

Mary nodded.  She stepped to the side of the coach, opened the door, and swung outside, still holding the handle.  The door slammed, Mary clinging to the outside.

Three seconds passed.  A larger body dropped off the opposite side of the coach.

“Ouch,” Lillian said.  “I hope-”

The carriage bumped as it rolled over the larger body.

“-he’s okay,” she said, in a smaller voice.

The coach abruptly picked up speed, the horses trotting briskly.  Mary turned us to the left.

“We can still sneak in, leave boxes,” Shipman said.  “Activate it after.  We don’t have to be in the city.  It would help, but we’ll make do.”

“They know,” I said.  “I know they know because I damn well told them.  There’s no other choice.  They’ll dismantle it.”

I saw her expression change.  Gordon reached over to put a hand on her knee.

Then he opened the same door Mary had.  He raised a thin whistle to his mouth, and he blew.

A long, high, sweet sound.

Ten, twenty, thirty seconds.

There was an art to it, almost.  Such a convenient activation method.

The whistle was picked up elsewhere, mostly behind us, now that we were on the outskirts, heading out.  Each box of creatures was capable of mimicking the tone, passing it on, so it swept over the city, a single, sharp tone.

I saw the first of the spiders, the size of my fist, but black and bulbous, the center body almost tumorous.  I knew it had to be light if Mary had carried whole boxes of them, or it had absorbed ambient moisture, perhaps.  It didn’t matter.

From under one house, one box, just looking at the nearest wall of the building, I could see dozens of the things.

As the rain poured down, the spiders rose up, searching for windows and doors to crawl through.

“You owe me, by the by,” I told Lillian.  “I got you out, in a roundabout way.”

“This doesn’t count,” she said.

“Does so,” I said.

“Does so,” Jamie added.

“I think I’m going to treat Helen first,” Lillian commented.  “Fine.  I owe you one.”

“Technically, the deal was-”

“I owe you one, Sy.”

I nodded, turning my attention to look out the window.

The little envelope-sized slot slid open.  I could hear Mary speak.

“Where to?”

Where to.

I glanced at Gordon.  Different as we were, even with the rift between us, the unanswered questions I had, and his anger over the way his project had ended, I knew we were on the same page.

“Westmore,” Gordon said.  “It’s time for them to attack.”

I nodded at that.

We wouldn’t be working behind the scenes, this time.  This was going to become something else entirely.  An environment the Lambs had never faced.

A battlefield.

Esprit de Corpse – 5.7

The rain got worse as we got further up the road.  It all flowed down toward Whitney, though a cliffside took most of it, which seemed like a pretty good idea from a strategic standpoint.  Marching uphill against an entrenched position was one thing, if Whitney wanted to march on Westmore, but an uphill march against an entrenched position, against flowing water ranging from ankle-deep to knee-deep?

I was willing to bet it was an accident, but it was a happy one for the Academy’s side.

Sandbags had been piled up on the mountain road, giving clusters of stitched soldiers places to stand and wait.  Some were piled in front, to protect against gunfire, while others were piled behind, to divert the flow of water and keep the stitched soldiers drier.

Each cluster had one person with it.  I imagined the shifts were short, only an hour or three at most, but it had to be miserable.  Sitting, waiting, watching.  As the only truly intelligent set of eyes, that individual had all of the pressure placed on them, their only company the five or six dead men who stood around them.  Those same dead men would smell faintly of the less pleasant human odors, except baked in.  The scents of ozone, burned hair, and decay could and would join those.

The moisture in the air helped to carry smells to the nostrils.  I wondered if the watch was a punishment detail.

Poor bastards.

One figure at the nearest set of sandbags blew a horn, raising an arm to order us to stop.  The coach slowed, then stopped.  Two hundred feet separated us.

Three figures came down the road, and one of them was stepping very carefully on the wet, sloped path.  It was easier to tread where the sandbags broke the water’s flow, the road was wide, and I doubted there was that much danger.  Maybe if someone tripped over their own two feet, or if the spring’s chill and the damp surroundings had left their toes numb.  If and when someone did fall, though, they were likely to keep sliding.  There would only be the rocky outcroppings on one side and the steeper drop off the side of the path to the other to interrupt the slide.  Neither was fun.

The other two figures weren’t careful at all.  They walked with very natural gaits, not so much with confidence as a lack of concern.  It made it easy to tell the stitched from the living.

Lillian and Shipman had looked after us, more Lillian than Shipman by a considerable measure, but Jamie and Helen were still in unfortunate shape.  Jamie’s cough had quieted, and the two of them were powdered, to slow the flow of blood.  Mary was driving the coach, and the rest of us were within.  Gordon and Shipman exited through the one door to step out and get a better view, while Lillian stood in the doorway, standing in such a way that she could look up over the top.  I stuck my head out the window on the other side, watching as best as I could.  I liked being able to lean rather than stand.  My stomach still hurt, Lillian’s attentions notwithstanding.

“Ho!” Gordon called out.

“What are you doing?” the sole living soldier called out from a distance.  He was wearing an Academy uniform.  His hooded jacket was red, an academy’s shield sat on the breast, one I didn’t recognize, and was backed by the universal Crown, which formed a halo of sorts around the top of the shield.  The gap between the crest and the top of the halo had the man’s rank.  A dog’s head and the roman numerals for three.  Spec 3.

That was barely above the G-ranks.  I’d seen enough military types here and there to put together the details.  Just as another day of hard training in the rain out in the fields was looming, a bigwig would step up and say there was an opportunity for promotion.  They would have to miss training, there would be a long stint in classrooms, some lessons, but there would be hot tea provided.  A few people on their last legs would jump at the chance.  A promotion to ‘specialist’?  Getting some training that might help them get their foot in the door when their stint with the Academy’s forces was done?  It sounded good.

The G-twos with older brothers and friends among the higher-ups would know better.  Sure, the class was fine, there was hot tea, and it was pretty painless.  Borderline interesting, even.

The problem was that it led to this.  Being the ‘dog’ who knew the essentials of how stitched worked and how to fix them, looking after them.  Spending time in their company and their company alone.  When they weren’t the human arm and brain of a particular unit of stitched, they were doing drudge work, being among the man who dragged the dead back to camp, or who did the jobs too menial for the proper academy students to do.

Most who fell into the trap walked away as changed men.  ‘Changed men’ being the nice way of saying they ended up as assholes who resented everything and everyone they interacted with, or they were paranoid of further traps.

I watched him draw nearer, and his face was visible, a surly glare, a glowing cigarette propped between his lips, not the first nor the tenth of his watch, I was betting.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“We work for the Academy,” Gordon said.  “We’re reporting in.  I’ve got a badge, issued by Radham-”

“Stay right where you are,” the man said.

I pulled my head into the coach, looked through the window to see Gordon stepping back, the hand with the badge dropping to his side.

“Children?” the man asked.

“Yes, sir,” Gordon said.  “We’re spies.  We’ve got information regarding movements, numbers, people of interest, and events in Whitney.

“Mm,” the man murmured.  He didn’t give a clear response, hemming, hawing, and making noises, as if contemplating.

“Some of it is time-sensitive,” Gordon said.  His tone was so good, too.  Perfect pitch and intonation, authoritative and confident, without sounding arrogant.  If he’d used that same tone with one of those teachers who was just itching to find something to lecture a student about, they would have made a face and moved on to the next student.

But the words were the wrong ones.  Gordon was good at what he did.  People tended to like him.  He bent the world to his will.  He was the opposite of me; I always fought an uphill battle to get people’s trust.  I had to study them and tailor my approaches to their motivations and weaknesses.

I knew that this man we were talking to was making the most out of the very limited power and amusement he could get, here.  Gordon had showed the man a kind of weakness.

We have a need, thus it’s in your power to make us twist in the wind, I thought.

“I suppose you want me to let you into Westmore?” the man asked.

“Yes, sir,” Gordon said.

“It’s suspicious.  People don’t travel down this road, and a coach of children, no less.  Makes me think of the Trojan horse.”

“What possible danger could we pose?” Mary asked, without the slightest trace of irony.

I let my forehead bang against the frame of the window.

“What was that?” the man asked.

“My comrade.  Another spy.  We have three wounded inside the coach.”

“What wounds?”

“Two partially blinded, with burns.  One gunshot wound.”

“I’ve heard stories.  A group mingling with refugees, knowingly spreading a plague.  People carrying parasites into enemy camps, sometimes inside their bodies.  It’s easier to hide symptoms when you’re bearing injuries.”

“I understand that,” Gordon said.  “If you let us talk to your superior-”

I banged my head against the door of the coach yet again.

Make him feel impotent, why don’t you?

“Ahem.  I’ll be able to put those doubts to rest,” Gordon finished.

“Or infect a superior officer,” the Spec-three said.

“We’re more than happy to submit to quarantine procedures-”

I banged my head for a third time.

“Shut up, Sy!” Gordon called out, then resumed, “-if you’d just let us talk to someone in charge.  We’ll keep a safe distance.”

The man made a sound, then said, “I don’t think-”

“Sir.  I’ll be blunt.  Brigadier Ernest Tyler is expecting to hear from us.  I’ve corresponded with him.  I know your fellow soldiers have been doing more prep, things are changing around, there’s an energy in the air, and fear is a part of it.  The G-twos know it deep down, even if the people at the top haven’t said anything.  The Brigadier is preparing to mount an attack, he’s just waiting for the signal.  This is the signal.”

“That’s not-” the man started, then he changed his mind.  “There’s no guarantee.”

Weaker footing.

Gordon verbally bludgeoned his way through.  “We were forced to act early.  He’s going to be forced to move before he’s entirely ready.  He won’t be happy, not with us, not with the situation, and if you happen to be interfering with us and interfering with his situation, that unhappiness is going to land directly at your feet.”

He let the words hang in the air.

“Sir,” Gordon belatedly added, with that perfect measure of confidence that was so hard to call him on or slap down.

I closed my eyes, forehead resting against the frame of the window, listening.

“You go.  I’ll watch this group.”

“She’ll need to come too,” Gordon said.  No doubt indicating Shipman.  “She knows the more technical details.  We’ll need everyone to debrief, but we can give the Brigadier the immediate particulars.”

“Go,” the man said, not sounding happy.

“Yes, sir,” Gordon said.  This time he said it with a jaunty tone.  Rubbing it in.

He wasn’t above his moments of childishness.  I grinned.

I stuck my head out through the window, saw Gordon and Shipman marching the rest of the way up to the front gate of Westmore.  I pulled the window down from overhead, with flecks of water splashing inside as the latch clicked.  Lillian climbed inside too, the door slamming shut.

The coach rocked.  A weight on one side, then the other.

That would be the Spec-three, taking a seat on the driver’s bench.  Not to take us anywhere, but just to sit.

A moment later, my door opened, startling me.  Mary climbed inside.

She was wearing fairly simple clothes, but she had a habit of dressing up a little.  A thin belt with a buckle to draw the waist in, lace-trimmed ribbons in her hair -only one ribbon today-, and lace at the bottom of her dress’ skirt.  I knew she did her own sewing, to supplement what she was given.

As a covert agent, having tells was not a good thing.

As a girl, the touches defined her.  She wore a coat, but it didn’t protect the lower half of her dress.  The fabric clung to her knees and thighs, and only a second layer of fabric hid the outlines of the knives at her upper thigh.  At the knee, the parts where the fabric was white and wet were see-through.  We’d been traveling for a stretch, and I suspected she’d had her hood down for some of it, because her hair was wet, and so were her shoulders.  I could see the straps of her underclothing and the tan of her flesh at the shoulders and arms.

Raindrops still beaded her throat, parts of her face and the parts of her leg that weren’t covered by boot or dress.  Her knees were white, compared to the rest of her.  A lot of time in the market, more indirect sunlight peering through the clouds now and then than any direct sunlight, but it added up.  She was oddly prone to tan, either way.

She grabbed one portion of her dress, pulling it out to the side and inadvertently showing off more of her legs as she wrung the fabric dry, water spilling out onto the floor of the coach.

I looked up, and she was staring at me.  She let go of the wrung-out cloth, and it fell roughly into place, still bearing the wrinkles of being twisted in a way that higher quality cloth might not.

“Mary,” Lillian said, her voice cutting into the stillness.

“Mm hmm?”  Mary turned, dropping onto the bench with a bit of a flounce.  Her damp dress did its best to flounce with her, and more or less failed, falling limp around her knees.

“The coach-driver?” Lillian asked.

“I told him to turn to leave the city.  He didn’t want to.”

“He was nice.”

“He was a member of the uprising,” I said.

“He gave injured children a ride to the hospital, at no cost to himself,” Lillian said, sounding genuinely upset at my interjection.  She turned back to Mary.  “Did you- did he?”

“We rode over his knee and ankle,” Mary said.  “He’s alive.”

Lillian exhaled in audible relief.

“You wimp,” Mary said.

Lillian smiled, but she didn’t argue.  She’d been holding that little nugget of worry in for the entire ride to Westmore.

“He’ll wish he wasn’t when Shipman’s spiders get to him,” I commented.

Lillian stared at me in horror.

“What?  Were you pretending that this was all nice and sweet?”  I grinned.

“There’s something seriously wrong with you,” Lillian said.

“You’re a jerk,” Jamie mumbled.

I shook my head.  Mary was sitting opposite me, still soaking wet, and there was a definite twinkle in her eye as she met mine.

“Sorry,” I told her.  “About the plan.”

She shrugged.  “Nothing we could do.”

“I filled the others in, but you were driving the coach and I wasn’t up to climbing out to join you,” I said.  “Four or five assassins came after us.  We got one.  There are still three or four to take into account.”

She nodded.

“Enhanced smell, enhanced eyesight, enhanced touch, I’m not sure how that works, and enhanced hearing.  There might be taste, or another sense.”

“Seeing those teeth,” Jamie murmured, his eyes closed, “Might be wrapping up smell and taste into one sense.”

Mary smiled.  “I want to meet them.”

“You don’t,” Jamie said.

“I definitely do.”

“You might get a chance.  It depends on whether Gordon sells us up the river and agrees to something like that stupid quarantine measure that came up just now.”

“He didn’t really expect the Spec dog to take him up on that,” Mary said.

“I know,” I said, “But if that man was a little smarter and if he realized what Gordon was doing, then he might just agree, to put Gordon in a tight spot.”

“Mm,” Mary said.  She began to wring out her hair.  Some of the water ran down her arms, and droplets landed on her stomach and on spots which were still dry.  The droplets sank into the thin cloth and spread out in widening circles.  “But he was right.  I think he had the right sense of things.”

I sighed.  “Yeah.  Probably.”

Mary turned, abrupt.  “Lillian.  Do you have a comb?”

“With my belongings, in the back compartment.”

“Nothing in that massive bag of yours?”

Lillian shook her head.

“Jamie?” Mary asked.

“I use my fingers, most of the time.”

“You’re such a boy.”

Jamie didn’t react, motionless.  I suspected any movement hurt, with his condition.

“Try Helen,” I said, leaning forward to look past Jamie, one hand on my side.  Helen was draped over the bench, her head resting at an awkward angle at Jamie’s thigh.  Her blonde hair was still gritty past a certain length, from crawling in the mud.

“She’s sleeping,” Lillian observed.

“It’s okay,” Mary said.  Someone else might have thought she meant the comb wasn’t important, but Mary had come to be a part of the team, she’d shared more rooms with Helen than any of us.

“She’s fine,” I clarified.  I moved over, half-draping myself over Jamie to touch Helen.  I poked her in the forehead, hard.

No moan, no restless shift.  Her eyes flicked open, already focused on me.

“Comb,” I said.

She rolled a bit to one side, reaching into a pocket, then raised a hand, holding a very elegant looking comb.  She handed it to Lillian as Lillian reached forward, then dropped her arm, eyes flicking shut.

Asleep again, just like that.

Lillian scooted over, and Mary half-turned so her back was to Lillian.  A very automatic process, without any offers or asking.  As if it was just assumed that Lillian would do Mary’s hair.

A month or two back, I’d been at a store and I’d picked up a little rose-colored book, no thicker than my finger, titled ‘stories for girls’.  I’d paged through it out of sheer curiosity.  Not because I had any interest in girls in any special way, but because I’d been wanting some insight into how girls thought and how they were different.

I’d been disappointed somehow, and my inability to put my finger on why had annoyed me more than anything.  It wasn’t even a big or important sort of disappointment.

The fact that I’d remembered that moment while watching Lillian taking care of Mary in the here and now made me feel like I was a little closer to figuring it out, except I hadn’t and it just made the annoyance well up all over again.

I could recall Jamie and Helen nettling me about girls and things, and I could imagine how they’d very wrongly interpret my line of thinking and felt even more annoyed.

I shifted position and punched Jamie in the arm.

“Ow!  Damn it, Sy!  What was that even for?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He grumbled, but he didn’t have much fight in him.

Mary and Lillian were watching me out of the corners of their eye.

“Sorry,” I finally said.

“Y’should be,” he mumbled.

There wasn’t much conversation.  Jamie and Helen weren’t up to much except resting.  Mary had her eyes closed, head rocking in time with the strokes of the comb, head periodically jerking when Lillian found a snarl, though she didn’t seem to mind.

I watched them, Lillian asked about the pain, I answered.  Mary made some general comments about the runs she’d done to deposit the boxes of spiders, and that sort of died off as she dropped into an almost meditative state, her hair being brushed.

“Oy!” Gordon’s voice was faint, and muffled by the walls of the coach.

“And he’s back,” Jamie observed.

We collectively roused, Helen sitting up, Lillian and Mary shifting position.  I opened the door to step outside, flipping my hood up.

“We’re in,” Gordon called out, still too far away to be heard with a normal volume.  He closed the rest of the distance, then reached up to hand the Spec-three a note.

The others finished climbing out as the man read it over.

“Gordon,” Shipman whispered, tugging on Gordon’s sleeve.

“Shh,” the Spec-three made the shushing sound.

“Do you see?” she asked.

“See what?” Gordon asked.

“Shh,” the Spec-3 shushed them again.

“Oh!” Gordon said, louder.  “Oh.”

I had to step around to Gordon’s side to see.  As I did, the man on the bench of the coach looked up, staring down at us.  He’d refreshed his cigarette since I’d last had a look at him.

He followed our line of sight, down to his pants leg, which was torn, with a trace amount of blood collecting at the base of his boot.  His leg jerked, and in that motion, he realized what had really happened.

The flesh of his legs had been joined, a ragged strip cut away, attached to the other leg.

“What?  What’s the- what!?” he jerked more frantically, cigarette falling to the base of the bench.

“Don’t tear it,” Shipman said, “Don’t- careful!”

As the man struggled, one of the spiders from Whitney moved off to one side, away from the flailing legs.  Once two legs, they were now functionally one.  The Spec-3 saw the thing and twisted, pulling out his gun.

“Dont!” Gordon said, “You’ll spook the horses!”

Even the raising of his voice and the frantic movements of the man on the bench were making them agitated.

Shipman circled around the horses, while Mary climbed up beside the man.  Before Mary could deal with the spider, he brought both feet up, then slammed them down, partially crushing the thing.

Shipman didn’t seem to mind.  She reached out and grabbed it, fingers between individual legs, and flicked it in Gordon’s general direction with a movement of the wrist.  She put her hands on the man’s shoulders, and Mary put a hand on one knee, and he stopped struggling.

“It’s okay.  One of the spiders must have gotten onto the coach,” she said.

“What the fuck?  What the fuck?  I didn’t even feel-”

“Specialized anaesthetic and very standard coagulants,” she said.  “It dulls your sense of touch, makes you feel like the limb is asleep, it cuts out partial sections with the incisors and stitches them to adjoining parts with its own silk and its forelimbs.  Even if it had a few days with you, it probably wouldn’t kill you.  It’s just for the psychological effect.”

“The fuck!?”

I think he’s psychologically affected, I thought to myself.  I bit my tongue rather than offering the comment out loud.

“You’ll be fine,” she said.  “It’s a very easy fix.  They just need to cut the spider’s sutures and put the skin back where it belongs.  There won’t even be scars.”

“The fuck,” the man said, staring down at his bound ankles.  Just his ankles, it seemed, now that I was looking closer.

“Do you think we can get the coach around the sandbag emplacement?” Gordon asked.  “I was eyeballing it, but…”

“We can scooch by,” Mary said.  “We’ll have to, since our guest here isn’t mobile.”

Gordon nodded.  “You want to, or should I?”

Mary smiled, putting a hand to one horse’s neck.  It flinched, then relaxed as she gave it a few rubs.  “I can.”

The rest of us climbed back in, or partially climbed in.  I stayed at the outside, one hand on a bar just beside the door, my foot on the step below.

I saw through the window as sourpuss Shipman showed more energy and excitement in two seconds than I’d seen out of her in the entire time I’d known her, bouncing in the spot and putting an arm around Gordon.

It works, she was saying, going by the movements of her lips.

My hood flew back as the coach lurched forward, and I didn’t fix it.  Things rocked left and right as the coach scraped the cliff wall to the right and the sandbags to the left.  The stitched that hadn’t accompanied the Spec-three were still standing watch, and their heads turned, dull eyes watching us.

Not nearly so well made as Fray’s Wendy had been.  They were intended to do only one thing – follow orders.  The man who was supposed to give the orders wasn’t with them.  I hoped that Westmore wasn’t attacked in the time it took a replacement to walk down and join them.

Westmore was a city that had been built in wartime.  Obvious enough.  Walls, gate, defensive emplacements, and buildings that had been made solid, helped by an excess of material from nearby mines in the mountains and hills.  Every building had a gutter around it, redirecting the water.  Here and there, collections of debris and leaves blocked the way, or enough water had backed up to lift a collection free, and a grouping of brown-black detritus was scurrying along at the base of a building like some decaying, leafy version of a rodent.

It was a contrast to Whitney.  Where Whitney had been a sprawl, too many people crammed into one space, Westmore was organized.  Even at rest, people were in squads.  Working, they were in formation.  Everyone matched, with only slight variations in facial features, stature, and hair color.

The stitched were corralled, in strict rows and columns, their belongings at their feet, guns at their sides, butts on the ground, hands on the barrels.

In stitched alone, Westmore had twice as many soldiers as its little sister at the base of the mountains had in regular rank and file.  It easily matched Whitney’s number in human troops, and Whitney’s soldiers weren’t, for the most part, even experienced in fighting, as this group looked to be.  The ensuing conflict would be the enemy’s first.

Every set of eyes, the stitched included, watched us as we rolled down the main street, past neat stacks and wagon-loads of supplies.

On the other side of our vehicle, Gordon was doing the same thing I was.  He gave Mary a verbal direction, guiding her to our destination.

We passed a barn, and I saw inside.  There was something unnatural within, four eyes reflecting light, a deep scar running down its face, horns bigger than I was scraping the floor of the stable.  A war-beast.  Some Academy student’s final project for their fourth year of study, probably.  His reputation would hinge on how well it did.

There were others.  Like everything else, the creatures were neatly organized, kept in their own discrete places.  Weapons from some of the Academy’s brightest.

“What are you thinking?” Mary asked me.  She sat above me, looking down over her shoulder at me.

I could see the Brigadier waiting for us at the end of the street, standing under a set of eaves.  An older man, with a beard and no mustache, wearing a uniform without a hood, a stylized helmet on his head.

Unlike my feeling from earlier, I could put my finger on this one.  Something about the man, and all the little details put together.  That prey instinct that had come up in my first interactions with Mary, an awareness that came from countless clues the subconscious registered that the consciousness didn’t.

“Why does it feel like, if things go on as planned, we’re going to lose this battle?”

“Excuse me?” the Spec-three who was on the bench asked, indignant.

“I don’t know,” Mary answered my question.  “But it does feel that way, doesn’t it?”

Esprit de Corpse – 5.8

The stitched gave each of us a pat-down.  I bit my cheek rather than protest at the pain as clumsy hands prodded my side.  It wasn’t worth it, the stitched wouldn’t care, and I didn’t want to seem weak, when we already had two members down.  The older man, now with his helmet doffed, was studying us.  Jamie and Helen were looking less than stellar, even with their injuries looked after.  I could put on a brave face.

“It would be easier-” Mary started.  She made a face as the stitched pulled a knife out from her beltline.  “If you’d let me remove the knives myself.  Or I can tell you where they all are.”

The stitched didn’t react or respond, and the Brigadier didn’t give the order.

We waited in silence while it found eight more knives, each belted around Mary’s upper thighs.  It gave her a quick pat-down, then stood straight.

“If I may…” Mary said.  She reached up and pulled a long, thin knife out from the thickest part of her hair.  More a needle than a blade.  She raised one foot up, bracing calf against knee, and pulled another knife free of the heel of her shoe with a bit of a jerk.  Rather than a handle, it had a t-shaped configuration, more a knife that was punched with than thrust.  A matching knife came out of the other shoe.

She deposited two more, another punching knife from behind her belt buckle, and one with fluid in a reservoir in the handle from behind her back.  Finally, she provided the garotte-wire that had been curled around her body, hidden on the other side of her belt.

Absolutely, utterly unnecessary.  She could have kept the items on her person and lost nothing for it, but I suspected she wanted to make a point.

“We’ll have to teach them to do better,” the Brigadier observed.

“Yes sir,” Mary said.

The Brigadier was old, a caricature of a man with a puffed out chest, bedecked in a uniform jacket, with tight leggings beneath, making it seem like his upper body was meant for a different lower body than the one he had.  He had kind eyes, as he appraised us.

I instantly disliked him.

He looked at the man who still sat on the bench of the coach, his ankles bound.  The man looked deeply uncomfortable and embarrassed.

“See that Specialist Timothy gets care.  Patrick, see that your stitched search the vehicle for more spiders.  Lambs, you can come inside,” he said.  “We’ll talk.”

We passed through the doors, joined by the stitched guards.  Formations seemed to have been ingrained into them.  As we moved two-by-two, the stitched did as well, two between Jamie and I and Mary and Lillian, and two at the rear.

Past the doors was a coatroom, and we quickly removed our things.  Adult-sized shoes were on the floor.  The Brigadier paused, taking in the shoes, examining us and our feet, then said, “if you wouldn’t mind carrying on the rest of the way in socks and stockings?”

Dutifully, we peeled off our raincoats and boots.  I stepped onto the wooden floor beyond the coatroom, lifted up one foot, and saw a muddy print.  The grime and the wet had soaked into my boots.  My socks were just as dirty as the soles of my boots, if not dirtier.

I peeled off my wet socks and progressed barefoot, which was only slightly better.

The Brigadier had chosen a lodge as his base of operations.  It was one of the largest buildings, one of the sturdiest, and I suspected that had little to nothing to do with his choice.  The exterior was stone and mortar, up to a point that was just over the top of my head, with logs extending up the rest of the way.  The roof had a tree growing across it, augmented building, and swept up at an angle, the lowest point just over the front door, the highest point of the roof at the far end, where a chimney speared up from a stone fireplace-cum-stove.  It looked like a bedroom and bathroom were to either side of the coat room, tucked in at the front.  The remainder was an open living space, with tables surrounded by nice chairs and a couch, a desk was positioned near the fireplace, and the only piece of furniture that didn’t match the decor had been placed opposite the desk, a heavy table.

A stitched boy was feeding the fire.  No older than I was.  Probably the Brigadier’s personal servant.  He looked like he’d been around for a while, a stitched with actual stitches.

The Brigadier was a man who liked his comforts.  A candle burned above the desk, and a glass held ice but no drink.  If I smelled him, I could smell a trace of drink, but not the sour tang of an alcoholic.  As the boy and his style of dress suggested, he was a man who took care of things.

Hard to read, when it came to this situation.  He was so wrapped up in himself that I couldn’t get a good sense of who he was as a strategist.

Maybe that was a hint unto itself.

We walked all the way to the end of the room, passing the area that served as a sitting room or a tea room, where books and maps were laid out.  The wood of the floor got progressively warmer as we approached the fireplace.  By the time we reached the end, it was hot enough to be on the cusp of uncomfortable.  I glanced over the table opposite the desk, and saw far more maps, as well as various letters.  Pens were scattered here and there.

He took a seat at the desk.  “If the injured feel the need to sit, you could take one of the chairs behind you and turn it around.”

Jamie did.  He dropped his backpack on the floor by the chair.  Helen remained where she was.

I did, too.

“Whitney is under attack, then,” the Brigadier said.

“Yes sir,” Gordon said.  “We moved too soon.  We hoped they would be active late at night.  When the majority of people were deep asleep, and we hoped there would be more.  Enough that their first few attempts to eradicate the spiders would fail.”

“But you were nearly ready.  You said as much in a recent missive.”

“Not that close.  Account for the fact that they’ll respond faster in the daytime, it won’t be enough.  I’d say we have less than a day before the window of opportunity closes,” Gordon said.

“I think you’re underestimating what that kind of psychological warfare will accomplish,” the Brigadier said.

“We’re well versed in that kind of warfare, we’ve dealt with experts in it for as long as we’ve been working together,” Gordon said.

“Which obviously isn’t that long,” the Brigadier said.  “Not to belittle what you do, of course.”

“Of course,” Gordon said.

Only those who knew Gordon would be aware of the subtle change of tone, or the hints that he was working just a little too hard to keep his words carefully crafted.

“They’ll break,” the Brigadier said.  “It’ll put them on their heels.  People will leave Whitney, too afraid of a repeat performance.”

“Sir,” I said.  “It’s more complicated than that.”

“Of course it is!” he said, in a laughing tone.  “There are always nuances and complications.  This is war.”

Brigadier Ernest Tylor lifted his glass, drinking the water from the melted ice, then opened a drawer to retrieve a bottle of what might have been scotch.  He tipped it into the glass.

He saw us watching, and he smiled.  “The ice is a travesty, I know, but I allow it because it goes so well with the heat of the fire.  I’d offer you drinks, to thank you for your hard work, but…”

He gestured, a kind of up-down motion.

“But we’re too short?” I asked, feigning confusion.

Jamie elbowed me from the left, and Mary kicked my leg.  It hurt more than if she’d been wearing her shoes.  Somehow.

“It’s fine, sir,” Helen said.  “Two of us can’t even drink, and I can’t even enjoy it in the same ways, myself.”

“Strange group,” the man said.  He was barely drinking what he’d poured for himself.  One sip.  A gesture of power?  Habit?

I watched and waited for him to take another sip.

The moment he did, I opened my mouth, knowing he couldn’t cut me off without sputtering.

“Sir,” I said,   “In all seriousness, what I was saying before, about complications.  They’re more prepared than you may be giving them credit for.”

He swallowed, stayed like that, glass in hand, then set it down.  “How so?”

“Three or four assassins, skilled, each augmented.  One of them was an uncanny shot with a rifle from about a kilometer away.”

He raised his eyebrows and nodded.

“They’re confident.  They know the resources you have to bear, they have countermeasures in place.  They have resources, some ace up their sleeve that we weren’t able to uncover before we had to flee the assassins.  They think they’re going to win this.”

“Then they’re idiots,” the Brigadier said.  “We outnumber them threefold.”

“Virtually every soldier they have has a gun they’ve nicknamed the Exorcist.  Designed to put down stitched and augmented creatures.”

“Not a concern.  I’ve led armies in battle.  I’ve even managed situations like this.  A fortified position, an insurgent groups with numbers on their side.  Those numbers swiftly dwindle at the first hint of defeat.  You’ve delivered that, and I’ll see that you get medals for it.”

Mary reached out and took my hand.  I squeezed it.

The look she gave me out of the corner of her eye was one of worry.  The hand-holding was for reassurance, not for some desire to celebrate the recognition and the victory.

Yeah.  That feeling we’d had was getting worse.

“There were scientists.  Ex-Academy.  This isn’t rabble, sir,” I said.  “They have knowledge they can bring to bear.  Experiments of their own.”

“Who?”

“Louis Peralta,” Jamie said.  “He specialized in pain.  Leopold Pock, produced modified, vat grown humans, of a different type than the assassins we encountered.  Edwin Grahl, John Durant, Christina Wilder, Ian Roy, Wesley Vas-”

“I get the picture,” the Brigadier said.  “How many total?”

“Eleven.”

The man nodded, rubbing his beard.  “At a certain point, it becomes academic.  Assuming the guns are twice as effective as the norm, the experiments all Academy class, they still have to reach us before they can take action.”

“Reach us, sir?” Gordon asked.

“They’re mounting an attack against an entrenched position.  We have a number of tools at our disposal, and we can frustrate their efforts.  Trust me when I say this, war is a psychological game.  Once they realize the cost of attacking, on top of your clever work with the spiders, their numbers will dwindle.  Without the support of the group, their hired scholars will drop away as well.  There will be nobody to hold the guns you’ve mentioned.”

“You don’t intend to attack,” Mary said, the disappointment and disbelief clear in her voice.  “You want to stay, fight from a defensive standpoint.”

“Exactly so,” the man said, smiling.

“Why?” she asked.  She didn’t even try to hide the accusatory tone.

I squeezed her hand, a warning.

“How refreshing,” the old man said.  “I’m not usually made to explain myself.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

He waved a hand.  “I always firmly believed that every person in a position of power should have to explain their rationale.  Your name, if you don’t mind?”

“Mary.”

“Who are we fighting against, Mary?”

“Insurgents.”

“Yes.  Rebels, revolutionaries, insurgents.  But who makes up the bulk of their number?”

Mary took a second, then connected the dots.  “The Crown’s people.”

“Assume we fought every fight by wiping out the enemy.  What would happen after?  The Academy would suffer, the Crown would suffer.  There would be long-lasting repercussions.  Resentment, hatred.  If we can minimize the losses on both sides, and still break their stride, if we do it with care, then we could very well leave them feeling thankful that we were as merciful as we were.”

“Yes, sir,” Mary said.

I wondered if the higher-ups at Radham were laughing.  Hayle had made a gambit, sending us here.  He’d believed we could be useful.  Had someone with experience with the Crown’s military allowed him to do just that, knowing just what we’d have to deal with?

There wasn’t a Lamb present, I knew, who wasn’t filled to the brim with frustration.  We’d gathered information, we’d positioned ourselves, we’d set up a trap that would lay them low enough that an army could sweep over them without much contest, and here we were.

I looked either way, down the line of Lambs.  Lillian, at the far left end, was staring down at the floor.  Her neck was rigid enough I wondered if she’d start trembling.

The others weren’t much better.

So very little gained.  He wasn’t paying attention to the information.  Lillian and Shipman’s notes on how far along they were in terms of knowing about the Academy were effectively being ignored, as was Jamie’s information on the local threats, and my details on the assassins.

“The spiders were a good ploy.  I’m glad I extended you the trust and signed off on it.  Tell me, what’s next for you?  If you want it, I’d be happy to extend you some freedom.”

“Freedom, sir?” Gordon asked.

“I imagine the Academy keeps you busy.  If you’d like, I can tell them I have need of you, and keep you for a few days.  It’s a little drab here, mines and lodges, a lot of damnable rain, but you could rest and recuperate.”

Gordon glanced at the rest of us, then said, “Speaking for all of us, sir, the offer is appreciated-”

“Excellent.”

“But I think we’d prefer to be useful, if you don’t mind my saying so.  Those of us who aren’t injured.”

The man nodded.  “Any particular duties you have in mind?”

“Something pertaining to the upcoming situation, sir?”

“Nothing to be had but turns at the watch, and trust me when I say you don’t want that task.  It’s a punishment detail.”

“Yes sir,” Gordon said.

“Let me get back to you on that tomorrow, then?” the man asked.  “It’s getting later in the day.  Recuperate, take a well-earned rest.  You’ll be staying in the Miner’s camp.  Nicer place to stay than you’d think.  Some officers and specialists there, but you’ll have enough space that you shouldn’t want for privacy.”

He was the first person I’d met who could take the Lambs in stride at first meeting, recognizing what we were and how we operated.  Gordon’s letters might have helped with that.  He was also gentle, and not above treating us with kindness.  That he’d actually considered offering us drinks said a lot. There was no deception at all in what he was saying.  He believed it all, deep down.  That veteranship of experience had layered and ingrained it all into him.  A very rare species, no doubt a grandfather, and a veteran of the Academy’s wars, his experiences mingling into someone who actually almost understood us.

I could count the number of people who fit that label with three fingers.  Hayle was the first.  This man was the third.

Yet, in my frustration, there was nothing I wanted to do than jam my thumbs into the orbs of his eyes and hear him scream.  Because he was too kind in expression as he looked down on us, because I was sure I saw a glimmer of pity that came from a place of actual understanding.

It was a surprisingly violent line of thought, even for me.

We’d been dismissed.  The others were already turning to go.  I hadn’t turned, and I still held Mary’s hand, so she hadn’t gone either.

“Sir,” I said.

“Yes.  Do you mind mentioning your name, while we’re talking?”

“Sylvester.”

He nodded.

I took that as my cue to continue.  “If you’re really grateful about what we’ve done-”

“I am, Sylvester.”

“Then I’d like to maintain a responsibility, in the meantime.  I’d need a bit of help.  I want to do some patrol rounds around Westmore, personally.”

“It’s bigger than it looks, you know.  It worms between hills and mountains.”

“I know, sir.”

“What help do you need?”

“We’re each carrying silver badges.  They have the Radham emblem on them,” I said.  I fished mine out of my pocket.  “Would you pass on word to your soldiers, that we can go where we need to and make minor requests?”

He considered.  “If it were to fall into an enemy’s hands…”

“There aren’t any children among them, as far as we know,” I said.

He rubbed his beard, musing.  “Why, then?  We have the patrols covered.”

“Because they hired assassins.  As we mentioned earlier, there are three or four,” I said.  I paused for effect.  I wished this would sink in, convince him that this was a different sort of battle, that the enemy was smarter.  “I doubt they hired assassins to keep them in Whitney.”

“If you deem it necessary, then I’ll spread the word down the chain of command.  You’re free to go where you need to, and to make minor orders.”

I nodded.  “Thank you sir.”

“Thank you, Sylvester.”

I had the vivid mental image of the eye-piercing and screaming again.  Mary let go of my hand to head to the coatroom, leaving me behind.

I turned and crossed the length of the Brigadier’s lodge to join the others, who were flanked on either side by the stitched who had come into the door, now standing on either side of the coatroom.  I ignored the discarded socks, depositing them into the raincoat pocket, and simply slipped my feet into my boots.  There were tiny rocks in there with the silty mud, but it was far from the most irritating thing to happen today.

Among the Lambs, there was an odd kind of rush to get out the door and get away.

We covered a lot of ground before we were far enough away from the Brigadier’s men to talk.

“Why?” Mary asked, sounding genuinely lost.

“Because the Academy doesn’t lose wars,” I said.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Mary told me.

“It makes all the sense in the world,” Gordon said.  “He’s never lost a war.   He could lose this battle, sure.  He could lose the next five.  But if the dust settles and he’s alive, which he probably will be, then what can the Academy say?  The failure is theirs, not his.”

Mary made a fist, then moved like she was going to punch a wall.  She stopped just short.

A moment later, Lillian slammed the side of her fist into the wall, a few feet from Mary’s.  She waggled it, wincing in pain, looking like she’d regretted the gesture.

“You really hated that school, huh?” I observed.

“I thought hitting things was supposed to help relieve anger,” Lillian said.  “Ow.”

“It doesn’t,” I said.

Lillian made a face.

“I need to teach you how to throw a punch,” Mary observed.

“Don’t make me feel worse,” Lillian muttered.

It was getting dark, the rain was coming down hard.

“It’s about risk and reward,” I said.  “Going back to our earlier topic, not hitting things.  Attacking Whitney is a risk.  His career, life, and control of the situation come into jeopardy.”

The words weren’t helping with the general aura of frustration that seemed to linger.  Only Helen and Shipman seemed able to be able to handle it.  Shipman had a few years of maturity and probably some experience in seeing her hard work thrown away.  Helen might not even experience frustration in the same way we did.

We could have stood there in the rain for hours, kicking at the mud with our toes and grumbling.  It was Gordon who got us moving.

“We might be arguing about nothing at all, if the man is right.”

“He’s not,” I pointed out.  “He’s missing just how angry and dedicated our opposition is.  They won’t break as easily as he thinks.”

“Sy,” Gordon said, sounding exasperated.

“Gordon,” I replied, mimicking his tone.

“I’m not arguing with you.  I’m inclined to agree.  But there’s nothing we can do about it.  Let’s go see where we’re staying,” he said.  “Get our wounded looked after.  Yourself included, Sy.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” I lied.

“You were,” he said.  He paused.  “The patrols.”

“No ulterior motives,” I said.  “I just didn’t want to get cooped up.”

“No.  Wasn’t going to ask about that.  Was just going to ask, do you mind if any of us come with you?”

“You want to patrol,” I said.

“Yeah.  And from the looks of it, Helen and Mary do too.”

Mary smiled.

“We’ll make a thing of it.  Go in pairs, maybe.  We’ve been split up for too long, doing our individual things, be nice to talk.”

☙

A shout.

The crack of a dozen rifles firing.

Another shout, ordering a reload.

A violent explosion, screams.

It was so dark we couldn’t see, except when the explosions lit things up.  The dead of night.

Gordon and I were on the wall overlooking the sloped, waterlogged road that led down through the mountains to Whitney.  We peered over the top, watching the scene unfold.

From atop the wall, an entire regiment’s worth of rifles fired.

Bullets weren’t weightless.  They dropped as they traveled.  Having the high ground counted for something, I imagined.

Not that I was much of a fighter, or an expert on guns.

I watched as a series of explosions ripped out.  Something was coming up the path.  Stitched, but big, not all human.  It probably had a short lifespan.  But it wasn’t intended to live out an extended life of servitude.  It was about shock, awe, and giving our side a reason to doubt, if only for a minute.  It was holding a modified cannon in its arms.  It nearly fell as the cannon fired.

The collision shook the wall.  I could hear stones from the wall falling to the road below.

Gordon and I had been mid-patrol when the alert was sounded.  Now we watched.

Westmore’s stitched were firing in barrages.  I watched them, saw another flash of light as an explosion occurred further down the road, the scene highlighted in oranges and reds.

Another explosion.  The group of stitched was one fewer.  It took me a second to spot why.

“Head down!” I shouted in Gordon’s ear.  Louder than was necessary, maybe.  The explosions and gunfire was making my ears ring.

He ducked down with me, a quizzical look on his face.

“The rifleman with the eyes, the same one who shot me.  He’s picking off the commanders of the Stitched’s squads.”

“Tell someone.”

I looked at the scene.  Just when I spotted a person who looked like he was in charge, he turned, walking the other direction, gesturing.

A group of specialists in a nearby building opened a cage.

The thing that came out was a dog without a head.  The stump was an open void, and tendrils spilled out and peeled back over the dog’s body, streaming behind it as it ran.

Sharp whistles directed it, two for left, one for right, volume guiding it.

It went over the top of the wall, pouncing.

I heard gunshots, listened, trying to identify the rifleman’s.  Knowing the dog would be taking the man’s focus, I dared a look over the top.

There was a crowd at the end of the road, approaching with makeshift shields up to cover them.  They’d reached the collection of sandbags furthest down the road, the same one that the poor sod that had gotten his legs stitched together had come from.  It became cover for them.

I imagined someone was supposed to keep that from happening, but the people who were supposed to make the call were getting picked off.

The tendril-dog was limping forward, momentum broken.  Stitched were dying in droves.  They were supposed to take a half-dozen bullets before going down.  They were taking one or two at most.

The ‘exorcist’ rifles were doing their job.

Gordon pulled on my shoulder, and I ducked down.  He gestured, and I gestured back.

We descended the stairs at our side of the wall, back to the ground level.  A gun was briefly trained on us, before we were recognized.

We had to cross the length of the street before the sounds on the far side of the wall grew muffled enough that we could talk.  I spoke, looking at the forces massed on our side of the wall.   “They need to sound a retreat.”

“No retreat,” Gordon said.  “They won’t.  They can’t.  It’s only a half-dozen men out there who die, and a lot of stitched.  If they open the gate, there’s no guarantee they’ll be able to close it.”

I shook my head.

“They won’t get through,” Gordon said.  “Not tonight.”

“Probably not tonight.  This was them saying they’re here.  They’re angry, they haven’t given up.  Someone in charge probably stirred them up.  People who weren’t committed to the fight picked up guns, even.”

“Maybe,” Gordon said.  “Sy.  I want to ask everyone, but since you saw, I’ll ask you first.”

We were getting further away from the site of the battle, the volume was dying down, and the horrible ringing in my ears seemed to be getting louder in comparison.

“Ask what?” I told him.

“Do you think he’ll change his mind?”

“No,” I said, without missing a beat.  “He’ll adapt his strategy, he’ll make an excuse.”

“That they expended resources.  They’ll be weaker on subsequent attempts,” Gordon said.

“Something like that.  You were thinking the same thing?  That he’d say no?”

Gordon nodded.

I had a funny feeling about the way he was acting, which was strange.  Gordon wasn’t a guy I usually devoted a lot of brainpower to figuring out, and now I’d done it twice in recent memory.  Thrice if I counted Fray.

Okay, I was lying.  A million, six hundred thousand and two times, if I counted Fray.

But the strange mood in the market, how he’d been oddly out of sorts and avoiding the heavy lifting when I’d seen him earlier in the day and how this?

“Why does the group need to make a collective call about what the Brigadier is doing?” I asked.  “It would have to be important, for you to ask for something like that.”

Except I already knew the answer.  The look in Gordon’s eyes, faint as it was with only the streetlamp to go by, was telling enough.  He knew I’d figured it out.

“Right,” I said.  “Hm.  It might be hard to convince some of the others.”

“You think?”

“Treason is typically pretty hard to sell,” I told him.

Esprit de Corpse – 5.9

Mary was finishing her trip around the perimeter when we caught up with her.  The sounds of shells and gunfire in the background were joined by a singular, high screech.

“No si-” Mary started to say, before the sharp crack of an explosion stopped her.  She winced.  “No sign of the assassins.”

“One was on the battlefield,” Gordon said.  “Sy’s gunman.”

“Why is he mine?  I don’t want him!” I protested.

Mary’s eyes had lit up with anticipation at Gordon’s statement, however.  “The others have to be close.”

“We’ll do what we can,” Gordon said.  He frowned.  “We need to talk.  And not about them.”

“They’re an issue,” Mary said, insistent.

And here is the point that marks the difference between Gordon and Mary, I mused.  Gordon was flexible, he was well rounded enough to adapt.  Mary’s focus had been honed to a point.  She was wired to go after an enemy.  Her ‘parents’, as it were, but even so.

“Dangerous enemy,” I agreed.  “I can attest.”

“Yes,” she said.

A rolling rumble, like thunder, marked the collapse of a part of the mountainside, cliff, or road.  My heart was racing, just hearing it all.

“But all the talking in the world won’t uncover more about them,” I said.  “We’ll keep an eye out, work under the assumption they’re here, but there’s something more complicated we need to discuss.  The assassins are only a small part of the big picture.”

“They nearly killed you,” she said.  “You want to ignore that?”

The gunfire in the background was incessant. It didn’t help that, as we walked beneath eaves as a trio, I would occasionally get a fat sucker of a raindrop dropping down with considerable force.  Just enough of a ‘tap’ that a small part of me thought I’d been shot again.

“No, Mary,” I told her.  I sighed a little.  “What do you want to do?  What are you thinking would be best, for the Lambs’ plan of action?”

“We go after them.  Lay a trap, take them out.”

“Lay a trap how?” I asked.  I was on the attack now, in a manner of speaking.  “They could come after us or any of the superior officers.  It’s pretty clear they have enhanced awareness on a lot of fronts.  That’s a hard trap to lay.”

“You’re good at thinking outside the box,” she said.  “This is doable.”

“Maybe doable.  Probably.  But ‘doable’ doesn’t mean ‘we should do it’.”

“But-”

“And thinking outside the box is only doable if there is a box and if I know what the box is and how it works,” I said.  “They’re a box I don’t know.”

“You’re making less sense as you go along, Sy,” Gordon said.

“I’m injured,” I pointed out.

“Which would be a great excuse if you got shot in the brain,” Mary told me, with a very unimpressed tone.  Even as we talked, she was scanning the surroundings, watching the darker parts of the street.

She was itching to go up against this new enemy.

“Sy’s right.  It doesn’t make sense,” Gordon said.

Mary shifted position, impatient, annoyed.

“If we let this slide,” Mary said, halting as the noise in the background reached a crescendo, “if- I just don’t want this mission to be stillborn like this.  I want a win, Sy.”

“That,” I seized on the opportunity, “Is exactly what we hoped to talk about.”

Gordon nodded.

Mary was paying attention now, even if her eyes didn’t show it.  She was still looking out for trouble.  But her hands weren’t clenched and scrunchy the little lines that tended to appear between her eyebrows and on the bridge of her nose when she was upset weren’t as pronounced.

Even as we stepped out of the way of the streetlight and into darkness, her silhouette had changed in how poised it was.  She’d been coiled like a spring, ready to pounce or react, and now she wasn’t.  Not as much, anyway.

“You’re being sly, Sy,” she said, wary but interested.  “Gordon too.”

“This is more Gordon than me,” I said.  I said it because it was true.  It was Gordon’s plan.  But also because Mary was more likely to listen to Gordon than to me.

She was closer to me, I felt, but she was more likely to listen to Gordon.

Gordon cleared his throat.  Mary fixed her attention on him.  The pair slowed to a stop, and I realized Gordon had a hand on Mary’s shoulder.  He wanted her full attention.

I walked a bit forward, the two of them behind me.  Taking over Mary’s watch, so to speak.  Looking out for trouble.

Behind me, Gordon asked, “Do you agree with the Brigadier?”

“No,” Mary said.

“Sy told me you didn’t have high expectations about how this would turn out, even before we talked to the man.”

“I don’t feel the killer instinct,” she said.  “We talked about this after leaving the meeting, but I was thinking about it.  They hate us.  Their side is angry, they have a cause.  This side, I don’t know how much they really want to fight.”

“I’m asking,” Gordon said.  “Because if it came down to it, and the Brigadier exited the picture, but we found ourselves in a position to win this battle…”

Mary made a sudden movement, and I turned to get a better  look.  A hand to her mouth.  Connecting the dots.

The sound of explosions drowned out the start of Gordon’s statement.  Men came running down the street, a crew of stitched following them.  I glanced over them as they passed under the light, looking for the unique facial features of the assassins.

“-would you be?” Gordon asked.

“Not very,” Mary said.

There were two ways that could be taken, without context.  I wished I’d heard how Gordon had framed it.

But I saw Gordon’s shoulders relax.  His hand dropped from where he’d been resting it on her shoulder, and the two of them walked to catch up with me a bit.  Gordon looked pleased.

“It depends, though,” Mary said.  “On execution.”

“Doesn’t it always?” Gordon asked.  “Let’s sound out the others before we start discussing particulars.”

“Sure,” Mary said.

“For the record,” I said.  “I’m not entirely on board with this.  I see where Gordon’s coming from, I get it, but I have concerns.”

Gordon nodded.

“Gordon’s the reckless one for once?” Mary observed.

“You should have seen him when he was younger,” I said.  “He was as bad as I was.”

Gordon chuckled.  “I wanted to learn the good stuff so very badly, and they wouldn’t teach it to me.  Sy cottoned on and the two of us would take off.  Every day.  They’d find new ways to lock us in or station new guards, Sy and I would compete to see who could get out and free the other one.”

I was very aware that our conversation and banter had taken on a lighter tone.  It was a contrast to the ongoing fight that we could do so little about.  The seriousness of what it was that Gordon wanted to do here.

“What Gordon’s thinking, if he’s thinking what I’m thinking he’s thinking,” I said, “Is-”

“If you say thinking one more time I’m slapping you across the back of the head,” Gordon warned me.

“Is going to put us in a risky position.  We do this right, the Academy will let it slide.  But if we pull the ‘traitor’ move and we fail, we’ll have to off the Brigadier and blame the assassins.”

Mary nodded somberly.

I couldn’t see in the dark, but I was suspicious that if I could, she’d be showing me a mischievous grin while maintaining a poker face on the other side, for Gordon’s benefit.

“Okay,” Gordon said.  “I know Sy is joking-”

The sentence was cut off as a building detonated.  Flame and flying bits of whatever erupted from a rooftop, halfway between us and the wall where the fighting had been happening.

Bells were rung, people mobilized.  Civilians this time, some in nightclothes.

Putting out the fire.

“Wow,” Mary said.  “If they keep that up…”

“They won’t,” Gordon said.  “So far, the Academy’s been seeing how well they can hold back the enemy with the minimum possible resources.  But they won’t let that go unanswered.”

There were calls and orders.  Permissions given.

Unleashing the monsters.

I thought, as Specialists stepped to the fore, joined by the scientists who were looking after the individual projects.  Men pulled on chains, hauling experiments out of the enclosures where they had been contained.

Three were large, with the massive horns, thick hide, and shaggy fur.  Nothing fancy, probably no special qualities.  It kind of amazed me when I dwelt on it.  Someone had played god, they had made an entirely new life, and they had done it for a grade, halfway through their Academy education.  Exercising the fundamentals.

Give Lillian two more years and she might just put something like that together.  Except she’d do it different.  I would be deeply disappointed in her if she didn’t learn something meaningful from all of our adventures.

The gates swung open, and the creatures charged through.  Each one was probably pretty darn close to being bulletproof.

We picked up our pace as we moved further away from the site of the explosion.

Can’t think straight, this close to it all, I told myself.

“If this goes badly, it’s going to cost us,” I said.  “They’ve got Evette the Second in the works.  I don’t want them getting second thoughts about moving forward with that.”

“They’re not going to cancel a project they’ve already invested into,” Gordon said.

“In wartime?” I asked.  “War is the best excuse ever.  Not just for scrapping projects or changing things up.”

“Right,” he said.

“Don’t get me wrong.  That guy pisses me off more than any enemy we’ve gone up against.  I’d love to pull this one off, play it off like we haven’t in a while, but… I have questions, Gordon.”

“For me, specifically?”

“Yeah.  Mary, look, since we’re almost there, you maybe want to handle rounding up the others?  With some officers and people in the building, it’s a bad place to hold this conversation.  I need to ask Gordon something.”

I hated to ask.  I knew that Mary didn’t like being left out.  Her isolation had been the tool I’d used to get her away from Percy.

We continued walking, and I felt a little nervous, between Mary’s silence and Gordon’s reaction to my earlier concerns.

“How long do you need, for your chat?” Mary asked.

“Not long,” I said.  “You don’t have to dawdle.  But don’t rush to get everyone out the door either?”

“Alright,” she said.

I reached out and took her hand, giving it a squeeze.  She smiled at me.

We reached the house where we were staying, and Mary stepped inside.  I gestured, and Gordon and I stepped away from the door, to the corner of the house.  We stood under the eaves, streams of water coming down in front of us, like the vertical iron bars of a cell.  Our backs were to the wall, and we watched the surroundings.  Men were marching in the opposite direction from the gate that was under siege.

The city of Westmore was laid out between mountains.  It zig-zagged more than it sprawled, and the various exits from the city were all mountain roads and paths, blocked off by sturdy gates much like the one at the front.

It somehow made me think of Westmore as being weaker than it was strong.  That the Academy had taken it by force only weeks ago suggested that it wasn’t impregnable.

Weakness…

“Gordon,” I said.  “First thing I gotta ask.  It’s bugging me, and Mary probably knows the answer, but I gotta hear it from you.”

“Ah,” he said.  He heaved out a sigh.

“I know it’s a touchy subject, but… this morning.  You were sitting on the wagon instead of helping out.  You can tell me, straight up, if you were hurt in a very normal, conventional way, or lie to me and tell me you were, and I’ll leave it be.  But-”

“I’m not going to lie to you, Sy,” he said.

I felt my heart plummet.  “What happened, exactly?”

“Phantom pains,” he told me.  “Couldn’t coordinate my fingers right.”

He lifted his hand.  He touched his thumb to forefinger, middle finger, ring finger, then pinky, then did it back and forth, faster and faster.

I swallowed.

“It’s better now,” he said.  “It was minor, when it happened.  But it was a wake-up call.  That things can go wrong.  That maybe this is the very first step.  I start breaking down, things start going wrong.  Little things, and only for a short while each time, but the times get longer and the issues get bigger, and eventually, I dunno.  I’m lying in a bed and nothing works or works together, and it all hurts, and the Academy decides it’s too much trouble to keep the Griffon project alive?”

He was speaking in an artificially low voice.  One that he tried on now and again as his voice steadily and smoothly changed.  Burying emotion, doing what he could to control the words and keep them steady.  Except at the very end, he was having to try more.

He’d made it a question.  I had the answers.  He knew that.

“I could tell you what I know,” I said.  “The projected outcomes.  Timelines.  But I think you’d resent me for telling you, after, when the sun was up and things were a little brighter.  Because it would cast a shadow over every good day from here on out.  You’d take what I told you and convince yourself it was worse than it was, or something.”

“Damn it, Sy,” he said.  His voice was rough, a little choked.  He wasn’t looking at me.

“Does Mary know?”

“Yeah.  I had to explain.  Gladys, too.”

I nodded.  “The others?”

“Lillian.  Not Jamie.  Not Helen.”

He wouldn’t have had an opportunity with Jamie and Helen.

I didn’t say anything, just thinking.  The sound of battle was dying.  It wasn’t just that we were far away.  The bomb blast on the one rooftop and the subsequent release of the warbeasts had ended things.

They’d forced the Academy to play their hand.  The rebellion had spooked the Academy forces of Westmore, and they’d proved they’d spooked us.  Psychologically, it was what I’d want to do, if I was leading the enemy.  Not that I’d mount a frontal attack.

“They put me together with the best pieces they could get.  Augmented, altered, fixed, matched to what I needed.  I’m a chimera.  A hodgepodge puzzle of about twenty-six people and some things that weren’t ever people,” Gordon said.  “Everything wired perfectly, with treatments to keep it all in alignment.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve had trouble with coordination before.  Early on.  But the phantom pain… I had my hand, but my brain was trying to tell me I had a second, and it was caught in this- this ice cold vise, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing.  It wasn’t the pain that got me, or that I couldn’t get my hand to do what I wanted it to.  It was… I was worried about what it meant.”

“The second hand?”

“Yeah,” he said.  His voice had that rough edge to it still.  He was having a hard time keeping it steady, but he was managing it.  “Sy.  They didn’t just work with muscle and bone and the frame of my body.  They took a few brains, took them apart, with a few choice pieces in mind, and they jigsawed it all together.”

“You’re wondering what happens if your brain starts doing what your hand was.”

“I know phantom pain and the connections don’t work that way.  But phantom pains like I felt, they’re a disconnect between the brain and the body in the first place.  I just-”

He stopped mid-sentence.

I gave him time to find the words to speak, or the ability to create the words without letting something emotional slip through.

The gunfire had stopped altogether.  There was distant shouting, but that probably had more to do with the fallout from the one shell that had hit the roof.

I heaved out a sigh.

“You don’t have anything to worry about just yet,” I said.

He raised his voice, “I told you not-”

“I know I know I know,” I said, cutting him off.  “I know.  But you gotta hear it.  And I have to say it.  I can’t have that tearing at you like that.”

He nodded.

“Okay,” I said.  “Right.  That took longer than I thought it would.  You know you can talk to me about it, right?”

“But you won’t tell me, if I ask?”

“If you really ask, I’ll tell.  If you need to know, or if it looks like there won’t be any good days, I’ll tell.”

He nodded.

I could hear the others inside the house, coming down the stairs.

“Shit,” I said.  “Okay, look.  Gotta ask.  This plan of yours, being entirely honest, how on board with it would you be if we were doing this six months ago?”

“What do you mean?”

“Fray.  You were going to go with her.”

The tension in the air was awful.  I honestly felt like he was going to reach out and grab me.

He didn’t say a word.

“Are you wanting to do this because a part of you thinks that if it goes horribly wrong, maybe we’ll all have to pick up and go to Fray?”

Silence.

“Or because of the phantom pain?  The feeling that you might be breaking down?”

“Sy,” he said.

“I gotta ask.  We gotta go into this with our eyes open.  No fooling.  Knowing that you might cut corners or shift priorities because you feel like you have an ‘out’ in Fray…”

“You want to know what the box looks like,” Gordon said.

“Yeah.”

“Yes,” he said.  “Not going to lie because I know you’ll see right through it.  Yes.  There’s a bit of a feeling of having an out.  We don’t need the pills anymore.  The chemical is everywhere.”

“Alright,” I said.

“Does-” he started to say.  The front door opened, and Gordon pursed his lips.  He gave me a look, as if I’d timed things specifically to end the conversation there and leave him hanging.

Jamie, Helen, Lillian, and Mary all stepped out, wearing raincoats, Jamie with his bookbag.  Jamie’s coat was a bit too big, swallowing him up.

“Where’s Gladys?” Gordon asked.

“Sound asleep,” Mary said.  “Thought about it, but…”

“-she’s not a Lamb,” I said.

Mary nodded.

Gordon bristled at that, but he didn’t argue.  I suspected it had something to do with the fact that he had no idea where I stood, since his confession.  Lillian gave me a look, almost inquiring.  But she was enough of a Lamb to be included here.

We moved as a group, in the opposite direction from the gate.

“What’s this about?” Lillian asked.  “You’re making me nervous.”

“Mutiny,” I said.

Gordon gave me a sharp look.

I was too busy watching the others to figure out where things stood.  Fear in Lillian’s eyes, as she looked at each of us, trying to figure out what was going on, or what we were thinking.  Jamie looked concerned, and rightly so.  Helen gave no sign, of course.

“The first foray didn’t go well?” Jamie asked.

“Nope,” I said.  “The people of the small township of Whitney are angry on a number of levels.  They’re devastated, scared, and armed.  The spider thing backfired, without the follow-up attack.  They found their courage, they’re attacking, trying desperately to hurt us before we can do something like that again.”

“If they knew how much work it took,” Mary muttered.

Gordon was watching me carefully.  I’d never told him which direction I was leaning with this plan.

“They’re not going to let up,” I said.  “It’s our feeling, given where things stand, that this isn’t going to end well for the Academy.  We’re the only people who’ve seen both sides of things.  We don’t have enough anger to drive us to go for the jugular.  Brigadier Tylor is a good indication of that.  He wants a safe win.”

“And you want mutiny?” Lillian asked.

“You were as mad as any of us, after that meeting,” Gordon said.

“But mutiny.”

“Sy’s choice of words, not mine,” he said.

“How would you put it?” Jamie asked, quiet.  His first time speaking up since stepping outside.

Gordon explained, “We disable Tylor.  Either we do it and we take over, acting in Tylor’s place, to give the orders and manage this end of the war ourselves, and we plan to do well enough that he has to keep quiet and take the credit, or we disable him in a way that won’t raise suspicion, someone else takes charge, and we lean heavily on the new leader to get the results we need.”

“I feel like if we do this, we’re going to want to do it fast,” I said.  “They’re not going to let up.  They’ll regroup, the people in charge will fan the flames, and they’ll make another attempt.  Before dawn.”

“I have thoughts on that,” Gordon said, “But let’s not get distracted.”

I nodded.

“You three are pretty committed to this?” Jamie asked.

“No,” I said.  “I have reservations.”

Jamie nodded.  I thought I detected relief.

“Reservations is putting it lightly,” Lillian said.  “Are you nuts?”

“A little,” I said.

“This is dangerous,” she said.

“We talked about that part,” I said.

“It’s not just the sort of thing that screws us up and makes it so they don’t trust us anymore.  It’s the sort of thing that ends the Lamb project.”

“We could make a case,” Gordon said.

“You think they’d let you?  I’ve sat in on meetings where they talked about the Lambs project.  They asked for my opinions.  How often you were each getting hurt, what your growth looked like, development, promising elements, challenges.  I know they were testing me as much as they were evaluating you.”

“You’re worried this will damage your rep?” I asked.  “That you won’t get invited to sit in on meetings?  You’ll lose all of the trust and favors you’ve bought by helping get this far?”

“Wow,” Lillian said.  “That’s unfair.”

“But it’s true, isn’t it?  You’ve earned a kind of status, respect and an ability to dialogue with higher-ups that a lot of people four or five years ahead of you in the Academy haven’t been able to obtain.”

Lillian’s eyes narrowed.

“Hey, I don’t begrudge you that.  I only want to know where your protests are really coming from.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Are you saying no as an Academy student, or as a Lamb?” I asked.

Playing dirty.  Sorry Lil.

“The two aren’t- it can be both!”

“They can be not-both,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Sy,” Lillian said.  “I’m mad, I don’t like this, but I can’t do this in good conscience.  The risks aren’t worth it.

Jamie nodded.  He was already healing from the wounds to his face, but he still looked a little haggard, and despite Lillian’s ministrations, there were still parts of him which had the drops of resin clinging to him.  She’d cleaned his hair, at least, but the light occasionally caught bits of the glue-like stuff.

“You too?” Gordon asked.

“I’m with Lillian.  It feels reckless.”

“And Helen?” Gordon asked.

“I’d like to find another way to be helpful,” Helen said.  She was healing faster than Jamie, but she also had bits of the resin on her that caught the light.  Like tiny raindrops frozen in time.  “If we tried to take over the Brigadier’s position, I think I’d be the least helpful.  I don’t want to be useless.”

Gordon was frowning.

“Question,” I said.  “If we found out a plan that was guaranteed to work, would any of you three change your minds?”

“I might,” Jamie said.  “I trust you guys more than I trust myself w-when it comes to some things.”

I only caught it because of the way he’d stuttered, but he was cold enough he was shivering.  His teeth were chattering.

The smoke had taken a lot out of him.  Medicine could do a lot, but the body did have to carry its own weight.  Sometimes nutrients needed to be supplied, the body needed time to take in the medicines and use the resources the medics or the doctors had so kindly provided.

Jamie was frail, and it looked like he was fighting to stay standing.

I approached him, coming to stand next to him by the wall, so the side of my body pressed against the side of his.

“I’ll break the tie, then,” I said.  “I’m defecting to their side.  It’s too hard to do, too risky.”

“Okay,” Gordon said.  He raised his chin a little.

When he looked at me, it felt a little like he was looking a little bit through me.

At a certain point, Gordon had stopped being quite the Rebel and had started to fall in line with the Academy’s expectations.  He’d done marvelously.  Now he was returning to the kind of person he’d once been.  A little bit reckless.

When we’re babies, we shit ourselves, we struggle to walk, we struggle to communicate.  When we’re old, we shit ourselves, we struggle to walk, we struggle to communicate.

As things began, so did they end.

Did Gordon recognize that?  Was he touching base with his roots, as he got his first warning that he was moving toward his conclusion?

I almost changed my mind right there.  I might have defected a second time, trying to convince the others.

I wanted to give him this.

“Go inside,” I said.  “Get some rest.  Gordon, you do a walk around the city?  Maybe with Mary, if she’s up to it?  I’ll meet you when you’re back.  Then you and I will do a walk around, then Mary and I.”

“Can I?” Lillian asked.  “I don’t- I mean, I want to help, I don’t want to be useless or for there to be hard feelings, because I think that it’s crazy to try and do something to the Brigadier.”

“It’s okay, Lillian,” Gordon murmured.

“Go with one of the pairs,” I said.  “But maybe let Gordon and Mary go alone, first?”

“I don’t need to vent or rant,” Gordon said.

“Okay,” I said.  “Then Lillian can go if she wants.  Jamie and Helen hang back, recuperate.”

Jamie and Helen nodded.

“What are you doing, then?” Gordon asked me.

I smiled.

“Seriously.”

“Going for a walk,” I said, walking backward, away from the group.

“That’s suspicious,” Gordon said.

“Yeah, well, that’s me in a nutshell,” I said, still smiling.

“Am I going to be happy when I find out what you were up to?” Gordon asked.  “Are we?”

“You won’t be unhappy,” I told him, still walking backward, still giving them my fake smile.

There was no response, there were no accusations.  I turned, walking into the rain, and I could hear Mary mutter something.  Clearly unhappy.  We’d gotten her hopes up.

The closer I got to the gate, the more intense the smell of the smoke was.  The building had taken a nasty hit, possibly a storehouse, and the fire had burned well enough that I suspected the bomb blast or explosion had been intended to spread fires.

Interesting on its own.  Fire was a typical countermeasure to stitched.  The more they depended on that primal, alligator part of the brain, the less they liked it.  Newer stitched were capable of ignoring fire, defaulting to a frozen state or marching headlong into it with no heed for personal harm, which was only a marginal improvement over the fits of rage or panic that it had caused in prior generations.

Our enemy had a surprising number of tools that were very effective against us.  The warbeasts had likely forced a retreat, suggesting they didn’t have a countermeasure to that, but something told me that the person in charge of the attack had ordered a retreat the moment the bomb had hit the roof.  They’d bloodied us, they knew we had to retaliate, so they minimized the damage that retaliation could have caused.

The warbeasts were loping back toward their pens now, making their way into the gate.  I approached the man at the gate, saw him frown.

“Keep out of the way,” he told me.

I raised the badge, and I saw his expression change.  Eyebrows up.  Lines of what I almost read as disgust on either side of his mouth.  Indignation.

“There are four assassins on the periphery of Whitney,” I said.  “Each one modified.  Any time you open the gates, you need to commit people to searching wagons, checking faces.  Even if it slows things down.  If they can slip past the walls, the leadership of Westmore is going to be dead within hours.”

“Uh huh,” he said.

“Double guards on each of the gates, too,” I said.  “Doesn’t matter if they’re hurt.  Just so long as their eyes work.”

He gave me a curious stare.  I turned and left.

He wasn’t the reason I’d gone back.

I retraced my steps, going back, and crossed the street.  In the zig-zag of the city, the building was placed at one of the sharp turns, positioned in such a way that it had more space around it.  Elbow room.

The Brigadier’s lodge.

As I approached the door, two stitched stiffened, hands on their bayonets.

I held up my badge again.  “Let me in.”

They didn’t budge.

Had he passed on word to the soldiers, but not the stitched?

“Tell Brigadier Tylor there’s a little boy here to see him,” I said.  “Please.”

The stitched took an interminably long time before turning and passing through the door.

Almost a minute passed before the door opened again.  The stitched took time getting back into position at his post, lips slightly parted, eyes unfocused, before he addressed me again.  “Go in.”

I stepped inside.  I took my time removing my raincoat, which made my stomach ache, and bending over to remove my boots, which made it ache more.  My coat and boots were half the size of the ones that were already present.

Tylor was in the room with several of his superior officers.  They were gathered around the table at the far end, opposite his desk, the fireplace off to one side, oil lamps and candles burning throughout.  Many of the officers had cigarettes or pipes.  The high ceiling kept the room from being too smoky, and because the light didn’t quite reach the peak, the darkness had a nebulousness to it.  Shifting, moving, almost alive.

“Something of import?” the Brigadier asked me.

“No.  Not of import.  No emergency.  But we do need to talk.”

“One minute, then,” he said, before returning to business.

He was crisp in the orders he gave to his men.  Who was stationed where, and which weapons to keep at the ready.

I walked around to his desk, finger tracing the heavily lacquered wood.

Papers, letters, bottles of ink and quill pens, actual metal pens, and stacks of mail.  Opened and unopened.  He had a nice little letter opener, with a dog engraved into the top of it.

My finger touched the handle of the drawers.  I knew from earlier that he had a bottle of something in the one.

Had we collectively agreed to commit treason, then this would have been the moment I discreetly opened the drawer and dropped something Lillian-provided into the bottle.

Instead, I kept circling the desk.

There.  Half-tucked beneath a stack of papers were envelopes, many with curls of paper peeling off of them.  Opened, empty, the contents neatly placed elsewhere.

Probably intended for the fire.

I took one of his nice pens, one with actual gold inlaid into it and making up the metal parts, the nib excepted.  I began penning out short statements on the blank side of each envelope.

I lined them up, turning them over.

The Brigadier was true to his word.  About a minute and a half after he’d told me to wait, he sent his men away.  They pulled their boots and coats on, and the cold outdoor air blew into the lodge as they pulled the door open and stepped outside.

“Excuse me,” the Brigadier said.

I stepped out of the way, and allowed him to reach his chair, where he promptly set himself down.

“Can I ask what the plan is?”

“We have weapons.  We’ll have at least two warbeasts on guard at any time.  If there’s a problem, we open the gates and set them on the enemy.  Artillery emplacements will be moved here and there, mostly to the forward gate.  It took a lot of damage.”

I nodded.

“You’ve redecorated my desk,” he said, noting the envelopes I’d laid out.  “Am I  supposed to keep it this way?”

“I want to play a game,” I said.  I leaned against the corner of the desk.

“A game?” he asked.  I could see the struggle of his thoughts on his face as he very briefly considered going off on me for making light of the situation.  But he composed himself.  “How do we play?”

“It’s a proposal more than anything,” I said.  I tapped the envelope nearest to me, “My prediction for the enemy’s next move.”

“Hm,” he said.  “And the other three?”

“More predictions.  The game is simple.  If I’m right, and I turn over an envelope, then you give us more power.  More say, more ability to decide how our side fights this war.  If I’m wrong, then we get less power.  We do what you say, we don’t get in your way.”

He nodded slowly.  “What if I said that this isn’t worth it to me?  I could say I stand to gain very little.”

“You can,” I said.  “It’s your right, sir.”

“Mm,” he made a sound.  “You were already right about how tenacious they were.  They didn’t feel like a broken enemy.”

He stood from his seat, looking down at the envelopes.

Starting with the leftmost one, closest to me, he turned each one of them over.

That’s not how you play my game, I thought.  I suspected I was getting a sense of what Mary had felt when we’d told her we weren’t focusing on the assassins.

“One.  They attack before dawn.  They leave within the next two hours, time of attack depends on how long the path to the nearest available side gate is.  That side gate gets attacked, similar to how the first one was.  They either bring out the big guns, they attack two fronts at once, or they utilize a bomb at the gate.”

I nodded.

“Two.  Just before dawn, we get hit for the third time tonight.  Chaos in our ranks.  The attack in the previous envelope was a distraction to get one of the assassins into the camp.  Superior officers die.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Three.  The assassin, if not caught, manages a signal to the others.  Now that the Westmore forces are looking out for him or her, the assassin only moves in concert with scheduled attacks.”

I nodded.

“The second part of that message is, if the assassin is caught, ahem, because the Lambs are awesome, then the schedule we find on the paper the assassin is carrying is incorrect.  They attack by another schedule or means.  Repeating steps one and two, to get assassins in place.  It is very possible they enter and/or attack using the mine system or any sewer.”

“I don’t know Westmore enough to know the particulars there.”

“We don’t have a sewer system they could abuse like that,” the Brigadier said.  “Waste runs off into one of the mine systems, where it drops into a steady current underground.”

“Impressive,” I said.

“The Academy has its strengths.  They’re more likely to use a mine shaft.  We have enough of them.  But they won’t do this to get their assassins in the first time?”

“I don’t imagine so,” I said.  “It would risk tipping their hand.”

“You know this how?  You studied them that carefully?”

I shook my head.  “All of that, it’s what I would do.”

He turned to the fourth envelope.  He tapped his finger on it.  Something told me I’d insulted him.

“The Academy forces of Westmore that are led by Brigadier Tylor lose,” he recited, giving me a level stare.

I didn’t budge, only meeting his eyes.

“You were right on the first one,” he said.  “That gives you one win.  If you want something, and it doesn’t cost me anything, I’ll grant it.”

I nodded.

“We’ll take measures to react to this attack on the second gate you’re predicting.  That does cost me something, it’s less men and resources on the forward gate.  But I’ll give you the benefit of a doubt.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“First thing I want that doesn’t cost you anything, I want to call the rest of the Lambs here.”

Esprit de Corpse – 5.10

Gordon, Shipman, and Mary came in from the rain.  The rest of us were already present and waiting.

“No activity,” Gordon said, raising his voice to be heard from the other end of the room.  “Double guards are stationed, and ambushes are laying in wait outside the gates.”

“Only stitched for the ambush?”  I asked.

“Only stitched.  Both sides of the path.”

I nodded.

There hadn’t been an attack yet.  Gordon and Mary had left to do another circuit around Westmore, checking for anything suspicious, and now they were back, having picked up Shipman from the residence at the tail end of their route.  The rest of us had gathered, but we were in a position where we were tired and lacked many concrete things to do, but not quite able to relax.  Jamie was at the table with the maps and some books spread in front of him, filling his head with any knowledge that might be relevant.

Lillian was with Jamie, and the two of them were talking in low voices, as Jamie explained something or other.  They were both very good at the ‘library whisper’, and had a way of looking like they were sharing a secret when they did so.  It had something to do with the energy they had when they talked, Jamie finishing sentences, helping Lillian’s verbal stride rather than harming it, yet not getting so excited that they forgot how others might be bothered.

I walked around to look over their shoulders.

A list of the various projects ongoing in Whitney.  Jamie was supplying additional details, some major, some minor.  Even noting the people that some of the scientists had been talking to at the gathering we’d passed through.

Lillian looked up at me and smiled as I walked around the table.  I walked past my empty cup of tea and the plate with a shortbread cookie on it, both provided by the Brigadier’s stitched.  I collected the one piece of shortbread I hadn’t eaten.

Helen was at the opposite end, curled up in a chair that had been grown rather than carved, shaped as the branches grew.  For a large man, it would be snug, but Helen was curled up rather comfortably, feet under her, a heavy blanket surrounding everything but her head, which was already healing a lot of the damage that had been done earlier.  A few red patches with the skin loose at the edges, darker circles under the eyes, but she was mostly alright.

I jabbed the shortbread at her face, and she opened her mouth in time to intercept it, clamping down with her teeth.  She ate it without pulling her arms free from the bundle of blanket.

Walking past Helen, I intercepted Gordon, Shipman, and Mary.

“Brigadier is out ordering some minor changes to organization,” Mary said.  “I think he’s doing it to have something to do more than out of real strategic reasons.”

“It can be both,” Gordon observed.  “By giving the orders and changing the organization, he gets to refresh himself on who is where.”

“And he changes things up, which makes things harder on spies,” I said.  “Spies and infiltrators thrive on consistency.  Being unpredictable here helps.”

“This was your idea,” Gordon said, realizing it out loud.

“Yeah,” I said.  “He was suspicious, but I convinced him that he would only be waiting around here, and we could send anyone important his way.”

“You’re pleased with yourself,” Gordon said.

“A win for everyone involved,” I said, smiling.  “Except the losing side.  Or a loss for everyone and a win for them, if our guess is wrong.”

“If they don’t attack tonight, we lose some clout with the Brigadier,” Gordon said.

“They will,” I said.

“Mm.”

“And you had no ulterior motives in getting rid of the Brigadier, hm?” Mary asked, one eyebrow arched.

“He’ll be back,” I said.

“That doesn’t answer the question,” she said.

I made a face.  “We need to plant our feet here.  This can’t be a prolonged engagement.  They’re too angry, and that’s a fire that burns hot and fast.  Once they get past the wall, it’s going to be over.  Not guaranteed to be a win for them, but it’s going to be over.”

“That has what to do with the Brigadier, exactly?”

“I figure there’ll only be two or three big clashes before this swings one way or the other, the upcoming ambush excepted.  If we lose the Brigadier’s trust, we can’t be certain we’ll get it back before things are over.  So I figure we set down roots, work ourselves into the greater scheme of things.  A little signal or change of plans that makes this lodge more our base of operations than his, if you will.  He leaves, we stay.”

“That’s an awful lot of thinking and work for a pretty minor advantage,” Gordon observed.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Wasn’t a compliment,” he told me, jabbing me with his elbow on his way to the table.  I turned and kicked at his rear end with a sock-clad foot.

“You’ll thank me later,” I said.  “Or, or!  You could thank me now.  Because you got what you wanted.”

“Thank you Sy,” he said, in a sing-song voice.

Helen excepted, we gathered at the end of the table near Lillian and Jamie.  I waved a hand a few times to get the attention of the Brigadier’s fire-tending stitched and then asked for tea.

He wasn’t as clever or animated as Wendy was.  When the fire dropped to a certain temperature, he put a log on, and poked it or used the bellows.  When there weren’t any logs, he went out and collected some from the stockpile.  He could make tea and presumably handle a small handful of other errands.  He likely couldn’t dress himself – his outfit was simple and probably wasn’t changed more than once a blue moon.

The world was so backwards in some ways.  We hadn’t progressed a slow and steady path from the normal to the horrific.  We’d jumped headlong into the horrific, with stitched like these preceding ones like Wendy, and an advanced project like Gordon, who was in many ways a stitched who had never died.

“We have a few big questions that are hanging over our heads,” Jamie said.  “The next attack is the big one.  Where, when, how, and which one?”

“Which assassin,” I clarified.

“Yes.  Which brings us to what and how, if the assassin gets past us,” Jamie said.

I always liked seeing Jamie when he got going.  It usually took a while, some prep time with information at his fingertips, but the rarity of these moments made them all the more fun.

“There isn’t much we can do to answer those questions before the attack happens,” Gordon said.

“No,” Jamie said.  “No, there isn’t.”

“But we can think about what we do if and when things get that far,” I said.

“Sure,” Gordon said.

“But we can’t do that until we raise the other questions, which tie in or complicate things,” I said.  Handing the ball back to you, Jamie.

“They have a trump card,” Jamie said.  “They were confident about their ability to take Westmore.  It might have something to do with the plague men.”

“The men with the boils and scars,” I said.

Jamie nodded.  “But we don’t know much about them.”

“They were physically and mentally affected,” I said.  “Off kilter from the rest of the soldiers, isolated, excluded.  When they appeared in groups, they were with stitched or they were with others of their own kind.  Usually.”

The others nodded.  They’d each seen the men around, to varying degrees depending on how much they roamed the city, and what I was saying didn’t seem to conflict with their own observations.

“I noted the presence of about a hundred in total,” Jamie said.

“That many?” I asked, surprised.

“There might be more,” Jamie said.  “There might be less.  I’m wondering if any experienced swelling, which would alter their faces, maybe lead to me counting some of them twice.  It would be easier to say if I got out more, but I wasn’t really wanting to explain why I was always coming and going from Ames’ headquarters.”

“A hundred,” Gordon said.  “We have no idea of what they do or why they’re there.  Were they voluntary or forced?”

“Might explain the mental issues, how some of them were almost catatonic when they weren’t actively doing something.  Alterations made to keep them compliant?” I suggested.

“Creepy,” Lillian said.

“But I’m wondering if it’s something else,” I said.  I thought for a second, trying to find the words.

“What is it?” Gordon prompted me, impatient.

“I can’t put a finger on it.  But they had a kind of respect from others?  Someone walks down the street, other people get out of their way.  But someone commands your attention, like a pretty girl might-”

I gestured in Mary and Lillian’s direction, not ignoring Shipman, but not really indicating her either.  Mary smiled, and Lillian looked shocked and a little confused.  Which was why I’d done it.

“Ahem,” Helen said the word rather than make the sound, sitting at the other end of the table.

“You’re ugly right now, with the marks all over your face.  You don’t get to play that card,” I told her.

“Aw,” Helen said, at the same time Lillian gave me an indignant, “Sy!”

“She doesn’t mind,” I said.

“I don’t mind,” Helen said, blithely.  “Sy’s good in my books.  He gave me one of his cookies.”

“See?”

Lillian glared at me, looking very uncomfortable, yet she couldn’t formulate an argument as to why or to make her point.

“Are you done interrupting me, girls?” I asked, mostly to needle Lillian.

She opened her mouth to protest, but the front door opened.  The Brigadier, with a retainer of stitched guards.

I cleared my throat.  “Just like a pretty girl draws attention, being noticed and then holding some sway by some invisible rules, I feel like maybe the plague men had that sway.  But it was respect.  No hard facts, like I said.  I’m not Jamie.  But that’s my interpretation.”

“Going by what you said before, you think this was voluntary.”

“I think it might have been,” I said.  “Might be a project that was supposed to end up different than it did.  But I think those are men that know how to use guns.  They had bearing.  A part of me wonders if they aren’t veteran soldiers.”

“I put the image in my mind’s eye together with what you’re saying, and I can see how you’d make that connection,” Gordon said.

The stitched boy brought tea over.  He began pouring it into mugs.  I was still standing, so I walked over to Helen and collected her cup, bringing it down to the other end of the table.

The Brigadier joined us, stopping by his desk to collect an empty cup from there for his own tea.  He didn’t place it with the other cups, but held onto it, waiting for us to be served before he was.

“We can’t make assumptions,” I said.  “We can’t assume that one thing is going to work or that another will lead to certain victory.  They have a trump card, and they have the plague man soldiers.  When they attack the side gate, we can’t assume we stopped the assassin from getting in.”

The Brigadier’s deeper voice cut in, quiet and confident.  “The problem with that approach, and I’m speaking from experience here, is that you can’t do that without taxing yourself.  Covering every possibility, all of the angles, every eventuality, it exhausts you, opens you to mistakes.”

“That’s true,” Gordon said.

“To an extent,” I said.  “But there are two things to keep in mind here.”

“I’m very interested in hearing this,” the Brigadier said.

“The first thing is that this is likely to be a short engagement, not wanting to assume, but going with common sense.”

“I don’t disagree,” the Brigadier said.

“The second thing is that we, as a group, are six individuals with experience not just in working together, but in thinking together.”

“There are seven of you,” the older man pointed out.

Gordon, with Shipman right beside him, was giving me a hard look.

“Those two are two peas in a pod,” I said, in a very cavalier way.  “Semantics!  We think well as a unit.  Fourteen eyes and seven brains on the situation”

The man nodded.  “If you prove that, I’ll be glad to rely on you for that.”

“How are the soldiers?” Gordon asked.  “Morale-wise?”

“How is anyone, after a fight like that?” the Brigadier asked.  “Thirty of ours were injured, seven killed.  The injuries can be fixed, the deaths…”

“The dead can be made into stitched,” Lillian said.  “Or were they using those special guns?”

“The exorcists you described,” the Brigadier said.  “Big exit wounds.  Looking at it, I’d guess we’d get six stitched out of them.  Take one man apart for replacement parts.  But we’re not going to do that.”

“It’s a strength of the Academy, being able to recycle its soldiers,” Mary said.

“In terms of the raw numbers it can bring to bear, yes.  But if a man fights and realizes the stitched fighting next to him is a face he recognizes, he starts to have doubts,” the Brigadier said.  “You’ve promised him that if he falls, he’ll end up the same.  That’s a doubt that works its way deep.”

“Fear of that fate could push someone to fight harder,” Mary said.  “Sir.”

The man waved his hand.  “Let’s dispense of those formalities while we’re in private.  I’d rather focus on giving my enemies something to fear.  No need to bring it inside these walls.”

Which is why we’re in this situation in the first place, I thought.

The Brigadier held his tea, poised as if to drink it, but he talked instead.  “The six soldiers we’d gain aren’t worth the hundreds of soldiers we’d lose, from a loyalty perspective.  Not that they’d leave, not like this, but their hearts wouldn’t be in it, they would stop being wholly ours, and they’d end up turning a share of their time, thoughts and energy to self-preservation…”

He punctuated the thought by finally drinking that tea.

I wanted to like him more now that he was debating with us and challenging us, but I could remember the look in his eye from earlier, and the softness of his approach.

I respected jerks more.  I wasn’t sure if this guy would have what it took to cover my back if and when it really counted.

I looked over to what Jamie had in front of him.  It looked handwritten, with black letters.  The Brigadier’s notes?

I reached out and moved the paper to a better angle so I could read it, saucer with tea in my other hand.

“Oh,” Jamie said.  “The notes from previous skirmishes.  Warning shots, sightings, scoutings…”

“It wasn’t all peace before you arrived,” the Brigadier said.

Jamie nodded, “They didn’t want to provoke a fight, but they weren’t hiding either.”

“They have new leadership,” I observed.  “That woman-”

“Cynthia,” Jamie said.  “Not sure if she’ll be deferring to the rebellion’s military leaders when it comes to strategy, or if she’ll be doing it when it comes to the particulars of leadership, or if she’ll be doing neither or both.”

“After we observe their movements, do you think you’d be able to tell who’s behind them?” I asked.

“That’s abstract,” Jamie said.  “I work better with concrete things.  I can try, but I’d rather give you guys the knowledge you need and let you make the calls.”

I nodded.

I made a mental note to ask Jamie.  When things got hectic, he could often get lost in the shuffle, wanting to say something but not getting a chance.

“I’m also trying to keep track of this.  If we can gauge the weapons, units, or devices our opposition is using, we can try to figure out what each of the rogue scientists they brought in has been busy working on,” Jamie said.  “I’ve been trying to draw a connection between one of the scientists and the plague men, and Lillian was helping, extrapolating.  I was thinking of Leopold Pock, but if you’re right about them being veterans, that would eliminate the possibility.”

“Explain?” the Brigadier asked.

“Augmented soldiers we observed in Whitney.  Sy thinks they’re soldiers that voluntarily underwent some augmentation.  A lot of soldiers, choosing an augmentation that makes them hideous, and does something to their minds.  Likely a permanent change, or as permanent as anything we do to our bodies is.  We’re trying to figure them out.  Why they’d do it, who did it, specifically.  Pock is tentatively ruled out.  Doesn’t fit the working theory.”

“No idea about their capabilities?” the Brigadier asked.

“No,” Gordon said.

“A lot of soldiers,” I said.  “A hundred, at least.  What makes that many men want to change themselves that much?  Enough that a small child might cry to look at them.”

“Hmm,” the Brigadier made a sound.

“Expert opinion is welcome,” I said.  “What does every soldier want?”

“To go home,” the Brigadier said.  “Safe and whole.”

“In their eyes, we attacked them at home,” I said.  “They’re no longer whole, either.  In fact, they’re less whole after the procedure.”

The man nodded.

“Next best thing to going home,” I said.

“To not have to be afraid anymore,” the Brigadier said.

He said it so readily, as if he didn’t even have to think about it.  He simply knew.  They were heavy words, and we were quiet as the words sat with us.

“Lillian,” I said.  “Shipman too, I guess-”

Shipman looked irritated at that.  Gordon too.

“-Any ideas on what-”

Gunshots sounded in the distance.  A few shots at once, then a veritable torrent.

From the right direction, no less.

I was the first one to the front door.  I hopped into my rain-boots rather than pull them on, catching the door for balance as my stomach protested where I’d been shot.

Lillian said something to rebuke me, but I was already pushing the door open, hurrying outside with my raincoat in hand but not yet worn.

My stomach continued to throb now and again, and I forced myself to slow down.  The others caught up with me, the Brigadier among them.  Even Helen and Jamie.

It was the gate I’d predicted.  It was human nature to default to the simple, and to take shortcuts.  Sending people further down the network of roads was risky.  It was more opportunities for our side to spot them, or for them to get stranded if things came down to it.

This one was a gimme.

Just as the Brigadier had sought to break our enemies’ will, they were putting pressure on us now.  The attack was meant to keep us on our toes, to wear down on morale, and getting an assassin inside the doors would give them a chance to drive the wedge in.

The Brigadier broke away from our group to talk to some senior officers.  We headed to the stairs that led up the one side of the wall.  I had to hold up my badge to get through the little doorway and gate that blocked off the stairs.

Reaching the top, I could see flashes of red and yellow as guns fired.  The road stretched along a pass, the floor of it loose, but too rocky to be proper mud.  Crushed stone, provided from elsewhere.  Steep rocky walls rose on either side.

The enemy had come up one side of the road, it looked like, taking shelter in the shadows beneath the rock wall on one side of the road.  They’d discovered, too late, that stitched were lying in wait, kneeling in those same shadows.  The stitched had reacted, firing, and a matching group on the other side of the pass did the same.

Someone from the rebellion had managed to start a fire before dying.  A makeshift bomb, perhaps.  Four or five stitched had fallen.  Minor in the grand scheme of it all.

“Thirty or forty,” Jamie said, his voice soft.  “Dead.”

“I don’t know how you can even tell,” I told him.  It was the middle of the night, and the heavy rainclouds weren’t letting any moon show.

The smell of blood, feces, smoke, and gunpowder were thick in the air.  I could imagine the rock walls on either side of the path were a funnel, bringing the smells in, in a very concentrated way.

“I can see them well enough to count them,” Jamie said.  “We gave the instructions that led to the deaths.”

“The decision to-” Gordon started.

I raised a hand, gesturing.  He stopped.

Gordon would have argued, and shoved his way of thinking at Jamie, and Jamie would have agreed.  It probably would have sunken in.  Jamie would have internalized it, and it wouldn’t be a bad thing.

But I wanted to talk to Jamie about this, not to Gordon.

“We did give the instructions,” I said.  “Me, mostly, but we all played a part, yeah.”

“It feels impersonal,” Jamie said.

“It is.  It was.”

“It feels worse for being impersonal.”

“You’ve killed before,” I pointed out.  “Personal kills, you looked them in the eye.  Even Phlegm.”

“It feels worse for being impersonal,” Jamie said.

“How?” Gordon asked, all at once.  “Why?”

Jamie shrugged.  He didn’t have an answer.

“Whatever the reason,” I said, “It’s allowed to feel however it feels.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“Never a problem.”

The silence was broken up by handlers on the wall-top shouting down to the stitched below.  We hadn’t lost any actual lives down there, and stitched were more expendable, tougher.  Easier troops to field.

“Didn’t see anyone climb the wall,” Mary said.  “But if they did it at the start-”

Still fixated on the assassins.  Not a bad thing.

“We’ll assume someone got in and take measures,” I said.

Mary nodded.

“I kind of want to see the vat-grown humans that Polk made,” Helen said.  “I wonder if they can have babies?  Jamie, do you know?  Lillian?”

Lillian made a squeaking sound as her name was mentioned.

“Do you?” Helen pressed.

“Why do you want to know?” Jamie asked, very cautiously, then before Helen could answer, he quickly added, “And do I want to know why you want to know?”

“I’m just curious,” Helen said.

“Do you want babies?” Jamie asked.

“No.  Why?  What does that have to do with anything?” Helen asked.

Which all added up to the Lambs being very confused.

I wondered if Ibott had instructed Helen to practice psychological warfare.  Her talk at the teahouse, and now this?  If he’d given the order, she’d picked up on it remarkably fast.

The stitched turned on little lamps they had with them, and more were tossed down.  Each lamp had mirrored metal around the majority of it, so a beam would be cast out in a cone.  The light that was cast was a yellow-orange, and danced as the wind blew.

As the lamps lit up and the stitched spread out, we were given a view of the battlefield in all its garishness.  The road was too rocky with too many gaps, and the rain had pounded down the blood that hadn’t slipped into the gaps.  The bodies were just lying there, and without the right amounts of blood, they looked artificial, even posed.  A little girl’s dolls, dropped and left in whatever position they fell.

I studied the cliff face, looking to see if maybe one of the assassins was utilizing it to climb.  Nothing.

How were you planning to get in?  I wondered.

Jamie reached out, grabbing my upper arm.

He pointed.

There.  At the rear of the group.  A figure with features spaced too far apart, strange earlobes, and a girthy belly.

Phlegm lived?

No.  I didn’t buy it.  The reactions of the woman with the teeth…

“Guess we won’t find out,” Gordon said.

The rain continued to pour down.  I continued to try and think of all of the different vectors for attack.

I turned and headed down the stairs, approaching the Brigadier.

“You were right,” he said.

Oh.  That.

Last thing on my mind.

“One assassin fell, it looks like.  But the man is supposed to be dead.”

“The dead can come back,” the man said.  Rain was streaming off his helmet, and collecting in his wooly chin-strap of a beard.

“Guess so,” I said.

“Just sent my men out to get reports from each of the other gates.  If this was a distraction, something might have happened elsewhere.”

I nodded.  We did have security measures at the other gates.  The Academy forces of Westmore weren’t going to be sleeping tonight.

“We’ll see if your next prediction is right,” he said.

Someone gave a shout, and the gate opened.  The other Lambs were gathered together in clusters, or meandering down the stairs.  Jamie and Helen were a little slower to move.

The stitched that had been stationed outside filed in, carrying the dead.

“We’ll have some replacement stitched that won’t be hurting morale any,” the Brigadier said.  “Might even come out ahead.”

“Might even,” I said.  “Can I have a bayonet?”

He raised his eyebrows.

“I’ve been right twice.  I get to ask for more favors, don’t I?  Things that might be a little questionable or inconvenient?”

“I suppose,” the Brigadier said.  He gestured for a soldier to come closer, then took the man’s weapon.

“Hold on,” I said.  “Don’t give it to me yet.”

It took another minute before the stitched had made it inside the walls.  The gate creaked as it swung closed.  Bars were lowered into place.

I reached out, and the bayonet slapped into my hand.

As I approached the line of stitched and bodies, Mary fell into step beside me.  I extended the bayonet to her, and she tossed it into the air in front of me.

Gordon, appearing on my other side, caught it.  By the time I looked back at Mary, she had knives in her hands.

“The bodies,” I said, clearly, my gaze on the corpses that were being dragged.  I raised my hands to my hood, pushing it back and running my fingers through my hair.  My tone was weary as I said, “Check the dead bodies.”

“Mm,” Gordon said.

Gordon lowered the bayonet blade, aiming for the first corpse.

At the last second, before stabbing, he raised it, stabbing the stitched.

Mary moved fluidly, throwing her knives, hitting the second and third stitched in the line.

They reacted as anyone might.  Alarmed, hurt, they reached for their weapons.

“Stand down!” the Brigadier hollered.  “That’s an order!”

The specialists on the wall and beside the line repeated the order, though they looked confused.

Gordon was already moving, aiming for the fourth stitched in the line.  Mary threw knives at the fifth and sixth.

The sixth ‘stitched’ moved fluidly, knives in its own hands, as it struck the throwing knife out of the air.

Faster and more graceful than any stitched was.

Mary threw more knives, sprinting forward.  The stitched hit them out of the air once more.  It approached, picking up speed as it made a beeline for Gordon.  It didn’t seem to care that he was armed, or that he was raising the gun to aim.

It wasn’t Gordon that shot.  Others on the sideline opened fire.  As much as the man could knock a thrown knife out of the air, he couldn’t do much against bullets.  He jerked, stumbled, and tripped over a corpse that lay on the ground behind him.

The rain continued to pour, the sound of the gunshots ringing in my ears.

No assumptions, I thought.

Now the dance really began.  With this ploy failing, our enemy would be forced to get creative.  I’d get to see what kind of tacticians we were up against, and we’d have to match them in kind.

Esprit de Corpse – 5.11

The two bodies were each held by four of the Academy’s soldiers.  With a shout and a very practiced motion, the bodies were heaved up and onto freshly wiped granite slabs.  One was Phlegm.  The other was dressed as a stitched, complete with our uniform.

The doctors and scholars of Westmore were already collecting around, many wearing their coats and aprons, masks covering the lower halves of their face, goggles over their eyes.  Black, elbow-length gloves were pulled over freshly washed hands.  The room was open-air, a shelter for wagons, very possibly a drier point for coal to be offloaded, but canvas cloths had been tied down and sealed it off, with sandbags up to the four foot mark, providing some insulation and walls.  The floor was packed soil, and was caked with old blood, shit, and other detritus.  Kits off to the side had all of the material needed for stitched, while toolbox-like constructions were in one corner, providing other tools for more conventional medical care.

“Out of the way,” a man told me, as he wheeled a cart over to the foot of the table.  He had more than enough room.  He was just bullying me, indicating that I was not supposed to be here, in a way that meant he didn’t have to say it outright.

I hopped up onto a stack of sandbags in the corner.  I offered Mary a hand in climbing up next to me.  Totally unnecessary, but I had to be gentlemanly.  Gordon, Lillian, and Shipman stood at the other side of the enclosure, pulling back into the corner a bit, where they were clear of the normal footpaths.

“No children in the room,” one of the scholars said, getting in Mary’s way.  Black coat, black apron, black gloves, a pin at his collar marking his rank, Field Surgeon.  He was surrounded by grays and whites, some with pins, some without.

“Ahem,” Lillian said.  She took a quarter-second too long to say something, reaching for the badge in her pocket.

“Out!” the man said, raising his voice, more at the fact that I hadn’t budged.  Gordon and Mary were taking my cue.  I pointed at Lillian.

Lillian spoke up, “I’d like to-”

“John, Troy, see that the children go,” the Surgeon said, turning his back.  It was what I would have done.  Deflecting and dismissing her, forcing her to appeal to more people, people who were in service to authority, a hard chain to break.

Lillian looked at me for help.  I stayed quiet, watching.

Sure enough, two of the doctors who hadn’t yet washed up approached, ready to usher us out.

“Sir,” Shipman said, her voice stronger than Lillian’s had been.  She grabbed Lillian’s wrist, pulling Lillian’s hand from the pocket.  Lillian was holding the badge.  “We’d like to stay.  Pursuant to the Brigadier’s orders.”

The surgeon turned to look back at the badge.  He made a face, then raised his chin.  “Sir?”

We turned, and we could see that the Brigadier was standing in the street with a few other men.

“They can watch.  Have them bring me the write-up when you’re done,” Brigadier Tylor said.  Then he was gone, looking after other business.

The surgeon’s face was hidden by the mask and goggles, but I entertained myself by imagining that it looked like he was sucking on a lemon while he had his balls in a vise.

Probably wasn’t the case, but it was funny to imagine.

Mary and Shipman hurried to get to a vantage point where they wouldn’t be in the way.  A tough job, considering how packed the space already was.

“Troy, would you take the notes?” the surgeon asked.  Troy, still wearing the apron and coat, but not scrubbed in, picked up a pen and paper.  John hurried to get to the sink and wash up.  I presumed it was a constant competition to get recognition from the surgeon.

Another doctor took scissors to the clothing of the men, cutting away what they couldn’t open on their own.  The men were soon left naked on the table.

Phlegm had a broad stomach, the sort where a strong man also ate too much.  The muscle was there, underlying it, but it was insulated enough that the lines werent’ readily apparent.  Thick neck, strangely spaced facial features, and odd earlobes, with messy hair.  He was covered in deep, recognizable scars.

“Subject appears to be stitched, standard ‘Y’ cut.  The work looks as if it was done only hours ago.  Trepanning method of lobotomy, holes still present, with skin flaps covering.  This was a fast job.”

“We killed him earlier today,” I commented.  “They needed a decoy.”

“If I want commentary, I will ask for it,” the surgeon said.

I raised my hands in the gesture for surrender.

“The word ‘Phlegmatic’ is tattooed along the first subject’s collarbone,” the surgeon said, prodding the flesh.  “Bone structure stands out as differing from the norm.  Fused collarbone, ribcage has flat affect across the front and back, with broader sternum and fused spaces between ribs.  Vat-grown.  Older scars suggest the changes are the result of grafts and prior work.  Layered, different types of scars.  The previous work was done over a long period of time.”

“John, White, see to the staples.”

Two others at the slab got pincer tools and began removing the staples.

The surgeon bent down, examining Phlegm’s face.  “Changes are of a type expected from nineteen-ought attempts to modify the living code, rewriting the fabric of a grown individual.  The grafts, to speculate, were part of efforts to repair the damage done with the system-wide changes.  Subject had limited vision, with occlusion of the ocular cavity, sinus cavities, mouth -enlarged tongue- and-”

He pried Phlegm’s mouth open.

“-throat.”

“Intentional,” Lillian said.

“Beg pardon?” the surgeon asked.

“I’d bet you dollars to pennies it’s intentional, and it can be controlled.  He used weaponized gases, I think, before he died.  The blockages would have been a casualty of the changes to his facial structure, and they were modified to serve a purpose.”

“If true, that will be verified at a later point,” the surgeon said.  “No more commentary from the gallery, please.”

“I’ve seen work by students who were trained by Phlegmatic’s creator, very similar.  Efficient lungs, improved circulatory system, every orifice can be closed,” Lillian said.  “He’d be made to hold his breath underwater for twenty minutes.  Or in a cloud of noxious gas for twenty minutes.”

Was she like this around her classmates?  I wondered how many of them wanted to throttle her.

“Thank you for that observation,” the surgeon said.  “I’m sure we’ll see for ourselves when the time comes.”

“You should pay attention to the ears and eyes,” Lillian said.  “Most of the work would have been there.  The eyes would need protection, which means there’s some interesting work-”

The surgeon cleared his throat.

“There’s some interesting work done there, with eyes made immune to most airborne issues, or the eyes were sealed and he used another sense.  Probably the ears.”

I was willing to bet that if the Brigadier hadn’t given the okay, the Surgeon would have grabbed Lillian and literally thrown her out of the enclosure himself, even knowing he’d have to scrub down all over again.

“What an insightful set of observations,” the surgeon said, sarcastically.  “Do you have anything more to say, or may I continue with the investigation?”

“Oh, I’m done for now,” Lillian said, smiling, as if she had no idea he was upset.  “I’ll say more as things come up.”

“I’ll thank you not to,” the surgeon said, somewhat under his breath.  “Before we were interrupted, I was moving on to the ears.”

Which was probably true, I imagined.  It had to rankle.  I noted that Shipman was murmuring something to Lillian, who was smiling.

“Ear canal and normal ear structures are present, with little modification.  The area surrounding, however, suggests a latticework of tympanic membranes, of varying size,” the surgeon said.  “Barring another situation of heavy occlusion, he would have possessed exceptional hearing ability, both in terms of sensitivity and range.  Moving on…”

The surgeon moved away from the head.  On to the torso.

“The body is probably booby-trapped,” I commented, idly.

The surgeon reacted like he was going to lash out and say or do something, but then the words sank in.  He remained frozen where he was, scalpel hovering over Phlegm’s chest.

I shrugged, very casually explaining, “He was already dead.  They made him into a stitched to bait us into thinking we’d caught one of their assassins.  He’s resistant to many gases and poisons.”

“Ooh!  Of course!” Lillian said.  “He’d have bladders in his body, for holding reserve, or for buoyancy control, if he’s aquatic at all.  Which is probably.  Any one of the bladders could be pumped full and sealed.  Would be.”

The surgeon stared down at the body, scalpel still in hand.

“Just so you know,” Lillian said, smiling wider than before.  She met my eyes.

“Sorry to interrupt,” I told the surgeon and Lillian both.

Lillian, I was realized, was having a great deal of fun.

She and I didn’t get to play off each other like this, ever.  The earlier attitude had been intentional, needling the man.

Not that she was necessarily wrong about the booby trap.

“Perhaps,” the surgeon said, very carefully, “You children would want to leave, to be safe?”

“Not at all,” I said.

“There’s nothing to worry about, so long as you’re careful,” Lillian said.

Shipman cleared her throat.  “I think I’ll step out.”

Gordon reached out for her hand.  I wasn’t sure if it was to hold her back or to offer reassurance of some sort, but the gesture was ignored.  Shipman stalked out, flipping her hood up as she exited into the downpour.

He didn’t look at any of us as his hand fell back into his lap.

The surgeon went back to work.  The staples were removed, and the man took a scalpel to the existing incisions, which had been glued shut.  A very careful cut, with several slices, each one cutting only a fraction deeper.  The skin parted, and a rank odor filled the enclosure.

People were alarmed, stepping back, hands to their masks.

But it was only the stench of death.  This would be why the enclosure wasn’t properly indoors.  It was a more ventilated space.

“Low cook temperature for a stitched,” the surgeon observed.  “Rot setting in already.  The wires are visible, recently implanted, with no overgrowth.  A crude job.”

He moved a flap of skin.  In the lower stomach, an oblong shape was nestled in just beneath the skin, anchored to fat and stomach wall.  Stretched thin enough to be translucent, it had veins running along the surface.  It had been inflated.

I saw the scalpel tremble a little as the surgeon pulled it away.

“Two air-bladders have been discovered.  One penetrated by a bullet and explosively emptied when the stitched was incapacitated.  The other remains active.  The examination will be terminated here, due to observable risks should rot or infestation penetrate this or any other bladders inflated with airborne poisons.  ”

He stepped away, hands raised, scalpel in one, and gave the order, “Close him up.  Seal him, wrap and bag him, dispose of him.  Treat the body with care.”

The people he’d given the instructions to didn’t look very happy to be assigned the task.  Not just because of the traps, but it smelled worse with every passing second.

The surgeon went, removed his gloves, washed his hands, donned another pair of gloves, and then turned to the next body.

“Anything I should know before examining him?” the man asked.

“He was quick,” I said.  “But he wouldn’t be booby trapped.  Probably.”

The surgeon began cutting away the mask of flesh.  “Fresh.  From one of ours, if I had to guess.”

“Removed on the battlefield,” I chimed in, mostly to nettle him.  “Impressive improvisational skills.”

“Ahem.  Troy?  The notes.  This is our second patient.  Choleric, according to the label at his collarbone.  The patients are named after the four humors, presumably.  There are subtler signs of the same rewriting of the individual’s pattern, and similar means of grafting, likely from the same time period, suggesting they were worked on in concert.  Academy level work, judging by quality.  The goal varies, but the methodology matches our prior patient, Phlegmatic.  Rictus smile-”

“Because of changes to musculature and nervous system,” Lillian jumped in.  “No occlusion this time, of course.  I think if you look at the eyes, you’ll find…”

The surgeon’s grip on the scalpel tightened.

☙

Gunshots rang out in the distance as we entered the Brigadier’s lodge.  The man was there, talking to some of his officers.  Jamie, Helen, and Shipman were at the table, Helen bundled up, Jamie with a towel around his shoulders.

Gordon handed the Brigadier the papers on Phlegmatic and Choleric.  I hung back to see the Brigadier’s reaction and hear his response, while Mary and Lillian headed to rejoin the others.  Lillian was smiling.

Something told me that if I hadn’t been there for the autopsy and analysis, Lillian wouldn’t have been a troublemaker.  I’d rubbed off on her a little, and the surgeon had suffered for it.

“Gunshots,” Gordon observed.

“Another attack from the front,” the Brigadier said.  “We’re aware of the possibility that it’s a distraction.  Guards are stationed elsewhere.  We have eyes on all mineshafts and tunnels.”

“It’s too quiet,” I observed.

The Brigadier gave me a curious look.

“It’s almost timid, isn’t it?  No explosions, only bullets.  Getting our attention, but nothing more.”

“And?”

“It feels like a distraction, rather than a proper attack.  A handshake more than a ploy.”

“The enemy’s shaking our hand?  Explain.”

I shook my head.  “We expected an attack to cover another attempt at getting an assassin inside our walls.  They’ve answered that expectation.  They might as well have a flag unfurled saying ‘distraction’, but that’s a communication of it’s own.  That they know what we’re thinking.  And because they know, they can meet us halfway.”

“They’re saying hi,” Gordon said.  “To us more than to the Brigadier.  They’ve recognized that the style of leadership changed.  The ambush, the assassin they tried to get inside didn’t make it and hasn’t given the signal they expected.  The way the posts have a different distribution of guards.  Something tipped them off.”

I nodded.

“You’re acting like this is a game,” the Brigadier said.

“They have only a peripheral idea of who they’re dealing with.  Same goes for us,” I said.  “They’re feeling things out.”

The Brigadier looked at the commanders who he’d been talking to, and indicated for them to leave.  He leaned against the front of his desk, arms and ankles folded.

“Should we expect this to continue?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “They’re breaking from pattern, just as we are.  It’s hard to say.  Can we share this conversation with the others?”

The Brigadier nodded.  While Gordon and I rejoined the others, the man poured himself another drink.

“Thought exercise,” Gordon said, as we took our seats at the table.  “If you were on Whitney’s side, what would you do?”

“I’m not a fighter,” Lillian said.

“Give it a shot,” I prodded her.

I could see her squirm a little, uncomfortable.  I’d been nice to her recently, we’d had fun with the surgeon, and she was probably lonely after all of her weeks in the school, separated from most of the rest of us.

Now I was asking her to do something outside of her comfort zone.

“Jamie and I were talking earlier tonight,” she said.  “Looking at the resources they have, how they might use them.  Peralta specializes in pain.  If the winds blew differently, or if they found a way to get further up into the hills, a vaporized spray to deploy a toxin could incapacitate us.”

“We have masks,” the Brigadier said.  He’d joined us.  Jamie had the papers Gordon had given the Brigadier.  “Every post, all of the men have their own individual masks.”

“There are a lot of vectors,” Shipman said.  “If it could be absorbed through the skin…”

“Or if it obscured sight,” Gordon added, “Or if having to wear the masks played a part in things?  Limited vision, mist or smoke, assassins can creep in.  It could be the trump card we were worried about.”

“Could be,” I said.  “But I feel as if they’re a little more cohesive than that.  This isn’t slapdash.  They brought in people and those people are meeting and talking.  They’re discussing, making a strategy, and that woman Cynthia is at the top, somehow.  I think that their movements will be more in step.  Not sending in an assassin without a mask on a city they intend to gas.”

“The assassin can steal a mask,” Gordon said.

I made a gesture, indicating my lack of confidence, then remembered the Brigadier wouldn’t be familiar with it.  Shipman either, for that matter.  “Don’t think so.”

“Alright,” Gordon said.  “Jamie?  What do you think is coming?  What would you do?”

“I’d continue to feel out the enemy.  Go in with as much information as possible.”

“Then?” I jumped in.

“Then attack.  Keep the trump card in reserve.  You said, uh, Sy said, that their biggest strength right now is how angry the people are.  The soldiers are ready to kill because they don’t have any other choice.  But that fighting spirit is easily broken.  They throw themselves at these walls and gates enough times without a success, they’ll lose that fervor.”

“At which point they pull out the trump card,” I said.

Jamie’s voice was soft, “reignite the anger and the passion.”

“It would have to be something offensive,” Mary said.

Jamie nodded.

“Mary, what would you do?”

Assassins, I thought.

“Use the assassins,” she said.  “They just lost their second.”

“You think they’ll throw good money after bad?” I asked.

“They’re people.  They have feelings, and they just lost two of their own.  Use the mineshafts, use the plague men, two assassins, and fight past any guards.  Chaos in our camp, coinciding with another hard attack.  Gun for our leadership, behead us.”

Mary paused, looking at the Brigadier.  “Sorry, sir.”

The man was silent.

“Helen?” Gordon asked.

Helen perked up a little.  “What Mary said.  But no gunning.  Poison.  Bombs.  Traps.  Get to the food supply, the meat lockers we use to feed the warbeasts and other experiments.”

“I kind of like that more, now that I hear it,” Mary said.  “The attack from the inside sounds romantic in my head, but in execution…”

“I agree,” the Brigadier said.  “I’m more concerned about subtler attacks than a direct attack aimed at me and my immediate subordinates.  We have people stationed as guards.  We can maintain that guard, but I have to echo what I said to Sylvester earlier.   People can’t maintain that level of focus for too long a time.  The mind and the heart won’t have it.  Mistakes will be made, people will slack, convince themselves they can.”

“The condition of being human,” Gordon said.

“One the enemy has to worry about,” I said.  “It’s really the same problem they have with keeping the fires stoked, keeping the people hurt and mad.  Which is really very easy, considering the spider thing.  And the sterilization.  And the leash.  But it is a weak point for them.”

“What are you thinking, Sy?” Gordon asked.  “You’re the best to ask, when it comes to this sort of thing, I was saving you for last.”

“Ah,” I said.  “What Jamie said.  We can expect another hour or two of harassment.  Gunshots, maybe an explosion or two.  But all this while, they’re going to be telling people, wait.  Wait.  Wait.  Get some rest.  Be prepared.  Because the real attack happens later.”

Gordon nodded.  “The first attack was a foray.  They forced our hand.  But they didn’t commit resources or show their own hand as they did it.  A big stitched here, Sy’s rifleman with the eyes, too, but none of the weapons the scientists might have been working on.  The second attack, with Choleric and stitched-Phlegm, that was only a small squad.  This, right here, it’s a tease, a handshake, according to Sy.”

“And while they’re holding our hand, and our guard is down, they use their other hand and slap us full across the face,” I said.  “The next attack is going to be the decider.  We’re gong to find out what the plague men are, and what the scientists have been working on.”

“We don’t seem to have a consensus,” Gordon said.  “But an indirect attack seems-“

“They’re going to attack head-on,” I said.  “Full-force.”

The Brigadier paced over to the fire, holding his drink.  We watched in silence as he paced for a moment.

He looked like he’d aged years over the course of the evening.

I wondered how old he really was.  It was a hard question to answer sometimes.  There were sixty year old women who maintained the appearance of someone a third their age.  Brigadier Tylor was the opposite, in a way.  Fitting, for someone who existed on the periphery.

He drew in a deep breath.  He already had our full attention.  “Sylvester.”

“Sir.”

“Your fellows have been talking about all the possible vectors of attack.  Including attacks from the flank, using special weapons, and attacks from within.  There’s nothing we can do to block up mine shafts.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“You’re anticipating a frontal attack.  Why?”

“Because they have no idea why the prior attack failed.  We didn’t leave survivors to go back and report.  As far as they know, the side roads are a deathtrap.  They default to what they know and understand, and what they know is that the way is clear to the front.”

“This current attack is a handshake, according to you.  They know or assume our current organization was able to figure out their move with Phlegmatic and Choleric.  What guarantee is there that they won’t change their plan here, in anticipation of a similar prediction?”

“Ah,” I said.  “That’s a fun question.”

The Brigadier wasn’t smiling.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “There’s no guarantee.  I don’t know her well enough to predict her.  But when that woman Cynthia came after Jamie, Helen, and I, and Choleric signaled for her to back off, she was champing at the bit, and only barely restrained herself from coming after us.  That’s the person in my mind when I picture them coming for us.  A snarling dog in a pretty evening dress with pretty hair.  Someone who knows types like Choleric and Phlegm, who arrives in town with the likes of Leopold Pock and Peralta.”

“She knows the dark underground of the Academies,” Gordon said.  “The disenfranchised, the monsters who’ve lurked under the radar and avoided the likes of Dog and Catcher.”

I nodded.

“You believe this firmly enough that you’d put the bulk of our defenses at the front doors?” the Brigadier asked.

“Yes,” I said.  “Not soon.  Keep guards where they are.  But I’d say that in about an hour, you’d want to start moving them to the front gate.  Skeleton guards on other defenses.”

The man turned back to the fire, then finished off his glass, which had only been one-quarter full to begin with.  He placed the glass on the top of the hutch that held spare firewood.

“I’ll trust your read on her, but I’ll manage the distribution and logistics myself,” he said.

“Probably for the best, sir,” I said.

Didn’t want to lose him now.  Hell, he was probably right.  He did know better than I did.

“I’ve already told the others.  After they let up this time, we press the attack,” he said.

An attack against an unknown enemy.

“We follow them home, right on their heels.  We can’t keep playing this game.  We don’t have the resources for it, and so long as they have the scientists and doctors, they’ll always have more tricks up their sleeve.  We need to squash this.”

There was silence in response to that, but we nodded as he looked back at us.  The man mas serious.  There was a bit of fire on our side, now.

I just wished it was better directed.

We’d armed him with all the knowledge and perspective we could.

I was already planning and plotting, not just against our enemy, but trying to work with the man.  I doubted he’d budge, and we had to follow him, or find a reason to make him change course.

“Thank you, for your counsel on the defense,” he said.  “Jamie, I understand you have maps?  Of Whitney, and the enemy positions therein?”

“Yes sir.”

“I’ll have a look at them, if you please.”

We need information we don’t have, I thought.  On the plague men, on the trump cards.

We need to survive this incoming attack.  We need to guarantee that our attack on them isn’t fruitless.

What are you thinking, you snarling dog of a woman?  Do you see us coming?

Esprit de Corpse – 5.12

As organized as Westmore had been at the start of the evening, things were devolving.  The warbeasts were out of their cages, and every time they set foot on an area that wasn’t roadway, they left the ground torn up.  Those areas soon became cesspits of mud.  Stitched were gathered, but there was less rhyme and reason than before.  Rank and file in hooded jackets, steaming in the rain, guns in hand.  Weapons were being rolled into place, and officers were having to work harder to enforce discipline.

It was too late in the evening.  People wanted sleep, and in the absence of sleep they were smoking or sitting down at their posts – more in the posts off on the side gates and the little buildings that were housing supplies than at the gate and along the streets.

Gordon, Mary and I chose our route to be unpredictable, weaving and winding, aiming to get a view of the areas where assassins might lurk.  Now and then, Gordon would walk off a short distance and kick at a fallen set of planks or a bit of cloth, to identify anything hiding beneath.  The three of us had guns in holsters, our coats on, not so dissimilar from the stitched in appearance, though we were almost half the size.  I was less than half the size, myself.

We passed a set of doors, and Mary did the bending-down, touching the small rigging of sticks and wire under the first door.  A motion of her hand indicated that it was fine.  We passed to the second door.  No issue.

At the third, she gave the flat-handed gesture for negation.

I gripped the handle of my gun.

Gordon snapped his fingers to get Mary’s attention, then gestured at the side of the building.  She and I trained our guns on the door while Gordon walked around to the side, found a way to half-climb up the building, and peered into the little window.

As he dropped to the ground, with only the smallest splash, he drew his own gun, hurrying to join us.

Meaning there was something to be concerned about.

I stepped to the side of the door, back to the wall, hand on the knob, other hand holding my revolver.  My eyes scanned the short street we were on, looking for trouble.  Gordon and Mary were poised.

I turned the knob.  They rushed the room, while I covered their rear.

Tense seconds passed, with no gunfire.

“Sy,” Gordon murmured.

I entered the building.

A man was slumped on the floor.  He was snoring softly.  ‘Man’ might have been too generous.  Older than fifteen, younger than twenty, with only a ghost of a beard and mustache.

Mary bent down and picked up the little twist of wire and branch.  ‘L’ shaped, not much longer than any of my fingers, it was small enough to go unnoticed, but if a door was opened, the little twist of wire would get moved across the floor.  If we couldn’t find it, someone had been inside since the last time we passed through.

“Rest well, soldier,” Gordon murmured.

Mary sniffed.

We shut the door gently behind us.  Mary bent down to put the twist of wire back into place.

“What was that noise you made?” I asked, my voice soft enough it was almost drowned out by the march of boots on the road a street over.  Forty or fifty people, probably stitched from the noise they were making.

“Noise?” Mary asked.

“After Gordon’s ‘rest well’?”

“Oh.  Doesn’t matter.  I kind of wanted to kick him in the ass and yell at him,” Mary said.  “That kind of behavior makes me antsy.  Knackering off when there’s a battle to be fought.”

“We don’t know his story,” Gordon said.  “What might be driving him, what happened earlier in his day.”

“He’s sleeping while there’s a battle to be fought,” Mary said, again.  “Everyone is tired and anxious.  Why does he get to sleep?”

“He found a way,” Gordon said.  “If he gets caught, he faces the consequences.  If he doesn’t, he gets to sleep.”

“Rules are in place for a reason,” Mary said.

This time I snorted a little.

Gordon bent down to check the next door.  “Talk to Sy about that one.  He could talk your ear off.”

“Hey.”

“But seriously,” Gordon said. “I agree with him.  Sometimes the only good a rule does is weed out the people who can’t figure out a way around it.”

“I like how I’m being dragged into this conversation, and I’ve barely said anything,” I said.

“That person’s presence in the next fight might be the factor that makes or breaks our victory,” Mary said.

Gordon shrugged.  “His being well rested might make or break it, too.  Or it might give him a chance to stand out.  Be a little bit sharper.  I’d rather have clever people who know how to break the rules in charge, over people who’ve only ever done as they were told.”

“I wouldn’t,” Mary said.  “Because those clever people would be in charge of people trying to take shortcuts and skip out on work.”

“And that’s why we love you, Mary,” I said.

“That’s deflecting,” she said.  “You’re trying to distract me by throwing the word ‘love’ out there.”

“Sure, but I’m not deflecting so much as I’m trying to take the reins of the conversation and get it away from a debate that’s never going to end.  Gordon’s on one side, he prefers the fastest, most expedient  method of getting results, and we’ve got you on the other, striving toward perfection and order.”

“You could be the tiebreaker,” Gordon said.  “Settle it.”

“You’re an ass,” I said.

“Why?” he asked, and he actually managed to almost sound innocent.

“Break the tie,” Mary said, before I could voice a response.  She wasn’t about to let it go, now.

That was why Gordon was an ass.  Mary had a way of obsessing or fixating, and it got worse when she was tired.  Something about the way she’d been raised, the very minor changes Percy had made to her brain as she developed, it made it so she could and would keep practicing or training or studying when someone else would be too exhausted to keep going.  It was possible for her to push her own limits to the point where she damaged her own body.  It was even likely, if the people around her weren’t careful to keep an eye on her or set strict rules.

I stepped ahead a bit to bend down, my stomach still sore, using the excuse of checking the wire under the door to try and delay having to give an answer.

“Sy,” she said.

I could imagine Gordon’s smile, in the shadows of his hood.

“You win,” I said.

“Too easy,” she said.  “I don’t believe you.”

“Fine.  Gordon’s right.  Better to let the guy keep sleeping.”

Gordon snorted.

“Give me a real answer,” Mary said.

The rumble of gunfire in the distance saved me.  Our heads turned, and then we were off, running, boots splashing in muddy water.

The gunfire was different from before.  The last attack had been the ‘handshake’.  Feeling us out.  Tentative, bullets spitting and spraying here and there, an already-injured beast unleashed to see how fast it died, and to show them that we were confident enough to sacrifice it.

This was a swelling.  Answering one exchange with something bigger and louder.

Off the side street, onto the main.  A long-haired warbeast with horns bigger than I was saw our movement out of the corner of its eye and turned its head in our direction, snapping.  Gordon stumbled, with the speed and amount he had to duck the swinging horn.  Mary ducked a little.  I was happy to let the horn pass over my head.

The specialist in charge of the thing rebuked it, provoking a drawn out and guttural moan from the thing, but it was well behind us by then.

We reached the wall.  I held up my badge without breaking stride.

Within one second of my stepping on the stairs to go up to the higher portion of the wall, an explosion rocked the area, and I ended up slamming my shin against the third stair.

Gordon grabbed me and unceremoniously hauled me to my feet, holding me by the back of my pants until I had my feet under me and was keeping up.

The area was lighting up.  Bioelectric lamps were on, shedding light on the battlefield, but liquids were leaking out as stray bullets caught them, and they were of the sort that flickered a lot, even left alone.  It was unreliable lighting.

The enemy was here.  It looked like a lot of them.  Maybe every able bodied person in Whitney and many who weren’t able bodied, all camped out on the road, far enough back that our bullets wouldn’t reach them, and vice versa.

I’d been right.  This was the full-frontal attack.

Problem was, this was a situation the Lambs weren’t suited for.

If we were still in the enemy camp, it would be a different story.  We’d handled the strategy, informed the commander.  Our only hope was to gather information or hope they made a mistake we could exploit.

I didn’t even try to talk, with the noise around us.  One of the warbeasts was getting agitated by the sound of the battle it wasn’t being allowed to join, and I wondered if it hadn’t been injected with stimulants; perhaps a chemical to help an already pain-tolerant, bullet-resistant creature of war cover the distance between us and them.

I gestured instead.  Open hand to fist.  Fist tapped to chest.  Two finger flick gesture toward the other side of the wall.

Want, claim, take, for the first gesture.  Then me.  Then over there, moderate distance.

I want to get over there.

Gordon gave me a cool look, ducking his head below the rise of the short wall between us and them, but he didn’t gesture in response.

I knew it was dangerous and suicidal.  But our only ability to truly control this situation depended on information.  The Brigadier seemed set on attacking the enemy, and if we decided we needed to change that course, then we needed new details to bring to him.  If we decided the attack was the right plan, then that information could only help.

If there was a chance we could figure out what they had up their sleeves in time to prepare our side, that could be the most important thing.

It all hinged on our ability to actually obtain that information.  Simple observation wouldn’t do.  The explosions and the vibration of one wall-mounted gun at the far end of the wall were making it hard to focus.

As Gordon and Mary had been tense and poised to attack as I’d prepared to open the door, I felt a sense of readiness now.  One opportunity, one event, one clue.

A different sort of attack, this.  On our end, at least.

They had stitched.  So did we.  Eight out of ten people at the top of the wall were stitched.  Two specialists, a commanding officer, Mary and I were the only ones who weren’t.  Gordon was a grey area.  Forty or so stitched were shoulder to shoulder along the top of the broad stone gate.

Something roared, from their side.

That was a surprise.

A warbeast.  I chanced a peek, and I saw it charging up the road.  Not Academy material.  Weaker and less refined than any of ours: slower, smaller, and uglier.  Hornless, it more closely resembled a cross between a rhino and a naked mole rat.

Still, it had all of the right characteristics.  Thick hide sufficient to stop most bullets, tons of raw muscle, hostility.

I realized I was holding my breath, seeing its approach.  I could hear the specialists on the wall calling out orders to the stitched in their charge.

Bullets fired, targeting the thing.  I couldn’t see in the gloom, not with all of the rain, but I saw its head jerk to one side as a black smudge opened around one eye.  Blood.  Blind in one eye?

It veered to one side as its head jerked – it had a habit of running where it was facing, and then it self-corrected, not slowing down.

“Hold!” one of the specialists screamed.  “Hold!”

The enemy wasn’t following up on the warbeast’s attack.  Had they attacked with all of their massed forces and the beast, perhaps using a few other tricks, they would have forced us to either mow them down or kill the beast, either option giving them a shot at breaching the wall.

My mind turned over the options.  Was it a leadership gambit?  A promise made by Cynthia, to energize the forces, that the lives of the people of Whitney wouldn’t be thrown away?

Did she think she could win without sacrificing soldiers?

Or was there another explanation?

“Hold!” the specialist called out.

A bullet caught him.

The man with the eyes, I realized, before ducking down.

Bullets weren’t clean.  They weren’t tidy.  The shot had struck him in the upper chest.  Too high for the heart or lungs, I thought, but he dropped, letting his gun fall, hands to the wound as blood poured out.

He was trying to speak, calling out.

When he failed to get the words out, he raised his hand, pausing, making awful choking sounds, aiming to be heard by the other specialist on the wall-

Another bullet struck the upraised hand.  Two fingers were ruined, left hanging by trace amounts of skin and muscle, the shocking white of bone exposed.

Mary raised her head.  I grabbed her with both hands to try to haul her down, but she raised herself up with more confidence, rather than less.

“He’s on the cliff!” she called out, raising her voice.  “He just changed locations!”

I raised my own head up to look, trying to see the cliff.

The specialist dog with the ruined hand let it drop.  The other specialist was too busy giving orders to reload to pay him full attention.

Not enough human brains on this wall.

“Now!” Gordon hollered.  He’d been watching the scene unfold, had a sense of the timing.

Stitched lobbed small objects over the wall.  Grenades or bombs.

The warbeast was closing on the wall.  It got within fifty feet, then forty, then thirty-

The grenades and other devices went off.  Detonations kicked up mud and moisture, and the other devices erupted in collections of flame that danced over the water’s surface instead of being extinguished by it.

The thing’s course was altered.  As before, it turned its head to one side, perhaps trying to protect the one remaining eye, and it lost virtually all of its momentum.  It walked through fire without seeming to care overmuch.  Some of the flames crept up its feet and legs.

It slammed its head into the front gate.  The entire wall vibrated.  One elephantine warbeast, and it hadn’t even had a full charge backing it.

The specialist dog who’d missed the intent of his partner was giving orders, bidding the stitched to rain down guns

More explosives and accelerants were dropped down on top of it, a steady, constant rain, more aimed toward the thing’s rear than it’s front, to avoid damage to the door.

“Hold off!” the commander called out.  “Guns only!”

The specialist relayed the order to the stitched.

I must have had a confused expression on my face, because Gordon leaned close, raising his voice to be heard, even though he was right in my ear.  “They’re opening the gate.  Our warbeasts against theirs!”

Why did I feel like that was exactly what the enemy expected and wanted?

I rose to my feet, ducking low to keep my head out of the way of flying bullets.  Down the stairs.  Gordon and Mary came with me.

It was madness on the lower level.  Sandbag emplacements were going up on the road, people and experiments were trying to navigate the spaces between.  I made a beeline for the warbeasts, scanning the crowd.

With the volume of the noise and the amount of distractions, I had no choice.  I grabbed the man who seemed to be talking to the warbeast handlers, as a smaller child might grab for their mother’s legs.

He turned his attention to me.  One eye twitched, not because of me, but because of an explosion.  Maybe a dud bomb that the beast had crushed underfoot.

The gate rattled as it swung its head into the iron-reinforced wood.

“Trap!” I called out.  “They want you to open the gates!”

“No choice!” the man said, with complete confidence.

That doesn’t mean this is the right decision.  It just means they’ve maneuvered us into a corner.

“Bullets!” I said, still raising my voice to be heard.  The rain was coming down harder, but it was like there was so much going on that the individual rain drops were being broken up into a harsh, downward spray.  “Bombs!  That thing won’t get through the door!  It’s small!”

“It’s going to do damage if we don’t put it down fast!”

“Let it!” I called out.

“And the next time?  The time after that?” the man asked.

The man shook his head, sweeping his arm out to push me out of the way.

I found my badge and held it up.

A stitched threw itself off the top of the gate, dropping to the ground between us and the door.  It twitched and thrashed as it fought.  I looked back, staring, while Gordon hurried over to the body.

I turned my attention back to the man, and saw him focusing on the badge.

“It’s an order!” I said.

He made a sound that might have been a laugh.  “You can’t give orders!”

Frustration seized me.  I had a distinct mental image of myself cutting him down right there, consequences be damned.

But the cost was too great.  I’d lose other opportunities.

The gate rattled again.  Headbutt after headbutt.  But it wasn’t making significant progress.  It would die before it did.

The commander was weighing things in terms of cost.  The damage to the gate, the damage the enemy might do later in this fight, or in future ones.  He was thinking about how many bullets and explosives we had, and how many we wouldn’t have, if we tried to gun this thing down.

I was thinking in terms of the enemy’s strategy.  Their eerie confidence that this, right here, was a battle they could win.

This felt like step one of that battle plan of theirs.

I grabbed his jacket.  He pushed me aside, turning to someone, giving an order while pointing at me.   I could barely hear over the ringing in my ears.

Gordon stepped up.  He reached up and grabbed the man’s collar.  One fierce tug, and the man bent over, almost tipping over face first onto the waterlogged road.

Mary stepped closer, a knife in hand, touching it to the man’s throat.

“Listen,” she said.

While I desperately thought of a way to convey the sense of alarm I felt in a way he’d understand, men in our vicinity had drawn guns, with us now in their sights.

“We took one of their creatures apart!” I told him, “It was packed full of gas.  Human sized experiment, could have killed a roomful of people!  That thing could have enough gas in it to kill everyone at the gate and on the wall-top above it!”

I watched, waited, stared at his eyes, and refused to betray the slightest bit of doubt.  I had to convince him on every level.

“Right!” he said.  He pulled himself back up to a standing position, one hand on Gordon’s shoulder, and both Gordon and Mary let him straighten up.

Mary and I backed off, stepping to the sidelines, where row and column of stitched stood waiting, shrouded in their black coats and hoods, guns in gloved hands.  Gordon was still kneeling by the fallen stitched.

It was cold enough for my breath to fog in the air.  The last traces of winter, joined by freezing rain.  Whether we won or lost, there would be frost on the ground for the sun to melt, come morning.  The world would keep turning.

The world didn’t feel like it was turning.  The gate wasn’t opened, the warbeasts on our side weren’t sicced on the smaller one on their side.  It was a slow wearing down of two very durable targets: the warbeast on their side and the door on ours.  Two immovable objects.

Well, theirs could bleed, at the very least.

Our forces bled in their own way.  A stitched stood, arms flailing, and then collapsed onto the surface at the top of the wall.  Still thrashing, it rolled over the edge, dropping to the ground.  Still alive, it moved too violently to be approached.  They left it like that, struggling.

“Backing off!” the commander on the wall shouted.

I felt like Jamie, a step behind.  It was an unfamiliar environment, my senses were overloaded.  I belatedly realized what they were saying.

The enemy warbeast was retreating?

Surprisingly complex behavior for a creature to display on its own.  To decide it was too hurt to keep going?  That wasn’t the usual warbeast psychology.  That was counterintuitive, if anything.  Who wanted a warbeast that ran?

Inferior work?

Part of the plan?

Gordon straightened, running toward us, an object in his hand.  The stitched he’d approached had died on hitting to the ground.  Durable as they were, a snapped neck was a snapped neck.

When Gordon was halfway to us, he was knocked to the ground by a thunderclap of an explosion, trumping any we’d felt this night, with the exception of the one to hit the rooftop.

I saw and smelled smoke, billowing in from the gate.

A bomb.  Had the warbeast been rigged?

No.  I connected the dots, too late.

The warbeast wasn’t alone.  It had been given instructions.

Sleight of hand.  Distract someone with the flash, something impossible to ignore, and the other hand moved subtly at the scenes.

Someone or something had accompanied the warbeast.  Inside it, under it, hiding on top, I couldn’t guess.  That figure would have had to have hidden in the shadows at the very base of the wall, knowing that the rifleman with the bugged-out eyes was picking off anyone who raised their head too high or leaned too far over to look down.  To work in concert, with that kind of trust, it had to be the woman with the teeth.  The sniffing woman.  Melancholic.

She’d brought a bomb, something larger, she’d waited until the explosives and fire raining down from above had slowed in amount, ordered the warbeast back and out of the way-

Had the gate been open for our warbeasts to go through, she might have had her creature carry the bomb into our ranks, or planted the explosive further in, during the chaos, to make it a difficult or impossible to defend our wall.  If we didn’t have the stairs up to the platform at the top, to shoot over and see what the enemy was doing…

As it was, her explosion had damaged the gate.

No, worse than that.

Her warbeast renewed its attack.

It struck the gate, and the gate did more than rattle.  It knocked.  Something was loose, banging against the frame.  A second strike made a louder knock, with a creak marking something straining, falling out of place.

The explosion damaged the gate -enough-.

Enough that the warbeast could make headway.

That the people on our side couldn’t haul it open.

Enough that the enemy felt confident in mounting a proper attack.

“Repair teams!” a commander called out.

Men and women with wood, metal, tools, oversized stitched with them to do the heaviest lifting and work.

They’d patch things up, but they needed room.

The warbeast charged, and the billowing smoke expanded out of the way, showing its head.  It had rammed through loosened wood and planks, head sticking through the gate.

An order was given, one of our beasts, the energetic one, lunged.  It gripped the enemy warbeast in its teeth, holding onto the thing’s head, twisting and wrenching.  The struggle damaged the gate further, but the enemy warbeast quickly faltered, its skull being crushed at an agonizing rate.

Our beast won, tearing the enemy warbeast’s head free of its neck.  The amount of blood was astonishing.

No gas, thankfully.  I’d been wrong.

“We shoot the gas canisters through, keep them at bay!  Send the stitched in to do what they can!” the commander was saying.  “When the gas dies down, step in to work and direct the stitched!”

The repair crews gave their affirmative, but I could see the nervousness in their body language.  The enemy could be marching on us now.  More weapons, more beasts, more surprises.  It was hard to say.

This was going poorly, but if we could get the wall repaired-

Cannons fired, aiming for the opening in our own gate.  I could see the gas rise, higher than the wall on the other side.  Something lethal, poisonous.

Our stitched approached the gate, ignoring the thinner streams of gas that filtered through the damaged parts.  There were a lot of damaged parts.

“Be ready!” the commander called.  “If they have stitched, they might try sending them through the gas!  They won’t be commanded, so concentrate fire and be smart!”

Mary reached out and clutched my sleeve.

Gunshots sounded, close, and from the other side of the wall.

A stitched laborer on our side dropped.

A bullet caught a non-stitched laborer on our side.

It was surprising, and the surprise accented the awfulness of it.  The shock, the blood, the wrench of agony in the woman’s features.

More bullets came.  Through the cloud of vapor and the rain, I could see the shadows of legs, people ducking low, the flash of rifles firing through the gaps.

Our side fired back.  The enemy ducked out of the way.  Grenades flew in through the gap, and when they exploded, they didn’t produce fire or explosion.

Gas.  Like we’d deployed.

Smart stitched?

Mary’s grip tightened.  I grabbed her wrist, and grabbed Gordon’s sleeve.  We backed away, taking cover.

It was the inverse of the situation the commander had mentioned.  As we hurried to fight back, pulling warbeasts out of the way and trying to organize our stitched in the midst of the chaos, our stitched were left leaderless.  The exorcist rifles did horrific damage.  One or two shots to down each stitched.

As the gas crept closer to Mary and I, I pulled my shirt up around my nose.  A sad measure, but the stuff hadn’t been aimed at us.  It wouldn’t reach us, short of the wind changing direction.

The men strode out of the gas.  One or two rubbed at rheumy eyes and scarred eyelids.  A mild reaction for the danger the gas should have posed.

Plague men.

I was reminded of Mauer’s speech on the horrors of the battlefield.  I realized what might have driven a soldier to subject themselves to that kind of ugliness.

They’ve made their elite soldiers immune to the plagues, poisons, and parasites the Academy might use against them.

They’d traded away the secret, but they’d seized the front gate in exchange.

Esprit de Corpse – 5.13

The spot we’d chosen to hide ended up being one of the worst possible positions, short of actually standing in between the two forces.

Stones, planks, sandbags and barrels had been set down by the side of the road.  We crouched there, using them for cover, while bullets flew.  They smacked against the sandbags and stones intended for use in repairing the gate.  Others struck the street and the dirt a matter of feet behind us, likely ricochets more than anything.

It was hard to see, with both sides using noxious smoke and gas.  Both sides were fighting more or less blind, only a hundred or two hundred feet from each other.  What my ears told me, however, when I strained to process what was out there behind the shouting and the report of gunfire, was that the plague men were silent, the only noise being the tramp of boots as they shifted position and took cover.  Our side was doing the same, but they had to cede ground to the gas, sending the stitched on and forward.

“Idiots,” Gordon said, right in my ear.  He was closer to the end of the pile of supplies, nearer to our people than to the gate.  I strained my eyes to see what he was seeing.

Whatever it was, I couldn’t make sense of it.  As smoke swirled, I was only able to make out vague shapes, but the rote movements of the stitched and the fact that they didn’t move or reposition let me gradually put together a mental picture of what I was looking at.  Stitched knelt behind sandbags, methodically reloading, aiming, firing, reloading, aiming, firing.  They didn’t flinch as the larger bullets of the plague men’s special guns put massive holes in sandbags inches from their heads.  When one stitched died, the rest kept on working.

“Idiots?”

It seemed dumb to be raising my voice to be heard over the gunfire when we were supposed to be hiding, but there was no other way to manage, and I doubted we would be heard.

He shook his head.  “Gave ground!”

Gave ground.

I could sort of see what he was thinking, now.  The plague men were advancing, returning fire until the stitched weren’t shooting anymore, then moving up to take defensive positions.  The stitched remained where they were, but they operated on simple rules and instructions.  Face forward, shoot the enemy.  They couldn’t improvise, and they didn’t have the basic creativity or problem solving ability to figure out less conventional defensive positions.  They didn’t use the corners of buildings or the drop of porches, they didn’t realize when their cover was whittled away.

There were a lot of reasons stitched were a terrifying weapon in war.  In this fight, they weren’t being wielded right.  They were being deployed to the rows of sandbags that had been placed in the road.  They weren’t lasting long at all.  They went down thrashing.

While our side kept sending more into the clouds of gas with orders to take up the first available set of sandbags and open fire, convinced they were pushing the enemy back.

Doing the same thing over and over again.

Soon, the plague men would reach our cover, and there would be no chance of hiding.

There were two likely options for our side, now, provided they realized the mistake they were making.  They could pull back, secure positions, maybe even burn buildings that the enemy could use, regroup and make a concerted effort to use the stitched as they were supposed to be used, durable shock troops.  We had enough of them, but without the coordination we would lose more than we killed.

The second option was that our side might well release the warbeasts and other experiments.

I was really hoping they didn’t release the warbeasts.

An explosion in the vicinity of the gate nearly knocked me over.  Blind gunfire touching the ground a bit behind me told me I could very well have died if I’d lost my balance and fallen.

Another explosion touched down.  It said a lot that I wasn’t sure which side was using it.

“Careful!” Mary shouted.

The explosion had stirred clouds of gas.  All three of us turned away from the blast, so our backs were to the wind and the onrushing gas, hoods pulled up.

I held my breath, even after the wind passed.  I waited as long as I could, and when I could breathe again, I exhaled forcefully, for the little good it did.  I kept one eye tightly closed and relied on the other, the knuckle of my thumb pressed to a nostril.  Head down, moving as little as I had to, to keep my heart rate lower.

Standard precautions, when dealing with unknown toxins.

It was a mistake to be here, but the ebb and flow of the fight had moved faster than we’d been able.  Now we were pinned down.  There was nothing clever we could do to get out and away, because there were no people here.  Nobody to manipulate, no tools to use, outside of sticks and stones.  No place to run.

Horns sounded.  Warbeasts roared.  The ground shook.

My head was already bowed, hood pulled down, back hunched over.  I was already in a pretty defeated posture.  There weren’t any options for expressing my absolute dismay.

My nostrils and eyes were burning.  When I blinked, my vision streaked, as if I were looking through a smudged window.

The rumbling of the ground intensified as the warbeasts drew closer.

I heard Gordon’s alarmed grunt, felt his shoulder touch me, and with no idea what to do, I let myself go limp, trying to fall so I was lying along the base of the stack of wood and stone.

The crushing impact was powerful enough that I was left momentarily breathless, and it wasn’t even a direct hit.  I felt something collide with the construction supplies we were using for cover, and the power of the blow passed from the pile to the ground, and through me.

I looked up, and I saw the warbeast charging on, into the smoke and gas by the gate.  Wood and stone flew through the air, some fragments clinging to the single horn that had struck the edge of the pile.

Our cover was mostly gone.

This wasn’t why I’d hated the idea of sending the warbeasts.  This was a bonus.  A crummy-ass bonus in a crummy-ass situation.

The problem was that they weren’t realizing the problem.

This wasn’t a dumb, thoughtless attack.  We were fighting people who knew us, knew the tools the Academy had.  Why the hell would they attack if they didn’t think they could deal with the warbeasts?

Near the gate, another of the rebellion’s warbeasts lunged out of the smoke.  It collided with ours.

Two-thirds of the size, the rebellion warbeast was furless, thick-skinned, and functioned like a blunt weapon.  A crude club, used for smashing.

Ours was thick skinned, but had thick fur at the head and shoulders, a bison’s mantle or a lion’s mane, massive, sweeping horns, and pirahna teeth.  It could bite, bash, rend, slice, and it could likely do any of the four better than the smaller one could smash against things.  Combine traits of the four, and it was a devastating work of art.

I wondered if the student who’d made it knew how carelessly it was being thrown away.

We had armored vehicles.  Just as there were cars on the road, there were armored cars with guns mounted on them, and powerful engines.  There were armies that had relied on them.

The problem was, warbeasts like these were built to last.  They could take the gunfire offered by the armored cars, close the distance, and then there was nothing the armored car could do.  One headbutt, and the car could be rolled.  Claws could tear at doors or hatches, and powerful limbs could tear at guns.

That had led to a series of countermeasures and counter-countermeasures.  Bait cars were rolled into the field, set to explode when a warbeast attempted to roll it.  Warbeasts got smarter and tougher, or they got mass-produced.  It was too expensive to make those bait-cars compared to how easy it was to grow the beasts.  More inventive countermeasures had to be developed.

It was hard to wage a war when one side was forced to constantly outdo itself in being inventive and devious, and the other simply had to do the same thing they were doing, only a little bit better every time.  Stronger, faster, tougher.

Plague men moved out of the noxious gas, the exorcists dangling from straps.  They were holding other, smaller guns, spreading out and firing at our warbeast.

Two more of the Academy’s warbeasts joined the fray.  One collided with the wall, claws scraping against stone.  Another aimed for the plague men, who moved out of the way, too spread out for the beast to go after more than one or two at a time.  With the gas blocking some of the view, I wasn’t sure if it was making any contact at all.

What had come first?  Had they possessed the eerie calm and ability to focus wholly on this fight first, leading to them agreeing to be modified, or had the mental changes been part and parcel of it?

A combination of the two?

The rapid report of a higher-tech gun marked more bullets being fired.  The warbeast closest to us twisted around a hundred and eighty degrees, switching the side that was exposed to the gunfire, and then reversed direction, unable to escape the hail of fire.

It roared and then abruptly charged with no provocation.  It collided with the wall, to the left of the gate.  I was pretty sure it had caught one of the plague men between its head and the stones.  It wasn’t the smoke obscuring my view, but the blurriness in one eye.  It was getting worse.

Gordon was reaching over me.  I raised myself up out of the puddle at the base of our meager cover, to get a better look.

It was black, and it looked more like a crystal than anything, pointed at both ends, more akin to a needle than anything.  Almost akin to obsidian, but not quite so sharp at the edges of each plane.

Where had he picked that up?

The stitched.  The one that had fallen from the wall.

“Bullet?” Mary asked.

Gordon nodded.  I couldn’t make out what he was saying over the chaos of the combat.

They examined the thing between them, each keeping half of an eye on the situation, half on the bullet.  My focus was on trying to track how the situation was unfolding.

I blinked hard, trying to clear my vision.  My nose and eye were burning, and it was a surprising amount, considering how resistant I tended to be to most poisons and chemical weapons.

“-to go!” Mary said.

Stating the obvious, but sometimes the obvious needed to be stated.  The problem wasn’t the enemy – they were focusing on the warbeasts.  It was our side, shooting blindly.

The gas canisters and weapons that had opened the foray were long out of juice, and wind was carrying away the worst of the gas.  The area was clearing up, which made us easier to spot.

The distance to the next set of structures that could provide cover was two hundred feet.  Short grass, torn-up dirt, mud, and loose, crushed stone.

I heard a shout from the among the plague men.  A sharp crack marked an explosive going off in their vicinity.  Heads were turned away, hands raised to faces.

“Can’t see,” Gordon said, rubbing at his eyes with a sleeve.

With my shoulder pressed up against Mary’s side, I felt rather than heard the affirmative sound she made.

There was no happy ending here.  Even if the Brigadier stepped in and got the Academy to start fighting back properly, and if Helen, Jamie, Lillian and Shipman knew enough to start an effort to extract us, I wasn’t sure it was possible.  We were too close to the enemy, our side had given ground, and we’d been left behind.

Half-blind, outnumbered.

The warbeasts were struggling.  They spent more time flinching and snarling at the gunfire than attacking.  I heard the louder fire of the exorcists going off.  The warbeast farthest from us staggered and dropped.  A moment later, it was on fire, ignited by something thrown.

In case of parasites more than anything else, I suspected.

I reached out, pushing my fingers into Gordon’s closed fist.  He was gripping a handkerchief.

He loosened his fingers, then held his hand out as I unfolded the handkerchief and took the black shard from within.

I pricked the back of my hand.

“Mf,” I made a sound.

It burned like fire.  Within a few seconds, the muscle was twitching involuntarily, the burning sensation like a thousand papercuts a second.

“Mmmmurrggh,” I started off making one sound, then ended up making a guttural noise instead.  My voice was tight as I managed an, “Okay.”

“The heck are you doing?” Gordon asked.

“It’s poisoned,” I said, my voice still tight.  “Or it’s crystallized poison or it’s something.  Ow.”

“Peralta?” Gordon asked.

“Peralta,” I said, in a strained, intense way.

There was a detonation closer to the wall, aimed at one of the beasts.  It didn’t do much more than kick up dirt.  The cliff-side was only a dozen feet away, and both debris and moisture bounced off of the wall to land on and around us.

Shorter ranged guns, delivering only pain.

I remembered how the stitched had acted.

That had been the aim.  It was why our lines were disintegrating as fast as they were.  Faced with stitched and warbeasts who felt only as much pain as they needed to be able to function, Pock had given the enemy a weapon that delivered it, distilled.

The alarm on Mary’s face suggested she was very aware of just what that meant.  The look on Gordon’s face, as he stared at the ongoing fight with the Warbeasts, was one of deep concern.

The beasts didn’t know how to process the experience.  Their well of experience might have been limited to experiencing only a moment of pain, enough to know where the harm was coming from so they could lash out.  Except now they were feeling that moment over and over, from all directions.  They lunged, swung their horns around, howled, and attacked nothing in particular, only periodically going after the plague men.

The pain in my hand was fading.  Whatever it was, it didn’t last forever.

But that had only been a trace contact.  Getting shot by one of these, it would be more than a trace contact.

Agony the dead would feel, apparently.

We were losing the cover of smoke and gas, and even with the less affected eye, the one that I had kept closed, I couldn’t make out the enemy as more than smudgy abstracts.  I doubted they were suffering in the same way.

I put the black crystal on the ground, then grabbed a stone from the pile.

I smacked it, aiming for only the tip.  The motion got Gordon and Mary’s attention.

Lifting the rock, I saw that the crystal had broken up.

Which suggested that getting shot by one didn’t mean having to extract one shard, but possibly dozens.

I grabbed the longest, narrowest one, and bent it until it snapped in two.

“What-” Mary said, before gunfire drowned her out.  They were exorcising the third warbeast. “-ng?”

“Knife,” I told her.

She had a knife in her hand in less than a second.  She looked at it, then at me, as if only now questioning it.

“Cut my stitches,” I said, lifting up my shirt.

“Can’t see, Sy,” she said.  Well, I was pretty sure it was what she’d said.

“Cut,” I told her, again.

“-Idea?” Gordon asked.

The exorcist’s fire had died out, and the third warbeast was dead.  Scary to realize the plague men had dispatched three of the things, and I wasn’t sure they’d lost more than a half-dozen of their own.

It was more alarming to realize that the primary source of gunfire was in the other direction from the gate.  A little ways down the road.  Hopefully it was because our side had pulled back to regroup, and not because the plague men were crushing us underfoot as they advanced.

“Idea,” I confirmed for Gordon, lowering my voice now that the gunfire was further away.

“Try to cut,” Gordon told Mary.

I saw her head bob.

Her vision was bad enough that she had to lean close to use the knife.  Her nose touched my stomach, making one muscle twitch in a ticklish reaction.  Her hot breath swept over my cold, wet skin.

She had steady hands.  I flinched as she cut one suture, then another.

“Stop,” I said.

She did, without moving her head away.  She turned her face upward, to look at me.

“How sure are you?” Gordon asked.

“Make the wound bleed,” I said, then, barely able to hear even my own words, I admitted, “Not very, but there’s not much room for cleverness here.”

“Yeah,” Gordon said.

Mary cut.  My stomach moved of its own accord.

Too much of this plan depended on factors I couldn’t control or wholly predict.  Educated guesses.

“Lose the weapons,” I said.  Rather than try to work my holster off of my belt, I simply undid my belt entirely, hauling it off.  I jammed it into a gap between stone and wood.

“All the weapons?”

“Keep your knives.”

“Okay.”

There were shouts and calls.  More people at the gate.  The enemy was moving up.  I couldn’t tell if it was ten or fifty.  My vision was suffering too much.

I judged distance, took the broken black crystal and poked a hole in my shirt, so it stuck through.  I did it with more of the shards, spreading them out.

I looked at the black crystals.  If they were poison, and I was resistant to poison, were they worse for someone else?  Or were they not poison at all, their design a detour of sorts?  A way to simulate pain without using the regular channels?

Either way, this was going to suck.

Fingers placed alongside the fabric, spikes of black crystal poking through and pointed inward, I slapped the fabric against my own stomach, the biggest shard touching the wound Mary had opened up.

The pain was immediate and mind-altering.

I screamed without even meaning to, keeling over, landing in mud.  I might have drove shards deeper as I landed on the ones at my side.

I’d experienced agony before, on a monthly schedule.  I knew how to deal, in a way.  This blew that out of the water, made it impossible to turn my mind to reach for any of the tools.  I’d stabbed my side, and I felt it in my bones and in my brain, in the nerves of my teeth.

I was glad I’d fallen forward, because I screamed until something changed in my throat and I heaved up my stomach contents.

I was dimly aware of an enemy soldier standing over us.  One of the plague men.

Mary was screaming.  About being blind, unable to see what was happening to me.

The plague man stared down, expression unchanging.

Variables I couldn’t predict or control.

Educated guesses alone.

Failing any other variables, anything at all, human beings tended to favor the simplest, clearest options.  The easiest thing for him to do, without emotion or orders saying otherwise, was to shoot and end us.

That was only one of a half-dozen things that could go wrong.

But he had to have a reason to fight.  A reason to change himself so drastically.  There was an answer to that question that could see us through.

An iota of mercy?

He grabbed me by the arm, dragging me, weapon in one hand.  As my body stretched out, the shards making contact with me touched me areas of my gut.  They weren’t deep, except for the big one, but all the same, it renewed the pain twice over.

It was almost transcendant, taking me out of myself.  I was wide-eyed, incapable of moving.  Processing the little I could see and hear and storing almost none of it.

Dim light and noise, darkness.

Mary.

Gordon.

A flickering light so bright I couldn’t look at it.  My head lolled to one side, and I focused on the darkness there, and the square of faint orange-purple light.

Mary’s voice, again.

The pain was getting easier to bear.

A man’s voice.  Soothing.  I was trying to scream, I hadn’t stopped, but the energy wasn’t there.  My chest jerked, and only small sounds came out.

I closed my eyes.  The pain was receding more.

I could process.  I was in a tent.  The wall to one side was stone.  The exterior wall of Westmore.  By the gate.

I was on a table.  A doctor was extracting shards from my side.  One of the rebellion doctors.

My head turned.  On the other side of the room, Gordon and Mary sat in chairs.  Their hands were bound in front of them.

A plague man with a gun was standing beside the pair, weapon in hand.  I still couldn’t really see.  Nothing had fixed things from before.  The only improvement was that there was light and we were out of the rain.

Cynthia had to have told them to watch out for children.  My educated guess had been right, however.  These were men who’d undergone changes for a reason.  There was a rationale, partially driven by fear, but partially driven by a desire to oppose the Academy.  They were almost an incarnation of that.

Opposing the Academies meant opposing the way the Academy operated.  There had to be a sense of conscience in there.  A child wounded with a weapon meant for monsters, even if they had orders to kill children on sight?  I’d gambled on them showing mercy.

This one had a parasite living under his skin on one side of his face.  It kept moving, making his facial features change each time.  One of his eyes didn’t close properly.

Parasites that would prey on other parasites?  Chemicals to counteract other poisons or stave off disease, all with their severe side effects?

“You’re more alert?” the doctor that was working on me asked.  “One big one, then we take off your shirt and see if there’s more to dig out.”

“Is he okay?” Mary asked.  “Please.  I can’t see.  I can only see your shape, kind of, because the window is behind you, but I can’t see Simon, and he’s not screaming any more and-”

“Hush,” the doctor said.  “He’ll be fine.  The shards never penetrate too deep.  They’re a nonlethal measure.”

When the victims don’t commit suicide to end the pain, I imagine, I thought.

Mary hadn’t been saying what she’d said for the doctor’s benefit, but for mine.

Already thinking about how we might find our way out.

My back arched, the pain searing me as the shard was pulled free of the wound, making a sucking sound.

“There we go, hold on, wait,” the doctor said.  He pressed something to the wound to absorb the welling blood.  I would have lost more blood and had it welling around the site of injury, thanks to the extra damage Mary had inflicted.  Part of my attempt to draw pity.

All of it calculated, in a way.  If Mary had been the one injured, then we would have been two scraggly boys.  This way, there was one hurt child on the table, and one girl in the chair.

There were more factors, but this was the ideal combination.

“Okay?” the doctor asked.

I opened my mouth to respond, but my words didn’t come out.  I’d lost the ability to speak.

I nodded.

“Any pain, still?”

I made a face and nodded.

A lie.

“Let’s take a look, then.”

He peeled my bloody shirt away from my stomach.

I turned my head away, and met Mary’s eyes.

I reached out to the pair of them.  And I gestured.

“You’re going to be okay, Sy,” Mary said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.

Two affirmatives.  We were good to go.

I blinked, very deliberately.

On the other side, the doctor said, “What the hell?  You’re already-”

Her bound hands went over her head.  She brought them forward together, simultaneously.  A two-handed throw for a lone knife.

“-injured?”

The knife caught the doctor in the throat.

I tried to move, and realized I was bound with cord- enough I couldn’t move freely, but loose enough I could be repositioned.

Gordon brought his knees to his chest.  Rope that had bound his ankles to the chair was loose enough to fall to the floor.  He was up and out of the chair, hands still bound, moving past Mary to where reference books sat on a military travel chest.  He grabbed a book and threw it like he was thrusting it into the air more than anything.

The plague man only managed a short sound of alarm before the book caught him in the lower face.  I was betting Gordon was aiming for the throat, but a smack to the mouth served for a moment.

Gordon threw his whole weight against the man’s knee.  He hit the ground, and the plague man fell over top of him.  Gordon used the rope that bound his wrists to choke the plague man.

Nobody had responded to the yell of alarm.  I wondered if there had been enough screaming from this tent to desensitize.

Three seconds passed, the doctor gurgling, the plague man choking, trying to throw Gordon loose and failing, and Mary- I couldn’t make out what Mary was doing.

The ropes were severed, I realized.  She was free.  She bent down over the plague man and cut his throat.

Gordon’s hands were freed.  He extricated himself.

I was next to be freed.  I held the bandage to the thrice-opened wound as I lowered my feet to the ground.

“Sometimes I think you do that to yourself on purpose,” Gordon murmured.

I opened my mouth.  No words came out.

“I like you like this,” he said.

I gestured.

“We need to get out of here,” Mary said.

I nodded.  I gestured again.  This time it was something less obscene.

“Don’t know what you mean by that one,” Gordon said.  “War, battle?”

“Fighting our way out?” Mary asked.  She’d bent down over the plague man.

I sighed, shaking my head.

Bending down, wincing, I picked up the book.  I tore out a page and balled it up.  I held thumb and one finger together under it.  Not a gesture, but I hoped the idea was clear.

“Fire,” Gordon said.

I nodded.

“We can’t do too much damage.  Westmore needs to be able to use the location.”

I shook my head.

“No?”

I shook my head again.  I blinked hard, trying to clear my vision and failing.

“We’ve lost this one,” Mary said.  “Plague men, black bullets, they have answers to what the Academy can bring to bear.  Best we can do is cut our losses.”

I could have hugged her.  I nodded.

“Okay,” she said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “We should try that way, if I remember right.”

The three of us, with probably one set of working eyes between us, moved to the other end of the tent.  It was getting brighter outside.  The orange and purple light I’d seen was the sunrise.

We ducked under the bottom of the canvas flap, peeked into the adjoining tent, and then moved through there.

The enemy’s focus was on the front lines of the battle, from the sounds of it.  There were barely any figures in the makeshift camp they’d set up at the gate.

But they’d brought some supplies and they’d left some behind.  The incendiary weapons they’d used to dispose of the warbeasts were among them.

Any building we passed that had a window was on fire moments after we’d left it behind us.  Nearly blind, we passed through the freezing rain, heading straight for their back lines and for the other Lambs.

Esprit de Corpse – 5.14

Our fires raged at one end of Westmore.  A full quarter of the city aflame.  Though the wood used to grow portions of buildings and plant matter grown to seal the gaps between stones had been treated to make it less combustible, it was still wood.

Stitched, buildings, chemicals, it took so little for the Academy’s work to go up in flames.

The smoke billowed, but the walls meant it didn’t have many places to go.  We were boxed in with mountains, cliffs, and walls, and that concentrated the smoke that hung lower to the ground.  The rain pounded down on the burning buildings, creating a dull roar.

It was attention-grabbing.  Enough to concern the forces at the battlefront.

We couldn’t see, but with the smoke, our enemy couldn’t see either.

We found the best hiding place we were able, listening as best as we could for the tramp of boots, then moved as soon as we heard the noise receding.

I wanted to communicate, reach out to the others and make sure we were on the same page, when it came to strategy and more.  I hadn’t counted on being struck dumb.  I’d wanted to make sure that I was the one who was stuck in the bed, while Gordon and Mary were free to act.  Being injured wasn’t necessary, but I’d needed to sell it, and that meant blood and making my performance as real as possible.  Opening an old injury was better than making another.

If I’d known I would have lost the ability to communicate, I would have gone another route.

I was scared in a way I usually wasn’t.  I wasn’t able to use my senses to their fullest.  With my eyes as screwed up as they were, and the chaos of noise in the background, the only things I could be sure about were things within thirty feet of me.  The smoke hampered our enemy, but that didn’t do much good if we took the wrong turn or path between buildings and ended up face to face with a plague man and his exorcist.

It didn’t help that I wasn’t sure how the other Lambs were doing.  Had I been able to take in more of the situation, I might have been able to reassure myself that the enemy lines hadn’t advanced far enough, or that there were avenues for them to escape.  As it was, we scurried here and there, keeping our heads down, straining every sense, hoping that the combined senses of the three of us were enough to alert us to possible danger.

We stopped for breath, and to get our bearings.  Gordon was doing the listening for trouble.  I stayed beside him, while Mary stood a short distance away.

She knocked on the wall once.  Not entirely necessary, given the broken window, but I imagined she was looking for her own unique sorts of reassurance.

Gordon and I listened, hard.  There were no footsteps, no boots.  Nothing close enough to be differentiated from the roar of background noise, of guns firing and rain pouring down on a spreading sea of fire that was stubbornly refusing to go out.

He knocked.

Mary’s foot splashed in a puddle as she rejoined us.  Her hand fumbled for and touched my shoulder.  I squeezed Gordon’s upper arm.

We bolted.  There was a soft ‘woof’ sound as the incendiary weapon went off.

A shout, directly ahead.  Footsteps.

Gordon didn’t slow.  I knew he had to have heard.

We made it another ten feet before he jerked us in one direction.  We ducked in behind a solid metal object.  I kept my head down, shoulders hunched, providing as small of a profile as was possible.

The men who ran past us weren’t plague men, but they wore the darker colors of rebellion members.  They made their way into the opaque wall of rain and smoke, feet splashing.

We remained still until we couldn’t hear them.  Mary coughed lightly.

The smoke was catching up to us.  Soon it would drown us out.  My world shrank from thirty feet to twenty, or perhaps fifteen.  Anything beyond was indecipherable.

I wanted to tell them we needed to move faster.  We had to get to a point that we could observe the situation, so we could find and reunite with the others, or get a grasp of any obstacles in our way.  If we took too long and the city was drowned in smoke and fire, we might have to chance running across a warzone and risk taking a bullet, to get to the lodge where the others were.

At least the distraction was diverting enemy forces.  The sound of gunfire had abated.  They would have probably planned to get further into Westmore before their advance slowed and stopped.  They didn’t have a place to retreat to, and they no longer had any certainty that they would have shelter if this dragged out.  The tent with the doctor and the stitched had no doubt been intended to be such a waypoint.

No place for the wounded to go, no place to sleep, to eat, nowhere to retreat.

They weren’t fearless.  Humans had basic needs, and the plague men were human.  In attacking their assuredness that they would be able to sustain those needs, we knocked the legs out from under them.  Uncertainty, doubt, morale, all would turn to our advantage.

I just wished mine wasn’t suffering so much.

We stopped.  The gunfire was closer, now.  Running blind for a minute or less might see us running straight into harm’s way, now.  Out of the alleyway and into the street.

“I’m out,” Mary said, under her breath.

I was already out.  I hadn’t grabbed many, and in my hurry to make sure my hands were free if I needed them, I’d used them quickly.

“I have two.  Want to hold on to one, just in case,” Gordon said.  “I’ll go.”

He headed to the nearest window we could make out.  Mary and I moved a little further down.

I could hear him open the window.  Mary and I listened.

It was harder, with the fighting being so close.  There were people tramping this way and that in between nearby buildings.  Plague men looking for vantage points.

We were in serious danger of being caught.  I could only hope that we could pretend to be scared children.

Harder with Gordon than with any of us.  He already looked like someone in his early-teens.  He’d grown early and fast.  Almost to the point where someone might have thought he should be in uniform with a gun in his hands.

Gordon knocked.

We carried on listening.  I was pretty sure we were thinking along the same lines.  That, being as close to the fighting as we were, we wanted to be extra careful.

She had hold of my hand, and was squeezing it, hard.

Mary prided herself so much on perfectionism.  To be hampered, damaged, a sense failing her, unable to be her best, it probably knocked her legs out from her, like the fire had been intended to do for the enemy forces.

No sound.

We knocked.

A third knock sounded, just a short distance away.  Not Gordon.  The sound had an effect on me, as if all the cold outside of me was suddenly sucked into my bones, making everything come to a standstill.  The fear that made a rabbit stand stock still as a fox came into sight.

I let go of Mary’s hand and drew my gun.

“Cynthia’s gas, is it?” Melancholy asked.

Gordon’s pistol fired.  Mine was a second late, slowed by my concern that we’d draw attention.

“Blind?” Melancholy crooned, not seeming to care.

I was in the midst of reloading, but Gordon had already reloaded, and fired again.

I held my fire.  She wouldn’t have been taunting us like this if we had a chance of hitting her.  I kept my gun in both hands, holding it firmly, so it couldn’t be taken away, and waited for an opportunity.

Mary was right beside me.  Mud sucked at her boot as she shifted her stance.

“I’ll-” Melancholy started.  Gordon fired again.

He made a grunting sound, and I heard a wet slap as he landed full-on in the mud.

He didn’t make another sound.  Mary did, beside me, but it was shock, a muted gasp.

The bone-deep chill I felt was a different sort from fear, this time.  There was a very good chance this was a moment that would be engraved into my memory for the rest of my life.

It didn’t break my focus.  I stared into a morass of smoke and rain, and saw absolutely nothing I could use.  There were only the smudged shapes of buildings, a hundred shifting blurs of light and dark that could have been Melancholy and could have been nothing at all.

I heard a mechanical click.  I aimed, but I didn’t fire.  I heard the sound of boots on mud, quick.

Like Choleric had been, she had good reflexes.  She was agile.

She could see us, while we couldn’t see her, and she had Gordon’s gun.

“Let’s try this again, minus interruptions,” she said.  She was around the corner, if I was gauging right, “I’ll make you a deal.”

I couldn’t respond.  Well, I might have been able to, but it would have been a mouse’s strangled squeak.  Drowned out by the noise around us.

I reached out with a foot and kicked Mary’s ankle lightly, once.

“We’re listening,” Mary said.

“I want to know where Phlegmatic and Choleric are.”

“That’s doable,” Mary said.

“I’m not done.  I’m taking one of you hostage.  The little one, messy black hair.”

“Sylvester.”

“Yes.  Him.”

I offered another kick.

“He says yes.”

“Why doesn’t he speak for himself?”

“He can’t.”

“Okay.  Sylvester.  Throw out the gun, straight in front of you.”

She was around the corner and to my left.  She wanted to see the gun fall.

I tossed it out for her.

“Girl.  You too.”

Mary hesitated a little bit longer before doing the same.

“Now, be good,” Melancholy said.

I reached out and kicked Mary’s ankle again.

She kicked me back, hard.

Then she did it again.

I twisted, reaching out, trying to stop her, but I felt her arm move.

She was fighting back.

Stupid, aggressive, single-minded Mary, no!  There was nothing I could do to stop her that wouldn’t potentially get us both killed.  I pulled my arms away, backing up so I was flat against the wall.

Mary grunted, moving, hurling knives.  Weapons that were utterly silent in use.

Melancholy was the one to make a small sound this time.  A grunt of pain, a grunt of frustration?

Mary moved forward, following up the throws with an attack, slashing, feet slapping mud.

Then there was silence.

Mary remained in place shuffled, turning left, then right.  Searching.  I could make out her outstretched arms, the weapons held within.

Not throwing knives, but knives meant for close-quarters fighting.

She’d lost Melancholy.

There was a splash further down the alleyway.

Running, back toward the fires?  I strained my senses.

Then a larger splash.  At the corner of the buildings, between where Mary and I stood.

Enough of an impact that I knew it was Melancholy.

She’d gone up.  Onto the roof.  Hanging on, or standing on it.  She’d thrown something to distract, and now she was between us.

The fight between the two was brief, impossible for me to follow.  I could have fumbled in the mud for my gun, could have thrown myself into the fray in the hopes of grabbing Melancholy and hampering her enough for Mary to get a good hit in.

I remained where I was, against the wall, eyes closed, to better hear what was happening.

I heard a yelp, and the noises of fighting and feet skidding in mud stopped.  My nose and mouth were choked with the smoke from the fires, not that I could smell anything with the acrid gas lingering in my nostrils, and my eyes were useless for making out anything that wasn’t in arm’s reach.

“And then there was one,” Melancholy said, her voice soft.

Again, that chill.

Mary.

“Do you need help?” a man asked, behind me.

“You three get back to the stablehouse at the corner.  We’ve diverted too many people to combat the fires, we need to make sure we don’t lose ground,” Melancholy said.  “I’ve got this well in hand.”

Plague men.

I hadn’t even heard them.  Well, I heard them leave, now.

“I’d say it felt unfair,” Melancholy said, “But you already killed one of my partners, and I have to guess about the fate of the other.  If your girl there had been five years older and capable of seeing, it might have been a fair fight.  Little bitch still caught me once.”

I didn’t offer her any tells, beyond my attempt to swallow that was a little more forceful than I’d expected.

A hand seized my throat.  She hauled me up, choking me further, and held me up with my legs dangling, through a combination of strength and the force with which she pinned me to the wall.

“Do you know what their real plan was for us?” she asked.

She paused, as if she expected an answer.  Had I not screamed myself mute, I still wouldn’t have been able to say anything, with the grip she had on my throat.

I grabbed her arm for support, as if I could alleviate the pressure.

“Four of us.  Bastards kept giving us missions.  Even when one of us weren’t in full working order, or when we were feeling the hurt from recent surgeries.  Do this, find this person, kill them.  Bring us the body.  Again and again.”

I sputtered out a breath, but it was a breath out, not in.

“They told us if we failed too many times, or if we got recalcitrant, then they would move on to phase two.  Take us, butcher us, and keep the best pieces of each.  My nose, Phlegm’s ears, Cholera’s body, ‘Guin’s eyes.  As for brain, well, that’s how they tried to set us against each other.  Telling us that the most obedient, the one most willing to turn on the others-”

I made a high, strangled sound, trying to breathe.  I kicked in her general direction, but her other hand swatted my foot aside, and held it at an awkward angle, so my lower body twisted to the left, my left leg blocked by the firmly held right.

“You get the picture,” she said.  “Did they do the same with you?”

I could have, should have said yes.  Built a rapport.

I shook my head, as much as I was able.  My neck muscles were as tight as bands of steel.

“Ah well,” she said.

I opened my mouth, as if I were speaking.

She let go of my leg and gripped the front of my raincoat and shirt.  She shifted her grip from my throat, allowing me to suck in smoke-filled air, and held my by the collar instead.

I tried to form words, pushing them out, but they came across as squeaks.  The gunfighting had died down for now, it seemed, and even with less noise coming from that, I was barely audible.

She drew her ear closer, until it almost touched my mouth.

I could have bitten it.  Seized a vulnerable piece of her in my teeth and held on as if it was all that mattered.

But what came after that?  It would have been a waste.  A final, bitter gesture before she killed me.

Not that she planned to keep me alive.

I spoke, and it was as if I were putting in all the effort of screaming at the top of my lungs and getting only raw pain in my throat and barely formed sounds.

“They pick one,” I managed.  I coughed.  The smoke was getting to me.  “One of us.”

Only one of us, in the end.  Possibly after another generation, though that’s looking less likely, the way things are going.

I coughed some more.

She stared at me.  Even with her face just a short distance away, hair draped over much of it, an oddly shaped nose and wide, razor-toothed mouth in the part I could see, I couldn’t see her all that well.

Had she killed Gordon and Mary?

If she had, we were too far from help to revive them.

“There’s something wrong with you,” she told me, her voice low, breath hot on my face.  “That you’d stay loyal.”

I shook my head, opened my mouth.

She dropped me before I could respond, seizing me by the throat again the moment my feet hit ground.  She struck one of the hands that reached for her wrist.

“I know what you’d say if you had the chance,” she told me.  “You’re loyal to your friends, not to the Academy?”

I stopped fighting, pausing.

“I was the same,” she told me.

In our first meeting, she’d rebuked us for trying to draw parallels.

“If you’re really loyal, show it by cooperating,” she told me.  “You’re going to be a hostage.  Maybe if this goes smoothly, someone can get those two some help.”

So vague I could have spit.  What had happened?

“Maybe,” she said, in a different tone, as an afterthought.  Emphasizing that it was only a possibility.

I bowed my head.  I nodded.

I felt a knife touch my throat, and I wondered if it was Mary’s.  She had me hold out my hands while she bound them.  She held the knife to my groin while using one hand to loosely tie my ankles.  Keeping me from running or kicking.

We walked, leaving Gordon and Mary behind.  Into oblivion and smoke.  Past figures I couldn’t make out, shadowy and nebulous.  Souls in the limbo between life and death.  Some living but scarred and left largely dead inside.  Some dead, but with lightning crackling beneath their skin.

“I have the firebombs your friend was holding on to,” she told me.  “If you or someone else try something clever, I burn the building with the Brigadier inside.  Fuck orders.  Your remaining friends can burn with him.  It’s a bad way to go.  One I reserve for people who’ve wronged me, understand?”

I nodded.

We passed through a cluster of people.

She stopped, and her wrist dug into my throat as I jerked to a stop, the blade tight against the side of my neck.  I felt the sting of a shallow cut.

“Paper,” she said.

The man in front of her reached into a pocket and produced a pad.

“Pen.  And hold onto that pad,” she said.

I heard the scratches of pen on paper.

“Have a stitched carry this to the Brigadier as a messenger.  Have them count the people inside.”

“Ma’am,” the plague man said.

The Academy forces were an army of monsters and dead men, commanded by people.

It was starting to feel like the rebellion was an army of men, commanded by monsters.

Of course, I had no idea who or what Cynthia was.  Perhaps it was an unfair assertion.

We waited in the rain, Melancholy with rain streaming down over wet hair, while I had my raincoat on.  I was the one shivering, while her hand remained steady.

“He said he’s open to discussion,” someone in the crowd said.

“Which stitched’dja send?” Melancholy asked.

“That one.”

“Will he answer my questions about their numbers?”

“He should.  His handler told him to stand down.  But stitched are stitched, you know?”

“I know,” Melancholy said.

She poked me in the back, bidding me to move.  We walked together, her knife to my throat.

I could tell from the way she moved against my back that she was favoring a leg.

Good girl, Mary, I thought.

Well, redact that.  The attack had been reckless.  I could understand the reasoning behind it, that Melancholy had only needed one hostage, she wouldn’t simply let the rest of us go, but it had been reckless.

But Mary had got our assassin once, at least.

“You.  Were there people inside?”

It was a stitched’s voice.  “Yes.”

“How many adults?”

“Five.”

“Children?”

“Uh.”

“Think.  Children.  This age, give or take.”

“Three.  Four.  Three?”

“Explain.”

“One… between.  Older.  Girl.”

“Describe her.”

“Thin.  Girl.  White hair.  Or blonde hair.  Glasses.”

Shipman.

“Alright.  Good man,” Melancholy told the stitched.  “Don’t know who that one is, but I don’t care about them.”

We walked up stairs.  I recognized them as the stairs to the Brigadier’s Lodge.  I saw people on either side, using the building for cover, and took them to be the Academy’s.  Westmore forces, with their brighter jackets.

There’d been a bit of a stalemate.  The Academy forces had regrouped.  They’d decided this was as good a defensive position as any to draw the line and decide they had to stop retreating.

But for the situation to be as it stood… something had happened.  Perhaps this had been too hard a position to attack.  They couldn’t move on without resolving it, couldn’t attack it without undue losses.

Complicated by… what had she said?  Orders.  Killing the Brigadier had been off-limits.

Melancholy kicked the door three times.  It was ajar.  “Coming in!”

She strode into the room, me in front of her.  I wasn’t that effective a shield, but it hardly mattered.  She had security of another sort.

“Brigadier.”

“Sy,” I heard a voice.  Lillian’s, perhaps.

“You’d be one of the assassins,” the Brigadier said.

“I would.”

“Tea?” the Brigadier asked.

“I’m not that stupid.”

She wasn’t budging from the doorway.  We were standing in the coat room.  The part of the lodge past the midway point was raised a bit, and the other Lambs, Shipman, and the Brigadier’s people were gathered on that part, watching.

“You want to discuss options?” the Brigadier asked.

“You’ve lost,” Melancholy said.

“I noticed the fires.  Didn’t seem like the wisest thing to do,” the Brigadier said.  “My young colleagues here think it wasn’t wanted, on your part.  You want to secure this building because it should be far enough from the fire.  A defensive position you can fall back to.  You’ve been put in an awkward position.”

“Not my concern,” Melancholy said.  “I only have the ability to give orders so I can secure you and your top officers.  The army is someone else’s to lead, and the state of Westmore is that someone else’s concern.”

“Cynthia, her name was?” the Brigadier asked.

Melancholy nodded the affirmative.  “If you surrender and order your men here to put up no fight, you’ll all be given safe passage.  You’ll be treated as prisoners of war and afforded every respect.”

“I see.  I-”

“Before you accept.  There’s another term.  You give over the children to me.  They die.  Payment for me losing mine.”

Her grip on my throat tightened, the blade stinging my throat.  It was less painful, which was a bad sign.  Less painful meant a deeper cut.  The pain came later than it did with a shallow one.

“Ah,” the Brigadier said.  “There were two with him.”

“Crippled, bleeding, left to burn.”

I could see the shadow of the man’s head moving.

“Seize the children,” the Brigadier said.

My head bowed.  There were shouts of protest, but Gordon and Mary were the fighters, and they weren’t .  They were dealing with military men of some experience.

“I gave you your chance,” the Brigadier said.   “I hope you understand.”

I leaned forward, not caring about the knife, I screwed up my face, and I spit.

“I have to do what makes the most sense,” the Brigadier said.

“Hmf,” Melancholy made a sound.  “Thank you for being cooperative.”

“Sy!” Jamie called out.  “You-”

He stopped as Melancholy shoved me.  I sprawled, landing on the floor.  The Lambs were in front of me.

I flipped over, because I didn’t want to see them as Melancholy killed me.

She stood there, arms stretched out to either side.

I blinked.

I blinked again, trying to clear my vision.

Melancholy had a passenger.  Clinging to her back, was a blonde girl.  Helen.

I turned, looking at the crowd of people.

Sure enough, there were three figures who were the right size to be Lambs, and there was one who was definitely Shipman, all with soldiers behind them.

But… yes.  One was the Brigadier’s stitched servant.  The firetender.

They’d noticed the stitched doing a headcount.

The perils of an expendable soldier.

Melancholy stood as if crucified, or as a bird in flight might appear, her arms gripped, twisted, and pulled back.  Helen perched on her, feet finding purchase in the small of the assassin’s back.

The assassin shifted her footing.  Slowly, but with surety, she contorted, body twisting, head turning as well, to a greater extent.  She drew her mouth open, and even my ruined eyes could see the whites of her teeth.  Opening wide, as she drew ever nearer to Helen’s face, a bear trap ready to take the front of Helen’s head off.  Helen pulled away, contorting in her own fashion, but she couldn’t do more without releasing the assassin.

The others couldn’t shoot without the risk that a bullet might pass through Melancholy and catch Helen.

I stood.  Going by memory more than sight, the mental image I’d cobbled together as Melancholy and I walked, I went for the woman’s left leg.

Mary’s wound.  I found it.

I dug the fingers of both hands into the gap, then wrenched it open.

Melancholy snarled.

Arms still outstretched, she bent forward, snapping for me.  A viper’s movement, compared to the glacially slow contortion as she’d gone for Helen.

Helen moved, shifting grip, adjusting her own weight, throwing herself to one side.

I heard the snap, the pop, the cartilage and bone grinding.

Melancholy’s face, blurred, stretched into something hideous in the moment before she crashed to the ground.  She writhed for a moment, solely with her upper body, before she gave up the last gasp.

Vertebrae separated, if I had to guess.

Helen remained there, holding Melancholy’s arms.

“Hello, Sy!” she said, brightly.

I opened my mouth to respond, then closed it.

There was a commotion as the others came.  Lillian was quick to hurry to my side.

Everyone, be they the Brigadier or my fellow Lambs, was quick to throw a dozen questions each at me.

I touched my throat, looking at who I hoped was Lillian.

“On it,” she said.  “Need my bag.”

Too much to communicate, too little time.

Gordon and Mary hurt and bleeding out, with enemy forces between us and them.  The location surrounded, the city overtaken by armies and fire, and Melancholy’s orders had been the only thing keeping the enemy from assaulting the Lodge.  Now she was dead.

The moment they realized that, we were done for.

Esprit de Corpse – 5.15

“Turn your face up,” Lillian told me.

I did.

She rinsed out my eyes with something.  Liquid streamed down past my temples and ears and the back of my neck.

“Blink, lots.”

I did.

“It’s not helping.”

“Keep blinking,” she said.

I did.  Gradually, the world became clearer.

I gave her a thumbs up.

“Let me know when blinking stops working,” she said.

“We need to focus on Gordon and Mary,” I said.

“We need to win this,” one of the men who’d been with the Brigadier spoke, “We’re being overrun.”

“I’m pretty sure the plague men are immune to poisons, parasites, and diseases,” I said, still blinking.  “They have the firepower to gun down your monsters, and they’re zealous.  Stitched are falling faster than they should, and your specialists, rank-and-file and officers are getting intimidated.”

“This isn’t news.”

“Making sure everyone knows what’s what.  I don’t know what you’ve been doing, cooped up in here.”

“Waging a war.”

“And being overrun,” I echoed him.

It was the Brigadier who stepped in to speak.  “I have to ask.  Was it you who set the fires?”

“No,” I lied.  “They happened.  We used them once they began.  Spread them further.  We felt it was important to divert them, make sure they didn’t have safe ground to fall back to.”

“I see.”

“Sorry,” I said.  “It was a judgment call on our part, seeing how and where they were moving.  I understand if you don’t want to work with me any further.”

I could make out the individual slats of the boards in the arching ceiling, now.

“I don’t think we have any other choice,” the Brigadier said, and there was a curious tone to his voice, as if he’d caught me in the lie, and he was hinting he had, while trying to keep his men from grasping that fact.

I gestured at Lillian, and she rinsed my eyes again.

This time, as I blinked, I lowered my head, looking around.

Helen was sitting on the edge of the table with the maps, close to the fireplace, her feet in Jamie’s lap.  Shipman was sitting at the far end of the table.  The men were all standing.

I wiped at my eyes and temples with my hands, then ran my fingers through my wet hair to get the worst of the cleansing agent out.

I looked down at Melancholy.

“You opened your wound again,” Lillian noted.

I looked down at my side.  The cold rain had washed away a surprising amount of the blood.  There were traces, though, a blob of pinker fabric.

I pulled my raincoat closed.  “We’re surrounded, on the defensive, we have two key people who need immediate attention, and if they find out Melancholy here is dead, then her orders to keep certain individuals alive stop holding water.”

My attention turned momentarily to the Brigadier as I hopped down from the edge of his desk and walked over to Melancholy’s body.  One of the commanding officers was standing over it, another was at the window, peering out.

“You’ve summed it up,” the Brigadier said.  “We need solutions.”

He was being more curt than before.  Had we disappointed?  Or was something else bothering him?

“Thinking,” I said.  “Believe me, I know we need solutions.  Two people I care about dearly are out there, and I don’t know if they’re alive or dead.  The sooner we can get to them, the better.”

I rifled through Melancholy’s pockets, patting her down.  Everything I pulled out found its way to the floor.  Three rings that might have been wedding bands, except they were the wrong metal, threads, buttons, two torn patches with what looked to be cloth badges on them, two photographs, of all things, badly exposed, showing very normal people.  There were also things I expected: a pen, a flask of alcohol, two knives, a tube of something that smelled foul, and three pieces of paper.  The firebombs she’d taken from Gordon were on her belt.

The mementos caught me off guard.  This was a person with keepsakes and history.  People she kept photos of, both men.

I took the belt of firebombs, unbuckling it, and collected the pieces of paper, along with Melancholy’s pen.

After a moment’s hesitation, I grabbed one of the three rings.  Steel, dark, but it had been polished bright where it had been rubbed.  It was a hair too large on my finger, so I moved it to my thumb.

“-the fireplace?” Helen was asking.  I’d been slightly out of earshot.

“Hm?” I asked.

“Up the fireplace.  Escape route.”

“Possibly.  There are no guarantees you won’t be shot when you pop out the top, or that you have any place to go if you aren’t shot,” the Brigadier said.  He gauged the size of the chimney.  “You children could squeeze through, but your escape route doesn’t help any of the rest of us.”

Helen’s face was devoid of compassion as she took in that sentence and continued to stare at him.  He looked away first.

I slapped the papers down in front of Jamie.  Helen craned her head around to look at it.

“What’re these?” Jamie asked.

“Letters in Melancholy’s possession.  Her handwriting.”

He groaned a little, head bowing.

“Can you?”

“I can try,” he said.

“Explain,” the Brigadier said.  His men were looking more antsy, now.

“Forgery,” I said.  “We have some of Melancholy’s handwriting.  Someone in their leadership.”

“There’s a lot wrong with that idea,” the Brigadier said.

Still so negative.  Still curt.  He was upset.  It felt disconnected from the idea that he was losing this battle.  If it had been connected, he would’ve been more vocal during some parts of the conversation thus far, and less vocal during other parts.

“What am I writing?” Jamie asked.

“Brigadier Tylor, sir,” I said, choosing the full title to try and curry favor with the man.  “You get to be Melancholy.  She’s not the direct leader, but she’s next best thing, and she’s in the field, here.  Her orders supercede most others.”

“I can’t order a retreat.  They wouldn’t believe it.”

“Probably not,” I said.

“Unless-” Lillian started.

Heads turned, and she fell silent.

“Go on,” I urged her.

“Superweapon.”

I nodded slowly.

“Westmore doesn’t have a superweapon,” one of the officers said.  “They have to know it doesn’t.  They controlled the city for a long period of time.  They interrogated captives, kept prisoners.  I imagine they tortured and drugged those prisoners.”

I nodded slowly.  “Ordering a retreat and claiming we have a mysterious superweapon is pushing it.  Jamie.  First order.  Written to the vanguard, the front line.  Furthest up.”

“That would be the northwestern point,” the Brigadier commented.  One of the commanders nodded.

“Georgie Madsen,” Jamie said.  “Probably.”

“Go for it,” I said.

“How do you know that?” Shipman asked.  “That it’s him?”

“I read a lot of the correspondence and paperwork that passed over the enemy’s desk, while I was babysitting Ames,” Jamie said.  He was already writing.  “Madsen is the best fit.  Young officer, eager, aggressive.  Had a wife, they were expecting, his wife lost the baby.  He blames the drug for the loss, and now the sterility throws a wry stitch into things, because they can’t try again.  He’s angry.”

“That’s not how it works,” Lillian said.  “The drug.”

“Doesn’t matter, because it matters to him, and it gives him a reason to push to be at the front,” I said.  “Officer Madsen gets a letter from Melancholy.  There’s a superweapon in the mines, with caches of weapons.  Leave a skeleton crew to man the front, other units are coming to reinforce his position shortly, get to the mine shaft by that one gate-”

“Southeastern gate,” Jamie said.

“Have him send some people down.  Even if the superweapon is a hoax, the cache is almost a certainty.  Paranoia on the Crown’s part, after the near-shortage before.”

“Tying them up,” the Brigadier said.

I nodded with vigor.

I was anxious.  I wanted to be gone, and this maneuver wouldn’t be fast.

“Second letter,” I said.

“West gate.  They have to be there,” the Brigadier said.  “They want an escape route with the fires burning behind them, they don’t want to pass us and then get attacked from behind.  It’s the only logical point.”

“Combat fires in the southwestern position,” I said.  “Madsen’s group is secure at the northwest and is being reinforced as we speak.”

The brigadier nodded.  Jamie nodded too.

“Third note.”

“I can only write so much at once,” Jamie said.

“To the command here.  To be passed on to their superior officers.  Melancholy has finished with her task here.  She has Tylor.  Send two coaches, have two men collect the injured children at… damn it.  We were close to here.  Within earshot to hear people shouting about the firefight here.  Plague men came directly at us from…”

“Which direction, Sy?” Jamie asked, voice soft.

“Between the last fires we set and, it had to be a bend in the road, the way foot traffic was.”

“Hereabouts?” Jamie asked, pointing at the map.

I looked, trying to gauge.

“Thereabouts,” I said.  “He and the children are to be brought back here and put in the coaches.  Prisoners of war, and children of important figures.”

“That’s almost a bigger stretch than ‘the rebellion forces should collectively retreat,” Jamie said.  “Almost.”

“Our safety was guaranteed in exchange for information about the weapons in the mine,” I said.

Jamie nodded.

“They may not buy it,” the Brigadier said.  “These missives coming from here?  Having us escorted into the coaches with the assassin remaining behind, unseen?”

“I have an idea,” I said, while still pontificating on what that idea entailed.

Jamie wrote with Melancholy’s pen.  He passed the first paper to me, immediately starting on the second.

The handwriting matched perfectly.  There were individual letters that weren’t in any of her notes, but there were the florid, angular capital letters, even the way the crisp handwriting got messier for words further down the page, as if she’d lost patience with the neat handwriting style and started scribbling out the words instead.  A habit in both of the papers I’d given Jamie.

“Keep in mind,” I said, “If her handwriting gets gradually sloppier, that’s going to carry over across the three messages.  If they check it, we don’t want that little oddity to raise alarm bells.  Prey instinct.”

Without looking up, Jamie crumpled up the paper he was writing on and started on a second.  “This is not a strength of mine, Sy.  I haven’t practiced it.”

“Do your best,” I said.  “Helen.”

Helen beamed a smile at me.

“You’re Melancholy, for our little task here.”

“Wow,” she said, smiling wider.  “How does that work?”

“Well, for one thing, we can be glad her hair covers so much of her face,” I said.

She nodded.  “I’ll need a knife.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” the Brigadier said.

“You will,” I told him.  “Knife?”

He hesitated.

Still that aura of negativity.  Doubt.

“Please, sir.  We’re short on time.  Even if for your own preservation, we can’t have Melancholy’s meeting with you extend too long.”

The man lifted a foot, and pulled a combat knife from the side of his boot.  He extended it handle-first.

I took it.

“Lillian,” I said.

Lillian trotted to catch up with Helen and I.

“You want to cut off her hair?” Lillian asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” I said.  “I figure it’s easier to maintain her hairstyle if we just take it all in one go.”

Lillian blanched a little.

I smiled at her.  “What?  You’ve poisoned people.  You’ve seen people die.  This is cake.”

Helen made an amused little sound.  I handed her the knife, and she bent down.

She proceeded to scalp our assassin, knife following the hairline.

In the doing, she revealed Melancholy’s eyes.  A little milky in color, with sockets that looked too splayed out, the ridges of cheekbone and brow too accented.  She might have looked skeletal, but it was more that her skeleton was an odd shape.  Her jawline, too, was strange.  Akin to a snake’s.

Something about it, the large eyes, the disproportionate features, the odd shape of her head, minus half of her scalp, it made me think of a newborn baby.  Blind, orally focused, agape, face twisted in emotion she wouldn’t be able to express again.

Hadn’t she said something about how we were all brought into the world?

She’d been more focused on the relationships than on the fact that we came into the world bloody and powerless, though.

I rotated the ring around my thumb with one finger as I looked down at her.

“Bloody,” Helen observed.  “Wouldn’t do if I had blood running down my face.”

“Rinse it,” I told her.  “Lillian, use some powder or something, get the bleeding to stop.  Then makeup.  This is your chance to shine.”

“What makes you think I have makeup?”

“You’ve been wearing some.  You were wearing it at the school the last time I saw you there.  I know you have something to cover up bruises and cuts.  Unless you were a twit and used it all up.”

Lillian sighed, exasperated.  “You’re a real charmer, Sy.”

“I know you’re not a twit, Lil,” I said.  “I just really want to help Gordon and Mary.”

She nodded.  “Me too.”

We were pulling it all together.  There was just one thing we needed.

I looked at the fireplace tender, and I felt a moment of doubt.

No.

“Shipman,” I said.

She looked a little wary as she turned her full attention to me.

“Why do I have a bad feeling about this?”

“You’re learning,” Jamie murmured, still writing.  He’d scrapped two drafts since Helen started scalping.

“We need legs for our new Melancholy.”

☙

It was a bad joke in stage plays, one child atop another’s shoulders, trying to be an adult.  But Melancholy had a heavy black raincoat, and Helen was an actress.  She already wore Melancholy’s scalp.

“You’ve got a hump,” I observed.

Helen contorted, shifting position.

“Pressure, ow, pressure!” Shipman raised her voice a little.

“Shh!” I hissed.  “You can damn well cope.”

“She’s digging individual toes in between my ribs for a foothold.  I’m allowed to say it hurts!”

“Bring your knees in,” I said.

The bits poking out beneath the armpit receded.

“Better,” Shipman said.

“Don’t care,” I said.

“Too tall,” Jamie observed.

Helen dropped her height an inch.

“Too short,” Jamie said.

Helen raised her head a half-inch.

Exemplary control over her own body.  Not perfect, but enough to make the difference.  To sell this in a way that wouldn’t normally work.

“You need the mouth,” I said.

“I don’t have the teeth, and I can’t do the voice,” Helen said.  “Unless you want to get a file?”

“Ibott would kill us,” I said.  “Don’t talk, don’t open your mouth.”

She nodded.

Then she pulled at muscles in her face.  A rictus grin, too-wide, until it looked like her mouth would tear open.

It wasn’t perfect.  The nose was wrong.

But people didn’t look at noses.

“Officers, Brigadier,” I said.  “Kneel.”

I could tell the instruction didn’t go over well.  These weren’t men who had knelt for anyone but the Crown.

I got a kind of perverse joy out of it, watching as they knelt.

“In a line,” I said.  “That pissed-off look on your faces?  Keep it.”

They arranged their positions, so they were all in a line, down the center of the room.  Jamie, Lillian, and the firetender took up position just in front of them.

‘Melancholy’ and I approached the door.  Shipman was slow, carrying Helen.  She didn’t complain any further, though.

“Good girl,” Helen purred.  “Keep going.”

“I don’t need the encouragement,” Shipman said.

“Pat on the head for you,” Helen said.

I opened the door a little, caught it with my foot, and then kicked it open, trying to make it look more like ‘Melancholy’ had opened it than I had.

She stood in the doorway, so the door remained propped open, and I threw myself forward, stumbling to the point of nearly falling down the stairs.

The people on the street were far enough away they’d infer I’d been pushed or kicked.

I looked at the Academy forces at the walls on either side, defending the position, ready to open fire.  I moved my head as if I was looking past everyone and everything, blind.

“Soldiers?  If you’re there, throw down your guns,” I said.

I could see them hesitate.

“That’s an order!  Throw them down!” Tylor bellowed, from inside.

As I walked down the stairs, I could hear the guns being dropped to the ground.

That sound and the presence of Melancholy in the doorway lent me an air of legitimacy.

I stumbled down the stairs, missing the occasional step, and trying to step down to another step when I reached a short landing.  I made my way down to the street.

“Someone in charge?” I asked.  “The assassin sent me.  Someone?  Anyone?”

The mail was snatched out of my hands.  A plague man had it.  He had pocks and boils breaking up tattoos on his neck and hands, military tattoos.  The sort that almost counted as medals people gave themselves, or to memorialize the dead.

Don’t read it.  Don’t read the others’ letters.

“What are these?”

“She said, um, one for you, and then one for Madsen, and one for the forces at the west gate.  Orders from the top.”

The man made a face.  I saw only through my peripheral vision, as my ‘blind’ gaze stared a hole through his chest.

He didn’t like Melancholy, I realized.

Funny how it worked.

“Is she coming down to join the rest of us?” the man asked.

“I only- I was told to bring the letters.  I can’t see what’s going on,” I said.

He opened one of the letters, then hunched over.  “Damn rain.  Ink’s running.”

I remained silent.

“The senior officers are being taken as prisoners of war,” he said.  He turned his head.  “Two coaches.  We’re going to be rid of the ugly bitch, and not a moment too soon.  Send runners with these letters to Madsen and Hughey.”

Gordon and Mary, I thought.

He wasn’t giving the order to go and find them.

The simple, stupid reality of humans.  There was only so much they could process.  We’d given them too much information to dwell on.

He’d completely glossed over that part.

If I said anything else, it put everything in jeopardy.  Gave them cause to be suspicious, to pay attention to me, the lowly messenger…

I swallowed hard.

Had to take the risk.

“My friends,” I said.  “They were with me, and she hurt them.  She said, Tylor made her promise to help them.”

I stared at the ground as I said it.  Hoping, hoping.

“Mm,” the man said.  A single syllable response.  Not even a word.

I had a knife and I had a firebomb.  If it came down to it, I’d stab him and make a break for it, using fire to delay pursuers.

I wasn’t sure what I’d do at that point, but I couldn’t do nothing.

Come on.  Basic sense.  You can’t go against her deal with Tylor, or you jeopardize everything.

“Vic.  Head over in the direction of the bank.  Opposite end of the street, behind the houses.  If the fires aren’t too bad.  Bring someone to help carry.  Supposed to be two injured kids.  Related to bigwig doctors.”

I sagged in relief.

Relief or no, I didn’t say or do anything to draw attention to myself.  The rain poured down, battering the paper the plague man held gripped in his fist.  Gunshots and explosions sounded off to the north end of the city.

The fighting had stopped here, but the war hadn’t left the area.  The air smelled like smoke and blood, and there were more people staring off into space than there were people talking.  Everyone in their own individual worlds.

I could remember seeing that look in the plague men’s eyes back in the city.  A part of them missing, perhaps.  Was it a casualty of the transformation, or of previous battles?

What did it mean, to be so changed?  They’d become the perfect soldiers for this ugly battlefield, but it was a change that made it awfully hard to go home, when all was said and done.

I’d talked about the importance of the fact that these people wanted to fight.  They wanted justice and revenge.  The Academy forces didn’t want either.  They wanted to return to their ordinary lives.  It made a difference, when push came to shove.

Was there a chance that these men who had been made into soldiers would want to keep fighting, when ordinary, sane people would want the war to end?

We’d never identified the doctor responsible for creating these transformations.  He was likely to be elsewhere, making more.

An awful lot of men with little to look forward to, except the expectation of death and blood.

I stood and waited in the rain, shivering, until the coaches arrived.  Two men perched on the back, each holding on with one hand, their other hands wrapped around Gordon and Mary, respectively.

Mary’s eyes were open, and her expression changed as she saw me.  Gordon was moving, but very weakly.

I allowed myself to feel relief, finally, but I didn’t let it show.

Three commanding officers, the Brigadier, and all of the Lambs found their way into the coaches, hands and ankles bound.  Two plague men rode up top of each coach, and another was inside the cab of one of the other coaches, but there was room on the bench.  I was the last one into the crowded space of the first coach’s interior.

Well, not the last one.

Melancholy made her way down the stairs.  I didn’t stare, instead turning away as she drew ever nearer, but I imagined the challenge.  Shipman, not the largest of us, but sixteen nonetheless, with a burden on her back and shoulders, walking down wet stairs.

One stumble, one fall, and the ruse was ended.

I reached out for Mary’s hair, and stroked it, pushing it out of the way of her face.

She smiled at me, her eyes half-lidded.

There was a slight collision as ‘Melancholy’ reached the door.

“You’re not riding up top?” the plague man who’d taken the letter asked.

She couldn’t talk, not without revealing her voice, or the fact that her teeth were normal.

Instead, she chanced a look in his direction, giving him a better view of her face.

A sneer of contempt.

She lurched into the cab of the coach.  The door slammed behind her.  The other coach’s door slammed as well.

I didn’t dare breathe, my ears peeled for any sign that they’d realized or started to doubt matters.  That they were angry and would start an argument.

The door was closed, and all was silent, but for Gordon’s labored breathing.

Were we free and clear?

My heart pounded.

The coach set to moving.

Free and clear.

☙

We stopped at a fork in the road.

The able-bodied officers of the Academy’s forces hauled the plague men out of the vehicle, leaving them at the side of the road.  Even with many of us being children, we’d had the weight of numbers in a cramped space.  After that, the ones up top had been caught and either strangled or shot.

I watched how Jamie stared down at the bodies.  But we had other things to focus on.

“You know the way?” I asked the Brigadier.

“Of course.”

Jamie spoke, not taking his eyes off the dead plague men, “Back around the side roads, up to the north end of Westmore.  You can appear at the rear of our own forces, and lead them with knowledge of what the enemy is likely doing.  Their forces will have been pulled back from the front.  You can flank and destroy, then use the momentum.”

“Or command a retreat,” the Brigadier said.

I raised my eyebrows in surprise.

“I haven’t decided,” he admitted.  “We’ll see.  I don’t think Westmore is salvageable.  But it may not be for them, either.”

I nodded.

There was a pause.

Nothing more to be said, except-

He extended a hand.

Again, my eyebrows went up.

“You made the best of a bad situation,” he told me.  About the best compliment I could get, given the circumstances.

I took his hand and shook it.

“We’ll be going now,” he said, moving over to the other coach, which was already slightly turned to the northernmost road in the fork.  “Lost time is life spent.  Especially in wartime.”

“It won’t always be,” I said.

He gave me a sad half-smile.

“I really believe it won’t be,” I said.

“That there won’t be war, or that we’ll one day have time to spare?” he asked.

“Is there an answer I can give that will make you stop giving me that pitying, condescending look?” I asked.  Then I remembered, “Sir?”

“Good luck,” he said, with a kind of finality.

I nodded.

The words were on the tip of my tongue.  I wanted to ask, but I didn’t dare.  Yet I knew that having no answer would bother me for a long time.

Why were you upset that we rescued you?

“You too,” was all I said.

I climbed into the other coach.  An officer rode on top, wearing a plague man’s hat ad coat.  He was the only one not going with the Brigadier, and he kicked things into motion.

I settled in next to Mary, and let my hand rest on her forehead.  She was a little too warm.  Opposite me, Gordon had his head in Shipman’s lap, feet on Jamie’s.

“Was just tellin’ the others,” she said, sleepily.  “Our misadventures.  Wish we’d done better.”

“We did pretty well, circumstances allowing,” I said.  “We’ll wrap this up neatly.”

“If that sniper who shot you doesn’t get us,” she mumbled.

I looked up, in the direction of the coach driver.  My finger rotated the ring at my thumb.  “He’ll be fine.  Flying enemy colors.”

“Sure,” she said.

“Is this really how we want to operate?” Jamie asked.

“Hm?” I asked.

“Killing those who show mercy and heal us, abusing the terms of surrender, wearing enemy colors?”

“And hair!” Helen said.  She was at Mary’s feet, the hair in her lap.

“Yeah,” I said.  “I mean, isn’t it?  We do what we have to, to make this work.  I don’t know where you’d draw the lines, otherwise.”

“I think you know where the line is, Sy,” Jamie said.  “I think you deliberately choose to cross it.  Sometimes when you don’t have to.”

“I like that side of him,” Mary said, sleepy, thoroughly under the effects of the painkillers. “I like Sy.”

“I like him too,” Jamie said, voice firm, “But I think you’re a bad influence on him.  You and Gordon both.”

Mary snorted.

“I mean it.  I don’t know that I like what Sy becomes, when he’s with you two.”

“I’m not that suggestible,” I said.

“You are the exemplar of suggestibility,” Jamie said.  “It’s your strongest trait.  You absorb and you learn more effectively than any of us.  I know because I know exactly what’s happened in the past.  I know who you’re with when your behavior changes.  I see the patterns.”

“Using my suggestion against me?” I asked.  I’d told him to watch for trends.

“To your benefit, Sy,” he said.  “Not against you.”

The rest of the coach was so very quiet.  Everyone was hanging on to every word, and nobody was jumping in, to defend me, or in the case of Gordon or Mary, to defend themselves.

I nodded.  “So I’m just a composite of influences around me.”

“No,” he said.  “There are definitely things that make you you.  Some I’ve puzzled out.  Some I haven’t.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Your earnestness.  Your hope.”

“Sure,” I said.  “Give me a few years, I’ll turn as sour as any adult.”

“Your eagerness to sacrifice yourself for the benefit of others.”

“That’s not how I’d put it.”

“And, as I’m reminded with the plan to off the rebellion doctor, your insistence on attacking the people who are kindest to you.”

I shrugged.  I’d deflected the last two comments, but I felt like I couldn’t with this one, without being dismissive of the weight it seemed to carry with Jamie.

He was too gentle a soul.

“I’m suggestible, like you said,” I said, eyes on Jamie’s knees.  “My oldest memories are of days and weeks of people consoling me, telling me it’s going to be fine.  I’m so brave, I’m so kind.  They’ll give me things.  I just have to stop crying, stop struggling, stop making trouble.”

I raised my hands, gesturing, “Kindness, then unbearable pain.  Kindness, unbearable pain.  You can do that to a slug and it’s going to leave a lasting impression.  People are kind to me, then horribleness follows.  No.  I’m done with that.  I know what lies beneath the surface.”

Mary, head still in my lap, reached up and gave my arm a rub.

Lillian’s eyes were shiny.

Shipman, in stark contrast, looked like she wanted to be far, far away from here.  Her attention was outside the window.  Even with Gordon’s head in her lap, she didn’t look like she was connected or present at all.

Their relationship was over.  I knew it.  The war, or Gordon’s actions, or the danger, something had driven a wedge.

“But we’re kind to you, Sy,” Jamie said.  “Aren’t we?”

“You are,” I said, without hesitation.  “But-“

I’d started speaking again, somehow in the expectation that someone would jump in and finish the sentence for me.  Then I realized I didn’t want them to.

“But?” Lillian asked.

“But we aren’t people?” Jamie asked.

“That’s not what I meant.  It sounds wrong, like it’s being twisted around to mean the opposite of what it means.  You’re…”

I floundered.  It was a rare thing for me.

“You’re better than people?”

My heart was cold in my chest.  I felt like I’d somehow stumbled on the worst combination of words to say, and I’d put everything in jeopardy.

Nobody was talking.  Body language was weird.

Jamie rose from his seat.

He crossed to my side, then nudged for me to move over.  Mary and I did a little bit of reshuffling to make room.  Even so, he was a touch squeezed between me and the door.

“Do that more,” Jamie said.

“Compliment you?  Talk about your superiority?”

“Be upfront.  Say what Sy is thinking.”

There was no way to say anything to that.  It would have felt forced.  I was left mute, only able to nod.

He elbowed me, then turned his attention to Mary.  “Didn’t make you too uncomfortable?”

“Nope,” she said.

He reached over and began fixing her hair, pushing it out of her face.

“You going to be good to go?” I asked.

“I’ve fixed what I could, but breaks are breaks,” Lillian said.  “No hard exertion.”

“I’m good to go,” Gordon said.  He worked his way to a sitting position, making use of the space Jamie had vacated to move his legs.

His hand was trembling.  Phantom pains, again?  It shouldn’t have been so soon.

“I’m not very fast, but I can help,” Mary said.

I nodded.

It was cozy, squeezed up against Jamie, Mary’s head in my lap, the others around me.  I almost could have fallen asleep.

But as I looked out the window, I could see Whitney.

I reached out past Jamie’s face and knocked on the glass.

The coach slowed, then stopped.

We slowly made our way out of the coach, many of us hurt, offering help where we could.  Only Shipman remained behind, with the driver.  She avoided our gaze.

We had a job to finish.  Westmore was a wash.  Even if our forces won every fight that followed, it would be chalked off as a loss.  A detriment to the Crown.

But the rebellion wasn’t in a position to commit halfheartedly, and Cynthia hadn’t been in or around the tents where I’d been brought for treatment.  She was still in Whitney.

Vulnerable.

Barely illuminated by the rising sun, we made our way down toward the city.

Enemy (Arc 5)

Cynthia leaned back.  “You’re sure?”

Sanguine nodded.

“You did the right thing, coming back,” she said.  “No signal from Melancholy or the others?”

Sanguine shook his head.  He smiled with a mouth that was too small for his face.  “It happens.  We have very strong personalities.  We get caught up in our activities.”

“If you aren’t worried, then I won’t worry,” Cynthia said.  “But those fires… a fireproof creation, perhaps?  Maybe more than one?”

“It could be.”

“Or it could be the superweapon we already know of.  The Lambs.”

Sanguine smiled.  One of his eyes, the size of a woman’s fist, remained fixed on Cynthia.  The other turned to one side, peering out the window, past the rain-streaked glass and into the barely-lit street.  He focused and unfocused his gaze on three different levels, telescoping his vision.

Too dark.

He switched focuses and stresses.  The world took on different tones, textures, and hues, as he focused on a different spectrum of light.  He adjusted again, and the darkness was illuminated, cast in white and black.

Across the street, in the shadows between a shack and a house, a rat cleaned itself with its tongue and the water from the rain.

He snapped his eye back to Cynthia, watching the world return to focus.

“What are you doing next?” she asked.  She was gathering paperwork together.  Maps and letters.

“Me, personally?” he asked.  “Or us?”

“I’d like to know the answers to both.”

“Speaking for myself, I don’t know,” he said.  His eyes remained fixed on her face, but he altered his focus, until his peripheral vision was sharper than what he could see in the center of his field of vision.  He could see her cleavage as clearly as if he was nestled in it.  The pores, the tiniest, fairest of hairs, the drop of sweat that traced its way from her neck down to her collarbone, then down into the alluring shadows that her blouse cast.  His smile widened.  “The smoke is too thick.  I might wander the outskirts.  But I thought you should know about the fire, and I wasn’t going to get much for my time.  I won’t, really.  Even if the fires are extinguished, the smoke will still rise.”

“Then stay,” she said, her attention still on the paperwork.  She was reading a letter, before deciding to tear it up and throw it aside.  She met his eyes.

He’d cocked his head to one side.

“Best case scenario, Melancholy comes back with Choleric and the prisoners of war my boss wanted spared.  Worst case scenario, your colleagues are dead, and you expose yourself by being out there alone.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t offend you, I hope, with the idea that you’ve lost the others.”

“I’m hard to offend.”

“Alright.  Keep an eye on things here.  If you can kill any of those damnable spiders, I’ll thank you for it.  Keep an eye out for trouble, watch the roads.  From what you describe, they’re too pinned down for a counterattack, but I don’t like relying on luck.”

“You’re scared,” he observed.  He could see the softest, most vulnerable parts of her, the base of the throat over the pulse, moving faintly in response to the increased heartbeat.  She was pretty in such a natural way, but she’d gone to lengths to make herself prettier still.  That she did it because it was just another tool or a weapon for her to employ was something special.  Yet… “You’re packing up to run.”

“Concerned.  Whatever the cause of it, the fire means you can’t enter Westmore, I can’t send reinforcements, meager as they would be, and I can’t carry out my remaining gambits.  I have no control over what happens next.  I have no reason to stay.”

“That is an excellent rationale,” he said.

She gave him a sharp look.  He cocked his head again.

“I preferred dealing with Melancholy,” she said, sighing.  “And that’s saying something.”

“She is much better at dealing with people,” Sanguine said, offering his version of an ear-to-ear grin, though even at that point, his mouth was no wider than another person’s might be when at rest.

“Thank you, Sanguine.  If Pock is up, you can tell him he should get some sleep,” she said.  She made it a dismissal.

He gave her a lazy salute, then headed for the door, his eyes pointing out to either side as he passed between the two immortal soldiers who guarded the door, then snapping back to point forward after they were behind him.  Scarred and infested with parasites from head to toe, they were as stern and silent as he wasn’t.

He walked away with a jaunt, humming, his long rifle banging against his calf and shoulder.

He searched the streets.  It was nice and quiet.  The world was brightening, the sun rising, casting long shadows.

There.  A movement beneath a building.

A stray cat slept on top of a barrel under the awnings of a shop.  It had been targeted by one of the spiders.  The spider had only started to work on the sleeping cat’s tail.

He knelt, raising his rifle, one eye closed, the other looking down the sights.

He adjusted for the speed with which the bullet would fall, raising the tip.

Squeeze the trigger.

The gun was loud, always was.  Not that the spider heard in time.  Sanguine rose to his feet in a quick, steady motion.  Keeping with habit, always start moving right after shooting.  One eye watched where he was going.  The other watched the target.  He made it one step-

-The spider was obliterated.  The cat startled, waking up and dashing off aimlessly.

The tail would heal.

He could remember being newly made, and wanting a cat of his own.  Having it with him on a good day, sitting in his lap while he sat cross legged, watching for a victim, purring now and then?

He swaggered his way to the labs on the Lanyard Avenue corner, pausing to admire the crown of trees growing out of the tops of the four walls, before he let himself in.

The building had been a factory once, making use of imports from Westmore, shaping iron into nails, if he had to guess from what remained.  Most of the machines and tools had been carried out, and the place retooled.  There was a clear space down the middle, a path drawn out without paint or tape or railings, only convention and accepted practice.  To the left of the cleared space were tables where stitched could be made, with Stitched ‘sleeping’ against the wall, hooked up to a flickering battery with things swimming inside.  To the right was Edwin Grahl’s lab.  The man was absent, and his work was left half-complete.  The pieces of another giant stitched arm.  Grahl hadn’t been seen since sundown.  He would have seen off his first cannon-wielding giant, then gone to sleep, secure enough his work would suffice for Cynthia’s purposes.

There were two sorts of people that Sanguine would see tonight.  People who had slept through the night, like Grahl, and people who hadn’t.  He wasn’t sure which one Pock was.

Though originally a factory, the building had been modified.  Crews of stitched and grown material had been used to throw together a second floor and a roof, producing a second tier to the building within the span of a day.  This tier was home to three more laboratories.  One to the left, one to the right, and a third at the end, no walls separating them.  Left and right were left unoccupied, but Pock was in the one at the end.

Pock was flanked by two identical women that stood seven feet tall, each one about ten stone at best, with long faces, folds at the eyes making them look Asian, their hair straight and black.  Their spidery fingers were the most animated part of them, the rest of their movements so slow they looked like they were moving underwater.  The pair took turns handing him tools as he requested them.  He made an incision, and slid a slice of fatty tissue into the cut.

“Ah, you,” Pock said, almost derisive.  Almost.

“Me.  Cynthia Imlay would like you to know that she won’t be needing your services tonight.  There are fires prohibiting access to the city.  I saw with my own eyes.”

Sanguine smirked as if he’d made a joke.

Pock stopped.  He heaved out a sigh.  “Are the prisoners of war still due to arrive?”

“Very likely.  My colleague is on it.  But there’s no need for haste,” Sanguine said.

Pock nodded.  He raised his hands, and the experiments on either side pulled off his gloves.  “I’d complain, but it’ll be good to let the swelling subside, and see how close I’ve managed to get.”

The man on the table slept, his face subtly different from one side to the next.  Old enough to have grayed hair, his facial hair was cut to have only a beard, no mustache.

“He looks real,” Sanguine admired, studying pores and finer structures.  There were differences from an ordinary man, but not ones a typical eye would catch.

“He is real,” Pock said, offended.

“For something made in a vat, he looks human.  And he’s not even a clone.”

“He’s close to being one.  I had the notes from a colleague.  We even had two conversations over the phone.  I gave him my own notes.”

Sanguine leaned closer, cocking his head until it was lined up with the man’s.  “You have a reference image?”

“A painting,” Pock said, pointing.

Sanguine nodded.  He straightened.  “Beautiful thing, this.  To come out of war, no less.”

“Mm,” Pock said.

“War is amazing like that, isn’t it?  Nothing drives us to be better as much as a gun to our head does.  With the western Crown States in the midst of a civil war, we have thirty-thousand guns to thirty-thousand heads.  The world is going to change in the wake of this war.”

“Of course it is,” Pock said.  “We’re going to uproot the Academy from these states, take the clutching fingers the Crown is using to grip it and break every one, until we can retake this part of the country for ourselves.”

Sanguine broke out into a laugh, genuine and hearty.

“Yes,” he said.  “That sounds wonderful.”

Pock wasn’t looking half as impassioned now.  The man had gone cold.

Was the laugh too much?  Sanguine cocked his head.

“Was there anything else?”

Sanguine shrugged one shoulder.  “You can rest if you need to.  The prisoners of war will be here by midday, if not sooner.  We won’t lose anything if we start late.”

“Uh huh.  Will you be shooting that damnable gun of yours in earshot?”

“It’s likely.  I’m supposed to look out for trouble.  There are some spiders lingering, at the very least.”

“No sleep for me, then,” Pock said, grim.

Sanguine bowed a little, then saluted in the most insulting way he could.

He passed downstairs, out the door, and locked it behind him.

His head turned.  He studied the surroundings, adjusting the focus of his eyes as he did it.  The changes in sharpness and softness and detail rotated through a series of possibilities, until it looked and felt as if his eyes were hearts, beating in his eye sockets.  The surroundings throbbed in a way, and he could get a sense of dimension, of texture.  His visual memory was acute, and as he took a few steps forward, searching, he could get a sense of where the ground rose and fell, all the way down the length of the street.

The eyes were such an important sense to humans, but the eyes had stopped developing long ago, because the developments were so very unnecessary.  When they’d made his eyes, they’d turned to sea creatures for inspiration.  Even his face was a bit fishy, he liked to think.

He smiled.

He could see footprints in the mud.  He could gauge their size, follow their path, see how the light rainfall distorted the water that had collected in them, and even guess at the amount of muddy water within, water that would have been squeezed out by the weight of the foot setting down.  His eyes pointed in two different directions and adjusted until he could compare both places at once, his own footprints from a minute ago against this very small footprint.  The amount of water suggested that the person had passed by a moment after he had.

He was amused by the fact that they had probably been watching him, yet he hadn’t seen them.

One child.  A Lamb?

It took him a minute to walk to the set of tracks.  He pulled his gun around, holding it in both hands, though he didn’t point it at anything.

Whitney wasn’t a city meant for warfare and the military.  The layout wasn’t organized in a way that made it easy to defend and hard to take.  The military leadership, Cynthia included, had wanted to situate themselves at the center, at the heart of things, except the buildings there were mostly shops.  They’d changed the buildings here and there, and made compromises elsewhere.

The footprints led to one such compromise.  A shop with living quarters above it.

He slowly turned, taking in the surroundings.  Looking, searching for more errant children.

He slipped a bullet into his gun, then fired blindly at the sky.  He did it again, then again, then again.

It was Pock who stepped out of the Lanyard Labs, swearing up a storm.  His assistants followed him.

“The hell do you think you’re doing, you imbecile!?”

Sanguine held up a hand, index finger raised.

“What?  You’re telling me to wait now?  You wake half the city, and-”

“Can you shoot?”

“What?”

“Shoot.  Are you able?”

“Yes.  Of course.”

Sanguine nodded, his eyes still roaming.  He drew a gun from inside his jacket and tossed it to Pock’s assistant, who caught it.

Pock’s attitude changed.  “What’s going on?”

“You are coming with me.  We’re entering this building.  A spy is lurking within.”

“And why would I put myself in close proximity to a spy?” Pock asked, derisive.

“Because the tracks suggest a limp, making this one the most obvious target,” Sanguine said, “And because there are five more close by.  If I leave you alone, you’ll be dead before I step outside again.”

Pock didn’t have a ready answer for that.

Sanguine reached into his coat, then affixed a blade to his rifle.  He took his time securing the bayonet, using a key to tighten the banding, before slipping the key into a notch to secure it’s place on the barrel.

“The others.  If there’s that much danger, then-”

“Cynthia will have heard the shots and thought there was something unusual about it.  She knows there’s danger.”

“You’re sure?  Because she-”

“I’ve seen her fight.  She’s the rare sort of capable.”

“Are you done interrupting me?”

“Yes.  Because you must be exceedingly quiet,” Sanguine said.  “Or you may die, sir.”

Pock fell silent.

Sanguine smiled as he approached the door.  He nudged it open with one toe.  “Leave your assistants outside.  They’ll make too much noise.”

He adjusted to the darkness with a speed and facility that matched poor Pock’s ability and quickness in blinking.

Dusty.  The store hadn’t been cleaned since the commanding officer had taken up residence upstairs.  Light streamed from the window above the stairs.

Another adjustment this time.  Focusing on light, contrast.

The specks of dust almost glowed, as he focused on the way they caught the light.  Fireflies in darkness, swirling, dancing.

The swirling was more intense further up the stairs.  His quarry had passed by more than a minute ago, but the air still stirred, just a little.

And, halfway up the stairs, he noted a wire.

Not meant for people giving chase or coming upstairs.  For someone going down.

A just-in-case measure, was it?  If the target got away and ran for the front door?

He approached the stairs, touching the blade of the bayonet to the wire.

Movement.  Slight.

He leaned over the railing, repeating the touch.

An empty flower vase on a little stand beneath the stairs moved in response.  The razor thread wound lightly around the railing, extended down to the vase.  If disturbed, the vase would fall.

Because of the limp.  A lack of security in his or her own ability?

Was it the boy he’d shot the previous day?

“Assassin,” he murmured.  He couldn’t hold back his excitement.

Pock made a face, quizzical.

“Not a spy.  An assassin,” he clarified.  “Take the vase, Pock.”

Pock did as he was told.  Good man.  Sanguine turned the rifle upside-down and used the sharp end of the bayonet blade to cut the wire.

He gestured for Pock to follow, watching the movement of the dust in the air as he ascended the stairs.

He saw the way the swirl of dust danced down the hallway, leading to a room at the end.

He gestured for Pock to stop, this time.  His feet fell on the sides of the hallway, not the center, and he transferred his weight slowly.  His body had suffered in the same set of treatments made to capitalize on his eyes.  He wasn’t strong.  He was sensitive to the heat and the cold, which were bad traits for a sniper who would otherwise want to remain still in poor weather for long periods of time.  But that same degree of sensitivity let him sense the creaks as they started, shift his weight away, move the foot to the next few floorboards, and try again.

He was silent enough that he could hear Pock more than he heard himself.

He stopped at the doorway.  He could hear whisperings, two voices.

A girl and a man.

His movement noiseless and smooth, he leaned his head forward, peering past the doorway.  Nothing so sudden to draw focus.

The girl was straddling the officer, who was in bed, wearing his pyjamas.  Her knees were pressing his arms down, but he was undoubtedly strong enough to throw her off.  The wire she had around his throat was keeping the man still.  She held it with one hand, the wire wound around the handle of a knife.  The other hand was on the headboard, so she could lean forward, her face inches from his.  She was wearing a raincoat over a dress with lace at the ends.  Twelve or thirteen years old, ribbons in her brown hair.

But she had the eyes of a killer.  Her pupils were contracted to sharp points.

Sanguine stepped forward, thrusting.  The floor creaked.

The girl moved, rolling to one side.  The wire unspooled from the handle, and Sanguine lunged for it, using the sheer length of the rifle to try and get the point of the bayonet’s blade under it.

She saw, and she moved, turning so her own body pressed against the wire, while her hand pulled it down, flush against the bedspread, while it cinched tighter around the officer’s neck.  It took Sanguine a second to turn the bayonet around, slash at the wire.

But she was already moving, taking advantage of the moment’s pause.  There was a nightstand on the far side of the bed.  She heaved it over, and the cord went tighter still, digging into the corner of the bed.  She’d wound the wire around the drawer or ornamental bit of the piece of furniture, and now she used the weight of it.  The blade’s point dragged against woolen covers and sheets, but not deep enough to cut wire.

Sanguine threw himself forward to get a better angle.  The only place the wire wasn’t digging into the bed was next to the man’s neck.  He found the right position, pulling the blade along the wire rather than sawing or pushing, aware that his quarry was heaving the window open, casting one look over her shoulder, eye glinting-

The thin wire snapped where the blade had cut at it, going slack.  Sanguine was only dimly aware of the way the blood welled out from where the wire had dug into flesh.  Too much, too fast.  No arterial spurts, but enough blood that the man was almost guaranteed to die.

“Pock!” Sanguine called out.

Without waiting for a response, he hurdled over the bed, going to the open window, thrusting the gun’s point and the blade through, followed by his head and one arm, eyes pointing in either direction.

She was at the side, climbing over to the front of the building.  The eaves.  Her eyes were already on him.  She’d seen the gun’s point emerge.  Saw what he was going to do next.

He wanted to see what she had planned, and it wasn’t like he was going to do something different.

He slapped the gun against the side of the building, aiming, squeezing-

Sanguine saw the movement, the tensing muscle, and relaxed his grip.  She threw herself back and away, pulling her raincoat up and over her head.

He followed her, watching her lift her raincoat up, so it would catch on the edge of the gutter for the next house over.  She now gripped the inside of the sleeves, while the middle of the raincoat looped over.  She let the raincoat sleeves turn inside-out, controlling her descent.

He moved the gun over, aiming, so he could shoot her the moment she was in the air, when no amount of agility or cleverness would let her move to either side.

Except she hauled down on one sleeve of the raincoat, changing the angle of her descent a fraction.  In the final moment before she let go of the raincoat, she swung a bit to one side, letting go.

He adjusted his aim, ready to hit her as she hit the ground, two or three feet to the left of where she had originally been planning.  He pulled the trigger this time.

She hit the ground with a stagger.  The wood of the porch railing beside her exploded into splinters.

She flashed him a white-toothed grin before half-spinning, half-stumbling around the corner of the porch, ducking too low for him to have a clear shot.

He smiled.

He loved it when they were clever.

He pulled away from the window.  There was no point, now.

“I can’t save him,” Pock said.  “If I had my kit-”

“Alright,” Sanguine said.  He wasn’t surprised.  He crossed the room to look the terrified man in the eyes.  He gave the man a light slap on the cheek.  “You.  The girl was asking questions.”

The man sputtered, spit, not blood.  “Please help.”

“You heard the doctor,” Sanguine said.  “We can’t.  What was she asking?”

The man was breathing hard.  He had that animal look in his eyes.  A horse in panic.

Sad, coming from a soldier.

“Was she asking about Cynthia?”

The man’s attention clarified a moment.

“She was?”

The man nodded slightly, before something reminded him of his present circumstances.  The panic returned.  His eyes were unfocused.

“They split up,” Sanguine said.  “Now they’re going to converge.  I need to find them as they do.”

“What?  They were going to do this to me?”

“Probably,” Sanguine said, smiling.  “I like them.  Nightmarish little pricks, aren’t they?  The girl was wounded and threw herself off the side of the building.  Must have hurt like the dickens.”

“I- what?”

“Come now, sir,” Sanguine said.  His blood was pumping, he felt almost drugged.  “You can’t be so surprised.  You’ve dealt with monsters before.”

He stood, backing away from the bed, cocking his head to one side as he studied the dying commander.

He pointed the rifle at the man, who was too out of his senses to even recognize the threat.

Thrusting, he drove the blade’s point into the roof of the man’s mouth, and into the brain.  The man jerked, struggled for a moment, and then abruptly died.

“Good god!” Pock said.

“The key parts of the brain should be intact,” Sanguine said, raising his voice to be heard as he walked away.  “I’m going, you stay.”

“What if they come back!?”  Pock reached the railing by the stairwell and leaned over.

“They won’t.  They can’t.  They’ll be striking at key targets before fleeing!” Sanguine called out.

He pushed the door open, eyes adjusting for distant targets before he was even outside.

Cynthia.

She could handle her own.  He knew that.

The sole building that was toward the center of the town that was also fit for the rebellion forces to use was a mason’s workshop.  Stone walls, tall, spacious, it could take a hit from a bomb without crumbling into tinder and dust.  Cynthia had changed the location of her headquarters from the theater after the children had been chased from town.

A door halfway to Sanguine’s destination was left unlocked, slightly ajar.  Grahl’s place.  One of his eyes peered through windows.

There.  Through the front window.  Grahl had spent the night in an armchair, a bottle and a glass beside him.  Not one to sleep through a battle after all.  The handle of a hatchet or hammer stuck up and away from his head like a lone insect’s antennae.

There were others.  The children had moved unerringly, as far as he could tell.  Had they planned this from the beginning, figuring out who was where, who would be remaining here, vulnerable, when the fighting was elsewhere, or was it simply an amazing degree of coordination?

He focused on the tracks.  Knew they were different ones.  Three children.  One with a limp, another slow, not running but not limping either.

Just before reaching Cynthia’s place, the sets of tracks diverged.

He felt excited, seeing it.

They knew he was following.  They would lay a trap for him.  Try to distract.

The mason’s house.

He slowed, searching.

A giggle.

A girl’s.  Hard to match to the girl with the limp.  The sound carried.

Melancholy had mentioned their names, reading what Cynthia had given them, he wished he remembered.

A distraction?

“Sorry about Melancholic!” the voice called out, so innocent it was almost taunting.  The sound bounced off walls of a nearby alley.  “I broke her!”

Ah.  Wasn’t that too bad?

Still, he smiled.  The theatrics were a nice touch.

“Choleric too!  Riddled him full of holes!”

Sanguine nodded.  He believed it.

“And poor Phlegm!  Killed him again!”

Marvelous control of sound.  Changing position, letting the voice carry, bouncing at him from different directions.

Phlegm would have liked that, ironically enough.

He felt sad, but it was a small sadness.  Not that his colleagues were dead, but because he’d always assumed that when one of them fell, the rest would fall in short order.

And, Sanguine told himself, he didn’t plan on dying tonight.

He asserted his grip on his gun, reaching the front door.

“Wrong direction!  She ran!” the girl called out.

He hesitated, hand on the doorknob.  One eye flicked out to the side.

No tracks fresh enough to be hers.

A gunshot startled him.  Distant.  A window two feet left broke.

“Shoot, gosh, and damn!” the girl called out.  “Missed!”

He pushed his way in through the door.

Theatrics, with a slim chance of a lucky shot.  She’d been too far away to be shooting at him with a pistol.

The mason’s workshop was dark.  Lights had gone out.

Halfway between the front door and the stairwell, one of the so-called immortals lay bleeding.

At the door to Cynthia’s office, another lay dead.

He walked past them, ignoring the dying man, and moved through the workshop.  No sign of life.

He had to be right on their heels.  The children weren’t fast.

Through the back door.  Tracks only a handful of seconds old.

A glimpse of movement, further down, between the base of the hill and the back of the workshop.  He adjusted his eyes a second too late.

There was only a narrow avenue behind the buildings, with sparse grass growing, and the periodic flower.  With the water rolling off the mountainside and down into this space, it had to be fertile ground, though it wouldn’t get much sun.  He stepped carefully past fallen firewood, eyes searching.

Had to think like the children.  They were steering, moving as a pack of wolves might.  Around the periphery, chasing, guiding.

Except he had to think like Cynthia might as well.  Because she would recognize what the children did and try to find an avenue they weren’t covering.  A gap in the net.

The slower ones would be closer to him.  The quicker ones further down, cutting her off.

He ran, feet tramping down on the footpath.  The girl wouldn’t have had time to lay a wire, but-

There.  Caltrops.  Nails bent so that four prongs stuck out in different directions, left in the dirt.

He skipped past them.

Heard a whistle, close.  Above?

Looking up, he almost missed what was happening to his left.  He passed a space between buildings, and the girl who had had the wire was there, already in motion, out on the street in front of the buildings.  Keen eyes saw the movement.  Throwing.

He ducked, bending over.  The blade struck his back, across his shoulderblades.

Fingers gripped the corner of the building, helping him come to a stop on the slick ground.  He heaved himself in the opposite direction, toward that same alley.

Gone.  Of course.

One on the roof, to let her know he was coming, so she could be ready.  Slowed as she was, she would have had to have carried straight on down the road, while he was busy navigating the building interior.

Wolves circling.

He watched for her as he continued running behind the buildings, following Cynthia’s tracks.  He saw soldiers on the street.  They were shouting, calling out.

A smell in the air.  He wrinkled his nose.

She’d used her gas.  The foul, sense-obscuring stuff.  Somewhere further down.

He broke away.  No use following, if he’d lose any use of his eyes from the lingering traces of the stuff.  He headed to the soldiers, hailing them.  Ordinary men.  Boys, almost.

“You,” one soldier said.  “One of the assassins?”

Sanguine nodded, focusing more on catching his breath and studying the surroundings.

No sign of the limping girl.

“You should know, the children she warned us of are about,” the soldier said.

“I know.”

“Commander ordered the group to follow her, warn her.  We were told to stay, pass on word.”

Sanguine frowned, eyes peeled for any movements.

One on the roof, but he didn’t see a thing.

One on the ground, the limping girl with the wire and the knife.  But she wasn’t moving forward.

“She carried on this way?” Sanguine asked, indicating the other direction.

“She did.”

“To her apartment?” Sanguine asked.

“Yes, sir.”

And they chased her.  The soldiers chased her.

Not just a handful of children chasing her.  Her own men would be looking for her.  Very possibly tipping off the children to her location.

Sanguine broke into a run.

They’d showed themselves for a reason.  Raising the alarm.  People would find the dead officers and doctors and instinctively want to protect Cynthia, among others.

That she’d changed where she operated from, both to the Mason’s and where she laid her head at night, it didn’t matter.  All the children had to do was follow the soldiers.

How many children left?

The giggling girl, the one on the rooftop, the girl with the knife.

He could see the tracks now.  The largest of the children had broken off.

One child, smaller than all of the rest, moving from cover to cover as he followed the soldiers.

All the way to Cynthia’s apartment.

Sanguine slowed.

The men were gathered at the front, guns in hand, watching, searching the surroundings.

He joined them.  “She’s alright?”

“She’s fine.  She’s gathering her things.  We’ve got the place surrounded.”

“You led one of the children here.  They know where she is, now.”

The man frowned a little.  “The entrances and exits are covered.”

Sanguine studied the area, backing away from the group, his head turning, each eye operating independently.

Shingled houses, row on row.  A cobbled street.

The quiet was broken by a distant, distant rumble.  An explosion in Westmore.  An hour away.  Had to be a big one.

Then stillness and quiet again.

“Cynthia!” Sanguine called out.

He saw her face appear in an upstairs window.  She peered down at him.

“Out!” he called.

No sooner was the order given, than a small object flew down from a nearby rooftop.

A moment later, there was fire, and the men at one corner of the house were engulfed, screaming struggling.  Panic and madness.  The front of the building was licked with flame.

Sanguine, calm, collected, raised his rifle, eyes focusing.

The boy was hiding, using the peak of the rooftop and the chimney for cover.  Sanguine took long strides, aiming, looking for a hint of a movement.

He heard a bang, on the far side of the house, out of sight.

A window opening.

He dropped the rifle, running.

“Stay!” he called out, but too late.

She’d leaped from the second story window.

In the same moment she fell, another grenade was cast down from the rooftop.

She’s capable in a scrap, but he’s not even giving her the opportunity.

As with the first, it expanded into flame.

Sanguine saw a glimpse of the boy on the roof, already turning to run, scampering along wet shingles and peaked roofs.  He might have had a shot, if he wanted it.  Yet Cynthia was flailing, reaching out for help.  Every heartbeat counted when it came to saving her.

He straddled the fence, a coin flip between one or the other.

They’d been given orders to leave the Lambs alive.  Orders he hadn’t cared about, as his earlier shot at the boy had evidenced, but given this knife’s edge of a decision… he turned his attention to Cynthia, who was partially engulfed in fire.

She could be saved, at least more certainly than the boy could be shot down.

Beauty gone.  Even the rebellion’s best doctors would struggle.  It would take time to fix.

But there was nobody left to work with.  Better to have her alive, so he had a place.  He’d have his Lamb-hunt another day.

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.1

Jamie walked down the hallway while reading a book.  I tackled him, throwing my arms around him, pinning his arms to their sides.  Mary joined me, clapping a hand over his mouth, her other hand making sure he didn’t drop his book.

“Mmph.”

“Shh,” Mary said.  “We need your eyes.”

“Mmph?”

We led him over to the window.  Helen was already standing by the window with Lillian.  We were on the second floor of Claret Hall, overlooking one of the grassy open spaces where students were eating their lunches, most doing it while looking over papers, making notes, or having discussions.  Always working, working, working.

A canopy of slanted glass panes set between interwoven branches directed the rainwater onto stylized grates, with the water disappearing into some underground reservoir.  There was a steady patter of rain, but it was also a hot summer day, making for the kind of humidity where clothing stuck to the body.  Gordon was there, sitting on a bench beneath a tree, unfolded paper on his knee, a partially eaten sandwich in hand.  Shipman was on the other end of the short bench, arm’s length from Gordon.  Brown bottles of Sassafras Beer had been placed on top of Shipman’s papers as a kind of paperweight.  Meeting for lunch, between their individual tasks.

“You’re better at lipreading than I am,” Mary said.

“Why am I lipreading?”

“Because,” I said.  “Their breakup has been a long time coming.  I want to know which of them makes the call.”

“That’s perverse,” Jamie said.

“Come onnn!” Lillian said.

“Come onnnn!” Helen echoed her.

Down on the bench, Gordon raised his head, looking around.  He’d heard us.

I shushed the others, then told Jamie, “If we know, we can tailor how we respond to him.”

Mary nodded enthusiastically.

“Or,” Jamie pointed out, “We can let him decide how and when he wants to let us know.”

“They’re talking,” Lillian said.  She grabbed Mary’s arm.  “Mary, Mary.”

“I’m looking,” Mary said.  “I’m watching.”

Jamie sighed.  He didn’t walk away, though.

“I’ve been thinking,” Mary recited, her voice deeper.

Shipman looked at Gordon.

Mary switched to her ‘Shipman’ voice, “The way you said the maids-”

“That,” Jamie corrected.  “Makes.”

“-makes me think it’s important,” Mary finished.  “You asked to eat lunch with me for a- reason.”

“Good,” Jamie observed.

I would have thought he’d forgotten that he’d been objecting just moments ago, but he wasn’t one to forget.

“I respect you a lot,” Mary said in ‘Gordon voice’, then switched for Shipman.  “Gordon…”

She trailed off, apparently struggling to figure out the words.

“I’m a big girl,” Jamie said.  “I know what you’re going to say, there’s no need to try and soften the blow.”

“Sorry,” Mary said, Gordon voice.

“I feel like you and me together has been more apologies than…” Jamie said.  Shipman had paused, hesitating.  Jamie resumed a moment after she did.  “I don’t know the right word.  But a relationship should be about being secure with one another and not having to apologize.  There should be that security.”

“Yeah,” Mary said.  “I wanted this to be a positive thing for both of us, but it doesn’t feel that way.”

They were taking turns now.  Mary for Gordon and Jamie for Shipman.

“This is going a lot better than I thought it would,” I remarked.

“Shh,” Lillian shushed me.

“It’s to your credit,” Shipman/Jamie said, “I didn’t think this would be anything serious.  You saved me, back in the dungeons, with Sub Rosa.  I was curious about you and your friends and I thought I’d humor you, but I actually liked you quite a bit.”

“Past tense.”

“I’ve never been good at talking to people.  I’m good at my work.  That’s what I do.”

“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” Gordon/Mary said.

Gordon leaned back against the tree behind the bench.

“When you went to Whitney, I shouldn’t have gone with you,” Shipman/Jamie said.

“Do you think so?”

“Too much time around each other, woke me up to how different we were.  The world you lived in.  If I’d been ignorant, we could have stayed together.”

“We still wouldn’t have been a perfect fit.  Only difference is it would have taken us longer to figure out,” Gordon/Mary said.

“Maybe that’s true.  So is that it?  We’re over?”

“I’d like to work with you in the future.  I respect the work you do.”

Shipman reached over, touching Gordon’s cheek.

“Something something fatter girl?  Her head was turned,” Jamie said.

“You know how to flatter a girl,” I guessed.

“And now she’s saying, ‘If you find another girl and she needs a reference, send her my way?”

“What?” I asked.

“I don’t think relationships work that way, Gladys,” Gordon/Mary said.  “And they’re laughing.”

They were.

“This is going a lot better than I thought it would,” I remarked.

“You sound glad,” Jamie said.

“I am.  Really.  I thought Gordon would charge the problem head-on, offend Gladys, and this whole thing would end in tears.”

“You don’t give him enough slack,” Mary said.  “You haven’t for a while now.”

“I’m just saying.  Gordon is a problem solver.  When he solves problems, he does it in ways that keep that problem solved.  Hammer through the brainpan, broken legs, smashed glass…  even social problems, he likes his firm solutions.  His handling of this is a lot more delicate than I would have expected.”

“We’re all evolving,” Lillian remarked.

It was a strange statement, coming from the only one of us who wasn’t augmented, altered, or inhuman.

Gordon raised his bottle of beer and clinked it with Gladys’.  The pair weren’t smiling, but they weren’t upset either.

“What are the rules for this?” Mary said, in her Gordon voice.  “Breaking up?”

“What do you mean?”

“We can be civil to each other, say hi when we cross paths?”

“See?” I said.  “Firm, solid solutions.  Making sure everything is settled.  Very Gordon.”

“Shh!” Lillian shushed me.

“Yes,” Shipman/Jamie said.  “We can be civil.”

“Stay in touch?”

“Yes.”

“And, if there’s someone else, somewhere down the road, there won’t be any…”

“Hurt feelings,” Jamie supplied.

Gladys was smiling.  “Do you already have your eyes on another girl, sir?”

“No.  But I want to make the most…” Mary started.  She hesitated.  “…of the time I have, and I don’t want to hurt you or anyone else if I happen to move on more quickly.”

Shipman reached out, touching Gordon’s face.

The group was quiet.  Shipman and Gordon talked for a solid ten or fifteen seconds, and there was no translation via. lipreading.

My heart felt uncomfortably weighty in my chest.

It wasn’t just the words, the idea behind what he’d said.  That he’d told her, that he’d changed the mood to do it?  He’d been holding on to that.  He’d needed to express himself, share that, and he had chosen Shipman over the rest of us, to do it.

I saw Shipman’s body language change.  She was using her hands more, and her volume had raised a fraction.

“Wait, what’s she saying?”

Mary had a hand to her face.

“She said she might introduce him to someone, what kind of girl does he like?” Jamie said.  “He said he wanted someone more mature.”

I slapped my hand to my own face.

“She was asking him what he means by that, she’s two years older than him, he said two and a half, she said she wanted to know what he meant, was she immature?”

“Gordon, Gordon, Gordon,” I said.

“He says no, that’s not what he meant.  He meant he would be more interested in someone who knew how to handle themselves in a situation like we had in Westmore, and now they’re arguing.  I don’t really feel comfortable trying to figure out exactly what they’re saying.”

“He was doing so well,” I said.

“Guess we’re not evolving that much after all?” Lillian asked.

“We are,” I said.  “But… journey of a thousand steps, I guess.”

Shipman stood up, snatched up her drink and the papers she’d brought with her, letting Gordon’s drink fall to the ground.  She turned on her heels and stalked off.  Gordon remained sitting.

“Sad thing is, he’s a brilliant guy,” I said.

“Mm hmm,” Mary made a sound of agreement.

“We’re all idiots, when it comes to first romances,” Helen said.

Every head present turned to face her, a little caught off guard at the profound statement, coming from Helen of all people.

“Speaking from experience, Helen?” Jamie asked, very carefully.

“Nope!  No romance here, and there never will be.  Instead, I get the-”

“Stop,” I said, putting my hands out to mash her mouth shut, both of my palms pressing against the lower half of her face.  “No.  Don’t finish that statement.”

Her eyebrows furrowed into a frown.

“Because it’s going to be weird and disconcerting,” I told her.  “Let the rest of us live in ignorance.”

She nodded.

I released her mouth.

Down on the bench, Gordon picked up his fallen drink, wiped dirt from the glass, then tipped it back to finish it off.  He folded up the paper he’d wrapped his sandwich in and set it aside with the bottle, one hand resting on it to keep it from blowing away.  He heaved out a deep, profound sigh.

A moment later, he reached out to touch his thigh.  He rubbed it, hard, as if he was trying to rub the bone beneath the muscle, then doubled over a little, expression changing, eyes shut, jaw clenched.

I turned my back to the window, and Jamie did the same.  I saw Mary staring, and touched her arm, steering her away.

Too personal.

“I should help him,” Lillian said.

“Nothing you can do,” Jamie said.  “He’d be more upset that you came to help than thankful.”

I nodded.

“It’s my job to look after you.  All of you.”

“Leaving him be is looking after him,” I told her.  “With Gordon, if he doesn’t ask for help, he’ll resent it.”

“That’s stupid,” Lillian said.

I shrugged.

“He’ll get looked after during his next appointment,” Jamie said.

“Whatever,” Lillian said.

“He’s going,” Helen observed.  She was right.  Gordon was limping just a little, but he seemed able to walk it off, or at least pretend it wasn’t a problem.  By the time he reached the end of the field, his umbrella going up to shield him from the rain as he passed from under the canopy, he was walking normally.

“Let’s catch up with him.  Drag him out to the city,” I said.

There was no argument.  We moved as a group, down the hallway, passing the occasional student.  People were wearing their summer uniforms, but even the people proudest of their lab coats and the prestige those coats afforded them had doffed the things, leaving them in offices and dorm rooms.

Passing outside, though, the heat was like a physical wave of water, except this wave smelled like hospitals, blood, and that vague pungent smell of fresh manure.  The opposite of refreshing, really.  It made me feel disgusting the moment it swept over me.

“Blahhh,” Jamie said.

I nodded.

We walked the gauntlet, no less than five different experiments sniffing, touching, or waving digits at each of us.  Prehensile limbs, antennae, and long-fingered hands gave us each a thorough search.  One limb snaked through the armhole of my shirt, before sliding down my back, sweeping sweat free.

“Ow,” Mary said, as long fingers tugged at a knife she’d worked into her hair.  “Careful, you.”

Other fingers from the same lumpy figure poked at knives resting flat against the small of her back, the outlines just barely exposed by the humidity-soaked clothing.

“I’m reaching for a badge,” she said, moving slowly, talking to the Academy student who was overseeing the things.  She raised the badge, to show the man.

“Let them on through,” he said, sounding disinterested.

The morass of various creatures that had investigated us were quick to listen.  I wondered if they had human brains in there, or if someone had gone to the effort of making a nonhuman brain that understood speech.

We walked, and half of us didn’t flip up our hoods or raise umbrellas.  I was part of that half.  It was so humid that I figured I’d be dripping anyway, and at least the rainwater was a cleaner dripping.

Hot as it was, the Academy was far from sluggish.  People milled this way and that, hurrying, all with things to do.  The population was different, too.  Before Fray’s war had erupted, there had been perhaps a ten to one ratio of ordinary people to experiments or stitched, not counting ourselves.  Now it felt like half-and-half.  Unlike Dame Cicely’s, however, there were two discrete groups.  It wasn’t student paired with experiment, but whole groups of experiments, weapons of war, and regiments of stitched, churned out and ready to be carted off somewhere.  Specially constructed wagons carried the resources that would go toward making more.  Cart upon cart of food for feeding the newest and greatest weapons of war.  The students were cogs in this machine, heads down, their thoughts on their work and the expectations of their superiors.

We walked with purpose too, but our goal was to find Gordon before he went and disappeared off on his own.

“There,” Mary said.

Gordon was walking, oblivious to the rest of reality.  We caught up with him, falling into formation, walking as a group in the most natural way imaginable.  He arched an eyebrow as he looked at me, to his left, and Mary to his right.

“Appointments?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Lillian said.  “Sorry.”

“Why would you be sorry?” he asked.

“Um.  Because I know you probably want to get back to work.”

“Getting away wouldn’t be so bad,” he said.  “Maybe some place by water, where we can swim in this kind of heat.”

“That sounds nice,” Mary said.  “We’d need swim clothes.”

“We’re going into the town,” I said.  “Want to come with?”

“Sure,” he said.

We reversed direction, to pass around Claret Hall.  The concentration of experiments and idle weapons of war was even greater, and the air was heavy with smells that I couldn’t entirely place.

The Duke was there, and as royalty, he was surrounded by a guard of sorts.  The gauntlet of creatures investigating each and every person that came or went was part of it.  Some of the weapons were top of the line, too.  Two giants were sitting on either side of the door.  Skinless, with three or four layers of muscle and bone set atop one another, with gaps suggesting what lay beneath.   Humanoid warbeasts, capable of using weapons.  Probably from another Academy.  They didn’t move much, probably to reduce the amount of resources they consumed.

As we approached the gate beside the Hedge, we were subjected to another battery of searches.  As the tentacles and prehensile noses stretched toward her, Mary heaved out a sigh.

For my part, I got the one with a sense of humor.  It prodded at my face, repeatedly, apparently aiming for my nose and eye.  I squinted and tilted my head a few times, dodging the pokes.

I couldn’t begrudge it that, though.  If the roles were reversed, I would have annoyed people all I could, knowing there was nothing they could do about it.

I snapped my teeth as it got too close, again.  As the experiment overseer rose from his seat, I drew my badge.

He waved us on through, the search ending prematurely.

“So glad I got these,” I said.  “Aren’t you glad I got these?”

“You’re glossing over the amount of trouble those badges caused us, when you picked them,” Gordon said.

“But,” I said.  “Short term trouble, long term gain.  Seriously, how much trouble have these badges spared us?”

“Uh huh,” Gordon said.  “That doesn’t make up for it.”

“Does too.”

He reached out for me, probably to muss up my hair, but I dodged his hand.

Normally he would’ve got me anyway.  He didn’t.  Slower to move.  Was his leg still bothering him?

I made a mental note of that.

We made our way down the path, past Lambsbridge Orphanage, and into the city proper.

It, too, had changed over the months we’d been away.  With a given job taking weeks or months, a brief visit back home to report in, then another job taking weeks or months, we’d only really seen glimpses of the transition.  Now we were back, there was no job waiting for us, and we had more of a chance to take it in.

If there was a fifty-fifty split of people to experiments in Radham Academy, it was even more pronounced in the city.  An experiment on every corner, armed, uniformed stitched walking the streets in pairs, and more choking the street itself.  Some buildings had been torn down or retrofitted, the new buildings grown for expediency’s sake, leafless branches still spearing up and out, the building features themselves vague: too-narrow windows, lumpy protrusions around where the doors had been set in.  It was thick material, clumsy in construction, but it was durable.

Military emplacements, placed at regular intervals.

The Academy was often described as being laid out like a living thing.  The spread of Radham around it was little different.  But this was a living thing which was trying to anticipate an attack from within.  An uprising, sabotage, revolt.  How did a body protect against such things?  Antibodies.

The effect on the city was oppressive – no doubt intended.  Should there be another Mauer-like issue, Radham was fully prepared to squash it.  But there was such a thing as an overactive immune system.  The body could rebel.  Things could start falling apart.  The system originally meant to protect the body could destroy it.

“Where are we going?” Gordon asked.

“I’m open to whatever,” I said, “But I thought we could visit an old haunt.”

“I thought you were up to something,” Gordon said.

“What?  Who?  Me?  No.”

“You have this way about you when you’re being sly, Sy.”

“Damnable lies.  I know that psychological trick.  You convince someone they have a tell, and they work so hard to reverse it that they develop one.  I’m pretty sure I told you about that, even.”

“Yeah, uh huh.”

“Uh huh,” I mimicked him.  “Nope, you’re wrong.  There are other reasons for this.”

“Yeah?  I break up with a girl and before I even figure out how I feel about it, you guys come out of the woodwork to show me special attention?”

“Yeah,” I said.

He narrowed his eyes at me.

“You broke up with Gladys?” Lillian asked, feigning surprise.  I don’t think she could have sounded less convincing if she’d spoken in a monotone.

Gordon gave me a knowing look this time.

“Hey, Lil,” I said.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Your fault he knows we know.  I’m obliged to punish you,” I said.

“What?  No.”

“Something slimy down the back of your shirt, maybe?”

“No.”

“Or an ice cube in your underpants, Lil?”

“What?  No!  I don’t even know how you would, but no!  Don’t you dare.”

“Or something in your ear…”

“Gordon,” Lillian said, “Don’t let him.”

“I’m just really fascinated by the insight into how Sy thinks,” Jamie said, his voice dry.  “It’s all very physical torments, two out of three for getting under Lillian’s clothes, no less.”

“That’s fascinating,” Gordon said.

“Wait,” I said, “Hold up.  “We’re tormenting Lil here, not me.”

The discussion continued, with a lot of back and forth and everyone getting their turn as the one made fun of.  We were interrupted as we had to pass through a waypoint to get from one district to another.  Another brief search and questioning.  A mark made in a book.

Into the shims.  The more dilapidated end of Radham.

“Same old markings,” Gordon said, touching a wall.  The wood had been carved with a triangle, given two eyes and two circles for ears.

“Nostalgic,” I said.

“What does it mean?” Lillian asked.

“Safe spot for the young,” Gordon said.  “Every generation or so, you’ll get a group that look after each other, not as an organized thing, but it’ll just happen.  Because there’s too many kids who don’t have a good reason to go home and they have to spend their time with someone.  Every other generation or so, you’ll get someone who ‘makes it’.  Who has a shop or a house or something and they aren’t hard up for cash, and who looks after kids.  The mouse is for places like that, or for groups that’ll look after you if you’re young.”

Lillian nodded.  She’d left her hood down, and her hair was wet.  She brought her hands up to tuck wet hair behind her ears.

“Three triangles for a fox,” Gordon gestured at the corner of one building, near to the ground.  There were two such markings there.  “Is the fox.  That’s not one you used to see very often, and you’d never see it in pairs.  Usually people would work together, deal with it, and the only fox mark you’d see would be crossed out.”

“There was one earlier, too,” Jamie said.  “By the waypoint.”

“What’s the fox?” Lillian asked.

“The fox preys on the mouse,” I said.

Lillian’s eyes widened.

The rain was worse here, kind of.  It wasn’t that it was technically heavier rain or anything, but the buildings didn’t necessarily have gutters, the water streamed off of the rooftops, and it spattered as it landed in puddles, where the water hadn’t drained completely.

The houses were dilapidated, falling to pieces, many uninhabitable.  Even the poor had started migrating toward the city center, leaving the edges a little lonelier.

Jamie pointed, indicating another fox scratched into a doorframe.  I nodded.

We came to a stop.

“Hey!” Gordon shouted.  “Buttholes!”

There was a pause.

A window opened, on the second floor of a building across the street.  A boy about our age poked his head out.  “What, dickstink?”

“How about a hello, huh?  Open the door,” Gordon said.

The kid smirked, then pulled his head back inside.  I heard him give an order to another kid.  A few seconds later, the door opened.

“This is meant as a bit of a treat to you, Mary,” I said.

She arched an eyebrow.

“Show you a bit of what Gordon and I used to do, back in the day,” I said.

“I like that,” she said, smiling.  She folded up her umbrella.

We passed into the house.  There were three kids on the ground floor, and an older, shirtless boy at the top of the stairs.  I recognized Thom, and the young Daisy.  The house was scattered with knick-knacks and detritus.  I was being polite, given that it was ninety percent trash.

“And,” I added, under my breath, “I thought you might like to get some tips on lockpicking, among other things.”

Her eyes lit up.  She gave me a happy little wiggle of the shoulders.

We made our way up the stairs, to a floor of the house that had little more than scattered bedding without beds, blankets, and discarded clothes.

“Long time, Gordon,” the shirtless boy said.  “Hi Helen.”

Helen gave him a wave.

“Craig,” Gordon said.  He threw an arm around Craig’s shoulders in a half-hug, Craig doing the same.

“Hi,” Lillian said, as the blonde girl Daisy approached.  She was seven or eight, if I had to guess.  Not that anyone had ever known or cared about Daisy’s birthday, to keep track.

Daisy ignored Lillian, talking to me instead.  “I’ve been keeping an ear out.”

“That’s good.”

“I can tell you who’s who, now, and what happened with the Byron Boys, and how Miss E is sleeping with the pastor’s sister,” Daisy said.

“You gotta ask for cash before you drop tidbits like that.”

“Setting the hook,” Daisy said, looking up at me.  “Like you told me.  There’s enough more that I’m not worried.”

“Alright, fair.  Hook’s set,” I said.  “Curiosity piqued.  But give me a bit to get caught up before I start grilling you.  I don’t want to pay for information I can pick up for free.”

She made a face.

There were several more kids on the upper floor – six in all.  A card game was underway.  Most were just staying in the darker corners, enduring the heat.  Many heads turned as Helen came up the stairs.

Thom came up the stairs behind us.  I clapped a hand on his shoulder as he passed me.  He’d helped me get my hands on the others’ files, back around the time we’d dealt with the snake charmer.  He’d helped me many other times, besides.

“Someone’s going to break out the old practice locks for this pretty girl to learn lockpicking,” I said, indicating Mary.  “And they’re going to do it for free.”

“That so?” a boy I didn’t know asked.

“She’ll show you a cool knife trick,” I said.  “After she’s learned something.”

He mulled it over for a second, then waved her over, lifting up the bench under the window to pull out some stuff.

The rest found their places, Helen watching the card game, distracting both of the players.  Lillian stuck closer to me, while Jamie found a seat, pulling out the book we’d interrupted him from reading earlier.

I started to fill Lillian in on particulars.  Rules, expectations, groups, with Daisy nodding along and enjoying being able to offer her own input, while being very miffed at Lillian being there at the same time.

I was distracted from my explanation as I overheard Gordon talking with Craig in a low voice.

“Girl troubles,” Gordon said.

“I know those troubles,” Craig said.

Gordon smiled.  He looked more at ease than I’d seen him in a while.

“You’ve got other troubles?” Gordon asked.

Of course he’d find other work to do.  It’s not like we get a proper day off.

“Lots,” Craig said.  “Be more specific.”

“Last I was aware, you had a lot more kids up here, that was half a year ago.”

“Ah,” Craig said.  “Yeah.”

“It’s not because of the waypoints or anything, is it?  Kids being unable to get from there to here, because of curfews and checkpoints and all that?  There’s something else going on.”

Jamie was looking up from his book, watching.  Most of the others were distracted.

“I saw four foxes scratched into the scenery on the way here,” Gordon said.  “Kids in here, not out and about?”

Craig nodded.

“Who’re you hiding from?”

Craig made a face.

There were more ears listening, now.

“Come on,” Gordon said.  “Out with it.”

“It’s awkward, given you are who you are,” Craig said.  “Don’t know if I should.  Don’t want to hurt our ongoing relationship.”

Gordon punched Craig, hard, in the arm.

“Try again,” Gordon said.

Craig frowned.  “The Academy.  Pretty sure it’s the Academy.  Picking off the little ones.  They go, they don’t come back, they don’t turn up at that Orphanage of yours.”

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.2

“I want the youngest ones out,” Craig said.

There was resistance.  Daisy stiffened.

“If I haven’t had you in on previous leadership meetings, I don’t want you in on this one,” Craig said.  “Git!”

Daisy rose to her feet.  Two more kids joined her in heading for the stairs.

“If there’s any sign of any of you listening in, you bleed,” Craig warned.

An unsteady sort of leadership here.  One enforced with knocks on the head and crude threats.  But it was necessary.  Anything else wouldn’t work on kids like these, who didn’t know other sorts of authority, and the alternative was having no leadership at all.

Thom remained, as did the boy with the locks, who was sitting with Mary, and one other.

“We called them ghosts, at first.  We lost two of the youngest ones, one right after the other,” Craig explained.  “Sent Bertie home.  He’d been here too long, taking too much, not giving.  Figured his dad would give him a hard time and he could come back later.  But he wasn’t to stay here all the time.  He cried, but he went.”

“And he never made it?” Gordon asked.

Craig made a face.  Disgusted.  “I should’ve had him stay.  My gut told me it wasn’t right, sending him back, but I wasn’t thinking about it in terms of the bigger picture, y’know?  I thought it was about him and his dad and his dad roughed him up but he’d survive.  Weighed his survival against ours and what he was costing us by eating out of our cupboards.  Thinking too small, not considering everything else.  Stupid!”

“You know deep down inside that there was no predicting something like this.  You couldn’t have known.”

“I knew!  Not about the ghosts or foxes or Academy.  I knew he was little and he hadn’t got that thick skin we all get at some point.  He ducked his head and he cried and anyone who looked at him knew he was a victim.  Whoever took him knew he was a victim!  He was prey to the whole rest of the world and I knew it and I sent him out there alone!”

“Okay,” Gordon said.  “Then yeah.  It was your fault, at least a little.”

Craig shook his head, but it was in anger at himself.

“You were angry with him,” I said.  “You wanted to give him that thicker skin, you knew you couldn’t coddle him.”

“Doesn’t justify it,” Craig said.

“How far to his place?  Where does his dad live?”

“Four streets over.  Still in the shims.”

“That close?” Gordon asked, surprised.  “Five or ten minutes away?”

Craig nodded.

“You said there was another.”

“There’ve been six I know of,” Craig said.  “Two right from under my nose.  Bert was the first.  We went out looking for him.  I expected to find his body.  Nothing.  But while we were looking, we got a little too far apart from each other.  Len was helping out, never one to stay here overnight, had it pretty good, but he’d play cards with us, join in any games, participate if we were pulling something.”

“Sure,” Gordon said.

“Sharp enough a guy.  Whisked away, not five seconds after I last saw him.  No noise, no scuffle.”

“Len’s mom is torn up about it,” Thom said.

“And you?” Gordon asked Craig.

“Len could look after himself,” Craig said, but his expression betrayed some concern or doubt.  Self-blame, but it didn’t cut as deep as Bert did.  Craig cleared his throat.  “We switched it around, so we didn’t go anywhere except in groups.  When they were in the mood to play with cards or dice, I told them to do it from perches.  Watch over the streets while they played.  Keep an eye out for anything odd.”

“And?” Gordon asked.

“What we saw was people in Academy coats, using Academy carriages.  People with gray coats, loading an unconscious kid into the coach.  Since we started keeping an eye out, we’ve seen the carriages show up now and again.  Usually from a distance.  We try, we lay in wait, but they steer clear.  Can’t seem to pin them down.  But they’re still getting us.  That’s when we started to call them ghosts.”

“All boys?” Lillian asked.

“No.  Girls too,” Craig said.  “Tom and Sam were at one perch.  Got caught up in their game, not watching, Tom says.  Then hands seize him, they tip him off the edge of the roof.  Broken arm, broken leg, wrenched his arm so bad it tore out of the socket.  What are you supposed to do, knowing what we know, that it’s Academy people doing this, and Tom is that hurt?”

There was a waver of emotion in Craig’s voice.  He was younger than some of the leaders of the mice I’d seen.  Experienced, but young.  He didn’t have full control over his emotions, he wasn’t detached, and his skin was thinner than he’d like to pretend.  When he asked what he was supposed to do, the uncertainty was spilling out.  That uncertainty was laced with the raw fear of someone that was responsible for others and failing in their duties.

“What did you end up doing?” I asked.  “With Tom?”

“Sent him to the Hedge.  His mom says he’s there, he’s in repair.  He hasn’t disappeared.”

“I think that was the right thing to do,” Gordon said.

Craig shook his head a little.

“And… I forget the other one’s name?  Who was on the roof with him?” I asked.

“Sam.  She was next oldest, compared to me.  Tom didn’t even see them leave the building.  Whoever attacked him, they and Sam just…”

Craig spread his hands.

“Gone.  A ghost,” Gordon said.

“It was a lot easier when she was around,” Craig said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “I think I remember her.  Scowler, wasn’t she?”

“Face like a dog with its muzzle smashed in,” Craig said.  He glanced at Lillian, “Don’t give me that look.”

“I wasn’t- okay, I was, but you can’t say that about a girl.”

“She said worse about herself.  She knew where her strengths were, and none of the whole sitting proper, doing up her hair nice, wearing powder on her face and being sweet stuff was part of it.”

Lillian shifted uncomfortably.  Her hands had been folded in her lap, and she, very casually, shifted her posture, so they were gripping the bench on either side of her legs, instead.

“Feel like I have to ask, so I don’t step on toes,” Gordon said.  “You want help with this one?”

“I don’t think I have any other choice,” Craig said.

Gordon nodded.  He glanced at me, and I nodded confirmation.

“Do you have descriptions?” Jamie asked.

“Tom does, but he’s at the Hedge.  Daisy was one of the ones who kept a lookout.  She’s seen ’em from a distance.  You could ask her.”

Jamie nodded, rising from his seat, bringing notebook and pen with as he headed downstairs.

Gordon heaved out a sigh.  I didn’t miss the fact that one hand was clenched in a weird way.  Another attack, so soon?

Still, he spoke in a very careful, level voice.  “I know you know something about what we do.  That we do work for the Academy.  I know you know well enough not to ask.  Because we’re not telling you particulars.”

Craig nodded, jaw set in a firm line.

This had been a point of contention in the past.  The not-telling part.  In a world where the stars had aligned differently, the pair could have been the best of friends.  In this world, the secrecy had been a wedge.

“Knowing what I know about the Academy, I’ve got to say this, and I know the response you’re going to give, but I’ve got to say it.  I don’t know that there’s any guarantee the Academy did it.”

Craig’s posture shifted, forward-leaning, aggressive, “Academy-controlled town in wartime, Gordon?  Academy coats?  Academy transportation?”

“It’s likely,” Gordon said, “But it’s not a guarantee.”

“Sure, Gordon,” Craig said, in the most disagreeable way possible, without quite being sarcastic.  His hands clenched the fabric of his shorts at his knees.  “Decide what you want.  You have to do what you have to do.  But if anyone gets snatched up while you’re wasting time trying to prove the people you work for didn’t do it, you know I’m going to hold it against you, yeah?  If they’re dead or disappeared?  That’ll be on you.”

“I know,” Gordon said.  He suddenly looked very tired.

“What do you need?”

“Clothes,” I said.  “Clean-ish.  We’re wearing orphanage clothes.  We need orphan clothes, instead.  So we don’t stand out if we happen to be looking around.”

“We don’t have many girl clothes,” Craig said.  “Room under the stairs was where Sam changed when she came over.  Might have something.  Come on down, I’ll get some of my stuff so you can wear it.  Might smell a bit.”

“We’ll live,” Gordon said.

Jamie was in the kitchen with Daisy, grilling her while he sketched.  She wasn’t making him pay for the information, which was a little out of sync with the lessons I’d taught her.  I’d used her on a previous job, way back in the day, because she’d been small enough to go unnoticed.  She’d proven good at listening to the drone of gossip here and there, picking out the important details from the noise, and I’d had her hone those talents.  Whatever she wound up doing, and the shims weren’t a part of Radham that brimmed with opportunity, knowing what was going on and what information other people might be willing to pay for was a skill she could carry with her.

I’d worked with others that weren’t here now.  I’d worked with Thom, but not in a specific capacity.

“Under the stairs?” Lillian clarified.  The area in question was adjacent to the kitchen.

“Yeah.  That’s the girl’s room,” Craig said, waving his hand to indicate the general direction.

I glanced over, and noted that the ‘girl’s room’ wasn’t a room so much as a closet, and that might have been generous.  A pole had been nailed into the doorway to the space, and a curtain hung from it.  Lillian and Helen entered, while Mary joined me in watching Jamie’s sketching.

He was doing it in very loose, broad sketches.  General shape.  Man in a lab coat, drawn in about five loose sweeps of the pen, basic geometric shapes.  When Daisy said the man had been taller and narrower, the hair different, sweeping back, Jamie started anew, elsewhere on the page.  Once that was set, he moved on to details.

He still wasn’t an artist, but there was a process at work.  One that relied on his ability to recreate that which he’d done before, making steady adjustments.

“I only saw him from far away,” Daisy said.  “That’s more or less it?  My head plays tricks on me.  I imagine him as more devilish than I know he was.”

“Memory is a funny thing like that,” Jamie said.  “Tell me about the woman?”

“Women,” Daisy said.

“Women,” Jamie said.

I would have thought that women would get the attention of the other boys in the house, but they were clustered in the kitchen, talking nonchalantly.  It made me think that something was up.  I watched them, trying to figure out what they were doing, until Gordon interrupted, hucking balled-up clothes at me.  I took the first, heaviest ball right in the stomach, then caught the rest out of the air.

I took a step to the right, so some of the boys in the kitchen blocked Mary’s view of me, unclipped my suspenders, and switched shorts in roughly two seconds flat.  I pulled off my shirt, stepping back into view.

“I like how you stepped out of view of me, but you didn’t for Daisy,” Mary observed.  “I see how things are.”

“Do you?” I asked, smiling.

“What I see,” Gordon commented, “Is the skinniest little bastard.  Half of the people in this house don’t even eat regularly, and they’ve got more meat on their bones than you do, Sly.”

I offered him an obscene gesture, pulling on the dark gray sleeveless shirt.  In a proper outfit, it would have been an undershirt at best.  For the here and now, it worked for casual wear in the poorer end of town.  Shorts, shirt, no shoes.

“Jamie,” Gordon said.  But he threw -not tossed but threw– the clothes at me instead.  I caught them, took them over to Jamie, and draped them over his back, as he hunched over his book.

“I’ll change when the girls are through,” Jamie said.

“Shy?” Craig asked, tone just a little mean and mocking.

“Yeah,” Jamie said, softly.  “Shy.”

Gordon might’ve said or done something, because Craig replied, “Fair.”

Helen and Lillian emerged.  Both were wearing bag dresses.  Bottom of the barrel clothing, perhaps in even a literal sense.  When parents were counting every bit of money that came their way, some used the bags that oats or crops came in to put clothes together.  Some of the farmers had caught on, and had taken to printing the dresses in simple patterns.

Helen was, I suspected, going to stand out no matter what she did.  She wore a slightly washed-out dress in a purple floral pattern, and was licking her hands and fingers, running them through her hair.  Lillian’s dress was much the same, but checked in white and green, and considerably more washed out, and she wore her socks to the knee, while Helen’s feet were bare in her shoes.

“I’ll be right back,” Mary said.

“My bag?” Lillian was asking.

“Leave it,” Gordon said.

“But if I need the stuff-”

“A full bag is the sort of thing that people are going to want to take.  Leave it.  Take only the essentials,” Gordon instructed.

The boys in the kitchen were acting different again.  It dawned on me why.  They were very casually leaning over, looking-  I crossed the room, moving to their side, and saw that the curtain, due to the poorly-positioned and bent nails at one end of the rod, didn’t cover the entire gap.

I saw Mary in profile, undressing, felt a shock that was the opposite of unpleasant, momentarily paralyzing me.  A knife’s blade dangling at her bare shoulder glinted, breaking the spell.

I felt annoyance and anger at the boys.  Very casually, I crossed the room, leaned by the doorframe, and pulled the curtain shut.

Lillian was arguing about the bag with Gordon, and Helen was draped over the clothes that I’d draped over Jamie’s back, chin on his shoulders, watching him draw.

Sure that nobody would see and that heads wouldn’t roll, I met the eyes of the glaring boys and glared back, drawing my finger across my throat.

They found other places to be, scattering, some moving back upstairs.

“Thanks for closing the curtain,” Mary murmured, through the curtain, her mouth not far from my ear.

“You could’ve moved, or done it yourself.”

“Thanks anyway,” she said.  I could hear rustling.  “You looked.  I saw.”

“Uh huh.  Sorry.”

“Boys will be curious,” she said, voice light and casual.  “It’s nice to know I’m worth being curious about.”

“Ha ha,” I said.  “I was curious about the knives, that’s all.  You hide them so well.”

“That’s all?  Good.  Then come in, help me.”

“Uh,” I said.  My brain missed a stair, thudding heavily at the next one down.

“Uh,” she said, echoing me, mocking.

“Helen and Lillian usually help you with that,” I said.  “If you need help at all.”

She poked her head out to my right, holding the curtain tight, looked around the room.  “Helen and Lillian are busy.”

Her hand gripped my collar.  She hauled me into the little space, then hauled me a half-foot to one side, so my back was to the gap in the curtain.  “There.”

She was in her underclothes, a camisole and knickers.  She’d removed the ribbon from her hair, and it hung loose around her shoulders.  The space was small enough I didn’t know where to look.

She turned her back to me, hands over her nearly-bare shoulders.  “Here.  Hold it.”

She held out wire.  There were twists of metal at the ends.  I took the wire from her, which was hard, given how fine it was.

“Up,” she said, holding the dress up in front of her.  “Down a little.”

I adjusted as she required.  It was a necklace, of sorts, the pendant a throwing knife, pointing straight down toward her belly button.

“Can you connect the wires without moving it up or down?” she asked.

I did.

“You’re better than Helen, and she’s done this a dozen times,” Mary said.

I was silent, watching as she pulled out more.  There were ribbons and wires, straps and belts.  I realized the band of her knickers was solid, more a belt than anything.  I held her dress against her body as she judged the best possible length for the wires that connected to the belt.

“If it had been just Helen in here, I don’t think you would’ve looked,” Mary said.  “You have that mortal fear of her.”

“Healthy fear,” I said.

“He finally talks!” she said.  Mary sounded merry.  She was damn well enjoying herself, putting me in this situation.

“And if it was just Lillian, you would’ve teased her.  Said something or done something, to get a rise out of her.  Then you would’ve protected her, holding the curtain closed like you did for me.”

“She’s fun to tease.”

“She likes being teased,” Mary said.  She turned around, stepping closer, “Look over my shoulder.  I want the ribbon to run along the same line the collar does.”

I did.  She had the ribbon held out, and I saw what she meant.  A series of blades hung between her shoulderblades.  I adjusted the slack.  She held out another pair of ribbons, to draw out an ‘x’, pinning the blades in place.

“Lil likes being teased?”

“And you tease her,” Mary said.  Her breath was hot against my shoulder.  “But me?  You don’t dread me.  You don’t tease me.”

“You fall somewhere in the middle?” I said, making it a question.

She made a sound I couldn’t figure out.  Something of a ‘phooey’ and a raspberry mixed together.  She turned her back, picking through the knives and ribbons.

“If I had to put it into words, I respect you,” I said.  “There isn’t another one of the Lambs I’d rather avoid going up against, one-on-one.”

She was silent.  Then she slipped a ribbon through the armhole of the camisole, holding it diagonally against her back.  She paused, and I took her signal to mean I should reach out and hold it in place.  She turned her head, and I saw that she was smiling, eyes downcast.

She worked on tying the ribbon, then did another diagonally, the other way, with my help.  She set the knives in place, then looped threads around the blades to keep them at the right angle.

Not a single sheath.  Only blades, twenty-two by my count, close to skin.

She bent down, moving easily despite the close proximity to razor edges, skin brushing against the blades.  She picked up one of Sam’s dresses.  A washed out red, and pulled it on.  I helped tug it into place, so the cheap fabric wouldn’t drag against any knifepoints.  Without being asked, I did up the buttons at the back.  Mary took the time to do up her hair in a loose, wild ponytail, wavy brown hair lasso’ed with a strip of lace torn from a dress that was already going to rags.

“Did it bother you?  The knives, the blades against skin?  Back when you started, I mean.  Was it something you had to get used to?” I asked.  Mostly to fill the quiet.

“I always liked it,” Mary said.

She had a knife in her hand, and she hadn’t had one a second ago.  She reached out, and I didn’t flinch, as she ran it down the inside of my right arm.

“Sy,” she said, voice very quiet, eyes on the blade, as she moved it ever slower.

“Hm?”

“What’s going on with Gordon?”

“Don’t know if it’s my place to say.”

She adjusted the position of the knife, pricked me, made me jump.

When I met her eyes, they were very close.  Her face was an inch from mine.  She was taller than me.  Her breath touched the bridge of my nose and eyelashes.  She was angry, annoyed.

“He’s going to pieces,” she said, without a trace of that anger in her voice.

“Yeah,” I said.

“How long?” she asked.

How long?

“It can vary.  He might get lucky, they might figure something out-”

“Weeks?  Months?  Years?”  She moved the knife away.  She raised it to the ponytail at the back, working with two ‘s’ shaped bits of wire.

“Not years,” I said.

She nodded, lowering her hands, the knife left where she’d placed it, hidden in her ribbon-tamed mane of hair.

“If you’re looking for the courage to say something to him,” I said.  “Or if you’re wondering what kind of window of opportunity you have, I can’t say for sure, but sooner is better.”

She put her hands on my shoulders, pushing me away.  The space was confined enough that my head hit one of the stairs that slashed up through one upper corner of the little box of a room.  “What?”

“If you want to say you like him.”

“And you were mocking Gordon for being a doof,” she said.

It was my turn to ask, “What?”

“Nevermind.”

“I know you like him.  He’s handsome, he’s fantastic, you go together like peas in a pod.”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” she said.  “I’m saying that at this particular moment in time, Sy?  You’re a bigger doof than Gordon.”

“That is a baldfaced lie.  I’m never a bigger doof than Gordon.”

“What do you think this was, here, Sy?” she said.  “Seriously.  I’m trying to figure out what’s going through your head.”

My voice was soft.  I had a hard time meeting her eyes.  I swallowed hard.  “I think it was you inviting me in, lowering your defenses, and being beautiful and girly in a way that was very ‘Mary’.  It’s- I don’t want to be weird, but every time I see a pretty girl, or have a nice moment with a girl, I’ll compare it to this.  And a lot of the time, I’ll be comparing those things to this and they’ll be worse off for it.”

She started to speak, then stopped.  She frowned at me.

“There’s a lot to be said for you being you, and getting to see a side of you nobody else has.  Mary’s pretty neat, you know,” I said.

She sighed.  “See?  That wasn’t a doof answer.  I was prepared to yell at you, and now I’m not sure what to say.”

“Well, you can start by not saying doof anymore.  It’s annoying.  You doof.”

She poked me.

“You didn’t answer the question,” she said.

“Did too.”

She pricked me again, just the tip of a knife, making me jump and bang my head on the stair a second time.

“Ow,” I said.  “Someone’s going to hear that and wonder.”

“Answer the question.  Why did I bring you in here?” she grilled me, still holding the knife.

“Because you think you like me,” I said.

She moved the knife to my throat, threatening.  “I like you, Sy.”

Only Mary would say as much with a knife to someone’s throat.

“You do.  Some.  And,” I said, “When we’re in danger, Gordon’s the one you turn to.  Gordon’s the one you ask about, the one you leap to the defense of.  He’s your first pick when we’re pairing off.  He’s the one you show interest in.  When Shipman was there, you stepped into the background more.  When she left the picture, earlier today, well, you started wanting to show off to boys.  Even if it meant giving some strange boys a thrill by allowing them a peek, knowing you probably wouldn’t see them again.  Letting Sy in as you’re getting dressed, telling yourself you have confidence and that you’re pretty, which you are.  I don’t think you’re aware, but Gordon’s more important to you than I am.”

“No,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, intense, then again, less intense, “Yes.”

She shifted her grip on the knife, frowning.  I saw her move a little in frustration, not sure where to go or what to do.  I thought she’d storm out.

Instead, she held the knife to my throat again.  “This is supposed to be one of those times where you lie.  You bend the rules and you play unfair and you keep your stupid mouth shut, and you and I fumble our way along and there’s more like more of this and it’s good.”

“If I could’ve, I would,” I told her.  “Really.”

“You should’ve,” she said.

“But we don’t have the luxury of time.  The Lambs won’t be around forever, and within a couple of years, maybe a couple of months, or weeks, or days, or hours, there’ll be one less Lamb.  Then one less, then one less,” I said.  I paused.  I didn’t like saying the words.  “Like I said… the sooner the better.”

Her expression shifted.  Just a bit.  A little bit of fragility.

I wondered, for a moment, if the expiry dates had ever really sunk home for her.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

Her head bowed, her forehead coming to rest against mine.

“Sorry,” I whispered, gain.  I reached out to rub her upper arms, felt knives under fabric, and shifted to her shoulders instead.

She nodded, the movement of her head making mine move in turn.

She stayed like that for several more seconds, then straightened, stepping away, head turning as she rubbed at the corner of one eye.  I watched as her expression changed.  Neutral, safe.  A poker face as good as any I’d seen on her.

“If you’ll excuse me,” she said.

“You’re excused,” I said, smiling a bit.

“We need to catch these ‘ghosts’,” she said.  “Because I damn well want to stab something right now.”

Then she swept the curtain aside and stepped out into the kitchen.

There was jeering.  I heard the ‘thock’ of a knife striking a surface, and most of the jeering stopped.

I drew in a deep breath, then stepped out of the little room.

More jeering.  I didn’t have a knife to fling at them.

Jamie approached, bundle of clothes in his arms.  He paused to lean close as he reached me, to say, “You’re blushing.”

“Am not,” I said.

He stepped inside.  I held the curtain closed as I had with Mary.

“Yeah,” he said.  “You’re not.  I wanted to get a dig in.”

“Too frigging bad,” I told him.

“You okay?” he asked.

I cocked my head to one side.  I mulled over the question for a bit.

“Not sure,” I said.

“We’ll distract you with a good mystery,’ Jamie said.  “How’s that?  Foxhunt.”

I smiled.

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.3

My finger traced a symbol that had been etched into the woodlike growth at one corner of a building.  Two ‘v’ symbols.

Lillian and Mary were looking.

“A death happened here,” Gordon spoke.

I nodded.  “Older cut.  The weather’s worn away the splinters and hard edges.  Not relevant.”

“There are a lot of foxes,” Mary observed.

“Probably Craig’s mice, trying to put the pieces together.  Leave a mark wherever the ghosts were seen or suspected to be active, try to trace their paths or find clues,” I said.  “Jamie?”

“It’s useful, honestly.  I’m drawing up a mental picture.”

“Can you draw up an actual map?” Gordon asked.

“Not while walking.  It’s in my head.  I’ll remember.  I’ll put it down for you guys as soon as I can.”

“Good,” Gordon said.

“If you need a second to stop and try to pull ideas together, let us know,” I said.  “I know how your head works.  I don’t want you so caught up in drawing that mental map with all its symbols that you can’t stop to look at it and get a sense of what it means.”

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “That makes sense.  Whatever you need.”

“Okay,” Jamie said.  He offered me a smile.

We were spread out, walking as a pack, some more off to one side than the others.  Our core was Lillian and Jamie, however, with both me and Mary close by.  Helen was off to one side, swishing her skirt with her hands periodically, walking backward now and again, in her own little world.  Gordon was leading the way, looking alert and wary enough that it was liable to tip off anyone who saw, if they were even watching.

I wasn’t so sure they were.

“Ghosts,” Mary commented, in a way that suggested she was thinking aloud.

“Yeah, someone else named our enemies for us, this time around,” I said.

Mary continued, “Ones that will throw one child off a building to claim another.  They’re elusive, they show up in a black carriage and never where the mice can approach or deal with them.  They disappear, and their victims disappear with them.”

“We’ve been at the Academy for two weeks, waiting for your appointments,” Lillian said.  “I haven’t seen any captured children around, have any of you?”

“No,” Jamie said.  “In twos and threes, sure.  Families?  Sure.  But nothing like they described.”

“If Jamie says no, that’s pretty definitive,” Gordon said.  His voice was low, and he sounded almost distant.  Preoccupied.  He added only a belated, “Okay.”

“Could be going straight to the dungeons,” I remarked.  “Unless, have you been down there, Helen?”

“Yes!  My father is doing some projects for the war.  I was observing.”

“Can you not call him that?” Lillian asked.  “That’s icky.”

“Okay,” Helen said, smiling.  “I didn’t see any children.  But they’re still renovating, and I didn’t have permission to go to the lower floors.”

“Doing nothing to work against the ‘ghost’ idea,” Mary said.  “They’ve up and disappeared.”

I took note of more marks here and there.  Symbols on doorframes of homes and small shops – the sort of small, crummy little bakery that subsisted in the shims, and homes that barely qualified as homes.  A roof over the head and something on the floor to sleep in.  Many, going by the aroma, didn’t have proper washrooms.  The people we saw here and there, far too sparse considering the time of day and the area, all dirty.  Most didn’t seem to care or give a second thought about the rain.

It was the heat that did it.  Putting up a hood was unpleasant, more fabric meant more heat.  Raising an umbrella was too much effort.

Better to get soaked, and let the faint breezes be that much more effective.

None of us had raincoats, and only Jamie had an umbrella.  Jamie and Lillian had bags, but both were carrying very little – Jamie’s oversized notebook, and Lillian’s bare essentials for care.

My eye fell on Jamie’s book.

“Did you get descriptions?  For the women?”

“I did.  Three women have been seen, as far as we can tell.  Each in good shape, attractive, each wearing makeup.”

“Not always a priority for a doctor or a student,” Gordon said.  He was thinking of Shipman, no doubt.

“No,” Jamie said.  “Especially for a group that’s been trawling the shims.  You’d think makeup would make them stand out more.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Do you have a thought?”

“Not really.  Keep going.  We can’t stampede all over you.  I’ll think on it.”

He smiled, “I’m used to being trampled over.  Um.  There’s the man, older, usually seen with the carriage, and then the three women.  One of the women is a blonde, another is a redhead, the third is from the East.”

“Eastern Crown States or over-the-pond East?” Gordon asked.

“Across the western pond,” Jamie said.  “Chinese, Japanese, or something like that.”

“Huh,” Gordon said.

“You don’t see many of those,” I remarked.  “They aren’t usually allowed, given we’re at war with them.”

“I thought about it, and I don’t remember seeing anyone fitting that description around Radham,” Jamie said.

“Is it possible they’re not actual Academy personnel, but an experiment?” Mary asked.

“Very,” Gordon said.

“It’s just the impression I get.  One man, at arm’s length from the rest, sending his creations out to do the dirty work,” Mary said.  “And sometimes men like making pretty women when they’re making their servants.”

“Do they?” Helen asked.  “I had no idea.”

“Shush, you” Mary said, but she smiled.  Helen smiled back.

“That methodology, you’re thinking about Hayle?” I asked.  “How he uses us?”

“I wasn’t, actually,” Mary said.

“It’s a common pattern,” Gordon said.  “It’s in keeping with how the Academy works.  Leadership figure at the center, operating through several arms, each of those branching out into subordinates and then branching out further to the work and creations those subordinates work with.”

I nodded.

“We can’t rule out the Academies as the source of this problem,” Gordon said.  “Much as we might want to.”

Are you saying that because you really believe it, or because of what Craig said, about you being beholden to other interests?  I couldn’t help but wonder.  Much as Gordon hadn’t done or said anything to suggest he was going to betray us or the Academy and run off to go find Fray, I wasn’t sure I trusted him entirely.  More to do with what I didn’t fully grasp about his current psychology than about any actual decisions he was making.

I couldn’t see the moves he was making or thinking about making.  I couldn’t anticipate him.  That left me feeling very unsteady in the Gordon department.  His break with Shipman was perhaps the best move he could’ve made, and went a long way toward restoring my confidence in him.

But even here, with Craig, I couldn’t be sure.  Mary’s action, dragging me into the room under the stairs, it had surprised me, but when I looked at it in perspective, it felt natural and flowed with my understanding of her.  Some of Gordon’s most mundane, everyday actions or word choices didn’t feel natural or flow with my understanding of him, odd as it was to think about.

“If what we know about the ghosts holds up, they won’t show up where we can get at them and outnumber them,” Gordon said.  “We should do what the mice did.  Find perches and observe.”

I nodded.  “If that doesn’t work, we could lay a trap, or we could try baiting them.”

“Trap in what sense?”

“Literal trap.  Deadfall, dig a hole in the ground for the carriage to fall into?”

“That sounds like a pain in the ass,” Gordon said.

“We’ll have Craig’s gang do the heavy lifting,” I said.

He rolled his eyes.

“Do you really think baiting them is a better idea?” I asked.  “Against a complete unknown?”

“No,” he said.  “No, I suppose not.”

“Groups of three?” I asked.  “We know from hearing about what happened to Tom and Sam that they’ll go after pairs.”

He gave me a nod.  “Groups of three.”

“You pick first,” I offered.

“Helen,” he said.

I frowned at him.

“What?”

Assuming each group needs to keep one person who can handle themselves in a fight, that forces my hand.

Had he given me Mary on purpose?

“Nothing,” I said.  “Jamie.”

“Lillian.”

“Mary,” I finally said.  I eyed her, but her face didn’t give anything away.

Gordon gave me a curt nod by way of response.  He turned and pointed at a nearby rooftop.  The four posts at the corner were grown wood, not cut, and the branches reached up.  A tattered cloth fluttered there, bound at all four corners.  There would be shade, cover from the rain, and a little bit of concealment.

“Okay,” I said.  “Jamie, Mary, any preference?”

“There,” Mary said.  She pointed at a small church.  The window was broken and hadn’t been repaired, suggesting it was abandoned.  Stone walls.  It would be cooler, better insulated.

“Sounds good,” Gordon said.

Then he was gone.

A little abrupt.  Too businesslike.

He was someone I could no longer pin down.

We made our way to the church, noting the markings here and there.

On a door, a circle, with three pairs of the ‘closed eyes’ that marked death.  Again, it was old.  Simply a sign of life in the shims.  More for remembrance than anything else, though there were areas marked with innumerable ‘closed eyes’ that were essentially back alley battlefields.  I saw the three crossed lines that formed a six point star, warning of Academy lawmen, and a series of diamonds around a ‘t’ shape, which warned of a monster.  An escaped experiment, very likely.

We reached the church and found it empty.  Dust was thick in the air, the light catching it, and plant life had grown up through floorboards, climbing up the walls.  It was strange to see a church which had Academy materials, but I saw the less-straight, organic patterns, framing some of the windows, reinforcing some of the cracked stone.  From older days, before the Crown had started taking issue with the cross.  It came down to power, as so many things did.

Once-white sheets stained with leaked, fatty tissues and bodily fluids were laid out on pews, of varying ages.  The bodies they covered were emaciated, mummified by the changes in temperature and the elements that had made their way in through broken windows and cracked walls.  In lieu of burial, people had been laid to rest here for the scavengers to gnaw on and the weeds and moss to embrace.

Jamie changed course slightly to fix a cloth, gently lifting up a skeletal head to tuck the corner of the sheet beneath, so it was covered.

“They weren’t buried?” Mary asked.

“This is easier,” I said.  “People do what’s easiest, as a rule.”

“I think it’s more about wanting to put the dead to rest where graverobbers won’t find them and haul them off for a few coins,” Jamie said, briefly laying a hand to rest on the sheet.

“Or both,” I said.

“Or both,” he echoed me.

He wiped his hands on his shorts as he rejoined us.

We ascended stone stairs up to the second floor, and I took a little bit more care with the footing, before deciding the floor was secure.  The floorboards were loose, broad, thick planks with old fashioned square nails at the ends, but the wood was sturdy.  I perched in one window at the north face, my back to the frame, feet on the windowsill, so I had a view of both the interior and the world outside.

Mary took her time setting up a tripline at the top of the stairs.  Once she was done, she sat in much the same position I was, at another window at the west face of the church.  We had a view of each other, but she was so far away I’d have to raise my voice to talk to her.

I wondered if that was residual awkwardness from her talk.  It said a lot that the moment she’d sat down, she had a knife out, turning it over and around in her hands, periodically tossing it into the air and catching it by the handle.

Antsy Mary.

Jamie stood by my window, backpack off and dropping to the floor beside me.

“See them?” he asked.

I nodded.

Under the distant rooftop, Gordon’s group was already waiting and watching.

“Will the pen scratchings bother you?” Jamie asked.

“Nah,” I said.  My eyes roved over the street.  There was a group of stitched standing in an alley by a building.  I wondered if they were expired or waiting for nighttime.  On a hot day like today, the usual faint burned-hair, rotting-flesh smell of a stitched could become a pungent burned-hair, rotting-flesh smell, instead.  It was humid enough that the air carried smells far better than it usually might.

I could remember how Mary smelled, in close proximity to me.  Memory and sense of smell weren’t my strongest traits, yet it stuck with me.

A bit of a tangent of a thought, that.

Jamie settled down beneath me, his head resting against the windowsill, back to the wall.  He had his book out, and was scratching away, drawing a map.

Something big lurked in darker corners between a wall and a building.  A bear without fur, a reptile without scale, it was hard to tell from a distance.  I watched it until it moved out into the street.  I saw locals look at it without reacting with alarm, and took it to be a long-time resident of the shims.

“Are you and Mary okay?” Jamie asked, voice soft.

“We’re fine.”

“Because the way you’re sitting and not talking, it makes me think you’re not quite okay,” Jamie said.

“We’ll adjust.  I’m not worried,” I said.  “She might want some time to think on her own.  You know as well as anyone how hard it can be to think straight when you’re surrounded by the rest of the Lambs.”

“Uh huh,” he said.  His pen scratched away.

“That wasn’t a convincing uh huh, Jamie.”

“That wasn’t a convincing statement, Sy,” he retorted, not looking up from the page.

I frowned down at the top of his head, but his nose was in his book, and he couldn’t see.

“Mary!” I called out, making Jamie jump, “Hey!”

She turned her head slowly, reluctantly, and gave me an annoyed look.

“We’re okay, right?”

She switched her knife to her other hand.

“Uh,” Jamie said.

She threw it.  I didn’t flinch as it sank into the wood about a foot above my head.

“I don’t know what that means!”

“We’re fine, Sy!” she said, in a tone that suggested the opposite.  “Now shush!”

Silence reigned, but for Jamie’s pen scratches and the periodic noise from outside.

I reached up and tried to pull the knife from the windowframe.  When I couldn’t, Jamie sighed, exasperated, and rose from his seat to reach over and haul it free.

“It was the angle,” I said, “That’s why I couldn’t get it.”

“Sure, Sy.”

“It was.  And if I pulled too hard, I’d fall, and-”

“You’d never do something that nice for others without an ulterior motive,” Jamie said.

I stuck my tongue out at him.  He did the same to me, before half-sitting, half-collapsing to the floor at the base of the window.

“You weren’t supposed to mention it, I think,” Jamie mused.  “That there was anything with you and Mary.”

“You asked.”

“Whatever exactly happened, it was between you two, maybe.”

“But you asked,” I said.

“And a gentleman never tells,” Jamie said.

“And there’s nothing to tell.”

Jamie looked up, face turned up so he looked at me upside-down.  He raised an eyebrow, then relaxed it.

“And besides, who would ever call me a gentleman?” I asked.

“Point.”

I watched a few carriages move through the shims.  They didn’t look like an Academy make, and there was nothing particularly special about them to draw my attention.

That would be suspicious unto itself, if we didn’t have the details we did.

A light flashed in my eye.

I looked and saw Mary, angling a blade to reflect light at my eye.

That would get annoying fast.

Before I could do anything, she raised the blade to her lips, shushing me, and then pointed with her free hand.

There was a rat, crawling across the rooftop.  Unlike the usual rat, it was green.  Fur tufted out and back, winding around the tail.  Flowers and weeds were growing out of it, all apparently alive.

A perfect camouflage.

By the angle of Jamie’s head, he was already watching it as it found a hole in the floor and squeezed its way through, a small puff of plant matter flying out as it made its way free.

When I looked back at Mary, she was smiling.  She shifted position, looking outside once more, expression still soft.

She looked lonely, I thought.  That was a thing.

But I was pretty sure we were okay.

“It’s nice, stepping away from the city sometimes,” Jamie said.

“We’re in the city.”

“No, from the city-city.  The machinery and meat of it.”

“I don’t know what this is, if not the meat.”

“The bones, the framework, the husk?” Jamie suggested.  “The dead leaves, fallen from a living tree?”

“Dark way of looking at it,” I said.

“Do you think so?” Jamie asked.  “I don’t.”

“I think you’re weird,” I said.

“And you’re not?”

“You’re being all poetic and garbage.”

“Garbage?”

“Talking about this place and making it out into something it isn’t.”

He leaned his head back, so it rested against the edge of my thigh and the windowsill.  “I spend so much time in the past.  Wallowing in memory.”

“Sure?”

“I like to think about the future.  Extrapolate.  Figure out where we’re going.  And the shims feel like a place we’re going.”

“How’s that?”

“That rat.  A project long forgotten.  How long before the world’s riddled with things like that?  The wars are done, maybe we’re here, maybe we’re not, maybe not in the same way, and all over, there are experiments that have become matter of fact, their creators long forgotten.”

“Huh,” I said.  “Are we among those experiments?”

He made a sound.  A one-note huff of a suppressed laugh.

“Probably not, huh?” I asked.

“Probably not.”

I thought of Mary, and of Gordon, and of Mary and Gordon.  I wasn’t really plotting what I was saying, but the words came out anyway, thoughts spilling out as words, more aimless than my usual.  “Problem with looking too much at the future, is you can get caught up in enjoying or anticipating what’s down the road.  Sometimes you have to live in the now, bring that future to pass.”

I wondered if Mary would.  If she’d reach out to Gordon in time.

“That’s very, very good advice,” Jamie said.  He seemed to take a while to digest it, then said, “I’d ask you if that’s what you talked to Mary about, but I think it should stay between you two.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Definitely.”

Several minutes passed.  I watched another carriage carefully.  Black, this time, but not an Academy carriage.  It could be mistaken for one, if I wasn’t being generous to Craig’s group, but was it really the ghost carriage?

“Sy,” Mary called out.

Was she thinking the same thing?

“Gordon’s trying to get our attention.”

I looked.

Mary was on the roof, arms extended above her head.  She was distant, but she apparently noticed when I turned my head to face her.  She extended an arm out toward the east.  Gordon did the same.

I looked, searching, and in roughly twenty seconds, I saw the real ghost carriage come down the path.  An Academy vehicle, washed free of dust by the rain, with nothing to suggest it was in any state of disrepair, a matching set of horses, covered by drapes to protect them from rain.  Stitched.

“There we are,” I observed.

Jamie stood to go look.  He handed me his book, where he’d scratched out a map.  He touched that map with one finger, moving it as the carriage traveled.

“I thought we’d have to spend a while waiting,” I said.  “Maybe hunt a grass-rat for food?  What the hell are they doing?”

“Don’t know,” Jamie said.

The carriage slowed, then stopped.

Two women got out, wearing labcoats with hoods.  One had long, very straight hair, the Easterner, the other had red hair, curvier than the first.  They started walking, a very leisurely, sure pace.  Moving as if they knew where they were going.

Curious.

The carriage resumed motion, turning at the next corner.

“The carriage always picks them up,” Jamie said.  “Right?”

“Right,” I said.

“If it dropped them off, it’s moving, it’s going to meet up with them again.  Whatever they’re doing, they don’t expect to take long.”

I looked over at Gordon.  I pointed an arm straight out in his direction, then raised my arms above my head, an ‘x’ shape.

His group.  Aggression.  In the simplest terms possible, for our crude language system, he was going after the people.

His right arm went up, confirmation.

I left one arm above my head, then dropped it, letting it swing pendulum style.

My group.  Ground, moving.

He raised his arm again, confirming.

We had our tasks.

Mary had joined Jamie and I.

I’d hoped to have her in Gordon’s group, to give her opportunity.  Gordon had been oblivious.  I was very aware of her, and thoughts of her as she’d been in that room danced through my head, making even the fact that she was standing near me that much more interesting and exciting.

“We’re after the coach, he’s after the two on foot,” I said.  “We need to stay together.”

“I’m going to slow you guys down,” Jamie said.

“Well, you’re not staying behind,” I told him.  “Not with that story Craig told about that one kid disappearing when they were searching for the first one.”

“Len,” Jamie supplied.  “Bert.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Get your book,” Mary said.  “Sy, help me.”

I frowned, “With?”

She stomped on the floor.  A floorboard rattled.

By the time Jamie had his book in his backpack, which wasn’t long at all, Mary and I had torn up a lone floorboard.  It stretched twelve or so feet, and was less than a foot thick.  We slid it out the window, to the nearest building.  Mary tested it, wobbling it.

Jamie looked a little wary at that.

“I’ll hold it,” Mary said.  “Sy, you go.”

I stepped up to the windowsill.

“I’ll take the bag,” I said, reaching for Jamie’s book.  “I weigh less, and I trust my balance more.”

He handed me the bag, but his expression was clouded with doubt.  “Why do it like this?”

“If we go down, on foot and try to navigate around buildings, we’ll lose too much time,” Mary said.

Her reasoning continued as I ran down the length of the plank.  I hooked the bag over a chimney and held the other end firm.

I could only barely hear what Mary was saying to Jamie.  “-follow Sy and-”

He moved at a crouch, more a shuffle than a run, but it wasn’t as slow as I’d anticipated.  Mary was as fast as I was.

As a pair, while Jamie held onto us to keep us from sliding down the shallow slope of the roof, we hauled the plank up, propping it up to the next building.  We had to place it at an incline, leading up to a higher vantage point.  One slip, we’d fall, bounce off the roof, and hit the road.

We flipped it dry side up before I went.  I went up first, bare feet on wood, quick, and grabbed the edge of the roof.  I hauled myself over the lip.  Flat-topped roof.

I looked and noted the location of the carriage.  Another look marked the location of the two women.  Gordon, Lillian, and Helen were traveling over rooftops, too.

There were benefits to the dense urban geography and the narrow roads of the shims.

I gave Jamie a hand as he followed.  The two of us reached down, each devoting one hand to holding the plank steady while the other hand reached for her hands.  We clasped her fingers and lifted her up.

From then on, it was smoother sailing.  Buildings with grown exteriors, branches extending out, some hewn short, others left like leafless trees.  Handholds.  We tracked the cart.

There was a trick at work here.  An experiment, something less natural.  Academy work.

We hadn’t done anything at this point that Craig’s mice couldn’t do.

Yet we made our way along rooftops, taking shortcuts, tracking the carriage.  We kept the location of the women in mind, noting their presence every time intervening buildings blocked our view, giving Gordon’s group direction to point the way to the women when we could.

The carriage, apparently no longer intent on a rendezvous with the women, pulled away.

“Checkpoint,” Jamie huffed.

“What?”

“That way would be one of the checkpoints.  Search and investigation by Academy tools, armed guards.”

“They’re going back empty handed?” I asked.

“Must be,” Jamie said.  “The carriage only stopped once.”

“Two carriages?” Mary asked.

I frowned.  I didn’t see a second.

Gordon had stopped, he was signaling.

A question.

I turned and looked, tracking the last known location of the women.

One woman.  The Eastern one.  Between the time they’d stepped behind an obstacle and now, one of the two had become a ghost.

Mary was drawing a weapon.

I drew the blade she’d thrown at me.

Gordon’s group seemed to get the message.  Gordon hopped down from the rooftop, out of view, Helen and Lillian following, in that order.

The problem with hunting predators, was that the tables could so easily turn.

We moved, running along wet, loose shingles, weapons in hand.

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.4

The weather was hot enough that the air shimmered in the distance, heat rising, a light rain falling.  The city was covered by a haze, giving it a dreamlike quality, yet my adrenaline was focusing my senses, making the immediate surroundings extra sharp.  Reality was a dilapidated neighborhood, crowded together, surrounded by walls and a city crowned by tree branches.  The heat shimmer and the movement of the rain made it seem to be growing by the second, yet it never went anywhere.

The carriage was at the checkpoint.  It was stopped, being checked, and it was going to take us several minutes to reach it, even while we used every shortcut at our disposal.

That said nothing of Jamie slowing us down, and the fact that we had to watch our backs.

A whistle, distant.  Gordon.

Warning?  Drawing attention?

I leaped up to a rooftop, grabbing the gutter for a handhold, then climbing the rest of the way up.  I was glad my feet were bare – they offered more traction on the shingles of the roof than any shoes would.  While I was turned around, reaching for Jamie’s hand, one foot already braced against the little chimney, I studied the surroundings.

Further back, down the road, the Eastern woman had been alone, her companion branching off, very possibly flanking us or hunting for other prey.  If I followed the path she was taking to its logical conclusion, she wasn’t there.  I couldn’t see her anywhere.

Two in the wind, now.

I caught Jamie’s hand, hauling him up as he half-climbed, half-ran up the side of the building.  I made sure he was secure before standing and stepping away.

Mary was quick to follow, faster to climb than I was.  Her new clothes were already stuck to her, and a loose strand zig-zagged across her face, between her brows and down a bit of her nose, to reach the other side of her face, plastered there by moisture.

“They’re gone,” I said.  “Could be anywhere.”

She gave me a curt nod.

We ran, with me taking the lead.  My feet slipped on some wooden shingles, but I caught myself, legs moving as if I were running at double the speed, the knife in my hand stabbing at a gap between shingles to give me the necessary hold and traction.  I had to twist the knife to get it free.  I ascended to the peak of the roof, ran along the spine of it, and leaped onto a branch that jutted out the side of one building and used it to cross the street, leaping onto a balcony.  The bag with Jamie’s book banged against my tailbone as I landed, feet skidding on a puddle, making me land on my ass.

Jamie was already running, leaping.  I scrambled to get my feet under me so I could catch him if he missed.

He missed.  I ended up catching him by the shirt-front, gripping it so it pulled tight against his body.

“Thank you,” he breathed, as he took hold of the railing and got a foothold.  “Mary said to copy what you did.”

“You’re not me,” I said.

“I know,” he said.  “But it’s a way to do things, worth trying out.  Sort of works.”

“Except you don’t know why I’m doing things.  If you step on a patch that’s wet or muddy because I just stepped in it?”

“Right.  Drawbacks.  But it sort of works.”

Copying me to the point that he was actually almost effective?  That he could actually do that…

I shook my head, parting from Jamie.

We started to make our way over the balconies, hurdling railings, me occasionally stepping on them, an up-down movement that made my legs burn: up to the railing with one leap of a stride, down to the middle of the balcony with my other foot, up to the far end of the balcony.  It was only doable because the balconies were so close to one another that they might as well have been attached.

I kept my eyes on the carriage, still at the checkpoint, still being searched and questioned.

“Mary!” I called out.

“What?” she called out.  She was only a short distance behind Jamie, who was a longer distance behind me.

“How close do you need to be to throw a knife?”

“At the carriage!?”

“Yeah!”

There was a pause.

“That house with the branches,” she said.

It was that far.  A few rooftops down.

“To be accurate?” I called out.

Another brief pause.

“Green roof with red moss!”

I saw it.  Further along.  Ten rooftops to cross.  Halfway between here and there.  No slips or delays allowed.

I would have crossed my fingers, willing the carriage to stay put, but I needed those fingers to ensure I had a grip as I hurdled gaps between buildings.

“Throw?” Jamie managed.

“We won’t get there in time.  A knife might!” I called out.

We approached the house with the branches.  It stood out because wood had been used to grow the exterior, with four treelike growths at the four corners of the building, but the branches had been left to grow long and tall, a mess and a tangle that limited the view beyond.  I noted a surprise clothesline I hadn’t seen from a distance, no clothes on it.  I searched for details, clues that might inform my imminent jump and landing, my race beneath that strange canopy, and the leap to the building beyond.

In the midst of that search, I saw motion.

Red hair.

I was in the exact wrong position, moving too fast and already too close to the edge to actually stop.  It made for a dozen conflicting thoughts and priorities in the span of a second.  Warn the others and where was my knife and can I fight her and is it really one of the ghosts and what do I say and what do I do!?

Warn the others.  My hands went out to the sides, fingers spread, palms facing the others.  I said the first words that came to mind.

“Oh no!”

I leaped.

I had the knife Mary had thrown at me in hand, already badly battered for my use of it in climbing.  Reminding myself of it, making sure I had a grip, it took attention away from my landing.  I stumbled.

The red-haired woman in a gray lab coat was blocking my way, standing at the edge of the roof.

Fast.  To get here from there?  They’d been behind us.

She had an empty, cold look in her eyes that essentially confirmed that she wasn’t human.  An experiment, or a modified person.  She didn’t blink at the water that ran down her face, beneath the hood of her coat.

“Who are you!?” I called out.

In answer, she stepped back, over the edge.  She dropped out of sight.

One of Mary’s throwing knives hit one of the branches that was still swinging from brushing against the red-haired woman.

Fast, fearless, and knows what she’s doing.

I picked up speed, pushing myself, my legs screaming for me to stop, reached the edge where she’d just been standing, and leaped to the next building, as if she’d never stood in my way.

Mid-leap, I looked down.

No balconies to drop down to, no apparent holds, no hiding spots.  The flat side of a building, a two-floor drop to the road, and nothing to take cover behind for ten feet in any direction.

I landed, and the twist of my head as I’d looked down and over skewed my body to one side.  I dropped onto a slanted roof, and spun out, dropping to all fours, almost belly-flopping in my attempt to get some traction on the wet shingles.

I found the right orientation and clawed my way forward.  I didn’t make any headway for a full two seconds as momentum and my downward slide won out over traction and hurried movements.  Then I had traction, and I bolted.  Jamie landed to my left, hitting the crest of the roof, feet and hands planted on either side.

He fell behind, which was probably a mix of intent on his part, letting me lead the way, and just him being a little slower as a rule.

I was impressed that he was keeping up this well, as it was.

Another rooftop, then another.

I saw the red-haired woman on the far side of the street.  She’d been running, and she was slowing to a walk.  She didn’t pant for breath, she didn’t say or do anything.  She only watched, her head turning to take us in as we made our way forward.

As we passed her, she picked up speed again.  A light jog, then a sprint, then a faster movement, her coat flapping behind her.  Pulling ahead, moving to cut us off.

She crossed the street, drawing nearer to us.  The perspective of the building we were running over blocked our view of her.

I made the next leap, watching.  With the space in between buildings, I should have had a glimpse of her as she ran alongside us.

She was already gone.

Camouflage?

No way was there anything that accurate or effective in modern science.

“Sy,” Jamie called out, huffing for breath.

I could see.

The women weren’t our focus.  The carriage was.

It was starting to move, haltingly as it had to navigate past bystanders and a carriage in the immediate vicinity.  Not far away at all, a hundred feet, but there was no way we’d get down from the roof to the street, across to the cart and past the checkpoint before it pulled away.

We were close to the house with the green shingles and what I’d taken for red moss, actually an algae now that I was close enough to see.  It grew on the rooftop and gave an appearance very similar to raw, open wounds.

“Mary!” I called out.  “Throw!  Doesn’t matter if you hit, just throw!”

I heard the short, whip-like noise as she whipped the first of the knives out and over.

I leaped over to the house with the green shingles, glad that the algae offered more traction rather than less.  I collapsed, no longer running.  There was no point.

A hail Mary, I thought, joking with myself.

Not the kind of joke that was worth getting in the habit of saying, considering the Academy’s relationship with religion.  Young children among the hoity-toity got lectures for saying ‘oh Jesus’, much as adults lost friends or jobs for mentioning religion.  At best, it was a lower class thing to say, only the peons dwelt on such things, as Mauer’s followers had.  At worst, it could offend someone with ties to the Academy.

The weapon flew through the air.  Mary was already throwing more from the rooftop behind us.  She had the threads out, and was spinning the knives in whirling circles before casting them out sending them more up and skyward than over.

Her aim was better than I’d thought.  I had weighed the odds, and considered a civilian with a knife in their shoulder or head to be worth it, but Mary was better than that.  The first two knives didn’t veer far off course, and they didn’t hit anyone.  Crates, boxes, and the side of one cart, striking violently enough to interrupt conversations and turn heads.

The third hit one of the larger monsters that were serving as guards, just a little past the front of the carriage.  Solidly built, with a bulging, translucent forehead and reptilian cast to its horned skin, it was nonetheless humanoid.  I could hear it roar, see it react with pain.  It lurched forward, lashing out, and shouldered its way into the horses at the front of the carriage, and the ensuing movement and chaos made one side of the vehicle rise up.  Forward movement arrested.

We were going to have to apologize to people.

Mary grunted softly as she hopped over to the rooftop I was on.  She walked past me, picking her way past one arm I had outstretched to grip the cusp of the roof, a thread and knife spinning within a few inches of my head.

“Kill?” She asked.  She had a cold, dead look in her eyes, as she stared into the distance, focused on her quarry.

I wanted to say yes.

But we didn’t know for sure if they were Academy or not, and murdering someone who was in good standing with witnesses watching could get us in trouble.

“Wound,” I said.

She made a face, then released the string.

The knife flew skyward.

“You ask a lot,” she said.

“I’m a jerk like that,” I said.  “And I know you’re capable.”

Jamie stopped panting long enough to whistle, “Is it too soon to say nice throwing?”

“No,” she said.  “Unless he moves.”

The man driving the carriage twisted, shouting something to people behind him.

But his legs were where they were.  The knife came down, seemingly right on top of him, and he screamed, doubling over.

“Hit?”

“Thigh,” she said.  She sounded oddly detached from things.  No joking, no follow up comments.  Like a stitched might sound.

My mind was switching gears, thinking about the social dynamics, the challenge of dealing with a crowd of people with guns, now at high alert, convincing them to give us the man in the carriage.

It was complicated because a part of me was stuck interpreting Mary, trying to read her.  She was stuck in my head, for the time being, persistently, stubbornly occupying a portion of the mental real-estate.

“We should go, before he gets away,” I said.

The group of soldiers was busy trying to get a wounded, angry monster under control, simultaneously trying to locate the threat.

Some were pointing at us.  They had weapons in hand.  Rifles.

Reluctantly, my legs protesting, still a bit short of breath, I stood up.  I was careful to move slower to avoid posing any threat.

I sheathed my knife in my belt, slid down the roof, searching below for any sign of the red-haired woman before I let myself fall.  I dropped down to the street, raising my hands the moment I was able.   Mary was the next down, and I lowered my hands enough to help catch Jamie as he dropped down, before passing him his bag with the book.  We walked as fast as we were able, hands raised.

The soldiers weren’t pointing the guns at us, at least.

The carriage was still there.  Once we were in earshot, I’d have to give them a warning.  Make something up?  I could tell them a portion of the truth, show them my badge.  If it didn’t convince them to arrest the man, it could make them keep the man, his carriage and us in custody until a higher-up could arrive.

With that arrival, we’d have answers.

But things couldn’t be that simple.

The red-haired woman stepped out of a space between buildings, eyes fixed on us.  She stopped, back to the men with the rifles, her full attention on us.

Her eyes looked feral.  She was curved and flawless in a way that made me think she was crafted rather than born.  With her hood down, her hair was getting wet.  She’d cast off her coat with the hood at some point, no longer wearing it.

Definitely not a proper human being, yet something about her seemed familiar.

Blocking our way.

“Who are you?” I tried again.

No answer.  She backed away a step, then another, eyes still fixed on us.

“Wound?” Mary asked, from beside me.

I signaled with a gesture rather than speak.

Mary threw out an arm.  A knife soared through the air, straight as an arrow, aimed at the heart.  The knife’s target stepped to one side, pulling one shoulder back and away to let the knife fly past her.  It hit the road a distance in front of the men with the rifles, skittering, spinning, before coming to a stop.

They recognized it, and one shouted, “Hey!  You!”

Mary tried again, not caring about the rifles.

Another dodge, to the point that it looked easy.

Enhanced reflexes?

This ghost was untouchable, it seemed.

We were drawing closer, though.  I wasn’t sure what that meant.    Twenty feet away, then sixteen, then twelve-  the red-haired woman was retreating without running.  She was a short distance from the men with rifles, enough that Mary was reluctant to throw.

“Behind us,” Jamie said.

I half-turned to look.

Not just fast, but strong.

The Easterner was directly behind us, approaching at a brisk walk.  She had a small child in her arms.  A grubby child, no older than six, or perhaps a malnourished eight, a girl.  The girl was unconscious or dead.  Again, the woman wasn’t wearing her lab coat.  Only a simple black dress.

And way, way, down the street, almost beyond my ability to make them out, I could see the others, giving chase, trying to catch up.

Turning my attention forward, I could see the man at the carriage, turning to stare at us, his expression flat.  He had longer hair and a widow’s peak, his beard cut so there was no hair on his cheeks, round specs on his nose, and a doctor’s lab coat draped over him.

He was pulling ahead, moving.  He’d been given permission to go.

“Hold!” I called out to the riflemen.  “That carriage!”

The red-haired woman bolted, turning a hard right and sprinting for an alleyway.

I twisted to look, saw the Eastern woman doing the same.  They’d moved in the same instant, and she moved just as fast with her burden in her arms.

We moved to give chase, Mary drawing her knife-

-and stopped altogether as one of the men at the waypoint fired their gun.  Aiming it into the air.

We came to rest, watching as the ghosts disappeared from view, the carriage moving further down the street, beyond our reach.

“The carriage-” I started, raising my voice.

Another rifle shot.

I scowled, falling silent.

The men with guns approached, and we waited patiently as they drew near, hands raised.

One day, we’re going to invent a better brain.  Then we’re going to put that superior brain in everyone’s heads, and stupid things like this aren’t going to happen, I thought.

I considered it for a moment, then amended the thought to add, as much.

Bayonet blades and rifle-nozzles prodded us as they drew close.

“Don’t suppose you could send someone after that carriage?” I asked.

“Shut up,” a soldier said.

“Or tell us who was in the carriage?”

“Shut up!” he said.

I sighed.

We were searched, and Mary relieved of the blades they could find.  When they realized they had to reach under her clothes to get at her knives, they opted to bind her hands behind her back instead.  They did the same for me, rough, and were working on Jamie when Gordon’s group caught up with us.

“It’s okay!” Gordon called out.  He had his badge out and was holding it up.

They’d already found mine in the pocket of my shorts while patting me down.  It was sort of irritating that they actually gave Gordon’s a proper look.

“Hunting enemies of the Crown,” Gordon said.  “You can reach out to Professor Hayle at the Tower if you need to confirm our identities.”

“You attacked us,” the soldier said.

Gordon gave me a look.

“We had to stop the carriage at all costs,” I said.  “All costs.”

“And my aim is good enough that I wasn’t going to hit anyone important,” Mary said.

“Uh huh,” the soldier said, in a way that suggested Mary’s statement hadn’t helped our case.

All of us were panting, except for Helen, and all of us were sweaty and dirty.  My hands were bleeding in places from the scrabbling, violent climbing and running on rooftops.  I had a skinned knee.  Jamie and Mary weren’t much better off.

“The carriage,” I said.  “Who did they tell you they were?”

“We didn’t question him,” the man said.

“Isn’t that your job?  To question and search?”  Gordon asked.

A little too accusatory.  It didn’t go over well with the soldier.  Tensions and frustrations were already high between our two groups.

“Shift change.  We got updates and debrief on recent goings-on from the last shift, which pretty much is jack shit all and gossip.  Last shift processed the carriage.  It looked like he had papers.”

I panted, eyes roving aimlessly, searching for clues or cues that I could use to formulate a better question, squeeze an answer out of the soldier.

“Have you seen the cart before?” I asked.

“In passing,” he said.

I could have stabbed him for being so unhelpful.

“The women,” Jamie said, voice soft.  “The red-haired one and the Japanese woman with the child?  Have you seen them before?”

“Sure,” the man said.

“Sure?” I asked.  “Could you be more specific?”

“I wouldn’t brook that tone,” he said, now hostile.  “I’m not sure I trust any of you, yet.”

“Please,” Helen said, stepping forward.  “Children might be dying.  Friends of ours.”

Helen knew how to provoke reactions, to play the social game or change the tenor of the conversation.  She put the soldier on his back foot with one deft verbal thrust and a little bit of emotion injected into her words.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” the man said, “And I don’t like not knowing what’s going on, considering it’s a part of my duties here.  Perhaps you should have your turn at doing some explaining.”

I felt the urge to stab him again.

“Someone may be posing as a member of the Academy, using experiments to find and kidnap children from the shims,” Gordon said.  “The man in that carriage is one.  The two women you saw are two more.  There’s also a blonde woman.  They’re attractive enough to draw attention.  Surely you’ve noticed them before?”

“From a distance,” the soldier said, relenting a little.  “Usually during night shifts.”

Gordon pressed, “And the carriage?  When you say you see it in passing, does that mean it usually passes through just before your shift begins?”

“I suppose,” the soldier said.

“Does the time you start your shift change, or is it set?”

“It changes.  You’re implying some conspiracy here?”

Gordon nodded.  “If they have a pattern of passing through when you’re busy and preoccupied, that says they know a dangerous amount of how the Academy and our military is operating.”

Now we had the soldier’s attention.

And now that we had it, my attention was on the people in the background.  The captain’s subordinates.

They looked uncomfortable.

“Speak up,” I cut in.

The captain gave me an offended look, shifting to a hostile state in a flash.

“You,” I said, pointing at one man in the crowd.  “Say what you’re thinking.”

“Excuse me?” the captain asked, on behalf of his soldier.

“I’m not thinking anything,” the man said.

“Your eyes slid to one side as you said that,” I said, “That’s a sign of evasiveness.  You’re lying.”

An utter lie.  His eyes hadn’t moved at all.  But now he was thinking about his eyes and not his words.  More pressure, on top of the attention of his captain and the rest of the squad.

“Your buddies here are looking at you, your captain is looking, you know something and you’re not saying it,” I said.  “Why?”

“I’m not thinking anything,” he said, with even less sincerity than before.

“Your gaze moved again,” I said.

“It didn’t!”

“James,” the captain said.  “What’s this about?”

“It’s not- it’s…”

“Do we need to go to the barracks and bring others into this?” the captain asked.  Now he was on my side.

“I- no.  No sir.  It’s just… the women.”

“What about the women?”

“I’ve seen them before.”

“Did they have kids with them?” Jamie asked.

“Sure, but that’s not so strange, is it?  Given that it’s the shims?  Even when women work?”

“Work?  You mean prostitutes?” Gordon cut in.

The man startled.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “That almost makes sense.”

The captain gave him a curious look.

“They’re weapons.  Evasive ones.  They’re aware of their surroundings to the point that they can avoid trouble and isolate targets, they pass as either employees of the Academy or as prostitutes, to slip past our defenses, whichever works.  Individuals you don’t question, ones that can distract, or ones that you’re afraid to pay too much attention to, depending on who your commanding officer is.  Probably different identities for different checkpoints and situations.  Chameleons.”

The captain’s look hardened into one of grave concern.

“I think you should notify people further up the chain,” Gordon said.  “Because this is as serious as it gets.  If they’re capable of doing this, they’re capable of worse, and with a war going on, they might not just have three.  Or they might have these in cities other than Radham.”

“Stay,” the captain ordered.  Then, as an afterthought, he ordered his men, “Watch them.”

We watched as the man broke into a run, heading to the nearest phone or superior officer.

“I’m exhausted,” Jamie said.

There were a few nods.  Lillian was among them.

“It’s rare for me to have a feeling and be unable to pin it down,” Jamie said.  “But does this methodology feel familiar to anyone else?”

My eyes went straight to Mary.  She had a dark look in her eyes.  Before I could speak, she did.

“Yes,” was all she said.

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.5

“The man driving the carriage was Mr. Percy,” Mary said.  “Not exactly him, the hair was a little different, but I recognized him.”

“Appearances can be easily changed,” Hayle mused.  “If anyone would recognize him, it would be you.”

“Yes, professor,” Mary said.

The Lambs were assembled in Hayle’s office.  We were lined up in front of his desk, while the old man sat, arms folded in front of him.  His hair was shorter than it usually was, more neat, and his lab coat was immaculate, without wrinkle or speck.

The Duke’s presence reached even this far, from Claret Hall.

Hayle glanced at me, then back to Mary.  “Mary.  Not to put too fine a point on things, but Sylvester reported to me at the time of your recruitment that you have a command phrase.  If he utters it, you might be a liability?”

A dark look passed over Mary’s expression, not that she’d been bubbles and sunshine a moment before.  “Yes sir.”

“Perhaps it would be best to keep you away from this altogether,” he said.  “You’re collectively overdue for your appointments, which have been sporadic at best while you’ve been away, and I know there are places where we could make use of you, once those are done.”

I wasn’t Hayle’s friend, I didn’t even necessarily like him, but I respected the man.  In this, right here, he was proving he had the right to that respect.  I’d communicated the situation to him, I’d asked him to take Mary on as one of the Lambs, and he’d agreed, after a long evaluation period and some research.

I’d told him the truth.  That Percy had escaped, leaving a note for Mary.  Where she’d been led to think it was a command phrase to turn her into a reckless killing machine, with me doing some of the leading, it had been a genuine goodbye, meant to express to her how fond he was of her.  The command phrase hadn’t existed.

Now the man was back in the picture.  He now knew, presumably, that she was counted among the Lambs.  If those feelings still held true then the man posed more problems than his penchant for cloning alone.

Hayle knew, and he was steering us away.

“There are stirrings of a cult in the Capitol.  If we-”

“No,” Mary said.

Hayle raised his eyebrows.  “Beg pardon?”

“I want to see this through.  Please.  I have to.”

Again, he glanced at me.

I wished he wouldn’t do that.

I parted my lips to speak.

“Why, Mary?” Gordon asked, before the sound had left my mouth.

No, don’t give her a chance to justify her position!

“Because he made me.  He can unmake me, if we let him.  I can’t let someone else handle this and know that if he gets away, I’ll have that hanging over my head forever.  We know now that they’re slippery.  These women are his new clones, with the same idea as before.  Except… less intimate.  Unless there’s a trick we haven’t caught on to, the only way we’re going to catch them is if we bait them.”

“Believe it or not,” Hayle said, “the Academy has invested a lot in this project over the years.  Time, effort, energy, mine above all.  I would rather not have it go to waste by sending Lambs in as bait against a threat we do not totally understand.”

“We understand!” Mary said.  “That’s what we do.  You’ve sent us in against worse, with frequency.  We assess threats, then we devise solutions.  How is this different?”

Well.  That was a problem.  Mary was emotional about this.

I had a horrible sinking feeling in my gut.  Things had shifted to the point where, no matter what path we took, there was either a general sort of awful or a risk of a worse sort of awful.  Hurt feelings and confusion, or danger of white lies being exposed.

“Dog and Catcher can track them down.”

“I’m not disagreeing,” Gordon said, “But Dog and Catcher just came back from the field.  This is their time to rest.  They’ll be fatigued, hurt, distracted, they’re not approaching this fresh.”

“It’s your time to rest,” Hayle said.

Gordon shook his head, “It’s been a while.  We’ve rested.  We’re raring to go.  You can’t deny that this is important.  This is big, if our instincts are right.  I agree with Mary.  I don’t share her reasons, but we can do this.  We should.”

“It is important.  That’s why that I don’t want a possible liability in the field,” Hayle said.

Mary tensed, flinching as if she’d been hit.  Hayle noticed.

More gently, he said, “I respect the work you do, Mary.  It took some convincing on Sylvester’s part for me to bring you on board.  That you’ve worked out as well as you have has been to your credit and Sylvester’s.  I’ve never been quite so glad to have my doubts banished as they were on this.”

“Thank you,” Mary said, relaxing a bit.

I reached out for her hand, to hold it.  She pulled away as if I’d stung her.  She clasped her hands in front of her instead.

Huh?

Hayle continued, oblivious, “That said, there’s a danger, I want to keep you with us, and that means treating this situation with care.  If we acknowledge that the Lambs are the best way to handle the task, we might need to compromise.  I want you to sit this one out.”

Good.

“No,” she said, not an eye’s blink after he’d finished speaking.

Glancing at her, I could see her expression.  Stricken.  Scared?

This was Mary laid bare.  Defenses stripped away.

I knew why, and my heart fell.

Mary is and always has been afraid of being alone.  It’s the fulcrum point I used to leverage her into the Lambs, and right now, right here, she’s isolated.  She’s been reminded of our mortality, that she might lose any of us.  To take her now and make her sit this out, it could drive a wedge in, if she even listened.

She was disconnected, at risk of detaching from the group, breaking ranks or losing faith and friendship.  With our recent interaction, I wasn’t sure I was in a position to bring her back in.  She’d pulled her hand away.

“Sir,” I said, and I hated saying it.

“Sylvester?”

“She should participate.  She knows Percy better than anyone.”

The old man stared over his desk and across his office to give me an unwavering, cold look.  I knew he was weighing odds and considering all the factors.

To trust Sy, or not to trust Sy?

He’d been trying to keep her out of this because of the details I’d shared.  Now I was telling him to do the opposite, and I wasn’t in a position to explain.

“Alright,” he said.  “I’ll let people know what you’re doing.  We have birds going out to other Academies.  We’ll ask for them to keep an eye out for anything that looks like this.”

Jamie spoke up, “If it’s Percy, then it’s very possible that the women will meet the same physical descriptions.  It’s easier to make more of the same than to make individuals.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Hayle said.  “I’m taking you all at your word when you say you can do this.”

I didn’t miss the momentary, pointed look that he gave me, as he said that last bit.  The message was clear.

“Keep me up to date,” he said.  “And check in with your supervising doctors.  Remind them about your appointments.  See if they can make the time.”

We turned to go, exiting Hayle’s office.

The upper portion of the Tower had no stairs.  The hallways sloped, something I’d always considered to be a nuisance.  Stairs could be taken two at a time, going down, while the gentle slope only made walking difficult.

Little white birds had settled on branches that framed the windows, moving and fluttering as we made our way down to the next available floor with a stairwell.

A young woman in a white lab coat hurried past us, head down, clutching books and papers to her chest.  She looked at us, almost stopping, eyes wide, then seemed to change her mind, heading up the hall.

Fear?

I craned my head, looking back, to see if there were any clues.

“What was that about?” Gordon asked.  He was looking, too.

“I’ve seen her before,” Lillian said.”

“Her name is Anne,” Jamie said.  “She works downstairs.”

“Of course you know that,” Gordon said.

“And in the bowels,” Helen said.  “She turns up a lot here and there, because Hayle supervises her.”

I cast another glance upstairs.  With anyone and everyone, I now had to think in terms of Percy’s work.  Whether she was a danger.

But the others were vouching for her, and, everything else in consideration, it didn’t make sense that there would be clones this deep in the Academy.  If things were that bad, we’d already lost.

“She was scared,” I observed.

“Thought it was something like that,” Gordon said.  “Going up, only person she could be going to would be Hayle.”

“She works on the tree structure,” Jamie said.

“Ashton’s old project?” I asked, suddenly spooked.

Jamie nodded, silent.

“I didn’t think that was a project which would have emergencies,” I said.

“It’s not,” Jamie said.

“There was one with me, once,” Helen said, smiling.  “My first time out of the vat.  I was only half as tall as I am now.  I opened my eyes and wanted to give someone a hug.  They shot me.”

“Charming,” I said.

“The tree structure is different.  This would have to be something else,” Gordon said.

Mary remained silent, one hand moving to her side, thumb hooking under the side of her skirt, no doubt to touch one of the knives there.  Reminding herself it was there, being prepared and primed for danger.

Lillian reached out with one hand, touching Mary’s.  Mary flinched, then let Lillian take her hand.

Walking behind her, I could see muscles in Mary’s shoulders relax.

Jamie elbowed me.

I glanced at him.

His expression blank, he didn’t say or do anything else.

I elbowed him back, and he smiled a little.

Then we rounded another corner, and I could see people clustered outside the door of a lab.

Again, the attitude was spooked.  One of them was brushing at his coat with his hands.

In another section of Radham academy, a doctor being very scared about what they had on their coat would have been a reason to start running.  Here, it was only very concerning.

“What’s going on?” Gordon asked them.

“Anne didn’t tell you?” the doctor nearest us asked.

“Tell us what?” Gordon asked.

The echoing tramp of footsteps made the doctors turn, backs straightening.  I connected the dots in the last possible second, not fast enough to do anything about it.

He rounded the corner at the far end of the hall.  As he reached the window, he extended a long arm and rapped the window, startling the birds just outside the window, scattering them to the air.  A smile touched his lips.

He was taller than a man should be, and he was beautiful.  His overall appearance made me think of the face cards of a deck of playing cards.  All of the pieces put together could have and should have made him look inhuman, but they only barely toed the ‘human’ side of the line.  Shoulders and upper chest broad, waist narrow, legs lean, features sharp, with long arms and legs.

His blond hair was parted sharply, the majority of it tumbling down one side of his face and down one shoulder, more extending straight back behind him.  His clothes were as fine as clothes got, with a decorated jacket in black and gold, the tail of it extending behind him, nearly to the ground.

Despite the heavy clothing, he had alabaster skin, without the slightest shine of sweat.  He could have been sixteen or thirty, none of the usual indicators were there, but he carried himself like a sixteen year old might, while logic and what I’d heard of the man told me he was much older.  He loomed, slouching just slightly, as if under the weight of the golden spill of hair and the heavy jacket.

My assessment of him was interrupted somewhat, as I was falling to one knee as soon as he appeared.

“Hm,” he made a sound, amused.  The voice was deep.  Altered, augmented.

I stared only at the ground, kneeling, head down.

Only years of training my poker face kept me from flinching as his fingers touched my head, running slowly and absently through my hair.  It was still damp from my trip over to the Tower, a little tangled.  I felt stabs of pain as very strong fingers tore past one or two snarls.

The hand disappeared.  There was a long pause.

“Stand,” he said.  “Let me get a better look at you.”

As one, we stood, straightening.

It was the eyes that got me.  They were eyes that made me think of countless people we’d gone after and killed.  People who’d been pushed too far, or who’d gone over the edge before we even found them.  A little too much in the way of whites around the edges, they didn’t blink enough.  Tension did it, adrenaline pumping hard and fast through the veins for too long, muscles too tight in the face.  People under a deep, profound, long-term sort of stress and those with mental illnesses often had those eyes.

He didn’t strike me as someone who was under any stress.  His movements were too languid.

“The Lambs,” he said, voice quiet and tender, yet still deep enough to reverberate, nearly musical in tone, “I was looking for you.”

We’ve been actively avoiding you, I thought.

The Duke of Francis was accompanied by four doctors.  All four stood behind him, waiting for instruction.  We were frozen.  There was no talking without being asked to speak.  No moving without permission to go.  From the time he’d been born to now, his world had revolved at his whim.  Only his family members would be able to gainsay him or check his conduct.  As far as I was aware, the next member of the Crown was on the other side of the Crown States.

Long, strong fingers touched the side of my face, stroking me as if I was a pet.

His index finger slid under my chin, then lifted it, turning my face up, not so I could look at him, but so he could look at me.

Wearing the wrong expression could be dangerous.  If I looked like I was frowning or sullen, he might take offense.  If I smiled, he might be pleased with me, which could be worse.

“Hm!” he made that amused noise again.  His hand dropped away from my face.  “Look at you.”

I didn’t know what to do, so I kept my chin at the angle he’d raised it at.

He moved over to Helen.  I watched out of the corner of my eye as he stroked her hair, took the collar of her dress in hand and adjusted it, before bending down to tug at her belt, straightening out wrinkles in the fabric.  He touched her face, running a thumb over her lips.

“Beautiful,” he said.

Helen smiled.

The Duke smiled back.  “Those doctors that accompany me back there, they’re the best at what they do.  They create art.”

He gestured at himself, as if to demonstrate.

“They made me immortal, or close enough to count.  They made me beautiful, strong, and quick.  They made me dangerous enough to dispatch anyone who might seek to take my life.  Yet here you are, and you could pass for a cousin of mine, with the same treatment.”

Helen bowed a little, a coy smile on her face.

My heart pounded in my chest.  The Duke’s thumb pushed its way between Helen’s lips, then lifted one up, making her sneer.  Looking at her teeth, as one might the proverbial gift horse.

I clenched my hand at my side.

“You look like you want to say something,” he said.  “Speak.”

“I was crafted by Professor Ibott, lord,” Helen said, demure.

“Hm!” the Duke made that noise again.  It was probably a tic, or he didn’t realize he was doing it.  Or maybe he didn’t care.  “He’s made noises about wanting to dine with me.  I had a glimpse of him and I soured on the idea.  But seeing the work he does… hm!”

Of course Ibott wanted to secure a spot in the inner circle of the Crown’s elite doctors.  It was the next best thing to being royalty.

To secure him for the Lambs project, Hayle had pricked Ibott’s pride.  Helen might well have been made to prove that Ibott had what it took to earn a place in the inner circle, and now things were coming full circle.

Helen was undoubtedly a pawn that Ibott would sacrifice for the sake of his aspirations.

“I’ve been homesick,” the Duke said, as quiet as he was capable of being, with a voice and lungs modified to give him the ability to effectively address crowds.  “Having you nearby might be like having family close at hand.  You’d be little more than a toy, but wouldn’t that be fun?  You could play at being a noble lady.”

“Yes, lord,” Helen said, smiling.

There was no other answer to give.  The Duke had his own gravity.  Nothing went against it.  He’d grown up in those circumstances, and he’d been shaped by them.

I heard footsteps behind me, but I couldn’t turn to look without turning my back to the Duke.  Anna?

The Duke straightened.  “Professor Hayle.”

“My lord,” Hayle answered.

“I’ve been admiring your Lambs.  This one in particular.  Do you imagine Professor Ibott would let me keep it?”

“He likely would, lord,” Hayle said.

My blood ran cold.

“But I wouldn’t advise it, lord,” Hayle said.

“Why not?”  Vaguely reminiscent of the tone of a toddler who just had a treat snatched away from in front of them.

“She’s a praying mantis, lord.  Professor Ibott could explain.  She draws targets close and then kills them.  Ibott’s work is exemplary, but it would be improper, and there’s the outside chance that it might pose a danger, in strange circumstances.”

“Oh.  I don’t want her for that,” the Duke said, cavalier.  His hand cupped Helen’s face as he stepped past her, his arm extended behind him, as if to keep hold of a prize he wasn’t about to release.  He was moving closer to Hayle, as if challenging.  His tone was jovial, “But just in case, my doctors here will remove the danger and render her harmless.  Knowing what I do about Professor Ibott, he’ll assist in the process, to curry favor.”

“As you wish, lord,” Hayle said.

I watched as Gordon nudged Mary, who was standing behind Helen.

Mary had a knife in hand.

Having a knife in hand this close to the Duke, of all people, could be a death sentence for her and all the rest of us put together.

Casually enough that it wouldn’t draw attention, Mary extended the knife forward, and pressed the point against the back of Helen’s dress.  She pressed with enough force that it penetrated fabric and sank into flesh.  A spot of blood welled around the cut.

Helen didn’t move or jump.

“The Lambs won’t suffer unduly for the loss of one?”

“They’ll be less effective, of course, but no, not unduly, lord,” Hayle said.

I knew it was what he had to say, but I went from thinking the best of him to loathing him in the time it took him to finish the sentence.

Mary twisted the knife.  Helen didn’t budge a hair.

I couldn’t figure out the point or intent behind the action, if Mary had intended a different result or not, but Mary quickly resumed a normal standing position as the Duke moved, turning.

He still cupped Helen’s face.  He looked down at it.

She’d changed her face.  Not so much it was definable, but tension here, relaxation there, a fractional shifting of features, a smaller scale version of what she’d done to emulate Melancholy.

The Duke’s expression was haunting, or perhaps haunted.  Looking at him, I fully believed he saw through the ruse.  That Helen had made herself just a little bit uglier or stranger.  He wasn’t a stupid man.

He let her head drop down to its resting position, from where he’d moved it.

She relaxed her features.

He lifted her chin again.  She added the strange tension, even less than before.

“Perhaps not,” he finally said.  There was a long, tense pause.  “Professor Hayle.”

“My lord?”

“Are the Lambs at my disposal?”

“Always, lord.  They’re preoccupied with a task, but I can reassign them at a moment’s notice.”

“What task are they preoccupied with?” the Duke was all business now, Helen seemingly forgotten.

“A possible cell in the city, lord.  Someone the Lambs are intimately familiar with.  He’s creating augmented women to infiltrate our defenses.  He may be active elsewhere.”

“I haven’t heard of this.”

“I just received the report from the Lambs in my office.  You were the next to know, lord.”

The Duke looked down at Hayle, and I wondered how sharp he was.  He’d lived a lifetime with people dancing around the truth, trying to convince him to do things without outright saying such.  It would make anyone paranoid.  Whether it made him an effective paranoid was up in the air.

He turned, stepping back, studying us, evaluating us.  There was a coldness in those wide eyes, this time.  If he’d liked us before, I didn’t feel like he did anymore.

“Keep them on that task.  Have them finish it sooner than later,” he instructed.  That said, he swept his coat back and turned to leave.

I didn’t miss hearing what he told one of his doctors.  The acoustics in the hallway were too good.  “I want every file on the girl, and a meeting with Professor Ibott before the day’s end.  Verify-”

And then he was around the corner, out of earshot.

A simple fact check could be a devastating weapon.  If Ibott was uncooperative, if anything we said or did or implied was proven to be a lie, the Duke could end us.

A full minute passed before anyone felt safe to move.  The moment the tension was broken, the doctors in the hallway with us disappeared into their office.

“You stabbed my butt,” Helen said.

“I wanted to communicate that this was serious,” Mary said.  “I wasn’t sure how else to do it.  Sometimes you go along with things without thinking them through.  I was worried you would go along with him.”

“I like my butt, and now it’s got a hole in it!”

“Another hole,” I said.

“You’re gross,” Lillian told me, before telling Helen, “That’s fixable.”

“I hope so!”

“On your way,” Hayle said.  “Stay out of his way.  Check in with your doctors.”

We headed down, taking a more leisurely pace, to be sure we didn’t catch up with the Duke and his retinue.

“I like how he knows I have a perfect memory, but he insists on reminding us of things,” Jamie said.  “Also, can we not ever meet that man again?”

“Unavoidable, probably,” Gordon said.

“Nice play, Helen,” I said.

“Thank you very much.”

“We can’t afford to get on his bad side,” Gordon said.

“We already are,” I pointed out.

“All the more reason to wrap this up, neat and tidy,” Gordon said.

“I’m not disagreeing,” I said.

We made our way down several flights, taking the long route around the circumference of the building before we reached the top of the stairwell, leading down the rest of the way.

Once we hit the third floor, we began splitting up.  Each of us to our individual labs and doctors or teams of doctors.

I found my way to the small room where I so often had my appointments.  It doubled as a research area and a storage area for books and records.  Really, all I needed were regular doses of the Wyvern formula.

Huey was there.  A thug of a man, he was scribbling something down.

“Huey,” I said.  His pen scratched on the page as he jolted in surprise.

“Don’t do that,” he said.

“Appointment?”

“No.  Busy.”

“Okay, good,” I said.

I walked away.

Postponed for weeks, with no sign of letting up.  All hands were on deck with the war underway, and our teams were preoccupied with other tasks and responsibilities.

The others would take longer.  Their doctors weren’t as efficient as Huey was.  I went up a floor, instead, and made my way to Anna’s lab.

She was absent, still probably hiding in Hayle’s lab.

The lab was dark and surprisingly cool.  It smelled earthy.

The tree structure was growing at one end of the lab.  Roots stretched across part of the floor, wood stretched up the wall to the ceiling, and branches extended along the wall and ceiling.

I touched the bulge in the center.  It was cold to the touch, but the image it evoked was a warm one, a pregnant woman’s belly, fluid within and within that fluid…

It would have been nice to feel a kick.

A few minutes passed.  I told myself I needed to go down and meet the others.

I stayed where I was.

“I remember,” Jamie said, behind me, “Back in the day, I’d find you sleeping on the floor in here.”

I smiled.

“Do you remember?  I sometimes lose track of how far back other people’s memories normally reach.”

“I wouldn’t forget,” I said, still smiling.  “That tree was dead, back then.”

“Yeah.  It was sad, but it wasn’t…” he said.

He didn’t finish the sentence.

Wasn’t a bad thing?

A minute passed.  I managed to turn away to go.  I reached out for Jamie’s hand before I realized I was doing it, and he took my hand in his, book tucked under his other arm.

“See you, little brother,” I said.

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.6

“Gordon’s taking his time,” Jamie remarked.  “He wasn’t in his lab?”

“No,” Mary said.  One word answer.  Preoccupied.

“Did you see him enter the lab?”  I prodded her.

“Yes.  He left before I finished with Doctor Edith.  The doctors were gone too.”

More than one or two words, this time, at least.

I frowned.

“Should we wait inside?” Lillian asked.  “It’s too hot.”

“We stay here, where we agreed to meet him,” I said.

She groaned, long and loud.

“Besides,” I said, gesturing in the direction of the security team at the base of the building, “Do we really want to have them run their hands and tentacles and noses all over us?  Twice, since we’d have to go in and come back out?”

Lillian made a different sound, groaning and moaning in disgust.

“Let’s not,” Jamie said.  “I’ll be glad when the war’s over, and we don’t have to do it anymore.”

Jamie was more conscious about his appearance than any of us.  He was private, and that privacy was violated several times a day.  Worse, attention was drawn to his scars now and again.

“We’ll work extra hard to make it happen,” I said.  “End the war sooner.”

Jamie smiled.

“There he is,” Mary said, perking up a bit.

Gordon.  He wasn’t in the building, but was coming from the Rise, the storage buildings and a few labs that were kept separate from the rest.

There were a lot of temporary buildings set up in that vicinity.  As Gordon approached with Dog and Catcher in tow, he had a backdrop of very large creations and tents that only barely covered the warbeasts and projects within.  These were projects that had very high metabolisms.  Started small, highly efficient, they devoured food to grow into hulking beasts that would need the big gate to exit the Academy.  They were placed near the Rise for easy access to food, and it was very possible to see one in the morning, then see one at night, and see a noticeable difference in size.

Gordon was talking to Catcher as he approached.  They wrapped it up as they reached us.

“You disappeared on us,” I said.

“Hayle said Dog and Catcher were free.  I figured I’d ask.”

“That’s a good idea,” Mary said.  She raised her hand in a small wave.  “Hi.”

“Hello,” Catcher said, with a voice like gravel.

Catcher was wearing a military jacket, his usual wide-brimmed hat replaced with a lopsided military cap with a fold at one side, the other laying flat.  His high, modified collar and the skew of his hat left only his eyes visible, milky white and framed by scars that looked like old burns.  He cut an imposing figure, shrouded in a long coat that hung open to reveal the curious and very sharp tools that were strapped to his chest.  His mancatcher was strapped to his back.

Dog grunted, before making an unintelligible sound that might have been speech.  He was outfitted for war, and had more rigging and hooks around his quadruped body that no doubt served to hold bags and containers, or armor, or other things in that vein, when he was out in the field.

“That means ‘hello’,” Gordon said.

“Yes,” Catcher confirmed.

“I figured as much,” Mary said, but she was smiling.

“Shall we?” Gordon indicated the direction to the gate.  We started walking as a group, many of us going without our umbrellas.  “I’ve already filled them in.”

Mary practically skipped to keep in step with Catcher and Gordon, her attention more on Catcher than anyone.  Dog loped beside the group, long and large enough that Gordon walked beside his head, Helen walked behind Gordon, and I walked behind Helen, and I was only beside Dog’s left, back leg.

“To establish the particulars, they’re fast,” Gordon said.  “They’re elusive.  The trick is going to be finding them in the first place, and they know we’re onto them.  I was talking to my team, well, they were talking at me and not saying anything I hadn’t heard before-”

He shrugged, a little too fast, not very convincing.  Trying to seem more cavalier than he was.

“-and in the back of my mind, I was wondering what the next step was.  How we find them and get ahead of them when they might be leaving, going into hiding, or completely changing how they operate.  I thought of Dog and Catcher.”

Distracting himself by focusing on the job?

What exactly had his research and development team been telling him?

“You’re quiet today, Sy,” Gordon said, turning around.  “Thoughts?”

I was a little caught off guard.  He’d interrupted my thoughts in much the same way I figured he would if I’d been speaking aloud.  I took a second to think on the subject at hand.

“Just killing them won’t accomplish anything.  We need to capture or follow them back to wherever they’re set up.”

“Mm,” Catcher made a sound.  He reached over his shoulder and grabbed his mancatcher, holding it with one hand, then unclipped his coat and reached behind his back to retrieve another head for the mancatcher.  Where the head at the end of the thick pole formed a partial circle with teeth pointing in toward the center, the one he’d picked out had no teeth, but did have hooks pointing out and back, like a bull’s horns.

“Can I please see?” Mary asked.

“We haven’t talked, you and I,” Catcher said.

“I’m new.  I joined a year and two months ago.”

“I know,” Catcher said, in the tone of an annoyed parent, with the actual voice of an elderly man who’d gargled iron filings.  “Take off the head yourself, watch it, it’s heavy.”

He held the pole so it extended toward Mary.  She caught it, and she grunted.

“Told you.”

He didn’t tell her how to remove it, but she figured it out quickly.  She removed pins and then unscrewed the head from the pole, letting the circle hang off her wrist while she adjusted positions.  She handed it to Catcher, getting the new head in return and as she turned to do it, I saw the look on her face.  There was a light in her eye.

She was having fun.  This was her midwinter present.  A new toy.  A small challenge.

“Hm,” she made a noise, as she got the new head on.

“What?”

“I- uh.”

“Speak,” he barked the order.

I almost laughed.  It was a fitting command coming from someone who was partnered with a ‘Dog’.

“It needs cleaning, and oiling, this part.  The pins are halting as I put them in.  If you wait-”

“I won’t wait,” he interrupted.

“Okay.  I didn’t want to insult you, saying something bad about your weapon.  But-”

“You’re right.  It needs attention.  Lots of smaller parts and blood in the mechanisms.  I ran out of cleaning supplies in the field.  I was going to spend the day cleaning my tools.”

Dog snorted, loud enough to startle bystanders.

“I don’t think Dog agrees,” Gordon said, amused.

“Making me look bad in front of the children,” Catcher said.

“I don’t think you look bad,” Mary said.

“Hrmph,” Catcher grumped.  “You’re a good one.”

Mary beamed.

“Here.”

He extended the pole out further.  The entire thing was too heavy for just Mary to hold, even with Catcher holding the spiked butt-end of the weapon, so Gordon took hold of the head, with Mary in the center, free to fiddle with it.

“How was the fighting?” Jamie asked.  “I wouldn’t normally ask, but-”

“It could have been worse.  We were kept busy.”

Mary used the lever.  The head of the weapon closed, forming a complete circle that would typically have someone’s neck within it.  She toyed with it, switching between open, closed, and locking it.

“The Duke was giving the orders?” Jamie asked.  “Assigning you your missions?”

“He was.”

“Have you met him?” Lillian asked.

“No.  But there was a dialogue.  He gave us tasks.  We accomplished them.  We would get one or two days to breathe or heal, then he would give us another set of tasks.  A lot was said, in terms of expectations and results.  I walked away thinking he knows what we’re comfortable doing better than the team that created us,” Catcher said.  He turned to Mary, “You like it?”

“When I was being trained, I learned to use and make a garrote on a pole, because I was expected to take down adults, and I can’t always reach the throat.  I like this, it’s sort of the same, but it’s so clever!  And satisfying when it closes.  Like, tch, tch, it’s a solid sound.  Do you have a silent one?”

It hadn’t been that long ago that she’d only been giving one word answers, and I’d had to squeeze longer sentences out of her.

“I do have a silent one, and I do have cords, for when I need my target especially silent, too.  When we stop to rest, I can get them out and show you.”

“Yes please!”

Mary’s earlier tractability was gone, replaced by her excitement.  I suspected it would return, but there was a lot to be said for Mary being young, with her areas of interest.

“I like the Duke,” Catcher said, to the rest of us, as he took his weapon back from Gordon and Mary, strapping it to his back.  “I would not want to be in the same room with him, or have to endure a conversation with him, but I like him.”

“Based on the… what, scraps of paper with written instruction?  The ‘dialogue’ of job given and job completed?” I asked.  “His intuition and command?”

“Yes.”

It reminded me, in a way, of the dialogue between our group and Cynthia, as we’d engaged in the opening foray of strategy and counter-strategy between the forces of Westmore and those of Whitney.

We’d  reached the gate, and the team there started hauling it open as soon as they saw our advance.

The team in charge of searches moved our way.

Dog rumbled, a low, long growl.  He moved something, and metal slammed against metal on the far side of his body.  His head swung to one side, to stare at the group.

“You know who we are,” Catcher called out.  “Don’t insult us to boost your own egos.”

“We have orders to-”

“Shove your orders,” Catcher said.

Their group stopped, watching as we kept walking.

I had a wide grin on my face, and turned to make sure they saw it before picking up my stride to catch back up with the others.

“We don’t hang out nearly enough,” I said.

Catcher chuckled.

It was a bit of a walk to the area we’d last seen Percy and his ‘ghosts’.  Conversation continued, sporadic, sometimes the entire group falling silent, just walking and feeling far too warm.

“How’s your bum?” Lillian asked Helen.  “It’s not sore?”

“No.”

“Holding together?”

“Yes, thank you,” Helen said.

Silence.  Somewhat awkward silence.

I eventually broke the silence to ask, “Did anyone else feel a compulsion to say or do something immensely inappropriate when the Duke was staring us down?”

Everyone present, Dog and Catcher included, gave me horrified looks.

“None of us, then.”

“Don’t even joke,” Gordon said.

“I’m just saying-”

“No.  Don’t even entertain the thought.”

“But if you were to pass wind, just really quiet, but long and quiet, so everyone knew what was happening-”

“Sy,” Lillian cut in, voice a little tight. “Please.”

“Or if someone dropped trou?  Stared him in the eye, like it was any other day?  Don’t you wonder if he would be so amazed at the audacity of the act that he’d reward it?  It’s got to be boring, with everyone always saying yes-”

“Sylvester,” Gordon cut in.

“Ignore him,” Jamie said.  “He was as spooked as any of us.  He’s just using the situation to get a reaction out of you.”

There were one or two chuckles and a few names thrown my way.

“Spoilsport,” I muttered to Jamie.

“They’re already on edge,” he muttered.  “Why make it worse?”

“Because-”

“Nevermind,” he said.  “I know the answer.”

I frowned at him.

His expression remained placid.

“What’s the answer?” I asked.

His lips firmly pressed together.

I jabbed him in the stomach.

“What’s that at your collarbone?” Mary was asking Catcher.  “The metal thing.”

“It goes into the eye socket.  Pinch it like this to open it up, hooks go under the eyelids, prying the eye open, and you release, and the rest sits against the socket.”

“Why would you need to pry someone’s eyes open?  Well, I mean, I can think of reasons, but why not just have a knife?”

“For psychological effect.  To make them watch what I do to their friend.  Or I can hold their head still, and let water droplets fall on the open eye.  The eyes are the window to the soul.  Pry at the eyes, and you can shake the soul.”

“That is so… oh wow.  The way you said it, even.  And that one?”

“Slide it into an opening, turn the dial… it unfolds from a tube to a sphere.”

“And that one?”

I jumped in, “It’s what he uses to pick his teeth.”

Mary half-turned.  “You can’t see what I’m pointing at, can you?”

I shook my head.

“Because if you could, you’d get how funny that was,” she said, and she allowed me a small smile.

“Uproariously funny, apparently,” I said.

She rolled her eyes, turning back to Catcher.

“We’ll see if you can figure out what it’s for, by the end of the task at hand,” Catcher said.

Dog made a sound, garbled, a jaw of metal and wires and oversized teeth, not quite made for speaking.

“What’s he saying?” Gordon asked.

“Ignore him,” Catcher said.

Dog ‘spoke’ again.

“I don’t know what that means,” Gordon said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Catcher said.

Dog ‘harumphed’, which was a pretty impressive sound coming from something as big as he was.

“Alright, alright,” Catcher said.  “Fine.  Spend this much time with someone, they lose all patience.”

“We spend all of our time together, pretty much,” I pointed out.

Catcher ignored me.  “I don’t know what it’s for.  I thought it looked intimidating.”

Mary laughed, and the sound caught me off guard.

Beside me, in a low voice, Jamie spoke, “You okay?”

“Fine,” I said.

“Because you don’t seem fine.  The way you’re holding yourself, the way you’re talking…”

“No problems.”

“Your jokes are falling a little flat.  You’re talking less.  Teasing less.  You were moving a little less fluidly, when we were chasing.  I know because I watched you.  I’m pretty sure everyone sees the way you’re interacting with Mary.”

“Mary’s a different thing,” I said, with a fierce whisper, my volume minimal.

“I know she’s a different thing.  But she’s a thing that I think the real Sy would be more on top of.”

I gave him a look.

“You know what I mean.  Actually, I’m surprised you know what you mean.”

“Jamie, come on.  I’ve seen the sheep and horses go at it.  I’ve seen cats, and there were the warbeasts, too.”

“I wouldn’t start by comparing yourself to a horse or a warbeast, Sy.  That road leads to tears.”

“I’ve lost track of what you’re talking about, but I’ll try to keep that in mind,” I told him.

“I started this off asking if you were okay, but I only just now realized you successfully changed the topic and distracted me, which means you’re not too bad off.”

“Just a little bad off,” I murmured.

“Because of Mary, or because of…?” he made a syringe motion toward his head, depressing the invisible plunger with his thumb.

“Girls, poison, what’s the difference?” I whispered.

Helen, walking in front of me, turned to give me a look.  Those sharp ears of hers.  Beside her, Lillian turned, looking between Helen and I quizzically.

“But you’re the best kind,” I told Helen.

She sniffed, turning forward.  “I hope so.”

The confusion on Lillian’s face redoubled.

“You more than anyone, Lil,” I said, smiling.

Her eyes narrowed, she turned away, then shot me another look, as if she could’ve caught me smirking at her back.

I smirked when she was done.

“We really need to get you an appointment,” Jamie said.  “Before you get yourself in trouble, trying to be funny.”

“Hate to admit you’re right,” I said.

“They said I could have had my appointment, but I convinced them to put it off, because I knew the rest of you wouldn’t.  Better to do it all at once, so the Lambs aren’t shorthanded.”

“Good.  I’m glad to have you with us.”  I clapped a hand on his shoulder.  He smiled.

We were all the way down King street, and now, like the veins and arteries in a human body, things were starting to break down into smaller streets.

“Hereabouts,” Gordon said.

“If you’re looking for specific smells,” I said, “Academy carriage, or something made to look like one, stitched horses.”

“Too common on these streets, both,” Catcher said.

“Child, drugged, in the carriage,” I said.

“Enclosed?”

“Yes.”

“Too muffled an odor.”

“Blood,” Mary said.  “I threw a knife at one of the beasts at a checkpoint, it attacked the horses.  I had another knife hit Percy, at the front.  I wasn’t-  I didn’t…”

She stopped herself.

And, though I was only able to see occasional glimpses of her face as I watched her, I could see her attitude shift.  The glitter of pretty stabby torture things and the glamour of spiked mechanical confinement tools were only meager bandages for a bigger wound.

She hadn’t finished her sentence, and the answers that my mind supplied weren’t kind ones.

I wasn’t sure it was him?  I didn’t want to hurt him?

“Bleeding stitched is more distinct,” Catcher said.  Dog bobbed his oversized head in a ponderous nod, the metal at his jaw clicking and rattling as he switched from moving his head down to lifting it and vice versa.  “Bleeding man and bleeding stitched?  That’s a starting point.”

Dog swung his head one way, then the other.

“And he’s got the scent,” Catcher said.

“Excellent,” Gordon said.  He was smiling.

Metal at dog’s face shifted, covering his nose.  That metal moved, slats opening to let the air in, closing as he moved his head, then opening again when he stopped it.

He turned to Catcher, then huffed, a blast of hot breath.

“Got it,” Catcher said.  He tilted his head to one side.  “There.”

Dog started moving, loping forward.

“We’re not running?” Gordon asked.

“When we’re closer.  Don’t worry,” Catcher said.  “Very few slip away when we have the trail.”

We backtracked a bit, then headed down a side street.  The buildings here were more apartment than anything else, with the occasional shop on the lower floors.  Bakeries, butcheries, furniture stores.  The balconies weren’t as clustered together as the ones in the shims, which suggested larger residences, but the area wasn’t quite nice.  It just wasn’t awful.  A step up from the shims.

Jamie whistled under his breath, then gestured.

In the time it took our collective heads to turn, the blonde woman in the window ducked out of view, only a flash of pale hair visible for an eyes’ blink of time.

“Want to chase?” Catcher asked.

“We’re not fast enough,” Gordon said.  “They’re quick.”

“Do you?” Mary asked Catcher, “Want to chase?”

“No.  I thought you’d want something to do.  It’s your job, we’re just helping,” Catcher said.

“Our job.  We share the credit if this goes well, we Lambs suffer any consequences if it goes bad,” Gordon said.

“Says Gordon,” I said.  “Heck no.  I totally want the credit.  But if Dog and Catcher want to take some of the blame, I’m not going to whine about it.”

“It’s a good thing I know you’re joking,” Catcher said.

“Am I?  I didn’t realize.”

Jamie made another small whistle, gesturing.

The Japanese woman, also on lookout, this time on a rooftop.  Once she realized we’d spotted her, she moved, falling back to a position where we couldn’t see her.

The situation had reversed from what we’d faced before.  This time, they were the ones on watch, we were the ones encroaching on their territory.  We wanted to make away with a captive we could squeeze for information, if we couldn’t get to Percy himself.  They’d wanted to make away with a child.

We didn’t make it another half-block before Mary moved, pointing with a knife-tip.

The red-haired woman.  Inside a window.

“Stop,” Catcher said.

Collectively, the group stopped moving.

The woman was already fading into the shadows within the unlit apartment.

“Ghosts,” Catcher said.  “I can’t hear them.”

Dog shook his head.

Catcher spoke again, “I can hear most footsteps, can hear some from a distance like this if I focus.  I’m focusing and I don’t hear them.”

Dog said something garbled.

“You do?” Catcher asked.

Dog grunted an affirmative.

“Footsteps?”

Dog shook his head.  Spoke in that mishmash of sounds and metal against metal that only Catcher and sometimes Gordon could understand.

“A high sound,” Catcher said.  “Too high for even my ears.”

“Or mine,” Helen said.

Dog raised one paw, an amalgamation of flesh with metal supporting and replacing the flesh where it hadn’t grown in strong enough, bobbing it in time with noise we couldn’t hear.  Up up, down, up up, down down down, up…

A conductor to a silent orchestra.

The paw came down, the claws themselves clacking like so many spurs.

“Silence?” Catcher asked.

Dog nodded slowly, head craning, vents on the lower face opening and closing.

“There,” Jamie said.

The Japanese woman.  On another rooftop.  She’d managed to cross the street in front of us and travel a distance that would have taken another person four or five minutes, and she’d done it in half that, without being seen.

She didn’t budge from her position, halfway down the street, at the top of a flat rooftop.  The wind stirred her damp hair and black dress.

No.

“Okay,” Lillian said, “I’m a little spooked.”

“That’s good,” I said.  My eyes were wide, searching, my senses pitched to a painful sharpness.  “Sensible reaction.”

“I didn’t think they were that fast.”

“They’re not,” I said, just as Dog began shaking his head.  “There’s more than three of them.”

Jamie pointed to the other side of the street.

A brunette.  Same clothes, same demeanor, same look in her eyes.

The next building over, another Japanese woman, identical to the one who stood on the flat rooftop.

We shifted positions, our backs to one another, shoulder to shoulder, searching the area.

They stepped out of hiding, one after the other.  There was a petite one with dark hair, who I saw four different versions of, another blonde, two more redheads… those were only the ones in the direction I was facing.

Dog raised his paw, bobbed it, then dropped it to the street.

“They’re talking,” Catcher said.  Dog nodded confirmation.

“They communicate with whistles?  Too high frequency for any human to hear?” Gordon asked.  “A unique language?”

“So it seems,” Catcher said.

“So many of them,” Lillian said.

“Yes,” Catcher said.

Mary was silent, her expression dark.

“Communicating like that… they’re pack hunters,” Helen said.

“So it seems, yes,” Catcher repeated himself.

“We can’t get separated,” Gordon said.  “Best thing we can do-”

“Hold on,” I said.  “Hold on.”

Silence reigned for a long few seconds.  The women gathered around us were all utterly still.

I felt like I could hear the high pitched sound, but I couldn’t.  But something was setting my teeth on edge, making my head hurt.

I raised a hand, snapping my fingers.

When the others looked at me out of the corners of their eyes, I gestured, fierce.

Silent.  Around, enemy scout.

Or, in context, be quiet.  They can hear us.

Hear what we say to each other, plan or counter-plan accordingly.

Gordon raised his hand, snapped once, gestured.

Leader chase.  I group dog.  You go.

There were two options.  To decide we were in over our heads, or to go for the leader.

Gordon wanted to go for the leader.  He’d group up with Dog.  The rest of us, Catcher included, would take another path.

I didn’t technically disagree with the idea.  The ghosts were coordinated enough to make use of any weakness or opportunity our splitting up afforded to them, but Gordon and Dog together could be fast, and I trusted them to be effective, for the most part.

Yet his left hand, at his side, was partially clenched, ring and middle finger extended, and the middle finger bobbled up and down as if it wasn’t under his control.  He was holding it between himself and Mary as if he hoped to keep it out of people’s view.

“Gordon,” I spoke aloud.  He looked at me.  I glanced down at his hand.  “You sure?”

“Perfectly.”

I didn’t believe him at all.

It was such an awful situation.  When I had to extend trust to someone or lose their trust.  It took a great power balance and upset it, because it wasn’t a thing that happened once.    Gordon and Fray, Mary and Percy.

He gestured.  Our gestures for numbers were what they were for much this reason.  It wasn’t intuitive.

Three.  Two.  One.

He grabbed onto Dog’s armor, hauling himself up, heading right.  The rest of us ran forward, down the length of the street.

Silent, without fanfare or theatrics, the ghostly sentries of this neck of Radham slid away.  Not all into shadow, but perfectly out of view.  It was as if they knew where every single one of our blind spots were, every piece of cover that would serve.

Percy was injured.  He’d be patching himself up, if he wasn’t already done, and as hurt people tended to do, he would be inclined to find shelter, return home.

The enemy wasn’t the only wild card in this game, not fully understood as a group.  Mary counted as one.  Gordon counted as another.

Catcher leading the way, Mary at the rear corner of our triangle formation, Helen at the other corner, we ran, making a break for the weakest link, the critical target.

A leap of faith, then another, then another.

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.7

We were surrounded with the net closing around us, and I was swiftly realizing that the so-called ‘net’ was made for this.

The women were entirely capable of staying out of sight as they closed the distance to us, and they chose not to.  They revealed themselves, crossing a street, hopping down from one place to another, moving along rooftops, or stepping out of cover.  Most were wearing black dresses, some had shoes, some didn’t.

But each and every one was erratic.  They didn’t run headlong at us, but moved in diagonals or horizontally.  They only revealed themselves when they were in a position to reverse direction and take cover, or take a step to the side and be out of reach.  All of the instincts and habits and prediction that suggested where they should be were consistently, inevitably wrong.  They would step out of sight and reappear a distance away, and I could never be sure if it was the same one, or a clone.

Three times, Mary started to move to throw a knife, and each of those times, the ghosts would fade away in the same moment she started to move.  The knife never left her hand.  It would have been a wasted throw.

As psychological weapons went, it was all very effective.

Gordon and Dog had broken away from the group, and I could see some of the women moving, turned away from us, giving chase in their roundabout way.  The women were still disappearing, hiding with the same mind-bending effectiveness, even though we weren’t their focus.

Throughout it all, I could feel a peculiar tension and strain, as if my body was experiencing a unique form of stress, bone-deep.  It was as if something was stretched too tight, a terrible noise that would have been hurting my ears if I could hear it.

“Echolocation,” I said, between pants for breath.  I was running as fast as I was capable.

“Probably,” Catcher said.

They communicated through screeches, too high for the human ear to catch.  Those same screeches told them where we were, and what the surroundings were.  To be this effective at staying out of sight, they were mapping it all out in their heads, figuring out where our fields of view were, and avoiding those areas.

If I recognized their system and tried to muck with it by turning my head more, being unpredictable, I only saw glimpses.  My head and eyes could move faster than their whole bodies could, but only barely.

Not sustainable.  I was disorienting myself more than anything.

Craig had said this was Academy work.  We’d convinced ourselves otherwise.

But to create this many, to do work this good, it was beyond the capacity of the rebellion, as I understood it.  The Snake Charmer, Percy, and all of the doctors working for the rebellion thus far had been people who’d been removed from the Academy.  Less resources, less education, or less grounding.  Some had been brilliant, but they’d been working with less.

Unless there was something I was missing, these women were on the level of a superweapon.  On par with Dog and Catcher, or the Humors, or the Lambs, but modern, not years out of date.

That did mean they were less experienced.

No, I have to focus.  It was too hard to think along multiple tracks at once, these days.

“There!” I pointed.

An ajar door.

If we were being surrounded, then we had to minimize the number of avenues they had for approach.

We ran through the door, catcher first, Mary at the rear.  She slammed the door shut behind her.

It was an apartment complex under construction, two stories high, getting more apartments with length rather than height.  The essential posts and beams of the building were intact, not yet cut back from the mostly straight, treelike growths that had been generated, and only a few walls were being grown, plant matter set to grow, the rapid growth directed with boards that had been propped up and temporarily clamped into place.  The project must have moldered, because there was grass and flowers growing up here and there where the work had been left incomplete.

The door was barely shut when I heard glass breaking and things tumbling to the floor above us, and at the various parts of the building to the left, right, and front of us.

“We cornered ourselves!” Lillian said.

“No,” Catcher and I spoke at the same time.  Catcher glanced at me, and I said, “We were already cornered.”

“Oh god,” Lillian said.  “I remember-”

She paused, she was talking too fast while trying to take too much air in, and ran into a conflict of sorts.  “-when I started.  They said I wouldn’t get into danger.  I’d stay at the back and sidelines, just close enough to practice what I’d already learned.”

“They lie,” I said.

“Says our best liar.”

“Everything I am, I learn from others.  I learned from them, Lil.”

“Focus!” Catcher barked.  All business.  “Your hand signals, earlier.  You have a minute to teach me.  Command for stop?”

“We have three,” Jamie said.  “Different-”

“You have fifty-five seconds to teach me!” Catcher said.

“Stop,” Mary raised a fist, pointing it at the ceiling.

“Left?”

“Like this with left hand,” she said, doing the same gesture, pinky extended, then raised her other hand, thumb extended, “This with right.”

“I can guess what the sign for the other direction is.  Danger?”

Mary extended middle and index finger together, pointed in various directions.  She then pointed it straight down.  “Trap.”

He did the gesture, but pointed straight up.  “What’s this, then?”

“Heads up.  Alert,” she said.

“You sat down and worked this out?  A special language, for all of you?”

“No,” I said.  “It evolved naturally.  We bullshit it half the time and trust the others to figure out what we mean.”

“Okay,” he said.  “You think they hear us?”

“They hear everything,” I said.  “If they do have echolocation, they hear the walls.”

“Mm.”

I looked to make sure Jamie, Helen, and Lillian were keeping up.  We’d spent enough time out and about in the last six months for them to build up stamina, but Jamie and Lillian weren’t athletic.  Not like Mary, definitely not like Gordon.

Helen was different.  She didn’t have the capacity to build stamina in that sense.  The rest of us, we were human, in varying senses, and humans had come into being as primates who excelled at marathon running.  In getting better at running, we were returning to our roots.  For her, it was learning something alien.  Something she wasn’t built for.

Catcher raised a hand, two fingers raised.

Alert.

He was adjusting his grip on his weapon.

Twenty feet down the hall, a red-haired woman stepped out of a doorway, spinning to face us, rapidly walking backward.

The two fingers folded into his fist, leaving only the gesture for ‘stop’.

He’d picked it up fast enough.

We stopped in the middle of the hallway.  There were no footsteps drumming above us, but there were creaks here and there in the apartment building, as if it were caught in a strong wind, or it was busy resettling.

A full second after we stopped, the sounds did too.

“Hello!” Helen called out to the red-haired woman.

The woman was silent, staring.

“It’s okay,” Helen said.  She pushed her way through the group, slowly approaching.  “I’m not armed, see?”

Hands out to the side, fingers splayed.

I held out my hand, two fingers together, pointing at the ceiling.

Helen pushed my hand aside.

“You can search me, can’t you?  You know I don’t have any weapons,” Helen said.  “I just want to say hi, before you all jump on us all at once and cut us into itty bitty pieces.  You’re pretty.  I’m glad I get to die looking at something pretty.”

She was rambling, not really stopping one sentence before leaping into the next.  Patter, customized for her target.  She was drawing nearer, halfway between us and the woman-

Helen set her foot down on floorboards, and her foot went through, the floorboards shifting.  It was only a foot or so of distance from floorboard to the surface beneath, but it left Helen off balance, unable to pull back or pull away while she reeled, trying not to fall forward and wrench the ankle.

The red-haired woman was already moving, lunging forward from the instant the foot came down.  She also put a foot through floorboards that had been nailed in place, but for her it was a deliberate motion.

She raised the same foot, kicking straight up to bring a shorter piece of board straight up into the air to slap against her waiting palm.

She thrust her blunt spear toward Helen’s throat.

It was a series of movements that made me think of Mary.

Helen let herself collapse backward, like a rag doll, one ankle still embedded.  Her back flat against the ground, she brought her feet up.

The spear wielding red-haired woman was already pressing the attack, stepping forward again, this time onto secure ground, stabbing for Helen’s face.

Catcher’s mancatcher encircled the end of the board.  He wrestled it to one side, forcing the woman to drop it, then lunged forward, moving not in a straight line, but curving off to the right, to place his feet on the floorboards at the base of the wall.  They rattled, but they didn’t collapse or slide off to one side to let his foot fall through.

He was fast.  Almost the opposite of Helen in many respects, he was built to survive, to endure.  He didn’t tire from running, and he was built to be good at it, just as he was built to be strong.

She was quicker, all of our pursuers were, but the red-haired woman lost time by having to turn around and navigate the shaky floorboards.  While she was picking her way, skipping more than running, covering surprising ground while doing so, he extended the mancatcher for the back of her throat.  As if she had eyes in the back of her head, the woman ducked beneath it, and it snapped closed above the top of her head.

A moment later, floorboards gave way under Catcher’s foot, and he twisted as he fell, using the rotation of his body to get more velocity as he threw.  A bola.  Mary threw too, almost in unison.

The red-haired woman dodged that too, moving to the other side of the hallway.  Mary’s knife-throw had followed Catcher’s throw by no more than a second, and the red-haired woman stepped out of the way of that too.

It wasn’t all a wash; the two sudden changes of direction left her off balance, and Catcher took advantage.  His feet under him, he lunged forward, weapon in one hand, the other outstretched.  Between the reach of his already long arms and his pole-weapon, he wasn’t leaving her any room to dodge to either side.

Helen raised a hand to her ear, then made a high sound, “Eeh!”

Whatever she was trying to communicate, Catcher reacted too.  He moved, striking out, but he was blind to the exact nature of the attack.  A petite brunette woman tore out of one doorway, straight behind Catcher, knocking his legs out from under him.

A moment later, the red-haired woman was gone through a doorway, the brunette had carried on forward into another apartment, and Catcher was lying on the floor of the hallway, staring up at the ceiling.  No danger in sight.

“Hmm,” Catcher made a noise.

Noises rustled throughout the building for a moment as the ghosts found new positions.

Then we had silence.

We picked our way over the section of floor, approaching Catcher, as he helped himself to his feet, using his pole.

He touched the back of his legs, and the tips of his gloved fingers were crimson with blood.

“They hear the walls well enough to know what parts of the building are sound,” Jamie said.

“So it seems,” Catcher said.

“I really thought that might work,” Helen said.  She gestured.  That enemy.  Silent.  Quiet/rest.

No hostile action, no sound, no indicator of violence.  Just letting Helen walk into the de-facto trap.

Catcher was watching us, his eyes on Helen.

“Um, here,” Jamie said.  He pulled out a paper from his pocket, and wrote down the gist of it for Catcher.

“Hm,” Catcher observed.  He gestured, emulating Helen, and Jamie pointed to words in turn.  The man went on to say, “I’m not going to remember all of this.”

“Helen,” Mary said.  She switched to gestures once she had Helen’s attention.  Noise.  You.  The third sign was the one for morning, past, before.

Jamie was scribbling down a rough translation for Catcher.

Enemy scream.  I warn.

She’d heard the scream, at a pitch and volume none of the rest of us, Catcher excluded, had been able to hear, and with no time to spare, had tried to communicate that the enemy was communicating.  It was a very instinctual, Helen way of dealing with it.

“Next time, signal us?” I said.

Helen nodded.

“Any chance we can learn what they’re saying?” I asked.  “Predict their moves?  It would force them to either stop coordinating so damn well, or let us counterattack.”

“If you could, I would be amazed,” Catcher said.  “It’s a mess of noise, faint enough I’m not sure if I’m imagining the sounds or hearing them.  It gets louder as they close in.”

Helen nodded.  Same for her, apparently.

“Damn,” I said.

“I don’t think they’re that capable of fighting,” Mary said.  “Seeing how they moved, they’ve practiced, but they aren’t practiced, if that makes any sense.”

Catcher nodded.

“I hope Gordon’s okay,” Lillian said.

“I trust Gordon to handle himself,” I said.  “But we need to keep up with him.  Do you have the scent, or whatever?”

“No,” Catcher said.  He took the pen from Jamie, scribbling down a message.  “Dog will let us know which direction to go in, as soon as we’re out and able to communicate.”

The message read only: Yes.

He paused, then added, they’re communicating.

He did have the scent.  A small mistruth was changing how the ghosts organized.  More weight on Gordon and Dog, but it perhaps alleviated pressure on us.

Catcher led the way, the butt end of his polearm sweeping across the floor, checking for loose floorboards.  He wasn’t much slower, despite the damage to his legs.  I was expecting trouble to come from around the corner or any of the doorways we passed, but there was nothing.

As we reached the double doors at the end of the hallway, he kicked it open, picking up speed.  Mary was right beside him, passing through the door in the same moment.

He slammed his hand out, clumsy given the need for haste, and shoved Mary into the doorframe.  He brought his foot out, kicking, and stopped mid-stride, hovering over the top of a set of stairs.

Razor wire.

“Look out!” Mary shrieked, throwing herself back toward the rest of us.  I caught her in my arms.

With my face full of Mary hair and shoulder, I didn’t see all of what happened next.  A piece of furniture, a stack of bricks and a ladder slammed down onto the top of the stairs, between us and Catcher.  Brick fragments and bits of wood went flying in every direction, and the dust that came with all of it occluded our view further.

Jamie whistled, a short, sharp sound.

I turned to look, and saw figures moving across the hall, further down.

The net was closing.

“Traps,” Mary observed.  She looked angry.  “Deadfall, razor wire.  Staples.”

“Backed by a natural ability to assess environment and locate the enemy,” I said.

Catcher was isolated.  If he was hampered or injured in any way, they’d be closing in.  We needed to reach him.

There were windows to either side, absent of glass, with boards in place.  A sufficiently impact would probably get us through.  We could ram past or try using our bodies.  We couldn’t do either and devote the required attention to the ghosts behind us.

And if they’d trapped the front door, I wasn’t sure they hadn’t trapped the window.

I stared at the doorway, saw the rubble and the heap of detritus, the cloud of dust, the ladder sitting askew.

I touched my fist to Mary’s shoulder.  I was gratified that she didn’t flinch or pull away like she had when I’d tried to hold her hand.  I gestured, quick, a series of instructions.  Together.  Push.  You.  Right.  Push.  Up.”

Then I grabbed her arm, pulling her alongside me, whistling to get the others’ attention.

We charged for the stairwell that they’d just dropped everything on.  The razor wire was still potentially there, the footing was uncertain, and there was no guarantee there was even a path through, with the dust obscuring vision.  If I was wrong, then we’d lose precious time, we’d open ourselves up to being attacked.

Except, much as we’d been cornered from the start, we were already in danger of being attacked.  We had little to lose.

I threw my shoulder against the base of the ladder, to the left side of the door.  Mary stepped up onto loose bricks and pushed the top.

There was a spring to the ladder as it pushed back, pressing against the razor wire, but the wire was only at knee height or below.  By pushing my end, I kept it in place.  Mary tipped it forward, so it leaned forward, landing on top of more razor wire and rubble further down the little staircase.  The wire bit into wood and locked the ladder in place.

Before I was even standing, Helen was up, stepping onto the struts of the ladder, crossing the makeshift bridge.

They’d communicated to signal that the deadfalls and traps should be released, but their communication was simpler, limited in some of the same ways our hand signals were.  When the order had gone out to release the trap, everyone had released it.  Nothing was kept in reserve for when the rest of us poked our heads out and made a run for it.  The trap had been sprung, and our exit into known difficulties here was safer and faster than any alternative.

Lillian and Jamie crossed too, losing a little speed as they made sure they didn’t slip or fall.  Mary offered me a hand, and I gratefully accepted it.  We crossed together, me a step behind her.

Catcher stood about twenty feet ahead of us, hunched over, bleeding from a wound to the face that had cut a deep notch into his high collar.  Slices.  His attackers weren’t anywhere to be seen.

“You’re okay?” he asked.

“Physically?” Mary said.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Catcher said.  “Our enemy doesn’t seem intent on playing fair.”

His hand moved.  A signal.  Danger.  Left.  Left.  Left.  Right.

Now that I looked, I could see them.  The women stood so that only half of their faces were exposed, or the shadows embraced them.

Looking around, I identified the area as one that had burned in the fires around the time the war had started.  Effort was being made to piece it together, but it was slow going, and resources had been diverted elsewhere.  The result was that we were in an empty husk of a residential area.  No residents, no ‘home’.  Seeds and components for construction were everywhere, stacked in front of buildings and on either side of the streets, so that it was impossible to go more than three or four paces before reaching another pile of stone or wood or a crate of something.  Cloths and treated canvases had been tied over many of the piles, light rain running off them.

Too many hiding places for the enemy, here.

Very naturally we fell into a position so that we stood in a circle, our backs to each other.

In answer, more of the women around us emerged.

It was a given that we’d be surrounded.  They were fast.  They knew the terrain.  They would harass us, they’d punish recklessness by closing in on us and picking us off or making us bleed, and they’d punish us for biding our time by setting up traps in the periphery.

In execution and raw effectiveness, it was a big step up from Mary’s generation.  Percy had a hand in this, but his wasn’t the only one.  There was another, probably two or three more minds collaborating to make this work as it did.

I was starting to feel like we might not be okay, this time around.

“It’s not often that I’m stuck like this,” Catcher said, echoing my thoughts.

I did like the man.  If the Lambs were my siblings, in a roundabout way, Catcher was an extended family member.

“What are you thinking, Mary?” I asked.

“He replaced me.  With these,” she said.  There was a note of emotion to her voice, more anger and frustration than anything.  “We can’t catch them, we can’t pin them down.  They’re better than me, and they outnumber us.”

“You’re more experienced,” Jamie said.

“They have that damn echolocation trick,” Mary said.  “They can dodge thrown knives.  I’d be willing to trade my field practice for that trick.  Probably.  Maybe.”

I watched the women, knew they were listening, and I didn’t care.  They were staying still, watching from various vantage points and perches.  Seven in total, in our immediate vicinity.  Possibly one or two more in the upper floor of the building we’d just vacated, and one on the ground floor.

I’d already sussed out their attack pattern.  They were pack hunters.  They ran their prey down, always playing it safe, skirting the edges, remaining out of reach.  It was an attack pattern devoid of one critical component.

“They might know how to dodge a thrown knife,” I said, “But they don’t seem to know how to throw them.  If they did, they would have already.”

“And we’d be dead,” Jamie said.

Lillian made a small sound.

“Sorry,” Jamie said.

I watched as Mary’s posture changed.

She needed support in this.  She needed reassurance, in an odd, hard-to-define way.

But Mary wasn’t supposed to be my focus.  I cursed the way my brain was stumbling lately, and focused on the danger.

The arrangement of the women was lopsided.  Seven I could see, a number more I couldn’t.  Of the seven, four were lined up on top of or in the windows of buildings down the length of the street, almost in a row, and two were at the far end of the street.  The other was standing in the middle of the street, opposite the other two, just in case.

“Dog signaled yet?”  I asked.

“He’s not telepathic,” Catcher said.  He tightened his grip on his weapon, and his hand signal pointed the way to Dog.  The line of four women was apparently intent on blocking our way to accessing Gordon and Dog.  We’d have to pass between or under them.

“And you still don’t have a scent on our target?”

“No,” he said gruff.  His other hand indicated the end of the street.  The two individuals were in our way.

Now we knew where Percy was.

“Yeah, you’re utterly useless,” I said.  “Don’t know why we brought you along.”

“Watch it, brat,” he said.  “I don’t suppose you have any clever ideas?”

“Thinking,” I said.

Beside me, Mary was holding a throwing knife.  I imagined it wasn’t solely for throwing, but also a reminder that she wasn’t inferior to our attackers.  The knife wouldn’t be useful, when the ghosts were this very slippery.

Or was there another use?

“Mary,” I said, holding out a hand.  “Knife?”

She started to reach out.

I caught her hand before she could reverse the direction of the knife to give me the handle.  My heart was pounding.  Shot in the dark, and I was tense, certain that, the moment I gave them any opening, they’d lash out.

“Other hand,” I said, without letting go of her fingers.

She gave me a sidelong glance.  She brought her left hand my way.

Enemy.  Speak.  Around.  Question.  I signaled.  I suspected I knew the answer.

Beside me, Jamie confirmed.  Not that he could hear the enemy’s communication, but he’d relayed to Helen, who could.

They were busy communicating.  Chattering, planning.

I was holding Mary’s hand, which was holding the blade.  Moving it, I touched the sharper edges of the blades together, and moved them against each other.

Nothing.

I let go of Mary’s hand.

She repeated the motion.  This time she knew what she was trying to accomplish.

Blade against blade, sharpening, scraping.  It was a sound that could put hair on end.

Every single one of the ghosts in the area turned their heads, fixating on Mary.

I didn’t even need to wait to see Jamie’s relay from Helen.  I could sense the change in the air.  I could almost breathe deeper, without feeling the tension or hearing that inaudible chatter.

“What did you just do?” Catcher asked.

“Communicated on their level,” I said.  “I don’t think they liked it.”

Mary was smiling, now.

“Okay,” I said.  “We make a break for Dog and Gordon.  Group with them, then see if we can’t find our target.”

My hand signals instructed differently.

“Let’s make this as difficult for them as possible,” I said.  I glanced casually down the length of the street.  I saw a wrought-metal railing, indicated it to Mary, who passed it along to the others.

Another signal, counting down, and then we made a break for it.  Toward Dog, the four women lurking on rooftops.

Collectively, our assailants vanished.

“Now,” I said.

We changed direction, heading for a point further up the street.  Mary drew blade against blade, eliciting sounds we couldn’t necessarily hear.

I felt a sinking feeling as the women reappeared.  It wasn’t disrupting them, and it wasn’t having an effect.  Was it merely another sound to them?

“Crap!” I swore.

“No,” Jamie called out.  “They’re different!”

I had to glance over to look.  I saw the women fading away, but the synchronicity was gone.  They weren’t fading in and fading away in the same way.  Not in a way that made them hard to count or helped them play off each other.

The sounds Mary was making were undoubtedly different from the sounds they made on their own, but it was a more unfamiliar sound, one that was on similar channels to their usual mode of communication.  Anyone could hold a conversation with a guy in the corner shouting nonsense syllables, suffering only minor annoyance, but these women were young, in a sense.  They were inexperienced.  There was an opening, a vulnerability today that might not be there in a year.

“Catcher,” Mary said.  “That thing, you challenged me to find a use for it.”

“What about it?”

“Give it to Sy!”

It was a ring, sharp-edged, with a bit of a corkscrew coil on one side.  I wasn’t even sure how to hold it without cutting myself.

“What am I doing with this thing?”

“Windows!”

Further up ahead were a set of shuttered windows, the glass so dusty they were almost opaque.

Clever Mary.

I veered to the right, closer to the window, holding out the edge of the ring as best as I could.

Metal screeched as it cut glass.  It got a reaction from Catcher.  I didn’t see Helen’s reaction, because she was toward the tail end of the group, but I imagined it was the same.  An unpleasant sound to anyone with a good sense of hearing.

We were covering ground now, and our assailants were faltering.  They were able to keep up, but the confidence was gone.  They appeared, flanking us, they taunted us, but they’d changed their pattern.  It no longer seemed like they were everywhere, uncountable and unpredictable.  They no longer were able to say, in their ultrasonic language, ‘I’m stepping out, someone else step in’.

But, at the end of the day, they were wired to take advantage of any gap in defenses.  They were scavengers, picking off the weak and, apparently, the overconfident.

With a smoothness that proved deceptive, leading the eye to take a fraction longer to register it, one stepped out of the alleyway.

Helen was the first to react, shouting in alarm.  Mary turned, raising her knives.  I swiped hard at the nearest window, and the edge of the circular blade cut into the base of my palm, making the woman flinch.

The woman nonetheless drove her attack home.  A length of pipe, sharp at one end.  Her reach was longer, she was stronger, and Mary’s attempt to fend off the attack proved futile.  She twisted around, trying to sidestep the attack, holding out the knives to keep it at a distance from herself, and the woman only took a longer stride, then thrust down and through.

Mary.

Injury added to insult, for Mary to be struck down by one of her successors.

She’d always hated to lose, and to lose here, of all places?

Catcher lunged.  Off balance, senses failing her, the brown-haired woman wasn’t even aware enough to see the attack coming.  The mancatcher closed around her throat.  She stumbled as Catcher moved the stick to force her to carry forward with her movement, and folded over his shin as he kicked her in the middle.

While she reeled, he repositioned her, and then kicked again, this time for the small of her back, snapping her back in two.

I caught up to Mary, who’d ceased running, and only stumbled, each step weaker than the last.  I threw my arms around her before she could fall to the ground.

“Dumb,” I said.

“Jerk,” she said, voice already weak.

Catcher reached us.  He relieved me of my burden, grabbing Mary with one arm, pole held in the other.  As I stepped away, I felt the blood that had already welled out of the open wound.

“Refuse to die,” Mary said, quiet.  “Supposed to- have to look Percy in the eye.  End him.”

“You’re not going to die,” I said.

“Good,” she said.

Lillian had caught up to us.  She wasted no time in taking hold of the tear in Mary’s dress with both hands and hauling it open wider.

I was aware of the ghosts gathering around us.  There was a feral edge to what they were doing, now.  More disorganized, something about their body language and expressions that suggested we’d pushed them out of their comfort zone, and they were no longer content to bide their time.

Very similar to Mary in that way.  Sometimes her blood got riled.

“Catcher,” I said.

Catcher was still holding Mary with one arm under and around her armpits.  He didn’t respond.

“Tell me Dog and Gordon are close?”

“They aren’t,” he said.

There was no hand signal to go with the statement.  He was telling the truth.

Gordon was gone, Mary was down.  Helen, Lillian, Jamie and I weren’t fighters.

The ghosts were.

“Excuse me,” I told Mary, as I reached under her skirt.  I knew just where to reach to unclip two lengths of razor wire from her underwear, blades strung along the length.

“Gave you your chance,” she said.  There was a note to her voice, as if she was already delirious.

My expression was stone as I took a series of knives for myself and then handed the other to Jamie.

He gave me a look.

“I hope you’ve been watching Mary closely,” was all I said.

He gave me a curt nod.

I could see Lillian trying to tend to Mary, Catcher trying to make her job as easy as possible while being on guard for an attack, and I couldn’t pull my attention away from the scene to focus on the enemy.  I couldn’t think along multiple tracks.  I felt stupid, at a time I needed all my wits about me, and I felt even stupider because of the incoherent, violent emotion mixed into it all.

“Nobody’s dying today,” I said.  “Not like this.”

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.8

They circled like vultures.  I counted six in total that were in plain view.  All with effective reflexes and spatial awareness.  The screeching as we were circled was mine, however, a scrape of blade against glass, back and forth, a staccato nails-on-a-blackboard noise that made the little hairs on my arms and neck stand on end.

It was giving them pause, but I could read their body language now that I could track them consistently.  They were building up confidence to attack.  They’d seen one of their own die, and the noise of blade on glass was screwing with their senses.  I imagined it was like being thrust from the bright world into darkness for the very first time.

The thought of darkness made me glance at Mary, who was being worked on by Lillian.  I really didn’t like the expression on Lillian’s face.

Focus, I told myself.  Adrenaline went a long way in helping me to pull my thoughts together.  The edges around the thoughts felt sharper and the details more crisp.  I felt more like myself, I could touch on a thought in the middle of a running stream of consciousness and that thought was crystal clear.

I tested the knife in my hand, judging its weight.

I’d practiced some, one didn’t spend more than a year in Mary’s company without trying it out, but the benefits of practice had been questionable.  I’d pick it up after four or five throws, then I’d actually be pretty good, landing about three in four thereafter.  Then I’d try again the next night, and I’d need a few throws worth of practice again.

The women started, making motions like they were going to attack.

‘Feint‘ was my immediate thought.

Catcher reacted all the same.  The butt end of his weapon slapped out.  he struck a window, hard enough to shatter it, the glass breaking, the crash sharp enough to give our attackers pause.

Not that they’d been going anywhere, not really.

Still, it was opportunity.

I threw, roughly the same time Jamie did.

Our targets didn’t even move.  The knives went flying off, far from being on target.  Jamie’s went straight over his target’s head by at least a foot.

“We’re doomed,” Mary’s voice was faint.

“Don’t need commentary!” I said.

“Wasting good knives,” she said.

“Shush!” I told her.

“Jamie,” Mary said.  “Your arms are shorter than mine are.  Release later.”

“Got it,” Jamie said.

“What about me?” I asked.

“I’ve given you advice… hunnred times,” she mumbled.  “Waste.”

I really didn’t like how fast she was dropping off, here.

The women moved, I scratched glass with the tool, and they halted.  I tried throwing again.

My target didn’t even dodge, for the second time.  Jamie’s did, but I doubted he’d been on target.

That was what I was telling myself.  No way was Jamie going to be better than me at this and get to be the hero.

They made a move to approach, and I scratched the glass again.  I figured they were feinting or uncertain, but I wanted to tell them off all the same.  Warn them, feed that uncertainty.

My damn hands were shaking.  It wasn’t helping my accuracy or concentration.

Jamie, Helen and I weren’t strong.  Catcher was, but Catcher was guarding Lillian and Mary.  Each of the ghosts was capable and dangerous.

When our ghostly vultures swooped in, I didn’t think much of our chances.

It was too easy to let my thoughts run away.  I wasn’t someone who won fights.  At best, I helped find the road to victory.

“No, no, no,” Lillian said.  Her voice was breaking.  “Please, Mary, no.”

In my peripheral vision, I could see Mary drawing closer to the ground.  Catcher let her slump down, easing the drop by slowly relaxing his hold on her.  Lillian did much of the work in draping Mary out alongside the gutter at the base of a storefront.

My hand tightened on the knife’s handle.  As I turned away, I sensed movement, and moved to react.

Three of them were closing the distance, using our collective distraction as an opportunity.  Two women with blonde hair and a brunette, drawing in close, fast enough I wasn’t sure I’d get my arms up in time.

Catcher acted.  His weapon reached for one of the blondes, who immediately reversed direction, backing away out of range.  He wasn’t striking at her, however.  His weapon reached further, and one of the jutting spikes touched the wrought-iron railing I’d pointed out earlier.

Swiping violently away from the enemy, he dragged metal against metal, eliciting a screech that made my vision waver.  The two attackers stopped in their tracks, momentarily stunned or disoriented.

I saw opportunity and went for it, knife in hand, the rest of the string of knives dangling, stabbing.

She backhanded the wrist of my knife hand, hard. I didn’t make contact, and the entire string of knives fell from my hand.  I reached out to catch it in the middle with my other hand, which still held the round blade, simultaneously trying to grab at her wrist with the hand she’d just disarmed.

I realized, around the time I sort of failed at both, that I was doing exactly what Gordon always accused me of.  Trying to do too many things at once.  The disarmed hand was still smarting from the blow and was slow to move.  I didn’t get a grip on her wrist.

The hand that was grabbing the mess of knives and wire did grab what I was going for, but there were more sharp edges and lengths of wire than there were things to properly grip, and I only got the middle of the length.  Wires cut into the webbing between four different fingers as I got a grip on the knife handle between my middle and ring finger.

There was no time to adjust, or move, or do different, or even to make sure the wire wasn’t wrapped around my hand in a way that would make any action on my part hurt me more than it hurt her.  I whipped the twin lengths at her upper body and face.

I grazed her.  I felt the impact, I saw her flinch, before she retreated well out of my reach.  Superficial damage.  She didn’t make a sound as she reeled, face twisting, one eye closed, a lick of crimson at one cheek.

Small as it was, it was perhaps my greatest victory in an out-and-out fight yet.

I had to think like they thought, connect the dots, figure out how they operated and mess with that.  This was an unrefined project, untested in a combat situation.  They weren’t soldiers.  They were assassins, and they were still raw enough and new enough to the world that the unfamiliar could put them off balance.  The jangle of blades and the nature of my attack had been strange to her.

Strange enough to get the blades a half-inch closer to her face and upper chest.

Jamie and Helen were together, dealing with the other one.  She stood close enough that Jamie should have been able to swing and make contact, even with her being as fast as she was, but it wasn’t happening.  He tried, she stepped away, and she kicked him, hard enough that he stumbled into the storefront behind us.

Helen maneuvered to corner the woman, keeping one eye out to the side and behind her for any surprise or flank attacks, but the woman easily danced to one side, putting Jamie between herself and Helen, before stepping back a fraction to avoid a furtive slash.

Jamie and Helen were getting further from the rest of us as they tried to keep their distance from their assailant.  I wanted to shout something, a warning, but I couldn’t afford to take my attention off the one I’d just injured.

I adjusted my grip on the wires and blades, trying to make sure I was in a position to respond if she lunged for me, and probably failing.  I had to work to get one wire out of the webbing where it had bitten down between my index finger and thumb.

Blood ran down my hand and dripped from my fingertips as I gripped the ring.  I swiped it against the window, and the blonde woman in front of me lunged.  Again, I swung the tangle of wires and knives in her direction.

Too quick, for how slow she was on the approach.  I finished swinging the moment before she got close.

Her palm thrust out, slapping my forehead, driving my head back into the window with enough force that it cracked.  The effect on my vision was about the same as what they were probably experiencing when I scraped the glass.  Distortion, no strange colors or sights, but a momentary loss of the ability to put the pieces together.

She held my head against the broken edges of the window, gripping my head hard enough to bend it back, tilting my chin up.

Her other hand went up like she was going to slap me across the face, but I could see the blade, flat against her palm, held between two fingers.  It was my throat, not my face, that she intended to strike.

Efficient, almost surgical execution.

I kicked at her legs.  She was able to avoid the worst of it, pulling her legs back out of my way, while adding to the press of my head against glass, jagged shards like a half dozen individual knives cutting me.

Catcher acted once more.  Another swipe at the railing, fierce, this time swinging forward, simultaneously swiping at the three of the women who were surrounding him.  They would be trying to find an avenue to get past Catcher and attack Lillian and Mary.

It was a distraction, and I saw my attacker wince, but she didn’t let up the pressure on me.

Catcher hadn’t stopped moving, however.  He’d pulled another weapon from his coat.  The woman who held me released me, stepping back to preserve herself.

And my foot, which had been kicking at her, went up, the toe hooking under the front of her dress.  As she tried to back up and evade the incoming attack, I caught her.  She stumbled a little, I was hauled back and away from the window, feeling the glass slash me as I was hauled past it.

She slashed at the fabric to sever it and free herself, but the delay cost her a half second’s time and a moment of her attention.  Catcher’s weapon, akin to a bear-trap on a leash, slapped against the side of her face.  It bit deep.

She didn’t make a sound as he hauled on the cord.  She clutched blindly at the contraption, but the teeth had sunken in, and she didn’t have the leverage to remove it.  Blood welled out around the edges of the trap’s teeth, too slick for her to get a grip on the metal.

All but one of the women around us were backing off, now.  Helen had the other blonde in her grip, the two of them on the ground, Jamie stepping on the woman’s head, knives in hand, watching Helen’s back.  Catcher’s distraction had been well timed.

I could see how the women were watching the one in the bear trap.

I could feel it in my teeth, the harshness that cut through the humid air.  A sound I couldn’t quite perceive.  Different from what Catcher had described as a cacophony.

She’s screaming.

She was stumbling left, then right, hands scrabbling in a futile fashion, and she was utterly silent, but for the clack of the metal ring that was attached to the cord, banging against bloodstained steel.  She reached the limit of her movement, the teeth pulling against flesh, and her entire body arched and spasmed with pain.

“Helen,” Catcher said.

“Yes?  Is Mary okay?”

“No.  Finish fast,” Catcher said.

I swallowed hard.  Catcher’s ‘No’ hit me harder than I’d expected.

“Aw.  I never get to take my time.”

Catcher was silent, studying the enemy.

“Please, Helen,” I said.  “Next time, I promise.  But this is serious.  Do it for Mary?”

“I wasn’t going to say no,” Helen said.  “Move your foot, Jamie.”

Off to my left, Helen moved.  Cartilage and bone snapped and ground together as Helen strained, a torture rack in human form.  I imagined I could hear the silent scream from Helen’s victim as her arms were stretched out and to either side, like a bird.  Helen’s body shifted, bones standing out in strange ways against skin or the fabric of her clothes, a biological equivalent to a spring or mechanism being set, a trigger cocked.  Her hands bit deep enough into skin that I wondered if she was squeezing muscle aside to press against bone.  Flesh between fingers was bulging like it might pop.

Then Helen readjusted.  It was a sudden, violent movement, the twist of a constrictor snake seizing its prey all at once, contorting itself in knots in a sudden, spasmodic way.  Her body could move like that, but the body of the victim that was securely in her grip couldn’t.  The wet sounds and the crunch of bone and gristle against more bone and gristle seemed to go on forever.

Helen hadn’t done anything but twist and wrench, but she was still bloody as she picked herself up and off of her victim.  Her bones were still in weird places, like she had a feline or a lizard’s skeleton inside a little girl’s skin, the limbs too long, the shoulders oddly skewed.  She sagged under her own weight, her muscle structure not lending itself well to standing upright.  Slowly, piece by piece, she pulled herself back into a more normal configuration.

The ghosts were utterly still, standing a fair distance away.

Catcher’s captive grew ever more feeble, before sinking to her knees.  She hit ground more violently than Mary had, bear-trap first, a sharp impact that didn’t make her move or flinch at all.  Passed out.

Catcher used one hand to reel her in as he spoke, a sharp order cutting into the silence, “Stop talking.  Listen.”

Rain pattered down around us.  I chanced a look at Mary and Lillian.  Lillian was moving so frantically, and Mary wasn’t moving at all.

“If you want to pick this fight, we will win,” Catcher said.  “And the next time, Helen there will have the leeway to draw it out, to make it hurt-”

“Yay.”

“-And I will use some of my best tricks and tools, to make you wish you had her attention instead of mine.”

Helen gave Catcher an annoyed look.

“You hurt one of ours,” Catcher said.  “I’m being merciful, because I’m going to give you a chance to run.  Leave the area.  Go in any direction but that one.”

He pointed in the general direction of Percy.

“Don’t try to be clever, tr- I told you to stop talking.”

I could see the tension in his stance.  He looked around him, and as he did, I cocked my head to one side, to get his attention.  His eye fell on me as he finished reeling up the chain, the body dragged to his feet.  He stepped on her throat and hauled the bear-trap-ish thing up and away.  It pulled free, taking generous handfuls of flesh with it, and snapped the rest of the way closed.

He held his hand at his side in a very deliberate way.

“Don’t double back,” he said.  “Don’t try to trick us, or notify anyone.  If you’re good about this, if you-”

He stopped.  His finger twitched.

I scraped the blade across the glass, hard.  The women reacted.

Stop talking, I thought to myself.  Listen.

“Ahem,” Catcher said.  “If you’re good about this, I’ll offer the same chance to any of your sisters who get in our way, and give a quick death to those who can’t or won’t leave.”

The scene was still.  I felt the heat and the exhaustion of our exertion now more than I had during, even with the rain running down my hair and face.  A glance at my shoulder suggested I was losing a lot of blood, even considering that the water running through it all was making it seem like more.

I didn’t feel it, at least.

“Go,” Catcher said.

The women moved, each heading straight for the nearest piece of cover.

We collectively waited a full three seconds after they had disappeared before turning our attention to Lillian and Mary.

“You’re hurt,” Jamie told me, as he rushed to my side.

“Mary’s hurt,” I said.  “Lillian needs to focus on her.”

“I can devote some attention to you,” Jamie said.  “Because you look like you need something.”

We collectively made our way to Mary and Lillian.  Jamie grabbed some cloth and handed it to me, pressing it down against my scalp.  He gestured to Helen, who was probably the worst person present to have my damaged scalp firmly in her grip, and had her keep pressure on the wound.

Lillian looked like panic had overtaken her.  She was struggling, fumbling.

Jamie knelt down by Lillian, asking, “How is she?”

Lillian sounded like she was on the verge of tears, her voice wobbled, “She got stabbed right through the middle.  In the front and out the back.  Organs were perforated.  She’s not good, Jamie.”

“Fix her,” I said.

“I’m not- it’s not that easy, Sy.”

“It’s your job to keep us alive.  If you fail at this the first real time that’s in question, I’m not sure why we keep you around.”

She set her jaw.  It looked like she had tears in her eyes, now.

“Wow, Sy.”

“You have the ability.  But if you don’t have the capability, well…”

“You’re such a penis, Sy.”

“And you’re a good doctor,” I said.

“In training,” she said.

“Who has studied this garbage.”

“Believe it or not, Sy, I’m only fourteen, and I haven’t gotten around to actual surgery.  And I’m in the field, too, without an operating room or all the tools.  I’m thinking we should try transporting her to a clinic.  If we can get Dog to carry her, I think I can keep her going long enough.”

“Excuses,” I told her, “and cowardice.  Why go that route when you can be the surer thing?  I think you’re lying to yourself and to us, because you’re scared.”

“Of course I’m scared!” she said, her voice too high.

Mary’s chest wasn’t even rising and falling like normal, her breaths were so shallow.  Lillian stabbed Mary in the chest with a needle, depressing it.

Lil’s voice returned to a more normal level, “I’m being realistic.”

Mary’s breathing picked up as the injection took hold, though it still wasn’t great.

“You’re being a wuss.  You know what Gordon keeps telling me?” I asked her.  “Every time I lose a fight, which I do a lot?  You have to make a move, or the world will move against you.  Take action, be brave, and leave no doubt that you exist.  There’s too many people for any of us to fall into the background.  Above all, trust your instincts, because you’re better than you think.  You are better than you think, Lil, and I’m saying that as the person who was your biggest critic, back in the day.”

Her smile was a grim one.

I continued, “You’ve started fixing her up, you’ve patched up the holes, best I can figure it out, now stop making excuses and get to work, you wuss.  She’s supposed to be your best friend.”

“If you’re implying-”

“I’m implying!” I raised my voice.  “If you wimp out on this and you let Mary die, then I’m going to forgive you… eventually.  We all are.  Crap happens!  But you?  I know people and I know you, and I know that your fears drive and define you.  If you give up here, you will never find your way back from it to become a proper doctor, and you are never, ever, ever going to forgive yourself for it.”

Her face screwed up as she looked at me.  Fresh tears were squeezed out, running down her cheeks.  She raised her arms to try and wipe at the tears with her forearms, but they were streaked with blood.  She let her arms drop, before emptying a bottle of powder onto her hand and daubing it around the edge of the wound.   Her attention fixed on Mary.

Jamie offered a handkerchief, reaching out to dab at Lillian’s eyes and cheeks.

“Thank you, Jamie,” she said.  “Sy?  Remember when I called you a penis?  I was being kind.  You’re the runt of penises.”

“For the record, I agree with Sy,” Jamie said.  He knelt beside Lillian.  “Don’t focus on what you can’t do.  I know you know the stuff.  You’ve read up on it, even if you haven’t practiced it.”

Lillian shook her head.  Small, nervous shakes.

“There’s an acronym, to get you started.  The order in which you do this,” Jamie said.

Lillian’s nervousness seemed to drop away as shock took hold.  She looked at Jamie.

“You know the steps,” Jamie said.  “First step?  A.”

“Assess,” she said.  “Jamie, you’re-”

“Focus,” I told her, fully aware of the hypocrisy.  Catcher was standing over us, on guard, pole in hand.  I knew he was observing and listening.

I knew the gamble Jamie was making.

“Assess,” she said, again, focusing.

“You’ve assessed,” Jamie said.  “You know what the problem is.  Next.”

“Set.”

“You’ve laid the table as best as you’re going to get it,” Jamie said, his voice soft.  “If you need the tools, I’ll hand them to you.  You’re surgeon, I’m assistant.  Next step?”

“Entry.”

“You skipped a step,” Jamie said, without missing a beat.

“Keep.  Keep… I- I don’t think there’s-”

“You have the tools,” Jamie said.  “She needs blood to replace what she’s lost, and she’s going to need a lot.  You know our blood types.”

“My blood is poison,” I commented.

“I don’t even have blood, like you guys do,” Helen said.

“You can’t be my assistant and give blood,” Lillian said, but she was already prepping the tubing and needle.

“We’ll make it work,” Jamie said.  “Catcher is a universal donor.  Probably not wholly good for Mary, considering what he’s got running in his veins, but if he’s willing, I imagine his blood is better than not having enough blood.”

Lillian nodded.  She started the heavier, scarier work, Jamie talking her through it all, keeping her on track.

Even the best doctors had a hard time operating on loved ones.

It was a full ten minutes before Lillian didn’t need Jamie’s help, handing her bottles and the like.  Jamie stepped away, grabbing the stuff needed to fix my head.  He began tending to my scalp, while trying to keep the tubing that fed blood to Mary in place.

Timid, quiet Jamie, becoming a force in his own right.

Jamie managed to offer me a small smile as I studied him.  Lillian wasn’t panicking anymore.  I allowed myself to feel relieved.  It wasn’t spoken aloud, because nobody here wanted to jinx us like that.

Lillian’s work continued, with the tubing moving from Jamie to Catcher, so the man could supply some blood.  The minutes that followed were a little more tense, as Mary started to dip in condition.  More drugs and chemicals were injected into the tubing, to offset and counteract the cocktail that Catcher’s blood was dumping into her system.

A good forty minutes passed.  I watched Lillian more than I watched Mary, because the tension in her neck and shoulders was a better indicator than the bloody mess that Lillian was digging through.  Jamie’s handkerchief, previously used to wipe up Lillian’s tears, was now being used to swipe out the blood in the way.  Lillian’s hands were inside the wound as she worked blind, periodically asking Jamie for numbers, which he rattled off.

Catcher made no comment.

Jamie was working on the cuts to my hand and Lillian’s neck and shoulders were showing less and less tension when Mary finally stirred.

“Welcome back,” I said.

“Did we win?” she asked.

“Because that’s our priority, huh?” I asked.  “Yes.  Sort of.  We scared them off.”

“Okay,” she said.  “Help me up.”

“Um!” Lillian said.  “Not yet.”

“We’re going to lose him,” Mary said.

“You’ve been lying there for an hour while Lillian’s been fixing you.  Another five or ten minutes won’t hurt.”

Mary obediently let her head down to rest on the hard surface of the road.

“Do you want painkiller?” Lillian asked.

“Would it mess up my perception, if we run into Percy?” Mary asked.

“You really need to get your priorities straight,” I said.  “You almost died.”

“I agree with Sy.  For once,” Lillian said.  “You shouldn’t be running after Percy.”

I stuck the toe of my foot out to poke Lillian in the butt cheek.  She gave me an offended look.

And Mary said Lillian liked being teased?  Hmph.

“I don’t want to let him go,” Mary said.

It was a weird phrasing, one that could be taken two ways.  I remained silent.

“I believe Dog and Gordon are with the man,” Catcher said.  “I don’t know the context, but it’s the only reason they wouldn’t have caught up with us already.”

“With him in a good way or a bad way?” Helen asked.

“It wouldn’t be a bad way,” Catcher said.

“They could be dead,” I said.  Death was on my mind, with Mary’s close call.

Catcher turned his head to give me a sharp look.

“Or not,” I said.  “Scratch that, ignore me.”

“I trust Dog.  You should trust Gordon.”

“Okay,” I said.  Too chipper a response.  It came off as false, which it was.  I envied Catcher his ability to trust his partner as absolutely as he did.

“If he’s there, and Dog and Gordon are with him, then no painkillers,” Mary said.

Or should I have pitied him?  Did he really have no choice in the matter?  Was doubt dangerous enough that it could cost them at a critical moment?

Lillian finished.  She leaned back, and Mary reached down to pull her shirt down.  The expression in her face suggested she was momentarily regretting the lack of painkillers.

“Now can I stand?” she asked.

“Yes,” Lillian said.  “You are going to need a proper look from a doctor.”

“After.  We meet up with the others first,” Mary said.

I didn’t let it show, but a part of me recoiled at the re-emergence of this stitched-like Mary, so fixated on one thing, so detached.  That it came when she was weak, wobbly, and her defenses stripped away was concerning.

Catcher and Jamie helped Mary to stand.  She pulled her clothing back into order, picking for a moment at the back of her dress, which was soaked through with blood, from the shoulderblades to mid-calf.  She looked annoyed.

My attention fell on Lillian, who was still kneeling by the patch of road that had Mary’s blood soaked into it.

I reached down and gave Lillian a pat on the head.  “That’s a good doctor.  Who’s a good girl?”

Lillian rolled her eyes, tried to stand, and I held her down.

“You’re a good girl, yes you are!” I cooed.

“I have sharp tools, Sy, and I’m right at eye level to stab you where it hurts.”

“That’s the fifth time today you’ve made reference to that part of Sy,” Jamie said.

“Fifth?” I asked, intrigued.  I shifted position to better keep my hand on Lillian’s head, keeping her from standing.  “Do tell.”

“Ah, no.  Some of that was said when you were out of earshot.  It would be telling.”

“Aw,” I said.

Now Lillian was turning pink, which was fun.  Jamie smiled.

“Let me up, Sy,” Lillian said, flushed.

“Say please.”

“Is this worth the risk of being stabbed?”

“It totally is.  Say please.”

“Please.”

“Now say you’re the best little doctor in all of Radham.”

“I am the best doctor-”

“Little doctor.”

She reached for a scalpel that lay on the street, I stepped on it before she could pick it up.

“I am the best doctor in all of Radham,” she said.  “That’s all you get from me.”

I let her go.  “So long as you admit it.”

Her face was even pinker as I let her up.  I swiftly backed away before she could kick me.  I wasn’t sure, but I thought she might be smiling as she picked up the tools.

Mission accomplished.

Now for the true task at hand.

We didn’t move very fast.  Mary probably did need the painkiller, but was too proud to admit it, and Catcher’s legs were feeling the pain from where they’d been slashed.  Both he and Jamie had given a generous amount of blood.  Lillian and I helped a wobbly Jamie and Mary, while Catcher used his weapon as a staff to help keep himself steady.

Our destination was three streets down, and we didn’t see one of the ghosts en route.

Catcher pushed open the doors.

Glass tanks lined the walls of what had once been a storehouse.  The glass was broken, the bodies within cast to the ground, not yet fully formed.  Fine, fishlike spears of bone riddled the interiors of each body, almost hair-thin.

Gordon and Catcher were with three children.  I recognized the girl who had been taken earlier in the day, swaddled in a blanket, her hair wet.  It wasn’t enough children.  My eyes fell on the bodies from the tanks.

Material.

This would be all we could recover.  The rest of the children were gone.

“Everything okay?” Gordon asked.

“Took a hit, Lillian had to patch Mary up,” I said.

Mary visibly rankled at that.  To be so close to home, in a matter of speaking, and have her called out on a failure… a mistake on my part.

As we drew closer, I could see around a desk.  A smear of blood.  At the base of the wall, Percy was propped up.  One arm and both legs broken.

“Ended up charging through.  Took him down, broke the vats, the ghosts put up a brief fight, then called for a retreat,” Gordon explained, one hand going out to pat Dog’s side.  Dog nodded slowly.

“The retreat part might have been related to us,” I said.  “Hard to say.  We’re going to have to hunt them down.  But hey, you got Percy!”

“Ah,” Gordon said, and he sounded a little crestfallen, his expression falling as well.  He looked over at the man.  “About that.”

Mary crossed the distance.  She approached the man, and stopped as he turned his head to look at her.

“No,” she said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “I’m sorry.”

It was an empty look, devoid of recognition.

“Best Dog and I can figure,” Gordon said, “If you’re going to run two or five or ten different matching projects all in different cities, you can’t do it yourself.  You need one clone to oversee the growth of the rest.  And if you’re going to go that far-”

Mary’s knees gave out.  She sank slowly to the ground, kneeling ten feet in front of Percy.

“You might as well clone yourself?” I asked.

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.9

The Percy before us was a younger version.  If I had to guess, features had developed differently.  He didn’t wear a lab coat, and his clothes were utilitarian – a shirt with buttons, left half-unbuttoned, and slacks.  He was barefoot.  Beating the heat as best as he could manage.

Dog had positioned himself so his body was between the small children Gordon had rescued and the worst of the gore and death.  Not that it mattered.  They were unconscious, by the look of things.  Helen had a spring in her step as she approached them.

She would do fine as a babysitter, watching over them in case they roused.  It was good that she had something to do while we mulled this over.

As for myself, I walked up to Mary’s side, before dropping down to sit on my heels, bringing myself more to her level.  I didn’t touch or prod her.

“Can he talk?” I asked.

“Yes,” Gordon said.

The remainder of the Lambs gathered in a half-circle around Percy.

“Is he dangerous?” Lillian asked.

“Not really,” Gordon said.  “Dog had me watch him while breaking the vats, the Percy tried to fight me, I beat him.  He tried to run, we broke his legs.  Well, that was mostly Dog, but I got us started.  The moment Dog turned his back, the Percy crawled for a weapon under the table, we broke one of his arms.  I think he got the message.”

“Can I approach?” Lillian asked.

“I frisked him, I don’t see a problem,” Gordon said.

“Don’t have many supplies,” she said.  “But we can at least patch him up.  We were supposed to have one captive, right?”

She paused to roll her skirt up at the waist, until she could kneel on the bloodstained floor.  It didn’t matter.  She was already a mess from dealing with Mary.  Still, appearances had to be observed.

I looked at Mary, who wasn’t really moving.  Her eyes were focused on something I couldn’t see, making little movements as if she was following thoughts more than the current goings-on.

“How many of you are there?” I asked Percy.

He remained silent.

“Yeah, I don’t think you’ll get very far.  He’s a tough nut to crack,” Gordon said.  He was still leaning against the wall, a bit to the Percy’s right, arms folded.  “Pain doesn’t hurt him.  He doesn’t care that much about death and dying.”

“No self-preservation?” I asked.

“Not enough to matter,” Gordon said.  “He lives for the mission.”

I rose from my crouching position, and began to explore the surroundings.  It was a storehouse, and as best as I could judge, there was the big open space we stood in now, with us and the little lab at one and vats lining the path to the door.  The space between vats had been kept clear, once.  Now it held corpses.  Three doors led to side rooms.

“Mary,” I said.

She stirred, twisting to look at me.

I pointed at the open space.  “Training yard?”

“Probably.”

“Gordon says he doesn’t know how to fight.  How do they learn?”

“Percy didn’t know more than what a fencing hobby taught him, and he taught me a lot.  He pit us against one another.  If we did well, we got praised.  If we could teach a form or a technique to the others, we got rewards.”

“And you were good at that,” I said, without looking at Mary.

“Yes.”

I picked my way over the bodies until I found one that was roughly halfway intact.  I moved the head until it faced me, examining it.  I could see the exposed spines, and I could prod the now-bruised, swollen intact flesh to feel them beneath.  Running my finger one way, it was smooth.  The other way, I could feel the rasp, like brushing against stubble, only sharper.

It was hard not to draw the connection between this and Mauer’s creature.

“The clone of Percy there is conducting the role you were promised you’d have.  Looking after the next generation.  Training them, organizing them, looking after their growth.”

I did look at Mary.  She’d stood and turned around.  Her shoulders were drawn together.  She replied with only a word, “Yes.”

“You would have done better than this guy did,” I said.

Her eyebrows twitched.  Her response wasn’t another rote ‘yes’, this time.  I got surprised silence instead.

Lillian was saying something to Gordon, who was dividing his attention between her and my conversation with Mary.  Jamie was at the desk in the lab, looking over notes and papers.

“Fourteen vats,” I remarked.

“Academy’s vats,” Helen said.

“You sure?” I asked.

“I’m with Helen on this,” Jamie said, still poring over papers.  “They match what we use.”

Helen nodded.

I frowned, turning to take in the space.  “Fourteen clones per generation, one generation every… who knows how long.  Every few months?”

“Something like that,” Mary said.  “I joined the Lambs a year and some months ago.  He would have had to set this up, start it growing, then release them, and train them while starting the next batch.”

“Crap,” I said.  I looked around.  “Fourteen vats here.  He would have had to grow his Percies.  Probably a whole batch, with one ghost to act as a bodyguard for each?  And he’d used himself because…”

I searched for an explanation and floundered.

“Ego,” Mary said.  “Because he needed a source material with a high native intelligence.”

“But it’s still different,” I observed.  “You noticed a clear difference that wasn’t just a change in appearance or effective age.”

“Mannerisms, behavior, the way he holds himself… completely different person.”

I nodded.

It was disconcerting to be having this conversation, cajoling Mary in this way, this department, when I’d spent the first few months around her trying to create a distance between her and Percy.

“I don’t like how these numbers are adding up,” I said.  “Is anyone else feeling it?”

“It’s fast,” Gordon said.  “Very fast, to have clones created, up and running.  I mean, they’re mostly nonverbal, aside from the ability to run through scripts.”

“Didn’t run into that,” I said.

“We did,” he said.  “There are elements missing, but this is a scary amount of progress for, what, months?”

“Months,” I said.  I was starting to see the bigger picture.  I moved quickly between the bodies, turning them over, turning heads, looking for hair color, body type, and other traits.

I found what I was looking for, unfortunately.  A Percy, malformed, with more of the spines inside him.  His chest had only partially developed, spines sticking out, leaving him looking odd at best, horrific at worst.

“Exponential growth,” I said.  “One generation every few months, each one with a Percy that can study and learn from his creator, then go off to start a new cell.”

“Less trained than what he did with us,” Mary said, “But with a great deal of inherent ability, thanks to their echolocation.”

“Which seems pretty heavily inspired by Mauer’s creature,” I remarked.  I snapped my fingers twice, trying to place it-

“Whiskers,” Jamie supplied.

“Thank you,” I said.  “Fail to find and uproot every single cell, and the problem just reasserts itself within the year.  All with the real Percy in the background, patching up problems with the system, revising his work, running interference, organizing the organizers.  Apparently with the cooperation of others.  Mauer included.  Our enemies are banding together.”

We took in the implications, sharing looks, Jamie looking up from his papers, Lillian from the Percy, Gordon, Dog and Catcher gathered against the far wall, and the rest of us amid the carnage of the shattered vats.

Gordon broke the silence, “Dog and I were discussing it while we waited for you.”

“Dog can’t talk,” I said.

Dog huffed.

“He talks well enough.  What we’re thinking is this isn’t as bad as it could be.”

“It’s pretty damn bad, Gordon,” I said.

“It has the potential to be.  But it’s not there yet.  Even if we assume the quick timeline, they’re only just getting started.”

“Only just?” Mary said.  “If we look at the scale, here, it could be fifteen cells in fifteen cities.”

“Hell of a lot better than two hundred,” Gordon said.

“He wouldn’t aim for two hundred,” Mary said.  “Too much exposure, too hard to communicate, too easy for one to get found out and for everything to crumble.  Better to aim for fifty.  Something in that neighborhood is still very hard to wipe out, even with the Academy’s coordinated resources.”

Gordon nodded.  “That makes sense.  Fold the extras into the existing cells for training and reinforcement?”

“Yes.  Until a cell reaches a certain size.  When they do, have them achieve something.  Take out key players, go on the offense,” Mary said.

Gordon had joined the conversation, and it was mostly bouncing between him and Mary now.  I was content to let it happen, the two of them going at it, getting into the details and figuring out implications.  I turned away, picking my way past glass and blood to access the first of the doors.

Bunk beds, not true bunk beds, but crude ones.  Fifteen in one large room, the ‘beds’ simply cloths hooked to posts with metal rings.  I peeked, and I climbed up one post to check the upper levels, but I didn’t find much.  A twist of dead flowers, a trio of small quartz crystals, a stuffed animal, some marbles.

I hopped down.  The others were still talking.

“Food.  Biomass,” Lillian was saying.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Bottlenecks,” Gordon said.  “Lillian was saying growth wouldn’t be boundless, not forever.  There are factors that control how much they can expand.  They need weapons-”

He indicated Mary.

“They need the vats, and they need biomass.”

I nodded.  I approached the second door and pushed it open.  I wrinkled my nose at the smell.  I was reminded of compost and dying flesh.  The room was unlit, but the shelves on either side were stacked with bottles of varying contents and bags much like the bags that would hold flour.  Food, supplies, and probably formula to fill the vats with.  In the dead center was the carriage with its four stitched horses.  Wires ran down the wooden shelves to the horses, clipped onto the bolts at the horses’ shoulders.  If and when there was a storm, they’d receive their power.

Catcher spoke, “When you talk about biomass, are you thinking of the captured children?”

“In part,” Lillian said.  “But there would have to be more.”

“There is more,” I said.  “Food here.”

“He was making the purchases himself, I think,” Jamie said.

I traced my way through the rest of the building, trying to draw a complete mental picture of how they operated.

“Communication,” Jamie said.  “Not a bottleneck, but it’s something they were apparently very focused on.  The language the creations devised between themselves, ”

Of course Jamie would think of communication.  He’d kept a thumb on the enemy’s line of communication for a while back in Whitney.  His secondary focus throughout the war had been on trying to figure out what the enemy was saying and how.

“Makes sense,” Gordon said.  “It’s their biggest vulnerability.”

“Any signs of anything?” I asked Jamie.  “On that desk over there?”

He shook his head.

“Nothing?”

“Pens, paper, scrips from purchases of everything from clothes to food to firewood, scripts for the ghosts.  Conversation practice, selling themselves, logs on growth, it doesn’t sound like he expected every single one of the clones in this batch to make it.”

“That’s another upside,” Gordon said.

“Always looking on the bright side of life, Gordon?” I asked.

“Trying,” he said.

With that word and the faintly strained tone he’d used, my head turned.  I studied him in more depth, this time around.

He hadn’t budged from where he stood.  He was hiding that he was in bad shape, and it had nothing to do with what the ghosts had done.  I met his eyes, and it was clear he knew I’d realized.  His expression was stoic as he stared me down.

I turned away, heading for the third door.  Jamie had mentioned firewood, and the clones had needed to eat.

The interior of the third room was indeed a kitchen, with a small personal area for the Percy, complete with room for washing in the corner and an Academy uniform hanging above, dripping into the shallow basket.  There was a wood stove, and food sat here and there.  The window was open, the curtains billowing, water gathering on the sloped windowsill and dripping outdoors.

I put out a hand.  The stove was hot.

Lunchtime had been a bit ago.  Gordon and Shipman had had their meal, we’d set out.  It was later in the day, but it wasn’t quite suppertime, and why start up the oven so early, without even having food out to cook?

“Gordon,” I said.  I had to raise my voice to be heard in the next room.

“Yes?”

“When you came in, what was the Percy doing?”

“Not sure.  We were a little preoccupied.”

I searched for tools, found a poker with a bend at the tip, and used it to turn the key that unlatched the door of the stove.  Warm air and ash billowed out as the heat escaped into the only-slightly-cooler kitchen.  They hadn’t shoveled out all of the ash in recent memory.

“The ghosts were waiting for you?” I asked.

“Only a couple.  The rest were on our heels.”

They sensed him.  They stood their ground, while Percy did what?

Busied himself with the stove?

I stuck the poker into the stove, raking it through the ash and the logs.  I saw flakes that suggested paper and proved absolutely nothing, and, after a little bit more digging, moving one log, I hooked onto a thin bit of wood that the log’s weight had squashed.

That piece of wood was connected to another piece of wood, and another, with fine nails glowing pink from heat.  The fire had burned most of everything, leaving only a portion of a circular base, a hinge, and fine constructions of wood.  Decorative more than anything, with space between.

I pulled it free, closing my eyes and turning my face away, and walked into the other room, holding it out in front of me.  I passed Helen and the children.

“…scattered, passing on messages,” Jamie was saying.

“The ghosts we released?” I asked.

“Yeah.  They’ll split up, notify other cells.  Even if we manage to track one, which we probably can’t, we’d find another cell.  What’s that?”

“My counter-theory to your thoughts on how the other cells are getting their intel and warnings,” I told him.  I waved it in front of everyone.  “Any guesses?”

“Birdcage,” Gordon said, a half-second before Mary and Helen said it simultaneously.

“Birdcage,” Jamie said, late, probably to feel included.

“You guys take all of the fun out of guessing games,” I told them.

“He burned the evidence?” Jamie asked.

“He did,” I said.  “I think he burned paper, too, so don’t strain yourself.  Whatever you’re looking for, it’s gone.”

Jamie sighed.  He straightened from where he’d been leaning over the papers.

“Birdcage… messenger birds?” Gordon asked.

“I imagine so,” I said.  “Not a big birdcage, so we’d have to rake the coals to see if there are any more hinges from other cages.  Otherwise, it’s just the one.  You didn’t happen to see a whole flock of birds take off around the time you approached?”

Gordon and Dog exchanged a glance.  They shook their heads in unison.

“Any birds at all?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Gordon said.  “It wasn’t really what we were focusing on.”

“Would be handy if you noted the direction,” I said.  “What’s that they say about messenger birds?  It’s not that they’re clever enough to find their way to their destination every single time…”

“They’re dumb because they only know how to fly one place.  Home,” Jamie finished for me.

“Would be nice to know where ‘home’ is,” Mary said.  “If Percy’s coordinating, the birds would be flying straight to him.”

“You’re making too many assumptions,” Gordon said.  “There are more complex birds.  Ones for war, with strange flying patterns, or more complex flight paths for going between multiple destinations.  The Academy uses them.”

The Academy uses them, I thought.

I looked at the vats.  I thought about the carriages.  The uniforms.

I turned my attention to Mary.

“Our puppeteer sure likes co-opting the enemy’s system, doesn’t he?”

“What are you getting at?” she asked me.

“He’s using Academy vats.  How did he get them?”

“Are you accusing me?”

“No,” I said.  “No, no, no.  I’m asking you, because you have the best insight into who Percy is and how he thinks.  He’s using Academy uniforms, he’s using a convincing carriage of Academy make.  The mice back in the shims thought it was the Academy doing all of this.  What if it was?  In the chaos and confusion of the war, how many people are really checking and double-checking the books, making sure everything adds up and nothing’s going missing.”

“A mole,” Jamie said.

I held up the burned birdcage.  “A little birdy.”

Gordon straightened, stepping away from the wall.

Dog growled at the sudden movement.  Gordon paused.

“Gordon?” Mary asked.  She’d approached the rest of us, stepping away from the sea of dead clones.

“It’s okay,” he said.

I looked at Catcher, and thought about him telling me about how I needed to put trust in Gordon.

“If he says it’s okay, it’s okay,” I said.

Gordon gave me a smile.

“But-” Mary started.

“It’s not really okay,” Gordon said.  “But it’s not getting better and it hasn’t been getting worse while I’ve been sitting around here.  Best thing I can do is get to the Academy.”

“What is it?” Lillian asked.

“Only my heart.  Dog doesn’t like the sound of how it’s beating, and I gotta say I don’t love how it feels there in my chest.  Something stopped working right when Dog and I were running around,” Gordon said.  He smiled a little.  “No big, but I think I’ll have to ask for my team to stop whatever they’re doing and give me my appointment sooner than later.”

“You think?” I asked, at the same time Mary gave him an incredulous, “No big?”

“Nothing we can do about it here,” he said.  “I thought I’d tell you I had to go to the Academy after you figured out where you were going, and I could brief Hayle while you went gallivanting off, but since we’re all going to the Academy anyway, let’s get going?”

I didn’t miss the faintest hint of anxiety in his tone, however well he was working to hide it.

“Let’s,” I said.

☙

Dog was, as it happened, very useful when it came to forging a way through busy streets.  People and horses were daunted by him, and a way naturally cleared as the ghost’s carriage took us to the Academy.  Catcher rode on top with Mary, the others were in the back with the three kids, and Jamie and I were the designated lookouts, standing on a rail at the back, gripping the rail that ran around the top.

The ghosts were nowhere to be seen.  That was, perhaps, the entire point of them, to be evasive and subtle, but Jamie had good eyes, and I could be fairly alert when I focused on the task, and it didn’t make sense that they would be this hard to find.

We passed the Lambsbridge Orphanage and started up the incline to the Academy itself.

I stared at Mary’s bloodstained back.  Her clothing was all stiff where the blood had dried on, and Lillian had ripped it at the side to have more room to work with.  I could see the side of Mary’s stomach, painted in a mottling of blood.

“What are you thinking?” Jamie murmured.

“A lot of things.  It’s how I work.”

“Believe me, I know how you work,” he said.  “I know you’re out here because you don’t want to be in there.  You’re avoiding Gordon and you’re dodging the subject with indirect answers like that.”

“Oh man, Jamie, no.  You sound like me.  Don’t do that to yourself.”

He smiled.  “For most of the day, you’ve had me working to emulate the other Lambs.  You, mostly.”

“We’ve ruined you,” I said.

“Probably.  But what are you thinking?”

“You already asked that.”

“Are you afraid to tell me?”

I sighed.

“You don’t have to.  I know you care about us.  You look after us more than you like to admit.  Keep the balance, keep confidences, push us when we need pushing.  But when it comes to you… well, I see it as my responsibility to ask you if you’re okay.”

“I’m fine,” I said, breezily.

“You’re fine as long as the rest of us are fine.  But we’ve gone without appointments for a stretch longer than normal.  Things that were close to breaking down are breaking down, and it’s a little scary to see all at once.  You’re struggling, Gordon’s struggling.”

“Mary getting hurt had nothing to do with appointments.”

“But she got hurt,” Jamie said.  “And maybe you’re wondering if she would’ve gotten hurt if we were all in top form?”

“Now I am.”

“Sy,” Jamie said.  “If something happens, today, tomorrow, in a week, a month, or a year…”

“When,” I corrected.  Odd to be the one correcting Jamie.  “When, not if.”

“When.  Are you going to be okay?”

“I’ve been bracing myself for this for years now.  I’ve known the estimated dates since before we had Mary.  I’ve mourned and made the most of my time with everyone.  I’m fine.  Really.  But I’m not sure the group is.”

Jamie was quiet.  He didn’t look at me, still focused on his job, studying the surroundings, searching for ghosts in daylight.

I swallowed.  “Gordon was ready to leave, you know.  Back with Fray?”

“Things have changed since then.”

“He’s always been more independent than the rest of us.  If something happens, if the group cohesion breaks down, if there are hurt feelings, I really truly believe we might see Gordon break away.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not disagreeing with me.”

“I don’t disagree.”

I paused, taking that in.

“Mary,” I said, lowering my voice so I could be sure Mary wouldn’t hear.  “With the way things stand now-“

“With Percy.  Yeah.”

“Yeah,” I said.  Enough said.  “And Helen?”

“Helen?”

“I just… I have this horrible image in my head about the way things are flowing.”

“Explain?  I don’t think about things the way you do.”

“She’s loyal to Ibott.  And Ibott is loyal to his aspirations, and Hayle probably told Ibott that if the man wanted an in with the nobility, working on something like Helen would be that in, and now the stars have aligned and Ibott is greedy and…”

“…I see where you’re going.  Nothing concrete.”

“Nothing concrete, no.”

“But it’s believable.”

I nodded.  I felt both relieved and horrified to speak my fears aloud and have them validated.

“And there’s Lillian,” Jamie said.

“I don’t see her running off, but I- I don’t see her staying?” I said.  “I know it doesn’t make sense.”

“I can see both,” Jamie said.  “It depends what happens.”

I heaved out another sigh.

“You’ll feel better after an appointment,” he said.

“I’ll feel tons worse after an appointment.  Don’t lie to me.”

“And after that, you’ll feel better,” he clarified.

“I hope so.”

The side door opened.  The person within waited until we passed another cart going the opposite way, one that held an animal inside, then opened the door.  It was Lillian.

She gave me a fleeting smile before working her way along the side of the carriage, stepping up onto the cover above the wheel so she was beside Mary.

Jamie and I were quiet as we watched Lillian poke and prod.  She said something to the effect of, “-want to do a last-minute check in case someone grades my work.”

Mary patiently sat through Lillian’s ministrations.  She glanced back at us, and rolled her eyes, before a bump in the road made her have to reach out to catch her balance, and grab for Lil’s shoulder, to make sure Lillian didn’t bounce off.

We were at the last leg.  The group at the gate obediently got out of the way as Dog approached.  They remembered last time.  It put a smile on my face.

Lillian hopped down to the step beneath the door, then crossed back to Jamie and I, where we stood on the rear end of the carriage, looking over the top.

“Hi,” I said.

“I wanted to thank you, Jamie.  For backing me up.  I think I did okay, and I wouldn’t have without you.”

“You know it didn’t happen like that,” Jamie said.

“If you’re talking about me having it in me all along, Jamie, I have to tell you you’re full of horse-“

“No,” I cut her off.  “Jamie didn’t help you.”

“He-“

“You know what happens if they find out he knows this much,” I said, and my tone was grim.  “The project gets canceled.  Or very heavily revised.”

“I know that.  I’m not going to say.”

“Or hint,” I said, “Or thank Jamie, or mention it ever again.  Because it didn’t happen.  It won’t ever happen again.  And if you happen to imagine something like that happening again, in dire circumstances?”

“I’m only imagining it,” she said.

Jamie nodded.

“Good girl,” I said, my voice quiet.  “And Catcher, Dog?  I know your hearing is good enough to have overheard everything.  I’m trusting you two to keep mum.”

There was no reaction from either.

“I didn’t even imagine they were listening in,” Lillian said, quiet.

“They’re good guys,” I said.  “Others aren’t.  Be careful.”

She nodded.  She turned to go back inside the carriage, then stopped and turned back our way.  “When Mary was fading out, she was babbling.”

I nodded.

“You had your chance?  She said that to you.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

There was a long silence.  We passed under the gate.

“Okay then.  I feel like I’m always one step behind,” she said.

“Sy told you something before you performed the surgery on Mary,” Jamie said.  “You have to be proactive.  Step up and find the courage.  Pay attention to the sentiment.  You’ll always regret what you don’t do more than what you do.”

“Technically Gordon said that.”

“You said it too.  It’s good advice.  What I’m getting at is, if you want something, fight for it.  If you’re falling behind, work hard and catch up.  If you want to say something, then say it.  But don’t waver.”

“It’s not that easy,” Lillian said.

“Of course not.  It’s hard,” Jamie said.  “But things worth having are worth the work, don’t you think?”

He gave me a look.  I thought about how we’d talked about group cohesion.

Apt.

“Yeah, Jamie,” Lillian said.  “I think I understand what you’re saying.  I’m going to think on it.”

“Okay,” he said.

It took her a few seconds to maneuver her way into the carriage without letting the door swing out to hit a bystander on the crowded street.

“She is a bit of a scaredy cat, isn’t she?” Jamie asked.

“I really need an appointment, because I’m not sure I got any of that,” I said.

“She was asking about you and Mary.”

“Uh huh.  I got that much.”

“And Lillian was trying to work up the courage to ask you about you and Lillian.”

“Alright,” I said.  “I don’t know if it’s really that important.  We have bigger things to focus on.”

“You have things you’re focusing on.  You’re worried about the group.  You’re worried everyone around you will fall apart if and when something happens.  But this is important to her,” he said, voice firm.  “You can’t string her along forever.”

“I’m not stringing anyone along.  I’m not even sure there’s a string,” I said.  Images of Mary and the razor wires and knives in that little space under the stairs flew through my mind.  “Or there is, I- I’m not sure.  I don’t think it’s fair to ask me to be sure one way or the other when I haven’t even figured anything out.”

“Maybe not,” Jamie said.  He leaned forward, until his chin rested on the hands that gripped the bar at the top of the carriage.  “I trust you, Sy.  You’re smart enough to know when you’ve figured it out, and I hope you’re kind enough to let us know as soon as you do.”

I frowned.

“Us?” I asked.

Jamie’s eyebrows went up over his spectacles.

“You said us, not her.  Not them.  Am I reading too much into it?”

“No,” Jamie said.  “Us is right.  You’ve been spared the Gordon infatuation, he’s very much into girls, as his fling with Shipman suggests.  You’ve been spared the horrors of having Helen be attracted to you.”

He gave me an impish look, smiling, as if expecting me to laugh along with him.  My expression was still.  I saw the expression fade.

Dead serious, Jamie continued, “But half the Lambs have figured out what Gordon didn’t.  Or maybe Gordon did figure it out and that’s why he broke it off with Shipman.  We can’t expect any non-Lamb to really connect with us.  I don’t think it works.  They can’t keep up, they can’t draw close enough.  They don’t understand.  And with only six of us, it’s a pretty narrow pool to pick from.”

“Jamie, no,” I said.  “No.“

He nodded.  “I thought as much.”

“I like girls.  I am very sure I like girls.”

“I know.  I knew, before I even said any of this.  But I thought I’d take the same advice I just gave Lillian.  Thirdhand as it might be.  I can hardly call her a scaredy cat if I’m keeping my own mouth shut.”

He was being so cavalier about it.

I had a lump in my throat.

“They can fix that, you know,” I said.

Jamie’s smile was a sad one.  “No need.  I’m okay.”

“But-“

“Sy.”

The word was firm enough to shut me up.

The moment the carriage started slowing down, Jamie was gone, hopping off the back of the carriage, to walk on the road below.

The Duke was waiting, with Ibott beside him.

I put it all out of my mind.  I couldn’t afford distractions.

I had to focus.

We had an errant little birdy within the Academy.  Our mole, letting supplies into the hand of the enemy, taking a hand, partial or in full, of our communications, and co-opting those same communications to serve the enemy.  It was galling.

I was legitimately spooked at the thought of what the Duke would be like if he was angry.

I let my gaze fall on Jamie before I hopped down to walk around the other side of the carriage.

You were supposed to be the one I didn’t have to worry about, I thought.

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.10

Our approach as a group was somewhat staggered, as Lambs came in ones and twos to kneel before the Duke.  Jamie first, then me a few seconds later, then Helen and Lillian as a pair, Gordon and Mary, with Gordon helping Mary ease down to her knees as he knelt himself.  Dog didn’t kneel, but there were anatomical issues there. He bowed his head instead.

“Stand,” the Duke said.

We stood.

“I heard you left as a group.  I asked to be notified the moment you were seen returning,” the Duke said.  “Dog, Catcher, it is nice to put faces to the names.  Faces that aren’t from medical sketches, at least.  From the injuries, I assume you found something out?  Gordon, speak.”

“Lord, there are at least twelve of the enhanced clones in the city.  We found their base of operations with Catcher’s help.  We couldn’t run down the clones, but we killed three and captured a different type of clone.  Percy’s.  They’re in the rear hatch of the carriage.  Three rescued children are within the carriage itself.”

The Duke indicated the carriage with a hand.  Soldiers and one doctor approached it.  “Continue.”

“He’s distributed the clones to several cities or several points in this city, my lord, with his own clones producing further generations.  They’re taking a viral approach.  Occupying our cities, proliferating within, then spreading.”

The Duke remained very quiet for a moment.  Not a single person present dared speak.  Many of the people on the road around the Academy campus were keeping their heads down, sharply aware of the Duke’s presence.  People a third of the way across the Academy grounds probably sensed the shift in tempo and focus, all rippling from this one location.

“How severe a problem do you believe it is?” the Duke asked.

“At this stage, it might be manageable, my lord.  They won’t have spread very far in the last year.  They might only be working on the second generation now, but that could mean ten to twenty sites.  Individually, they’re dangerous, they have incredible amounts of spatial awareness and tracking ability.  They are training themselves in combat, but their ability isn’t high.  Not yet.  They rely more on their natural ability, their environment, and picking the place and time of their attacks to win.”

“This ability?”  The Duke cut in.

“Lord, we think it’s echolocation, derived from the escaped experiment we named ‘Whiskers’.”

“I know the one you’re talking about,” the Duke said.

I was a little bit surprised at that.  I was a little more concerned that Gordon hadn’t had the chance to finish speaking.

He watched as people emerged from the carriage.  Stitched soldiers carried one corpse each, and two more held the captive.   High quality stitched.  Elite guard?

My eye passed over Jamie as it turned forward again.  He was looking at me.

I felt uncomfortable.  It was a very hard uncomfortable to put my finger on and identify.  I felt angry more than anything.

Anger was a bad emotion here, so close to the Duke.

The silence lingered as the Duke seemed to take it in.  Nobody was permitted to speak without permission, and there was more to say.  It felt uncomfortable, having the things left unsaid hanging over our heads.

I could tell how the conversation was going to go.  I could play it through in my head, muddy as it was, and I could see several ways it could go poorly.  We weren’t used to being around the nobility, and Gordon had made a tactical error.  He hadn’t divulged the most critical, dangerous information, and now he wouldn’t get a chance to do it without being rude.  Being rude could have repercussions.

“This is effective work,” the Duke said.  “I’ll allot you some time to rest and heal before assigning you another job.”

“Thank you, my lord,” Gordon said.

“My lord,” I said, quickly.  I spoke at the same time I raised my eyes and saw the ruling body of Radham opening his mouth to speak.

“Sylvester,” he said.  His tone had the faintest hint of danger as he said, “You seem eager to speak.  Don’t waste our time.”

“Lord Duke, there’s another facet to this that needs mention.  They were using Academy resources.  Vats, chemicals, uniforms, this carriage, chemicals, and very possibly communication.”

“Communication?”

“My lord, it’s only speculation, but they were using birds.  They tried to burn the cage and their papers as Dog and Gordon made their approach.  I only recovered remains of the cage.  There are no guarantees, but-”

“Enough.”

I couldn’t meet his eyes, but I was aware of how he was moving and how he stood.  He seemed to assert himself, straightening.  He began pacing.

Having the Duke pacing before us was nerve-wracking.  He was moving his hand, as if to punctuate thoughts he wasn’t sharing with us.

“Your captive,” he said.  “The clone of Percy.  Will he respond to interrogation?”

“He didn’t for us, my lord,” Gordon said.

It was going out on a limb, to speak when I had the Duke’s attention.  Had Gordon simply let me continue to hold the conversation, he faced a heck of a lot less risk.  Now we risked sharing it, either as a pair or all of the Lambs together.

“But he can speak?  He’s capable of reacting to cues?”

“Yes, my lord,” Gordon said.

“Then there is almost certainly a way,” the Duke said.  He turned to one of his doctors, gesturing with one hand.  The man departed.  The Duke spoke again when the man was only a few steps away.  “Dobson?”

“My lord?”  The doctor stopped.

“The thought crossed my mind in relation to this interrogation.  Professor Briggs managed Radham Academy before my arrival.  While you’re making arrangements for the clone, have Professor Briggs detained and rendered to the labs as fodder for testing.  It should be made absolutely clear to him that I’m displeased at the number of mistakes that were made under his watch.  Give his wife and child a payment to give them time to get their feet under them.  Allow him to say his goodbyes.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“You may go.”

The Duke turned his back as his doctor disappeared into Claret Hall.  The team at the gates didn’t dare slow the man on his errand.

“I don’t like doing that,” the Duke said.  “It makes me uncomfortable.  I worry I’ll have to do it several more times today, as I look into this infestation.”

He was still pacing, periodically gesticulating.

My mouth was dry.

“Sylvester,” he said, coming to a complete stop as he whirled on me.  His coat flared behind him.  His eyes fixed mine, wild with too much white around them.  My entire body jolted with the accidental eye contact.

“Sir,” I said.  No!  No!  “I- I mean, my lord.”

Wrong word, sir was.  Wrong, very offensive word to use when referring to a noble.

The word seemed to hang in the air.

“Do you know the name of the woman who manages the birds and all incoming and outgoing communication in Radham?”

What?

Memory was Jamie’s strength.  It was most definitely not mine.

I could have named Jamie, could have said something, but then the agitated, upset Duke would be focusing on him.  Whatever weirdness Jamie had brought up, even if he’d changed the paradigm between us, I wasn’t about to do that to him.  No, especially now, I wasn’t willing to.

“I don’t know, my lord.”

“Avis Pardoe,” the Duke said.  “She manages the phone bank, and she looks after the birds who transmit more secure messages.  She was subtle, to work against us like this.”

“Yes, my lord.  I know the person, the name escaped me, I’m sorry,” I said.  A little too fast, all together.  I might as well have been rambling.

“I last saw her in Claret Hall, right behind me,” the Duke said.  He straightened a little.  He still gestured, his eyes moving in a way that reminded me of Mary’s, earlier.  “Dog, Catcher.  You were just in active duty, and you assisted the Lambs.  I would not begrudge you if you said you weren’t in fighting form.”

“My lord,” Catcher said.  “I am able and willing.”

“For the time being, we’ll dispense of formalities,” the Duke said.  “I won’t brook disrespect or disobeyed orders, but there’s no need for titles.  Foley, I want available forces to converge here.  Cut off escape routes.”

What was he doing?

“I’m not sure I understand,” Gordon said.

“Then I’ll explain what I know.  After our last discussion, I had the men at the entrance to Radham Academy questioned about these women you described.  Off-duty soldiers have been partaking of the services of some ladies of the evening.  They were recognized, and while thoroughly frisked, they thought that a professor or, ahem, a dignitary had arranged for the women to come visit.  As of right now, by their recollection, two such women entered Radham and have not yet left.  Did you intercept the bird leaving the enemy’s headquarters?”

“No, my lord,” Gordon said.  “I’m not sure if there was a bird.”

“Avis Pardoe may have received a warning.  If she’s not already running, she’s braced for us to come after her.  We’ll enter and move through the building.  The other usable weapons of Radham Academy are out of the city or preoccupied.  The uninjured Lambs will address this, in addition to Dog and Catcher and every able bodied man I can summon.  I’ll lead the capture.”

He’ll lead?

That spooked me more than anything Avis could bring to bear.

“Do what you do,” the Duke said.  “Keep me informed, relay information back to me in as timely a fashion as you can.”

“Yes, my lord,” Gordon said.

“I told you to forget the title,” the Duke said.  “It wastes time.”

Gordon nodded.  “Catcher, take the North door?”

“There are five non-window exits they could use to escape the building,” Jamie said.  “North, West, South, the service door at the side by the garbage haul, the secret door facing the underground labs, and a hatch leading under Claret Hall.  You can cover the secret door as well as the North door.”

Hatch? I thought.  I wasn’t sure why I thought it to myself instead of asking Jamie.

“What hatch?” Gordon asked.

“Accessible through the wine cellar, which is below the kitchens.  They store drinks for visitors.  The hatch leads to a drainage tunnel.  The tunnel collects rainwater from gutters and the plaza, where it collects in cisterns,” Jamie said.  “It’s ankle deep, the top of each cistern has a grate that can be walked on.  Maybe ankle deep in water, depending on rainfall, but it was meant as an emergency exit.  I don’t know how many people know about it, but it’s in old blueprints.”

“Where does it lead?” Gordon asked.

“The underground labs.  But if any part of the dungeon is sealed off, so is the escape tunnel.  There are rooms offset to the tunnel, where people can hide, same construction as the labs.”

Claret Hall was the center and headquarters of the Academy.  The heart.  It was where the Duke situated himself, much of the time, and it was where the administration worked from.  Important people who came to Radham came to Claret Hall.  It made sense that the place was riddled with options to give those people an extra measure of security.

Catcher looked to the Duke.  “With your permission, we’ll do a circuit around the building, see if she’s made a run for it, loop back, and then take up position.”

The Duke nodded.

Catcher and Dog left, each moving in separate directions.

I couldn’t be dumb, not in the sense of being mute.  Even if I wasn’t sure how to handle the Jamie situation, I needed to communicate and figure out what was going on.

“Is she watching us?” I asked, looking at the building face.

Jamie responded without looking at me.  “Her office isn’t facing us, but anyone can walk down the hall and peer out the window.  If she got a bird with a message and she’s looking out for trouble, she might already be planning her escape.  The secret door and the hatch are most likely.”

The Duke snapped his fingers, then pointed.  The doctors who’d accompanied the Duke had little bags with wheels and handles.  He was pointing at one bag.

It reminded me of our signals, but it was different.  Our signals were something cooperative, that we’d devised between us as a matter of course, because it seemed only natural.  For the Duke, he expected people to do as he bid, and people who spent any length of time around him adopted a way of thinking that involved anticipating and predicting the man every step of the way.

One doctor had opened the bag, withdrawing weapons.  A sword, one-handed, and a pistol.  Both were overly ornate.

The Duke stood, eyes surveying the building while the doctor strapped the weapons onto his belt.

If this goes wrong, and the man gets assassinated, do we all suffer the same fate Briggs did?  Are we deemed utter failures and summarily disposed of?

There were more soldiers approaching.  I could see others further along, approaching from a distance to surround the building.  They were keeping their distance, picking positions where buildings would obscure the view.  Somehow, knowing what the ghosts were capable of, I didn’t believe that Avis was oblivious to any of this.

The Duke only watched, listened, and reached out to stroke Helen’s hair in an absent way.

It was gratuitous force.  A hundred armed men, Dog, Catcher, the Lambs and the Duke himself, to catch three people?

This was a man who, given the opportunity, left nothing up to chance.

With every moment that passed, I had more of a bad feeling.  I wasn’t feeling sharp enough to know or say if it was because of prey instinct or if it was something else entirely.  It could have been lingering feelings from my discussion with Jamie, about how unstable the Lambs felt at this very moment.  We threatened to fall to pieces, and going into the fray so soon after Mary got hurt, it might have been a factor in why I felt uncertain.

If it was prey instinct, though, what was I noticing but not processing?  What little details were adding up to make me feel concerned?  There was no telling what the enemy was doing.  There was the fact that the Duke was involved here and he was something of a wild card, but he wasn’t doing much more than petting Helen.

I glanced at Ibott, who had remained nearby, silent, watching, clutching hands together like the toady he was.

Helen seemed oblivious to what was going on, but I knew she wasn’t.  It was more that there was a discrete, distinct break between what she thought and felt and what she did.  There was a reason she was such an effective actress.  For the time being, she was keeping everything locked down and away, and there would be no telling what she needed or wanted.

“Lord, my Helen can stay here,” Ibott said.

My bones felt like cold water had run through them in the wake of that statement.

I saw Gordon turn his head.  I knew Gordon well enough to read his expression, to know what he was thinking, that he felt the same way I did.

Well, I’d established myself as someone who spoke out of turn.  The Duke had given us permission to say what needed to be said, given that we were going into battle, I might as well use it.

“No,” I said.

Ibott turned to look at me, incredulous.  “You’d deny her company to the Lord Duke?”

“One of the bodies we brought in was Helen’s kill.  We need her at the front.  Mary’s injured, Mary can stay behind,” I said.

“It’s not your decision to make,” Ibott snapped at me.

“It is,” the Duke said.

Ibott paled a little, surprise and fear crossing his expression before he mostly composed himself.  He bowed a little, saying, “My lord.”

In straightening, he shot me a glare.

He already hated me.  I was surprised that he hated me more, by the looks of things.

My mind was struggling to draw up explanations even as fast as I provided them.  “We Lambs push in, spreading out while remaining in contact.  Catcher knows the hand signals.  We keep eyes on one another, watch each other’s backs.  Signal with right hand, relay with left.  If you see a signal, relay it.  As we extend in, the Duke and Mary can advance, Mary selectively informs the Duke what we’re saying and doing, keeping in mind that the Ghosts can hear us.  The Duke, in turn, can give orders to the soldiers and stitched.  Soldiers complement what we’re doing.  At our signal, Dog and Catcher can move.”

I glanced at Mary, who looked back my way, and there was emotion on her face.  She was upset.  Galled, to use a clever word for it.

Being left out or being told she was incapable, both struck to the heart of who she was, stinging her at her core.

I hated to leave her with the Duke, but it made the most sense.  Of all of us, short of Gordon, she was the one who could deal with the man, impress him, and yet not impress him to the degree that he wanted to take a Lamb for himself.

“Avis knows we’re here.  She’s got ghosts with her.  If we leave ourselves exposed in any way, they’ll get us like they got Mary.  But she’s a smart woman.  Has to be, to have that position.  I assume the Duke is using this show of force out of concern for any bioweapons or other failsafes she stashed in the event she was caught.”

“It was a consideration,” the Duke said.  “I trust your ability to manage it more than I trust the common soldier.”

But we’re still handling it.  We’re walking into a building while the Birdwatcher knows there’s trouble incoming.  She’s been working against the Academy for a long while, and she’s been fearing this day.

“She’s been at this for a while.  Maybe since she joined the Academy.  She’s been fearing being caught and having the entirety of the Academy collapse in on her since day one.  Every time she’s sent a bird out with a message intended to work against the Academy, she’s been fearing what might happen if it got intercepted, if the wrong person read it.  She’s worried if someone would say the wrong word and turn her in.  That’s a fear that eats at you and even consumes you.”

“How interesting, to hear how people think,” the Duke said.  “I can’t imagine living with fear.  I’ve only experienced it a few times in my life.”

“Wariness,” I said.  “Having to be on guard, think everything through.  You surely experience that when you look at the maps and plot strategy for the war, my lord.”

“I do.  But I do not fear anything when I do it,” the Duke said.  He observed, “Dog and Catcher have returned.”

“I see them,” I said.  “The thing about that fear, is I don’t think she’d be content to sit back and let it wash over her.  You can’t be that passive and rise to the position she did.  She’d take measures.  It would have to be subtle, something that wouldn’t get found, and it would have to be effective.  Something that would give her the security that there was a way out at any time.”

I was saying this not just to elaborate on the enemy, but to convince the Duke that this was a bad idea.  If he’d be willing to send someone else, or reconsider using the Lambs.

“A bomb would not be likely,” the Duke said.  “Poison gas or no, we have the like of Dog and Catcher to identify something like that.”

I nodded.  He wasn’t considering going with another option, it seemed.

Dog and Catcher reached us.

“She’s inside,” Catcher said.

The bad feeling was getting worse.

“A final group is getting in position,” the Duke said.  “One moment.  Catcher, stay near.”

I was painfully aware of Jamie.  He wasn’t communicating with me, wasn’t looking my way, wasn’t doing anything.

I’d let him down, I felt let down.  It gnawed at me, and I was in a particularly distracted state, without Wyvern flowing through my brain.  Normally, I might have turned to my best friend to confide in him and find some sense or peace in the midst of it, but I couldn’t.

Anxious, nervous, I broke away from the group under the pretext of looking at Claret Hall from another angle, or studying the regiment of soldiers off to one side.

I realized, belatedly, that I was making a beeline straight for Catcher.   Instincts at work.  I didn’t stop.

I ran my fingers through wet hair, pushing it out of my face.  It was just damp enough to stay where I put it.

“If you want advice about your Jamie,” Catcher said, “I’m the least qualified person to dispense it.  Dog is better qualified, but I don’t think we have enough time to translate.”

He’d heard it all.

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, or how to explain myself, or what I even wanted to communicate.

A full minute passed as I stood there, silent.

I saw the Duke stirring, and realized I was out of time.

“Thanks,” I said, and it wasn’t sarcastic, and I had no idea what I was thanking Catcher for.

“Good luck,” he said.

I turned to go back to the others.

He gave Helen’s head another stroke, then let his hand fall to his side.  He gripped the pommel of his one-handed sword.  “We capture her alive.”

“Yes, lord,” I said.  My response mingled with that of the others.

“Soldiers in first.  Lambs, follow alongside, then move as you suggested,” the Duke said.

We were among the rank and file.  It wasn’t something that I normally dwelt on, but each of the men we were working with were two to two and a half feet taller than I was.  They loomed, all in matching uniforms, all with guns.

This wasn’t familiar ground, and I wasn’t sure I would have liked what we were doing if it was.

Feet tramped on the ground.  The Lambs found positions between the rows and columns of stitched soldiers as they divided to enter through the two separate doors.

“I lead,” Gordon said.  “Helen, watch my back.  Jamie and Sy, you stick together.  Lillian, we keep you surrounded by soldiers, advance them forward, then have you escorted up to the new group.  Focus on the signals and relaying back to Mary and the Duke.  Be ready with your kit in case there’s trouble.”

“Lots of windows,” I observed.  “We need knives.”

“I’ve got knives,” Mary said, behind us.  Then, in response to a question I didn’t hear, she said, “The ghosts are sensitive to high pitched sound.  Blades against glass.”

She started passing the knives up to the rest of us.  I took three.

It was disconcerting, having the Duke following, watching our every move, judging.  This was a man so powerful that our project continued or faced cancellation at his whim, but we were almost beneath him.  We almost didn’t matter.  It didn’t help that he was here under the guise of leading us, but we were the ones devising the strategy.

The doors banged as the stitched pushed them open.  We marched into the hallway, the rows of rifle-wielding stitched taking up so much space that bystanders were being squeezed out or pushed up against the wall.

The ground floor was shaped like a cross, with a long hallway leading to a crossroad with a desk in the middle.  Offices and services were set off to either side of the hallway.  Beyond the desk was the north hallway, leading to the door that Dog and Catcher watched.  All of it was worked up in dark wood that gleamed with lacquer and resin, with gold trim and deep red woods here and there for accent.

And the people – there were hundreds of students in the space, and as large as Claret Hall was, it made for a jumble.  More so when they reacted to the approach of a full regiment with chaos and confusion.

The soldiers went out, checking offices to either side.  The hand signals came out from Gordon.  I relayed it back.  No sign.

“Hear me!” the Duke proclaimed, and his voice boomed down the length of the hall.  Before he was even done speaking, people were dropping to their knees.  “By order of the Crown, lay on the ground with your arms straight out above your head, and we will know you are no enemy of ours!”

It was as if an invisible wave was crashing into the crowd.  There was no question, there was no hesitation.  Every person in the crowded hall dropped, and many had already been in the process of kneeling or kneeling already.

Well, that was his contribution, I supposed.  We hadn’t had the element of surprise to begin with, and now we didn’t need to worry nearly so much about the people who were lingering.

Helen raised a hand, signaling.  Escape.  She swept it out to point to people behind us.

I passed it on.

“If you’re within five paces of me or behind me, you evacuate,” the Duke said.

I heard the people shuffling, scrambling to get off the ground and head for the South door.

Where are you, Birdwatcher? I thought.

Upstairs, probably.  With whatever weapon or tool she’d devised to quiet her fears and convince herself that she could escape when and if she got caught.

I hated the notion that she might be right.  That she really did have an out.  Or worse, that she didn’t, and that she was prepared to go out with a bang if her trick didn’t work and we ended up cornering her.

Couldn’t say no to the Duke, couldn’t retreat or take a different tack.  His presence behind us was pushing us forward, giving us no choice but to face this, however uncertain I or we might feel.  His advance behind us was like a pressure, pushing us forward, into deeper, uncertain waters.

I could feel the tension in my teeth, and I recognized it from before.

I snapped my fingers for the benefit of the others, then signaled.  Number.

Helen nodded, then touched an ear.  She relayed to Gordon, while I made sure the others behind me knew.

Of course there were more than two.  The sensation was already more intense than the seven had been, back when Mary got stabbed.

I listened for the order that wouldn’t come, in response to the chatter I couldn’t hear.  My heart sank.

He didn’t order a retreat.

This had suddenly gotten a great deal more difficult.

We know the first card Avis is playing, now.  All of their ghosts somehow found a way inside.

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.11

The nature of our enemy forced us to change up our approach, given how ‘stealthy’ meant a very different thing when dealing with enemies who could suss out our locations by hearing them.

They had eyes, too, but I had no idea if they relied on those eyes to the same extent we did.  It meant we had to pick and choose our positions carefully.  We made our way up the stairs to the floor above, the relay serving its purpose well.  With the four hallways below, people steadily evacuating under the Duke’s watchful eye, I could at least hope that my back was covered.  Lillian moved with her escort, and Jamie and I moved as a pair, five to ten paces behind Helen.

We stopped halfway up a set of stairs covered in red carpet, the railings some special wood with a marble-like texture and gold-colored caps.  I reached up to a picture; I was too short to reach it with my hand, but I could reach it with the point of my knife.  I got the blade between the picture and the wall, twisted, and pried it off, with a slight crack.  I poked the underside to lift it up, and it came free of the wall.  I caught it.  Some Professor’s painted portrait.  He looked like a smug twat.

Jamie did much the same, even utilizing my technique of the knife-twist.  By the time he had his picture, I had an arm curled around mine.  I put the long side of the knife’s edge against the glass, and began playing it as one might a violin.

Jamie smiled as he realized what I was doing, but as our eyes met, he flinched and turned forward, progressing up the stairs a few steps.

Running away.

I felt like having the formula running through my veins would have helped me find the thing to say and do.  Not just for Jamie, to bring things back to normal, to get him to look at me and talk to me in the right way, but for myself.

I was hurt, and I was angry.

He’d blown it off in that cavalier, casual way, but he’d had to have known he was throwing a wrench into things.  He was complicating how he and I interacted and he’d done it when I’d been confiding how uncertain I was about the Lambs.

He’d never been good at timing, but that was pretty frigging ugly timing.

Helen signaled.  We moved up the bend in the stairs.  In my agitation, I was moving the knife more dramatically.  As the texture of the glass changed, with regular, fierce scratches, I moved the knife further along the portrait.  In a few minutes, I’d have to replace it.

We reached our new location at the bend in the stairs.  We could see both up and downstairs, a large window to our back.  It was tree branches, reaching from the floor to the ceiling far above us, glass fitted between.

I signaled for Lillian to approach.  Half the soldiers tramped forward to a point halfway up the stairs.  Lillian came with the second half.

I used the knife on the window while I waited, to prolong the life of the portrait I held.

Above us, Helen relayed Gordon’s signals.  Clear.  Fist clenched.  Clear.  Fist clenched.

Punctuating each check.

If Gordon saw the ghosts, it was either because they wanted to be found, or the scratching of glass was working.

Helen’s other hand went up, head turning as she threw herself against the wall.  Thumb and pinky extended, touching nose and ear.  The hand pulled away, already forming the next gesture.  All five fingers pointed skyward, as if she were clutching a ball.

Smell.  Hear.  Fire.

She had only just formed the gesture when the ghost stepped out at the very top of the stairwell.  She was wearing an Academy uniform, but her hair was brown, her form petite, and I recognized the face as one of the ghosts we’d fought.

Helen hit the ground, chest flat against the stair she’d been standing on, hands over her head.

She had her eyes narrowed, flinching visibly with eyelids twitching as I brought the knife down the pane of the window, ready to throw it if I had to.

But she was already making the necessary motions, throwing a bottle with a rag stuffed in the end.

Helen’s Flame.

The weapon sailed through the air, an underarm toss, not necessarily hard enough to break the bottle.  The long drop down to us would do it.  Jamie wouldn’t be quick enough to get out of the way.

The portrait fell from my hand.  I leaped forward, bringing both feet up, knees to my chest.  I set my feet on the railing, then extended my legs, pushing myself up as high and fast as I could go, reaching up and over my head.

I touched the glass of the bottle, but I was too short to actually grab it, my hand too small.  I saw a glimpse of Jamie beneath me.

The touch made the bottle spin in the air.  My arms windmilling, I brought my other arm forward.  Knife still in hand, I reached over my head to stab the flaming cloth.

I followed through with the motion, bringing my arm down, sharp and away.  The bottle shattered against the wood and glass of the window-covered wall, and the knife with the flaming rag flew off onto higher stairs.

I landed, hard, amid the spatter of caustic chemical and broken shards of glass.  I barked out something of a cough, and my next attempt at drawing in air didn’t seem to draw in enough.  Each subsequent breath was better.

Jamie had barely moved.  His eyes were wide.

I panted for breath, getting a nice reserve of air back into my lungs.

“Are you okay?” Jamie asked.  He extended a hand.  I was already grabbing onto the window for a grip, and opted to follow through, using it to stand.

I regretted it the instant I saw his expression.  Nothing obvious, but a flicker of pain.

“I’m okay,” I said.  I felt the need to do something more, and reached out, bumping his shoulder with my fist, a light punch.  I sort of repeated myself, but I was saying something very different as I looked around at the spatter of chemical on us and the stairs, the glass, and the burning rag, well out of the spatter’s range.  “It’s okay.”

“Yeah,” he said, and it didn’t sound like he agreed.

I turned away, signaling Helen.  Good alert.

She nodded, stepping down two stairs to stamp on the rag.

“Seems like you’ve still got a little Wyvern formula in you,” Jamie murmured.

“There’s enough, I hope,” I said.  I was still far from baseline.  I was glad I wasn’t on the same level as a boy my age without any of the drug’s effects.  I’d only been there once, and it had been much, much worse.  I still had the skills I’d picked up.  My personality was still mine.  My analytical way of thinking hadn’t changed, even if the edge was gone and the focus wasn’t all there.

But I wasn’t wholly there either.  There was fog, blurriness around the edges of thoughts if I didn’t commit to them, and there was sloppiness.  I was legitimately worried that I would try something and I would find I didn’t have the ability.

I signaled the a-ok to Lillian, who was staring up at me from the midst of her sea of stitched soldiers.  I saw her hand go up, passing on the message, while her expression didn’t change, her eyes not leaving me.

Meanwhile, Helen was relaying Gordon’s signals from upstairs.  He was on the floor above, and according to him, there was more fire.

Fire had long been the go-to tool against the Academy.  Now Claret Hall burned.

If we let the place burn with the exits sealed, will she burn with this place?  It was so easy an option, but the Duke had given his order.  If she wasn’t captured alive, then we lost our one chance to get information on Percy’s plans.

Forcing the other guy to rush, as I’d often observed, was a critical part of a con man’s ploys.  It gave the target less time to think, and it gave them more opportunity to make mistakes.  Avis was forcing us to rush to reach her if we didn’t want her to burn alive.

That, or she was hoping to utilize the chaos and confusion native to fire and escape another way.

Hurry, I signaled Helen and Lillian both, making sure to look at each so they knew.

The rotations, movements, and relayed orders came faster than before.  One group wasn’t wholly in position when we started moving up the next.  Jamie and I moved up to where Helen had dropped to the stair, then further down the hallway.

The stairs above where we’d been were on fire.

There were any number of offices in this hallway, each one with windows looking in at the hallway, and windows looking out.  Just around the corner from where Gordon was was the vantage point we’d used to spy on his conversation with Shipman. Because the building was a square, the hallway ringing it, there was plenty of space for a set of rooms in the center of it all, these ones had windows for us to see within, the bottom of each sitting at shoulder level for me.  A reference library, a room with a long table and many chairs, a tea room, all of which were littered with bleeding corpses.  Each had windows that failed to give us a view of the ghosts, and each had multiple doors, so one could pass from any point in the hallway or pass from room to room.

The fire Gordon had signaled us about was at the opposite end of the building.  Around two corners, or through the room with the table and chairs.  It seemed strategically set to limit access to the upstairs, the flames set on and around the only other set of stairs.  Wood burned but didn’t ignite.  The designers of the Academy weren’t so stupid as to make the building well and truly flammable.

That said, while I imagined the wood had been treated to make it less likely, I wasn’t sure it was impossible for a proper blaze to take hold.  If it was only the surface of the wood that was treated, or only the floorboards, then there was a risk.

They’d left us no apparent way up, short of quenching the fire.

If it weren’t for the windows that seemed to be everywhere, I might have said it was the best possible environment for our enemy to be fighting in.  Too many avenues for access and escape.  Two strides in any direction meant passing a door that a ghost could be lurking behind.

I could see Gordon, further down the hallway, using a knife to cut what must have been a wire.  Through the windows that looked into and out of the rooms at the center of the building.

I continued to play my glass violin, watching, trying to get a sense of what the enemy was doing.

Gordon shifted his grip on his knife.  He raised his free hand, giving Helen the signal.

Move up.

Yet he hadn’t budged.

I passed information to the soldiers further downstairs.  They moved up to our position, we moved to Helen’s-

A woman in an Academy uniform stepped out of the doorway just behind where Helen had been standing.  She was so fast in turning up that she must have been only a stride away from Helen, separated by the door and doorframe.

She was silent, graceful, and only momentarily acknowledged our existence with a glance before approaching Helen’s back.

“Helen!” I shouted.  A white-knuckle grip on my knife, I raked the blade against the glass of the portrait, cracking the glass.  I saw the woman falter.

Jamie threw a knife.  It hit the woman in the lower back, right where the kidneys ought to be.

Helen was turning, and as the ghost stumbled forward, Helen wrapped her arms around her in a hug.  The two of them tumbled to the ground.  Helen let the ghost’s hand swipe at her face, and a stripe of crimson marked Helen’s chin.

Helen lay on top of the ghost.  As the ghost tried to sit up, Helen slid up, forehead coming down, ass going up, standing on the woman’s pelvis on tiptoes so the entirety of her body weight was pressing down on the woman’s head.  Her hands slapped out, grabbing for the woman’s wrists.  She brought her head up, and slowly but surely, she brought the woman’s arms across her chest, until the arms formed an ‘x’, breasts squished together between them.

Another shift of grip, reversing her hold on the ghost’s wrists, and the arms were now being strained, the hard end of one elbow pressing against the hard end of the other, both straining the wrong way.  The woman bucked and tried to throw herself to one side to hurl Helen off, but Helen’s feet went out, bracing on the floor to either side.

As bone and cartilage audibly cracked, Helen let the destroyed arm fall, grabbing the other in two hands.  One twist and maneuver, and she twisted the shoulder from the socket.  The woman reacted, twisting and struggling to pull away, and Helen brought the dislocated arm up and around, strangling the woman with her own arm, while the arm with the broken elbow flopped ineffectually.

More ghosts were coming from the other end of the hall, no doubt reacting to the screams.  Gordon to the right of us, a herd of ghosts to the left.

I signaled for the soldiers below us.  Move up.  Hurry.

Jamie was only a half-step behind me as I made a beeline for Helen.  I saw the blade jutting out of the woman’s back and kicked it, driving it in as deep as it would go, before stabbing with my own knife.  Helen glanced at me over her shoulder as I stabbed over and over, taking advantage of how Helen was holding the woman still.  One after another, the slices went between the ribs.

“I know,” I said.  “I know we promised!  We’ll let you have fun another time!”

I gave the woman one last stab before turning to face the assailants.

They were gone.

Too many doors here.  Too easy for them to fade away.

Helen had moved up to Gordon, and was crouched at his side, while he was crouched over himself.  The soldiers were at the top of the stairs, weapons out, on the alert.

My portrait was cracked.  I decided to make use of the windows that were so omnipresent here.

I reached for one with my knife, and it shattered a moment before I got there.  I reached for the next nearest one, and saw a shadow of movement on the other side.  I pulled away instead, before she could lash out or grab me.

Windows at the end of the hallway opposite Gordon broke.  Then, like a cascade effect, they began to break one by one, the progression leading in Gordon’s direction.  Thrown objects and coordinated movement.  We’d let our guard down, and we hadn’t been keeping up the sharp noises to throw them off.

No, Jamie had.

They were getting used to it.

Now they were removing the options, they were heading Gordon’s way, and whatever he was saying or doing with Helen, neither of the two were moving.

No, I thought.  I was falling into the sway of things.  Under pressure, time cut short by the threat of the fire, I was taking mental shortcuts and jumping to conclusions.

Leading the eye one way, while acting to take advantage of an enemy with their backs turned.

I signaled, touching my chest, then raising my hand, changing the angle-

Behind me.

Jamie and I turned simultaneously.  Lillian gave the order.  “Turn left and fire!”

The ghosts were only just stepping out of doorways as we turned around and the words left Lillian’s mouth.  They moved as if it had been the plan all along, leaping for cover.

The stitched with the guns fired.  In the enclosed space, my ears already ringing from the sound of glass breaking, the gunfire was as violent a sound as I’d ever heard.  Bullets punctured the walls below each window, they penetrated doors, and they broke the smaller branches off of the window frames that no longer had glass in them.

“Stop!” Lillian shouted.

The stitched ceased firing, though they hurried to fix up and reload their guns.

“Did we get ’em?” Jamie asked.  He backed away a step.

“I smell blood,” Helen said.  “Got some.”

I hoped there weren’t any people hiding in those offices and in that end of the library.  Or that we hadn’t just executed people who the ghosts had left behind.  Too big a chance that some were slowly bleeding out but not yet dead.

No, I had to stay focused.

Fixate on the enemy, Sy.  They know what we’re doing as we do it.  What’s their counterplay?

Gordon.  Helen.

I spun around.

I saw nothing beyond the two Lambs.  The pair were still hunched over.  Helen was crouched over like she was prepared to pounce at any second.

These ghosts follow rules.  Move away from danger.  Capitalize on the weak.

There was no easy passage between the offices that were set against the external walls of the building.  There was passage between the library, conference room and the tea room.

“Lil!  Jamie!” I shouted.  “Play me a song!”

“What?” Lillian asked me.  “And don’t call me Lil!”

But Jamie was already showing her how he was using the knife on the glass.

I was halfway to Gordon and Helen when the stitched began rubbing glass against bayonet blades, the edges of the broken shards of glass cutting into fingers.  A cacophony of discordant sound.

Where are they?  How are they moving?

As I got closer to the tea room, I could see through the window and make out where furniture was.

I raised a hand, warning, not looking at Gordon and Helen.

Then gestured.  Stop.

“Stop!” Lillian called out.

The stitched obeyed.

My footsteps slapped against wood.  One step, two steps, three steps.

Another signal.  Go!

“No!  Start!  Use the glass!” Lillian gave the order.

Another step, as the sound resumed, audible even to me, scratching and screeching.

I took one more step, then dropped, sliding on the floor as I reversed direction, my shoulder, side and hip touching the wall beneath the window.

I headed for a door I’d already passed, grabbing the frame as I slipped into the tea room.

A full six of them were there, crouched, poised, waiting, using furniture and the low wall beneath the window to hide, each of them in the position a sprinter maintained pre-run.  All amid chairs and round tables, each table furnished with kettles and little bowls of tea bags.  There were pastries and baked goods here and there on plates.

With the cacophony of noise affecting their clarity of echolocation, it took them a full second to register my approach, as I threw myself at the full group of them.

Knife in hand, blade pointing down, I swung down and at an angle.  I nearly lost the knife as it caught on the front of one of the ghost’s throats.

I’m shit in a fight, but that’s all the more reason to keep it from being one.

As fast as I’d been to get close to them, I reversed direction, heading for the door.  I threw the knife, and this time, I was pleased to note, the person I was throwing at had to move to avoid getting hit.

I was in such a hurry to get out of the tea room that I fell over on passing through the threshold of the door.  I watched the ghost I’d cut gurgle.  She clutched at the wound on her throat and she wasn’t able to stop the blood from flowing out.

They rose up as if they were buoyed by some force I couldn’t see, puppets on strings, or stitched in the first moment they were given power, all as one, a collective.  Each and every one bristled with hostility, the stress of the glass noises clear in their faces.

I rolled to one side, so they could no longer see me through the doorway, expecting them to come lunging out, swarming atop me.

They didn’t.

I met Gordon and Helen’s eyes.  I grinned.  “Got one.  Using their own damn tactics against them.”

No congratulations seemed to be in order.  Gordon’s expression was tight, and Helen’s expression was dead.

“What?” I asked.

She gestured, and it was a signal I hadn’t seen before, though the meaning was clear.  Fingers crossed, she touched her heart.

Dog had mentioned it.  Gordon had gone ahead.

I nearly snarled with the emotions that hit me then.  Instead, I made a face, turning away, reaching for another knife.

“Sorry,” Gordon said.  “I’m sucking right now.”

“You always suck, Gordon,” I said.  “At least you have an excuse this time.”

“You’re an ass, Sy,” he said.

“And you’re broken.  But tomorrow you’ll be fixed and I’ll still be an ass, so there.”

“That’s not how that goes, Sy,” Gordon said.

The ghosts still hadn’t attacked.  I had to judge what they were doing.

“…And I don’t know how fixable this is,” he said.  “They implied this was my last heart.  Adding another is going to tax my body too much.  I-”

“Enough of that,” I cut him off.  My voice was tense.  “No.  Job to do.”

“Alright.”

Figuring out where the ghosts were went hand in hand with figuring out why they hadn’t retaliated.  I figured both out as I looked back to check on Lillian and Jamie.

The Duke.  He’d emerged at the top of the stairs.

Everyone else, stitched included, was crouched over, keeping low to the ground.  It made us all harder to see, and it meant the enemy couldn’t reach through a broken window to attack or grab.  The Duke didn’t care about either.  He stood tall, surveying the situation.

“You’ve stopped,” he said, his voice carrying down the hall.

“Fire in the way, and we’re kind of busy killing these guys and trying not to die,” I said, the words escaping my lips.

“Sy,” Gordon said, voice soft.

But I saw the change in the Duke’s expression.  He approached, footsteps heavy and swift, coat moving behind him.  I had the impression of an onrushing train, and I was stuck on the tracks.

It was a ghost that saved me.  She approached from the room with the table, leaping through the shattered window, straight for the Duke.

He saw her and he turned, one hand reaching out.  She contorted in the air, twisting just out of his reach, before landing on the wooden floorboards with both hands and both feet.

The Duke drew his sword and cut in the same motion.  She slipped out of the way of that strike as well.

His pistol fired without even leaving the holster.  His hand had come down, he’d pressed the hammer down and adjusted the angle, while touching the trigger in the same motion.  She’d already danced to one side.  He fired twice more from the hip, before drawing the pistol and firing three more times.  At the end of the hall, Jamie and Lillian threw themselves flat to the ground to avoid getting hit by one of the stray bullets.  Lillian shrieked.

“Hm,” the Duke made an amused sound.  He sheathed his sword, then reached to his belt before sliding bullets into his pistol.  The ghost took the opportunity to duck through a doorway, running through the conference room with its long table and many chairs.

“You see what we’re up against, my lord,” I said.

“I do see,” he said.  He drew closer, and put one finger under my chin.  He offered only the lightest touch, but I still rose to my feet.  He spoke, “I also heard the insolence in your tone.  I’ll remember it.”

My heart skipped a beat in time with the click of his pistol, as he closed it up and cocked the hammer, just a foot from my head.  He tossed it into the air and caught it with his other hand.

Then, so suddenly I wasn’t sure I’d processed it right, he grabbed one of the sections of window frame with only scant glass shards remaining, and carried through on the movement to hurl it violently across the tea room.  It crashed through the window there.

I only barely saw the ghost move, abandoning her cover where she’d been standing.  The Duke’s arm was already extended, pistol pointing.  In the eyeblink the ghost’s head was visible, he put a bullet through it.

“Hm,” he made that amused sound again.

He walked past me, and he did it in a roundabout way that had the pistol in his hand touch my face.  It traced along cheekbone, catching on the ridge of my nose, and then stopping there, between my eyes, before he moved on.  He was tall enough he didn’t even need to move his arm or change the angle of his wrist to do it.  His arm hanging down at his side put his hand at eye level for me.

“I heard you say that you killed the one,” he said, as he walked away, “Lying on the floor, throat cut?”

“Sy isn’t normally-” Gordon started.

“You’re not the one I asked.”

“I am, lord,” I said.  I figured formalities couldn’t hurt, given circumstances.

There was no response, nor any explanation over the question.  Or perhaps the question was the response.

“The fire is barring your way?” he asked.  He wasn’t asking me, Gordon, or Helen.  He was talking to Jamie and Lillian.

“Yes, my lord,” Jamie said.

“I see,” the man said.  He stepped into the conference room.

Helen and I gave Gordon a hand in standing, and I was a little surprised at how much help he needed.  He was sweating a little.

As a trio, we approached.  I could see Mary at the center of the group, with Jamie and Lillian.  She looked better than Gordon did.

Wood scraped against wood, a haunting, awful sound.  The long table looked like it could sit eighteen, the wood of the tabletop two inches thick and very probably dense.  Rather than legs, it had boards of the same thickness at two ends, poised diagonally.  The Duke pushed it across the floor, out the double doors on the far end of the conference room, until it sat beside the fire that stood between us and the stairs.

Broad shoulders strained as he tilted it.  The table fell on its side.  Another turn, and it landed upside-down.  The heavy table’s top squashed the fire and sent licks of the flaming chemical dancing over hardwood.

He raised his pistol and fired down the length of the hall, toward the tea room.

“Gordon,” I said.  “Stay with Mary.”

“Yeah,” he said.

The Duke turned to set his eyes on us.

We wasted no time.  The herd of stitched followed, with Lillian at the fore of the group with two handlers and Gordon and Mary at the rear.

As I passed the Duke, stepping on the underside of the table, he moved.  He didn’t remain with Mary, this time, but fell into step, just behind me, with Helen to our left and Jamie to our right.

I looked back at the others, for feedback, or clarity.  As if someone could provide some sanity to this mad situation.  Instead, I saw the shadow of a ghost moving across the hall, in the direction of the opposite stairwell.

There was no firebomb waiting for us this time.  A good thing, considering Jamie and I were doused in flammable chemicals.  We reached the third floor of the building, and came face to face with stitched.  None of the four were armed.  None even appeared hostile.

But each one had a conspicuous hole in its midsection.  Intestines scooped out, they had empty cavities within, large enough to hide a human head inside.  Some cavities had different shapes to them, as if they’d settled around whatever they’d been holding.

That was a bad thing, as things went.

We’d been assuming she had something small, for her countermeasure.

“The Duke,” Avis’ voice carried.  “Should I be honored?”

“This will go easier if you’ll turn yourself in,” the Duke said.

“I sincerely doubt that.  I’m doomed.”

“You are,” the man said.  “But your extended family doesn’t need to be.  I know you have a sister.”

“I already sent the bird out.  Whoever you send, whatever message you try to get to your subordinates, it’ll be too late.  She’ll be gone.”

“I’ll have to get creative, it seems.”

“So it seems,” Avis said.

Her voice sounded sad.

“You know you can’t kill me,” the Duke said, as he stepped into the hallway.  He very casually put a sword through the throat of one stitched, then swiped it to one side, beheading the other three.

“I can try.”

“Hm,” the Duke made an amused sound.

I replayed her voice in my head, those last three words, and I couldn’t say why, but I suspected she didn’t believe she had a chance.

“I’ve been preparing for this eventuality for years,” Avis said.

“I’ve been prepared for any eventuality since birth,” the Duke said, very quietly.  “You’re building something.”

“Built.  It’s done.”

“No it’s not.  You’re biding your time,” he said.  He advanced further into the third floor.

The Lambs, too, climbed a little higher.  I could see across the floor, now.  A lot of open space.  There were few walls, and the floor sat in a depression, the staggered steps down doubling as seats or benches, with pillows here and there.

A social area.

“I’m done building,” she said.  “I’m just having a drink.  It’s taking a few goes to get all of it down.”

“A combat drug,” Lillian whispered.

“Whatever you need to do,” the Duke said.  He smiled, as he picked his way around the staggered steps.  He leaned his head one way, to try and look beyond the wall that only extended partway down the room.  “I’m hoping for a good contest.”

“Contest?” Avis asked, and her voice sounded different.  “Never.”

It was an echo of a thought that had passed through my head as I’d cut the ghost’s throat.

I didn’t even see the catalyst.  The depression in the floor ignited, the deepest part filling up with fire, clearly filled with an odorless accelerant of some kind.  Stripes of flame swept up the stairs to each corner of the room, separating it into four quadrants, the Duke cut off from us.

The sound of glass shattering and the roar of flame below us suggested our retreat was being cut off.

I fought to keep my breathing under control, my thoughts in focus, and the sound didn’t help in the slightest.  The Duke was chuckling, and the chuckle became a laugh.  He stood with flames within feet of him, arms spread, weapons in hand.

We didn’t even matter.  This fight, this scenario, it was all for him.

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.12

The room had been built and grown in such a way that the furniture was an extension of the room, rather than an addition to it.  The only walls that weren’t exterior walls were standalone, decorative more than anything, with benches built into them, facing tables.  Nothing we could lift up to copy the Duke’s trick and form a bridge over fire.

Not that I necessarily felt confident, with the sparks flying around.

None of the walls were connected to any others.  They might have been once, with walls removed as this part of the building was repurposed; an octagon with the diagonals removed.

Two of the walls separated the staircases on either side of the floor from the main area; I was looking past one to see the sea of fire in the center of the room.  The other two walls did much the same thing for rooms on the north and south faces of the building, with balconies extending those rooms.  The two rooms served for private conversation, and one of them was a hiding spot for our quarry.

All that said, we were the cornered ones.

I pulled off my shirt, backing away from the scene until my back was to a wall.  I balled my shirt up in my hands, my eyes fixed on the Duke.

“Lillian,” I said, my voice only loud enough to be heard over crackling flames, “Do you have anything that will make me not flammable?”

“What?”

“Focus!  I’ve got stuff on me.  Chemical, right?  How do I make it so I don’t burst into flame the second a spark touches me?”

“I don’t know!  That’s not exactly part of what we study!”

“Stitched overseer guys.  You don’t have any junk you can pour on any of your soldiers that go up in flames?”

“It exists,” one of the men in charge of the stitched said.  “We don’t carry it all the time.  Cans are heavy.”

I scowled, irritated.

“But if it’s chemical,” Lillian said, “We can try a dry soap.  I can’t promise, but-”

“Do it!” I barked.  “Me and Jamie.  Before this gets worse.”

“Those floorboards,” Gordon commented.  His face looked drawn, especially in the light of the fire.  “They’re burning.”

My eyes moved to the area he was looking at.  Sure enough, the floorboards were catching fire.

Every second floorboard.

“She modified the room,” I spoke the realization aloud.  “Maybe the building.”

The Duke turned his head, noting our presence, and I saw a smile on his face.  He was cast in hues of orange and crimson, tall enough that the top of his head touched the smoke that was concentrating at the center of the ceiling and slowly creeping out toward the edges.

He leaped from a standing position, and the wall in front of us broke my line of sight.

He’d crossed the pool of fire.  Approaching the other end of the building.

I saw figures in the shadows.

“Ghosts!” Jamie called out.

“I know,” the Duke said.  But he ignored them, approaching the northernmost wall.

Ghosts crept nearer.  The room didn’t offer much cover, and they didn’t seem to know how to use the fire or smoke for cover.  It wasn’t physical enough for their senses to process.

Still, there were five ghosts there, and possibly two more we couldn’t see, if I was keeping count right.  I probably wasn’t keeping count right.

The Duke stepped around the wall, pistol going out, and fired four times.  A large, dark shape darted out, passing around the far end of that wall, leaping well over the wall of flame that cut across her path.

Fast, agile.  That would be the combat drug.

“Okay,” Lillian said.  She approached me, bottle in hand.  She was shaking it.  “Who’s first?”

“Sy,” Jamie said, at the same time I said, “Jamie.”

He gave me an annoyed look.

“Me, then,” I said.   Jamie was impossible to get through to when he got stubborn, and with him being in a strange way of thinking, I wasn’t sure if it wouldn’t be worse than usual.

With my shirt already off, Lillian was able to rub the ‘dry soap’ on me.  It had a consistency like clay, it burned a little, and it had gritty bits that made it scratch as much as anything.

I clenched my teeth and endured, watching, trying to figure out what Avis was doing.

As she rounded the end of the wall that was furthest from us, I could get a better view of her.

She’d altered herself to the point that she looked more experiment than human.  Four white-feathered wings framed her.

Her hair, skin and clothing were dusted white, too – she’d covered herself in a powder, and much of it had been concentrated on her head.  The effects of the combat drug were obvious.  Her muscles were strained tight, and it included her face and neck.  Her eyes were wide and unblinking, her lips parted to show teeth and gums that were too red.  The bloodshot edges of her eyes and the crimson of her flushed lips were slices of red in an otherwise pale, powder-mottled complexion.

She’d taken off her lab coat, and wore a top that consisted only of a bit of cloth and straps to hold it in place.  The same straps that held her harness on provided a little bit more security in binding the set of wings to her back.  The feathers were slick with fresh blood, and that blood had been covered with more powder in turn.  Bony, insectile limbs reached around her, hooking into flesh of rib and breast.  At her shoulder, one had been shattered, a bullet grazing flesh, leaving the point of the limb embedded in flesh, the other end twitching.

Moving quickly, low to the ground, wings folded close to her back, she leaped through flame.  The feathers didn’t ignite, and she didn’t react to any burn she might have sustained.

The Duke was a matter of steps behind her.  She was faster, she was more agile, and she was apparently fireproof, or fire resistant.  She could presumably fly, or she’d been able to, before the one hook had been damaged by a bullet.

She wants to run, to fly, I thought.  I tucked my shirt into the crook of my elbow, took some of the soap-sludge from Lillian, and rubbed it into my skin.  I smeared a blob of it into the leg of my shorts, where some of the chemical had showered down on me.  I couldn’t tell if I’d gotten all of it, so I merely took more soap and smeared it on over.  I hoped it would be a layer of protection, and that I wouldn’t have to kick off my pants.

“What are we doing?” Helen asked.

“Thinking,” I said.

“Think aloud, Sy,” Gordon said, “Communicate.”

“I’m not- I will as soon as I have something to say.”

The Duke’s gun fired twice.  He hurdled one six-foot wall of fire with seemingly no problem, landing on the bench by the western wall, opposite us.  He called out as he picked his way across it, closing the distance, “You gave yourself wings, Avis.  Why don’t you fly?”

“You know why,” she said.

She was so close to us.  Five or six paces.  Three, and I could have possibly had an angle to throw a knife at her.

The ghosts crept closer to the duke, staying just out of arm’s reach.  He didn’t seem to pay much attention to them, except to hold one sword out in the direction of the nearest one, so the woman would run herself through if she lunged.

“I could promise to hold my fire,” the Duke said.  “I’m good for my word.”

There was no answer from Avis.

I followed the Duke’s line of thought to its natural conclusion.  She doesn’t want to fly because she’ll be a sitting duck in the air, without cover.  She knows how good a shot the Duke is.

Was she capable of diving for speed and to put more distance between her and any shooter, using the balcony itself for cover, or rounding the corner of the building?

Maybe she was, but the building was surrounded with soldiers.

How bad did things have to get here, before she was willing to risk death by bullet over a death by fire?

Gordon was saying something to one of the men in charge of the stitched.  The men then turned, moved through the ranks of the stitched, communicating to a few at a time.  Rifles were raised and pointed in Avis’ direction.

To stay out of the line of fire, I bent down.  Lillian started rubbing the soap across my bare back, then along the belt-line of my shorts, where some of the chemical had no doubt trickled down and soaked in.

I gave serious consideration to going into this confrontation naked, just to be safe.  The look I imagined on Lillian’s face was the first thing to bring me near a smile since the conversation with Jamie.

“Sy,” Mary cut into the thought.

“What?”

“I want to come.  You’re going to say I can’t, but-”

“You can’t,” I said.

“If I-”

“Mary,” Gordon jumped in.  “Do you really think you can hurdle six feet of fire?”

“I don’t think they can, so that’s a moot point!”

“We can,” I said.  “You can’t.  Not with that injury.”

“Painkiller,” she said.

“No,” I told her.  “No.  Stay there, have knives ready.  If ghosts come for us, aim for the ones who are busy dodging something else.”

Fire continued to spread along floorboards.  A great ‘x’ had been cut into the room, and the space between the lines of that ‘x’ were filling in.  The flames remained small, but they were gaining traction.

What did it take to change the flooring in the room?  She controls all communication out of Claret Hall.  Did she ask for a work order to be modified?  Did a crew of stitched put in flammable floorboards under the noses of professors, doctors, and wealthy clients of the Academy?

How many small ways had she found to sabotage the lot of us?  Was she the reason our enemies had been so well informed on the Lambs?  The four humors had been pretty up to date.

The Duke had to pick his way across the room more carefully as the fire took over more of the area.  He took a step to one side as flame touched one of the cushions a matter of feet from the Duke, only for the cushion to explode in a violent roll of fire.

A ghost appeared, airborne, taking advantage of the Duke’s turned back.  She landed astride his shoulders, and, so quickly it looked like I’d missed something, she began slamming a knife into the side of his neck, once, twice, three times.

He tossed his sword down, reached back, and grabbed her.

She slammed the knife deep into his face once, as he hauled her around in front of him.

One-handed, he tossed her into the pool of fire at the center of the room.

The Duke made that amused sound.  He turned, a little overdramatically, his coat sweeping out around behind him.  His eyes were wide, the heavy lines in his face catching the light and shadow of the fire and smoke, the veneer of humanity no longer visible.  The gaping wound in his cheek wasn’t helping matters.

He spat out what looked like a full mouthful of blood, directly at the flame.  It hissed in response.

That much blood, the knife had to have gouged the roof of his mouth.

“Reminds me of home,” he called out, to Avis.  His voice was different, with the wound.  He spat again.

“You’re done,” Lillian told me, slapping my back.  “I can’t promise-”

“I know,” I said.  I didn’t waste a second.  “Helen!”

Helen and I left Jamie behind.

Walls with heavy decoration carved into them meant handholds and footholds.  I signaled Helen, then interlaced my fingers.

With a running start, she stepped into my hand.  I hauled her up as best as I could.

Virtually any combination of us would have been better than Helen and I, for this particular trick.  Gordon in particular could have gotten Helen up as high as she needed.  Mary was more adroit.  I would have had Helen boost me up, but her strength worked differently, it didn’t add up to me being able to add her lifting strength to my leaping strength.

I got her up to the point that only her foot and ankle were touched by flame before she managed to climb up another step.  I double checked she wasn’t slipping before stepping away.

What served as a running start for me were moments where Helen was closer to the ceiling, where smoke was thicker, perched on the wall directly above the open fire.  Seared by heat, she nonetheless found footholds, one handhold, and extended a hand my way.

Time to see if the soap worked, I thought.

I adjusted my grip on the bundle of chemical-soaked cloth, then ran.

I was quick, I was lightweight, and I was spry.

I approached the wall in front of Helen, running full-tilt.  I leaped, touching foot to the wall for extra leverage, and reached her hand.

I felt the intensity of the heat as she helped swing me over the fire.  I only barely missed landing at the edge of the fire, and the moment I realized I’d touched safer ground was spoiled as burning floorboards cracked under my weight.

I reached out for Helen.  She lunged off the wall in my direction, and I grabbed her, half-throwing, half-pushing her away.  We sprawled across the floor, rolling over floorboards that licked with only small amounts of flame.

Avis was perched on the balcony, adjusting straps from her dress to tie them to her wing.  In front of us, a ghost materialized from around the corner of the balcony.  She approached us, a weapon in either hand.

I reached for my last knife, and then hesitated.

“She’s running!” I shouted.  “Can I stop her!?”

I saw Avis’ muscles tense.

“Do,” the Duke said.

I hurled the knife.

It caught Avis dead-center in the back.  It didn’t sink in point-first, but the side of the blade did hit.

Wings and limbs spasmed.  She did too, her back arching, already tense muscles visibly twitching and pulling so tight they kinked up.  I worried she’d tumble forward off the balcony and onto the soldiers waiting below.

Whatever it was she was wearing, it was akin to a large bug, running parallel to her spine.  I’d injured it, but I shouldn’t have hurt Avis herself.

Hooked into her nervous system.

The ghost that had stepped out was drawing nearer to Helen and I.  I’d just thrown away my last weapon.  There was only the bundled-up shirt,  which had touched fire and ignited.

Helen and I fought to get to a standing position, an awkward process with growing stripes of flame here and there on the floor.

“Sy!” Lillian cried out.  “You’re on fire!”

I looked.  Sure enough, a section of my shorts was burning.  I’d completely failed to notice, with the oppressive heat from the fire behind me.

I slapped at it with my hand, to little effect.

The ghost drew near, swift, picking and choosing where she stepped.

Touching the toe of my shoe to the bundled up shirt, I kicked up, directing it in the general direction of the ghost’s head.  A fireball.

She sidestepped it in an awkward way, burning cloth brushing past her face, briefly disorienting her.  I wasn’t sure if it was that the cloth was burning or the unsteady footing that led to the mistake.

It left Helen and I with no weapon to throw or use for self defense.  The fire was so close I could have sworn my back was breaking open in blisters.

I reached into a pocket.  Spare change.

I flung it at her.

This, she didn’t even try to dodge.  It touched her and danced off, clattering to the floor.

She stumbled to a stop.  She straightened, partially turning, and I could see the knife in her chest.

Good job, Mary, I thought.

But, lethal as the knife should have been, the ghost didn’t stop.  She stumbled forward, and the stumble became a run.

Bull-rushing us.

I pushed Helen against the wall, while I stepped out, parallel to the line of flame.  The ghost decided to go for Helen, grabbing her, and using forward momentum to carry her directly into fire.  The two stumbled into the blaze together.

No.

I was only a step behind, not quite entering the flame, but getting close enough it hurt.  I couldn’t see, the heat itself stealing away my ability to see as much as the smoke did, I could only intuit, lashing out as best as I could.

I kicked the knee.  That knee buckled, and the ghost toppled.  I grabbed her, tearing her down toward the ground as much as I did anything.  Burned floorboards creaked precariously under her weight as she crashed down.

Helen reached over the ghost, seizing my shoulders, fingernails digging in for a grip.  Unable to reach into fire, I instead hauled myself -and her- away and back, throwing the two of us to the ground for the second time.

She wasn’t as burned as I’d thought she’d be, but it was bad.  Hair singed, skin burned across virtually every part of her that I could see, her dress was scorched, barely intact.

She wheezed for breath, starting to rise, then dropping, writhing until she found a position where she wasn’t touching burning floor.

I stood, grabbing her.  I hauled on her arm, and I wasn’t strong enough to budge her.

The wheezing seemed to be getting worse by the second, and I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination or if it was the reality.  It filled my ears, drowning out everything else, even the sound of the Duke’s pistol shots.

I turned my attention to Avis.

She had recovered from the spasming.  One wing already lay curled up on the floor, folded into itself by way of far too many joints, a feathery, bloodstained ball.  As I watched, she hauled on the matching, smaller wing, tearing it out of the socket.  It curled up like the other had, the pair of them like legs of a dead spider furling beneath it.

She flexed her remaining pair of wings, glancing my way.  She backed away a little, I let go of Helen’s hand to approach.

“How many of you are left?” she asked.

“Enough,” I said.

“Is it worth it?” she asked.  “Working for them?”

“I’m not working for them,” I said.  “Not this time.”

Her eyebrows went up.

“The kids you killed to make those ghosts of yours.”

“They’re not ghosts,” she said.  “They’re alive.”

“It’s a name,” I said, annoyed, angry she was going on about stupid garbage when my friends were hurt and in danger.

“No,” she told me.  “They’re alive.  The children you say we killed.”

“You’re lying.”

“There’s no way to bring clones up to speed as fast as we did without a shortcut, Sylvester,” Avis said.  “The bodies were material.  The brains?  It wasn’t much different from making a stitched.  Keep the essentials.”

I thought of what Mary had said about the other Percy.

That he wasn’t him, the little things were different.

Tics.  Muscle memory, way of standing, way of walking.

I believed her.

“The children?  You’ve been killing them, not us,” Avis said.

“No,” I said.  “You took the part that mattered.”

Something cracked as the fire ate away at structural integrity.  There was a violent snap, and something tumbled.

“If you jump,” I said, “Then I’m jumping after you.  I’m going to grab your wings.  I don’t think they’re strong enough to carry both of us.”

“There are reasons,” the Duke said, “We haven’t yet made man fly.”

He’d emerged, stepping around the other end of the wall.  He, Avis and I formed a proper triangle, with Avis at the balcony.

“At best, four wings and some vigorous flapping, she could glide.  Two wings?  She can hope to try and control her spiral to the ground.  With luck, she’d even avoid the worst of the bullets and find a place to run from.  With a Lamb latched onto you, Avis, you’ll plummet.”

“He might not catch hold of me on his way down.”

My gaze was cold.  “I’m willing to try.”

Something told me she believed me.

“Will we have our duel after all?” the Duke asked.  “I’ve been handicapped.  I was stabbed no less than thirteen times.  One pole of some sort was thrust through my leg.”

He barely showed it, though blood ran down his clothing and dripped from a few spots here and there.  There was a steady and unbroken stream of blood trailing down from the wound in his cheek to the edge of his chin, where it carried on.

“I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.”

“I can’t imagine any sort of true satisfaction,” the Duke said.  He was smiling.  He spread his arms, and he looked like the giant of a man he was, especially in contrast to Avis’ frail form.  “A snack of a conflict, rather than a meal.”

“With all due respect, my lord,” I said, not taking my eyes off Avis- I fully expected her to make the leap at any second.  I said, “Where the heck are you taking in your meals?”

“I don’t,” he said.  “Not here.  But home?  I’ve always sparred with my brothers and sister.  That’s a meal.”

“You’re making this out to be something trivial?” Avis asked, eyes narrowed.

“You are trivial,” the Duke said, with the confidence that nothing else was even possible.

She shook her head.  “You’re everything that’s wrong with the world.”

I glanced back at Helen.  The fire wasn’t too near her.  I wondered if it was even possible to talk to the Duke and ask him to move her.

“You were lucky enough to grow up in a world my family created, Avis,” the Duke said.  “One where you haven’t seen the true ugliness of mankind, and you can actually believe what you just said.”

“Even before the Crown became what it is, before Wollstone, the world got better, decade after decade, century after century.  The people of the world were happier, healthier and longer-lived than those who came before.  From stone age to bronze age to iron age-”

“And then the dark age,” the Duke said.

She shook her head.  “No.  We were still progressing.  We had a way forward.  The age of machinery, then the age of blood.  The last age, where we look inward.  But you’ve perverted it.  You’ve made it about power, for you.  Powerlessness for everyone else.  Ask your people, the ones who serve the Crown, and three out of five will tell you you’re wrong, you’re loathed.  The other one or two out of five, I’m not sure they’re just too scared to say it out loud.  Your wars, your breaches of everything that’s right-”

“Is temporary,” I cut in, without thinking.

The Duke gave me a look, his chin rising a fraction.

“In this, we might agree, Sylvester,” she said.  She fixed her eyes on the Duke.  “The Crown is a temporary power.  It has to be.”

“No,” I said.  “No, not like that.  You’re wrong about something.  The age of blood isn’t the last one.  There’s a final expanse.  The mind, the brain.  Once we unravel that, we’ll be able to see a way through.”

“Of course you’d say that.”

“Of course of course!” I said.  I allowed myself a half second to wish I had the Wyvern formula to help me better formulate my rebuttals.  “I know how stupid people are!  I can see it in half the people I talk to, I veer from stupidity to brilliance!  I know!  We have to be patient.  We have to keep from destroying ourselves in the meantime.  We have to keep the likes of you from destroying them.”

From destroying us.

I thought of Helen, of the others, beaten, battered, and in danger.

“That’s how you justify yourself?  That’s really how you see it?”

“Yes.”

“You’re such a child,” she said.

“With the abilities of an adult,” I said.

“A far cry from being adult,” she said.  She heaved out a sigh, wings flexing.  “I don’t think I have many ways out.”

“You never did,” the Duke said.

“I’ll chance being shot.  If you want to catch me on the way down, feel free to try.”

Then she started to topple backward over the railing.  The Duke lifted his pistol, aiming skyward, rather than shooting.

I bolted, running.

I felt rather than saw the movement of the knife, just to my left.

It raked her shoulder, and it caught her wing.  Feathers and fire-resistant powder flew into the air.  I saw her eyes, already wide and bloodshot, go wider.

I dropped, throwing myself forward.  I reached past the rails of the railing, grabbing-

I seized a strap of her top with both hands.  Her weight dragged me forward, my head and ribs slamming into the rails.  I managed to keep my grip.

“Let me go,” she said.  Her fingernails bit into my arm.  “Let.  Go!”

My fingers started to give.  She was lighter than she should’ve been, more modifications, no doubt, but I wasn’t strong.  I felt a pain in my hands that suggested they’d be hurting for days.

And then the burden was lifted.

“Power, and powerlessness, hm?” I heard the Duke speak, close.

The Duke loomed over me.  He grabbed her as she kicked and fought, and held her so she was face to face with him.  An angel with the face of a demon and a demon with the face of an angel.

She’d enhanced her strength with the combat drug, but for purposes far from fighting the Duke.  Only to fly, or to make the attempt.  She wasn’t up to fighting the Duke, even as he drew a syringe from one pocket and plunged it into her neck.

I disengaged myself from the railing, clutching hands to my chest.  I turned to face the burning building interior.

It hadn’t been Mary to throw the knife that injured the wing, but Jamie.  He was at the edge of the balcony now, standing by Helen’s body, and by Lillian, who was tending to Helen.  They had to have crossed the fire the same way Helen and I did.

Surprising, on a number of levels.

Helen was breathing.  She was alive.  With Lillian there, she’d stay alive.

“Good enough,” the Duke said.  He was smiling like he’d just had the time of his life.  The fact that Claret Hall was burning down hardly mattered.  He raised his voice, loud enough for the crowd below and the pair’s sensitive ears to hear, halfway around the building, “Dog, Catcher!  The Lambs need a way down!”

He reached out with a free hand and touched the top of my head as he passed by, entering the building to collect the other Lambs and workers.

Jamie and I stared at the surreal image.  When we could no longer see him, his body cloaked by smoke and fire, there was a moment where we were supposed to speak, to look at each other, to joke.

I felt the absence of that moment keenly.

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.13

Avis raised her head, groggy, her vision unfocused.  Chains and bands of metal clinked.

The table she was bound to was set on a hinge so it could be laid flat, or tilted so she was standing up.  Bars sat between toes and fingers, locking them in place, and a network of wires had been worked into her mouth and around her shaved head, locking jaw and tongue in place.  Tubes fed clear fluids into her and drained out dark ones.  Mechanical arms with more tubes, syringes, and other tools hung around her, poised like a dozen scorpion tails, ready to strike at her.

Her gradual struggle, waking up to find out how firmly she was bound, made for a backdrop of clinks and grunts, quickly growing more intense.

“Avis,” the Duke spoke.

The noises ceased.  Her eyes found us.  The Duke stood, his doctors behind him.  His wounds had been patched up, now virtually invisible, and he’d changed both shirt and coat for something less bloodstained.  Jamie, Lillian, and I were there, Lillian beside Jamie, me off to one side, nearer the Duke, sitting on a table.

“If your chest hurts,” the Duke said, “It’s because of the day’s surgeries.  I imagine the drug you took was intended to kill you if you didn’t take a very specific antidote, but my doctors are very good.  You are going to live, Avis Pardoe.”

She was breathing harder, but she wasn’t physically struggling.

He glanced at a piece of paper that sat on the corner of the same table I did.  “Capsule embedded in your leg, I assume it would be activated with sustained flexing of the calf muscle, that has been removed.  We have also removed, for the time being, your ability to use your thumbs and fingers independently.  If and when we release you from your bondage, you won’t be able to stand, crawl, or make any vigorous movements without assistance.  Should you try, your hip and shoulder joints will come free of the sockets.”

He turned his attention back to her.

“The bonds you’re in now are a formality, and I do like formalities, Avis.  I’ve been told by my doctors that it is kinder to keep you like this, so you won’t accidentally hurt yourself.  You’ve been given our best drugs to dull pain.  I want you to think very clearly about things between visits.”

She tried to speak.  It was garbled by the wires in her mouth.

“You had your chance to speak earlier.  This isn’t a stage for you to say anything except what I want you to say.  One of my doctors is going to remove the gag from your mouth, I am going to ask you a question, and you will answer either yes or no.  If you take too long, I’ll consider it the same as you giving me the answer I don’t want to hear.  You do not want to say anything but that yes or no.”

She nodded a little.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said, as he signaled one doctor, “I don’t believe in torture.  I don’t like it, even as I recognize just how common it is.  Our own bodies torture us with hunger and pain if we put ourselves in the wrong circumstances.  If you’re smart about this, you won’t experience either.  You can say you won’t give me an answer, and nothing will be done to you, but don’t lie, and don’t say anything but ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”

One of the doctors stepped forward.  Two keys were inserted into either side of the gag, latches clicked, locks came undone, and the entire thing jumped in the man’s hands.  He withdrew it, and with it came a two-foot long cord of interconnected metal and tubes, with what looked like a lamprey worked out into the center of it all, thin streams of blood trailing from tiny teeth at the one end.

Avis coughed and sputtered, gagging as the end of the tube came out.  Her head bowed as she dry-heaved, coughing.

The Duke spoke, very clearly, “Will you tell me where I can find the other cells of Percy’s enhanced clones?”

She looked at the Duke, then at each of us.  I could imagine the cogs in her brain turning, over and over, trying to figure out the trick, the catch.  She coughed, trying to clear her throat.

“No, I assume?” the Duke asked.

“No,” she said, voice hoarse and gravelly to the point she sounded like an old man.

The Duke nodded.  “Doctor, I don’t believe there’s a need for the gag.  You can leave it out.  Avis, I’ll be back soon.  Take some time to consider your next response.”

She opened her mouth as though she was about to speak, then closed it.  She looked between us, wary, before fighting her bonds anew.

The Duke gestured to the door.  I hopped down from my seat.  The way things went, I wound up right beside Jamie as we passed through the door together, the doctors behind us.

Not that ‘together’ was the right word.

The Duke let the door shut.

“My lord,” I said.  “May I ask?”

“Ask.”

“Lord, time is kind of of the essence, isn’t it?

“It is.  Time is the operative word, as it happens, Sylvester,” the Duke told me.  “You know, I’m very interested in the brain.  You raised the topic with Avis Pardoe, and the timing felt serendipitous.”

“Time and brains, my lord?” I asked.  I felt as if he was getting at something.

“While you were looking after your fellow Lambs at the Hedge, seeing that they got the care they needed, I was busy looking after Mrs. Pardoe.  All four of my doctors worked on her.  One worked on her brain.  She’ll experience time in a very different way from now on.”

It dawned on me.  “With utmost respect, my lord, I’m assuming she won’t think you were gone for a few minutes?”

“She won’t feel as if I was gone for a few minutes, no.  In terms of raw thinking ability, I’m sure she’ll be able to rationalize it and logically work out that time is passing normally.  But she’ll think faster in some ways and slower in others.  Perhaps she’ll feel as if it has been days.  Weeks, more likely?”

He made it a question  One of his doctors gave him a nod, and a murmured, “M’lord.”

“Months aren’t out of the question?”

“No, my lord.  Not out of the question,” the Doctor said, quiet.  “Without patience or pacing, years or decades aren’t out of the question either.  It depends on her coping mechanisms.  If she tries to keep count of passing seconds and minutes, it will seem more pronounced.  The watched pot, in this case, never boils.”

“No torture, no pain, no mutilation,” the Duke said.  He looked pleased.  “I’m doing nothing more than giving her the time she needs to reconsider her stance.  After that, I will let her consider whether to turn in people she worked with, and whether to join the Academy in earnest, working to put herself back in our good graces.  I suppose we might have her report the whereabouts of her family and acquaintances, for future leverage.  I imagine it will be a productive night.”

“My lord,” Lillian said.

“Lillian, was it?  You’re the student.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Speak your mind, child.”

“I don’t- I think what you’re doing is torture.  Worse than anything you could do to her body, my lord.”

“I’d think a student was more on top of what the Academy is capable of doing, Lillian,” the Duke said.  “Is it truly so bad?”

“I wouldn’t wait too long, my lord.  You may be underestimating how frail the average person is.”

“Good advice,” he said, nodding.  He touched her hair.  “Good child.  I’ll see to her after we’re done talking, then, rather than waiting the full thirty minutes.”

Lillian ventured a smile.

“I hadn’t considered.  My doctors said it would be effective, and I almost didn’t believe them, but the principle wasn’t unsound, giving her more time to think, so to speak, or giving that time a different sort of meaning.”

It was a weird thought, one that I couldn’t quite frame, in the context of who the Duke was.  He hadn’t considered, which meant he couldn’t empathize, which meant…

“My lord,” I said, “Was something similar done to you?”

The Duke smiled.  “It was.  I do suppose I’ve had the advantage of it being the case from birth, something I’ve learned to harness, while our guest is experiencing it new, not a shift from a walk to a canter, or vice versa, but to a different vehicle altogether.  Even I wouldn’t enjoy the deprivation of sensation she’s experiencing now.  Doing nothing with my time is an alien idea to me, and wouldn’t have been permitted regardless.  I wouldn’t say I think faster, but I can devote exactly the right amount of time to a problem as is needed.  Brains are so fascinating, aren’t they?”

“Yes, my lord,” I said, my voice falling in with the others.

“When my brothers, sister and I were asked who was willing to come to Radham, the research being on brains here was one reason I volunteered,” the Duke said.  “As clever as this small alteration to my own brain is, it’s crude.  I often find myself wondering if my own heirs will have better brains.  If it’s possible that one of you will be the model for the next generation of nobles.  Or perhaps one of you will, when given permission, explore other options and open the doors to a new age.”

“Yes, my lord,” we said.  I was very cognizant of Jamie, who hadn’t had that permission to explore the options he’d dipped his toe into, and of Lillian, who knew about Jamie, but was a far worse liar than Jamie was.

“Tell me, Lillian, what’s your end goal?” the Duke asked.

“My goal, my lord?”

“Do you want to become a noble’s doctor?”  The Duke indicated the doctors standing at attention just behind him.

“My lord, I’d-” Lillian started.  She stopped abruptly as the Duke’s hand went up.

“You don’t.”

“No, my lord.  I don’t mean any offense, I-”

Again the hand went up.  I was annoyed on Lillian’s behalf.  Me, I could deal.  I’d earned the man’s ire earlier, and I had no idea if I’d patched it up by courting his favorite topic or if I had a sword looming over my head, ready to fall.  But he’d asked a question and he wasn’t letting her answer.  He didn’t truly know her, and he was setting her up to fail.  It was a blatant test.  With three Lambs being patched up, I felt a little more protective of the ones who’d remained.  Even if one was Jamie, who I had no idea how to deal with.

“No, my lord,” she said, again.  She stopped there.

“Were I to start talking about the Lambs and how things work, my hopes for the project and the possibility for the Crown, heads would turn.  I know how I was when I was young, my brain working the way it does, and I have many family members who are roughly your age,” the Duke said.  He arched one eyebrow and looked at Lillian.  “My younger relatives might well want to be Lambs, as a lark, or to have a way of stretching their legs as I did earlier today, I would imagine you’re the easiest one to replace, should we need to make room on this team.”

Lillian was so bad at hiding her tells.  I could see the horror on her face.

I felt it, myself.

“Or to move to a new team formed of nobles and higher quality work, now that I think about it,” the Duke mused.  “Counsel, an unbiased perspective able to inform the new group about how things are done.  You and three or four young nobles?”

“My lord, I wouldn’t be worthy,” she said.  She was trying to keep her expression straight.  She tried a smile and failed.  She cleared her throat, though it wasn’t her voice that had gone funny, but her face, as if she could make the sound and distract from what her face was doing.

The Duke took it in stride as if it was something that happened daily.

I felt a weird kind of jealousy and irritation at that.  If he was doing that unintentionally to Lillian, then it wasn’t right or fair of him.  If he was doing it intentionally, then he was bothering her in a way that was usually for me to do.  Not to mention that I was a lot more careful about how I did it, while the Duke didn’t seem to understand any of the nuances here.

“Hmm,” the Duke made a noise, considering.  “The reason I ask, dear Lillian, is that you’ve earned my attention and my respect.  If you know where you’re going, it could inform my choices, so I leave you as happy and close to your end goal as possible.”

“A-a black coat, my lord,” Lillian stuttered.

“A political appointment as much as it has anything to do with status.  You could learn to navigate the playing field by studying certain Lambs,” the Duke said, indicating me.

Had she given the right answer?  Did this lead the Duke to think she belonged with the Lambs?

“But,” he said, “You could well earn your professorship in record time, no matter where you are.”

Nope.  That’s the kind of conclusion that leads the man to think she could be put anywhere.

Lillian managed the most insincere smile I’d ever seen, and she was trying.

Was this man going to casually tear the team asunder, just like that?

“My lord,” Jamie said, pulling attention off Lillian. “Is there a particular reason you’re thinking about restructuring the team?”

“Yes,” the Duke said.  “I’ve been reading your files, as well as the latest updates.  It may be time.”

I was approaching the limit of my patience.

No, wait, scratch that.  I’d reached it.

“Lord Duke,” I said.  I took a half-step to position myself forward and to one side, putting myself more in front of Jamie and Lillian, between them and the Duke.  Jamie touched my arm, an instinctive movement, before he pulled away.  I spoke, “You’re wrong.”

Behind the Duke’s back, the noble’s doctors broke their stoic composure to give me looks as if I were insane.

“You disagree,” the Duke said.  Voice cold and dangerous.  “I haven’t forgotten the insolence earlier.  You test me.”

“With all due respect, my lord, you were testing her.  We all have default behaviors we go back to when we’re on unstable footing.  Lillian’s a good soldier, she defaults to shutting up and following orders, to insecurity and not speaking up when she needs to.  If you move forward with either of the options you’re thinking about, you will utterly destroy her.  You will hurt the Lambs, lord Duke.”

“A strategic break, nothing more.”

“We’re growing, my lord, we’re still young, we’re not fully developed.  Jamie’s improving by leaps and bounds, Lillian’s getting better.  We’re evolving the team dynamic.”

“‘Evolving’ may be the wrong word,” the Duke said.  “Going by reports and what I’ve seen, things might be trending in the opposite direction.”

He’d noticed.  The realization almost took my breath away, stealing my ability to argue.

I did what I could to hide my tells.  “We’re effective as a group, my lord.”

I felt a hand touch the small of my back, insistent.

Too far.

“As an experiment, you’re too muddled with one another to assess independently,” the Duke spoke.  “I have the distinct impression you’re arguing with me.”

“My lord, I would say I’m arguing for the Lambs, not arguing against you.  Forgive me, but when I talked about my views in front of Avis, I couldn’t help but feel you and I are on the same page, of similar views on where we should be collectively headed.  Let me add my views to yours, and yours to mine, my lord.”

“Presumptuous, too,” he said.

Oh.  Well.  That was that.  I’d gone and offended him.

“I’ve had others challenge me like this,” the Duke observed.  “Trying to appeal to my desire for excitement and challenge by arguing points, being reckless in conversation with me, foregoing custom and formality.”

I didn’t dare speak at this point.  I’d let my mouth run off with me.

“I’m trying to decide if you’ve crossed the line that the rest did in trying to challenge me,” he said.

“My lord,” I said.  I waited for an indication I had permission to continue.  He gave it, raising his chin a fraction.  “I wasn’t actively trying to challenge you.  I swear this.”

He nodded.

“I’ve read your file, Sylvester,” he said.  He touched the side of my face.  “You talked about the behavior we all return to when we’re on shaky footing.  I know this is where you go when you’re insecure, how you function as a living being.  I do believe you when you say that, and it does inform my answer.”

As much as you know and believe that that, I know that you default to playing with the lives of those around you.  When the world doesn’t suit you or make sense, you reorder it.  You’re good at reordering it.  A builder more than a destroyer.  But you’re too big of a man, Lord Duke.  You’re a giant among mere mortals, and the most trivial actions you undertake are ones with massive ramifications for the rest of us.  That’s how you function.

Except you’re not a dumb giant, trampling over everything in your path.  You know just how small we are.

“You’re seeing me as a threat, you’re studying me, and you’re working out a plan of attack,” he observed.

“Sy,” Jamie said, just behind me.

No, couldn’t dwell on Jamie, had to focus.  As if mirroring the thought, the Duke raised a hand, indicating with a raised finger that Jamie should stay silent and stay out of this.

In this, too, the Duke and I were on the same page.

“What are you thinking, ‘Sy’?” the Duke asked me, staring down at me with eyes that showed too much white.

“My lord.  I’m thinking that you’re smarter than you’re acting right now.”

If Gordon had been present, I was pretty sure he would have socked me one right there, to shut me up, then worked to beg for mercy.  He was being looked after for his heart.  Mary might have stabbed my butt like she had Helen’s, just to make it clear I was being stupid.

But this wasn’t a man who accepted half-measures.

“Precious Sylvester,” the Duke said.  His body language and voice softened.  He smiled, and his tone became something very dangerous, alongside the gentle phrasing and volume.  “I think you should explain yourself very carefully.”

“The Lambs are a unit, my lord.  We developed to cover each others’ weaknesses.  I, myself, was pushed forward to patch a gaping hole in the group.  But splitting us up now is like clipping a rose branch when it hasn’t budded yet.  You know you can let us reach a more complete state before evaluating us.  You have people come to you wanting to challenge you because you want to be challenged, you signal it, you outright asked for it with Avis.”

“I signal this?” he asked.  Not a question so much as a challenge.

“You’ve talked about home.  You want what you had there, on a deeper level.  Back home, I have to assume, if you bared your throat like you’re doing here, someone would seize the opportunity.  You’re doing it here, I’m seizing, and I’m hoping I’m doing it well enough you’re going to accept it where you’ve rejected others.”

He stared down at me.

“First of all,” he said.  “You forgot to call me ‘lord’.  I have a grave appreciation of formality, Sylvester.  It signals respect.  Forgetting something so simple is a telling blow to your attempt to earn my respect by challenging me.”

I didn’t budge an inch or give any outward sign or change of expression, but interally I was screaming and running around in circles.

“Second, your argument hinges on the notion that you’re not yet done developing to your full strength.  Yet your Gordon is near the end.  You’ve had more injuries.  Your group dynamic is reportedly and observably breaking down.”

He let that point hang in the air.

I ventured a response.  “My lord.”

He gave me consent to continue, a dismissive backhand swipe with the fingers of one hand.  His eyes and body remained stone still, not budging.

I lowered my eyes.  “We’ve had more injuries because we’ve been taking on more challenging missions.  If the Lambs are breaking down, if we’re dying or nearly done, let the first Lamb die or break away before you take any action.  You only lose the opportunity to work on the most perishable of us, and you stand to gain our loyal service in the meantime.”

My eyes still lowered, my heart pounding, I couldn’t see his expression, nor how much I’d succeeded or failed in swaying him.

It was a massive weight on my shoulders, wondering if I’d doomed myself or doomed the group.  I let that weight be something real, driving me to the ground.  Eyes fixed on the floor of the hallway in the Bowels, I dropped to my knee.  I heard and felt the movement of Jamie and Lillian behind me.

“That was my plan already, Sylvester,” the Duke said, above me.  “You’re not entirely wrong in your judgment of what I was doing.  The Lambs are not ready to be broken up.  We already have enough experiments capable of acting independently, too few who work as a collective.  I was thinking aloud, wanting to see your response.”

“Yes, my lord,” I said.

“You’re forgiven for this.  Stand.”

I stood.  My hands shook a bit as I did.  I hooked my thumbs into the pockets of my shorts.  The fact that my shirt stuck to my back had nothing to do with the summer heat – we’d spent the last while in the Bowels, and it was cool this deep underground, if not quite refreshing.

“You are not, however, forgiven the transgression earlier.  I know it is your nature, but I did say I would punish you, and I do what I say.  I will decide on something fitting.”

“Yes, my lord,” I said.

“Your fellow Lambs should be going straight from getting care to having their appointments.  Have yours as your doctors are able.  I expect you to be ready for another task before the week is over.  The war wages on, and our enemy is catching up to us in fits and starts.”

“Yes, my lord,” I said.  My voice was joined by Jamie and Lillian’s.

“I give you leave to go,” he said.

“My lord?” Jamie asked.  “Forgive me.”

“What is it?”

Jamie’s eyes remained fixed on the ground.  With just a bit of sweat on his nose, his glasses slid down the bridge of the nose.  He pushed them back up into place.  “It’s customary for the Lambs to fill each other in, so none of us are in the dark or lagging behind the others.  Most often that’s me.  But we’re going to talk to the others, and we’re going to talk about this conversation.  May I ask, if Sy hadn’t spoken up, would this have ended differently?”

“I would have given it thought first, much as Avis is giving her matter some consideration right now.  My instinct is that you would have been disbanded,” the Duke said.  “Dear Lillian thrown to the nobles, perhaps, Helen ordered to my apartments, the rest of you left to fend for yourselves, with every expectation you wouldn’t fend for particularly long, but you’d see to the most essential tasks in the meantime.”

“Yes, my lord,” Jamie said.  “Thank you, my lord.  Knowing that will make this easier to convey to Mary and Gordon.”

The Duke declined his head in acknowledgement.  He swept his fingers to one side to dismiss us, and we were gone.

We fled, leaving the Bowels and heading off to our individual, long-postponed appointments.  Lambs to the Tower.

The exit from the Bowels and the first half of the walk was painfully quiet.  We walked among soldiers and warbeasts, students and stitched.

Halfway there, Lillian started crying.  Heads turned, curious, but nobody stopped for us.

I reached out for her hand, and she squeezed mine so hard it hurt.  She kept wiping at tears, only for new ones to show up.  Had she simply let them fall, they might have been blamed on the light drizzle.

“Crybaby,” I said.

She kicked me far harder than was necessary.  Doing it while walking meant having to take a quick half-step forward and a twist to one side.  She pulled her hand away from mine as she did it, but I held it firmly.  I tugged her closer to me, and put my other hand around hers, until I held one of her hands firmly in both my own.  I squeezed hard.

I was aware of Jamie, so much quieter than usual, a little to my right.

“You stood up for me.”

“You’re a Lamb,” I said.  “I wasn’t going to let him throw you to some group of golden-haired sociopaths so they can torment you to death.  Tormenting you is my job.”

“I can do without that part,” she said.

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure,” she said.  “I like you more when you’re nice.”

It was very possibly the worst thing she could have said or brought up with Jamie there, overhearing.

She sniffed again.

“Here,” I said, letting go of her hand with one of mine and extending a sleeve, my hand pulled inside.  “Blow.”

“On your shirt?  Eww, Sy.”

“I’m changing first chance I get anyway, and I don’t have any handkerchiefs to offer.  You want me to try being nice, take what you can get.”

She sniffed, gave me a wary look, then took the cuff of my shirt and blew her nose into it.

The moment she released my hand, I wiped the snot on the fabric at her shoulder.

She shrieked and came after me, kicking and pummeling me with fists.  I dodged as best as I could, up until she pushed me into a puddle.  She kicked me when I was down, as much to splash me with muddy water as to drive the toe of her too-hard shoe into my thigh.  Proof as much as anything that she was learning stuff from being with the Lambs.

But she was smiling, and Jamie was smiling too.  I raised my arms in surrender, and the two of them approached me, offering their hands.

Jamie hadn’t said a word since we’d left the Duke’s company.

We passed the checkpoint at the tower, the guards giving me suspicious look as I dripped liberally with mud.  I kept an eye out for the proboscis as it searched Lillian, and saw it pause at the mucus on her shoulder.  She gave me a look.

But we were cleared to pass inside.  Here, at least, we were regular enough to be known to the guards.

Checking on the other Lambs was priority number one.  The door to Mary’s lab was closed, the doctors absent.  Ibott and Helen weren’t present either, but I fully expected her to still be at the Hedge or deep in the Bowels, getting replacement skin after the burns.

Gordon was awake.

He lay on a table, his chest open.  Tubes fed into it, crimson fluid churning and bubbling within.  Doctors milled around him, chattering.

“Sy had a long conversation with the Duke,” Jamie reported, as we drew next to the bedside.

Gordon blinked.  He lay his head down on the table, staring at the ceiling.  “Good thing my heart’s not in my chest.  I might have had a heart attack at the idea.”

“Really?” I asked.  “Is it?  Can I see?”

He grunted, then eased himself up, until his arms propped his upper body up.  The tubes fed into his chest, showing some metal clips and bits here and there, the blood-pumping tubes were connected to the major ins and outs around where the heart should be.

“You’re dirty,” Gordon remarked.

“You’re a heartless bastard,” I said, pointing at this hole.  “Is that permanent?”

“No,” Gordon said, lying back down, staring up at the ceiling.  “I’m getting the same heart back.  They’re changing some things, but the problem might recur.”

I nodded, but I didn’t feel happy about the news.

“I might be getting a dog,” he said.

“What?” Lillian asked.

“Dog-dog or dog-dog?” I asked.

“That makes no sense, Sy.”

“You know what I mean.”

“A dog.  A Gordon dog, for me.  I told them that Dog could hear the heart going before I was even fully aware of it.  They’re going to put something together for me.  Inconspicuous, but built like I am, and a dog.  If I know about the problems, I won’t jump into the fray and only realize I’m having problems when I can’t get out of it.”

“Not guaranteed to be a dog,” one Doctor said, passing by with clipboard in hand.

“It better not be a cat!” Gordon called out to the man’s back.

“What’s wrong with cats?” Lillian asked.

“You can’t do anything with cats,” Gordon said.

“Sounds like a good stopgap,” I said.

“Maybe good enough for them to find another good heart, or a way to keep my body from hurting too much as it rides out the rejection.”

Gordon held up a hand, fingers crossed.

I did the same.  Jamie and Lillian did too.

“How’s Mary?” I asked.

“Grumpy.  She stopped in.  She’s getting surgery.”

I nodded.  “And Helen?”

“Haven’t heard.”

“Alright.  Look, I’ve got an appointment I’m itching to get done.”

“And a shower, apparently.  Did you roll in mud?”

“And Lillian’s been gross and got snot all over her uniform.”

Lillian kicked at me.  I jumped out of the way, bumping into a doctor.

The man physically picked me up, carried me two steps, and planted me firmly down with the others, pressing down as if it would keep me in place, before carrying on with his business.

By the time I’d figured out what was going on and turned around, he’d disappeared into the mill of Gordon’s doctors.

I’d wanted to get revenge on one person.  Maybe I’d have to get revenge on the whole bunch of them.

“I’ll stop in when you’re through the worst part,” Gordon said.  “Hopefully.  I don’t want to be here too long.”

“Sure,” I said, “Thanks.”

“I’ll fill the rest of you in on the conversation with the Duke,” Jamie said.  “Felt important.  A sense of where we’re going.”

“Good going or no?”

“Not as bad as it could have been,” Jamie said.  “But elaborating on that would require sharing the whole conversation.  After.”

“Alright,” Gordon said.  “But you’re okay?”

“Bad day, but I’m okay,” Jamie said.

“Whichever one of us finishes first, we meet the other?” he asked.  “Maybe grab Mary when she’s done.  With Percy coming up today, she might need to talk.”

Jamie nodded.

Lillian, Jamie and I headed over to Jamie’s lab next.  The silence was oppressive, and even my attempt to shake like a dog and get the worst of the mud-brown water off only provoked smiles, not joking conversation.

As we reached the lab, Jamie grabbed his bag with the book.  He waved at his team of doctors, then pulled the book out, and then bent down, to put it down, so it would lean against the doorframe.

I was there before he did.  I put a hand between book and frame, grabbing the book.

“You don’t have to, Sy,” he said.

“I promised,” I said.  I watch you as you go to sleep.

“I know you want your appointment right now more than anything, and with the Duke and everything else, it might be a question of our group’s survival.  That whole thing was too close for comfort.”

“I promised.”

“The promise was that you’d…” he glanced at Lillian, then his doctors, obviously uncomfortable.  “It doesn’t matter if I’m here.  It’s different.  You shouldn’t put your appointment off.”

“Bullshit.  I shouldn’t break my promise,” I said.  I tugged the book from his hands.  “I promised.  Now I’m going to take the book and I’m going to look after it, and I’m going to sit here and if you try to convince me to do anything different, I’m going to rub snot on you.”

He met my eyes, a searching stare.

I only withstood the discomfort for a short while.  I broke eye contact, looking at Lillian.  “Not that it matters, you strip down anyway and they launder your clothes for you in the meantime.  Lillian should move over.”

I turned my focus to Lillian, repositioning her much as the doctor had me, moving her to one side of the doorframe.

When I turned around, Jamie was heading to his chair, a throne with tubes and connections running into and through it.  He didn’t open his mouth as one of his doctors led him up to the seat.

He pulled off his shirt, then pulled off his pants.  A doctor draped a cloth over his lap in time to protect his modesty.  Lillian wouldn’t have even blushed.

I took a seat in the doorway, back to one side, feet propped up against the other, book in my lap.

“What happened?” Lillian whispered.  She hadn’t budged from where I’d moved her.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Feels like something happened between you two.”

It was your fault, I thought, but the thought had no meat or merit to it, I knew.  She’d just been the unwitting catalyst to this whole mess.

“It’s nothing,” was all I said.

“Okay, Sy,” she said.  “Thanks for holding my hand and making me laugh.”

“What about the other stuff?”

“I think I got you back.  It’s okay.”

I nodded.

Then she was gone.  Back to her dorm to wash up and let reality sink in.  I imagined it was really lonely, and I was surprised at the level of empathy I felt in that regard.

No, it shouldn’t have been surprising.  I turned my attention to Jamie, who waved.

I gave him a small wave back.

Then my eyes dropped to the book.  I avoided looking at Jamie as the Doctors set everything up, pulling cloths off of the vats.  A faint bioluminescent glow filled the room.

I knew that if I looked at him, he’d gesture my way, and I’d have to respond.  I didn’t know how to respond.

Instead, I looked down at his notebook.  Annals of past events, from someone with a perfect memory.  I looked across the room at the bookshelves that ringed it, still avoiding looking directly at Jamie, and thought about the way things had been.  All of the memories in there.

I saw the men walk up the steps.  In keeping with the promise, I watched carefully as they put the mask on, and put Jamie to sleep.  I wasn’t sure Jamie saw me looking.

All the same, when they threw the switch, it made me jump.

Jamie was under.  He sagged slightly, the cords and connections running into his back and all down his spine, tension tight, holding him mostly upright.  I could hear the humming, see the overlarge brains in tanks move slightly, reacting to altered blood flow and temperature.

I nodded, then opened the book, paging through it.

I wanted to find an answer, and I didn’t.  There was an insight into Jamie’s eyes.  A drawing of the rat with grass and flowers growing out of it, other things he’d seen – creatures I’d missed, people in the street.  The Lambs recurred, over and over again.  The strokes were bold and harsh, sketchy more than anything.

A perfect memory made for that kind of harsh view of things, maybe.  You couldn’t forget the ugly little details.

I closed the book.  The answers I needed weren’t in there.

I spent a while looking at Jamie, then a while looking across the hall and out the window.

“Hey,” a man’s voice said.

I raised my head.  I saw a bruiser of a man in a lab coat that didn’t fit him.  “Oh.  Yeah.  I was supposed to stop in.”

“Don’t fucking waste our time, Sylvester,” Huey said.

“I didn’t mean to.  I was thinking.”

“You’ll think better after your appointment.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I nodded to myself.  “Yeah.  That’s true.”

“Let’s get it done.”

“Now?  Huey, look, if we can’t-”

“That’s not my name.”

I blinked.

“Dewey,” he said.

“Close enough.”

“It hasn’t been that long, Sylvester,” he said.

“No, probably not,” I said.  “Can you do me a favor?”

“I seem to recall the last two favors ending up-”

“Not like that,” I said.  “No.  I just… I need to think, without Wyvern.  To see if I even can figure out this problem in my head, when I’m like this?  Do you get what I mean?”

“No.”

“Okay,” I said.  “Yeah, look, can I stay?  You can dick off and do whatever, or get caught up on whatever.”

He gave me a level stare.

“Please, Dewey.  I need to be here, I think.  Or I won’t be focused on the problem.”

“We use the restraints this time.  You stay put, after getting dosed, you stay quiet, you don’t bitch, you don’t get clever and try to run off while you’re working through the worst of the pain.  Think you can manage that?”

I nodded.

“I fucking hope so,” he said.  “Fuck with us on this and you don’t get any favors again.”

I nodded.

He tromped off, heavy feet clumping down the hall.

Avis was enduring her own mental gauntlet, caught with nothing else to do but try to endure, to figure out what her answer to the Duke would be.  Mine touched on unfamiliar territory.  On Jamie, and a divide between us that I couldn’t ignore.

It hurt, that things couldn’t be what they were.  I was angry, I was confused.  There was no right answer to give, yet if I couldn’t one, then things would be broken like this forever.

That he’d think I wouldn’t look after his book or keep the promise after everything we’d been through, it scared me.  Some things were inviolable.  It made me feel uneasy.

Hours passed.  It was dark, but for flickering lights and the glow from the room, the doctors rotating so that one was observing at all times.

The entire time, I was trying to unravel the problem, though the edges of my brain had dulled.  I wasn’t sure why I was so stubborn about wanting to do it without a full dose of Wyvern, but I’d started the journey and wasn’t about to abandon it.

I looked deep within, trying to find a glimmer of something, as if I could pry out some part of myself that could see Jamie in the way he seemed to see me.  I thought back, memory by memory, trying to figure out when things had changed, knowing my memory was weak at the best of times.  I thought about looking in the books, but somehow I knew I needed to find the answer here, not there.

As the third doctor came in for their night-shift, stepping over me in the doorway, I asked the time, and was informed it was four in the morning.

Perhaps an hour after that, I realized what it was I was trying to do.

I couldn’t have one more minute like the past afternoon and evening had been.  Not another second of that painful awkwardness.  I wouldn’t be able to endure it.

I had to greet him with a genuine smile as he woke.  Nothing more.  I could do that much.  I was sure that it would at least open the door for things to get better, and that was all we really needed.

Secure in that knowledge, I finally drifted off.

☙

Hands seized me and dragged me, pulling me out of the way.  I stirred, annoyed, knowing I hadn’t gotten enough sleep, that it was far too early and I’d fallen asleep too late.

Then I realized where I was, my attention turned to where I was supposed to be – sleeping while sitting astride the doorframe, and I connected the dots to what was going on.  The Lambs were coming down the hall at a run – Lillian, Gordon, Mary, a patchy Helen.

There were far too many doctors in the room.

The shock of being pulled from deep sleep didn’t seem to go away.  I felt detached as I pulled myself to my feet.

Gordon was shouting my name.

I ignored him, pushing my way through the doorway, into the room.

So many doctors here, talking, chatting.  I’d seen all of them at one point or another.  Hayle was just entering the room behind me.  He gave me a passing glance, then headed over to talk to Jamie’s doctor.

I turned my attention to the throne.

Jamie wasn’t there.

There was a person, and that person looked down at me, but there was nothing there.  No glimmer of recognition, no personality.

He moved his hand, and it was a movement that suggested he was figuring it out.

Empty.

I could hear the chatter as two dozen disparate voices, talking about the same sort of thing.  What had been retained, what would be in the tanks, what to keep.  Project caterpillar this, project caterpillar that.

Everyone on their best behavior, with the Duke leaning against the wall in the corner, arms folded, observing.

Jamie’s name didn’t seem to come up once.

I spotted the doctors in charge of Jamie’s care.

They were taking it in stride.  Upset, as anyone would be when they had a bad day at work, but hardly upset enough.

I passed by one doctor, bumping into them, and my hand found their pocket.  A scalpel was clipped to the inside.  I grabbed it and popped off the tip.

A short distance later, I repeated the same process, finding another.  I drew nearer to Hayle and the other doctors.

The closer I got, the more sure my steps were.  I walked briskly, head down, scalpels hidden so they wouldn’t be too obvious.

I was tackled all the same, thrown to the ground, arms hugging my arms to my sides, scalpels gripped to either side of my waist.

I fought, squirming, elbowing, wrestling, mad and incoherent and not even sure what sounds were leaving my lips.  Tears were streaming down my cheeks.

It was Jamie, damn it.

I managed to flip over, got my wrist free of the grip, and stabbed, only to get caught again, and swiftly disarmed.

I stopped when I met Gordon’s eyes.  I saw the tears there.  I saw the Lambs huddled behind him, the expressions in their faces.  They were standing, and I was the one that was breaking.  I stopped struggling and went limp.

“The one fucking time you put up a half-decent fight, Sy,” Gordon said, soft words all too audible in the hush.

Enemy (Arc 6)

The door slammed shut.  The impact rattled her thoughts.  Double vision, triple vision, vertigo, but all cognitive, her thoughts alone.

One breath blurred into the next, the space between breaths stretched on, adding together, piling onto one another until she realized she was suffocating.  She coughed, gasping and wheezing for air.

Panic surged in her breast.  A bird’s flutter of emotion, beating harder and more frantically, until it filled her.

Then, unsustainable, it was gone.  Was it the drugs they were pumping into her that quelled the fear?  Did they worry that enough fear and anxiety could tax her brain and kill her?

Or had minutes passed, or hours?

She screamed, thrashing against her bonds, a cage custom-molded to her body.  The scream bounced off of the walls, joining the fresh screams as she caught breath.  A momentary catch, a drawn-out process of panting for breath?  Both?

She tried to figure out which it was, scanning her memory, gathering clues, and lost track of time.  She gasped for breath again, having let herself slip, letting the time between breaths become too long.

Heartbeat, she thought.  She fixated on her heartbeat.  The steady pulse, accelerated by her fear.  It was meditative, calming, a rope to cling to as she drowned in this new sea.

They stole my sanity, she thought.

They stole my mind from me.  They’ve hobbled my brain as surely as they crippled my body.  Until I can get this fixed, I’ve forever got one additional ball to juggle.

There were tears in the corner of her eyes.  She struggled again against the bondage, fierce enough she was certain she would hurt something.

She had to adjust her mental clock, taking into account the exertion, how it affected the heartbeats she was counting.

The lighting seeping in through the crack beneath the door had changed.  Was that the flicker of torchlight, or had she been down here long enough for things to change?  A different load on the systems of the Academy, leaving more power to go to the lights in the hall?

Her heartbeat had calmed, she realized, but she was still using the same measure, her judgment of how many seconds or minutes had just passed was dashed to the wind.

Someone moved in front of the door, a shadow passing through that slice of light.

Unable to find the words, she screamed at the door.  It was a futile thing, a cry for help with no expectation that that help would come.

Everything she tried, it was making things worse.  She was in the Bowels, a place where she’d spent a fair amount of time, and she knew how deep they would have put her, how thick the walls were, and how far the trip was to get to the surface.  Even once she was there, she would be surrounded by soldiers, she would have to pass through the checkpoint, and pass more soldiers on the road out of the city.

It was akin to being beneath the ocean, the weight of all of that water pressing down on her, crushing, wearing her away.

Three more times, she lost track of her breathing.  Her stomach gurgled, but it wasn’t hunger.  It was suction and air, as a tube worked at the side of her stomach, removing waste, tarry and black.  She felt a pressing need to go to the bathroom, but it never got better or worse.  Tubes coiled up inside her bladder, most likely.

Again, she screamed and thrashed.  She wanted to hurt herself, to find some avenue to rub herself raw, do some damage, out of some hope that she could make that damage severe enough to end her existence.  It would be a form of control, a way of taking charge of her own destiny.

But it was futile.  She’d been trained as a doctor, finishing her education here in Radham.  She knew what the tarry black waste meant.  She had a bloodspur in her.  When her blood pressure was sufficiently high, the device would bleed her, dumping the blood into her stomach.  New or artificial blood was fed in through tubes.  She couldn’t bleed herself out, not realistically.  If she was wounded, the bloodspur would cease working, and the wound would take over its duties of slowly emptying out the blood the tubes gave her.

She was exhausted but unable to sleep.  Again and again, she struggled, because there was nothing else to do with herself.  Again and again, she lost track of her breathing as she got too deep in thought.

Tears streaked down her face.  She recovered.

She screamed again, howling to see if she couldn’t scream her voice raw.  The seam in her chest where they’d done surgery threatened to pop from the strain.

The door opened.  The light was blinding.

Had she been in the dark that long?  Or was it drugs and a perpetual state of blood loss?

The Duke and his coterie.

“I’m sorry for the delay,” he remarked.  His expression was placid compared to hers, as she panted for breath.  “I wanted to have a conversation with the Lambs.”

She stared at him, uncomprehending.

“Do you remember the terms of our last discussion?” he asked, his voice eerily smooth and deep.  Artificial.

“Yes,” she said, and her voice was hoarse.

“I’m going to ask you a question.  Yes or no answers only.”

“Yes,” she said, again.

“Will you provide the locations of each of the other cells?”

She considered for a moment, but again, time threatened to slip away from her.  After half a second -or was it a minute?- the Duke turned to leave.

“Yes,” she said.  She opened her mouth to speak, then remembered his warning and closed it again.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know where Percy is.  Cynthia handled the coordination between groups.”

“I see,” he said.  He gestured at a doctor, “The mask.”

“You said I had permission to speak!” she cried out, struggling, trying to pull her face away as the doctor lifted the tube and the grasping bloodsucker toward her mouth.

“I didn’t say I’d favor the answer,” he said.  “Take some time to think it over.  I hope you’ll come up with clues about his whereabouts.”

The tube slid down her throat.  The device locked around her jaw and the back of her head, connecting to the table.

The lights went out, and again, the door slammed shut.

This time, she still needed to regulate her breathing, but it was through the nose alone.  She couldn’t scream, she couldn’t measure her breaths.

☙

There once was a girl named Mavis.  People all around her got sick, half the people in the town she grew up in.  It got worse and worse, people hacking and coughing, until the Academy arrived.  The best doctors, checking, giving care, not unkind people.

Had everything gone according to plan, it would have been a positive experience for her, a reason to respect and favor the Academy.

Except Simon Weltsch had fought in the war, and he said there was a more sinister explanation.  The Academy had made them sick, testing a drug on the village’s population without permission.

She never found out if that was true or not, and as head of communications for Radham, she’d made use of every resource available to her to try and find out.  It wasn’t to say Simon was spewing utter nonsense.  After becoming a student, she had researched the testing of drugs on communities, but the casualties were low to nonexistent, the rate of advancement high.  Without paperwork or records to tie back to her community in particular, it never quite hit home to the point that she could get angry about it.

She wished she could say that Simon Weltsch’s unexplained and gruesome death had woken her up to reality.  It was accepted across the community that the Academy had done the deed to silence the dissident, but everyone was healthy and nobody had wanted to stick their head up, Mavis among them.

She’d eaten dinner with her parents, gone for long walks and talked with her friends, and flirted with boys.  As she came of age, she started studying, and earned a place at the Academy, abbreviating her name as soon as she fixed on her preferred area of study.

No, Avis’ problem had never quite been with the Academy.

Her first winter holiday back home, she had been excited to share her tales of being at the academy.  Avis had met with friends for tea.  The boys who’d been farmers and laborers trickled into the bar, and she’d remarked on how few were turning up.  Then she had heard.  No, not gone to war.  Had it been that, she might have been able to justify it as necessary evil.

Three nobles had come into town, young ladies not much older than she was, gallivanting around.  The noblewomen had asked for the company of young men, and the young men had not been in a position to refuse.  When they left, they took the most handsome with them.  Avis’ girlfriends had joked that it wasn’t much loss, the noblewomen being so attractive, but she hadn’t missed the emotion beneath the words.

There had been only one letter back since the boys had left, and it had read like it had been written carefully, so as not to offend any who read it before it reached home.

It had taken some time for Avis to come to terms with her feelings over that.  Life had gone on as normal, with some farmers getting help from the community to make up for the labor their sons weren’t providing.  Where war was a necessary evil, this didn’t feel evil at all, and it most definitely did not feel necessary.

It hadn’t been the blow that destroyed her loyalty to the Crown, but it had been a wedge, and every story or idea that touched on the Crown drove that wedge in deeper.

Avis stared into the Duke’s eyes.

“Do I need to repeat the question?” he asked.

She opened her mouth, then closed it.  She felt painful bumps here and there where the inside of her mouth had been rubbed by the gag.

She nodded.

“Will you tell me the location of your loved ones.  Your mother, father, siblings, cousins, and the friends you wrote to while you were first studying in the Academy?”

“Yes,” she said.

She’d given up.  She was defeated.

“Your father?”

“He’s in Iverchester.  With my mother and youngest sibling,” she said.  His eyes seemed to swallow her up.

“Your older sister?”

“She said she would… she could find work in Burry, teaching.”

“Your friends?”

“Janice is in Chells, Tory is in Uskham.”

She could hear the damning scratch as the details were taken down by a doctor in the back.

“Please,” her voice was so quiet she could barely hear it.  She stared at the Duke’s collar, “My lord.  Anything else you want to know, sit me down, take me out of here, I’ll share it if you fix my mind.  Please.  I will do anything you want.  You’ve won.”

“Except sitting quiet and giving only yes or no answers, or answering my questions,” the Duke’s voice murmured back to her.  His tone was gentle, a light rebuke, and Avis couldn’t shake the notion that this was what it sounded like when a father told their child that cookies were for after dinner.  The Duke’s voice, rich, deep, and authoritarian, was as a child imagined their father sounding.

“You hurt children, Avis.  Kidnapped them off the streets, my streets, and put them on the table.”

“That wasn’t me.  It wasn’t the people I was working for.”

“A blatant lie if I ever heard one,” the Duke said.  He kicked something under the table that held her and then changed the angle, lying her flat.

“Cynthia was hurt, Godwin killed.  The group is in disarray, there are two factions now.  One side wants to stop the Academy, the other wants to stop the Crown.”

“And which are you, Avis?”

“I’m not- not anymore.  I won’t go against you again.”

“Stop stating the obvious.  Of course nobody ever goes against me a second time.  Answer the question.  Which are you?”

“I was –was- against the Crown.  The others, the ones who want to hurt the Academy, they’re desperate, they’re angry, they want to win an ever-escalating contest of strength.  They have other ideas in mind.  Breaking rules the Academy won’t.”

One of the Duke’s doctors was positioning a tool, a mechanical arm, so it was poised above her head.

A needle speared straight toward her.

Her breathing picked up.

“You coordinated for them.  Passed on messages.”

“I did, but-“

“You’re bending the truth to put yourself in a better light, Avis,” the Duke said.  “You convinced yourself that Percy’s actions were acceptable.”

“No.  But it wasn’t like he listened when I sent a letter.  If I’d reacted or tried to take action, I risked my life.  I had to play along, hope the others would coordinate, pull the two groups together.”

“I know of other things you’ve been complicit in.  The white plague in Danes, the ravager of Arwick.  You believe in what you’re doing.  Short term harm for long-term betterment.”

“It- yes.  It’s not so different from what the Academy does?” she made it a question.

The Duke’s expression changed, the light smile fading away.  “The sacrifice of a child?  No, I suppose not.  I do suppose it falls on my shoulders.”

She wanted to inquire about that, but the movement of the machinery and the swaying of the needle occupied her attention.  She didn’t find the voice to question what he meant.

“The difference is you failed in the end,” the Duke said.  “There will be no betterment, only harm.”

The mechanical arm with the needle came down, dropping a solid foot.  It jerked to a stop a half-inch from Avis’ eye.

A doctor gripped her eye in between gloved fingertip and thumb, forcing her to look straight at the needle.

The mechanical arm dropped another inch.  Avis didn’t even have time to vocalize a response.

“I believe in justice,” the Duke said.  “Punishment where it’s due.  I told you the rules, you had enough time to consider them.  This is your punishment, just as your decision as a whole have led to you being in this room.  If and when it comes to pass that my work ends in more harm than betterment, I hope my reckoning will come.”

Avis managed to find the breath to speak, as a doctor manipulated her other eye, forcing her to stare up at a second needle.  “Please.  How long have I been here?”

The second needle came down.  Her eyes were speared, locked into position.  There was no pain, not physical pain, but she knew the effect this would have on her mind and her already impaired ability to track time.  She felt the gag slip into place, slithering down her throat.

“How long have you been here?  I think that would be telling,” the Duke said.

The door slammed.

☙

She woke, which was a strange thing that had been happening lately.  She wasn’t supposed to sleep, but she took it as the resiliency of the brain, finding a way.  Her entire body hurt, and she had a headache unlike any she’d ever had before.

She moved her eyes, and her vision was blurry.

Avis raised her arm, as she’d tried to do so many times before, and this time the restraints didn’t stop her.

Pages were scattered around the room.  There was a matchbox sitting on a table in the corner, but it looked as though the slamming of the door had generated a gust, blowing it away from the stack of papers it had been weighing down.

Her movements were ginger.  She remembered what she’d been told, about alterations to her joints.

Her muscles should have atrophied.  Her joints were disabled, the bones shaved or implants put in to make them easy to dislocate.  She could feel the pain, which meant the drugs to dull pain were no longer coursing through her, and hadn’t been for a little while.

She staggered across the room, nearly falling.  Bending down, she picked up papers.  Each was one half of a sheet of paper that had been torn in half.

The order of them was hard to decipher, and the blur in the dead center of her vision made it harder still to read.  Ingrained into her by years of education, the habit of reading made her eyes want to slip onto each line of tight cursive writing, instead of holding above the line, piecing together the meaning of each statement.

The Duke has been visiting you less and less.  I have been visiting you more and more.  Soon, I think, he intends to visit you, to make you useful.  If I acted any sooner, you wouldn’t have been strong enough.  If I acted too late, you would be his.

She gathered sentences here, fragments there, not sure on the order of the pages, not when she could barely read.

Injections to your shoulders and hips.  Minor repairs, some minor surgery.  I accessed channels outside of your room, that I knew would feed into your blood supply.

Hands shaking, she sorted through the various pages.

Do not look for your family or friends.  You will only find unhappiness at best, and fall into the Crown’s trap again at worst.  Be wary in seeking old acquaintances, though reasons are different.  What was a war between two sides has become a war between three.  Old friends may not be friends anymore.

She trembled, hands unable to find the gap between two pages.

The advised escape route is the drainage tunnel to Claret Hall.  From there, you should be able to reach the Tower by using the dark avenues between the storage buildings.  The Tower will get you high enough to glide over the wall.

Another.

Internal components and tubes have been removed on this visit.  I leave you my words, which I hope you will burn, and a present for the winter holidays, admittedly belated.

Two seasons, Avis realized.

I need to act, and I have no freedom.  We’re speeding headlong into disaster, and you’re the only person I can think of who could pass on a message.  Burn the papers if you have any gratitude for your freedom.

The writing, she realized, was digging deeper into the page as the writer had gone on.  Intensity, urgency.  She could recognize the difference between papers now, the thickness of letters and amount of excess ink.  She’d already read some of it out of order.

She found the last piece of paper.

The tallest hill outside of Radham.  It has a view of the approach.  The message is such: It is time to step in.

Avis stared down at the paper, then crumpled it, and set it on the table, being careful to put a match to every part of it.

While it burned, she set to looking for her gift.

It was tucked in a corner – a small box.

She reached inside, and she withdrew wings.  Not hers, but similar.  The bends in the wings had hook-like fingers.

She put them on, feeling them bite into flesh, a little less merciful than her old wings had been.

A single revolver and a trio of syringes, each one capped, sat on the bottom, tucked neatly in the corner, stowed in the gap just left of a set of clothes.

She’d had enough time to think, trapped in a hell of her own making.  The Duke’s words rattled around in her head even now, taunting her.

She changed clothes, pulling off the hospital dress and donning the provided clothes.  Loose pants like a sailor might wear, boots, and a harness top she could wear with her wings.  She touched her head and found her hair short.

Dressing didn’t make her feel more human.  She felt cold inside.

Her hatred for the Duke had cooled from a burning hatred to an ice cold hate.  She wouldn’t bat an eye if she had an opportunity to hurt him.  She knew she might destroy herself for the chance.

Yet, even though she was able to collect the syringes, she found herself hesitating when it came time to collect the gun.

She’d hurt people in a casual way, facilitating what she had.  Letting Percy do what he had.

So easy to do when she was in the stride of it, but after having had time alone with her own thoughts, it didn’t sit nearly as easy.

She turned away, hauling open the door, feeling grateful as her shoulder withstood the strain.

The gun was left behind.

Rather than let the door slam, as it had innumerable times before, she gently closed it.

It was the dead of night.  There were no people on the staircase leading up and out of the underground labs.

She was as quiet as the situation allowed.

It was dreamlike, and her altered state of awareness didn’t help matters.  She wasn’t convinced this wasn’t a hallucination.

Her body was light, she’d altered her bone structure long ago, removing sections of organs to lower her body weight while maintaining the same rough frame.  Her diet while lying on the table had been different, but it hadn’t added any pounds that she could notice.

She flexed her wings as much as she was able, given the narrow space between railing and wall, and continued to ascend.

Passing a hallway, she saw a pale expanse, rather than dark, barely-lit hallway.

Her heart skipped a beat as she realized what it was.

Gorger made noise as he hauled himself out of the hallway, a matter of feet behind her.

As quiet as she’d been, Gorger was loud.  He covered surprising amounts of ground, feet tromping on stairs, one hand regularly reaching up to seize handholds, moving like a loping gorilla rather than a very obese giant of a man.

She found the needle, squeezed out the air in the syringe, and she jammed it into her own heart.

Strength, energy, perception.  It flowed through her quickly, as fast as her heart beat.  She was able to move faster, more securely, using her light body to its fullest, as the pain faded away.

Absolute terror at what awaited her if she were caught gave her the extra push she needed.  She knew she’d rather fall and die than get caught, and that gave her the courage to step up onto the railing, wings spread, and leap, aiming for a hole in the wall.

Gorger saw what she was doing.  Rather than give chase, he slammed his hand against the wall, hard.

The underground labs rumbled.  Things began to fall into place, a domino effect expanding out in ten different ways from the place Gorger’s hand had struck the wall.

But the underground labs were built around a massive silo, a cylinder set deep into the ground, and the effect had to reach around the edges of the cylinder.

She didn’t hesitate, even as she saw the slab of stone falling into place.

She passed under the slab, full speed, wings spread, and the slab came down behind her.

With no time to waste, knowing Gorger would be calling the alarm, she ran for Claret Hall.

She passed through one section of tunnel that had no lighting.

And she was back on the table, unable to move, body paralyzed, unable to breathe.

A dream?  A hallucination?

Flashback.

She floundered, struggled, and hauled herself to her feet.  Without her face down in a half-foot of water, she was able to breathe again.

Only a flashback.

She was still running, still making her escape.  But it was too easy to slip back into that same timeless place she’d spent so long.

There were so many questions and not a one of them mattered.  Who had rescued her, why?

By fighting forward like this, obeying the letters, she was risking doing the exact same thing that had gotten her in this mess in the first place.  Reckless action, lack of forethought, approaching her future at a run, without watching her step or paying attention to what happened in her wake.

She was in Claret Hall, she realized.  This was tricky.  The way out meant coming up out of the wine cellar, into the building.

She’d plotted escape routes enough that this wasn’t too hard.  Into empty offices, through the washroom.  A window large enough for her to fit through.  She passed into a shadowy space between buildings, and crossed to another.

A distant alarm was getting picked up by closer buildings.  As it was heard and people found the switches, the alarm was passed on.  It swept past her, and people in uniforms started to exit building in groups.

Soon, the stitched would be roused and directed.  The Academy’s security would quintuple at the very least, and she would have nowhere to go.

She was so fixated on watching what was going on that she didn’t wholly connect to the fact that she was tramping on something that crunched underfoot.

Frozen grass.  Patches of snow caught mid-thaw, frozen over by rain.

It would have to be spring.

Three seasons, all in all.

It was a realization that spurred her on further, into the labyrinthine maze of warehouses and storerooms.  Driven by fear, she made a break for the tower, the biggest open space yet.

She was glad her wings were black, and not white as the old ones had been, as she approached the door.

People left the Tower in a group.  A small army of stitched.

She danced away to the side, taking cover against the side of the building.

They were spreading out, organizing into groups.

She had no place to go except up.

With the hooks on her wings and her own frozen fingers, she scrabbled for a grip on the surface of the tower.  She climbed, cold stone and petrified wood leeching her body heat with every moment of contact.  Fingers scraped raw against mortar and frost, and she hauled herself up, circling around to put the body of the Tower between herself and the rest of the Academy.

Her perception of time was something of a blessing and a curse.  It let her climb more carefully, devoting her focus to the moment, but it felt like she was climbing an endless, infinite tower.  Blood ran from fingertip to wrist and down to the crook of her elbow.

As she got higher up, there were more windows.  She gauged her ability to glide over, and she had doubts.

She couldn’t even guess at her chance of getting spotted, were she to climb up and over.

Avis decided to compromise, raising herself up, so the bottom of the window was at eye level, peering left and right.

No movement.

She climbed, and was standing with stomach to the glass when she saw him.

A single figure, a boy.

One of the Lambs?

No, this one had red hair.

Paralyzed, she finally managed to move, raising a hand, finger pressed to her mouth.

The boy only stared at her with amber eyes.

It unnerved, and it made her think of the wrongs she’d committed, the children Percy had used, that the Lambs had executed so thoroughly.

As if recoiling, she threw herself back, twisting so her belly faced the ground, wings extending, and glided.

Avis didn’t pass over the wall, but she was able to grab it.  She heard shouts and calls, and heard a trumpet, then hauled herself over and beyond, as guns fired from a distance.

She was free.

She’d escaped, but she didn’t feel free.

She made her way to the tallest hill, feeling trepidation.

There were three figures waiting for her.  When she landed, it was to crumple into a heap.  She didn’t even raise her head.

A hand reached for her.  She flinched involuntarily, and the hand withdrew.

She knew who the hand belonged to.

“Fray,” she said.

“Yes,” Fray said.

“We were trying to contact you for a while,” Avis said.  Her voice didn’t sound like her own.

“It’s been a while, Avis.”

Avis nodded.  She fidgeted, because being too still made it feel like the walls of that room were closing in.

“It’s- I’m supposed to tell you…” Avis started.

She didn’t finish.  Her voice broke.  She curled up into a ball, folding her wings around herself.

“I know,” Genevieve Fray said.

Another hand touched her, and this one was very warm in the cold winter.  She flinched, at first, but this one was persistent.  It became a hug, and the hug was welcome.

“You’re with the right people,” Fray said.

Avis shook her head.

“No?”

“I can’t- I’m not a soldier anymore.  I couldn’t touch the gun.  I can’t be part of this.  I can’t stand the Crown but I can’t fight them either, I-”

“That’s fine,” Fray said.  “You don’t have to, to stay with us.  The Crown States have two major factions who are trying to destroy the Crown, they don’t need us.”

“What are you doing?”

“We’re saving humanity,” Fray said.  “Come on.  Let’s go.”

Rather than Fray, it was the giant of a man who offered Avis a hand.

Staring at his hand, she felt he was kindred, gentle.

Looking in his eyes, however, she saw a terrible anger, no doubt worse for her being reflected in it.

That was as comforting as anything.

Tooth and Nail – 7.1

I stirred in response to a knock on my door.

“Nn,” I managed.

I heard the door open, and pulled the covers down from over my head.

“Sylvester,” Mrs. Earles said, “Breakfast.  Lillian’s here, too, so don’t think you can skip eating this morning.”

“Mm,” I said.  “Isn’t she up and at ’em early in the day.  Obligations?”

“I think so, yes.”

I sat up, rubbing at my eyes, then ran my fingers through my hair.  It was long, it was shaggy, and I had the worst bed-hair of anyone I knew.  I had no illusions about my ability to keep the hair tamed.

Mrs. Earles cleared her throat.

I looked up, looked at her, and saw her pointed look, just behind me.

I twisted around, and saw Mary lying there, head on a second pillow.

“Oh,” I said.  “Yeah.”

“Hi, Mrs. Earles,” Mary said.

Behind her, some of the other children had already woken up.  I saw Rick step into view, glance at the scene, and smirk.  Mrs. Earles saw and shooed him off.

I reached under Mary’s pillow, she smacked my arm, and I withdrew it.

Fine, I thought.  But that’s going to be a thing.

Mrs. Earles positioned herself so that she filled the space between the door and the frame, with little chance of someone peeking or seeing past.  “It’s my habit to avoid asking questions,” she said.  “That said, given the situation, given that Sy is twelve at most, and you’re thirteen-”

“I think of myself as a small fourteen,” I said.

Mrs. Earles gave me a withering look.

“You don’t have to ask,” Mary said.  “Really.”

Mrs. Earles took that in, then nodded.  “I won’t, then.  I was looking for you, Mary, I was worried you’d gone out earlier than usual to practice your throwing.  It’s good that you’re here if Lillian needs you.  Don’t take too long getting ready.”

“Okay,” Mary said.  I nodded.

The door shut, the latch clicking.

“I like how she takes you at your word,” I said.  “But when I say something, oh, no.  I could tell her the sky is blue and she’d double-check.”

“The sky isn’t usually blue in Radham.  It’s gray at best.”

“You know what I mean.”

Mary swung her feet out from under the covers, standing up from bed, stretching.  I hurried to pat down the covers so there were no gaps for the cool air to leak through.

I looked past her to Jamie’s bed.  A large notebook sat on the bed, the weight of it messing up what had been a perfectly made, entirely neat bed.

“I missed my morning exercises,” Mary said.  “I’m so used to the way the sun comes into my room in the morning.  Moment it slips over the top of the window and hits my eyes, I’m out of bed.”

“That sounds like the worst thing ever,” I said.  “Why would you wake up early on purpose?”

“I like it.  It’s a good start to the day, keeps me sharp.”

“You’re sharp enough,” I said, reaching under her pillow for the knife she kept there, holding it up for demonstration.

Mary smiled.  She reached over, touching my chin to turn my head away.  I could still sort of see her in my peripheral vision.

“Lillian does it too.  The lunatic,” I said.  “If it wasn’t for Helen, I’d think all girls were screwed up somehow.  She appreciates a good night’s sleep.”

Mary was pulling off her night clothes.  I fixed my eyes on the ceiling.

“She sleeps with her eyes open sometimes, you know?” Mary said.

“I know.  I’ve done stakeouts with her.”

“It’s not the only weird sleep thing.  The first night I slept here, she climbed into bed with me.  Curled up beside me like a cat, no covers, no pillow, fell straight asleep.  One-time thing.  I don’t know if it’s about affection, or about dominance, or-”

“Insecurity,” I said.

“Hm?”

“Insecurity.  More rational than emotional.  ‘Keep your enemies closer’ is a very good tactic when you’re a Helen.”

“Ha,” Mary said.

“I’m not joking.”

“No, I know you’re not joking, but that’s clever.”

“Someone should probably mention it to Ibott, but then he’d want to keep Helen over in his labs so he can observe and train her sleep and blah to that.”

“Blah,” Mary agreed.  She stepped closer to the bed, dressed enough to be decent.  I reluctantly sat up, taking a second to rearrange the covers before I took the offered wires and knives.  I set to arranging them, with only minimal help from her, while she brushed her hair.

A minute passed like that as I set everything up.  Mary made only small readjustments.

“Gotta ask, Sy,” Mary said, as I wrapped up.  She walked over to the rest of her clothes, folded neatly on Jamie’s chair, pulling on a skirt over her hose-covered legs, “Why is this now?”

“Mmf,” I said, letting myself topple over, head hitting pillow.

“It’s been nine months.”

“I know.”

“Why the change?  Why now?”

“That’s a topic best saved for a group discussion,” I said, looking over at Jamie’s bed.

“I can recall at least three times where you’ve said something like that, and then you didn’t bring it up again.”

“Can you?  My memory isn’t that good.”

She gave me a look, finishing buttoning a blouse over her camisole.

“Okay,” she said, pulling on a sweater.  She bounced on the spot, making skirt and hair move and sweater settle into place, then turned to me, “You don’t have a mirror, so I have to ask you for the verdict.”

“Very pretty,” I said.

“Good answer,” she said, seeming satisfied.  She smoothed out a wrinkle.  “I should go wake up Helen.”

“Yeah.”

“Here, you’ll need this,” she said, tossing the brush at me.  I let it fall against the covers.  “If you’re not out of bed by the time I come back down the hall with her, I’m going to have her wake you up.”

I groaned.

“I could give her suggestions on what to do to you,” she said, as she opened the door, peeking out.  “What’s the most humiliating hold?”

“I’ll be out of bed, don’t worry.”

“Or maybe I’ll get her to chew on you?”

“I’ll be out of bed!”

“And dressed.”

“And dressed!  Go away!”

Mary smiled and closed the door behind her.

I climbed out of bed, stretching.  I shivered a little at the cold, then pulled some clothes out of my dresser.  Some shirts were Jamie’s.  I hadn’t grown nearly as much as I’d have liked over nine months, but it was enough to need a different set of clothes, and Jamie had been a bit taller than I was.

Button-up shirt, pants, suspenders, jacket.  I used Mary’s brush to try and fix my hair, gave up, and pulled a boy’s cap over it.  I emerged just in time to run into Mary and a dressed-and-combed Helen.  Helen had her head on Mary’s shoulder.  As she saw me, Mary gave Helen a light push.  Helen staggered my way like a bad stitched.

“Ahh,” I said, monotone, a mock cry as Helen draped herself over my back, arms over my shoulders.  She swiped my cap off the top fo my head, then lightly bit my scalp.

“Arr,” she said.

“You overheard.”

“I told her,” Mary said.

“Mmf, arr,” Helen said.  She adjusted position, mock-biting the top of my head a few more times.

“Don’t bite too deep.  Sy-meat is poisonous.”

“That’s totally not true,” Mary said.

“We don’t know it’s not true,” I said.  “I know my blood is poisonous, chemicals floating in it.  Stands to reason the rest of me is a little poisonous.”

Helen stopped biting me, resting her chin on top of my head instead.  “You smell like Mary.”

“Yep.”

“Probably, but could you not mention that in front of others?” Mary asked.

“M’kay,” Helen said.  Then she made a snoring sound.

More than half-asleep.

We made our way down the stairs.  Helen synchronized her steps with mine, so she wouldn’t come down a step a half-second after I did and end up driving the hard point of her chin into my skull.

As we rounded the corner, making our way down the last leg of the stairs, she pulled away, straightening.  She transferred the hat back from her head to mine.

“Good morning, Helen!” Eliza, Fran and Iris called out in sync.

“Good morning!” Helen said, bright, cheery, without a hint of sleepiness.

I rolled my eyes.  I rounded the dining table to collect my plate of breakfast, putting a hand on Lillian’s head to rock it left and right until she knocked my hand away in annoyance.

“Sy,” Gordon said, looking up from his plate.  “Sit here.”

I gave him a suspicious look, then gave a more suspicious look to the rugrat sitting beside him.  Albert.  “Why?”

“Because Al here keeps feeding Hubris.”

I bent down to peek under the table, at the mutt, then stepped over the bench, interjecting myself between the kid and the beast.

Mary and Helen found their seats as well.  With Lillian present for this morning’s breakfast, we naturally filled the empty spot on the bench.

Just let this meal go by without incident, I thought, staring down at the plate, methodically shoveling food into my mouth.  Sausage & mashed potato with onion and boiled vegetables of some sort I’d never seen before.  Don’t let this be a bad day.

With last of us served, Mrs. Earles headed off to start getting the little ones ready.  I saw her leave, and I saw Rick watch her leave.

I sighed a little.

“So, Sy,” Rick said.

Smug bastard.  Smug, round face, smug hair, smug fat ass.

“Rick, no,” Gordon said. “Whatever it is, no.”

“You’ve been on my case for the last year, practically,” Rick said.

“Nine months,” I said.

“Sy, don’t respond.  Rick, shut the hell up, or I will beat you,” Gordon said.

“Jamie’s in the hospital, fine, but you keep making me out to be the bad guy, and I’ve done and said nothing wrong.”

“Even if we agree that’s the case-”

“It is, unless you can tell me what I’ve said that’s so awfully bad,” Rick said.

“Even if we agree that’s the case,” Gordon said, “You and Sy don’t get along.  Sy’s missing his best friend-”

I clutched my utensils tighter.

“-and the very best thing you can do is to ignore him.”

“I don’t think it’s fair that-”

“Ignore him,” Gordon said.

The little kids who hadn’t finished eating were staring, silent.

Talking very slowly, as if he was spelling things out to a small child, Rick said, “I don’t think it’s fair that I live in this house and there are people who also live here who I’m forbidden to talk to or talk about, through no fault of mine.  I feel like I and others are kept in the dark sometimes.”

“Life isn’t fair,” I said.  There were a hundred different things I wanted to tack on to the end of that sentence.  There were statements about why Rick hadn’t been adopted yet that might have made the smaller children cry, and mentions of Jamie that might have made the smaller children cry.  I figured it was better to leave things unsaid than to make Mrs. Earles mad at me.

“That’s well and good, but I want to know what the rules of the house are-”

Gordon rose from his seat.  He stood there, hands on the table, staring Rick down.

Anyone else might have backed down, but Rick only smiled, playing at blithe ignorance.

“If you need to question the rules of the house, ask Mrs. Earles,” Gordon said.

“Okay,” Rick said.  “Alright.”

“I don’t know what bug crawled up your rear end to make you this strange this morning-” Gordon said.

“Ew,” Frances said.

“-But nothing’s changed.  Leave Sy alone.  Leave the subject of Jamie alone.”

“Okay, alright,” Rick said, throwing his hands up in surrender.

The meal continued.  I was making more progress than usual, just focusing on eating, eyes on the food.

“Are we traveling?” Mary asked, conversationally.

“Looks like,” Lillian said.  “School project.  We’re going to be gone for at least a week.”

“Which train?” Helen asked.

“It’s the train with the tea cart you like,” Lillian assured Helen.

Helen smiled.

“Been a while since we traveled,” Mary said.

“We’ve been busy enough,” Gordon said, as he settled back into his seat.

“But it’s been very low-key,” Mary observed.  “If they’re sending you out to get us, that means early train…”

“Yep.”

“Which means we’re rushing, but not so much we’re having to skip breakfast.”

“Yep.”

“And we’re probably meeting someone?”

“Let’s hope,” Lillian said.

“Uh huh,” Rick said.  I gripped my utensils tighter again.  I could sense Gordon tensing beside me.  Hubris, under the table, was reacting to Gordon’s body language.  “It’s kind of rude to talk in code, with everyone else at the table.”

“Code?” Frances asked.

“There’s no code,” Gordon said.  “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

“Why don’t you try carrying on a conversation that includes everyone else at the table?” Rick asked.  I had the impression he was actually irritated enough to show it, for once.  “Like, say, Mary, why weren’t you in your own bed last night?  Do you have anything to tell us?”

I sighed.  I could see the look of confusion on Lillian’s face.  Mary was shaking her head.  She signaled something at Gordon I didn’t catch.  Unbeknownst to Rick, Gordon shifted position in his seat.

“Are you and Sy a thing now?”

The bench, complete with me and the other three people on it, scooted backward, as Gordon pushed it back from the table.  I reached for and grabbed my bowl, holding it back out of the way as Gordon traveled around the length of the table to a wide-eyed Rick.

Rick was only half out of his seat when Gordon hauled him up and over, throwing him down against the ground.  He let Rick get halfway to his feet, then threw the boy into the wall.

“Mrs. Earles!” Eliza screamed, shrill.

Rick was bigger, Gordon was stronger.  Every time it looked like Rick was going to get his bearings, Gordon shoved him, or drove him back into the ground with the sole of one foot.

“If you do that again, I’m going to hit you back!” Rick called out.

“Step outside,” Gordon said.

“I’m not-”

Gordon shoved Rick again.  Rick’s head cracked against the wall.  I saw some of the girls wince.  Helen was among them, but I knew it was for show.

Rick raised his hand, starting to throw a punch, and Hubris closed the distance, biting his sleeve, stopping him short.  Gordon punched Rick in the collarbone, driving him down to the ground, then grabbed him, sliding him out and through the back door.

There were three stone stairs Rick had to roll down to reach the backyard, I knew, though I didn’t have an angle to see it happen.

Shame.

I continued eating, polishing off my breakfast.  Mrs. Earles came down the stairs, took in the situation, and then stepped outside.

I met Lillian’s eyes, measuring the confusion and the hurt, and shook my head.

She gestured under the guise of fixing her hair, lie?

I nodded a little.

I could see her relax a little at that.  She had the best vantage point to see the fight, from the end of the other bench.

“I guess I need my luggage?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Lillian said.

“Be right back,” I said.

I took my dishes to the sink, rinsed them, and put them on the drying rack.  I glanced at the trio of Mrs. Earles, Gordon, and a very sorry looking Rick before taking the stairs two at a time to go upstairs.

A set of luggage was always packed, ready to go at a moment’s notice.  Still, I undid the clasps and opened it up, revealing a collection of clothes weighed down by two notebooks.  If someone unpacked the clothes, they’d find the pistol and ammunition, vials of poison, and various small supplies and tools.

I walked over to Jamie’s bed, picked up the notebook there, and put it inside the luggage case, before closing it up again.

Heavy, but I didn’t mind.

“Next best thing to having you along with, huh?” I asked the empty side of the room.

I ran my hands down Jamie’s shirt, making sure I hadn’t been splashed with anything when Gordon pushed away from the table, or that little Albert hadn’t dripped on me.  I ran my hands through my hair once more, found a tangle, and pulled through it.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Next best is pretty fricking lousy.”

I closed the door behind me.

☙

The train car rolled back into motion.  People were mostly heading into the city, and those leaving were mostly made up of soldiers and stitched.  Seven of the eight train cars were occupied with military forces, the eighth was made up of people.

We’d been placed in a military car, but even then, we’d kept conversation to milder things.

When the single squad of soldiers entered and found places to sit on the other end of the car, I said, “I think we’re good to have a proper discussion.”

“The Duke told Hayle the specifics of this job, and Hayle told me to tell you,” Lillian explained.

“Look who’s moving up in the world, lil’ miss Lillian, doing the briefing.”

Lillian kicked at me.

“What are we after?” Gordon asked.

“What we know is that some major players have disappeared from cities where they had bases of operations.  Leadership for the firebrands and the spears, doctors working for either side, some experiments and projects they were keeping an eye on, most picked up and moved.  Something about the timing of it, it raised eyebrows?”

From the way she phrased that last statement, I figured she wasn’t sure about her recall.

“You’re doing fine,” Mary said.  “It makes sense.”

Lillian returned the praise with a smile that had little confidence.  Or was it because it was Mary?

“Both groups up and leaving at the same time.  They’re communicating,” I said.

“They are,” Lillian said.  “Which is strange because the ideologies have been diverging.  There’s even been skirmishes between the two groups, right?”

“Right,” Gordon said.  He had a minor scuff mark on his nose, but it was his only wound from what had been a pretty thorough thrashing of Rick.  I suspected it was from an unexpected swing of the arm as Rick flailed around, rather than anything intentional on Rick’s part.

Hubris was in the train car with us, draped over the seat next to Gordon, head in Gordon’s lap.  The animal was a fighting breed, square-headed, eyes obscured by bushy brows.  Even with the coarse, rust-colored fur that covered him, Hubris’ raw strength was apparent at a glance.

“Skirmishes between two groups, now sudden cooperation.  The higher ups are pretty sure that someone’s stepping in.  There’s some speculation that Cynthia is healed and ready to coordinate,” Lillian said, “But, well…”

“We know she’s been active on and off,” I said.  “Working for the spears, focused on the Crown.”

“Could be a deception,” Gordon said.

“Could,” I admitted.

“Most of the people who’ve been paying attention agree it’s Fray,” Lillian said.  “We have spies paying attention to the trains and roads, and we’re pretty clear about the city they’ve gone to, but we don’t know where.”

“A diplomatic meeting,” Mary said.  “All of our enemies in one place?”

“That’s the expectation,” Lillian said.  “If the Academy brings too much force to bear in advance, we might scare them off.  If they move blind, they risk missing the window of opportunity when they can’t find the targets.  We’re part of a limited scouting force, working with a few others.  Dog and Catcher will be there, but it’ll mostly be groups from other Academies.”

“They spent the initial momentum,” Gordon said.  “They needed victories to carry that momentum forward, and they didn’t have enough of those.  Losing Cynthia for as long as they did, they took the only option they had, splitting up, narrowing focus, trying to reinvent themselves based on area and personalities, in order to revive things some.”

“Focus on anti-Crown sentiment in anti-Crown areas, anti-Academy sentiment in areas where people chafe most with the Academies,” Mary said.

“But that’s a hard fire to keep stoked without fresh fuel.  It’s been a couple of months and people are tired of fighting,” Gordon said.  “The anger is there, but it’s not fresh, hot anger.”

“War peters out, things mostly settle until the next big excuse, the next war, the next revolution, whatever,” I said.  “Both sides know it, banding together is the only way to stay strong enough to stay in the fight, but ideologies have diverged too much, they’ve been competing with one another, they need someone very strong or very clever to unite the groups.”

“The person who started the war in the first place,” Lillian said.  “Not that they know that.”

Mary leaned forward.  “They’re not stupid.  They’re going to be covering their asses seven ways from Sunday.  Bodyguards, protection, counter-assassins…”

I nodded.  “I guess they’ve decided we’re ready.  No more soft-lobs to the Lambs.  We tackle this one man down.”

“About that,” Lillian said.

“Ah,” I said.  I brought my head back until it rested against the window.  “I jinxed it.”

“Sorry, Sy,” Lillian said.

“Ashton?”  I left the other half of the question unasked.

“I don’t know,” she said.  There was a long, painful pause, then she said.  “He’s been in classes with-”

“Okay,” I said, cutting her off.

Silence lingered among the Lambs.

“Okay,” I said, a little more brightly.

“You knew, didn’t you?” Mary asked.  “This morning, when we were talking, you said there was something to discuss later.”

I spread my arms.  “I’ve been peeking at files now and again.  Keeping tabs.  It doesn’t matter.  I knew it was coming.  They’re buffering our numbers.”

And I’m having trouble dealing, in little ways, while that weighs on me.

“How long until he shows?”  I asked.

“If not tomorrow, then the day after,” Lillian said.

“We finish before then,” I said.  “If he shows, he shows.  But we’ll have this wrapped up.”

“Sy,” Gordon said.

“It’s going to be disruptive, okay?” I said.  “Newbie joining the group?  Because he will be new.  There’s adjustment, any time we add someone.  There’s emotional stuff to deal with, I admit it, I’m going to have to get a handle on it, and I’m probably going to suck at it.  I know the rest of you will too, to varying degrees.”

I looked between each of the Lambs in turn.

“I’ve been upfront about how I’m doing and how I’m coping, so you aren’t surprised.  What I’m saying there, it’s part of it.  You know I’m right.  Given what we’re up against, I don’t want any wrenches in the works to make it even harder, for you guys, for me, for our plans, for coordination.  We do this clean, we do it in top form, and we do it fast.  If he shows, he finds the job done.”

“You know you can’t run away from this forever,” Gordon said.  “If we succeed, we might scatter them to the wind, and we’re going to get a half-dozen missions one after the other, chasing after the most dangerous and cunning of the survivors, cleaning up.  If we fail and Fray comes out ahead, then we’re going to be asked to deal with whatever messes she concocts.  There won’t be downtime like we’ve had.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Likely one or the other, Sy.  If they think we’re ready to get back into the game, we’re going to have to be ready.  You’re going to have to deal with the adjustments without breaking stride.”

He wasn’t talking about Ashton.

“Probably,” I said.

“Just making sure you know.”

“I know,” I said.

He reached over to give me a pat on the shoulder.

The train slowed.  My eyebrows went up, and I twisted around a hundred and eighty degrees to look out the window.

I turned, asking Jamie, “Does the map-”

I finished turning, pausing as I looked at the pale white curtain beside the window, opposite me.  It had looked different out of the corner of my eye.

Forgot.

“We’re there already?” I asked, barely missing a beat.

Nobody commented, except for Gordon to say, “We were on the outskirts of town.  We’re heading into the city proper.”

“Alright,” I said.  I managed a smile.  “Good debrief, Lil.”

“Thank you,” she said.  Then she kicked me, hard.  “But don’t call me Lil.”

I smirked.

The train slowed to a halt.  The soldiers in the car with us waited patiently as we collected our luggage.

We made our way out onto the platform, doing what we could to work through the crowd.  It didn’t even need to be said, but if we could keep an eye on the train stations, they could as well.

Our quiet, careful movements were interrupted as we collectively came to a halt.  The soldiers in front of us had, too, so it wasn’t too damning.

Heads craned, and we stared.

The city sprawled, a proper city, with several skyscrapers, trees growing freely, and other design touches.  One building looked like half of it had been peeled away to reveal a great stone giant, flensed of flesh but not muscle or organ.  An anatomical figure crossed with architecture.

A proper Academy city, as Radham was.

Except for the fact that the largest set of structures sitting atop the highest hill in the city were on fire.  I was guessing from the look of it that it would be a lack of fuel rather than anything else that saw it go out.  It looked pretty damn thorough.

“Don’t suppose that’s our rendezvous point?” I asked.

“It is,” Lillian said.

“Huh,” I said, brightly.  “That’s inconvenient.”

Tooth and Nail – 7.2

We rode on the back of a wagon, bumping and jostling as much as the twelve or so crates that were stacked back there with our luggage.  The crates had straps keeping them in place, which I envied.  My hands were already cramping up, and we weren’t even halfway to our destination.

On either side of the wagon, soldiers were standing with the toes of their boots wedged between two rails, holding onto straps.  Smaller warbeasts walked alongside, more like jungle cats in proportion and fluidity of movement, and squadrons of stitched marched doubletime in front of and behind us.

It was dusk, but the city was well lit – the neighborhood-scale bonfire notwithstanding.  Brechwell was an interesting city in terms of layout.  Radham had developed an Academy first, the city following naturally, with the Crown and Academy both taking a periodic hand to the development of that city in stages, as needs developed.  It was loose, a design I’d often likened to a living body, every part having a purpose, or to a tree, pruned now and again, parts cut away or used for resources as needed, be it the tree-like growths that supported structures, entire neighborhoods, or even sweeping districts of the city.

Those parts of Radham were sloppy, though, the result of a long series of successful accidents, the mistakes done away with.  Brechwell was the opposite, in a way.  It had been a military base first, and the Academy had been plopped down on top of it at a later point, the Academy adapting to the needs of the city and the area.

The streets were winding, just wide enough for two carts to pass side by side, very occasionally twisting to pass other under streets, through short tunnels that had portcullis gates at either end.  Buildings were made up predominantly of stone, with only aesthetic touches of vines, ivy, or branches, a stark contrast to Radham.  The roads were cobblestone, neatly fit together, and segued neatly into the base of each row of buildings, leaving me feeling as if we were traveling along the lowest point of a series of deep, wide trenches.

Every surface was soaked wet by the cold rain that poured down from above.  They looked alive, they looked cold, and if I unfocused my eyes, I had the vague impression that this city was reptilian.  The stones akin to scales, slick with moisture.  Only half of the windows were lit, and they were so small I doubted I could have crawled through them, high off the ground, and often round or narrow.  I imagined the eyes of serpents, narrowed, catching the light.

Soldiers at either end of the wagon were eyeing us.  We’d approached superior officers with badges in hand, and they’d agreed to escort us up.  The foot soldiers hadn’t been filled in, and were wondering at the odd addition to their ranks.

We ceased going uphill, settling onto more level ground.  I stopped feeling like I was going to bounce off the back of the wagon with every bump, and shifted my weight around, reaching back to hold on to a strap with one hand.  My other hand reached out for Hubris’ furry head.

He didn’t react in the slightest.

Gordon, for his part, reached out to give Hubris a brief rub.  The dog turned his head to better position it for Gordon’s scratches.

“If you’re going to be an honorary member of the group, you’d better learn to play nice with others, mutt,” I said.

“Maybe you just suck at giving scratches,” Gordon said.  “Or he might like you better if you called him by his name.”

“Maybe you smell like a butt, but you don’t hear me bringing it up.”

He rolled his eyes.

We came to a stop in the midst of a checkpoint, and waited as a squad of soldiers checked over the wagon.

Lillian and Mary were talking, with Helen sitting nearby, listening more than participating.  Rather than listen in on the secret lives of girls, I turned my attention to the front of the wagon.

The officers in charge of the group were riding up front, leaning forward as they exchanged words with the group at the checkpoint.  I could only pick out segments of the conversation.

“Same as last night…  four of them, led by someone different…”

“How many nights?”

“Last night…” something something “…the night before.  Different types of attack.”

“…time?”

“Same time.  The freaks from out-of-town…”

The man at the front of the wagon cut the checkpoint officer off right there.  I saw him turn his head to look our way.

I raised my hand, giving a short wave.

“Them?”

“From Radham.  They’re-”

“The Lambs.”

“Yeah.  The Lambs.”

The checkpoint guard lowered his voice, but I could still make it out.  “Shit, I thought they’d be uglier.  Shriveled?  Or like small stitched?”

“Nope.  Apparently they look like ordinary children.”

“Huh.”

I watched as the search of the wagon progressed to the back.  I raised my arms, feet still dangling over the end, and patiently underwent the pat-down.  Mary faced a little more trouble.

“I have weapons,” Mary said, “I don’t want you to be surprised-”

“Hands on your head,” the soldier told her.

“You’re not listening to me,” Mary said, not listening.  “If you pat me down and you aren’t careful, you’re going to get cut.  You-”

Helen grabbed Mary’s wrists, lifting her hands up, before firmly pressing them down on top of Mary’s head.

The guard pat her down, his expression changing as he stopped mid-pat.

“I’m telling you-”

“Shh.”

I looked from the scene to the commanding officers, who were still embroiled in a discussion.  Interesting that he hadn’t called for his superior officer’s attention.  What was the relationship like, there?

Let’s see if this works.

I leaned closer to the other side of the wagon, where the girls were.  “Sir?”

“Quiet,” he told me, automatic, sounding tense.  Grumpy fellow.

I pulled out my badge.  “We’re the Lambs.”

I saw his expression change.  Momentary confusion, then he pulled the particulars from memory.  The uniforms who were at either side of the wagon reacted, murmuring quietly among themselves.

“Huh,” the man said.  He squinted at the badge.  He indicated the superior officers, “They know about this?”

“They’re discussing us right now,” I said.

“Huh,” he said.  He let go of Mary, gesturing that she could put her arms down.  He looked at us, giving us a concerned look.

The man in uniform who’d been patting me down commented, “I thought you’d look more like dolls or something.”

“Your boss just said something like that,” I commented.  “What stories are they telling about us, anyway?”

“The slaughter in Whitney?” he asked.  “Group passed through to get information on prisoners of war, brought back stories.”

“Oh,” I said.  “Yeah, that was a night.”

“And some man in Iverness?  Every other bone in his body broken?”

“Don’t remember that one.”

“The Lonely Man,” Gordon said.

“Oh!  Yeah.”

“That was me,” Helen said.

“Might’ve been better if we didn’t actually broadcast who we were and that we’re here,” Gordon commented, under his breath.

“They know we’re here,” I said.  “If they don’t know already, then they’re so incompetent we don’t need to worry in the first place.”

“Don’t do that thing where you get in a mood and start taking chances,” Gordon said.

“I’m not.  I’m being realistic.”

“Mm, yeah,” he said.  Hubris nudged his arm, and he gave the dog a scratch.

“What’s with the fire?” I asked one of the soldiers.  “Third attack in as many nights?  Same time of day?”

“Yeah,” he said.  “Except this one is bad.  Everything they could set fire to, they did.  Mostly stone there, but they got indoors, and floorboards are floorboards.  The library is the part that’s going to hurt most.”

“Oh no!” Lillian said.  “I really wanted to see the library.”

“It was overrated,” one of the soldiers said.  By his badge, he was one of the ones who looked after the stitched who were lined up against the walls of the tunnel.  He was young, fresh faced enough I doubted he could grow facial hair if he wanted, and kept straight, neatly-parted black hair under his military cap.  “Professor Tobermory talked it up quite a bit, but it’s small, more about decoration, hunting trophies on the wall.  I think anyone who had anything nice to say about it had a lot of drink pushed at them by Tobermory.”

“It was that bad?”

“Don’t know,” the man replied.  “I wasn’t impressed.”

“Phooey,” Lillian said.

“You’re a student?” the young man asked.  “I thought you were a Lamb.”

“Both.”

He nodded, taking that in.  “What year?”

“Third, but my schedule is bumpy.  I spend a lot of time out of school.”

“Third is impressive.  Why the interest in the library?  Are you working on a project?”

“I’m starting to think about it.  I have to do a project next year, I don’t have a lot of free time, and I keep hearing that the subject of my project opens and closes doors, and that goes double for me, because I don’t have a lot of time to study.  If I pick something, I’ll have to do research on it on my own, and then the year after-”

“You’ll want to focus on things you have some grounding in, things you researched.  I ran into the same thing.”

Lillian nodded.

“End goal?” he asked.  “Where are you hoping you end up?”

“Professor.”

The young man barked out a short laugh.  I could see Lillian deflate a little.

“I remember when I was aiming for a black coat,” he said.  “Gave up on that pretty damn fast.”

“Yeah,” Lillian said, rather less enthused than she had been a moment before.

I paid more attention to the scene.  Lillian’s reaction to the man, her body language, the way she was almost wringing her hands, while sitting up straight.

She’d thought highly of him, for a very short encounter, an older boy at or nearing the end of his adolescent years, clean-faced, clever, gregarious, and he’d very casually slapped down her dream.

“It’s hard, even without the politics, the fact you need some luck, you have to innovate, break new ground in a way that turns heads.  Take it from someone who took some first steps on that path, it tears you up and grinds you down.”

“Yeah, I suppose.  I don’t-” Lillian started.

“Sir,” I cut in.  In doing, I interrupted Mary’s conversation with another soldier, and made Hubris’ head rise.  “You’re forgetting something.”

“What’s that?” the young man asked.

“She’s a Lamb.  She’s very good at what she does.  She already has discussions with doctors and professors on a regular basis.  She’s at or near the top of her classes, and she’s doing it while we drag her away from classes and into one bad situation after another and ask her to patch us up after the fact.  Becoming a professor is hard, I don’t blame you for crying uncle, sir-”

I saw him bristle at that.

I shrugged.  “But she won’t give up.  Not like that.  I don’t see it.  Nobody who’s worked with her sees that happening.”

“Agreed,” Gordon said.

The young man in uniform threw up his hands, “Wasn’t saying anything of the sort.”

“Ah, is that so?” I asked.  I didn’t break eye contact, boring into his eyes with mine.  “I must’ve misunderstood you.  I beg your pardon, sir.”

I’d put him on the spot, more than a few eyes were on him, they saw the little dominance game, and they were anticipating his response.  He was a nice guy, probably, but one who carried weight on his shoulders, his own past failures coloring his perception of things.  He likely believed that becoming professor was a fool’s journey, his intent had likely been pure in saying something to steer Lillian off that path.  It might even have been done with a friendly mindset, in the same way one might counsel a young friend against getting a permanent set of horns grafted onto their forehead at a back-alley doctor’s.

But who the fuck needed ‘friends’ who tore them down rather than building them up, good intentions or no?

He was frowning at me, not breaking eye contact.

I’d challenged him.  Now he couldn’t ‘win’ here without a crisp retort or getting indignant.  I could play off either.  Backing down would be a loss, in a sense.

His eye flickered to a point behind me.  He smiled, and it was a sly, smug smile, “Nothing of concern.”

Ah, his superior officer was watching.  The slyness and smugness hadn’t been directed my way.  He was a man who didn’t respect the man in charge.

The best thing he’d get to a draw.

“Moving!” the superior officer in charge of the Wagon called out.

Soldiers who had stepped off the rails at the side stepped back on.  I reached for and grabbed a strap with a fatigued hand.

When I glanced Lillian’s way, she gave me a small smile, before turning back to Mary to resume their conversation.

That conversation was cut short.  The officer in charge of the wagon spoke, his voice traveling back to us.  “They’re attacking us on a schedule.  Tonight’s attack was worse than the prior two.  Men and women with combat stimulants, some with scarred faces and hands, some as quick and stealthy as anyone they’ve ever seen, might have been more stimulants.”

I glanced at the others, gesturing.

Don’t know.  Plague men.  Ghosts.

The Plague Men and Ghosts were supposed to be on opposing sides.

“After the second night, the people in charge recognized it as a distraction.  They divided forces tonight, trying to root out whatever it was they’re trying to distract us from.  We didn’t have enough people in place, that stealthy group slipped past us, did a lot of damage, as you can see.”

I turned my eyes upward, looking past the roofs of nearby buildings to the blazing Academy structure.

“Expectation is that they found out when the first superweapons showed up, and that’s when they started with the distractions.”

“Who’s here, sir?” Gordon asked.

“Dog, Catcher, Wry Man, Petey, and the Engineer.”

“Some of the weird ones,” Mary observed under her breath.

“I don’t recognize all of those,” I commented.  “Petey?”

“He’s our age,” Gordon said.  “Kind of?  If you-”

The officer at the front cut Gordon off.  Possibly intentional, a dominance display.  Well, it had been rude to start a conversation when he’d been midway through talking.

“You’ll want to talk to the people in charge about where you’ll be setting up, and about calling for help if you need it.”

“Yes sir,” Gordon said.

The man nodded without looking back our way, and then fell silent.

“If they’re reacting this violently to the presence of Academy weapons in Brechwell, there might not be a need to hold back.  We could call for help now,” Gordon said.  “By the time it arrives, things could be underway.”

“We don’t want to scare them off or tip our hand,” I said.  “I’d rather resolve this or make significant headway before anyone arrives.”

“You’re still wanting to rush,” Gordon said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Why don’t we at least talk to the other weapons before we make any decisions?” Mary asked.  “I don’t know how touchy they are-”

“Some are touchy,” Gordon said.  “The three we haven’t met are loners, they work alone, for smaller Academies.”

“Then let’s not offend them.  We include them in discussions,” Mary said.

“Agreed,” Gordon said.

We passed beneath a quadruple-set of portcullis gates, entering into the most open area of the city yet.  The sprawl of the local Academy and plenty of open fields for military drills.

Promising weapons from other Academies are trained alongside their handlers to work alongside squads and armies, here.  Academy students with great minds for strategy and military cadets with a good mind for learning the particulars of Academy science are brought here to learn to become officers.

Or were, with emphasis on the past tense.

The fire was bad.  Buildings that should have weathered the blaze were sagging.  Stitched brought canisters of water, and Academy soldiers connected hoses and manually pumped levers to force it out.  They might as well have been throwing thimblefuls of water on a campfire.

Yet they kept at it.

“Sir?” I asked.

The man at the front twisted around.

“You’ve been here before?  You’re familiar with the area?”

“I have and I am, why?”

“Most Academies have a last-ditch superweapon.  Are you familiar with Brechwell’s?”

“The Brechwell Beast.  Last report I heard said it was awake but sedated, ready to go with a few minutes of notice.”

Gordon whistled a little under his breath.

But I didn’t care about the Beast, here.  I’d been more interested in his prior answer, his familiarity with the area.

I was getting a sense of how things worked here.  People new to the area would adopt that particular way of doing things, picking up on both the good and bad habits.

Thing was, I was seeing a lot of bad behaviors.  The way the soldiers had reacted to the superior officers, hesitating before bringing something to their attention, the fact that the officer hadn’t filled his men in on who we were, it spoke to a general lack of communication between tiers.

There was a flaw here, one I suspected our enemy was smart enough to exploit.  There were the guys on the bottom, and there were the people on top, and the ties between the two didn’t feel particularly strong.

Some damn idiotic things could happen when that was the case.  Like good soldiers and good water being wasted on a task, because the people at the top were insisting the fires be put out, and didn’t care that it was an impossible task.

“Sir?  One more question.”

I could tell he was irritated at this point, but he turned and gave me his attention.

“I’m just guessing here, but is the person in charge of Brechwell an utter prat?”

Gordon dropped his face to one hand, shaking his head.

“Beg pardon?”

“Is he a ponce?  A dimwit?  Does he not know what he’s doing?”

“I won’t dignify that question with an answer, and I’ll thank you to watch what you ask me in the future,” he said.

He turned around.

I turned my attention to the soldiers that stood on either side of the wagon.

One or two were smirking a little.

I mouthed words.  Is he?

I could make out the movement of their lips in their silent responses, and even if I couldn’t lipread, I could use guesswork to figure it out.  Massive prat.

The moment the wagon slowed, I was hopping down, dragging my luggage down after me.  It clacked hard against the road top.  The others followed suit.  Gordon gave a hand to Hubris, the dog using the outstretched arm as a step partway to the ground, then offered a hand to Mary.

She beamed at him as she hopped down beside him, her hair and skirt flouncing with the landing.

“Someone our age, I’m so excited!” Helen squealed, as she caught up to me.

“Ease up on the pitch a little,” I said, wincing.

Gordon, Hubris and Mary led the way, diverging from the path of the wagon, which was moving toward the fire.  I found myself walking between Lillian and Helen.  Lillian was quiet.  Helen wasn’t.

“He could have been a Lamb!”

“I don’t think so,” Lillian said.

“I almost want to ask you guys to give me the answer,” I said, “But at this point, I’m happy to see for myself.”

“I’m glad to have one over on you for once,” Lillian said.

“So you wouldn’t tell even if I asked?”

She smiled a little, hemmed and hawed, and then said, “After what you said back there, maybe I would.”

“Maybe, huh?”

“I’m worried you were trying to get my guard down so you can pull something on me.”

I snorted.  “Ulterior motives?  Me?”

“You were bothering the captain at the front of the wagon,” Lillian said.

Someone’s paying attention.

“Trying to wrap my head around Brechwell,” I said.

“Do tell,” Helen said.

“Please,” Gordon said.  He’d been listening in, his conversation with Mary trailing off.

“It’s a military academy.  It’s not a place that makes big advancements.  If you’re in charge of the Academy and you’re ambitious, and I’m working under the assumption people are, then Brechwell isn’t going to really open doors.  It’s a stopping point.  A place people come midway through their careers.  Have promise?  Study here a few years, pick up essentials, move on.”

“Sure,” Gordon said.

“People in charge are either here for punishment, they’re ambitious but frustrated, they don’t realize how bad their situation is because they’re that dumb, or they’re willing to try and play a subtler game, where they find pet projects and nurture those projects, and then try to claim credit for the successes that follow.  None of those things breed good leadership.  I’m not sensing good leadership here.”

“Which is why you asked the question,” Mary said.

I gave her a nod of confirmation.  “Feeling them out.”

“Identifying the problem is good, but there’s more to it,” Gordon said.

“We need solutions,” I agreed.  “With a gap between the leadership and the people on the ground, maybe we insert ourselves in as middlemen.”

“Maybe,” Gordon said.  “Worth watching out for.”

I nodded.

I realized why Gordon and Mary were walking in this particular direction.  There was a smaller fire burning, and three corpses were draped around the body.  Two odd figures were standing by the fire, and I realized that they were our fellow weapons.  The people we’d be working with for this particular mission, at least until help came.

Dog and Catcher not present, one missing…

The woman was middle-aged, and she looked frumpy.  Her hair was well looked after and her clothes were nice enough, but neither looked like a good match to her body type or particular appearance.  She wore a jacket with a pattern on it, left open to show a heavy apron, more like something a blacksmith might wear, only accentuating a protruding belly on an otherwise narrow frame.  Her boots were clunkers.  Her hair was short, and she didn’t wear enough makeup to tie it together.  A bit of blue eye shadow might have worked.

The old man was, I knew at a glance, the Wry Man.  His hair was gray, his skin wrinkled in a way that carved deep into his face, and his bushy eyebrows went with a perpetual grin.  He was stooped, much of his weight leaning on a cane.

“The Lambs, I take it?” the Wry Man asked.

“Nice to meet you,” Gordon said.

The Wry Man didn’t reply to that.  Instead, he lifted his cane, prodding one of the corpses.

“Lambs, meet our opposition.”

I turned my attention to the bodies.

One was a Ghost, I could tell from the damage to her body, the way the fine bones riddled her flesh, criss-crossing within her injuries, as if she’d been filled with bone-white needles.

The other was a man, but not one of the plague men.  He lay there, and he looked alive, skin flushed a bruised purple, veins standing out against his skin.  His fists were clenched, body contorted, and his mouth yawned open.  I couldn’t look at his face without imagining him mid-scream.

The third corpse wasn’t human, not at first glance.  Augmentations.  Hunched, skin textured, eyes wide and bloodshot, its hands were twice the usual size and claw-tipped.  The skin wasn’t uniformly colored, but instead bruised in patches that seemed to accent the deeper parts of the body- the hollow of collarbone and throat, the lines of the jaw, and the eye sockets.

“They’re mixing it up,” Gordon observed.

“Not one of them feels safe,” the woman said, her voice pitched in a funny way, as if she was putting on a voice for a puppet show.  “They brought bodyguards, and they’ve been convinced to send those bodyguards out.”

Lillian knelt by the body of the man who was covered in veins.  She had to dig in fingernails to pry his eyelids apart.

“Are these two people under the same drug, at different stages?” she asked.

“That’s what the docs are saying,” the Wry Man said.

“They’re modifying them on a core level,” Lillian said.  “Rewriting them.  It’s incredibly painful, not to mention dangerous.”

“So I hear,” the Wry Man said.

“Would have to be a bacteria, dumping a load of new information into the bodies, rewrite the pattern of their makeup in patches.  Looking at that one… they’re under the effect of powerful stimulants while it happens.  Do it a few times in a row-”

“Get monsters,” I finished.

“That’s what they want, but there’s a reason we don’t use this,” Lillian said.  “It tends to kill people as often as it gives you monsters, when you’re making changes this drastic.  That’s in Academy labs, under strict supervision.”

“They aren’t holding back,” Gordon said.  He looked up, “Where are the other weapons?”

“Your buddies Dog and Catcher are on the prowl, seeing if they can’t trace them back to where they came from.  The Engineer is with them.”

The Engineer?

I glanced at the woman.  She wasn’t the Engineer then.  By process of elimination-

She smiled down at me.  I averted my eyes, somehow uncomfortable.

“They’ve attacked at sundown every night.  Either hitting us here, or going after civilians,” the Wry Man said.  “If we’re going to get them, we need to do it tonight, or we’re going to have to wait until tomorrow night.”

“Crumbs,” I muttered.

“Willing to leave those bags behind?” he asked.

Gordon glanced at me and the others.  We nodded.

“Then let’s go join the others for the night’s hunt,” he said.  I saw how crooked his teeth were as he bared them.  “We can get acquainted on the way.”

Tooth and Nail – 7.3

We deposited our bags at the side of one gate, getting the attention of the soldiers there, asking them to look after the luggage.

While Lillian got her things ready, I quickly grabbed the three books from my bag and put them into a backpack, pulling it on.  Heavy, but not so much it would weigh me down or impact my performance.

Wasn’t willing to leave Jamie’s books behind.  No way, no how.

“I get to try my new ears,” Helen was telling the woman with the apron.

“New ears?” Gordon asked, turning around.

“My maker gave them to me, after I said I almost couldn’t hear the Ghosts.  I don’t know if I hear better, but I hear more, except it’s not like that.  The range is different?  Oh, but we have to explain who the Ghosts are!”

“The ones with spines inside them,” I said, trying to provide a bit of sanity in the midst of Helen’s ramblings.  “Echolocation.  Perfect sensory awareness in an area.”

“We’ve run into them,” the woman with the apron said.  “We were hired to find and eliminate cells a few months ago.  They keep cropping back up, but I think we’re keeping it more or less under control.”

I adjusted the straps on my backpack, ignoring the looks from the others.  They still weren’t asking or saying anything about it.

We set off through the gates.

“I got new ears, and Professor Ibott is changing some of my joints around, because he wants to make sure I develop right as I grow up, without anything getting too rigid, so my shoulders and hips feel a little funny right now, and he’s talking about shaving bones and putting in bone spurs, and, um, what else?”

“That’s a lot of changes,” Mary said.

“Because I’m starting puberty!”

I felt a bit of a chill.  Just to the side of me, Gordon muttered something along the lines of, “Oh hell.”

“I actually started half a year ago, but Ibott feels like I’m ready now, and because I won’t change unless he makes me change, and I could look really weird without the right attention, he’s been plotting out what I need and what works and things.”

“The Ibott?” the woman with the apron asked.

“Yep!  And he’s going to make me more dangerous and he’s going to make me gorgeous.”

“You are gorgeous, dum-dum,” I said.  She smiled at me.

“Out of the mouth of babes,” the Wry Man said.

“Huh?”

“I envy you your ability to say what comes to mind.  It isn’t so easy when you’re a hideous old man.”

“I dunno, I think I’ll still say stuff like that when I’m grown up,” I said.  If I grow up.  “Helen is gorgeous.  She was put together with an artist’s hand.”

Helen nodded, then smiled, “Uh huh, but I’m supposed to be gorgeous enough in two or three years to lure in the sort of man of weaker morals.  That’s a different kind of gorgeous.”

“A touch disturbing,” the Wry Man commented.

“Helen’s not usually this talkative, just so you know,” Gordon said.

“I like new people.  I get excited about new people, and I’m excited about getting improved!”

“The disturbing part of it is typical for when she does get going, though,” I said.

“Pooh to you both.”

“I envy you,” the woman with the apron said.  “It sounds nice.”

“You’re Petey, right?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve heard about you.  How’s your body doing today?”

“I’m so-so, thank you for asking,” the woman in the apron said.  “I’m good to fight if I have to.”

“We might have to,” Gordon said.  “There’s apparently enough of them in town that we’re going to run into someone.”

“Or something,” I added.

“I’ll be ready,” Petey said, smacking one fist into the flat of the other hand.

I wasn’t sure but I suspected I could have been more menacing than she’d been in that moment.

“I don’t like the layout,” Mary said.  “There isn’t much cover, there aren’t many good vantage points, and everywhere we go, people are watching us from those tiny windows.”

“It’s after curfew,” the Wry Man said.  “The fire got a lot of people’s attention.  They may be keeping an eye out for clues about what’s happening.”

“I don’t like not having escape routes,” Mary said.  She looked up, “Can we get up to the rooftops and use them to navigate?  I’d feel like we had more freedom.”

“We can.  There aren’t many options to get up onto the rooftops, and the ones that do exist are watched,” the Wry Man said.  “Going up carelessly can get you shot.”

“I’m not very athletic,” Petey said, “But we can if we have to.”

I narrowed my eyes a little, trying to figure Petey out.

She smiled at me.

“End of this road,” the Wry Man said.  “There’s a tower.”

The winding path and the buildings that blocked the view made it hard to tell just how far the ‘end of this road’ was.  As far as I could tell, the road curved to the right fifty feet in front of us.  As we made our way forward, I could see around the corner, revealing a gentle left turn, again taking the road somewhere I couldn’t see.

It was claustrophobic, even with the open sky above us and the open paths behind and in front of us.  The sky wasn’t a place we could travel, and there was no telling what exactly was around the next bend.

“I kind of agree with what Mary was saying,” I said.  “This place sucks.  I’m going to get so lost.”

“You can remember the paths and get a sense of the layout,” the Wry Man said.

“Maybe you can, but my memory is bad.  The way it’s wired.”

“Then I can see it being a problem,” the Wry Man said.

“Stick with us,” Gordon said.  “I should have a sense of Brechwell’s layout, though it’s going to take me a little while.”

Gordon’s memory was strong, but it didn’t compare to Jamie’s.  We’d been put together with a certain idea in mind, and one of us was gone now.  There was a lack.

I could improvise to fill some of that lack.  Gordon could shore it up with his limited ability.

It didn’t feel like enough.

It wouldn’t have felt like enough if all of us had Jamie’s memory capacity.

We rounded the bend, and Helen tilted her head.  “Shh.”

Hubris’ ears had perked up as well.

I heard nothing, but the girl and the dog were paying rapt attention.

In the distance, well behind us, a structure collapsed, weakened too much by the fire.  Helen turned and gave the blazing Brechwell Academy an annoyed look, as if it was somehow the fault of the buildings.

“Ghosts,” she said.

“Direction?”

She pointed.

We moved more briskly now.  I would have liked to say we were quiet, but Petey’s boots were heavy on the road.  Helen pulled a little bit ahead, paused, then pointed again.

Twice, we changed routes.  Paths met, intersected, and branched, and we chased an enemy that never seemed to appear.  Hubris’ nose was working overtime, as he snuffled at the ground.

“I hear Dog too,” Helen said.  “He’s up there.”

She was pointing at rooftops, further down the street.

“We’ll go up,” the Wry Man said.

The streets wound like snakes in the midst of death throes, lined on either side by narrow two-and-three story houses that bled into one another, most houses set with one directly to the left, right, and behind.  I could see tree-tops where there were wider gaps between houses left some space.  Secluded patches of green, each one locked off by the triangle or square of houses laid out around them.  I couldn’t imagine kids running around in those parks.  It made me think of prisons.

But each time a street ended, there was a tower.  The towers were military emplacements, sturdy, thick, and taller than any of the buildings around.  The front gate was locked, but a ladder led up the side.

The Wry Man went first.  He made it up a short distance, only two of us below him, when a spotlight targeted him, sliding down to take the rest of us in.  I squinted against the white glare, almost started to adjust, and then it flickered, as electric things tended to do.  I blinked the spots out of my eyes, and hoped they weren’t training a rifle on us.

The Wry Man had raised a hand, as if waving, and was poised, holding position.

The light went off, then on, then off again.

He resumed climbing.

Brechwell brooks no nonsense, I thought.  The claustrophobic feeling was getting worse.

The light fixed on us as we stepped off the ladder and onto rooftop.  The Wry Man gestured, pointing downward, and the light disappeared.

“Paranoid,” Mary said.

“The location makes Brechwell a prime target,” Gordon said.  “Military base staffed with students who have their careers riding on this, eager to show their worth.”

My footing on the rooftop was tentative, as I tried to judge how slick the shingles were, and how much traction I had on the sloped surface.

“I dunno,” I said.  “I tend to default to assume that people get lazy.  We gravitate toward shortcuts.  Stick a bunch of people in military academies, they’re going to be good as gold while they’re being watched, but stick them in a watchtower, without oversight?  I can’t believe they wouldn’t goof off.”

“You don’t believe in discipline?” Mary asked.  “Determination?”

“I believe in it, but I think it’s an anomaly more than the rule.  You only get quality if you set people against each other.”

“They get bonus marks for ratting each other out,” the Wry Man said.  “And they do get tested with regular drills during peacetime.”

I spread my hands.  “There you go.”

The remainder of the group made their way up.  Helen had Hubris under one arm, and was climbing the ladder one-handed.  She handed off Hubris to Gordon, then stepped up alongside the rest of us.  Petey followed, huffing, with Lillian last.

“You’re a solo operator?” I asked Petey.

“I am, yeah.”

“And what you said before, you’ve cleared out an entire cell of Ghosts by yourself?”

“Sy,” Gordon said, “Don’t be rude.”

“I have,” Petey said, in the same moment I said, “I’m not being rude.”

“Be nice,” Gordon said.  He kept a hand on Hubris’ side, but the dog wasn’t having trouble walking on the shingles.  It was a sheer three or four story drop to the road on either side, and there was little to stop any of us if we were to start sliding.

Petey lurched, and it took two of us to catch her.

I asked, “Okay, so is it hidden weapons, or some plague or…”

“Neither.  Well, I’m sort of a hidden weapon, myself,” she said, in that strange voice of hers.  “Undercover.”

“Good cover,” I said.

Mary jabbed me.

From our vantage point, I could see the expanse of the city, including the maze-like distribution of streets and houses, with bridges and gates here and there.

“We can go that way,” Gordon said, pointing.  The rooftops on one side of the street extended over a bridge to cross to the other.  “We could make good distance before we have to go down and back up again.”

“Ugh,” Petey said.

“If we’re quick, we can cut them off,” Gordon said.

“And we won’t have to go up and down,” I said.

“Then let’s hurry!” Petey said, now enthusiastic.

“Two by two,” I said.  “Hold hands.”

That got me some weird looks.

“Trust me,” I said.

Mary extended a hand to Gordon, who took it.  The two of them took the lead, taking off.

Without wasting a second, I grabbed Lillian’s wrist.  She looked a little startled, staring at me with wet hair clinging to the sides of her face and edge of her chin, but she clasped her hand around my wrist in turn.  I would have and could have explained my rationale, but time counted.

Our combination left an odd pairing.  With a member missing, we had one odd member out.

“Wry, can you go with Petey?  Helen isn’t about to slip.”

Wry nodded.

That said, I tugged on Lillian’s wrist, and pulled her along behind me.

Walking on a peaked roof with its subtle slope, it was hard to run across the peak, with each foot angling out in opposite directions.  It led to an awkward, bow-legged run, one with a higher chance of stumbling, not a lower one.

Holding hands, we were each able to angle our bodies slightly to one side, more or less placing our feet flat.  With my weight counterbalanced by Lillian’s, I didn’t need to worry so much about sliding.  If something happened, she and I together had a better chance of avoiding a fall than one of us alone.

Her hand was so warm, with the weather so chilling.  Her breath fogged slightly as she huffed out breaths, working to keep up with me.

Gordon and Mary made it look so easy.  Their weights weren’t matched by half, Gordon was growing in a way I wasn’t, but they were both athletic, and both knew exactly what they were doing.  Hubris ran just behind them, enjoying the fact that he had four paws for extra traction.

I didn’t glance back at Helen, Petey and the Wry Man.

“Here!” Helen called out.

We stopped.

She was pointing, tracing the path the Ghosts were traveling.

They were moving at the base of the houses we were running on, letting the eaves and the edges of the rooftops block our view.

Gordon pointed to a path, I signaled agreement.

The path available to us was shaped like an ‘H’, with a covered bridge joining rooftops on this side of the street with rooftops on the other.

We traveled along the middle bar, and as we did, the Ghosts came into view.  They realized we were getting ahead of them and stopped for a moment to communicate before reversing direction.  We adjusted our course, and they stopped once again.

I imagined the claustrophobia I’d experienced before, only it was imposed on our enemy this time.  We had the high ground, we could easily spy them, and the fact that we weren’t confined to winding, twisting streets meant we could easily stay ahead of them.

I wasn’t sure we could actually confront them, if it came down to it, because we still had to get from the rooftops to the ground, but if they carried on like this, we could track them wherever they decided to take shelter, or at least flag down the next group of soldiers to travel down the road.

What are you going to do now?

I was surprised at how much venom there was in my thoughts.  Not quite anger, but a part of me wanted to see them take a bullet.  I wasn’t sure if it had anything to do with the fact that they were children.

“They’re cornered.  In a sense,” Gordon remarked.

“Where do we take this from here?” Mary asked.  She looked at the Wry Man.  “What did you do, when you were cleaning up other camps?”

The man used his thumb to pull back the corner of his jacket.  Small vials sat side by side, ringing his belt.  Each one was corked.  “I worked with the locals, but I had some chemical help.  Not much good here.  Nothing I can drink that’s about to let me hop right down there and kill or capture either of them.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said.  “Push someone into a corner, strip away their defenses, and you’ll see their true selves.  Them?  They’re survivors at their core.  They’ll do what it takes to live, and I’m thinking that means they’re going to run like little rabbits, all the way home.  All we have to do is keep up.”

“Ugh,” Petey said.  “I hate exercise.”

I frowned at Petey, and was about to ask for more particulars on just how she was a weapon, when Helen’s hands went to her ears.  Hubris shook his head, and it wasn’t because he’d gotten wet.

“What is it?” Gordon asked.

“Can’t hear you,” Helen replied.  “I’ve got my hands-”

Gordon gestured, firm, quick movements.

“They’re screaming.  Sounds different.”

I looked at the pair, who hadn’t budged.  Their mouths were closed.

“Who has a whistle to call Dog?” I asked.

“I do,” Lillian said, “But it’s in my bag.”

“Get it.”

“They’re calling for help,” Gordon said.  “They’re not going to run home.  They’re bringing ‘home’ here.  We should let them go.  Everything that’s helping us keep them cornered is working against us if they mount an attack.”

Multiple paths of travel, the exposure, the vantage point.

Hubris turned, facing the opposite direction, and made a growling sound.

“More Ghosts,” I said.

But as the figures stepped out of one building, a cluster of people, I saw a man in their midst.  It wasn’t a Percy.

Something about the way they talked, walking briskly along the winding road that would take them to the Ghosts, it was too social, too verbal.  Their clothes were too… individual, if I had to say.  Three women and a man.  One woman and the man had messy brown hair, in dire need of a wash.  The other two women were wearing modified military jackets, with badges and everything else removed.  Two carried guns.

I instinctively dropped closer to the roof itself.

If they were Ghosts, they would have been using the silent Ghost-speak, I was sure.

Yet they’d responded to the cry for help.

Gordon gestured.  He was taking charge.  We were relocating, finding a more defensible point.  Getting closer to a watchtower with an active spotlight was vital, here.

The trip took us just above the Ghosts, who weren’t budging and who were presumably screaming.

“There, look,” Mary whispered.

We could see further down, along the winding road.  A group that wasn’t the messy-haired not-Ghosts from before was approaching, perhaps twenty individuals strong.

One or two Ghosts, but many of the others weren’t.

Plague men, yes, but other things.  There were the combat-druggers, who’d altered in shape and form, who had veins sticking out, and who walked a little separate from the rest of the group.  Gone feral, made more dangerous, but at a cost of humanity, unpredictable enough that their own allies avoided them.

I could identify leaders by the attention people gave to them.

A giant of a man, with plague man alterations, but something told me that if he hadn’t had the plague man effect, he still would have been something of a monster.  He rippled with muscle, wearing only a long coat, and tubes fed into his neck and chest.  His hair was long, and he walked in a way that suggested he expected nothing to get in his way.

His weapon was mechanical, long and toothed.

Weaponized birthing saw, I thought.

There were others.  Someone who wore a lab coat, with a custom warbeast at his side, and a woman with long hair, fur at the edge of her hood, and draping clothing to the ground.

The woman reminded me of Helen.

Special projects.  Scrapped ones, ones that turned coat, and worse.

“Who are they?” I whispered.

“The man is one of the Firebrand’s lieutenants, special project of Orickton’s Academy,” the Wry Man said.  “He killed his doctor and was locked up.  The Firebrands released him.  I don’t know the others.”

“Me either,” Petey said.

I bit my tongue, thought for a second, and then said, “Safe to assume the other two are just as dangerous?”

“That would be a high bar to meet,” the Wry Man said.

In the distance, I could see Dog and Catcher appear on a rooftop.  Catcher raised both hands, then moved them.

Gordon started to gesture back, then paused.  “We retreat?”

“We retreat,” the Wry Man said, without asking for input.

I bit my tongue harder.

Gordon gestured to Catcher, who gestured back before disappearing.

Then we were gone, putting as much distance between ourselves and the small army as we could.

I knew, instinctually, that it was too dangerous.  I knew we were outclassed, and there was so little we could have done.  Dog and Catcher would have some input, we could connect dots in the meantime, figure out a plan of action, rally the local forces, even.

Yet a part of me told me that Jamie would have known who they were.  Jamie would have known strengths and weaknesses or what the projects were.

We’d still be retreating, but I’d feel better about what came next.

We needed a win, and we needed it soon, if only to prove we weren’t diminished.  This was a weakness that would infect the group, influence me, with all of my vulnerability to being swayed one way or the other.

Lillian squeezed my wrist, and I realized I was still holding hers.

I squeezed hers back.

Tooth and Nail – 7.4

Dog, Catcher and the Engineer were able to pull ahead, as much by virtue of their sheer speed as the fact that they had a straighter road.  The trio of them were waiting for us at the base of one of the towers that overlooked a bend in the road.  The spotlight swept over us as we approached, then moved on.

As we came to a stop, I let go of Lillian’s hand.  I paced a bit, waiting for the stragglers, Petey, to catch up.  Disgusted with the state of things, I screwed up my face and spat over the edge, the little wad of spit joining thousands of individual raindrops.

The Engineer watched us.  His skin was as raw as a fresh burn, but he wore a mask that covered and sealed his mouth shut, a loose-fitting and incomplete metal shell surrounding much of his body.  Mechanical parts were worked into biology, open enough that I could see wet muscle and turning cogs.  It was a similar sort of project to Dog, I expected, but instead of going the warbeast route, they’d enhanced the man until things broke down, and they’d replaced the broken-down parts with machinery.  I had little doubt that there was at least one machine attached to his body that dispensed powerful painkillers at regular intervals.

All that said, looking past the glistening bits I could see between gaps in the heavy armor, the Engineer was a work of art.  The mask had a flair to it, the machinery gleamed, and there were traces of silver lining the edges of darker metal.  Even his gun looked impressive and ornate.

“They’re not following us anymore,” Helen said.  “I’m pretty sure?”

Catcher looked at Dog, who shook his overlarge head.  “Dog doesn’t think so either.  Tell me, what happened?”

“Nothing,” Gordon said.  “We had them cornered, and then they came out of the woodwork.”

“These Ghosts are getting on my nerves,” I said.  “Dealing with them alone, we’ve shown we can do that, but apparently our enemies have the scariest bastards around working under them?  We have to deal with the lot at once?”

“We saw some of them, too.  Hitmen, thugs for hire,” Catcher said.  “A couple of the most wanted in the Crown States.  We couldn’t close in on them.  Each of them had escorts.”

“It’s hard to stay unnoticed when you’re as ugly as some of those bastards are,” Gordon said.  “How are they infiltrating this city?  Checkpoints, standing guards, patrols, any one of those guys should have raised alarm bells.”

“Secret routes?” Lillian asked.

“I wouldn’t think, with how the city is put together,” the Wry Man said.

I nodded in agreement.  “They wouldn’t have security holes like that and not guard them.”

“Leaves only one option,” Mary spoke.  Gordon was already nodding beside her.

“Infiltration,” I said.  “A group of students, a commanding officer, or an entire faction within this city is working with our enemy.  Say what you will about the Academy, it has its strengths, but engendering loyalty isn’t one of them.  It’s not a problem when we’re winning, but when people see opportunity, they don’t exactly feel bad about taking action against the Academy, or twisting their perspective around to justify making some money or getting some power at the Academy’s expense.”

Gordon gave me a curious look, then said, “Yeah, something to watch out for.  We don’t talk about this with anyone until we find out more.  If we tip them off before we have proof or leverage, we’re suddenly going to find that it’s very hard to get anything done.”

There were nods all around.

Can’t trust the locals.  Meaning we’re even more outnumbered.

“What did you discover?” Catcher asked.

“We waited for them, and then we went looking.  The blonde one-”

“Helen,” Helen said.

“-can hear the screeching, like you can.”

“I’m aware.”

“Alright,” the Wry Man said.  “Should we head back, regroup, figure out where we’re sleeping tonight?”

“What?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Catcher said.  “What is it, Sy?”

“I don’t want to double back,” I said.  “We have the entire night head of us, we’re not going to accomplish anything by going back home.”

“Sy,” Gordon said.

“We have a job to do,” I said.

“I’m not disagreeing, Sy,” Gordon said.  “But you summed it up.  They have Ghosts.  We can disrupt them, make noise that bothers them, but all reports suggest they’ve adapted to that trick, and we’d still be broadcasting our location.  We can’t sneak up and observe or try to follow them without them knowing.”

“We can,” I said, “but we don’t know how, yet.”

“Same thing,” he said.

“If one group made a distraction while the other circled around,” I mused.

“No,” the Wry Man said.  “That’s suicidal.”

Petey cut in, “This might be the time to mention that our friend here is very experienced at the trade.  He’s been at it for-”

“Thirty years,” the old man said.

“Thirty years,” Petey said, in that high voice of hers.  “He’s… wary.”

“That is not a word I people tend to associate with me,” the Wry Man said.  “But I won’t throw my life away for this.”

I frowned.  Was this where different mentalities, personality types and approaches all clashed?  Herding the Lambs was difficult enough.

“How do you prefer to operate?” Gordon asked Petey.

“I’m reckless by nature.  Every time I make a move, I’m taking a risk,” Petey said.

A reckless undercover agent?

“Can we help?” Helen asked.

“Yes,” Petey said.

“I always thought you should be a Lamb,” Helen said.

Petey looked at our group, turning her head to look us over.  A group of dripping children and a soggy dog.  “It looks exhausting.”

“Let us show you how much we can help you,” Helen said.  “What you’d get, if you were one of us.”

Petey sighed.  “Yeah.”

“Then we use Petey,” Helen said.  “We go after them, bait them out-”

“They’ll run,” Gordon said.

“Then we catch them,” Helen said, as if it was the simplest thing in the world.

“They have the advantage on raw information,” Gordon said.  “If they think they can win, then they’ll hit us with an unreasonable amount of force.  If they don’t think they can win, they flee.”

“Stop,” I said.

The pair of them stopped.

“Let’s ignore that part, or we’ll keep arguing in circles until the sun rises.”

“Sy being the level headed one?” Lillian commented.

I stuck my finger out, pressing it against her lips.  “Shush.”

She slapped my hand away.

The rain ran through my hair, and I pushed my fingers through it to get it back out of my face.  I pointed at the Lambs, “Stay,” pointed at the Wry Man, Engineer and Petey, “stay,” and pointed at Dog and Catcher, “wait here.”

A glance skyward told me the spotlight in the tower well above us was glowing, moving over the streets and rooftops.

I crossed the roof and grabbed the ladder.  I started climbing, making my way up.

I was only part of the way up when a light touched me.  It flickered for a moment as it settled on me, the living battery skipping a beat.

Still on the ladder, I stuck my arms out to either side, showing my empty hands.

The light moved to the others.  The Wry Man raised a hand, apparently the signal that all was well.  He was a known element, clearly.

I remembered what we’d said about trustworthy and untrustworthy elements, that there were far too many people who had critical positions in the Academy and very little loyalty to the institution.

I knew full well that I could drive myself crazy questioning every ally we had, but it would do to remember that these three strangers were just that, strangers.  Whatever Helen was spouting off to Petey, it was hard enough to imagine adding two new Lambs to the group that I couldn’t bring myself to extend my trust to these people.

Solo operators, very good at what they did, but there was no guarantee someone else hadn’t reached them first with a better offer.

What did a Wry Man want out of existence, after thirty years of working under the Academy?

I continued making my way up the ladder.  The light fell on me again, then moved up to the tower top above me, streaming into the room there.  The light flicked off, on, off, and on again.

I pulled out my badge as I neared the top, and I banged my hand on the hatch.  I was working under the assumption that, even if the soldiers in here were working with our enemy on some level, they weren’t going to blow their cover or take a risk by attacking me here.

The hatch opened.  I was greeted by the sight of a weight overhead and men with rifles aiming at me.  Young men, students only five or so years older than me, but men all the same.

“Do you have a map?” I asked, in my best ‘innocent’ voice.

“This is no place for children,” one of the men said.  “And there’s a curfew, no less.  Climb up, unless you want us to help you on your way down.”

The blade of the bayonet touched my shoulder, suggesting just how he’d ‘help’.

“And keep your hands where we can see them,” another told me.

This is why people don’t like the Academy.

I climbed up, and held my hands out as they frisked me.

“Take a look through the hatch,” I said.  “On the roof beneath you.”

“Dog and Catcher?  We were told about them, we saw them coming.”

“Everyone,” I said.  “Not just those two.”

One of the men stepped past me, peering down and over to see the group.

Catcher raised his free hand in a kind of wave.

“They need a map,” I said.  “It’s semi-urgent.”

One of the officers crossed the room, “What kind?”

So helpful.

“Of the city.”

“Restricted,” he said.  “Maps can’t leave this room.”

Of course it is.

A city designed to be a maze, to make effectively attacking it as difficult a process as possible.  Letting maps of the layout out to possibly find their way to enemy hands was a security risk.

Except our enemies included Ghosts, who had a powerful sense of spatial awareness.  In this particular circumstance, it was more trouble to friend than foe.

Brechwell’s leadership at work, in a way.

“Can I see, at least?” I asked.

He gestured.  I approached the counter with maps laid across it.  They covered different neighborhoods, included full views of the city, topographic views, and views of the region, with symbols to mark the most likely avenues for entry.  There were maps that were more legend than actual map, with lists of names.  Probably families in a given range of streets.

The really interesting one had details on switches for the portcullis gates throughout the city.  If we could only get access to those controls, they’d have no chance.  But our enemy is likely thinking something very similar.

“There are wanted criminals in this city, they set fire to Brechwell Academy earlier tonight,” I said.

“Yup,” one of the soldiers said.

“They’re camped out elsewhere in the city.  We ran into a bunch of them just now, right here.”  I touched the map.  I was developing a story in my head.  “We saw some bad people, and I was told to come here and get a map so we could say where.”

“Uh huh,” the soldier said.

“Do you have a sheet of paper?  I don’t want to draw on your nice maps.”

“You most certainly don’t,” another soldier said, gruff.  “But we do have paper for you.”

“Trying to figure out where they might be based,” I said.  I pulled my raincoat off, draping it on the edge of the counter, and rolled up my sleeves.  “Ink, pen?”

They slid a pen and some ink across the length of the counter.

“I can’t take this with me, huh?” I asked, as I took offered paper, placed it over the map, and began to trace the most essential sections.

“You can’t.  No maps leave.  That means maps you draw.”

I made a face.  “I’ll have to do my best, then.  But getting it out of my head and on paper will help.”

I won’t remember, it won’t help at all.

I sketched out the Academy, and then drew lines for the major roads and rivers.  I circled the area where I assumed we’d seen the gathering.

“Any idea what neighborhood this is?”

“Sixty-second.”

I sighed.  Couldn’t even be a memorable thing.  Any numbers would slip out of my head before I was halfway down the ladder.

I finished tracing out more of the city.  As I drew, I moved my hand down the pen, which wasn’t hard.  Pressure on the end of the fountain pen produced more ink, and it got ink all over my finger.

“Okay,” I said.  “I think I’ve got it.  If I send them up here to see, can you show them?”

“Sure,” one of the men said.

“Ugh, I’m bad with pens,” I said, shaking my hand.  The blob of ink that covered the end of my finger spattered against the window and dotted a few of the maps.  “Oh, shit!  Sorry!”

Injecting just enough of a sense of alarm that they might think something was really wrong.  I could see a half-dozen ways to play out this situation, but if I got them anxious-

“What did you do!?” one man shouted.  He rushed closer, hurrying to see if there was any damage to the maps.

I took the opportunity to hug my completed maps against my own chest, running my forearms down the length of them.  I let them fall to the ground, snatching up my raincoat.

“Did he do any damage?  If we get in trouble for this-” one was saying.

“Fucking little kid, shouldn’t have given him ink,” another said.

I pulled my raincoat on as quickly as I could, trying to look as guilty and upset as possible, to deflect attention from what I was actually doing.  “Don’t- please don’t throw me down the hatch.”

One gave me a look, annoyed.  “We’re not going to do that.”

“You said you would earlier, please…  Just let me go.”

“Go,” was the order.

I left, down through the hatch, observed by one while two fussed over the maps and the trouble they’d get from their superiors if they were decided to be at fault.

Partway down the ladder, I reached fingers through the rungs of the ladder, and drew an ‘x’ on the knuckle of my thumb, just a short distance from Melancholy’s ring.

Hopefully that would be a reminder.  They’d been nice enough, all things considered.  Wouldn’t do to get them in trouble.

Jamie wouldn’t have.

“Taking your sweet time?” Catcher called up to me, as I made my way to the rooftop again.

I walked around the point where the rooftop met the tower until I found a position where the tower’s bulk blocked the incoming rain.  I pulled off my raincoat, then pulled off my shirt.  I held it up.  Excess ink had translated to the shirt, and though some of it had bled into the fabric, expanding out into fatter lines, and some of the finer details had dried too quickly to translate, the general image of the city was there.

“Have to mentally flip it left to right,” I said.

“Can’t see, needs to be higher,” Gordon said.

I raised it up..

“Higher.”

I raised it as high as I could.

“Higher.”

I realized what he was doing.

“You’re a dirty buttplug, Gordon,” I said.

“And you’re short,” he told me.

The Engineer reached forward and took the shirt, holding it flush against the tower wall.

I shivered a bit, shirtless, but still proud of my handiwork.  I dabbed a bit of moisture on the wall and touched the spot I’d already marked with my ink-wet fingertip.  I left a faint blue mark across the cloth, thin and dark at first, then fading as I applied more pressure and applied more of my finger.

“The drug-takers, had guns, sixty-somethingth neighborhood, approaching from the southwest, I guess?  And the strong men, led by one of our Most Wanted, along with creepy lady with the flowing dress, and the warbeast tamer.”

“Ghosts,” Gordon said, drawing his finger along the road I’d sketched out.

“More Ghosts,” Catcher said.  He touched the shirt, and his fingerprint came away a muddy yellow-black.

I glanced at him.  “Where’d you get ink?”

“Weapon oil,” he said.

I smiled.  I liked improvisation when I saw it.

The Engineer moved one hand and tapped the shirt.  Catcher marked the spot.  “Rifleman at a perch here, ducked out of sight when the searchlight swept his way.  Saw us, and hid.  Didn’t see him again.  And here, strange looking stitched sitting outside in the rain.  And here is where we lost the Ghosts we were chasing after the Academy fire….”

The dots and lines and marks were starting to form a picture.  It was shaped like a wobbly crescent moon.  An unfinished picture.

I touched the center of the incomplete circle.  “What’s here?”

There was no answer but the patter of rain.

“They are?” Lillian guessed.  “The bad guys?”

I traced my finger around the circle’s rim.  “Defensive perimeter.  And in the center there, we have critical figures.  Wanted men, leaders of different factions of rebellion.  Mauer.  Maybe Fray.”

I glanced at Mary.

“Percy,” she said.

“It’s possible,” Gordon said.  “But Fray has outsmarted us before.”

“The factions have been fighting for months.  Over three nights, they’ve banded together.  Either they’ve reached an accord or they’re getting there,” I said.  “When things are that tentative, are you really going to get complicated and take risks with how you station your guards?”

“Actually…” Gordon said.

“…Fray might,” I finished.  “You’re right.”

“And,” Gordon said, “It doesn’t fix our problem with how we get close enough to them to do anything.”

“It’s true, Sy,” Mary said.  “Using Petey, attacking with our massed forces, spying, our hands are tied.”

“Then we don’t use hands,” I said.  I tugged on my shirt.  The Engineer let it go.  I pulled it on, and shivered again at how clammy it was against my already wet skin.  “We use-”

Helen stepped close, all of a sudden, her face an inch from mine.

She licked my forehead, brow to hair.

“Uh,” I said, my train of thought broken.

“Go ahead, don’t worry,” she said.

“Uh.”

“You had ink on your face.  I wanted to get rid of it before it stained.  Keep talking.”

“That’s what you use a handkerchief for.”

It was a glimmer of the older, frustrating Helen.  “I don’t have one and my spit would work better anyway.  Go back to what you were saying.”

“What was I even saying?”

“We don’t use hands,” the Wry Man said, patiently.

“Right,” I said.  “Yeah.  Damn it, Helen, and I had a good one-liner planned.”

“It would have sounded silly if you said it with a blue stripe on your face,” she said, very sensibly.

“Sy,” Gordon said, “Focus.  What are you thinking?”

“We use horns,” I said.

“You’re right,” Mary said.  “That doesn’t sound nearly as cool after the interruption.”

I sighed, then shivered again.

“Horns?” Petey asked.

My eyes scanned the surroundings.  The city, laid out like it is.

“You don’t build a city like this without a design in mind.  Winding roads, claustrophobia, gates to control movement, towers to observe… all done with a point in mind.  If they seriously didn’t give the capstone of this design horns, I’m going to be ticked.  Gotta tie it together.”

“The Brechwell Beast,” Gordon said.

“Please tell me it has horns.”

“It has horns,” Gordon said.

I smiled, spreading my arms.  “Perfect.  Then let’s give them a distraction.”

“It’s a last ditch measure,” The Wry Man said, unimpressed.  “Not something we use right away.  We’re supposed to observe and report back so the Academy can take action, not take action ourselves.”

My eyes were wide, I was smiling, and I was shivering from excitement as much as cold, now.  “It’s Genevieve Fray.  She’s two moves ahead of us, every damn time.  I’m done playing chess.  Let’s kick over the damn table.  Right now.”

“I’m not sure,” Petey said.  “This isn’t how I operate.”

“Like I said,” Helen said, reaching out to take Petey’s hand.  “You’re with us for now.”

“This isn’t what I was imagining,” Petey said.

“I’m gathering Helen is for Sy’s plan,” Gordon said.

“I want to see it,” Helen said, the excitement clear on her face.

“Do you?” he asked.  Gordon reached out to touch the side of Helen’s face.  “No act, no games.  Because I know you don’t want like we understand it.  Say it again.”

The enthusiasm drained away from Helen.  Her eyes still glittered, but her expression was cold.  The angle of her head, the way she held herself, it all shifted in the moment.  More reptile than mammal, wearing raincoat and a dress.

She nodded once.

“Alright,” he said.  His hand settled on Hubris’ head.  “If Sy wants to do it, and if we can get the cooperation of the Academy, then I’m for it too.”

Helen smiled, resuming her act as if nothing had occurred.

“Yes, then,” Mary agreed.

“Yes,” Lillian said, which was a little surprising.  “Let’s get that bitch.”

Mary reached out to squeeze Lillian’s hand, smiling at her best friend.

As one, the Lambs faced the others.

“Do you think this will work?” Catcher asked.

“No idea, but I’m fairly sure that anything else we do, biding our time, it’s not going to work,” I said.  “I know Fray, and we can’t give her the opportunity to make the next move at her leisure.”

Catcher nodded.  He looked at Dog, who didn’t give any apparent sign, then looked at us.  He nodded once.

The solo operators were silent.

“I’ll go up,” the Wry Man said.  “I know the signals.  I’ll flash a message to the other towers.  They’ll pass it on.  If I say we know where Fray is, they’ll act.”

I smiled wider.

“Go,” he said.  “I’ll catch up after I’ve given the order.  We’re creating a window of opportunity here.”

I remembered my doubts from earlier.

“Can we trust you to do this?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Why?  Why are you with the Academy?  Why are you loyal?” I asked.

“That question could get you killed, if you asked it in certain places, or asked it in the wrong way,” the Wry Man said.

“Are you deflecting?”

“I don’t even know what that means,” the man said.

“Why?”

“They saved my life,” he said.  “Not the Academy as a whole, but people who are tied to it.  I have to repay those people, and I will probably never manage it before I die.  If I have to serve the Academy to do it, I will.”

My brain was pulling on every hint and detail on tells that I’d learned over the past several years.  Every lie I’d identified.

“Okay,” I said.  “I trust you.  I told them to expect someone.  You could tell them we spotted the enemy ringleader and they’ll believe you.”

He nodded once, then started climbing the ladder.

“You two don’t have to come,” Gordon said, to the other solo operators.

“I think I do,” Petey said.

The Engineer nodded.

I’d have rather they’d stayed, or gone back to the Academy to report in.  I didn’t trust them, and they’d be at our back in this.

We were halfway back to where we’d seen the ghost when the beam started flashing, pointed back at the Academy.  The dark, overcast night sky glowed orange on one end and reflected a dim yellow-white on the other, passing on a message.

Our enemies would see that light in the same way we’d seen the fire.

In a short time, I hoped, they’d hear the roar of the Brechwell Beast, and they’d react with concern and fear.

The box would be thoroughly rattled, the inhabitants set to scurrying, dangerous and mad as they were.

This was what I lived for.

Tooth and Nail – 7.5

An impact shook the city of Brechwell, dull and low, reverberating through the ground and up to the rooftops.  In the wake of it, windows and doors continued to rattle and bang in their frames, adding an eerie note to the tail end of it.

The entire city seemed to go still.  Birds taking shelter from the rain and the handful of soldiers on the street were all frozen.  Our group and the rainwater were the only things moving in a still tableau.

Then the warning bells started tolling, muffled, all through the city, the birds took off from roosts, and soldiers ran.  Where each of the towers had lone spotlights, additional lights were lit, the beams becoming diffuse, aimed at the city streets.  Stretches of light and dark.

State of emergency.

A second impact cut into the bass tolling of the bells.  As it rippled across a segment of Brechwell, the bells were jarred midway through their motions.  Some sounded early, others were delayed.

I gripped Lillian’s wrist harder as the rooftop shook with the strike.

The Brechwell Beast roared, and the sound carried.  It was a lowing noise, and I imagined I imagined it sounded frustrated.  An actual observation, gleaned from small details and intuition, or just what I wanted to think?

Wish they hadn’t warned people, but I guess they had to.  Someone in charge probably promised citizens there would be notice, to pacify them.

Down a side street, without a man or guard touching it, a portcullis gate slammed down, the blunted metal teeth of it striking the stone of the road.  The lights from the towers shifted, leaving that street dark, illuminating the path that remained.

I’d imagined this part.

Release the local weapon, send it out into the streets, and use the gates to control its movements.

I couldn’t stop smiling.

Helen, ahead of us, raised a hand, then gestured twice.

“Screams,” Catcher said, echoing the same sentiment.  “Your Ghosts.”

Here we were.

I’d never had the impression the Ghosts were particularly intelligent.  They could talk, recite from script, and they had residual behaviors and movement from the manner of their manufacture.  I wondered if the scenario of the Brechwell Beast had even come up, if the Firebrands had taken the time to explain to their inaudible children just what to expect and what to do if the weapon was let loose from its dwelling.

I heard the Beast roar, and this time it was moving.

They’d opened the gate it had been banging against.

“Cross!” Gordon shouted, pointing.  It was a set of rooftops above a gate that still yawned open.

“If it passes beneath us-” Petey had to raise her voice to be heard over the din.

“Cross!” Gordon called out.

Helen ran across, hunched over, one hand extended straight toward the ground, ready to drop and hug the peaked roof at a moment’s notice.  Gordon and Mary were next, followed by Lillian and me.

Dog, Catcher and the Engineer had gone ahead, and Dog had been kind enough to place his claws against sections further down the roof.  I could see patches where he’d leaped and where he’d landed, and shingles had been torn or scraped away by the violence and the weight of each of his movements.

Petey was lagging behind.  I made sure to keep an eye on her.  By all rights, Helen should have gone with her, but Petey and Helen were diametric opposites, Helen was our scout, capable of hearing the Ghosts, and Petey was far from being fast enough to help with scouting.

We could have and should have reshuffled the group, perhaps sending Mary forward with Helen, but it was too late to decide on that now, and we were almost there.  So long as Petey didn’t slip and slide off to one side and over the brink, we were fine.

Dog and Catcher stopped, and Catcher extended an arm, signaling.  Catcher remembered the signals for alert, and for direction.  Easy to make out in the gloom, as he was a dark silhouette against the glare of a tower’s lights.

I squeezed Lillian’s wrist, tugging her a bit as I willed her to move faster.

We were so close.

Over one house, past another, past an ‘x’ shaped intersection of rooftops and buildings, a park to one side and roads to another, and we could see what Catcher was indicating.

A trio of Ghosts and a quartet of others in civilian garb were all gathered, talking.  Some had rifles.  Infiltrators.

One Ghost was staring up at us.

I could feel the tramp of the Brechwell Beast’s feet, see the shift of the lighting as some lights moved to follow it.  It was loud, and the sound went beyond the heavy footfalls.  A grinding sound, like something heavy rolling over crushed stones.

The civilians were at a door, working to open it.

“Catcher!” I shouted, and my voice was nearly drowned out.

He said something, but I couldn’t make out the individual sounds.  He was reaching into his coat, withdrawing something that was about the same size and shape as a wine bottle, but black with fluid inside.

He tossed it out over the edge of the roof.  Ghosts scattered, backing up, while the other enemies in civilian clothing were oblivious.

The bottle struck hard ground, there was a flare of orange in the center, and then thick smoke filled the area.

He said something else that I couldn’t make out.

Each tromp of the Beast’s feet made my teeth clack together.  He was one street over, rounding the corner behind us, turning, approaching the corner that turned onto this street.

Helen dropped, hugging the roof’s peak.

I tugged Lillian’s arm, hauling her down.  I dug fingers beneath thick, wet, freezing shingles for a grip.  Others were doing the same.

The superweapon of Brechwell Academy lunged ’round the corner, not slowing, heedless of potential obstacles in its way.

Had someone taken a toad, a mammoth, a bull and a rhino and kept the most brutish features of each, they would have been in the right ballpark for the Brechwell Beast.  It was wide, muscular, and built to plow forward, with no sign that it was built to stop.  Its chest was triangular and deep enough to scrape the ground, even as powerful limbs carried it forward.  Tusks extending from the corner of its mouth scraped against the road and the sides of buildings, the curve of them keeping them from catching on anything, and horns extended around the top, doing much the same.  At the shoulder -the shoulders and upper parts of its forelimbs were perhaps its largest feature, I noted- it stood three and a half stories tall.

It was armored, something grown rather than hewn from metal, the plates white-gray in color, edges sharpened, layered over one another.  The plates at the chest scraped the ground like the horns and tusks did, and the plates across its back gave it a serrated appearance.  What I could see between and beneath armor plates suggested that the Beast had no lack of protection – it alternated from layers of heavy scale that was probably armor unto itself and skin that looked like it was nothing but callus and scar tissue.

The street rumbled, windows threatening to rattle out of panes as the Beast made its approach, and I found the vibration of its movement threatening to tear my fingers from the shingles.

I knew I wasn’t going to be able to hang on before it was halfway down the street to us.

It reached the ‘u’ bend in the road, with us at the middle of the bend.  Its full weight slammed against the building faces, and momentum carried the shock of the impact straight through to us.

I wasn’t even sure what happened.  In one moment, I was on the rooftop.  Then it was like I’d been hit across face, neck, chest and stomach with a physical blow.  In the next, I wasn’t touching anything solid.

A full second passed before my right shoulder scraped roof.  My right foot and ass touched the roof next, and I had my bearings.  A moment later, my backpack caught on the roof, and I started spiraling out, head going more down, feet more up.

I was halfway down the roof, sliding down faster than I could’ve run, and there was only an abyss below me, darker than the sky above.

My arms went out for traction, heels of my hand scraping against the rough texture of the shingles, and as I started to correct the spin, I brought one leg out, my pants leg and the flesh nearest the bone of my shin tearing on contact with the roof.

Belly down, more points of contact.  I was hugging the roof, trying not to do anything that would make me spin and keep the momentum going through another venue.  Three quarters of the way down.

In the engulfing darkness below, I could see a vague shape in gray, lit indirectly by the fire around a distant burning building, bounced off a cloud and down into the shadows beneath me.

A tree, but one too distant to reach with a timely leap, let alone a skid and fall.

The flare of hope died, but in its place I managed rage and fury.

I will not die here!

‘Oh, I knew Sy would do himself in eventually.’

I will not let them make remarks about how I was hoist by my own petard!

I shifted my weight.  Seconds away from going over the edge, I raised both feet and stuck one arm out, no longer trying to slow my descent.  I’d slowed, but it would never be enough, even if the roof was dry, if I wasn’t wearing a damn raincoat.

There was no light here, nothing to hint or illuminate my situation as I reached the end.  I reached into darkness, slamming my feet down at an angle.

My feet found the gutter, wedging into the space.  My tired, cold fingers found the edge of it, too.  Momentum carried me down and forward, and my shoes popped out of the gutter, kicking shingle on the way up and out.  A flap caught the meager light as it flew through the air, joined by one of my shoes.

I grit my teeth, bracing myself, as my lower body swung down, all of my weight jerking hard my fingers hard against the edge of the gutter, a wooden trough nailed to the eaves.  I heard wood and metal cry out in their individual ways, threatening to pull free of where it had been secured to the wall.

My other hand went up, punching skyward in an effort to reach high enough, and found a grip.

Panting, hurting in a dozen places, I stayed right where I was, and found enough breath to whistle.

I could feel the Brechwell Beast continuing on its way, rounding a corner, then passing somewhere to my right.  Each movement jarred me, and made the water that sat at the bottom of the gutter splash out, spattering me.

Catcher appeared in my view, mancatcher in one hand, touching the roof, the other extended out for balance, feet spread wide.  He eased his way down to me.

“You could have lost the pack,” he said.  “Shrug your shoulders, let it fall.  That has to be a solid stone of weight weighing you down.”

“Heavier.  It’s all books.”

“Point stands.”

“I’m okay,” I said.  “If it really came down to it, I’d let him fall.”

“Him?”

“It.  The bag.  Let me up, will you?”

“Hm.  Take this,” he said, “and don’t haul me down over the edge.”

He extended his poke, the spiked mancatcher end, and I shifted my grip to one arm, the entire arm and hand trembling as I reached up and through the closed metal ring to grip the pole just beyond.

I had to passively let him haul me up and over, because planting a foot on the edge and pulling myself up threatened to pull him down at the same time.  Once I was high enough, I found a foothold in the gutter.  A moment later I had one hand and both feet on the roof.

“Everyone okay?”

“Yes.  I had to save Lillian before I saved you.  I got her before she fell as far as you did, and she fell the other way.  Dog got Petey.”

“Good,” I said.  “Thank you.”

He gave me a simple nod.

I kept one hand on the mancatcher as we made our way to the peak.

The bells continued to toll as we rejoined the others.  I reached out with my less-sore left hand and took Lillian’s, noting how her hair was sticking up on one side.  She had a bit of a scrape too, and it looked like her ear was bleeding.

I looked down at the street where Catcher had created the cloud of smoke.  It didn’t look like they’d gotten the door open.  There was carnage, a body severed in half, no doubt sandwiched between wall and a sweeping tusk, and the lower body wasn’t visible or distinguishable.  There were meaty bits amid the streak of flesh and blood, too ruined for me to tell what it was supposed to be.

“Next time,” Gordon said, “We position better.”

I nodded, then I smiled, “It has to have reached them by now.”

“Probably.”

“Good to walk?” he asked, glancing at one of my legs.

I nodded.

We made our way in the direction we’d estimated Fray’s meeting spot to be.  As we walked, I pulled my raincoat off, freeing one arm from sleeve and strap of backpack before letting go of Lillian’s hand and doing the same with the other.  I let the raincoat fall to the roof before pulling the pack on again.

There was a crash a few streets over.  A plume of dust or smoke rose from the impact site.

Dog huffed.

“Going ahead,” Catcher said, as he increased his pace.  “Don’t fall again.”

The streets below us were getting wider, and I realized we were approaching the city center.  There were a few more patches of gore where the Beast had torn past bystanders, but less than I might have liked.

We crossed a bridge and another section of rooftops, and reached the base of another tower, overlooking a plaza.  It was an open area like we’d seen in the Academy, broken up by patterns in how the road was drawn out, with gardens in the spaces between the individual footpaths and a fountain in the center, set low to the ground.  The Beast’s tusk had already torn through two opposing walls of the fountain, and a foot might have crushed another.  Destroyed wagons and stalls littered the area already.

There was a building that might have been a town hall, a hospital, and another set of larger buildings I couldn’t label.  The Beast was here, with freedom to move as it pleased.   The white of the thing’s tusks was stained with mud, debris and gore.  Its eyes were dark compared to the mask it had been fitted with.

Objectively, it was beautiful.  Now that it wasn’t charging right for me, I could see the patterns on the armor, a mingling of old damage that had been left alone rather than repaired, and decorative etchings.  Rainwater ran down the armor, pausing and helping catch the light amid the etchings.  It looked like the lines of a maze.

Rifles fired from windows, and I suspected they might have been exorcists.  The Beast was too far away, and the rifles, as powerful as they were, were far too little to stop the Beast, even if they got past the armor.

But the noise and the patter of bullets against armor did get the creature’s attention.  It turned, focused on the source, and then charged from across the plaza.

I imagined the people inside the building were doing much what we were.  Though we weren’t the target, we scrambled to put distance between ourselves and the impact site.

The Beast’s tusks retracted.  Horns didn’t, but it lowered its head so the points of the horns were aimed almost straight down.  It didn’t have a neck, only muscle and shoulder, and thus served as a massive battering ram, nearly as tall and far stronger than the building it assaulted.

We had a fair distance, but I still lowered myself, pulling off the pack, and braced for impact.

The crack of it made my thoughts skip, and the impact resounded, distorting the regular rhythm of bells.  My vision jolted, and the fact that people manning nearby lights at the towers were jarred as well made the entire scene seem to wobble.  The stone could have taken cannon fire and withstood it.  The Beast didn’t care.  It slammed through a foot of stone blocks with as much ease as Dog might a wooden door, plunging head and shoulders into the building.

Forelimbs reached up, scrabbling for purchase, and its shoulders heaved upwards against yet-unbroken stone, splitting it and sending it sliding down either side of the Beast’s back.  The feet were reaching up to the first floor, straining to reach the second, and tore the floors down and away instead.

Huffing, puffing, the superweapon bucked, horns spearing up, striking at the floor above and the exterior wall, bringing more debris down.

I doubted anyone inside had survived that.  Tough luck to anyone who lived upstairs or downstairs from that particular group.

It tried to retreat out, and its horns snagged on the stone masonry.  It was a hair away from breaking the stone, but it didn’t haul itself free.  Instead, the Beast remained where it was, huffing, puffing.  Then it yawned, with no air entering or leaving its mouth.

“Cover your nose and mouth!” Lillian shrieked.   Then, in her haste to follow through with her own action, she got out another incomplete phrase, “Eyes!”

I allowed myself a peek as I tucked nose and mouth into the crook of my elbow, lowering myself.

The Beast was letting a dark fog creep out of its mouth, filling the cavity of the ruined building in front of it.

The fog wasn’t reaching us.

I started to lower my arm.  Lillian reached over and jerked it back up into place.

Something flickered.  Like tentacles snaking through the dark fog, fire reached out.  I brought my other arm up to protect my eyes as the fire expanded to find other pockets that would ignite, then others, swelling-

Our position on the far side of the roof, with the roof’s peak between us and the Beast prevented the worst of the detonation from reaching us.  Everything else was silenced by the crack, even Beast and warning bells, and then, as if all of the sound had been caught up and thrown our way, it rushed at us, a violent wind and torrent of noise.  I could hear glass breaking.

“Don’t breathe!” Lillian called out, voice muffled.  It sounded like her voice was strained, as if she was digging for the last scraps of air in her lungs to give the order.

I remained where I was, face buried in the crooks of my elbows, hunched over the peak of the roof.

I felt my thoughts start to waver, my vision going dark at the edges, as my lungs burned of a need for more oxygen.  The bells were resuming, and the deep thuds of the Beast’s footsteps shook the building and vibrated in the core of me, straining my already tenuous control over my struggling lungs and throat.

But when a doctor-in-training said not to breathe, one listened.  When they ran, one ran.  When they said ‘oh shit’, one ran and held their breath at the same time.

I was so focused on the singular act of fighting every bodily impulse that I didn’t fully understand what I was hearing as someone heaved in a breath.  I registered, and chanced opening my eyes.  Lillian had her mouth covered, but her eyes were open.  She stared into my eyes.

Three seconds passed.

Then she took in a breath.

I allowed myself to breathe, joined by others.  We got our wind, and watched as the Beast assaulted another, shorter building, trampling it to the ground.

I looked over my shoulder at the building it had already attacked.  The back end had blown out, and parts had collapsed.  Absolutely nothing still lived there.

“Everyone okay?” Lillian asked.

There were nods all around.

“The gas,” Petey said.  “What is it?  I might have breathed some in.”

“Probably a nerve gas,” Lillian said.  “If he’s about twenty years old, then he’s part of the Wynn generation of warbeasts.  A lot of them made their own from internal waste and byproducts.  I’ve read up on it, a little extra because Ibott said he was thinking about giving Helen a reserve.”

“That was a no,” Helen said.

“You’re probably immune, by the way.”

“Neat.”

“What would happen if we breathed it in?” Gordon asked.

“At this distance, that concentration, carried by the explosion?  Probably nothing.”

“Then-”

“Only probably.  But if you were unlucky, your throat might stop working, or it wouldn’t work as well, or you’d lose some function in your eyes.  If we weren’t wearing clothes, we might lose sphincter control.  Maybe bladder control, for the girls.”

“Not the guys?”

“I’m not going to get into anatomy 101, Sy,” Lillian said.  “Doesn’t matter anyway, unless you’re taking your pants off.”

“Don’t tempt him,” Mary said.

“Hey!” I protested, to Mary.  Then to Lillian, I said, “And it does too matter, I like my sphincter control.”

“We’re all glad for your sphincter control,” Gordon said.  “You’d be more unpleasant to be around if you didn’t have any.”

“More unpleasant?”

“Enough,” Mary said.  “Look.”

The Brechwell Beast was taking a side road.  The lights were leading it on its way.

I raised myself up and pulled my clammy shirt away from my chest, trying to make heads or tails of the runny lines there.

“It’s headed in the right direction,” Gordon said.

“Oh, good,” I said.

“You got the distraction you wanted.  They’re probably quaking in their boots,” he said.

“Maybe.”

“Now what?”

“We follow.”

“Okay,” he said.  “While we’re doing that, let’s keep an eye out for one of those rifles.  If it can hurt the Brechwell Beast, I wouldn’t mind having one for myself.”

I nodded.  The wreckage of the building would be too much trouble to go through.

The Engineer and Petey stared.  Petey was especially quiet right now.

“They open and close the gates, to control which routes the Beast can and will travel. It prefers lit area, I guess?” I asked.

“Don’t most of us?” Helen asked.

“Point.  It reaches the area we mentioned to the Wry Man, and then, what, they shut the gates and trap it and our enemies in the same space?  They hide indoors and…”

Gordon said, “Presumably, the Brechwell Beast pulls the same trick it just did.  Fills the area with gas, then ignites it.  Nerve gas finishes off those the fire doesn’t.”

I thought of how the horns had caught.  “If it’s trapped.”

Gordon nodded.

I looked at Mary.  “Is that okay?  Percy might be with them.”

She flinched visibly at the mention of the name.  “I’d rather get him alive.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because if we didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to believe he wasn’t a clone, that this wasn’t a trick.”

I nodded slowly.

“I’ve thought about it a lot.  The Percy thing,” she said, her voice quiet.  “I know how it looks and sounds.”

“We trust you,” Lillian jumped in.  “Or I do, at least.”

“I do too,” I said.  “I believe you.  I think you’re right.  Though you just put a nasty thought in my head.  I’d really hate to find out that the corpse of Fray was a clone, and that the real her was running around somewhere.”

“You might be getting ahead of yourself a little,” Gordon said.

“More than a little,” I admitted. “Let’s go.”

We rounded the perimeter of the oval plaza, picking our way carefully over the portion of roof that was still intact over the ruined, fire-charred stonework.  Helen, Mary and I went first, verifying that the ground was steady, before the others.  Petey was heavy and the Engineer was heavier still.  The dense, hefty body of the machine man was on the most precarious point of a stretch with nothing but thick wooden beams when a somewhat distant impact rocked the city.  He wobbled, found his balance, and hopped to safer ground.

“He’s there,” Gordon said.  “Fray’s area.”

“You sure?”  Petey asked.

“Sure as dammit,” he said.

A moment after he’d finished speaking, there was a flicker of fire.  It took a full second for the rumble of the shockwave to sweep past us.

“So soon?” I asked.

“No,” Gordon said, under his breath.

“No?  Fray’s doing?  She’s blowing it up?”

“No,” Gordon said.  He pointed.  “If I’m right… then the Beast is there…”

He moved his finger.  “The explosion-”

Another explosion occurred, this one close enough that I could get a sense of the particulars, that it was more than one thing detonating in close succession, in two very close-by locations.  There was another.

Gordon’s finger moved each time.

“Screams,” Helen said, “Some nearby.  It’s a signal.”

“Down!” he shouted.

We got down.

The remainder of the explosions sounded.  There was one at the north end of the plaza.

They were hiding indoors.  They had access to buildings.  Fray’s people are scattered around the area, some on watch, waiting in windows with rifles in hand… but they’re also guarding something.

Caches.

I could see the damage at the north end.  The front and back faces of the building were ruined.  The floor was intact, but light did shine through.

“Fray’s making her move,” I said.

“I don’t understand,” Petey said.

“She’s freed the Beast of Brechwell,” I said.  “No, not free, but-”

“Unleashed,” Helen said.

They can’t use the gates to steer it anymore.  It won’t be trapped.  Fray has an escape route, and the Beast…

…Brechwell belongs to the Beast, for now.

I smiled.

“Come on, and hurry,” I said, talking through the grin.  “She’s given her response, and we’re still ahead.  We’ve just got to take advantage before she gets away.  We can get her.”

Tooth and Nail – 7.6

Periodic gunshots cut through the sound of the bells and the roars and crashes of the Beast’s rampage.  Striving to find safe ground, some of the members of Fray’s group had started to climb towers.  The rifle shots that didn’t hit were a form of discouragement and warning.  The ones that did hit were even more effective at achieving those same two goals.

On the rooftop, we had the benefit of being able to see over the other rooftops and locate the Brechwell Beast.  The people on the ground didn’t- for them, there wasn’t a good way of distinguishing how far away the Beast was.  It was as large as a wealthy man’s house and I very much suspected it was designed to create noise and make things rattle to batter at the enemy’s psyche.

Tough enough to hold its own in a knock-down, drag-out fight with cannons and artillery, it wasn’t even playing that fair.  When it moved and when it made contact, it was with speed and devastating force.

In the distance, the Beast was working on plowing its way through a gap that explosions had created.  I heard rifle shots, and saw the Beast react.  It backed out of the gap, and began charging back into the designated area, searching for the attackers.

A clever trick, one that kept the Beast out of the city as a whole.  But it wouldn’t work forever.

“That has to be it!” Gordon called out.

It was a cluster of buildings that stood taller than the rest.  The style was slightly different, the design ostentatious, with access controlled by arches, opened further by explosions.  Looking at the road, as we got closer, there were more wagons and carriages set to either side of the road, or parked in little archways beside residences.

A number of bystanders, too, people bolting along the roads leading to the building.

It was possible there were people caught out after dark, but I doubted it.  Any ‘bystander’ here had to be assumed to be in Fray’s employ.  The guns many carried and the company they kept were damning.

The Beast was drawing closer.

A door opened.  A man shouted, waving them inside.  Another group that would dodge the monster.

“Oh no,” Lillian said.  “No, no, no.”

She was looking at the door.

I looked closer, and I could make out a shape at the man’s side.  In my haste to assess the situation, I’d taken a mental shortcut, figuring the lump at the man’s side to be an overlarge leg.  A detail held at the back of my mind until I could put all my thoughts in the right order.

We needed to get down to the street level, cross, and then deal with the group, and an otherwise unassuming man with that misshapen a leg was probably going to be less of a threat.  Less mobile, a single leg wasn’t about to be something dangerous.

But as I tapped into that impression of the man, recognized the lump, and processed what it was.  I knew before I even double-checked what I was seeing.

“Man with a little girl just let a group of rebellion thugs and some Ghosts into his house, to save them from the Brechwell Beast!” I called out.

“Sympathizer?” Gordon asked.

Oh, that would be so easy if it were true.

Lillian squeezed my wrist.

“Let’s assume no!” I called out.

The Beast was drawing nearer.

“The Beast passes, we go down behind it!” I called out.  “Cross street, get inside, stop them!”

“I thought we were going after Fray!” Gordon shouted.

“Never the plan!  Hit edge groups!  I explain after!”

The noise of the Beast’s one-creature stampede was starting to drown out my words.

The Beast appeared, fumes trailing from the corner of its mouth, eyes hidden by the armored mask it had been fitted with.  It raked against the side of the buildings we were atop, and the rooftops vibrated.  The Engineer punched an armored fist through the shingles to get a grip on the infrastructure beneath, extending an arm to keep me and Lillian from falling, the hand clasping Petey’s hand.  Gordon and Mary seemed to have a handle on their own business, and on Hubris.

Helen, well, Helen had a way of being the exception to the rule.  I had trouble thinking of a scenario where she would be physically thrown from a rooftop.

The Beast’s momentum carried it into the buildings on the other side of the street, as it rounded a ‘u’ bend directly in front of us.  It passed us on the other side, moving in the other direction.

By the look of things, it would reach Fray’s area before terribly long.  It remained to be seen if the explosions and damaged buildings would change its route.

Probably would.

But our enemies were in disarray, and the seemingly impenetrable perimeter had been breached, with everyone running for the hills.  The key was to capitalize on this.

As soon as we could walk, we made our way to the tower at the end of the row.  Helen, Gordon and Mary gripped the sides of the ladder, sliding rather than climbing down, Gordon doing it with one hand, the other holding Hubris to his back.  I did the same, even as my hands and one ankle ached.

Pain didn’t often get in my way, I knew how to manage it from long experience and a deeper perspective than most, but it did exist.  I knew I was hurt, I’d probably lightly twisted something, and too much more activity would see me doing more harm to myself.

I couldn’t have that.

Lillian was apparently too scared to slide, but she made some effort and managed a halting progression.  Petey and the Engineer were taking the rungs one at a time.

“Come on, almost there,” I said, anxious.

“I’m-” she slid a distance, the sides of the ladder already wet from the passage of everyone before her, “-working on it.”

“Classic white, today, huh?”  I said, staring up.

“You’re the worst, Sy,” she said.  “I knew, moment you got on the ladder before me, that you were going to say something.”

“But you didn’t stop me,” I said.  “I’ve heard rumors you like the attention.”

“Scurrilous lies,” she said.  She hopped off the ladder, and her face was bright pink.  She started to kick my shin, and then stopped, seeing how bloody and ragged it was.  She settled for hitting me in the shoulder instead.

I glanced up, decided the solo operators were too slow to be useful, and grabbed Lillian’s hand, tugging her behind me.

By the time Lillian and I caught up with the other Lambs, Mary was limp, and Helen was banging on the door.  I rushed to Mary’s side.

Gordon signaled.  Trick.

I tapped Mary’s shoulder, then signaled, me.

She rose from her sitting position, and I let myself fall into Gordon’s arms like a swooning maiden, just in time for the door to open.

Helen was already mid-act.  Her voice was a sob as much as it was words.  “Please, help, please!”

The man stood in the doorway, looking between us in confusion.

“Please!” Helen sobbed.  “He’s hurt!”

“Don’t move him,” he said.

“Have to,” Gordon said.  He wasn’t that bad of an actor either.  “It might come back.”

I could see the indecision on the man’s face.  “Okay.”

Gordon and Mary dragged me.  I was already scraped and bleeding from my earlier fall, and I made a better victim.  Mary did have the benefit of being the same gender as the man’s daughter, but it was too hard a sell.

I glanced back to see that the Engineer was at the bottom of the ladder, Petey only halfway down.  The man hadn’t noticed, even with the lights illuminating the street.

The moment Lillian was inside and the door closed, Mary drew a knife, pressing the tip to the man’s gut, without actually penetrating cloth and skin.

I could see the shock and fear on his face, and I knew he wasn’t one of them.  A bystander who’d thought he was doing the right thing.

Eyes wide, he asked, “What are you-”

Mary pressed a finger to her lips.

I rose to my feet, taking the knife from Mary, taking up her position of holding the man at knifepoint.  I signaled to the others.  Ghost.  Alive.

I got nods in response.  Mary, Gordon, Hubris, and Helen fanned out through the house, hand signals flying.

Mary passed through a door to the left, then exited a moment later, without a sound, following a few paces behind Helen.  Helen paused long enough to get a response from Mary, then the two girls headed down the hallway.

Gordon and Hubris went through a door to the right.  I heard gunshots, and a short bark followed by growling.

A man with a dog latched onto his elbow staggered into the hallway.  He looked in the opposite direction, further down the hall, then looked at us, alarm and confusion on his face.

An ordinary soldier, if I had to guess, or someone who was taking the drugs, remarkably young.

Then again, war often involved the young.  It would be too tidy and polite if the only price for war was the lives of old men.

Gordon re-entered the hallway, holding a rifle with a bayonet blade on it.  Not one of the exorcists, sadly.

Hubris let go of the arm, then went for a knee, wrenching and twisting.  Stronger than even the average fighting dog, he was able to topple the larger man.

Almost casually, Gordon thrust the blade of the bayonet at the area where shoulder joined neck.  A twist and a sharp motion carved out the front of the man’s throat.  Blood sprayed.

A bloodstained Gordon took in the surroundings, then tossed his rifle at Lillian, an underhand lob that left the stained blade pointed skyward through the entire trip.

His hands free, he signaled, two, then disappeared back into the room he’d just left.  He emerged with another rifle.  He didn’t look back our way as he headed after Mary and Helen.

“What’s going on?” the man I was holding at knifepoint asked.

“Please tell me there’s a rule about opening your door when the bells are ringing?” I asked.

“There is, but-”

“You broke the rule,” I said.  “Now you’ve got blood on your nice rug here, and a dead body in your living room.”

I heard gunshots upstairs.

“My daughter-”

“Might die,” I said.

“Sy!” Lillian admonished me.

“She might,” I said.  “We’re here, at least, we might be able to stop them.”

“You could phrase it nicer.”

“Nice?  You think anything about this here is nice?”

“I think it’s nice that you wanted to come here to help, at least,” she conceded.

My finger reached over and touched Melancholy’s ring.  I rotated it around my thumb.

“Sure,” I said.  Where were Petey and the Engineer?

Too much could go wrong tonight, but the worst eventuality was that we’d hit our stride and then discover at the worst possible moment that we would end up having a problem with our guest members.  The possibility kept recurring in my mind.

I gestured at Lillian, watch, and indicated the door.

She cracked it open, then opened it wider, waving.

The Engineer and Petey approached.  The man of meat and metal ducked his head to fit into the space.  I could hear too many wet sucking noises as he passed within a foot of me.

“Couldn’t find you,” the Engineer said.

“Right, sorry,” I said.  I’m so used to having everyone paying effective attention to everyone else.

I took my knife, and handed it to Petey, “Watch him.”

Petey nodded once.

“Upstairs,” I told the Engineer, pointing.

He took off running.

When I took off, Lillian followed.

“I was going to have us come here anyway,” I said, quiet, “Before I learned about the man having the kid, being a probable innocent.  Can’t take moral credit.”

“I thought so,” Lillian muttered.  “But her father at least got to see us as good guys after hearing me say it, right?”

My eyebrows went up.

I mentally awarded Lillian a gold star for that.

We reached the top of the stairs.  There was something of a standoff.  A man stood at the far end of the hallway, back to a door, a gun to the head of a little girl in lace-covered shorts and nightshirt.  She was holding back sobs, eyes red.

“Stay put!” the man was shouting at the Engineer.

“What’s our timeline, Sy?” Gordon asked, quiet.

“We need to move fast.”

“Thought so,” he spoke under his breath.  He turned his head more, acknowledging Lillian’s presence.

I knew what he was thinking.  If we pushed ahead, aiming for the element of surprise, then there was something of a chance that Lillian could patch up the damage or at least keep the girl alive.

I touched the ring at my thumb again.

“But don’t,” I said.

“What the hell are you brats muttering about!?” the man shouted at us.  His shout made the young hostage wince.

“I’m telling my buddies not to kill you just yet, limpdick!” I called out.

I saw a measure of incredulity and anger cross his face.  Emotions were too high for him to bury all of his emotions.

Gordon put one hand behind his back.  He gestured.  Forward.

Then he indicated off to one side.  Not me and Lillian, but the Engineer.

I was in a position to push the Engineer’s rear end.  It squelched more like a sodden sponge than anything else.  My skin crawled.

He glanced down at me with one good eye, and I made a little gesture with my finger, point-point.

He took one half-step forward.  Gordon stumbled.

“Don’t move!” the man with the gun asked.  “Don’t you damn well move!”

“I have to ask,” I said, “When did you stop fighting for the people of this country and start seeing them as leverage?”

“No head games!  No questions!  If you try to get clever, I’m shooting!”

“What do you want?” Helen asked.  Her voice was calm, a counterpoint to the man’s.  “What steps do we need to take to take to get you to let her go?”

“Moving toward me isn’t one of them.  Neither is touching those weapons.  Drop ’em.”

One by one, everyone put their weapons down, borrowed rifles clattering on hardwood and against stairs.

Something was off, I noticed, as I saw the group bending down and dropping their weapons.

Oh.  Hubris was gone.  The stumble was a distraction.  Hubris had used the opportunity to bolt.

Gordon had this situation in hand.  He had a better view of the situation.  He had figured something out.

“Now,” the man said.

“Wait, stop talking,” Gordon said.  There was a pause, quiet but for the sound of bells, the distant rumbles of the Beast, and the sniffles of a girl three or four years younger than I was.  “Okay.  Go.”

“Go?” the man asked.

Without a noise, Hubris leaped.  Teeth seized the man’s weapon hand, carrying it to one side, well clear of the young girl’s head.  A moment later, he was fighting, wrestling, wrenching, clamping deep into the man’s hand, making him double over in pain and from Hubris’ sheer weight.

“Engineer?” Gordon asked, stepping back out of the way, extending a hand in invitation.

The Engineer marched down the hall.  The man who’d taken the little girl hostage saw him coming, but his movements were hampered by the tugs and biting.

The Engineer’s fist struck his head, compressed it against the doorframe  and cracked it like a melon.  Hubris bounded back to Gordon.  The girl screamed.

Helen extended her arms for a hug, and the girl threw herself at Helen like a drowning person might reach for a rope.

“Two more,” Gordon said.

“They were up here,” Helen said.  “I heard them.”

In close confines.  Ghosts.

The Engineer stepped away from the man’s corpse, stepping into another room.  I saw only a glimpse as he bodily threw a piece of furniture across the room.

Rooting them out of hiding places.

My mind was in top gear as I took in the layout, trying to figure out the paths available to them.  Four rooms, two on either side of the hallway, with a small closet or bathroom at the end.

Engineer in the further-left room.  Helen halfway down the hall.  They weren’t about to try to squeeze past Lillian, me, and Mary.

Hubris had ducked into the left room, crossed to the room the Engineer was in now, the further room, and re-entered the hallway.  There was no doorway allowing passage between the two rooms to the right in that same way.

Where were they hiding, and how would they try to escape?

I reached out and took the rifle from Lillian.  “Gordon.”

He turned to look at me.

I gestured.  Gordon obeyed, stepping into the same room the Engineer was in, Hubris following.

I tightened my grip.  Mary had a throwing knife.

Furniture crashed against the wall.

“Got one!” Gordon called out.

In that same moment, a Ghost appeared from the room just to our left.  Fast, silent, I was expecting her and I was still caught off guard.

Rather than try to aim and shoot, I stepped forward, swiping.  It wasn’t a serious cut, no force behind it, not fast enough a swing.  But the Ghost stepped aside to avoid it.

She had to get by Helen to reach the available window to the right.  That limited her path.

I aimed and pulled the trigger.  The little girl in Helen’s arms yelped at the sound.  The shot was a miss, the Ghost didn’t even bother to dodge.

Mary raised a hand, firing a pistol, and the Ghost did dodge that shot.

She didn’t get any further.

She’d delayed too much, and Helen had fingers latched into the side of the Ghost’s tunic.

“Keep her alive,” I said.

“M’kay,” Helen replied.

Fabric tore, the Ghost fought to get back and pull free, striking at Helen’s face, but it was too little too late.  Helen didn’t react to being struck, reached out and wrapped one hand and wrist around the Ghost’s thigh.

Helen collapsed against the Ghost as if she’d been pulled into position.  The Ghost’s silent struggles got it nowhere.  Helen crawled up to a better perch, hugging the Ghost’s back, pinning its arms against its sides.

“You.  Little girl,” I said, to the young girl.

She was wide eyed, barely registering.

“Go downstairs to your daddy now,” I said.

She didn’t listen.

Why were ordinary people so frustrating?

“Don’t you want to see your dad?”

“Come here,” Lillian said, voice gentle.  “Come on, take my hand.”

The girl reached out, hesitant.  Lillian took her hand firmly, and Mary and I stepped to opposite ends of the hallway as Lillian led her down the stairs.

“They wait in the living room,” I said.  “Send Petey up, maybe.  But come back, we might need you.”

“Alright,” Lillian said.

The remainder of our group approached Helen.  I had a view through the one doorway to the room the Engineer had overturned.  A dresser was lying on its side with two bare legs sticking out from under it.  It might have been comical in a different context.

The Engineer was stronger than the Ghost was fast, apparently.  I wondered if Gordon had helped.

“Well, we got your captive,” Gordon said.  “You said you’d explain later.”

“I did,” I said.  “You okay there, Helen?”

“It’s pleasant, being like this,” Helen said, smiling.  “Like I’m home.”

“Good.  Alright.  Well, this is a bit of a shot in the dark, but we know what Fray’s going to be doing, if she isn’t doing it already.  She’s making a run for it.  Everything she’s been doing up until now has been about consolidating the factions.  Presumably.  I’m guessing it’s going to take a short time to get everything communicated and make sure that the perimeter groups have been pulled in.  Too many valuable people at the edges, I imagine.”

“I imagine,” Gordon said.

“Big problem is the Ghosts.  They’re too effective as scouts.  Make her group too slippery.  What I’m hoping is that we can get this one to make a distress cry.   Maybe, possibly, we can create an illusion of dangerous numbers or a standing army.  Fray tries to make a run for it, and a Ghost passes on a message that there’s something bad in her way.  Make her second guess.  We turn her tools against her, take away that security.  With the weight of a new coalition on her shoulders, maybe that’s reason to make her balk.”

“Have to move her, get ahead of Fray,” he said.

“Engineer is strong, can carry her.”

The Engineer nodded.

“There’s another problem,” Helen said.

“Don’t tell me that.  Coming from you-”

“Their language doesn’t work like that.”

My heart fell.

“It’s more nuanced, and I’m not sure if I know enough about how to nuance,” Helen said.

“Okay,” I said.  “Damn.”

“This is why you should share your plans before, not after,” Gordon said.

“I was sort of out of breath, and I wasn’t sure what the enemy group would look like.  If there weren’t ghosts, the plan was going to change.”

“Being out of breath isn’t an excuse.  I’ve been telling you to exercise more,” Mary said.

“And you can let us help come up with plans, sharing what you have.  This is definitely not the first or the fifth or the tenth time we’ve told you this,” Gordon said.

I looked around for an ally to help back me up as the pair ganged up on me, and felt only the conspicuous empty space to my right.

From the sound of it, Lillian and Petey were making their way upstairs.  Small consolation.  Lillian was as sure as anyone to get up my butt about what I was doing wrong.

“Sy’s plan might actually work, though,” Helen said.

My savior!

“I know,” Gordon said.  “But I wanted to let him stew.”

“You pimpledick.”

“I did too,” Mary said.  “You missed the hand signal.”

“Pimpleboob.  What’s the new plan?”

Gordon didn’t answer, looking smug as he scratched the top of Hubris’ head.

“Time’s a wasting.  Didn’t you hear me earlier?” I asked.

“I heard,” Gordon said.  He didn’t elaborate.

I could have throttled him, if I wasn’t sure he would win that struggle and make me look bad in the process.

“It’s Petey,” Helen said.  “We can use Petey.  They’re not saying because it doesn’t matter.”

“You’re just about my favorite, Helen,” I said.

“Good,” she said.  “Buy me a treat later.”

“Remind me?”

She nodded.

Petey made her way up the stairs.  She looked like she’d been lightly boiled, she was so red and sweaty.  Lillian was right behind her, hair still mussed up.

“Can you take the Ghost?” Gordon asked.

Petey scowled.  “I’d really rather not.”

“It’s mission critical,” Mary said.

“It’s like sleeping on a bed of swords,” Petey said.

“Mission critical, time critical,” Mary said.

“We did say we’d help you out,” Helen said.  “We got you what you need to do the most damage.  Right here.”

Petey stared down at the Ghost.  I heard a sigh.

“When I’m moving, don’t interfere.  Don’t ‘help’ me,” Petey said.

“Why?” Helen asked.

“Because it’s irritating,” Petey said.

She dropped clumsily to the ground, sitting in an almost-cross-legged position, attention on the Ghost.

I leaned against the doorframe, saw Lillian, and then noticed her hair.  I reached over to the side of her head and swept my hand through the bit of hair that was sticking up.  Lillian started using her fingers to comb it.

There were wet, sucking sounds as Petey worked, her body rocking back and forth a little.  Gordon stepped behind her to keep her from falling backward.

“You all knew what Petey was, huh?”

“Just about,” Gordon said.

“You’re all the worst,” I said.  “Filling each other in is important.”

“I’m going to remember you said that,” he told me.  “And I’m going to use it against you so many times.”

I rolled my eyes.

Petey wasn’t quick.  I saw that Lillian was struggling to work out the messy bit of her hair, stepped closer, and began fixing it myself, picking out bits of grit that hair had rolled itself around.

I was preoccupied enough I didn’t see Petey right away.

A fetus, crawling across the hardwood, skin almost translucent, with far too many veins spiderwebbing across the surface.  It had been grafted with additional parts, I noted, insect legs that gave it more ability to move in the outside world.  All the same, it was no larger than my two fists put side by side.

I remembered what the others had said.  That Petey was about our age.

A twelve-year old fetus?

As Petey made it halfway, I could see his ‘tail’.  The spinal column extended back, and was attached to a bag, half-filled with fluid.

“What’s that?”

“Brain, in a more malleable, bare-bones package,” Lillian said.  “Includes some life support.  Tiny body isn’t big enough to sustain a working, functional brain.  Life support keeps him alive until the host body adapts.”

“I’d almost think that was neat as anything I’ve heard this week,” I said, “But he’s so goddamn slow.”

“Shh,” Helen admonished me.  “He might be able to hear you.”

“I hope he can!” I said, raising my voice.  “It’s irritating to be picked up and carried over?  It’s irritating to wait!”

Petey stopped mid-crawl, turning very slowly until he was facing my general direction.  Delaying more, on purpose.

I took a step forward, and raised a foot, threatening to step on him.  Lillian grabbed me and pulled me back, before smacking me in the back of the head.

Petey resumed crawling, moving hand, foot, and spidery-limb one after the other as he approached the Ghost.  He disappeared beneath the shroud of her skirt.

“I feel a bit queasy,” Lillian said.  “I might wait downstairs.”

“This is what breaks you?” I asked.  “How much blood and gore and monstrous stuff have you even seen?”

“The Ghosts are dumb,” Mary said.  “They’re like animals, with only enough cognition to play at being people, if they have a script.”

“I’m not sure that makes it any better,” Lillian said, backing down the stairs.  “Or if it does, it’s not better enough.  You can call me a crybaby all you want, Sy.”

My mouth opened, then shut.  I’d given lots of thought to the dynamics between Lambs, and to the fact that one Lamb was now gone.  Jamie had been my counterpoint, someone I could rely on when my own abilities lacked.  In that odd way, he’d been a support, someone who had my back.  He challenged me at the right times and backed me at the right times.

I was missing that, just a little bit, a fact that was highlighted by the recent conversation and teasing.  There wasn’t a need to push quite so hard here.

I fiddled with the ring at my thumb.  “Nah.  You’re good, Lil.”

“Thank you, Sy.”

She went back downstairs.  The rest of us were left to watch and wait.

Petey’s host jerked.  Helen restrained the movements.

Then the Ghost reached out one hand, giving Helen’s hip two light taps.

Helen released Petey.

Petey’s movements were awkward, clumsy, and I thought she might fall as he rose to her feet.

“Good to go?” I asked.

“Ah-” he started, but his voice was strangled.  He paused.  “Hm.”

Ghosts couldn’t speak.

“Good enough,” Gordon said.

Tooth and Nail – 7.7

“It’s more halting, like this, but higher pitched,” Helen said, before making a series of high-pitched squealing noises that made sparks appear behind my eyes.

“Got to warn you, Helen, I almost hit you on reflex there,” Gordon said.

“Shh, Petey’s trying it.  Good.  That’s close.  But make each sound shorter, I think, and you’ll have to do it loud when it counts” Helen said, “that’s ‘many’, they did that when the building back in Radham was surrounded.  Now do this.”

Helen squealed again, in a way only young girls and very talented babies could.  She maintained the noise for three seconds, then five, then ten.

Gordon clapped his hand over Helen’s mouth just as she reached the ten second mark, which made me think he’d also been counting the seconds until she stopped.

“You could weaponize that,” I said.

Helen’s response was muffled.  Unable to turn her head, she pointed at Petey, then raised one thumb in approval.

“Think you got it,” I said.

Helen tapped twice on Gordon’s hand.  He moved it away.

“That’s a big threat.  They keep making that noise when the Superweapon is close.  Don’t do that willy-nilly, okay?  They’ll figure out you’re faking.”

“Petey knows what he’s doing,” Gordon said.

My estimation of Petey wasn’t very high.  Everything I’d seen about his coordination, his work ethic, his communication, the amount he whined, it didn’t inspire confidence.  I was left to wonder if he really did know what he was doing.

We reached the ladder, and started our climb.  The Brechwell Beast was in Fray’s general vicinity, if our experiment with the map was right.   Shots from the tower were a regular thing, now, though none seemed to be directed at us.

Further down the ladder, Helen was still coaching Petey, making an assortment of sounds.  It felt like each one was specifically designed to drill at a particular set of nerves.  Gordon was already getting irritable, but my mood, at least, was improved by the fact that things seemed to be at least partially on track.

“What’s next?” Mary asked, from above me.

“We get as close as we possibly can,” Gordon said.  “Track what they’re doing.”

“Yep,” I said.  Gordon’s on the same page as me, at least.

“We either move as a group to try and get ahead of them and disrupt their retreat, or we send Petey out alone or with a friend and do what we can independently.”

“I prefer the latter,” I said.  “They’re shaken up, there might be vulnerabilities, or information, or something we can use.”

“Thought you’d say that,” Gordon said.

The rote action of climbing up a ladder was starting to tire me out.  Muscles here and there had been strained or pushed to their limits by my earlier fall and a night of full-body exertion.  The repetitive movements were slowly and steadily making it worse.

My mind was in five different places at once, free associating.  There were too many notes to hit, here, and too many little details that tied my hands.  The rampaging superweapon wasn’t one of those details, oddly enough.  The possibility that Petey or the Wry Man could sabotage us, maintaining the general safety of the Lambs, and the time constraint were issues that I kept running into.

Start with the obvious, see if I can’t see other angles.  Frontal attack.  Obviously no.  Why not?  They’re strong, they’re prepared for a fight, we’re weak, risks the well being of Lambs.

Bait, sacrificial play.  We have three solo operators, and even only raising the idea might reveal things about them.  Too willing, unwilling, lack of cooperation.

Resources, resources, where do we have resources?  Lillian’s stuff, not good enough, Academy burning…

Environment, then.  What can we use?  What can Fray use?  She’s going to want to take the towers.  She probably already planned to.  Surest way to turn things around on us.

My thoughts continued to turn over in the back of my head, sometimes switching back and forth at a moment’s notice, while my mind’s eye was on the current prize.

Well, my eyes were on Mary, who was higher than me on the ladder.  She was wearing hose, which denied me the ability to poke fun at her and get a reaction.  Alas.

“Thinking aloud,” I said, very slowly.

“Good,” Gordon told me.

“Petey goes ahead, we flank.  The less time they can spend discussing and cooperating, the better.  If we can ratchet up pressure, distract, capitalize on their weaknesses or change their priorities, we win.  Best case scenario, they implode.  Worst case scenario, they lose time.”

“I prefer to think in terms of hard victory conditions,” Gordon said.

“If they’re still here when everyone else arrives, we win,” I said.

“Will that really do it?”

“It might not be so bad if they evacuate as a group, if they split up after, but our true ‘win’ is if they’re confined in the city when the soldiers and superweapons congregate.  After that point, things are out of our hands.  Maybe we keep going, maybe not,” I said.  “But if they can escape with everyone else here and surrounding them, then it’s really not our fault, is it?”

The question inspired a thought.  With Fray, we had to consider if we were playing straight into her hands.  Right now, assuming she wasn’t preoccupied as the mediator between two factions, she was busy anticipating my and everyone else’s next steps.  Was she counting on all of our forces assembling?  Would we surround her, only for one side to turn on fellow soldiers or deploy a weapon?

I felt like something was missing.  We needed to catch her off guard, but she’d already planned so much for what was happening right now, she had traps and countermeasures already in place, and there was no amount of thinking I could do to catch up to her.  She’d had a chance to study the area, she’d had a chance to think on this at leisure.

Every time my mind touched on the vague image of the situation I needed to contrive to put Fray on her heels, there was a lot of violence, fire, and there was a vague mental image of the Beast bearing down on her, which was an amusing mental picture, if a dark one.

It was like having my thoughts caught in an endless loop.  Needed to pressure her, catch her off guard, that was best done by tearing down everything around her, but her gathered forces probably beat the Lambs and our temporary allies in a fight, and I didn’t trust the various superweapons or soldiers on our side.  I needed to find another way to pressure her, then, but my mind kept going back to blood, explosions and tragedy as the way of achieving that.

I wondered if I’d accidentally imprinted my malleable brain with that particular pattern, creating a rut of sorts I kept falling back to.

Change tacks, abandon that line of thought.  We scout.  Need to put ourselves in the best possible position to spot any vulnerabilities, and there have to be some.  Not necessarily with her.

“We split up,” I said.  “Gives us more chances to capitalize on any mistakes or fractures.”

“Can I go with Petey?” Helen asked.

“Bad idea,” Gordon said.  “You two have a lot of the same weaknesses.”

I could have hugged Gordon.  I didn’t like trusting any of the Lambs to the company of the solo operators.  Instead, I just nodded, “Let’s say, Petey goes with… the Engineer.  Then Lambs in two discrete groups.  Not that sure I like that, I have to admit, but-”

“Why?” Mary asked.  “Why don’t you like it?”

“Because it’s… because I don’t trust myself, I don’t trust Gordon, and I don’t trust you.  Too much at stake, and I feel like we’re all emotionally compromised.”

“Gordon is?” Mary asked.

“I don’t know.  Maybe don’t pay attention to that part,” I said.  But I brought it up and you brought attention to it so it’s definitely in mind.  I lied, “He’s been working at a different rhythm all night.  Trying to prove something?”

“Have I?” Gordon asked, sounding genuinely curious.

“Take my word for it?” I asked.

“I can,” he said.  He seemed very accepting of the possibility.

Not so much it matters, but I’m not about to go into detail about the fact you wanted to go with Fray last time.  This is the next best thing.

We’d reached the top of the ladder.  He climbed off, then let Hubris climb down from across his shoulders.  I wondered how tired he was, lugging a large dog up and down ladders like he was.  Anyone would be exhausted, except he was the most athletic of us.

“Well, I already know how I’m compromised,” Mary said.  She stepped off the ladder and extended a hand, helping keep me steady as I stepped onto the roof.

I could see the little mannerisms, the fidget of fingers, the way she stood a little straighter, a little more rigid, the young lady who had been raised with culture and forged into a weapon by Percy.

She didn’t like admitting personal flaws.  Gordon could do it, but for Mary, it stung.

“Sorry, Mary,” I said.  I ran my fingers through wet hair and then made a gun with my hands and touched it to the side of my head, “I’m in this weird place.  Trying to be honest, but I’m not very good at that.  I figure it’s better to say it badly or say it while stepping on toes than not to say it at all, right now.”

“Not that I’m disagreeing with this specific scenario, but don’t compromise what you’re good at,” Gordon told me.

I nodded.  I wasn’t sure what he was saying, or why, but I had the gist of it.  Maybe he’d noticed Mary’s reaction to how I’d pointed out the Percy situation.

“Which brings me to the subject of, well, you said I was off-rhythm.”

“Different rhythm,” I said.  I was a little proud of myself for remembering the exact phrasing I’d used no more than a minute ago.

“Whatever,” Gordon said.  “You called me on that, I’m calling you out.  I feel like you’re trying too much.  This doesn’t feel like our Sy.  How you’re acting isn’t quite natural or fluid.  This thing with being honest is part of it.”

“Forced,” I commented.  I extended a hand and seized Lillian’s wrist, leading her up to the apex of the roof.

“Nine months of ‘gimme’ jobs leaving you a little rusty?  I know you slip easily without practice-”

“That’s not it,” I said.

“Oh.  Okay,” he said.  He shrugged.  He wasn’t pressing any more.  He’d raised the idea, he seemed to grasp that I had a bit of an idea of what was going on, and was content to leave it at that.

In the spirit of honesty, I said, “I’m just trying to adapt.”

He clapped a hand on my shoulder.

The little gesture only made me feel an ache for Jamie, in a weird way.

I took in a deep breath, and took note of where the Beast was.  He was near another area where an gray plume of smoke was rising into the sky, periodically flickering orange from the flames beneath it.  Would he press on through and escape into another part of Brechwell?

While the other members of the group reached the rooftop, I pulled my shirt into a better position.  It was wet enough to cling to me.

The Engineer made it over the top of the ladder and handed over the rifles he was carrying.  Gordon and Mary each took one.  Petey took a third.

“That’s the sound for death, right?  If you mix the two, like you did with ‘new’ and ‘threat’, yes.  Exactly,” Helen was saying.  “Exactly like that.”

Petey only seemed to glower back in response, mouth slightly parted.

“Is Petey good to go?” Gordon asked.

“Almost,” Helen said.  “Trying to cover the bases.  Studied the captured Ghosts in Ibott’s lab as practice for my new ears.  Complex parts of the language might be tricky to do, but being loud can make up for not being very subtle, right?”

“Right,” Gordon said.

“So, just to try it out, maybe ‘new’ and ‘big’?  Follow with the lighter ‘back’ cue, without the bob.  Loud as you can.”

“What’s this?” Gordon asked.

Helen’s expression changed, as she went wide-eyed, almost horrified.  She reached out and grabbed Gordon by the shirt front.  “There’s something here!  Surprise attack, and it’s big, I’m getting out of here!”

Even knowing it was an act, I almost believed her.

“Who’s Bob?” Gordon asked.

“Bob is a verb, silly Gordon.  Like a pigeon’s head?” Helen asked.  “Except it’s a sound?”

Gordon shook his head, confused.

Lillian was the one with the answer.  “I think I might know what she means.  When a pigeon takes flight, if it’s just flying off for whatever reason, it will bob its head first.  If it’s flying off because of danger, it won’t bother, and every pigeon that sees is going to take that as a cue to fly off too-”

“-Without a bob,” I cut in.

“Yes.  Without a bob, which cues others.  That way, if one pigeon spots a predator, they all have the best chance.  Except the Ghosts do it when vocalizing, I presume,” Lillian said.

Helen nodded, emphatic,  “Every time they go someplace new, they communicate it.  They ‘bob’ when it isn’t important, but they’re still letting others know where they are.  When they don’t bob, then it’s saying-”

“That others should follow their lead,” Gordon said.  “Got it.”

I found myself wishing that worked with people.

“Petey knows some of this, probably, but doesn’t know all of the communication.  That makes it hard to be a sneaky sort of Ghost,” Helen said.  “If he keeps misusing bobs or forgetting to use them, he stands out.”

“Is he going to do the scream, the command you just did?”

“He did,” Helen said, smiling.  “They’re running.”

“And,” Mary observed, “It looks like we also signaled our friends.”

It was Dog and Catcher, with the Wry Man trailing behind.  Their initial approach seemed hurried, but as they drew nearer and had a better view of the situation, they slowed to a somewhat more relaxed pace.

“Petey, Engineer,” Gordon said.  “Figure out what you need to do to stay close enough to each other while being able to cover each other’s backs.  You can hold your own if it comes to it, Engineer?”

The Engineer nodded once.

“Better not waste any time.  Helen’s prepped you as good as you’ll get.  Go.”

“That way,” I said, pointing.

They left.

We met Dog, Catcher, and the Wry Man halfway.  Well, that wasn’t exactly true.  They covered more ground, by virtue of having more raw strength and longer legs.

“Found her,” Catcher said.  “Looped back to look for you, found him instead.”

“Any problems?” the Wry Man asked.

I shook my head.  “Got Petey a convenient new body and some quick lessons in speaking Ghost more effectively.  She’s going to throw a wrench into their ability to scout.”

“Okay,” Catcher said.  “We-”

A violent impact shook Brechwell, worse than any we’d felt yet.  I traced the roads with my eyes until I saw the plume of dust and debris further away.  It seemed the Beast had run down one city street, but from the look of it, the road was one only accessible through Fray’s hole in the wall, and the creature had charged straight into a T-shaped intersection.  Without a smooth curve in the road to guide it, it had struck a row of buildings at full force.

I looked at Gordon, Helen, and Mary, and I squeezed Lillian’s wrist.  I suspected we were all thinking along the same lines.

The Beast had escaped the track it was meant to run, free of its cage, so to speak.  The city was built to guide and confine it, and it had found a way out.

If Fray was going to make a move, assuming she knew, saw, or could intuit what had just happened, then this was her opportunity to evacuate.

“Show us where she is, now,” Gordon said.

The rain was coming down harder than before, and that had the effect of making it harder to see, our footsteps more prone to slip just a fraction.

Gordon seemed content to fill Catcher in, explaining the plan, that we’d be splitting up, what we were looking to achieve.

Having a strict goal in mind for victory was very Gordon, and in this situation, it was very useful, too.

What does Fray want?  What is her goal for victory?

I had spent far too much time thinking about Fray over the last months and years.  I had a sense of what she wanted on the surface level, to shake things up, to change the order of things.  I had a sense of what she wanted on a deeper level, to convince others that her worldview was the right one, to prove herself right.

Starting the war, releasing the experiment to sterilize and chemically leash whole swathes of the Western Crown States, it had been a way of bringing everyone around to her point of view, creating that same righteous anger at how things worked, making every man, woman, and youth feel the need to buck against the Academy’s control, retaliate against the Crown’s callousness.  She’d used her enemy’s tools against them, forcing things into play too early.

But there was a big difference between proving oneself right and proving the other guy wrong.

Bringing two factions together like she was served as another kind of validation.  Being so very right that others came around to her point of view.  I could see why she was here and why she was doing what she was doing.  I could imagine that her drive was focused by the drugs she’d taken, honing ambition and perfectionism that had already been there, as evidenced by her gray coat and the self-medicating with Wyvern.  It let her spend ten or more hours a day focused wholly on the tasks at hand.

I wished I knew her better.  I wanted to get inside her head, hit her where it hurt, peeling away the veneer, and then figure out if there was something fragile, mad, or awe-inspiring lurking beneath.

“We’re close,” Catcher spoke in his gravelly voice, the sound carrying back to the rest of us.  “See it?  She was there!”

His weapon pointed the way, the spiked head aimed at a squat, broad building.  It was part of the concentric rings that encircled another, taller building, not invisible, but easily overlooked.  To look at it, I imagined a bank or a school.

The cluster of people around the building painted the rest of the picture.  Standing guards, nervous, all keeping within a few paces of exits and escape routes.  The Beast was rampaging through nearby streets, and many of the people on the ground were flinching at every impact, as if expecting the Beast to emerge or crash through at any moment.

I imagined it was an immense amount of psychological pressure, being down there.

The rifle shots I could hear throughout the city each marked one person who’d broken and made a break for a ladder.  I could hear some close by.

A spotlight swept over us.  I saw heads raise, heard voices on the ground, and tugged on Lillian’s arm, pulling her way and over to the other side of the roof.  I ducked low, and she mimicked me, just in time for some gunshots to sound.

We were under fire, but their vantage point was awful, especially as we kept away from that side of the rooftop.  We crossed over a gate and reached a forking path.

Around the time the spotlight swept over us, momentarily blinding me, more gunshots sounded from the closest tower.  I wondered for a moment if they were firing on us, which was not impossible or even unlikely.  Then I saw him.

The man with the modified birthing saw.  I could smell fuel and see the flicker of machinery he wore, all of it keeping the weapon going.  Saw-teeth rotated around the edge of the thing at a blur, periodically sparking.  He carried a shield as tall as he was, holding it up in the direction of the nearest tower.  Bullets struck the shield and bounced off.

Mechanical saw in one hand, shield in the other, he advanced on Catcher, Dog, and the Wry Man, smiling wickedly.

The Wry Man backed away a few steps, flinching as a shot caught the edge of the roof five feet to his right.  He drew a vial from his belt and tossed it back in one gulp.

“Lambs!”  Catcher called out.  “Circle around!  We split up as planned!”

We took the other path in the fork.  It seemed fairly clear that Dog, Catcher, and the Wry Man were taking the most attention.  Gordon raised his rifle and fired, but one more gunshot was lost in the noise, not even drawing any particular attention.

The Beast slammed directly against another wall, only a few streets over, and I heard the sound of glass shattering on windows beneath us, glass and frames warping with the force of the impact.

“Stay low,” Mary spoke, only loud enough that people on the ground weren’t likely to hear.  She gestured at the same time, indicating the Beast, a relatively short distance away.

Fumes.  Gas.

Possible explosions.

Was it frustrated?

Fray’s actions regarding the Beast didn’t quite feel like it fit into her usual pattern.  Everything else she’d done had been about changing minds, often in a very aggressive manner.  Who did she convince, doing this?

It hadn’t been timed the way she’d wanted, or it wasn’t being used the way she had originally planned.

Was there a weakness?  Could I shake or break her using that desire to validate and prove her way was the right way?

I felt a bit of a chill as I considered the flip side of that same question.

There was a way to get to her.

Gordon and Mary both aimed and fired.  Those shots did get attention.  We ducked low and used the peak of the roof for cover as we made our way around.  We were close, but the number of guards had increased.

And, if I admitted it, I was feeling hurt and tired.  I wasn’t up to running around.  We were close enough to see, and that had to be good enough, at least until we decided on another move.

“Stop,” I said.

The group drew to a halt.  Gordon used the time to reload his weapon.

“Last bullet,” he said.

“Want one of mine?” Mary asked.

He took a bullet from her and pocketed it.

“You okay, Sy?  You look cold,” Lillian said.

“I am,” I said.  My teeth chattered a little from adrenaline and cold combined.

“You look hurt too,”

“Sort of.”

“Do you want my coat?”

I shook my head.  “No thanks.”

“No sign of Fray,” Helen commented.

I stared at the building.

“Did she get away already?” Gordon asked.  “We could spread out further, if you guys want.  Sy stays, maybe with Lillian, so he can keep an eye on this place.  Mary and Helen or me and Helen go explore, see if there’s any trace of them.”

The ground rumbled as the Beast paced through darkness, five or six streets over.  The fumes were accumulating faster than they dissipated, and the Beast was slowing down.

The last time it had stopped moving, it had ignited its gas.

There was a lot of gas, by the looks of it.

“She’s here, I’m positive,” I said.  “We stay low.  Spread out over the rooftop here, so we have more vantage points to see.  Gordon far left, Mary far right.  Make sure that you aren’t thrown off if the Beast makes another explosion.  Dig in, keep eyes forward.”

“Alright,” Gordon said.  “You’re positive?”

I wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but I felt sure enough.  If Fray was a mirror of me, she probably felt the same sort of insecurities.  I’d worried about how fractured the Lambs were, and she was dealing with a fractured group.  Would she call for a retreat, if she wasn’t certain that she’d be able to reunite the two factions in the aftermath of the retreat?

“Yeah,” I said.

Gordon gave me a dubious look.

But he retraced his steps, heading left.  Mary went right, each of them with a rifle that each had, by my count, two bullets.

“Shoot only lieutenants or Fray,” I said, “Or in self defense.”

They each signaled the affirmative.

“Helen, that way, between me and Gordon.  Lillian, that way.”

My heart was pounding.

Dog and Catcher were drawing attention, the rest were taking cover, looking in all the wrong directions.

We were free to act, but action was lunacy.

We needed one master stroke, something Fray wouldn’t anticipate.

Did I have a grasp of who she was?  Who the major players were?  The current volatility of their organization?

“Lillian,” I said.

She’d started walking away.  She stopped, turning to listen.

“I’m okay, okay?”

She frowned at me.

“Okay?  I want you to know that.”

“You’re being cryptic.”

“Sort of.”

“You were being too honest before.  Was that a lead-in to you being particularly dishonest?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Not intentionally, but now that I’m here, with a plan in mind… yeah.”

“What are you doing?”

“Easier to show and tell,” I said.

I slid down the roof until I reached the gutter.

“Sy!” she said.

“Shh!  If you shout, you’ll get us both shot.”

“Sylvester,” she hissed, a strained whisper.

“I’m okay,” I said.

As I’d done after being thrown down the roof, I lowered myself down until I hung on wet wood by my fingertips.

I shimmied over to one side, until there was a broken window in front of me.

Too much glass on the sill.

I shimmied over some more.

There.

I swung forward, and felt the heart-stopping moment as I let go, flying toward the window.  I grabbed the too-thin crossbar in the center, a surer point to grip.  Then, the moment I had contact, slapped my hands out to catch the sides of the window instead.

I passed into a darker office.

The Beast’s movements made picture frames and furniture rattle and shift.

It was easier to get out of the office than it would have been to get in.

Down the stairs, to the front door.  I would be forced to leave it unlocked, but there was no way to be polite.

A mailbox sat just inside the door.  I picked my way through envelopes until I found a nondescript one, then I waited, periodically looking outside, assessing who and what was nearby.

The ghosts weren’t there.  Petey might have sufficiently distracted or herded them.

The detonation caught me off guard.  Even with streets and solid stone buildings between me and the detonation site, it left me briefly stunned.

I pushed the door open.

Outside, onto a street shrouded in smoke and darkness, where I could barely see ten  feet in front of me, envelope in hand.

Walk, don’t run.

I made it three quarters of the way to the building before someone spotted me, walking with my hands out to the side, an envelope held out between index and middle finger.

Their gun pointed at my chest.

I continued walking.

“Stop,” he said.

I stopped.

The Lambs were going to be so pissed at me.

“I’m accepting Fray’s invitation to sit in on the meeting,” I said.

He whistled sharply.

More people approached.  Two kept guns trained on me.  The first guy got close enough to take the letter.  I let it fall from my fingertips.

“That has nothing to do with this.  I just needed a white flag so you wouldn’t shoot me before I got close,” I said.  Then I lied, “I am telling the truth.”

“Lamb,” one of the men said.

“We’re told to treat all children as suspicious, and not to listen,” one of the men said.

“You’re one of Cynthia’s, I’m guessing.”

He raised his jaw a fraction.  I was right.

“One of you go inside.  Talk to Genevieve Fray.  She’ll tell you what’s up.”

Appealing to a higher authority.

Except Genevieve Fray hadn’t invited me.

Well, not in anything but the loosest sense.  She’d extended an invitation a year and a few months ago, before the war had started.

I didn’t remember much, but I remembered that.

I watched the men exchange glances.

“Turn around,” one of them said.

I did.

“Kneel.”

Hm.  This wasn’t a good sign.  I knelt.

I felt a gun press against the back of my head.

Then a coat was draped over my head.  I moved my hands to adjust it, and got a fierce poke with the bayonet blade, alongside a sharp, “No!”

I was having my head covered.  I supposed they didn’t want to show the way to Fray.

Whatever.

I could hear the Beast tearing at building, I could hear the bells, I could imagine Lillian hurrying to communicate to the other Lambs about what I was doing, if they couldn’t see me down here.

Minutes passed.

Fray wanted to change minds, she wanted to prove her worth, she collected the vulnerable, and her past interactions with the Lambs and with me had played off of that.

Here, I was expecting she would keep to that pattern.

I was expecting that, whatever else happened, her authority and power here would override the lesser players, some of whom had reason to loathe the Lambs.  To loathe me.

I was using the word ‘expecting’ because hope sounded awfully flimsy, and thinking too much along the lines of hope and maybe would set my teeth to chattering far more than they were right now.

Voices started up a murmured, muffled conversation behind me.

I was hauled to my feet, the jacket left in place.  I was walked, a grown man on either side of me.

It was only after doors were shut that the jacket was pulled away.  I moved my arms as much as I was able and tried to fix my hair.  Nothing I could do about my shirt.  If I had to look wet and bedraggled, I could look a crazy wet and bedraggled.  I opened my eyes wider and smiled.

Another set of doors was opened.

A hundred sets of eyes fell on me.

At a table at the end of the room, I could see the major players.  Fray, with Warren, Avis, and her stitched standing behind her.  I saw Percy, and Mauer at one end of the table, and Cynthia at the other, with a new and too-artificial skin covered partially by hair, a high collar, long sleeves and gloves, each of them with a half dozen I didn’t know or recognize.

The other eighty-some people I didn’t know were civilians, standing and sitting in chairs.  An audience for the forum.  I felt more accurate about my assessment of Fray, now.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said.

Genevieve smiled at me, and it was a smile of a shared secret.  There had been no invitation.  She and I were probably the only people in the room of any importance who wanted me to walk out of the room alive at this point.  Not that I was entirely sure about her feelings on that matter.

Tooth and Nail – 7.8

“Is this a joke?” Cynthia asked.

“No,” Fray said.  Her eyes were fixed to mine.  “Warren, would you do us a favor and bring Sylvester a chair?”

Warren approached with a chair.  He extended an open palm at the end of the table closer to Percy and Mauer.  I shook my head, indicating the middle of the long table, facing Fray, my back to the audience.

Part of it was that I didn’t feel comfortable sitting on one side or the other, for much the reason Fray couldn’t.  Part of it was that I suspected a few of them might casually kill me if I got in arm’s reach.  The final part of it was that I wanted the audience there so I was in front of them, facing the same direction, so that anyone who looked at me had to look at them.

Cynthia’s chair screeched as she stood from her end of the table.  Two gloved hands pressed against the surface.

Case in point.

“Are you going somewhere?” Fray asked.

“I think I’m done here,” Cynthia said.

“Are you?”

“The only reason I haven’t left the room yet is that I’m trying to gauge if I could get away with slitting his throat,” Cynthia said, raising her eyes from the table to look at Fray.  She smiled in a way that made it clear her skin wasn’t proper skin.  The creases were too ill-defined in places, too forced in others.

It might become more like ordinary skin in time, I mused.

It was reassuring to know that there were options like that available, when the fate of my own skin was up in the air.  Warren set the chair down and I took my seat.  It was a heavy wooden thing, likely grown into the shape of a chair by use of a mold, and I couldn’t sit in it easily.  Either my legs stuck out directly in front of me, or my back wasn’t touching the back of the chair, even with my backpack, and I risked slouching.  I pulled my feet up onto the seat.

“We have an audience,” Mauer told Cynthia.  “People who matter, who have contributed or want to contribute to what we’re doing.”

“Fuck the audience,” Cynthia said.

Angry.  Cynthia wasn’t nearly as composed as she had been the last time we’d crossed paths.

Mauer, however, seemed as cool as ice.  He still had the reddish-bronze hair, the weary look in an otherwise young face, blemished only by a sharp nose, but he wore a long sleeved shirt that looked a little worn and faded, suggesting he’d spent a lot of time outdoors, and he had a long military coat draped over his shoulders, a fair share of it covering his bad hand.  The hand was moving at his knee, fidgeting, and I imagined it was a tell, impossible to fully hide.  Too much pain and emotion together put it in perpetual motion.

Percy sat beside him.  I’d almost forgotten what he looked like, and might have forgotten entirely if it hadn’t been for the fact that I’d recently reread some of Jamie’s writings.  He was taller than Mauer, and almost the opposite of Mauer in condition.  Where the reverend’s physical condition was almost identical to what it had been, his clothes more worn, Percy’s clothes were finer than the ones I’d seen him in before.  I could imagine an aristocrat wearing his outfit, but for the long coat that was so reminiscent of a doctor’s without quite being one.  He still favored a style of clothes that accented his narrow frame.  Physically, however, his graying hair was longer, he had a mustache now, and his beard needed a touch of a trim.  The lines of his face were deeper, and deepened further by anxiety.

“To explain where Cynthia is coming from, so our audience doesn’t believe she or any of the rest of us crazed,” Mauer said, injecting a small barb into the phrase, “the little boy sitting here at the table is not a real child, nor is he human.”

“Your facts are wrong,” I said.  “I’m human.”

“A modified human,” Fray said.  “Calling you precocious would be understating things.  The Lambs have come up during discussions on other nights, as some here might recall.  This is one of them.”

Is this how it’s going to be?  Even you’re going to gang up on me?

“Hmph,” one burly man on Cynthia’s end of the table grunted.  He sized me up.

“A monster in the Crown’s employ,” Mauer said.  His voice was carrying to the rest of the room.  That hadn’t changed.  “Cynthia’s reaction isn’t an unfair one, dramatic as it is.  He has a body count, and if I understand it, Cynthia was one of his victims.”

“Almost,” Cynthia said.  “Very nearly.”  She had a knife drawn.  It wasn’t pointed at me, but the end of the knife tapped now and again against the table.

“You killed my children,” Percy said.

“In a manner of speaking,” I said.  Wasn’t worth arguing the particulars.  “That was more the Lambs as a whole than me.”

“A plague of spiders and a spree of murders in Whitney, the systematic execution of independent doctors and researchers, enforcing the will of the Academy and the Crown,” Mauer said.

His voice was so rich, the nuance on every word perfectly chosen.  I broke into a smile despite myself, glad that the audience  behind us couldn’t see my face.  “I seem to recall you putting a gun to the head of a little girl.”

“I recall that she was no more a human than you are,” Mauer said.

Point.  Couldn’t argue that one.  She wasn’t more human than I was.

“I’m human,” I said.  “I haven’t taken any drugs that Genevieve Fray here hasn’t.  I know you want to hammer in the ‘inhuman monster’ idea, and you’re going to keep saying it over and over until people start believing it, but people are here, they’re listening, they’re making choices.  They’re smarter than you’re pretending they are.”

“Is this your plan?” Cynthia asked, “Invite yourself to the meeting and subvert us from within with wordplay?  Address the audience and turn them against us?  Genevieve, you invited him here for this?”

Before Fray could answer, Percy spoke, “You freed Avis with inside help.  This wouldn’t be the help?”

I managed to keep my expression flat.

Fray shook her head.  “I would be happy if it were, but no.  And I think Sylvester should answer Cynthia’s question.”

As I opened my mouth to respond, she quickly added, “Keeping in mind that he is what he is, and every statement should be taken with a grain of salt.  ”

Et tu, sister?  I had to appreciate the word choice of ‘what’ I was versus ‘who’ I was.  A subtle choice that I was sure Mauer had noticed and appreciated.

I was in an awkward position, because I’d had so many accusations thrown at me.   It was an effective tactic in argument, throwing a dozen half-true statements at someone in short order.  To answer every last one would have taken five times as long as it took to make the accusation, and left me with no time to argue my point.  Even if I did argue against the worst offenders, I couldn’t change the fact that the first argument in my audience’s ears was that I was a monster.

Worse, my memory wasn’t quite at the point where I could pick out specific points to argue.

And I knew it was Mauer’s doing.  An attack on me, surer than anything Cynthia was doing.  He was the more dangerous one, even if she had a knife and the desire to use it.

Better to take a different tack.

“I thought you needed a, ah, you’ll have to remind me here, Mauer,” I said.  I snapped my fingers.  “Something something advocate?”

“Devil’s advocate,” Mauer said.  “Promoter of the Faith.  One who argues against.”

Cynthia stood straighter.  Her knife seized firmly in one hand, an impressive length just shy of being a proper sword, she stalked the length of the table.

Might have to revise my opinion on how dangerous the woman with the knife is.

“Cynthia,” Mauer said, not rushing his words despite the fact she was seconds from stabbing me.  “Don’t be barbaric.”

I saw Fray give a small shake of her head, but she wasn’t looking at me, Mauer, or Cynthia.  It was Warren, questioning if he should intervene.

Fray wasn’t on my side as much as I’d hoped, if she was really saying no.

Cynthia reached out, seizing me by the hair.  She pulled my head to one side.  As the knife came down, I reached up to block it with one hand.  It cut against the part of my wrist that was closest to bone, on one side.  I could feel the blade against bone, too sharp and clean a slice to properly rasp.

Knives were the worst things to deal with in a fight.  Guns were awful, a bullet hurt like the dickens, but thanks to the fact that they were meant to kill stitched, they tended to either miss or kill the target.  Knives either killed or hospitalized the target.  Short of being as trained as Gordon or Mary, there was no happy ending once the knife really came into play, and not always for them.

Worse, I was falling back into old habits.  My mind was split three ways, caught between thinking of something to say that would make her hesitate, something that would bring another person to my aid, and how to actually defend myself.

She pulled her hand back, then stabbed for my throat.  I twisted in my seat, moving as far away from the knife as I could-

“Cynthia,” Mauer said, more firmly.

She stopped.  Her knife and I remained where we were, the knife pointed at my throat, me halfway in leaning over the armrest, neck and head pulled away from the blade.

“Whatever he is, there are people watching, they will judge what they see, and that will hold more sway than anything we might say to them.”

Cynthia didn’t respond, and she didn’t move.  Her eyes didn’t move off me to look at the rows of people who were sitting in attendance.

I reached out slowly, and clasped my hand firmly against the slice on my wrist.  Short cut, but the gap opened wide, and the cup of my palm was filling with blood.

“He’ll have scars.  Care for the worst wounds, but there will be scars,” Mauer said, quiet, his voice probably aimed at communicating to the people at the table and maybe the audience members in the front row.  “I’m not going to say it is what we should do, but if you really wanted to kill him, the best way would be to strip him shirtless, make the war wounds clear, to erase some of the doubt from their minds.  Communicate to the people there, with eye and ear.”

His voice was almost hypnotic.  It nearly made this entire situation worth it, to have access to it.

“He’s stalling,” Cynthia said.

“Sort of, but it doesn’t matter,” I said.

She made a motion with the knife as if she was going to put it through my neck, but didn’t follow through.

“Why don’t you elaborate, Sylvester?” Fray suggested, her voice cutting through the tension.

I drew in a deep breath, then exhaled slowly.

“Instinct tells me to scare you, to drive in wedges, play up how you’re surrounded, the Brechwell Beast is loose, the help you’re expecting isn’t there anymore, and so on.  A mix of lies and truth.  But the reality is that Ms. Fray picked this location for a reason, she has plans, and there’s really no point in threatening you because she isn’t concerned, and she isn’t concerned for a reason.  She has a way out.”

Eyes moved to Fray.

“I’ve been assuring everyone that is the case,” Fray said, “Having you say it does help them to believe it, I hope.  Thank you.”

I nodded.  “That way out comes with a caveat.  I’m imagining that she’s holding onto it, a deal-sealer, a clincher.  When the time is right, she aims to tell you that yes, there is a way out, there’s a way to tie this together, and there’s a greater plan.  But, let’s not forget the caveat, the two groups need to work together, or at least swear off working against each other.  This will only truly work with a concerted effort.”

“You’re close enough,” Fray said.  “I’ve already told them what form our escape takes.  The plays after the fact, I haven’t shared those.”

“I hate that phrasing,” Cynthia said.  She still had the knife pointed at me.  “The ‘plays’.  As if this is a game.”

“It could be because you never experienced childhood,” Mauer said.

Cynthia stared daggers at him.

Because she’s an experiment?

No.  Because of her background.

“Would you rather ‘maneuvers’?” Fray asked, gently.  “Some time ago, your group asked me to join, and I refused.  Now I’m here, as per your request, and I’m trying to give you what you asked for.  The war isn’t sustainable, we can’t maintain conflict indefinitely and still muster what we need to change things the next time it counts.”

She was looking at each other person around the table as she talked.  As she reached the end with Mauer, she turned her attention briefly to me.

I felt a chill.

It wasn’t a chill of surprise or horror, because neither was the case.  I’d understood this was the case before I’d even sat down.  It was a dopamine rush, the same flood of momentary pleasure and shivers that came with listening to really good music.

Where we are now, she planned it in some form.  She may have even started the war to bring things to this point.

This table, with its interesting people, the danger, the strategy, it was where I belonged.

I spoke, because I wasn’t sure I’d get a chance again if I didn’t.  “When I said I was here to play Promoter of the Faith, it wasn’t that I’m arguing in favor of the Academy.  I’m genuinely curious what Fray is doing here, and I want the opportunity to hear it, knowing what I know…”

I met Fray’s eyes.  She arched an eyebrow.

“…Coming from the background that I do,” I said.  “If I’m advocating for anyone, it’s the rest of you.  I’m joining my voice to yours, questioning what she’s doing from a more objective standpoint.”

“You weren’t invited,” Cynthia said.

I was caught for a moment, stuck between trying to interpret her statement.  Was it that she was saying I wasn’t asked to argue on their behalf, or was she realizing Fray hadn’t invited me here?

“You’re my adversary, Sylvester?” Fray asked.

“No,” I said.  “No, not at all.”

I leaned back a little, resting my hands on a damp pants leg.  One hand was still clasped hard to the knife wound.

“I’m wondering whether, if what you’re offering and doing is good enough, you’re still open to having the Lambs join you.”

There was a hush, a bit of stillness.  The audience behind me was making more noise, people making sense of the conversation, talking among themselves.

Mauer’s expression was hard to read, but his hand was fidgeting more than it had been.  Percy was quiet, still, he’d barely spoken up, and I could see him analyzing me.  His eye traveled to different points of the room.  He’d been undercover for a long time, acting as a teacher while working to subvert the city through its youth, but I could almost read his mind as he looked to see if there was a physical sign of a trap.

Cynthia’s reaction was interesting, as the point of the knife dropped just a fraction.  I let myself relax more.

“Where are the other Lambs in this?” Percy asked, quiet.

“They don’t know I’m here.  But if you can convince me, then I can probably convince them.  Mary’s okay, by the way, Percy.”

The name was like a slap to his face.  Had he known she was ours?  They had so much information about us, but was he somehow in the dark?

“I see,” he said.

“She’s one of the Lambs.  We’ve taken good care of her.  If you asked her to come with you… I don’t know what her answer would be.”

The lines in his face hinted at emotion he was trying not to show.  He clasped his hands together in front of him, forming a ball that bobbed up and down twice before he spoke again, “How many lies did you tell her?”

“A few,” I said.

He nodded, seeming to take the statement in stride.  “I as well.”

I nodded, taking that in.

I hadn’t forgotten the mice, sacrificed to make the Ghosts.  My finger touched Melancholy’s ring, and rotated it around my thumb.

I was forced to stop as I realized I wasn’t keeping enough pressure on the bleeding wound.

Avis surprised me by speaking, “You were such a staunch defender of the Academy.”

“No,” Fray and I spoke at the same time.

She indicated that I should speak.  I did, saying only, “I wasn’t for the Academy.  I was for the Lambs.  The problem is and was that they are hard to separate.”

“That was my interpretation of it,” Fray said.  “I made the invitation over a year ago, and you refused me.”

One of the men I didn’t know spoke, “What provoked this change of heart?”

I shook my head.

“A Lamb died,” Fray said.

I hesitated, then nodded.

“Who?”

I raised my eyebrows.  “You don’t know?”

“They’re being more clever about who finds out about what.  No, Sylvester, I admit I don’t know.”

“Jamie.”

“Is he dead, or…?”

“He’s dead,” I said.

Saying it aloud was hard.  If I’d been anywhere else, anywhere at all, it might have been easier to handle.  I could have done something, moved, turned to someone, and found a small bit of respite.

But looking one way and seeing enemies, and looking the other, seeing more, unable to really do more than squeeze my wounded wrist even harder, it was the first time in months I’d wanted to cry.

I smiled instead.  It had done me okay so far.

Fray was nodding.  She started to stand, and the stitched girl helped in pulling the chair away.  Cynthia lowered the knife and stepped away from the chair to take a seat at one end of the table.

She’s from a rough background, and while Mauer fidgeted and Percy drew quiet, she reacted with anger.  A rat that bites when backed into a corner.

Looking at her companions, and at the members of the audience sitting closer to her side of the room, I suspected she was a rat with connections.

“You’re not promising defection,” Fray said.  “Whatever happens, whatever I say, you’ll want to go back to the Lambs to discuss the matter.”

“That would be ideal,” I said.

“Making this all a matter of nice sounding words, tempting us with added help and the information you’d be able to provide,” Mauer said.

“Less information, without the one with the memory,” Cynthia observed.

“True,” Mauer said.

The two sides were agreeing, now.  Cynthia at one end, and Mauer at the other.

“I wish I’d known you were doing this,” Fray said.  “I would have tailored my plan to suit the situation, and provide a tempting reason for the Lambs to defect.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“No, I’m not at all disappointed, Sylvester,” she said.

Fray stood hands on the backs of the chairs to either side of her, and she had the attention of the room.  “For the past three days, I’ve been arguing for an end to the war.  Not now, but soon.  I’ve pointed out locations where key individuals can go, places they can work without being found, while still maintaining a reasonable standard of living.  Believe me, I know how important that is.  I’ve been on the run for a year and a half.”

Her finger tapped on the back of the chair to her right for a second.

“I’m proposing we take the war in a different direction.  We leave them hurting, while helping everyone.  Give them an enemy they can’t effectively fight.”

She reached back.  Avis pulled something from a bag and handed it to Fray.

I almost flinched, seeing what she held.  It wasn’t tailored to what I’d just been talking about?  Bullshit.

It was a book.  Thick, large, and heavy, with a nondescript cover.  It made a sound as it was dropped onto the table.

“Don’t leave us in suspense,” the burly man spoke.

“The Academy’s knowledge, distilled.  This particular volume isn’t complete, nor comprehensive, nor is it well suited for doing research.  But it’s a starting point.  The tools and guides necessary to walk someone through some basic experiments.  There are other books, more complete ones for anyone who wants to advance their knowledge, and I have plans for yet more, simpler texts in simpler fields.”

“Giving the power to the people?” Mauer asked.

“Giving the Academy’s power to the people,” Fray said.  She indicated Cynthia, “Godwin’s enclave had the books, but not the means to mass produce, and the knowledge was of limited use – they had to find doctors and ex-students to use it.”

She was indicating Percy now.

“We give everyone the ability to learn, we take away the exclusive access to Academy knowledge, and our individual groups, working together, can incentivize use of the knowledge.  Novice doctors and students will come crawling from the woodwork with their experiments, farmers will be able to create their own help instead of buying it, and everyone else will compete with the Academy for the same resources.”

There were murmurs in the crowd now.

“Not a genie that can easily be put back in the bottle, is it Genevieve?” Mauer asked, with a note of humor.

“I did think you’d like this,” Fray said.

“The production?” one of the men at the table asked.

“Already set up.  I’ll reserve further comment for when we don’t have listening ears,” Fray said, indicating me.  “With a coordinated effort, they won’t be able to restrict the spread of the texts and deal with our final forays and efforts.  We play all of the cards we’ve been holding in reserve, and by the time the dust clears, the world will be different.  Humanity gets a fighting chance against the monolithic Academy.”

The words and voices blended in together.

I was disappointed.

Was it change?  Yes.  Undeniably.  The knowledge wouldn’t be used by everyone.  But enough people would pick it up.  Back alley practices and independent experimenters would crop up.  People like the snake charmer.  Monsters would appear.

There would be good and bad in equal measure, and the Academy would hurt.  It would be forced into a situation where it either had to take more control than it should, or lose control overall.

I suspected the former.  I suspected it would backfire, that raids and searches for books would ensure that the fires of hatred against the Academy continued to burn.  That the next war would be even more brutal, with the people on the ground having many more tools at their disposal.

She played the long game.  Always the long game.

Was it a stride toward what I hoped for?  No.  I couldn’t believe that it was.  Fray knew it wasn’t.  She’d said as much when she talked about how she’d have tailored it.

“Sylvester,” Fray said, quieter.

The voice snapped me out of a train of thought.  I realized that the groups on either side of me were talking.

“Is it what you expected?” she asked.

“In a way,” I said.  I’d expected this scene, the groups talking, the note of hope.

“If you’d come to me when I first asked, Jamie would be alive, wouldn’t he?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I told you how things would play out.  That a Lamb would die and you’d reconsider.”

“I know,” I said.  “But I don’t know yet.  I’m not sure.”

She nodded.  “You hoped for a better brain, one that could pave the way to greater things.  Did you hope it was Jamie?”

“I hoped it was me,” I said, quiet.  “But Jamie was a close second.”

The conversations around us continued.  Discussion, strategy.

“I need to talk to them about things you can’t hear,” Fray said.  “I’m going to let you go.”

Letting me go.  I’d expected to be taken prisoner, maybe even tortured in an edge case, but torture was something I could deal with, and had dealt with in the past.  I waited for elaboration.

“On the condition that you leave that behind,” she said.

She was pointing.

I turned to look, and felt the tug against one shoulder before I realized.

“Ah,” I said.  “No.”

“There’s no other way.  I can convince them, but you need to convince me first.  I figured out what was in that oddly shaped bag you refused to take off and place at your feet.  I remember the last time I met the Lambs.  I remember Jamie.”

I touched the strap of the backpack.  The books were inside.

“If I’d rather be taken prisoner?”

“Then they’ll kill you,” Fray said.  The word seemed to get attention, because one or two conversations stopped.  “I know them better than you do, and they’ll kill you.”

Almost thirty seconds passed before I slipped my shoulders free of the straps.  “You don’t read them.  If you do-”

“I won’t,” she said.  “None of us will.  Hand them to me.”

I placed the bag on the table.

It was hard, seeing Fray take it, lifting it free of the table and handing it to the stitched girl.

“Nobody gets to take that bag, or touch or read the books inside except him,” Fray told the stitched girl.  “Not even me.  He gets it back when he comes tomorrow.”

My heart was pounding harder than it had all night.

“You’re staying?” I asked.

“So long as we don’t venture outside, the Beast poses little risk to us,” she said.  “You have one night to decide.  Go and sleep on it if you must.  Next time you come, come with the rest of the Lambs.”

My heart felt cold in my chest as I said, “I don’t suppose I have much of a choice, do I?”

Tooth and Nail – 7.9

Armed men led me out of the building, with Warren joining them.  We made our way across the more open street, until we were just beyond the point where I’d been made to kneel, a coat over my head.

The Lambs were there, in the shadows, smoke and the rain, the group spaced evenly apart.  I saw them before my escorts did.  The men started, reaching for guns, and it was Warren who stopped them.

Gordon stepped forward.

He was hiding it, but I could see the smouldering anger in his eyes.

“Everything good?” his voice didn’t have a trace of that anger.

A nice vague question, conveying teamwork, expectations, while giving nothing away.

Gordon was a good guy.

“It’s good,” I said.

He nodded before turning his back.  I followed him back into shadows, leaving the men and Warren behind.

Mary, Gordon, Helen, and Hubris knew what was up, and they moved easily from areas of shadow to areas of deeper shadow, or to places where there was more smoke and cover.  The art of disappearing, honed over a long time, for the humans.  For Hubris, I imagined it was training.  I wasn’t positive that dog had the brain of a dog.

Lillian, though, was just walking away.  I could imagine how the onlookers could see her, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t disappearing properly.

I reached out to grab her sleeve, and tugged her into deeper shadows.

We made our way to the nearest tower, then climbed to the roof.

The Brechwell Beast was just close enough to give some cause for worry, but not so close that I was worried about my footing on the roof.

I was one of the last ones up.  I knew what to expect when I reached the top.

Glares, folded arms, concern.

I got out of Lillian’s way as she got off the ladder, and being mid-step on more precarious footing, I wasn’t in a position to dodge as she slapped my arm hard.

“What did you get?” Gordon asked, quiet.  The anger hadn’t really subsided, and he was still talking in that cool, collected way.

“You’re not going to get on my ass, sock me in the face, or anything like that?”

“At this point I’m suspicious you enjoy the reactions,” he said.  “No.  The mission.  What were you going for, and what did you get?”

I frowned.

“Because if you didn’t actually have an objective,” he said, pausing as the Brechwell Beast struck a wall, “I am going to be upset.”

“I wanted to know what they were doing.”

“Do you?”

I nodded.  “Bring the Academy’s knowledge to the masses.  Bring the war to a close with a few final, major events, distracting us from the distribution of very easy to understand texts.  Hurts the Academy in terms of the power gap in what they’re making, in terms of control, in economics, makes for more competition over the resources the Academy wants.”

“No.  We have classes on ethics, procedure,” Lillian said.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yes!  Of course!  So much would go wrong so fast, if you just started handing out these books and basic starter kits like the ones they sell to young Academy students.  It would be horrible, Sy.”

“Oh,” I said.  “Because my gut instinct was to maybe not fight as hard as we might otherwise fight, when it comes to this.  I’m not sure, but Fray might be willing to negotiate a trade, here.”

“A trade?” Mary asked.

“A few key players from their side, in exchange for letting this thing happen?”

“Fuck,” Gordon said, under his breath.

My eyebrows went up.  Harsher language than his usual.

“We lost Jamie,” he said.  “Not in the final sense-”

“Yes in the final sense,” I said, my voice low.

“Whatever.  However you look at it.  I’m bringing it up even though we’ve been dancing around the topic for months because I don’t want to lose you, Sy.”

“You won’t.  I knew exactly what I was doing.  I know how Fray thinks, I know how to dance on this razor’s edge.  I’m here, aren’t I?”

“You’re here and you’re talking about entertaining her ideas.”

I couldn’t keep meeting his eyes, so I turned away, only to find myself looking at Lillian.  I ran my fingers through my hair, fixing it, as I paced a little.

I came face to face with Mary and stopped in my tracks.

I talked to Percy, I thought.  But I couldn’t say it without it coming across as manipulative.

“What are you doing, Sy?” Gordon asked.

I turned away from Mary to look at him.  “What do you mean?”

“You’ve been acting different all night.  Changing your pattern, increasing the tempo and intensity, making calls and now you’re working against us like you’re trying to keep us off guard?”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do.  But I knew you’d try to stop me-”

“For good reason!” Mary said, startling me.

“I’m here!”  I said.  “I walked in, I walked out.”

“Without the bag?” Mary asked.  “Without the bag with Jamie’s books in it?”

“Oh.  Gosh,” Lillian said, under her breath.

“We’re going back tomorrow,” I said, annoyed.  “We’re going to walk out then too.  With Jamie- ‘s books.  Okay?  We walk away with an idea of what Fray is doing, with an idea of how to counter it or steer it in the right directions.  Mary gets to look Percy in the eye, we confront Fray, and with her preoccupied like she is, trying to juggle two factions and a half-dozen plans, we’ll have her at a disadvantage.  It will be the one and only time, maybe, that we ever have that.”

I looked at each of the Lambs.  I even looked at Gordon’s dang dog, in hopes of seeing a glimmer of understanding.

Gordon approached me.  I could see the anger in his eyes, the frustration.  I steeled myself.

Pretty much expected this since I’d realized I could walk inside those doors down there.

But Gordon didn’t hit me.

When his arms wrapped around me, I wondered if he was intending to simply toss me over the edge of the roof.  The size difference, the strength difference, my chronic low weight, I was willing to bet he could.

“What are you doing, Sy?”

Mary stepped closer, putting a hand on Gordon’s back, her expression unreadable.  Lillian hung back, both hands on her satchel with the medical equipment inside.  Helen was perched on the peak of the roof, slightly above us, staring, more old Helen than new Helen, just for now.

Seeing them, I was choked up in a way that made me feel like I was in the midst of drowning.  I wanted to get out of the hug, to have space, to have a chance to explain, and it didn’t feel like they were giving it to me.

“I’m trying to say it right.  The thing with distributing the books, it’s the second phase of a greater plan.  She’s got another plan.  I think, and maybe Lillian can say if I’m on the right track or not…”

I reached out for help.  Lillian didn’t give any indication she was going to play ball.

“…the work that comes out of the books.  Could it have a signature?  Give everyone the tools to make stitched, to create life, to create the right drugs, grow Warbeasts, I don’t even know, but in a way that sets them apart from the Academy.  Then, when she makes her next move, it’ll be easier to frame the Academy for it, like she did with the sterilization and the chemical leash, because that precedent exists.  She can establish a narrative, at a time when the Academy has less credibility, when it’s damned itself by trying and failing to control the spread of this information.  That the Academy is worse than it is.  The next war comes around, the rebellion is better armed, the Academy is hurting.  Step four drives a wedge into the cracks that become apparent.  I’m not saying this is it, but it’s- don’t you see the scale we’re operating at, here?”

“Sy,” Gordon said.

His tone suggested he wasn’t listening to me at all.

“Let go of me!” I said.  I fought my way free of his arms.   I backed away a few paces.   “Listen to me!”

“I hear you,” he said.  “We all do.”

“I’m right.  This is what I do, this is what I’m for.  I can figure a way forward, find what we need to do to exploit and derail her plan, and this war will be over, no more mice will have to get thrown into vats to make ghosts, people won’t end up conscripted by the Crown and find themselves facing down a cousin of theirs in a gunfight!”

“Probably,” Gordon said.  “But that’s not what we’re talking about.”

“It’s the mission!  It’s what we’re made to do.  I’ve been explaining for something like three or four minutes and we’re not talking about it?”

“No.  We’re not.”

“Because I seem to recall the last time we met Fray, you were thinking about defecting,” I said.  “You were close, too.  If a single snowflake had fallen on your back, it might have been the push you needed.”

The words hung in the air.

Gordon didn’t flinch.  The reaction wasn’t even all that profound with the other Lambs.  A turn of one or two heads, looking at our tallest, strongest member.  Curious looks, but it was almost as if they were wondering what his reaction was, more than they were wondering if it was true.

“I’m not even talking about going that far,” I said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “I hear you.”

“Then what’s the problem!?”

“The problem,” he said, and his voice was quiet, “Is that I’m worried you’re falling apart even more than I am, and I have seams, Sy.”

“I’m here,” I said, my voice low.  “I’ve been in top form tonight.”

“You’ve been in a form, Sy,” he said.  “I’m just not sure it’s yours.”

I could have hit him, if I didn’t know it would be futile.

“What do you want, Gordon?  You’re getting on my case, you’re making me play this dang-blasted guessing game, like I’m supposed to unravel a riddle that isn’t even a riddle.  Tell me what you want me to say or do, and I’ll say or do it.”

“Just tell me, Sy.  What are you doing?”

“Trying to do the mission?  Trying to figure out how to beat a woman that’s smarter and on better footing than I am?  Apparently without the help of my team?”

There was no response.  Mary kept one hand at Gordon’s arm, barely inches separating them.  His dog stood on the other side of him.

“Okay,” I said.  “Forget the mission.  You want me to bare my emotions?  I’m trying to figure out how things work with the group being a different shape, one man down, one dog up, and two more members on the way.  I’ve been worrying ever since the last time we saw Fray that the group might splinter.  Thanks to you, by the way.  You did start that.”

“Sorry.”

“Is that the answer you’re looking for?  I’m trying to hold things together, that’s all.”

“I think we’ll both know the answer when you give it.  But that doesn’t seem like you’re answering the question.”

I might have screamed in his face, if I didn’t think it would cause problems.

The Brechwell Beast was tearing at another set of houses a short distance away.  Widening the gap made by some of Fray’s explosions, it looked like.

I wondered if any people were dying in the process.

“Sy,” Mary said.

I snapped my head around.

“When you went down there, were you running to, or were you running away?”

“Don’t do this, Mary.  Don’t throw cryptic questions at me and expect answers I don’t have.”

“Because the rush, the recklessness, the fact you’re so adamant about wanting to get this done before the new member arrives… before Jamie arrives-”

“That’s not Jamie,” I said.

“-it seems like you’re running away.  And now you’re talking about working with Fray?”

“Not working with, just not working against as hard as we might.  Everything we’ve done to this point, what has it been for?  Does Fray really hurt the future of the Lambs and the betterment of mankind?  Are we really going to sit here and pretend we like the Academy, the Duke is an all-around stand up guy?”

“I think you’re evading.”

“I evade.  You might as well accuse Helen of acting.”

Gordon spoke up, “I just want a satisfactory answer to the question.  You, someone, just convince me that you’re not losing it, and I’m open to further discussion, whatever you guys want to do.”

“What am I doing?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said.

I threw my arms up, and I started walking away.

My body felt oddly light, and it wasn’t because of the exercise or the fact we hadn’t really eaten since early evening on the train.  The bag of books wasn’t on my back anymore, and the absence made me feel weird, eerily disconnected from the ground at my feet.

Jamie wasn’t at my back.

The others were following me, I knew.  I could have bolted.  Gordon and Mary would have caught me.

I ran my fingers through my hair again, then jammed them into pockets that had only just started to dry out while we were indoors.  Late in the evening, late spring, soaked through, I felt cold to the bone.

I wheeled around.  The others stopped in their tracks, but for Lillian.

I waited patiently as she made her way across to me, carefully striding so one foot was on each side of the gently peaked roof.  She pulled off her coat and extended it to me.

“No,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You’re a girl,” I said.

“It’s unisex, Sy.  Nobody’s going to poke fun.”

My finger touched the ring at my thumb.  “I meant you’re a girl, so it wouldn’t be right.”

“I’ll live, Sy.  Just hold my hand so I don’t fall off this roof, okay?  And so I know you won’t run off?”

I nodded.  I was too tired to fight.  The last few minutes of conversation had sapped all the fight from me, and I wasn’t sure I had it in me to even try for flight, either.

“You were going to say something,” Gordon said.  “When you stopped there.”

“Oh,” I said.  “Yeah.  Forgot.”

“What were you going to say?”

“What if I don’t have an answer for you, Gordon?  What if there’s no magic answer that makes sense of what I’m doing in a way that satisfies you?”

“Ah.”

I shrugged.  “Well?”

“I don’t know, Sy.  We adapt.”

We adapt.  He said it in a way that made it sound like we were talking about his body failing on him.  A inevitable, growing disability.

“Gimpy boy and his dog and Sylvester end up on the bench, while the new Lambs look after the next few missions?” I asked.  “And then someone else ends up benched, a new Lamb comes out of the Academy and replaces them, and so it goes, until we’re all reminiscing about the old days?  Doing the same tests we did back in day one, testing our cognitive ability as it slips away or our bodies fail?”

“I remember those days,” Gordon said.  “The days we first met, the tests.  I hated those things.”

“I found ways to make it interesting,” I said.

“I know.  You did.  I realized what you were doing after a bit, and then tried to mess you up, or throw a wrench into the works.  Then you made it harder to figure out what sort of games you were playing while we were playing other games, and so it went.”

“Is that what you’re afraid of?” Lillian asked.  “Being benched?  Being replaced?”

“No,” I said.  “No, that’s… not at all it, no offense.  That’s the human condition.  Parent replaced by child, except we won’t ever be parents, so this is a different sort of legacy.  The only thing I’m afraid of is losing you.”

I looked at the other Lambs.  “Any of you.”

The Brechwell Beast roared, not so far away.  I watched and listened for a second.

“Sucks,” I said.

Lillian squeezed my hand.

“Always thought it would be you guys falling to pieces and I’d be putting my brilliant mind to task with figuring you out and how to handle it,” I said.  “Goes to show how good I am, if Gordon’s right and there’s some riddle to my behavior I can’t answer.  Can’t even understand myself.”

“If I’m wrong,” Gordon said, “If there’s no complicated riddle to unravel, then that’s worse.  Because you can’t keep going like this.  You can only dance on a razor’s edge for so long.”

“Complicated?  I don’t think it’s complicated.”

All heads turned to Helen.

“Uh, clarify?” Gordon asked.

“Not complicated,” Helen said.  “It’s very simple, I think.”

“No, clarify about what ‘it’ is,” Gordon said.

“Sy is acting,” Helen said.  “He’s playing at being Jamie, and he’s doing a really bad job of it.”

“You might be getting confused,” I said.  “The longer hair, carrying his books around, it’s not an act, it’s a homage.  I don’t know.  A way of keeping him around.”

“It’s an act,” Helen said, firm.  “A bad act, because you don’t have the right tools.  You said you didn’t want to see the Lambs die.  The only thing any of us can do is hold someone in our hearts.  There’s an emptiness when they go, and we fill in that emptiness with memories.  Or drink, or work, or violence, sometimes, but mostly with memories.”

“Poetic,” Mary said.  “Where did you hear that?”

“I’ve been studying!  Ibott says it’s useful for when I’m older and I have to lure in men,” Helen said, smiling.  “But it’s true!  Sy is filling his heart with memories and he has a crummy memory.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Gordon said.

“Yes!  It is!”  Helen drew closer.  “Sylvester is trying to fill the empty space in the group’s heart, too.  He’s doing what he was made to do.  He’s trying to cover for the things that Jamie used to do.  The map, drawn on his shirt, that’s Sy being Sy to give us something that Jamie would have known like that.”

Snap of her fingers for punctuation.

“And walking into Fray’s meeting?” Gordon asked.

“Jamie would have known who the people are and he would have had ideas about what they were doing.  He could have drawn connections.  But Sy knows that if he just walks in and introduces himself, he will get an idea of who people are and what they’re doing.  He can draw connections.”

The others turned their eyes to me.

“It sounds awkward because it is,” Helen said.  “Jamie is probably the worst one of us to try and make up stopgap cover-ups for.  What Sy is trying to do, all the other stuff, like letting the Brechwell Beast out, he’s trying to get control.  Because he’s insecure.”

“Hey,” I said.

Lillian squeezed my hand.

“Control through chaos?” Gordon asked, still staring at me.  “Yeah, that sounds right.”

“It’s not about insecurity, thank you very much,” I said.  “But I don’t know.  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to cover the gap that Jamie left.  How to keep things working smoothly, so the group stays effective.”

“You’re doing it,” Helen said.  “In a weird way, but you’re doing it.”

More than I realized?

“The first part, anyway,” Gordon said.

I sighed.

“Jam- the replacement might be coming tomorrow,” Gordon said.  “This thing with Fray, is it you wanting that control?  Impact the world, even secondhand, let them know ‘we’re still here’, ‘we still matter’?”

Even without Jamie?

“It’ll have to happen before he shows,” Gordon said.  “If we decide to do it.  We’ll need to discuss this thoroughly.  Come to a consensus.”

“Then we-”

“In the morning, Sy,” he said.  “We come up with a game plan in the morning.”

We turned and started moving as a group.  There were soldiers and weapons gathering on some rooftops nearby.  They were surrounding the perimeter of Fray’s building.  Some of them had equipment to hook them to the rooftops, with long guns that were screwed into the roofs.

Dog and Catcher were waiting not too far away, with a Wry Man who was slightly hunched over.  The Wry Man was flushed, veins sticking out of his face, and jerked in reaction to the movement of me withdrawing a hand from a clammy pocket.

“Status?” Catcher asked.

“No update,” I said, leaving out any mention of my visit with Fray.  “They’re not budging.”

“They’re talking about mounting an attack.”

I shook my head, “No.  She’s got a maneuver she’s going to pull.  Moment we try, half our soldiers turn on the other half.  I don’t think she plans to leave at all.  Her soldiers in the towers are going to subtly guide the Beast away from her for the meantime, and they’ll be part of the uprising if and when she makes a move.  When the dust clears, she’s the one in charge of Brechwell.”

“How sure are you?” he asked.

“Mostly.”

He nodded.  He stared off into the distance.

“Don’t attack, then.”

“Bad idea,” I said.

“What do we do?”

“Wait.  Bide our time.  Gives more opportunities for the soldiers in towers to make mistakes.  In daylight, the Beast won’t be guided by any lights from the towers.  With a lucky roll of the dice, he might head in that direction.  Without that lucky roll, the Lambs will make a move.”

Catcher nodded slowly.

“You look tired,” he said.  “Go sleep.”

“You’ve been at this for longer than we have, you were here when we arrived,” I said.

“This is what we do.  We’re watchdogs,” Catcher said.  “You rest so you can do what you do.  Tomorrow.”

☙

I was pacing in the bedroom when the door cracked open.  I stopped in my tracks.

Mary.

“Sylvester.”

I turned, a little confused.  It was Lillian, wearing the raincoat I’d given back to her.

“Doctor’s visit?” I asked.

“Do you need one?”

I looked at my bandaged hands, then shook my head.

“Then no,” she said.  She closed the door very gently, then put down a bundle and pulled off her raincoat.  “I talked to Mary earlier.  She explained about what Rick was saying.”

“Ah,” I said.  “Rick.  That.”

“That?”

“Me as some tug of war rope while you and Mary engage in a competition or something to prove something.”

She blinked, looking startled.  “Sy, no.  That’s not-“

“Can we not?  I don’t think I’m in the mood.”

She shook her head, collecting herself.  “You’re in a mood.  Why aren’t you sleeping?”

“Thinking,” I said.  “About tomorrow.”

“Stop thinking.  Relax,” she said.

“Give me something, then.”

“I’m not going to give you something,” she said, sounding exasperated.  She crossed the distance to me, grabbed my arm, and hauled me over to the bed.  She shoved me down onto it.  “Stay.”

“Staying,” I said.

“And don’t look,” she said.  “I didn’t want to come here in a nightgown with all of the soldiers standing guard between here and the other building.”

“It’s my room,” I said, pointedly turning my head to look at her.  “Who are you to make rules about looking or not looking?”

She didn’t have a reply to that, but her face flushed pink.  She began unbuttoning her top.

When things reached the point where I might have seen something, I simply muttered, “Whatever,” and looked away.

“This isn’t a competition,” she told me.  “She encouraged me to come.”

“Sure, in the interest of playing fair,” I said.

“That’s not- stop that!”

“Fine,” I said.  “Mary sleeps nude most of the time she sleeps over, you know.”

Lillian froze.  I could see in my peripheral vision, and turned my head slowly to look her way.  She was holding the nightgown up in a way that protected her modesty, yet to pull it on.

If it’s not a competition on any level, that shouldn’t matter, I thought.  But it is, so you’re considering your options.

“Just kidding,” I said.

“You’re the worst.  You really are.  Look away.”

I did.

Lillian finished pulling the nightgown on.  I climbed under covers and scooted over.  She climbed in next to me.  Where Mary had found a natural configuration beside me, often with her back pressed to me, Lillian curled into me.  She positioned herself lower down, head on my shoulder and chest, arm reaching across my torso, one leg draped over my legs.  The fabric of the nightgown at her knees got in the way, so she hiked it up.

It took her a few seconds to find the exact right position.

“Mary always wear scratchier stuff,” I said.  “Lace and stuff.  This is softer.  It’s nice.”

I plucked at the hem of her nightgown.  She swatted it out of my hand and slapped my chest.

“Go to sleep,” she said.

I lay there, staring at the ceiling.  After a few minutes, she raised her head to look at me.

“What were you even doing?” she asked.

“Normally I’d be reading,” I said.  “but I don’t have the books.”

She nodded, head rubbing against me.  Her breath was warm against my chest.

“Doesn’t it get boring?  Reading the books over and over again?”

“Never.”

She nodded again.

“I miss him too,” she said.  “We got along.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “He was a good guy.”

“I’m really scared about tomorrow.”

“I know,” I said.

Then she didn’t say anything more.

It took me far too long to realize that there was a damp feeling against my chest, little movements.  I shifted position, lifting my head up.

Crying.

Pulling my shoulder out from under her, I changed position, so I was facing her.  I wiped tears from her cheeks.

“Crybaby.”

She hit me.

“Come on,” I said.  I pulled her head against my chest, and she burrowed close, clinging tighter.

I stroked her hair, over and over, rhythmically, but I was the one who was lulled into sleep.

Alongside the nights I’d had Mary stay over, it was the fifth night of sleep I’d had in two weeks.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Tooth and Nail – 7.10

“Sy, Lillian.”

“I’m up, Gordon.”

“Oh, I couldn’t tell through the back of your head.  Can you wake Sy up?  Make sure he gets out of bed.”

I winced, but played at being asleep.

“I will.”

I peeked and saw the door starting to close.  It stopped.

“Lillian.”

Lillian stirred, the arm and leg that were draped over me pulling away.  As she turned over, she made the covers pull away from me.  I tugged them sharply back into place, which inadvertently pulled her closer.

“Urm- Yes?”

“Are you doing okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know we can get a little focused on the mission, on other things.”

“I know you’re pointing at me,” I mumbled.

“Ah, you’re awake.  I don’t want to lose sight of the details, Lillian.  I thought I’d ask.”

“I’m a detail?”

“You’re a Lamb.  Details come part and parcel.”

There was a pause.  Lillian shifted position, but didn’t get up.

“I’m okay.  Thank you for asking, Gordon.”

“Alright.  We’re eating downstairs.  There are a lot of soldiers in the building, so you might want to get dressed before coming down.  Are you good to wear yesterday’s clothes, or should I send Mary with-”

“I’m okay, Gordon.  I brought clothes for today.  Thank you.”

“Alright,” he said.

The door shut.

I turned over, until I was on my back.  I looked at the back of Lillian’s head.

“He cares about you.”

“Yeah.”

“Like you’re a little sister, sort of.  He likes Mary, or could like Mary if he let himself, but he thinks it’s wrong to do anything when he might not have much time left.  Mary, meanwhile, isn’t making any direct moves.”

“Mary likes you.”

“Mary likes Gordon.”

Lillian turned over.  “Maybe, but she likes you too.”

Her face was just a couple of inches from mine, one arm folded under her head.  She was sharing the same pillow as me, and her arm being where it was meant her head didn’t slide off the end.  Her hair wasn’t even shoulder length when left loose, but it was bound in a ponytail for sleeping, which made it seem shorter, and hairs had come free in the night, laying across her temple and cheek.

It reminded me of Jamie.

“She might.”

“I like Mary,” Lillian said.  “If you and she did-”

I was already shaking my head.

“Why not?”

I sighed.

“I think she was made to follow orders, she clung to someone and obeyed them and conformed herself to them,” I said, my voice quiet.

“To Percy.”

“Yeah.  To Percy.  I think… she’s courting herself, in a way, if that makes sense?”

Lillian shook her head, face pressing momentarily against the pillow, “I don’t get it.”

“She’s still figuring herself out, after, what, nearly two years?”

“Spring of the year before last.  Yeah.”

“And when she first got here, she was insecure, she was dangerous, and I spent some time steering her in the right directions, watching her, coaxing her out of her shell.  Controlling her.”

“You’re worried that if she gets close to you, it’s going to be moving backward?”

Smart girl.

“I think Gordon is better for Mary and Mary is better for Gordon than I am for Mary or Mary for me.”

“That makes sense,” Lillian said.

“Yeah?  Because I’m not sure I didn’t get words mixed around.”

“It did.”

“I’m a little worried about what happens when and if she talks with Percy.”

“I wouldn’t be,” Lillian said.  “She’s my friend, she’s close to us.  She understands.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said.  I didn’t say it, but I suspected Lillian didn’t know just what Mary might find out if she talked to Percy.

Lillian gave me a half-smile.  “If that’s your reasoning about them, and if it won’t bother you, I’m on your side.  I’ll back you in this.”

“Alright,” I said.

I yawned, hand over my mouth, then settled my head back on the pillow.

It was cold outside, warm under the covers, and a part of me didn’t want to face what the day had in store.  A second part of me was a little worried about how much the third part of me wanted to meet the day head on.

Mary had a way of looking imperious or hawkish, almost as if her expression was on the verge of being an angry one, but it never actually contorted with the actual emotion.  When she felt the need to soften the expression, Mary had a way of becoming more ladylike.  It was rare that her back wasn’t straight, her eyes focused forward.  Wavy brown hair pulled back and tied into place with ribbons seemed somehow fitting.  Something elemental and natural bound into a set form.  Get too close, and it was starched collars, hems and lace that I’d joked could cut a man.  Beneath that was razor wire and hidden blades.

Lillian was more of a mouse than a hawk in demeanor.  Not as visually arresting, nervous, but warmer.  When she had her hair cut, I suspected at least some thought went into what was easiest to manage, so she could spend less time getting up in the morning.  She’d grown it longer in recent months, despite having more access to the hairdresser, and I imagined it was the influence of the other girls, a growing awareness of herself.  Straight brown hair curled out at the end.  She bloomed late, but where Helen was a flower tended by another, the inner workings almost entirely separate, and where Mary’s inner and outer self image were inexorably intertwined and carefully honed, I imagined that Lillian was becoming a real girl, but it was on her terms, only permitted when it didn’t interfere with other work.  It would be a slow, halting progression.

I could see her as an adult woman, respectable, but not fashionable.  Always a few steps behind the times, or too inclined to fall back on staples and safe bets, with only a few allowances to real femininity, like her hair was becoming now.

She had an expiry date too.  Not an official one, not one that would see her dead before twenty-two, but there would be a time when her studies would take priority, and she would be yanked from us.  That woman I was imagining would watch from a distance as the last of the Lambs died.

I pulled away, pinched the covers down between us to trap the air and warmth on her side, and slipped out from my side of the bed.  I stretched.

My luggage was in the corner.  I opened the clasps and hauled it open, before collecting the clothes for the day.  I draped each article of clothing over the open top of the luggage as I picked it out.

Yesterday’s clothes had gone to pieces.  I picked the long-sleeved shirt, green-and-black checkered vest, dark slacks and wool socks, picking each with the thickest fabric in mind, and pulled out boots with straps at the top.  I pulled off my pyjama top.

“I’m not looking,” Lillian announced.

“Good.  Because naughty girls who peek will find out I have no shame, and I’m not above wagging it in front of your face.  You can live with that mental image every time you look at me for the next few weeks.”

“It- Sy, no!” she protested.  She had her hands firmly over her eyes.

I dressed quickly, gathered my things, and made sure I had my pockets full of everything I might need.  Badge, knife, pen, chalk, string, razor wire, knife and sheath for my boot, needles, and lockpicks.  Not that I was very good with the picks.

Mary had influenced us too.  Being prepared.  Getting used to having everything we might need.

I hauled the window open, and looked out on the city.

Raining hard.  I could see the hump of the Brechwell Beast’s back as it meandered down a street about a mile away.  For it to be visible above the rooftops, it had either grown a size, or it was treading on rubble of a fallen structure.

Looking in the direction of Fray’s headquarters, I could see the irregular outlines of people or temporary constructions on the rooftops.  Warbeasts, possibly sandbags, crowds.

The Beast hadn’t attacked Fray in the night.

I stuck my head out as far as I could manage, and let the runoff from the eaves above the window run over my head.  I flipped over backward and let it spatter inconsistently across my face.

Climbing back inside, I shut the window and ran my fingers through my now-wet hair to comb out the worst of the tangles and pillow-hair.  There was a tiny bit of grit from the runoff, but it hardly mattered.  I pulled on a flat brimmed cap.

Lillian, lying there with hands over her eyes, looked so warm and dry, still covered by the blankets, enjoying exclusive use of the one pillow.  The part of me that wanted to avoid the day called out, told me to cover my head so I didn’t soak the pillow and crawl beneath those covers once more.

But that part of me was getting smaller, my brain was starting to get up to speed with the challenges I was sure we were going to face, idle thoughts buzzing in the back of my mind, and I knew it wasn’t really an option.

Last night was the closest thing to a moment of weakness that I was allowed.  I could have climbed under the covers and tried to hide from the world, I could have confessed insecurities and the others would probably have listened.  We could have changed course or made excuses or delayed the day, and I might have been able to spend the day warm in bed, in the company of the Lambs.  But the day after?  The day after that?  No.

It would weaken me, rather than strengthen me.  Set me too far back.  Set us too far back.

There was a mission.  An enemy to be outsmarted, problems to solve, mysteries to see to their conclusion.  It excited me.

A new Lamb to meet.

Not excitement as much as dread, there.

Lillian probably faced very similar dilemmas every single morning she was to accompany us, but I doubted the prospect of outsmarting someone like Fray or Mauer really drove her to get up and keep fighting forward.

“You should hurry, as soon as I’m out the door,” I told her.  “You don’t want to be the one keeping the Lambs waiting.”

“I’m up earlier than any of you, every single day, Sy,” she told me, sounding annoyed.  I was willing to bet the idea of being the slowpoke genuinely annoyed her.

“Gotta tell you, Lil, this is not the day to start being lazy, wow.”

“I’ll be ready!  Just give me some privacy.”

“Because if you delay us, we’re totally going to secretly judge you, except for me, I’ll openly-”

She reached over to the nightstand, picked up the first available item, a candlestick holder sans candlestick, and threw it in my general direction.  It banged against the door.

“Leave!”

I touched the brim of my cap, bowing a little, saw her reach for the next available object, and hurried through, closing the door behind me.

Gordon was right.  Soldiers were swarming the place.  Many were young men, and some who weren’t hurrying from one place to another were here, in earshot of Lillian’s shout, giving me knowing grins and quirked eyebrows.  Except I wasn’t exactly sure what they were being so smug or knowing about.

I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of boys only three to five years older than me milling around and going about their business with Lillian alone in the other room.

I waited with my back to the door, both hands behind me on the knob and one foot tapping, for what must have been several minutes.  I was about to poke my head inside and tell Lillian to hurry when the door opened, the doorknob slipping from my fingers.

“Oh!” she said, in surprise.

“All set?”

“Um.  Bathroom,” she said, looking around the hallway.  One of the young men across from us pointed.  “Don’t- don’t wait outside the bathroom door, Sy.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I didn’t.  I gave one glance to the young soldiers and headed downstairs.

The group had collected in one corner of the already small kitchen, Gordon and Mary sitting side by side in the windowsill, and Helen standing in one corner beside them.

Before I was even halfway down the stairs, Gordon used one toe to nudge a plate of mystery meat, eggs, and green stuff across the table.

“You beat Lillian down here,” he commented.

“Lies and slander.  Oh, you meant I’m first.  Yeah.”

“You’re in a better mood than yesterday,” Mary said.  “Keep that mood going.  Eat.”

I gave her a mock salute, then grabbed a knife and fork and set to work on the plate, standing rather than sitting down.  Soldiers were passing through behind me, and being on my feet made it easier to step out of the way.

Hubris put his paws up on the wall, head poking up between Mary and Gordon.

“Touch my right shoe, then Gordon’s left knee, then sniff the door, and bring me the umbrella,” Mary said.

Bemused, I watched as the dog went through the motions.  Nose touched to Mary’s shoe, then Gordon’s knee, before it hopped down from the wall, rounded the table to touch nose to the door, pausing.  It eased an umbrella out of the rack by the door and carried it over to Mary, being careful not to strike me in the back of the knees with the pointed end.

Mary took the umbrella, reached down to the windowsill beside her and picked up a bit of mystery meat, biting off a bit, then tossing the remainder to Hubris.

Lillian came downstairs, and before Gordon could toe the second plate in her direction, I reached out to pull it across the table.

“Sleep okay?” Gordon asked.

“Yes,” Lillian said, not making eye contact.

“I slept okay,” I said.  “Woke up in the middle of the night, thought something was going on outside with the Brechwell Beast.  Turned my thoughts over again and again and tried to figure out what I was hearing.  Nope.  Lillian snores.”

“As if,” Lillian said.  “Try harder, Sy.”

“She does.  You do,” Mary said, agreeing with me, then turning her focus to Lillian to restate it.  “We’ve shared a room and had our sleepovers between missions.  They’re little snores.”

I grinned.  “But she snores.”

Lillian frowned, not sure how to process that.  She turned and kicked me.

“Ow!  Stop that, you brute.  If you’re going to kick me, at least kick Mary too.”

“Mary is nice about things like that,” Lillian sniffed.

“Since we’re all obviously aware of what’s going on and you’ve all talked about it, I feel the need to chime in.  I don’t know where you guys have gotten the idea I need this, but-”

“You mean where you start acting like you’ve just had an appointment but it’s only sleep deprivation?” Gordon asked.

“Ok, I’ll rephrase-”

“Are you saying you don’t like it?” Helen asked.

“Huh?” I asked.  I put down my knife and fork, palms up, weighing, trying to find the words.

After a few seconds, I frowned and picked up the utensils, focusing on the food.

“He likes it,” Helen decided.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“I think it’s very simple,” she told me.

“I think I liked it better when you talked less.  It’s complicated.”

Gordon spoke up, “I’m more inclined to go with Sy than with Helen on this one.  Complicated.”

“Thank you,” I said.  I picked up my plate, three-quarters eaten, and carried it over to the sink.  I stuck out my tongue at Helen, who was standing beside the sink, back to the wall.

She stuck out her tongue, kept it out, and moved her head closer to mine.  I caught her tongue in between index finger and thumb.

“Saw that coming.”

“Mugh ah bahr,” Helen said.

Her tongue continued to extend.  I held the tip, but the middle section reached out, looping over my bent finger.  I twisted my hand out of the way, but she was persistent.

“Aaggh,” she said, when we’d reached a stalemate.  Her hand went up and pressed against my forehead, coming away with a bit of grit on one fingertip.

“Thank you,” I said, not letting go.  “No more licking.  I know you got a taste of me last night.  But we don’t do that.”

She smiled and nodded.

I let her withdraw her tongue into her mouth and wiped my fingers off on my vest, heading back toward my seat.

“Wash.  Hands,” Lillian ordered me.

I grimaced.  I grimaced again as I noticed the soap was the gritty bar kind of soap.  The kind that left skin raw.

“Getting back to the topic of the complicated, I don’t think we can put it off.  We need to talk strategy.”

I was focused on the sink rather than the group behind me, but I could imagine the tone of the room changing, a shift in the gravity, the attitudes, even the thought processes.

My own thoughts began changing in direction and focus.  Plans of attack, where things stood, who was involved…

“I took Hubris out first thing.  Went by the train station.  State of the city, the train schedules changed.”

My thoughts were momentarily derailed.  I turned around, hands still soapy, and rather than rinse them, just wiped them on the dishcloth.  “There’s a reason this is worth mentioning.”

“Early afternoon.  From a strategic point of view, this is a good thing for the Academy, a bad thing for Fray.  The weapons, soldiers, and reinforcements from Radham come en-masse.”

“What time is it now?” I asked.

“An hour before noon.  I thought you needed the extra sleep, and I figured you’d be awake half the night anyway.”

“I did, and I would’ve been,” I said.  Now that I had a timeline in my head, the world was starting to make sense.  “Perimeter still stands, Brechwell Beast didn’t attack Fray’s area.”

“She’s pinned down.  But you think a large body of the people who have her pinned down are traitors?”

I raised my hand, counting off on my fingers.  “That’s the number one possibility.  Number two is that she has someone pulling strings for her.  She’s here because she’s working with whoever runs Brechwell.  Who we suspect to be an incompetent ass.”

“Maybe say that a little quieter,” Mary suggested.

I looked back over my shoulder.  The soldiers were talking to their captain.  “Pshh.  They know better than we do.  But maybe we should talk outside, if Lillian’s done?”

“I’m done.”

It took us a minute to get our things together.  Mary deposited the umbrella by the door, and Helen had boots to pull on, while Gordon was quick to get his things on, stepping into another room before returning with the rifles we’d claimed earlier.

“Feel confident?” he asked me.

“How many bullets?”

“My pockets are full.”

“Then gimme,” I said.  “Give me a minute to practice shooting, I’ll be able to hit the mark every time.”

“That doesn’t inspire confidence,” he said.

But I still got the third rifle.  Gordon took one, and Mary took another.

“They’re restricting travel through the city.  Be prepared to get stopped,” he said.

I checked my pocket.  I had the badge.

We stepped out into the rain.  It was less crowded outdoors, the streets largely vacant.

“You were saying, Sy?”

“Remind me?”

“Point one, she’s confident because she has the strength on her side.  Point two-”

“Connections.  Hard to buy, knowing what I know.  Third tool for major engagements is resources.  Wealth?  How much money do you need to buy your way out of that?  Things others want that could earn leverage?  I don’t see it.”

“Strength, connections, resources,” Gordon said.  “Okay.”

“Four, devices.  I’ve been thinking hard, trying not to overlook anything like we overlooked the water in, uh-”

“Kensford,” Gordon said.

“But I don’t think there’s a vector or a complication like that, not here.  Which leads to devices part B.  Weapons, chemicals, bombs, traps.  Does she have a weapon so strong that it threatens to wipe out the opposition here?”

“It’s not impossible,” Gordon said.

“A weapon of her own?  Not taken from either group?  She needs to show strength to properly unite them under her banner.  Keep in mind she’s only had about a year, she’s been focused on other things, setting this up, preparing the books she plans to distribute.  Now it’s possible those books are an outright lie, but I don’t think they are.  I don’t think she has a weapon, and I don’t think she’d be as confident as she is, because she knows about cockroaches and cats.”

“No weapon can guarantee a slaughter of every last enemy,” Lillian said.  “The more varied the opposition, the more survivors you’ll see.”

“Cats?” Mary asked.

“You have to see the pictures.  When they talk about it with the younger children, they use pictures of little cats, some black, some white, some calico…”

“Point being,” I interrupted, “we’ve got all sorts of super soldiers and regular soldiers and people in different positions around the city.  There’s no device she can deploy or plague or parasite she could pack it with that is going to wipe us out so thoroughly that she’ll feel confident just strolling out of Brechwell.  A weapon?  No.”

“Is there an option after four?”

“Ideology.  Change minds, you change the paradigm.  She tried that on me last night.”

“Did it work?”  Gordon asked.  “I haven’t raised the subject, but you seemed to be considering it.”

“I was running away, not running to,” I said.  “Now?  I don’t know.  Even with the horrors that might be perpetrated, the ones Lillian talked about, I think I might rather live in a world where Fray’s books got out and the Academy couldn’t quite stop it.”

That seemed to startle Lillian, who was walking to my left.  “Why?”

“Because,” I said.  “Like I told Fray, I’m not loyal to the Academy.  I’m loyal to the Lambs.  What the Academy is doing with us, it’s a lazy, unhurried approach.  Raise a generation of brains and abilities, put them to use, figure out their limits, discard.”

“That’s a little harsh,” Lillian said.

“They didn’t save him,” I said.

I didn’t need to say who ‘him’ was.

As long as I kept my eyes on the ground, my hood blocked off my view of the other Lambs.  “The key to a good con is to rush the victim.  Deny them the ability to think clearly.  Apply the right kind of pressure and deny a man a chance to truly think, and you can fleece the Lord King of the Crown Empire of his crown.”

“Hells bells, Sy,” Gordon said, lowering his voice.  “Don’t say something like that in public.  We can talk about betraying the Crown all you want, and we can explain our way out of that, but if you talk like that…”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Right.”

“You want to con the Academy?” Mary asked.  “Apply pressure?”

“It’s not just that.  Pressure isn’t always bad.  You know this, Mary, you live by it.  In contests and records of strength, speed, in development of new and innovative biological sciences, we see accident, luck, or effort raise the bar.  The rest of the world realizes that it’s possible to go that one step further.  They work harder, they hone their ability, they study the particulars… and the rest of the world catches up.  What was impossible or world news one year becomes the norm a few years later.  The world moves, and people push themselves harder to keep up with that new normal.”

I paused, inviting question, response, commentary.  The Lambs were quiet.

“The Academy is lazy, lackadaisical.  It’s not really trying, so much as it’s maintaining a natural, lazy sort of momentum.  Now imagine a world where the books are out there.  What does the Academy do?”

“War, hunt for Fray,” Helen said.

“No, more basic.  What behavior does it default to in a pinch?  What does it crave?”

“Control,” Gordon said, “You’ve harped on it enough in the past.”

I nodded.

“They want control, but they’re dealing with something subtle.  It’s all in the background, all indirect.  The nature of war changes, and the books punctuate that,” I said.  I was getting more excited and emphatic as I spoke.  “How do you fight that threat?  How have they been fighting it, with the Ghosts?  Same sort of problem.  Background, hard to nail down.”

“Badly?” Helen suggested.

“Not disagreeing,” Mary said.  “But they’ve been keeping up.”

“The Academy doesn’t lose,” I said.  “Remember?  A perpetual stalemate is pretty good for the Academy’s enemies.  You could even make the argument that it’s hurting the Academy over time, because of how those Ghosts are created.”

I’d reminded myself of the other side of the coin.

The mice.  Not just the ones of Radham.  The little ones who couldn’t fend for themselves.  The survivors.

I kept talking anyway, “Think about it.  How have they been fighting the Ghosts?”

“Petey,” Mary said.  “The Engineer.  The Wry Man.  Dog, Catcher.”

“The talents they’re using, the tools.  Tracking, talent, infiltration, versatility, they’re brain tools.  Problem solving tools.  Put the books out there for everyone to have,” I said, “and the world is plunged into a situation where wars aren’t won on battlefields so much as they’re won in shadows and behind closed doors.  The Lambs stop being side projects that are kept on a shelf and brought out for special cases, we stop being secondary.”

“Is it worth the cost?” Lillian asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I really don’t.  Makes me wonder if Fray doesn’t want to recruit us more than she’s letting on.”

“Something to think about when and if we go to see her,” Gordon said.  “Which means we’ve got to decide on a plan of action, and we’re going to have to make our move, sometime in the next hour, if we’re going to do it before the rest of the forces approach and collapse on her.  Before…”

He trailed off.

Before the new Lamb arrives.

I frowned.  That little niggle about the time constraint had been sitting in the back of my mind.  An echo of my recent argument about the value of pressure, and it was complicated further by-

“The problem,” Gordon said, “Is we’ve got to do it while that region of the city is surrounded by ‘allied’ forces.”

Yeah.  that.

Tooth and Nail – 7.11

I could feel the soreness from the previous night as I ascended a ladder for the whateverth time.  Up roughly four stories, shoes and hands slipping on wet, cold metal rungs.  Each time, there was that precarious moment where I had to transfer over onto the roof, letting go of the ladder and putting my weight firmly on a slanted surface.

Gently slanted, but all the same, it didn’t leave much room for maneuvering or catching myself.

Eyes were focused on me as I stepped onto the roof.  Men and boys in uniform, some only a couple of years older than me, some middle-aged, were giving me the once-over, smirking, and murmuring to their buddies.

We’d been getting those looks and smirks for a while yet.  Approaching this perimeter, we’d ended up practically swimming in soldiers and cadets, along with other civilians who were making their belated evacuation from the area.  It had been hard to make headway and harder still to talk about sensitive matters, and the irritation of those two things was compounded by the smug and condescending attention we’d gotten.

They were frustrated, stupid military cadets who’d had it drilled into their head that society was all about hierarchies, and they saw an easier target in us, a way to relieve tension and stress.

“Nice gun,” one commented.

I touched the rifle I’d slung over my back, and declined to respond.

“Guy your size, you’re going to shoot that thing and the recoil will send you flying off the roof.”

The soldiers in the area broke into laughter.

“When they said we’d have more people coming to help today, I thought the help would be bigger.”

More laughter.

Gordon got off the ladder behind me, offering a hand to Mary.

“A girl with a rifle, now!” the comedian commented.  “Do you know which way to hold that thing?”

That was worth a chuckle from the gallery.  Kind of sad, really.  He had the ear of everyone nearby, and that was all he could do?  A wittier person could have had them laughing uproariously.

Mary gave me a sidelong glance.  I kept my mouth closed, standing at ease as we waited for Helen and Lillian.  She took my lead.

“They just keep coming.  Look at that!  Hello beautiful!  You brought your dog?”

Light chuckles, this time.  Bored soldiers, amused at an odd scene of children visiting the… I wasn’t even sure what to call it.  The inverse of the trenches.

“Good boy,” Helen murmured, as she put Hubris down.  She glanced down at Lillian.

“What’s going on here?” a man asked.  He stalked toward us, moving with surprising ease on the rooftop.  He had an officer’s coat and two medals on one side of his jacket, a helmet tucked under one arm, clearly not yet worn as his black hair was oiled and slicked back.  Spectacles were perched on his nose.

Not high ranked.  A half-step above a captain?  I could remember when the ranks had been neat and ordered, but special cases came and went, sub-ratings and capabilities, like Academy training and a core understanding of the types and dangers of superweapons, or the ability to manage stitched.  In a place like Brechwell, I imagined it was worse.  Teaching officers and non-teaching officers, to complicate things further.

Rather than answer the man, Gordon withdrew a badge from the coat of his raincoat, and handed it to the man.

I was willing to let him take point here.  It conveyed a better picture, as fun as it might be to toy with phrasing and really drive the point home.

“Mm,” the man murmured, taking the badge and opening it up.  It was a little bit of silver with a leather flap to back it, and the latest version had writing inlaid in the leather, visible if the metal was lifted up.  I had no idea how Gordon’s was legible – mine had so much wear and tear that most of the lettering had flaked off.

We waited patiently.  The joker and the other soldiers had fallen silent.

“If you look over there,” the officer pointed.  “The autonomous weapons are gathered over there.”

“I see them,” Gordon said.

“I trust your accommodations were suitable?”

“Yes, thank you,” Gordon said.

“If there’s anything you need, I can relay your requests to the Major.”

“We may take you up on that,” Gordon said.  “Where can we find you?”

“I’m looking after several groups.  Ask anyone here, they’ll know where to find me.”

“Thank you, sir,” Gordon said.

Navigation across the roof was treacherous, as groups were now camped out.  The little rises where the roof extended over windows were flatter than the rest, and served as points to congregate, with sandbags and weapon emplacements set down, and soldiers clustering there, so close together that knees and shoulders touched.  In other places, men with guns and binoculars were sitting on the roof’s peak, normally the easiest ground to tread on.

It struck me that the way the city was laid out made it easy to set a perimeter around a given location.  Pick any point in the city, and the constantly curving and looping streets allowed a circle to be established, with relatively few gaps.

There were gaps here.  Fray’s destruction had opened several, and I could see the distant shapes of people and emplacements on distant rooftops, covering those gaps.  Less effective than a 12-metre wall with gunmen perched on top might be.

With the streets being wider hereabouts, there was more room for Fray’s group to move around if and when they stepped out of the building, but less cover.  Some of those streets had scorch marks and craters.  There had been artillery fire in the night.  Some had been close to the building.

Scaring her people, keeping them off balance.  It was good.  A night without sleep, staring out windows and looking for signals from their double agents in our midst that something was going to happen, rattled by periodic artillery fire, wondering if that was the blast that preceded an attack, knocked down a wall, or wiped out a group of defenders.

I imagined Fray was very calm and collected throughout, but I had to wonder about Cynthia, who’d seemed shorter on temper, and about Mauer, who was a soldier, intimately familiar with these situations and this kind of pressure.

A crack and explosion made me think someone had fired an artillery shell.  Instead, as I looked to the source, I saw the Brechwell Beast.  I looked at its routes.  To get to Fray, it would have to travel for two minutes down one path, decide to turn down one path instead of continuing forward through a hole in a series of houses, turn right, and decide to turn left instead of taking the more convenient ‘forward’ path.

I was willing to bet it was designed to go forward when it had a choice.  Were there other aspects to it?  It couldn’t be solely limited to the city.  If they sought to bring it to bear in a confrontation outside of the city, how did they pilot it?  Were there ways it could be exploited?

Gordon raised a hand.  Stop.

We all, Hubris included, came to a stop.

“This is our best and possibly last chance to talk without being overheard,” he said.

I looked back, then further down the length of rooftop.  It was true; there was a wider gap than before, between the soldiers and artillery emplacement about seventy-five paces behind us and the group of Academy weapons about seventy-five paces ahead of us.  Provided we didn’t raise our voice, there wasn’t much chance we’d be overheard.

I saw Dog and Catcher among the Academy weapons and mentally revised my estimate.

I raised my hand in a pair of signals I was pretty sure Catcher didn’t know.  Subtle – careful – speak.

Watch your words.

Gordon nodded.  “We’ve had a chance to think.  We’ve got eyes on the situation.    There are squads of soldiers stationed every fifty paces, except for here, and any enemy that attacks this part of the wall is going to be sorry.”

Dog, Catcher, the Engineer, the Wry Man, others I didn’t recognize.  No shortage of weapons who could and would extract said apologies from errant enemies.

“From my guess, we used the attic windows to access the roof,” Gordon said, “I don’t think anyone is up to carrying sandbags and mortars up ladders.  If we’re going to get to Fray, that means going down through the house, crossing the open plaza with two hundred eyes on us.  From there, depending on where we exited from, there is another expanse of open space with even more eyes on us before we can reach her place, or we have to get around a row of houses on the way.”

“If we get seen, it reflects badly on us,” I said.  “Problematic, whatever route we take.  But I want to get in there.”

“Which is another thing we need to think about, the route we take” Gordon said.  “You’ve said your piece, Lillian and you have very different ideas on what the ramifications might be.  Now, keep in mind…”

Hand signs.  Subtle.  Careful.  Speak.

“What are we thinking?” Mary asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I want to talk to Percy,” she said.  Her eyes were focused on Fray’s building.  “I want to ask him things, why, and how much of what he told me was true.  I want closure, but…”

“But?” Lillian asked.

“My reasons are bad.  It’s not in tune with the mission.  It’s for me.”

“That’s not a bad thing,” I said.

“It is when we’re here, and there’s this much going on,” Mary said.  “The closure I want… I’m not sure it isn’t me sticking a knife between Percy’s ribs.  But I’m not sure it is, either.”

“That would be a poetic end,” I said.  “To be killed by your own creation.  There’s probably a Latin term for it.”

Jamie would know.

“Probably,” Gordon said.  “Okay, Mary doesn’t think we should do this.  Does that mean we start thinking about other approaches?  Arguments that could convince Mary or Lillian?”

“Percy  killed the mice to make ghosts,” I said.  “Time and again, he preys on the vulnerable.  The Mary before Mary, rendered into fodder for experimentation by… it would have had to be Cynthia’s group.  Sometimes it feels pathological.  The way he preys on children.”

“I didn’t know your feelings on the subject were so strong,” Gordon said.

I shrugged.  I couldn’t make eye contact with the others, because admitting to a more personal vendetta against someone, a justification, it felt wrong, awkward, doubly so because I was speaking it aloud.  I crouched, straddling the peak of the roof, one hand fidgeting at my knee.

“Sorry, Mary, to say all that.”

“No, Sy.  It’s fine.  I want you to say it.”

I nodded.  I didn’t think it was fine, but I didn’t say so.

“He’s a fox,” I said.  I ran my finger down the outside of my raincoat, collecting water droplets, and drew out the symbol on my knee.  There wasn’t enough moisture, so it barely worked.  A series of blobs and lines instead of a proper triangle with two little triangles for ears.  “If we move forward with my plan, what I’m arguing for, it doesn’t rule out working out how to remove Percy.”

At my knee, my hand made a gesture.  Speak.

I looked up, and the others were looking down at me.  No signs to ask for clarification.  I trusted they understood what I was saying.

We talk to Fray, and we make a deal, where Percy gets removed from the picture, in exchange for our help.

I ventured, “I don’t know how that works for you, Mary.  I know there’s the emotional component.  He was-”

“He is my father,” Mary said.  “My maker.  Everything I am, just about everything and every skill I’m proud of, he gave me.”

A knife had appeared in her hand, blade resting between two fingers, handle extended back over her knuckles and the back of her hand.   She rolled it along her fingers until it fell off the side, let it fall, and caught the pommel.

“We’re running out of time,” Gordon said.  “The discussion with Fray won’t be short, and things get more complicated when the reinforcements arrive.”

When the new Lamb arrives.

I’d spent so long so committed to the Lambs, living and dead.  Now, as I thought about the new member joining, I couldn’t be sure where I stood.  I felt more disassociated than attached.  An unfamiliar feeling not unlike nervousness had settled in my chest and it felt very ugly and very negative.

“The plan on the most basic level has to happen,” I said.  “Whatever we’re doing, we need to get in there.  We get close, we do our thing with Fray, I have ideas on how we get out.”

I signaled the half truth, my fidgeting hand at my knee.

I need those books back.  Mary needs to talk to Percy.

An artillery shell fired, distant.

It didn’t hit the building, instead hitting the street.  Only a few nearby windows were intact or mostly intact, and they shattered with the force of the explosion.  A plume of dust and smoke was kicked up, only to get beaten down by the rain.

I watched it, studying.

“We might have to decide on a plan as we act.  Come to a decision there.  Decide on our own,” I said.

“I don’t like that,” Mary said.

“That includes making a decision on Percy,” I said.  “If anyone doesn’t want to move forward, if Mary wants to spare Percy, then we retreat here.  Pretend we never left.”

“I don’t know,” Mary said, but she said it in a way that sounded like she was actually considering it.

“I don’t want to lose you,” I said, not looking at her.  “I don’t want to lose Lillian.  I swear to you, on my membership in the Lambs, that I’m not going to manipulate you when it comes down to the decision.  We get close, then we decide on a course of action.  But we can’t stay here, we can’t just sit and wait and let things unfold.  That serves nobody and no-one.”

“I agree,” Gordon said.  “I’m on the fence about this, I need to know more before we make a call.”

Lillian was only shaking her head, a small gesture, nervous.

“I know you have commitments to the Academy,” Gordon said, his voice soft.

“Yes.  And to the people,” Lillian said.  “To my family.  I might only see them once or twice a year, but-”

Gordon signaled.  Stop.

Lillian shut her mouth.

He shifted the signal to careful.  Listen.

The gesture for listen was loose, fingers unfolding to indicate the general area.  Listening ears.

“I can’t do this,” Lillian said.  “Please believe me.  It would be… so horrible.”

Fray’s release of the books, made out to be an apocalyptic event.

“Do you want to stay behind?”

“No!  I want- I want to… I need to know that the Lambs are who I thought they were.  That they understand, and when it matters, they take me at my word, about the very things I’ve studied.”

“Is that because what you studied is right and real, Lil, or is it propaganda?” I asked.

She whirled on me, as upset as I’d ever seen her.  “You just promised, Sy.  You wouldn’t manipulate me.  That’s manipulation.  What you just did.”

“No,” I said, very calm.  “Manipulation would be pointing out how you getting upset right now is telling, and that you’re more insecure than you’re letting on.  My promise was in regards to when we were there, deciding.  At the pivotal moment.  Not here.  Here I’m going to argue my case.”

“Sy,” she said, and her voice was terse.  “I’m fond of you, I’m fond of every one of the Lambs.  But I have parents to think about, I have aunts, uncles, and cousins.  I have dreams, and if you want to risk everything so you can make a grand dramatic play, then I’m saying no.”

Another artillery shell came down.  It was on the far side of the building.  I heard something crack and crumble, but the soldiers around the perimeter didn’t act like it was anything special.  A close call.

There were no underground tunnels, supposedly.  Fray couldn’t fly.  A literal army surrounded her.  I imagined the Academy forces saw it as an easy victory, a bird in the hand.  They could let the train come with the monsters, and use only the expendable assets to eliminate the enemy.  Only stitched and superweapons.

It had to be eleven thirty or thereabouts.  An hour and a half, and the reinforcements would arrive.  Those huddled men taking cover under canvas and by sandbag were probably discussing their strategy now.  So easy to do.  The way they mingled, sending men over this way and that under the premise of getting and sharing information, latrine breaks and grabbing quick bites to eat, they could be communicating a greater plan.

One signal, and there would be slaughter.  Fray would play her gambit, and if I was right, the army here would turn on itself.  Mortar shots fired at rooftops.  A coordinated strike, removing the major players.

“It’s not about the play or doing anything fancy,” I said, as my ears stopped ringing from the recent explosions.

“I heard what you said before.  I know you’ve got justifications.  But Sy, you’re smart enough that you’re going to come up with perfect, convincing reasons to do something you want to do, and you’re going to come up with perfect, convincing reasons not to do something you want to do.  When Fray or Mauer or whoever else come into the picture, you get caught up in their gravitational pull, because they give you the ability to make your mark, to make bigger, clearer actions and bigger, clearer justifications to do those things.”

“So, what?  Does that make everything I say invalid?  I’ll always have good-sounding reasons to do something or not do something?  My rationale doesn’t matter?”

“It breaks down to what Gordon was trying to get at last night.  The root of the issue.”

“We’re not going to play twenty questions again, are we?  Because the way you guys play, Gordon plays, is to ask the same question twenty times.”

“No,” Lillian said.  “We’re not going to grill you.  That’s not what I’m getting at.  I just think… we’re walking into the lion’s den, and I don’t know how we’re getting in or out, or if I like the Lambs going there when I know I won’t like what I hear.”

“I know how we’re getting in,” I said.  “Helen… wait, what time is it?”

“Hold on,” Lillian said.  She reached into a pocket, and pulled out a pocket watch without a chain.  “Eleven forty.”

“Okay, Helen, run a quick errand.  Tell the nearest artillery team to drop a shell between the ensconced building entrance down there, and the shop under us here.  Then further out, same thing, but between the building entrance and Fray’s building.  You see what I mean?  ”

“I see.”

“They shoot at eleven-fifty, eleven-fifty-two, as fast as they can load a shell and fire again, then do it in reverse, at twelve-twenty and twelve twenty-two.”

“Okay.”

Then she was off.

“Cover of smoke and debris?” Gordon asked.  “A lot of ground to cover.”

“We can make it,” I said.

“If Fray delays us…”

“She won’t,” I said.

“You’re sure?  Because-”

“She won’t,” I said.  “Trust me.  She won’t have a choice in the matter.”

Gordon frowned at me.

“Trust me,” I said.

“I do,” he said.  “As much as I trust anyone.  But I’m an old man, Sy.  Trusting you isn’t good for a weak heart like mine.”

“Don’t joke,” I said.

He gave me a slight smile.

“I know what you’re doing,” Lillian said.  “Ten minutes, you scheduled us to leave.  You’re setting a time limit, putting pressure on me.  I pay attention, Sy.  I’m a good student.  It’s why I’m here!”

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“Now that she points it out, it sounds like she’s right on the mark,” Mary said.

Not you too!

Before I could open my mouth, Lillian was on me.  “It’s like you’re an abusive husband, you act mean, you tease, you taunt, you manipulate, then you start saying and doing all the right things, you lure me back in, you make me let my guard down-”

“Husband is a little bit forward, I think.”

“No!  No jokes, no teasing, no manipulation.  I’m sorry I’m not cooperating, and this apology is for Gordon and Mary and Hubris and Helen who isn’t here, but no.  You’re not going to budge me.  The only way to win against Sy for sure is to not play his games.  I’m staying right here.  I’m not coming, and if you leave, I’m going straight to the people in charge and telling them what’s happening.”

I sighed.

Lillian folded her arms.

“Even if it kills us?” I asked.

“If you do this, if you’re really considering this, you’re dead to me,” she said.

I could see from her expression that that wasn’t true in the slightest.  That it killed her to say.

“Lillian,” I said, and I dropped my voice to a whisper, stepping closer.  I reached out to pull her hands free and take them in mine, and she refused to give them to me.  “She’s going to make this happen.”

“Not with our help,” Lillian whispered to me.

“I saw their setup,” I said, “Okay?  Where their stuff is.  I know where the labs are, you know what’s flammable.  No grand plays, nothing fancy, we get over there, Mary gets to confront Percy, I get to hunt for the books, we burn them out.”

All lies.

With all the strength I could muster, I pulled one of Lillian’s hands away from her arm.  I clasped her wrist, and put my hand in hers, palm up.

I signaled.  Ruse.

Her eyes narrowed.

I looked over my shoulder at Gordon and Mary.  They’d seen the gesture.

“I don’t trust you,” Lillian said.

“We’re doing this,” I said.  “We don’t have long.  Come on.”

Helen was already on her way back.

I had Lillian’s wrist.  I pulled her behind me.

In through the access window that let us into the attic of the building.

The hatch leading from the attic to the building below was locked.  I got my lockpicks out, but Mary pushed me aside.

“Sy,” Gordon said.

“Trust me,” I said.

It wasn’t a hard lock to open.  Less than a minute’s time.  The hatches were common to every attic in the area, and the real purpose was to delay invaders, they could afford to be cheap.

The building was a set of offices, smelling strongly of cigarette smoke and firewood.  We were quickly down the stairs to the third floor, then the second.

I stopped.  The others, intent on continuing down to the first, bumped into me.  I stopped them.

I raised a finger to my lips, and led the others to the window.  Still pulling Lillian behind me, I crouched there.

My fingers tapped Lillian’s pocket.  She withdrew her pocket watch.

Two minutes until.

Crouching, hands over my ears, I waited, the others with me.

The explosion rocked the building, knocking me on my ass.  Gordon’s hand kept the bayonet blade of my rifle from stabbing Mary.  They helped support me.  I watched the plume of smoke, then looked to either side, studying the surroundings.

The next explosion came before the debris from the first had cleared.  Easier to bear.

“What’s-” Gordon started.

I put a finger out, shushing him.

The retaliation from the rebels came shortly after.  A band of stitched, carrying heavy rifles.  The rifles of the people at the perimeter and the rifles of the stitched didn’t quite reach each other, with intervening buildings and everything else.  They were firing at people on the rooftops.

How does this work?

A horn, as it turned out.  It blared from above.

And who?

My heart sank as I saw.  Dog and Catcher reached the ground level in record time.  They plowed into the group of stitched.

One stitched ran back toward Fray’s building, dropping the weapon and disappearing into the smoke.

I held up my fingers, counting.

One.  Two.  Three.  Four…

“Sy?” Gordon asked, noting the fingers.

Eight.  Nine.  Ten.  Eleven…

Twenty seconds in all passed before Catcher returned, his quarry in his mancatcher’s grasp.  The smoke was clearing, and as it did, he picked up the pace, running for cover, snapping the stitched’s neck and tearing head from shoulders with a movement of the mancatcher.

He passed out of our field of vision.

“You expected that,” Gordon said, voice quiet.

I nodded.

“I don’t understand,” Lillian said.

“It wasn’t the plan to cross over and wing it,” I said.  “I suspected we were being watched or listened to.  I wanted them to think we were coming.  Fray’s mole, if she had any, would want to pass on information about us sabotaging her, blowing up labs, the fact our group was split.  The trick was to give them a reason and an opportunity.”

I looked at each of the Lambs.

“If they didn’t have a mole, nothing lost, we talk it through and schedule another crossing.  If they did, then maybe something like that happens.  A signal, asking for a reason to go down to ground level.  Dog and Catcher signal they’re going down, dispatch expendable troops, and relay a message, while they think we’re not looking.”

“They’re working for Fray,” Gordon said.

I nodded.  “And, given who was in their company, I’m not sure the other experiments aren’t either.”

Tooth and Nail – 7.12

“I told you to trust me,” I murmured.

Lillian pulled her arm out of my grasp and hit me.

“I couldn’t say anything without tipping them off,” I said.  “Too many hand signals would’ve been telling, too.”

“You know they can probably hear you now,” Gordon said.

“So?” I asked.  “They would have realized something was up when Catcher went there and we weren’t knocking on the door.  They know we know, and they can’t make another move without being obvious.”

“Damn it,” Gordon said.  “I liked them.”

“I like them now, no need for past tense,” I said.  “They’re good guys.  They’re just doing what we’re doing, trying to survive, find the best way forward.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Mary murmured.

A few distant gunshots sounded.  From the direction of it and the answering rumble, I guessed the local cadets and soldiers were trying to steer the Brechwell Beast.

“This feels like a continuation of last night,” Gordon said.

I shook my head.

“You careening around like a stray bullet, ricocheting off surfaces?  All the rest of us can do is try to stay out of the way and trust you to bounce in the enemy’s general direction.”

I shook my head again, watching the building across the open space.  “It was eye opening, what Helen said.  That I’m mimicking Jamie.  I’ve put that on the back shelf.  This is pure Sylvester.”

“Is it now?  Because it doesn’t seem like you.”

“It is me.  But Fray has a sense of who I am and how I operate.  Think.  Right now, what is she doing?  What does she want?  What does she expect?”

“Preparing for her massacre,” Mary said, counting on her fingers, “She wants a victory, to get out alive and do that thing with the books, she expects us to make an approach and discuss, and maybe to convince us?”

“Not victory,” I said.  “She wants to prove she’s the person with the answers, ideally by swaying people to her side with her rhetoric.  But yes.  That’s where she is, her attention is split, even if she had it mostly in hand, she’s going to be stressed and distracted, trying to coordinate.  Now she got a short phrase or a note from Catcher, she’s expecting us to be there, and we’re not.”

“She’ll adapt,” Gordon said.

“Which requires time, attention, focus!” I said, poking my finger against the glass-littered windowsill to punctuate the three words.  “Where are the Lambs right now?  Are they elsewhere in the building?  Is security good enough?  What does she need to do to ensure we don’t derail everything?  From now until we show up, if we show up, she’s going to have to second guess everything against us interfering.”

“Everything you said was just to throw Dog and Catcher off?” Gordon asked.

“Or whoever the mole was.  Half truths,” I said.  “Catcher might have noted something about the Lambs using labs and facilities in the building to start a fire and disrupt her group.  Is it another ruse, is it possible I got enough info in my visit?  Right now, I imagine he’s signaling to Fray.  Either a light or gestures that can be seen with binoculars.  A simple, crude system, or he wouldn’t have to go down to deliver a note in person.  He’d let the people on the wall fill those stitched with bullets.”

“Okay.  Let’s assume you’re right-”

“I’m right.”

“We’re running out of time.  We’ve been arguing, we aren’t any closer-”

“Let me stop you there,” I said.  “First off, Lillian, sorry.  I had to take a hard stance, or your stubbornness would have derailed our shot at ferreting out the mole.”

“Uh huh,” she said.  She was frowning at me.

“Gordon.  We have two options.  Option one, we use the next hour to figure out the key figures in this and we remove them.  Shake the box of bugs here, on the perimeter, see what stands out.  I don’t think Fray has been talking to each and every person here at this Academy.  She would have had to have targeted a few key people, teachers or commanding officers, people who resent the man at the top or who are jaded from the war, much like Mauer, and she turned them.”

“That’s predicated on a lot of assumptions, Sy,” Mary told me.  “There’s nothing guaranteeing you’re even right about the mutiny.”

“True,” I said, “And we’d be working against the other experiments.  Assuming they can hear us, they’d be trying to stop us.  If things come down to a he-said, he-said with us and Catcher, I don’t think people are going to listen to the kids.  It’s how things work.”

“What’s option two?” Lillian asked.

“We signal another drop, we cross over, and we confront Fray,” I said.  “Ideally, we do it as close to the deadline as possible.”

“What?” Lillian asked.  “Close to the deadline?  When the signal is given?”

“We just talked about it,” I said.  “What did you call me out on?”

“Time constraints,” she said.

“Fray created her own time constraint.  She wants us to come in.  She knows reinforcements are coming in by train.  Maybe they’re hers, maybe not, but the time window is small.  Now, assuming I’m right, I’ve got her number, my estimation of the situation is on target, soldier turning against soldier, traps going off, whatever else, the safest place for us to be isn’t here.  The safest place is there.”

I pointed at Fray’s building.

“If your estimation is wrong, that’s the most dangerous place to be.”

“If she has absolutely no plan, no escape route, no options?” I asked.  “Yeah, worst place to be.  But a war is about to erupt here, it’s tense enough that Helen’s hair is standing on end-”

“Is not.”

“-and honestly, the best options available to us are to either be as far away from this as possible, or turn to the smartest person in the area and do what they’re doing.”

“That’s predicated on us joining them,” Lillian said.

“We’re not joining them,” I said.  “Not while you’re against it.  But I don’t think we’re capable of stopping them, either.  We might need to play along just a bit-”

“Uh huh,” she said, in a way that sounded very far from agreement.  “I see your angle.”

“No angle,” I said, looking at the building again.  “I swear.  But we need to get close.  For a lot of reasons.”

“I don’t know,” Lillian said.

Mary spoke up, “If what Sy said about me getting to make the final decision on Percy is right, then I want to go.  It makes sense, and I think we can do more there than here.”

I nodded, smiling a bit.

“I don’t feel confident making a decision,” Gordon said.  “I believe you, I trust you, but we’re just charging in?”

“You love charging in.”

“With no plan in mind?  No.  I don’t know.”

“Then I’ll break the tie,” Helen said.

A few of us turned to her in surprise.

“You’re usually content to go with the flow,” I commented.

“Usually,” she said.  “But I couldn’t sleep normally last night.  I felt funny.”

“Oh no,” Gordon said, hand going to his face.  “When Helen says that…”

“It was a squirmy, warm feeling, all nestled in my belly, and I kept drifting in and out, thinking about the people we saw.  The man with the birthing saw.  I want to hold him.”

“Hold him?” Lillian asked.  She’d gone a little pale.

Helen had a smile on her face, warm, like a little girl looking at her new sibling.  “And Genevieve Fray, and the others.  I wanted to hug them and break them, open them and wrap them around me and me around them.”

I murmured, “This is the point where I’d normally tell you to stop.”

“Oh?” Helen asked.  “Normally?”

“But I think it’s dangerous to cut you short and move forward blind.  Finish talking,” I said, knowing I was going to regret it.

“I wanted to know what the inside of their skin feels like, kind of?  If I could make a cut and slide my hands between the skin and the meat, and feel all of them with all of me, while they writhed?  I suppose I’d have to break them first, like I said, and it would have to be multiple cuts, if-”

“Getting off track.  Try again.  Focus.”

“I had really interesting dreams,” she said.

“Let’s steer things back to what you were feeling.  You want to go inside?” I said.  Early, in my first interactions with Helen, I’d made the mistake of assuming that she didn’t feel.  It wasn’t the case.  Helen had an emotional spectrum, but it didn’t translate to what we felt.  Priorities were different, the goals and construction of it were different, and it was only with practice and training that she and Ibott had crafted an end result that could be seen as analogous to a human’s.

In this case, she was describing a more engineered end result, one where her killer instinct and her first flickerings of feeling for others had mingled into another sort of emotion or drive.

“Oh, hum.  I want to feel that want again.  Even if we don’t hurt them, it felt more more than most things I feel, I want to try it, so I can understand it better.”

“I’m already dreading having to write this down for the paperwork for Ibott,” Lillian said.  “I’m going to have to ask follow-up questions and I really don’t want to ask follow-up questions.”

“I was sad, sleeping in a bed all alone,” Helen mused, talking more to herself than to us.  She turned to Mary so suddenly that Mary startled a little.  “I thought about going to your room and crawling under the covers with you, Mary, since Lillian was with Sy.  To hold you, and not feel like there was so much dead, empty darkness around me.  But I didn’t want to disturb your sleep, so I decided not to.”

“I appreciate that,” Mary said.  “You don’t, uh, feel that way about me?  Wanting to feel the inside of my skin?”

Helen shook her head.  “Silly Mary.  Doing that would probably kill you.  I like you, I don’t want you to die.”

“Silly Mary,” I echoed Helen.  Mary shot me an offended look.

“You’re warmer and less empty feeling than a bed and covers are.  That’s why I wanted to go.”

“Uh huh,” Mary said.  “Can someone change the topic?”

“I think that empty what you’re describing is loneliness, Helen,” I commented.

“Was it?  Is it?”

“I think,” I said.

“The mission is important,” Helen said, eyes wide, very serious, sounding like a small child espousing what they saw as an absolute truth.  “I don’t want to get in the way of that, no matter how big and, um, swirly my feelings feel.”

“Good Helen,” I said, reaching out to give her a pat on the head.

She beamed at me.

“That’s one more person wanting to go in,” Gordon said, as if the prior conversation hadn’t happened.  “If you three are that certain, then I’m willing to go along with this.  Delaying and arguing is going to put us in as much risk as anything else, at this point.”

“It feels like whatever we do is the wrong choice,” Lillian said.

“Trust me,” I said.  “I don’t ask that lightly.  I remember losing Jamie.  I know what we’re doing is dangerous, and I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was worth it.”

Lillian pursed her lips.

“I don’t think we can stop whatever she’s engineered from happening, but if we’re going to, it’s going to be with us there,” I said.  “The more likely result is that we go there, we talk with her, we borrow her plans and safeguards to survive whatever happens next, and we go our separate ways, with us having convinced her that the Lambs might change sides.”

She didn’t answer for a long minute.

“Someone needs to go ask for them to drop more artillery shells,” Lillian said.

She’d agreed.  We were on track.

“Hubris can go,” Gordon said.  “He’ll deliver a note.”

Gordon had paper, I had a pen.  He scribbled down instructions, consulting Lillian’s pocket watch.

“Take this to the officer we talked to earlier,” Gordon said.  “Then come find us.”

Hubris made a sound low in his throat, a huff of response, then ran off, twice as fast as any of us could travel.

We were left in silence.

Bells started to sound, one or two distant knells, before stopping.

Not a signal.  There was no gunfire, no sound of any device going off, no chaos.  Even the Brechwell Beast was quiet for the moment.

“Probably the Beast entering a new area,” I said.

“Probably,” Gordon said.  “I wonder if she coordinated that.  If the people in the tower are helping to steer and bait it, then she might want the Beast further away if reinforcements come.”

I nodded.

Another awkward silence.

“What you said before, about me acting like an abusive husband,” I said.

“Sy, no, I was angry, I was-”

“Right.  You were right.  Partially,” I said.

“No, I don’t want you to think like that.  That’s not right, it’s not what I meant.”

“I hope you know I’d die for you,” I said, meeting her eyes.

Her mouth opened, but she didn’t manage words.

“Any of you,” I said.  “I’m not saying that in order to manipulate or serve some complicated goal, I’m saying it because it’s true.  You’re important to me.  If I hurt you, genuinely hurt you, I want to know.  I might poke fun or tease and mislead or lie or be an utter bastard, but I do it for you, for all of us.”

“You are what you are, Sy,” Gordon said.  “We never had any illusions.  I’ve never harbored any hard feelings.”

I chanced a glance at Mary.  She didn’t speak, but she offered me a small smile.

“I didn’t want this,” Lillian said.  “You acting different, feeling guilty.”

“You wanted it, you pushed me to face it,” I said.

“I don’t want to hear you say you’re going to die for me,” she said, insistent.  “That’s messed up!”

“You became a Lamb,” I said.  “You earned your place with us.  I know you have a family, and that’s something the rest of us don’t have, but you’re one of us.  If it comes down to it, I’d lay my life on the line.”

“No,” Gordon said.

“No?  You’re saying I’m lying?”

“I’m saying I hear you,” he said, eyes on the road.  He reached for Lillian’s pocket watch and checked the time.  “But that’s not allowed.”

“I get to decide, Gordon, not you.”

“How do you think we’d feel, if you traded your life for ours?  No.  If you’re going to trade yourself for us, then it’s only allowed if you get a two for one deal.  Same goes for you, Mary.  I’ll do it too.”

“Me too,” Helen said.  “Though Ibott would probably kill you, so maybe it should be three to one.”

I gave her another pat on the head.

“Or if the mission is on the line?” Helen asked.

“Don’t overcomplicate it,” I said.

She nodded.

“I thought you were okay with the teasing,” I told Lillian.

“I am, mostly.”

“I was told you liked the teasing, even, by two different sources.  That you acted different when there wasn’t any.  I paid attention, tested the hypothesis, and it seemed right.”

“Sy?”

“Yes, Lillian?”

“If you have to talk about this, let’s do it when the others aren’t around.”

“They know, you know.”

“Sy!”

“Yes.  Of course.  So long as we’re okay?”

“We’re okay,” she said.

Her head turned as Gordon reached for her pocket watch again.  I reached out and took hold of her hair and gave it a light tug.

She hit me.  But when I saw her face in profile, she was smiling.

Looking at her, Helen, and Mary, all I could think was, girls are so weird.

“Be ready,” Gordon said.

My hands went over my ears.  I crouched, using the wall for cover.

I felt a touch at my rear end, and wondered for a moment if Helen was in a dangerous mood, or if it was Lillian feeling me up for some perplexing reason, or-

Hubris, nosing around.  He licked me as I turned around.  Why did I keep getting licked?

Gordon got Hubris’ attention, and covered the dog’s ears.

Any moment now.

Any moment, then there was no going back.

“How long do we have, once we’re there?” I asked.  Gordon wasn’t covering his own ears.  I supposed he figured he was resilient enough to deal with the noise of the blast.  I pulled a hand away to listen.

“Before the final scheduled blasts?  Thirty minutes, if we decide we need to leave.”

I nodded.

Eyes closed, ears covered once more, I waited.

I felt a hand on my shoulder.

Movement from Hubris brushing against my backside was the second indication something was wrong.

I twisted around, and I came face to face with Catcher, or as close to face to face as was possible, when he was twice as tall as I was, the two of us crouching.

His rag-wrapped hand was pressing Hubris down, pinning the struggling dog against the ground.  His polearm was extended toward Gordon.

It made sense he’d find us.  Even ignoring his exemplary tracking abilities and enhanced senses, he would have been able to follow Hubris.

“What gave us away?” he asked me.

“You specifically?  Fray did.  Once I start assuming the most inconvenient result, my guesses get a lot more acccurate.”

Catcher nodded, taking that in stride.  Mary had her weapons drawn, but wasn’t using them.  The scene was a still tableau, about to be broken by an artillery shell.

“Let us go,” I said, calm.

“Without knowing what you’re planning?  I heard some of what you said.  I don’t know if I like any of it.”

I wondered momentarily if he’d heard what Helen had said.  The half-second I spent briefly entertaining that thought was a window of opportunity for Gordon to speak.

“Catcher,” Gordon said.  “Nothing good comes from this.  If you attack the Lambs here, you get hurt, we get hurt, maybe we die now, at your hands, maybe one side or the other wins, and we get assumed to be on the wrong end of things, and we get executed.  But that’s bullshit.”

Not quite the argument I would’ve made in Gordon’s shoes.  Still, I let him continue without me chipping in.

“We’re friends, Catcher.”

“I always liked you, Gordon,” Catcher said.  “Dog too.  I heard what Sylvester said earlier, about how we’re all trying to survive.  I wondered if it was a trick of his, but it sounded genuine.”

“It was,” I said.  “You’re closer to being one of us than the common-”

The artillery shell came down, close.  I fell over, senses momentarily obliterated.

Don’t attack, don’t fight, I thought.

I managed to start seeing straight again, and focused on the scene.  Catcher hadn’t flinched, he still had Hubris, and Gordon was still crouched a few feet away, the length of the pole between him and our old friend.

Mary hadn’t attacked either.

“Let us go,” Gordon said.  “If you believe in what she’s doing, then trust her to convince us.”

“I don’t believe in what she’s doing,” Catcher said.  “I’ve only done this because I’m so very tired.”

In the words, the way he spoke, if I listened beyond the shrill noise in my ears, I could hear that fatigue.

“I can’t have the stalk and the manhunt be the beginning, middle, and end of my existence,” Catcher said.  “Whatever I’ll do, it won’t live up to what I was created to do, but I won’t be able to go peacefully if I don’t at least try and fail at another course.”

“And Dog?” Gordon asked.  I could barely hear him with my ears suffering as they were.

“The same.”

“That’s your course.  Let us choose ours,” I said.  “Let us go, before the dust settles.”

The second shell came down.  Not as violent as the first, being further away, but it rattled the senses once again.

“-lost Jamie, I thought you would break,” Catcher was saying, as I started being able to piece together words once again.

The mention of the name made me cringe as much as the last shell had.  He understood that it was a true loss.  That our Jamie was gone.  He didn’t have to ask, or evade, or insinuate.  He understood.

“I thought you might be on the same course as I was.  Exhausted.  That you’d end up reaching your limit.  Maybe you would have, if they hadn’t given you the time to grieve and find yourselves.  But I reached my limit first, in the end.”

“Maybe,” Gordon replied.

I was itching to just turn and go, but that wasn’t a reality.  If the dust cleared, we wouldn’t get a third shot, I was pretty sure.  The pattern would be too obvious.

“It was the futility of the Ghost hunts,” Catcher said.  “A chore, find one group, another would spring up.  One time I went, and she was waiting.  The leash had already loosened, because she’d leashed everyone else with the same chemical.  She offered to free me.”

“Catcher,” I said, not sure if I was speaking at the right volume.  My mind was racing, trying to piece together his psychology, his motivations, and figure out the best possible argument.

He wasn’t trying to deter us or hurt us.  He was justifying himself.

“Catcher,” I said, again, more firmly.  “We understand.  I understood without you needing to explain.  When all of this has settled down, we’ll find you, and we’ll play cards and share a meal, maybe a drink.”

He met my eyes with his own rheumy cataract-white ones.  Old scars, but the eyes were sharper than they looked to the untrained eye.

“Holding us here is going to push us away, maybe get us killed,” I said.  “Let us go, so we can find you later.  So it can be like old times.”

“It’ll never be like old times, Sy,” Catcher said, voice soft.  “That’s the problem.  Time runs out.  It’s gone.”

He let go of Hubris.  The dog snarled, tensing, and Gordon made a small sound.  Hubris relaxed in an instant.

The polearm moved away from Gordon.

Without wasting an instant, we turned.  Gordon went from a crouch to hurdling the window, Hubris under one arm, into the dwindling smoke, rain and dust without even checking if the coast was clear.  Mary was right after him, then Helen.

“You were right,” Catcher said, behind me.  “About what comes next.  That it’s a massacre.”

“Live,” I said.

“That’s what I’m trying to do, Sy.”

I could see, looking at it, that the smoke was too thin.  If anyone was looking, and there were an awful lot of eyes to be looking, the shadows of our movement would be visible.

I reached for Lillian’s hand and pulled her after me.  If she hesitated, it might be too late.

Into the road.  An open area with soldiers on two sides that might reflexively shoot if they spotted us.

I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see clearly, and my heart was hammering.  A blind run, where I could get shot at any moment.

The smoke was thinning out too fast.

I heard a gunshot, and I heard the impact, very close by.

Lillian didn’t falter.  I didn’t hurdle over any dead Lambs.

Then, behind me, I heard the horn.

It cried out, a warning, that superweapons were on the field.  Hold your fire.

Encouraged, I pressed on, tugging Lillian behind me.

The smoke and rain made it too hard to see a short distance ahead of me.  I almost ran into the door, but Mary caught me, before reaching out to grab Lillian.

Gordon banged on the door.

Long seconds passed.

It cracked open, and we passed inside.

Tooth and Nail – 7.13

As before, Warren served as the escort.  The musclebound man wore a suit that hadn’t been put together by a true craftsman.  I could see, here and there, how the suit jacket pulled and where there was a bit of clumsiness at the seams.  It was good work, all the same, but whoever had done it probably wasn’t a seamstress.

Our destination wasn’t the same room I’d gone to the previous night.  We passed down a hallway, and there were people in the rebellion’s make-shift uniform, predominantly men, sitting and standing on either side of the long hallway.  Groups of humans, groups of stitched, and plague men stood apart, one or two paces separating each from the other.  The stitched had a smell when they congregated in numbers or were in bad shape, and both were the case here.

They waited at the ready for real conflict to unfold.

A hand touched mine, grabbing and nearly taking hold before I slipped mine free.  My first instinct was to think it was one of the soldiers we were passing.  I looked and saw that it was Lillian’s.

I gestured.  Question.  Why?

Fear.  Me.  Scared.

I saw a few curious looks from nearby soldiers, and wondered if they might see it as us plotting something.  I leaned closer to Lillian, and I murmured in her ear.  Ironic that it was very possibly less suspicious than the gestures.  “We need to look strong, stand straight, look confident.  We shouldn’t hold hands.  That looks weird, and weird is something they’ll notice.”

She gave me the slightest of nods, averting her eyes.

I could see her trying to pull herself together, but the tension was etched into her expression.  When she saw a movement, her head turned all at once, eyebrows going up and together in concern.  She realized it was just a man changing position, and that heightened tension didn’t fade, it only climbed and built up into something.

I suppressed a sigh and reached out for her hand, squeezing it.

It was our first serious mission since we’d lost Jamie.  The loss hadn’t even occurred in the field, but now we were in a dangerous situation, there were other things going on, and Lillian wasn’t coping.

Working to help her was at least helping me feel more centered.

I looked at Mary, and I could see how tense she was.  I reached out to touch her arm, and she flinched.

Then she saw me and relaxed.  She managed a smile.  I let my hand fall.

Warren opened the door, inviting us to step into the back room.

The room I had been in before had been for larger gatherings, a space large enough to dance in, or to set up a stage and have room for audience.  This room was something closer to a large dining room, and tables had been placed against tall windows with curtains on either side, the table legs making the curtains poke out.

The tables weren’t long enough to cover the entire window, and the top two or three feet of each window was left exposed.  The light from outside was meager, the sky already overcast, rain pounding down, and periodically, one of the lights from the towers moved over the building, too diffuse in daylight to be distinct.  It still made the room just a little bit brighter, now and again.

Fray and Avis were at one end of the room, Fray leaning back against a table, hands gripping the edges, while Cynthia stabbed a finger in her direction, it sounded heated.  Fray was dressed similar to how she had been dressed last night, with a knee-length dress, stockings, and a shorter coat.  The only changes she’d made were to tie her hair back and to don a belt that had equipment hanging from it.  An octopus was out of water, set on the table just a half-foot from her hand.

Cynthia, by contrast, had foregone the dress and stockings for a tight-fitting jacket, sweater, and what might have been riding slacks, tight against the leg.  She had a gun at one hip, a short sword at the other, and a long rifle slung over her back.  She looked like an entirely different person, even though her face was still that same eerie, ill-fitting mask, her hair covering much of it.

Fray looked at the Lambs as we entered, and she seemed almost relieved to see us.

She held up a finger.  Wait.

I realized I was interpreting that as a gesture, when it was a common shorthand.

It made sense to take control of the situation by making a visitor wait.  Professors and barons of business did it all time.  Fray would’ve been right to do it here, even acknowledging how little time there was.

But she wasn’t doing it for that reason.  She really couldn’t abandon the ongoing discussion with Cynthia.

I turned my eyes away from that scene.  There were other players who posed more immediate danger, people who might take advantage of Fray’s distraction.

As was the case with Cynthia, many had changed clothes with a purpose.  The gigantic fellow with the birthing saw, I was having trouble placing his name, he was wearing a military outfit now, and he’d gathered with others of his ilk.  There was a man with short hair and very thick glasses who stood by his cat-like warbeast.  The warbeast’s head was at just the right height for his hand to settle on while it sat beside him.  He’d traded out his coat for one of the rebellion’s black jackets, not quite long enough to be a lab coat.  I saw a man covered in scars, in a very different way from the plague men, and a burly woman with things crawling just beneath her skin, glowering at anyone nearby, wearing men’s clothing.

Those unique cases out of the way, there were another half-dozen people who passed for human.  Men, all of them, they had to be generals or squad leaders.

Among the ordinary men were Mauer and Percy.  The pair were the same as they had been last night, in the most general sense, a worn down old academic in nicer looking clothes, and a soldier with a deceptively fresh face and military clothes that had seen some use.

That said, both had dressed as if they expected to see conflict.  Mauer wore his jacket, having had pulled it over the one arm, with a chain across the lapels keeping it in place, where it simply hung over the mutated arm.  He had an exorcist rifle, and unless I was missing something, he hadn’t burdened himself with vials and medical tools like some had.

Percy wore his long coat, and he did have a gun at his hip, a long-barreled pistol, the holster attached to the two belts he wore to hold all of the myriad pouches and tools.

Mary stepped forward, coming to stand beside me, and I could see the movement of her throat as she swallowed.

Gordon’s hand went out, resting on Mary’s shoulder.

As a group, we approached the pair.

The me of a year ago might have tried to talk to Mauer, regardless of the circumstance.  I recognized how important this was, however, and held my tongue.

“Mr. Percy,” Mary said.

“My girl,” the long-haired academic responded.

I shivered a little at the choice of words.  From the look of it, the effect was far more profound for Mary.

I’d known Mary for long enough to know all of the tells, and even I couldn’t get a good read on her, seeing her now.  It worried me that I wasn’t exactly sure what she would say or do.

The conversation had already aborted, in the messiest use of the word.  Neither seemed able or willing to speak, and none of the bystanders, Lamb or Shepherd, were interjecting.  I was glad.  If Mauer jumped in, the conversation would likely be his, with the pair on the periphery.

“You’re well, Mary?”

“I’m… overall, I’m well.  Right now?”

She seemed to flounder for words.

The tells were for anger, excitement, impatience, insecurity.

“I don’t know what to feel right now.”

“Speaking for myself, I’m glad to see you.  When I first joined Cynthia’s group, they told me the Academy’s group had eliminated all of my, ah, children.”

“Misinformation or lies?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Sylvester,” Percy said.  He looked at Cynthia.  “I’ve wondered which it was.”

“You worked for her before, but now you’re on opposing sides?” Mary asked.

She sounded younger than she was, as she asked the question.

Mental note, Sylvester: her mental and emotional guards are down.  Mary is vulnerable.

“Let’s not go that far,” Percy said.  “We were on opposing sides, but a big part of the meetings over the past half-week have been about mending the fences.”

“We hope,” Mauer commented.  His attention had passed to Cynthia as well, and I was guessing he was viewing the situation with forward-looking eyes, where Percy had been looking to past events.

My eyes were on the present.

If I had to guess, Fray seemed anxious.  That crimson-painted smile of hers seemed a little too relentless in the face of Cynthia’s fury to be anything but fake, and her lower eyelids were raised, her focus fully on the discussion as she picked her words, speaking to Cynthia with purpose.

That anxiety was very interesting and it was very worrisome for the Lambs as well.

“The Lambs did a very good job of executing some of the more educated members of Cynthia’s contingent,” Percy observed.  “That night in Whitney?  Or is that so commonplace you don’t remember?”

“I remember,” Mary said.  “We remember.”

There was a comment to be made about Mary possibly forgetting that she was part of a we, even for a moment.  That comment was not to be spoken out loud.

“Military leaders took over, resources were shuffled around, projects were canceled, until more academic minds gathered to share resources and ensure the work on projects could continue.  Cynthia returned, saw the way things had changed, and adapted, as she does so marvelously,” Percy said.  “She took control over the military group, hand picked a few key minds and personalities to bring to her side, and left the rest of us to continue to fend for ourselves.  When we created something worth using, we sold it to her side.  Those of us who were still willing to deal with her after the insults and dismissiveness her people had directed our way, that is”

“I expected more hard feelings,” I said.

He shook his head.  “Like I said, we’re mending fences.  For the sake of bigger things, I’m willing to leave the past in the past.”

Which isn’t to say there aren’t or weren’t hard feelings.

“The schism over our ultimate goals and a competition for resources broke us.  Fray intends to mend us,” Percy said.

“And Cynthia doesn’t agree?” I asked.

Mauer smiled.  The thumb of his good hand was tapping arrhythmically against his leg, something I might have taken for a signal or code if I didn’t know better.  His face didn’t betray the anxiety.  “I’ll say this: for someone so adaptable and clever, she’s proving remarkably stubborn in the here and now.”

He turned to look at us, then gave Helen a double take.  “The little girl I nearly shot.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure where we stand, me and the Lambs.  You’re enemies in our midst, but we’re being civil.  In my case, because Fray and Percy have demanded it of me.”

“I’m always civil,” Helen said.  “Mostly always.  Sometimes I get excited, but even when I’m twisting people apart or stalking or killing them, I try to be polite.”

“That’s important,” Mauer responded.  “Self control.”

“Yes,” Helen said.

Percy tilted his head.  “Have you decided how you’re feeling, Mary?”

She put her tongue between her lips to wet them where they had dried.  Cleaned of the smoke and the touch of dust from when we’d sprinted through the dust cloud, the lips had more color.  “I’ve always been good at doing the job.  Focusing on a task.  Do that.  Have certain enemies, have certain allies.  I’ve never-”

She stopped.

Percy didn’t interject.  I realized I was holding my breath, and let it out.

She abandoned the sentence she’d cut short, “I don’t know what to feel.”

“You know that I trained you to be as focused and goal-oriented as you are, yes?”

Mary nodded.

“After making the initial headway, training each of you, I started to think about the next part of the plan, and I wondered if I had overdone it.  If I’d made you too narrow, incapable of operating outside of the bounds I’d defined.”

“I don’t think I am,” Mary said.

“I don’t think you are either,” Percy said, glancing at each of the Lambs before looking back at her.  “But I did have a time where I worried if you’d be well-rounded enough for the leadership of my next generation of children.”

The first of the lies I told her.

“And I failed?” Mary asked.  I caught the hint of hurt in her voice.

“What?  No, not at all.  I was a novice then, you were still learning, still innovating and developing your own techniques with the tools I had given you.  I put that worry behind me very quickly.”

“But you decided, in the end, that I was nothing more than a tool?  To discard me?”

Again, the hurt.

I could see the realization hit him.  His eyes met mine for the duration of a lightning’s strike.

“I regret leaving you behind,” he said.  “I very nearly got captured before Cynthia stepped in, and then I was told you were gone.  I did mourn.  You were a major part of a pivotal and lengthy chapter in my life.”

It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the truth.  He could see and I could see that Mary wanted more.

“You made promises to me,” Mary said.

My heart pounded.  I was the rabbit in the snow with a predator looking on.  Calling any attention to myself at all with movement or sound could see that predator lashing out.

Would he disrupt the uneasy truce in this room and simply tell her the truth?  That he had intended to keep his promises?

“Once, I meant to keep them,” he said.  “You were too clever, I was too arrogant.  I remembered stories about mistakes made fifty and a hundred years ago, when the Academies were newer and more callow, and I let those stories influence my judgment.  What use did my work have for me, once you had blossomed into your true self?”

My heart was beating faster, hearing his explanation.  He was helping me.  Supporting my lies.

To have an answer that sounded that good, was it truth?

No.  Not the truth.

But a fear that he had harbored, made out to be fact, maybe.

“So you would have had me kill my parents and kill myself, lost like all of the others?”

“Yes,” he said, and the emotion he injected into that one word was real, but likely to be something else entirely.  Pain, perhaps.  His words were insistent, driven, as if he was hammering in each point as he might a physical nail, “When I made you, when I gave you that drive and that focus you just described to me, I made you in my image.  To be too focused, to feel as though there is one thing to do, one thing to focus on, one thing that answers the question?  That is my struggle as much as it is yours.  The clones were designed with a purpose in mind, and I thought that if I only stuck to that plan and that purpose, I could see my way forward.”

Mary’s expression had changed.  The tells of anger and anxiety had faded.  Her hawk-like eyes were focused on him and his every word.

“Even,” he said, “To the point of sacrificing you.”

“I see,” she said.  “Thank you for saying so.”

“If it means anything, I’ve come to regret the decision.  Working for Cynthia, staying out of sight and out of the way of Dog or Catcher’s noses, cooped up in my lab, I had time to think.  To see how short-sighted I was.”

“I appreciate that,” Mary said, with very little emotion.

“Tell me, please,” he said, “Have they treated you well?”

He looked at me as he said it.

I could imagine him communicating with me through that glance.  The short exchange we’d had about Mary, about the lies we’d both told, with no specifics given.

He might as well have said it to my face: I’ve lied for your sake, if you haven’t looked after her…

“They have,” she said.  She looked at Gordon and then raised a hand, overlaying his where he’d left it on her arm.

“I’m glad.  When I worried about your aptitude as a leader, I remember thinking about how you hadn’t bonded with your brothers.  You always seemed very lonely, dear Mary.”

“I wasn’t while I had you,” she said.

There was no affection in the words.  A simple stated fact.

The lingering threads of the puppeteer had been cut.

“While you grow, you’ll need to change your diet,” he said.

“I have a team working with me,” she said.

“Supplements?  The builder’s acids, the concentration-”

“Twenty percent.  Type F.”

“C,” he said.  “C.  Tell them.  Twenty-five percent should do it.  You grew quickly in the early stages, you’re growing a little bit faster even now.  The Type C should include a good calcium mix, and it will keep byproducts from accumulating in your joints.  Without it, you’ll find yourself with arthritic symptoms.”

“I’ll remember,” she said.

“You’ll hit a wall before too long.  Rapid growth, tissue regeneration, byproducts from the non-human cells, organ failure, cancers-”

“I know I have an expiration date,” Mary said, her voice quiet.

Gordon’s fingers tightened on Mary’s arm.  I found I couldn’t look at anyone in particular, my focus destroyed by recurrent visions of Jamie, the reality of expiration dates.

His face was taut with concern and repressed emotion as he spoke, sounding as if he were twenty feet away rather than five.  “I was callow and stupid, starting out.  Arrogant and narrow-minded.  I thought a few years less of having to care for infants was worth a vastly shortened lifespan in my creations, that there was no point, because you weren’t to serve any use after a certain point.”

“If I had grown slower, I might not have met the Lambs,” Mary said.  “Or found where I belonged.”

Percy didn’t respond to that.  He moved his hands, as if he were going to put them into pockets, realized he was wearing a different coat, and folded his arms instead.  He swallowed, cleared his throat, and nodded.

“My friend seems to be speechless, as that might be the next best thing to forgiveness he will ever get,” Mauer said, smiling, “I’ll ask the question he would ask: are the Lambs going to join Fray?  I imagine he might like to have you over for tea, if nothing else.”

“I-” Mary started.  She glanced at me.  “I don’t know.  My feelings are… mixed.”

“I abandoned you,” Percy said.  “It’s understandable.”

“No,” Mary said.  Then she shook her head, “Not that, not only that.”

“What, then?”

“The children,” Mary said.

Percy’s eyebrows came together.  “Which?”

“That’s just it,” Mary said.  “There’s so many.  The ones you kidnapped and cloned, the ones you raised and used as weapons, myself included, now the Ghosts?  Always children.”

“Does that bother you?” he asked.  “Or does it bother you because it bothers them?”

The statement ‘I didn’t design you with a conscience’ was so implicit in the question that he might as well have said it out loud.

“I don’t know,” Mary said.  “But it’s not about me.  I’m trying to understand you, Mr. Percy, and I don’t know if I understand this.”

He smiled.  “I won’t sway you from this topic any more than you could be distracted from your duties, I don’t think.”

“Answer the question, please,” Mary said, that last word applying only a veneer of civility to the demand.

“It wasn’t a question, it was a statement, with-”

“Why children, Mr. Percy?” she asked.

“Because they’re the easiest to use, Mary.  They’re the most malleable, the easiest to shape.  That’s the pat answer, isn’t it?  You have only to look at the Lambs to know this is a maxim the Academy believes in, too.”

“What’s the not-pat answer?” Mary asked.  Her voice was firm.  She still wasn’t relenting.

“If I’m a little bit poetic in how I phrase this, you’ll have to blame the Reverend,” Percy said.  He looked sad, even as he joked, “In wartime, children suffer the most.  I think a part of me knew that, that it was most efficient to get that out of the way, perhaps?”

“I don’t think that’s right at all,” Lillian said.  “That’s demented.”

Percy smiled a sad smile.  “Then we’ll go back to the first answer, as pat as it might be.  I took very few Academy classes, and the ratios and numbers involving children and childhood were fresh in my mind when I started work.  Narrow minded as I am, I didn’t think to change course.”

“Yet you said you spent time in Cynthia’s service, regretting past choices.  Now, with the Ghosts, you’re making the same choices again.”

“No, dear Mary,” the puppeteer said.  He reached out, to put a hand on her face, and she stepped back out of the way.  He recovered, and he said, “For what it’s worth, I made the new ones dumb.  I didn’t want to become attached to them, only to lose them.  I learned that much.”

“I see,” Mary said.  As she was wont to do, she’d shifted to a more imperious stance and tone, the young lady, the Mothmont girl.  “With all due respect, Mr. Percy, I don’t believe we’ll be joining you for tea, whatever happens.”

I could see the hurt on his face.  Even with that hurt, he managed to respond with decorum, “Then I wish you the best.”

Mary turned to Gordon, and the two of them turned away, with Lillian and Helen following.

I was the last to step away.  Percy’s eyes bored into mine.

I might never know all of his reasons for why he’d done what he had, but I could guess as to some.

I gave him a nod.  He didn’t move.

I hurried to join the others.

Cynthia and Fray were still embroiled in their private discussion, the rest of the room standing well clear, but for the men I took to be Cynthia’s lieutenants.  This had gone well beyond the point where a delay was comfortable.  The attack was imminent, and we hadn’t had a chance to talk yet.

We were counting on Fray for an escape route and options, and when she looked as troubled as she did, it left me feeling anxious too.

Trouble, I signaled Gordon, as he looked back to see where I’d gone to.  I caught up with the others.

We-go away-talk-question.  Should we break away, plan?

I shook my head.  We wouldn’t get a chance, anyway.

Helen stood in front of the man with the birthing saw.  She seemed to bounce on the spot as she said, “Hi!”

He glowered down at her.

A chair clattered to the ground.  The room was tense enough that more than a few hands went to guns, though only one or two were drawn from holsters.

Cynthia had pushed it over.

She pulled herself together, standing straighter.  One hand went to the front of her jacket, fixing it at the collar.

“Thank you, everyone else, for your time.  I appreciate your efforts and the sentiment.  I would wish you luck as well, but it wouldn’t be sincere.”

I looked from her to Fray.  Fray’s eyes were on the ground.  I knew that look, though I’d never seen it.  I’d worn it on my own face when I’d been up to my neck in trains of thought and permutations and complications.

“We’re leaving,” Cynthia said.

Mauer chuckled.  Every set of eyes in the room went to him.  “Retreating to your room like a child?”

“No,” Cynthia said, her voice low and dangerous.  “Not to my room.”

“We’re surrounded,” Percy said.

“I’ve been fighting through warzones since I was old enough to walk.  I’ve fought my share of monsters, experiment and human alike,” she said.  “I don’t plan to die.”

She gestured a wave of one hand, and her people joined her.  A little under half of the people in the room migrated in her direction, following in her wake as she made her way through the door.  The man with the birthing saw walked past the Lambs, followed by his ‘brothers’, putting a hand on Helen’s head as he passed her.  He had to duck low as he reached the door, lest he smash his collarbone on the frame.

The room was nearly silent, though we could hear Cynthia barking orders to her people in the hallway.  A significant share would be hers.

I looked at Fray, and she hadn’t come out of that state of focus, her mind going a mile a minute, yet to find a way out.

Not part of the plan, huh?  I wondered.

Tooth and Nail – 7.14

Gordon touched Lillian’s shoulder, then touched his wrist.  Lillian retrieved her watch from her pocket and popped it open to show Gordon.  When I craned my head to see, she turned it so the rest of us could see.

Fifteen minutes.

Genevieve Fray’s contingent was at one end of the room.  Fray was still dressed up, staring a hole into the ground while her mind searched for answers.  Warren was wearing his suit, Avis wore a strappy evening dress with grafted wings on her back, and the stitched girl, Whitney or Winnie or whatever it was, was wearing simpler clothes with an apron.  The clothes were clean and tidy, and her hair looked nice, combed into a side braid that helped hide how dry the hair was.

A gulf separated her group from the rest of us, Mauer’s people, a number of soldiers, three or four civilians, Percy, and the doctor with the cat-like warbeast.  Four paces of empty space between us and them.  The people who had been standing there were making noise out in the hallway.  I could hear the sound of guns being prepared, orders given, and a discussion of strategy, though I couldn’t make out particulars.

“Lambs,” Fray said.  “I did promise I would talk with you.”

Mauer spoke from the other end of the room, his voice low, “Given the circumstances, we should overlook old promises and focus on our immediate future.”

“Be patient,” Fray said.  “Lambs, a word?”

We started to cross the gap between the rest of the room and Fray.

“I took countermeasures before coming here,” Mauer commented.  “Politics are something I understand.  I expect them to take me alive, where possible.  You?  I’m not so sure.”

“You could be shot on sight,” Avis said, “Or killed by accident.”

“That would be the reason I’m talking to Fray and looking to cooperate and see if her strategy is still intact,” Mauer said.  He had a dangerous look in his eye.  “But if she wants me to be patient, then I can give her a few minutes.”

We reached Fray’s group.  There was a table set against the wall, with a teapot, cups, and candlesticks on the top.  I pushed a candlestick out of the way and hopped up onto the table.  It gave me a good view of the whole room.

Gordon leaned against the table beside me, Mary beside him.  Lillian stood by the table’s end, at my right shoulder, Helen just a little further away.  Hubris was under my dangling feet.

“The books, give,” I said.

“Contingent on us actually having a talk,” Fray said.

“Then talk,” Gordon said.

Fray nodded.  “I received a note from a little birdy-”

“Doggie,” Helen said.  She reached down and scratched Hubris’ head.

“Yes,” Fray said.  “I wasn’t sure if you were wholly aware it was them, but I suspected.  I was confused for a moment that it seemed to think you were here already, and it didn’t help that I was preoccupied with Cynthia.”

“Were we responsible for that confusion too?” Gordon asked.

“No.  I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it was a question of ideology,” Fray said.

“How so?” I asked.

“Cynthia started on the bottom, at one of the lowest points a human being can occupy, orphaned, alone, barely more than an animal.  She fought her way to the place she holds now in the world, and she plans to keep on going.  I believe she wants to supplant the Crown, even in a token manner.  To be the new ruler or a major power when the Crown is ejected from the western Crown States.  She doesn’t like my plan because giving everyone the power to study Academy sciences takes away from her exclusive power.  Raise everyone else up, and she is effectively less powerful.  She would rather control that power, utilize some of the best and brightest minds she can collect, and be well situated to take power as it becomes available.”

“Until the Crown brings all the force it can muster to bear,” Gordon said.

“Yes,” Fray said.  “I underestimated her hunger for that taste of true authority, however transient it might end up being.  I’d hoped rational argument would sway her, and I was proven wrong.”

I wanted to jab at Fray, just to see how she reacted.  If I commented on how poor her ‘rational’ argument might be, if my estimation of her was right, then it would sting, and she might show me a glimmer of what she was really thinking.

Instead, I frowned and only said, “That night I burned her alive, I didn’t just hurt her chances in politics.  The Lambs killed some of those best and brightest minds.  No wonder she was upset with me.”

Fray nodded her head in agreement.  “Telling you more would be unfair and rude, when she was at least kind enough to hear me out.  I think you can draw the appropriate conclusions.”

“What you’re doing,” Lillian said, “Giving everyone access, you’re going to cause complete and utter chaos.  There are rules the Academy won’t break that novice students will.  Uncontrolled growth, real monsters, real weapons of war.”

“I was on track for a professorship,” Fray said.  “I got close, close enough that I heard the stories.  I promise you, Lillian, there are people crossing those lines every single day, in various places around the world.  One or two of the people you’ve gone after at the Academy’s behest have been among them.”

“I can back this,” Avis said, her voice soft.  “A lot of the messages about the worst crisis situations crossed my desk.  For every one the Lambs saw, there were four more within two days of train travel from Radham Academy.

“That’s a fallacy,” Lillian said.  “Just because people are crossing the line, that doesn’t mean it’s okay if you increase the problem a hundredfold.”

“Tenfold at best, but in talking to the others, the expectation seems to be a much more conservative doubling or tripling in the number of madmen and dangerous minds,” Fray said.  “Only a select portion of the population have the means, motive, inclination, and ability to truly take advantage of what I would be putting out there.  Not so much the Academy couldn’t respond, but enough to keep them and the likes of you busy.”

“Except,” Gordon said, “You’ve got Dog and Catcher, very likely Petey and the Wry Man, all on your side.  You’ve been working to strip the Academy’s ability to respond to an upswing in the number of problem elements.”

“They’ll bounce back.  It does mean they’ll have a hard time controlling the spread of the books at the outset.”

“I’m seeing what you’re doing,” I said.  “Okay, let’s say that the numbers do double.  Very conservative.  But you told everyone here that the two factions would be attacking one last time, playing all the leftover cards they have left to play, to distract the Academy and apply pressure to them.  That alone would occupy the resources that would control the spread of the book.  But you’re also denying them those resources, getting Dog and Catcher and some of the others on your side.  If you actually turned Dog and Catcher and some of the others against the Academy, or used information they’ve given you to lash out at key targets…”

Fray’s expression wasn’t giving up many tells.  She seemed amused, insofar as her anxiety seemed to be allowing her to enjoy herself.

Yeah, let’s not puff you up and make you feel too happy and in control, I thought.

“…You’re being disingenuous,” I said.  “There’s more to this.  You don’t intend to push them over.  You want to break their back on your knee.”

“I want to hurt the Academy,” Fray told me.  “Slow them down, give the rest of us some time to gain ground.  Yes.”

“Then say it straight,” I said.  “You trying to mislead us here makes me think you’re bending the truth when you give Lillian your expectations.  Forget the others.  What do you think the numbers will be like?  How many dangerous minds are going to go too far with your books?”

Lillian nodded.  I saw her shoot me a glance, and I suspected it was a grateful look.

I’d backed her where and when it counted.

“More than a fivefold increase in what you’re dealing with now,” Fray admitted.

“And how many people are going to die?” Lillian asked.

“There’s no telling, it’s too variable,” Fray said.  “But you’ve heard of the cockroaches and cats principle?”

I smiled.

Gordon put it succinctly, “We’ve discussed it.”

“I think,” Lillian said, “If you’re talking about cockroaches and cats, what you’re doing is a very bad thing!  You’re talking about killing nine in ten people?  Nineteen in twenty?  People only survive because of sheer numbers?”

“As you can see, the medic of the group is opposed to what you’re doing,” I said.

“And the rest of you?” Fray asked, very casually.

It was Mary who spoke up, “If you can’t convince her, then you aren’t going to budge the rest of us.  The Lambs stick together.”

Fray nodded.  “I see.”

There was a pause.  An explosion outside made the entire room jump.  Too close to the deadline.

Fray turned to Warren, murmuring in his ear.  I caught the essential bits, enough to piece it together after a second of thought.  “Go check on Cynthia.  Let me know if she’s getting ready to go or waiting.”

Warren nodded, then left the room.

Fray composed herself, taking a second before turning to look us over.  “I don’t think there’s time to have a full-fledged debate on the merits of one course or another.”

“Disingenuous again,” I said.  “There are a lot of courses, a lot of decisions to be made.”

“I didn’t say there were only two courses,” Fray said, sounding annoyed, “My point was that we’re short on time.  I expect only fifteen minutes, if the news about the train being early wasn’t Lamb trickery.”

She gave us a look as she said those last words.

“It’s not,” Gordon said, firmly.  “And it’s less than ten minutes, not fifteen.”

He put his hands in his pockets as he spoke.  I could see his thumb move.  Not a true gesture, but damn close to the movement of a ‘lie‘ gesture.

Giving her less time to work with, more pressure.

“We would have shown up twenty minutes before the real deadline if it was, after we’d let you stew and worry for a while, and after we’d complicated your communications with Dog, Catcher and the others.”

“As you tried to do with the Ghosts,” Fray said.  She sighed.  “You did force us to sacrifice a large share of them, so Petey could maintain his cover.  The release of the Brechwell Beast was much the same.  I believe you when you say the deadline is real.”

“I hear actual anxiety in your voice,” I said.

“A tightness?” Helen said.  “I think I hear it too, but I’m not that good with my new ears yet.”

Warren returned.  He rejoined us.

“Is she leaving yet?”  Fray asked.

He changed the angle of his head a fraction.

“Soon?”

He nodded.

“If all else fails, we might have to let her be the vanguard, and simply follow in her wake,” Fray said.  “Knowing her, it might prove difficult.  She’s as liable to be as dangerous to us as the enemy forces are.”

Warren nodded again.

“Avis, we’ll need you to deliver the signal soon,” Fray said.  She looked at us.  “Catcher’s note said you had deduced that I plan to turn the forces of Brechwell against one another.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’m flattered you think I could convince that many people.  I’m afraid I didn’t.”

“Then I think you’re kind of an idiot for getting into this situation,” I told her.

Provoke, push, test boundaries.  I’d passed up a chance earlier, because it was too hard, too harsh.  This was a softer touch.

I’d expected to gauge her response to the casual insult, in hopes of gleaning some insight into her mental state.  Fray didn’t betray anything, however, and it was Warren who seemed to take offense at the slight against Fray.

Worth remembering.  Maybe I could write it down.  My memories seemed to slip most between when I went to sleep and when I woke up.  Since the girls insisted on sleeping with me, I couldn’t stay up and achieve a balance of recall and alertness.  I wouldn’t be able to trust my brain to hold onto the little strategic details like Warren’s defensiveness of his savior.

“I do have a plan,” Fray said.  “It achieves very similar ends, but without the need for me to target and convince however many soldiers, officers, and major figures I would need to organize a true mutiny.”

“Fantastic,” I said.  “But you made a miscalculation, you’ve lost Cynthia’s help.  You’re worried, because what you did have planned doesn’t necessarily work that well without her.”

“We’ll manage,” she said.  “The real question is if you’re coming with us.  It doesn’t have to be permanent.  Follow along, I’ll give you the books, and we can have a more in-depth conversation in the aftermath of Brechwell’s fall.”

I didn’t respond.  My mind was taking in new information, ticking over possibilities.

“I think that would be dangerous,” Mary said.  “If we came with you, how much would it delay our return to the Academy?  Would we be assumed to be one of the turncoat special projects?”

“That’s for you to decide,” Fray said.  She stood straighter.  “I suppose you’ll have to make do.  Decide what you will, I need to focus on the matter at hand.”

Not a mutiny, but similar in execution.  What’s she planning?

“Wait,” Mary said.

Fray had started to walk away, Warren, Avis and the stitched girl following.  She paused.

“I said it was dangerous, I didn’t say no.  If the other Lambs agree, maybe I could propose a deal.”

“Time is short,” Fray said.  “What deal?”

“We’ll come with you, hear you out, have a serious discussion with no time limit, but…” Mary dropped her voice, “Percy dies.”

My breath caught in my throat.  I almost sputtered.

I wasn’t the only Lamb reacting with shock.  All eyes were on Mary.

“And,” Mary continued, meeting Lillian’s eyes, “You promise to excise all portions of your work that deal with the biology of children.  The ratios, the specific formulas, growth charts, scales, proportions…”

“All of it,” Fray said.  “A concrete loss of both an ally and resources, a loss in time to ensure the books are properly edited, in exchange for a discussion where there is no guarantee I’d be able to convince you all?  What makes you think I’d accept?”

Mary opened her mouth to speak, paused, and glanced at me.

“Sylvester briefed you on me,” Fray concluded.  “I see.  I want to ask why you want me to kill your creator, but there’s no time.  I’ll take your proposal under consideration.  Excuse me.”

Like that, she was gone.

I blinked a few times.

“Sylvester is a bad influence on you,” Gordon commented.

“Probably,” Mary said.  “Sorry, to throw that out there, but-”

“You need to cut ties formally,” Gordon guessed.

Mary nodded.

Lillian walked past me, reaching out to give Mary a little hug, before taking Mary’s hand.

“She’s actually considering it,” I said.  “Percy is a known element, he’s one-note, only effective right now because of the ability to incorporate the work of others.”

“You said she wanted to convince others,” Mary said.  “I thought we could offer her a way to convince us.”

“It was smart,” I said.  “You hit the mark.”

But Percy isn’t as guilty as you think he is.  By letting you sign a deal paid for in his blood, I can never tell you the whole truth.  You’d never forgive me.

Well, eventually, she might, but a theoretical five-year grudge was a long time in respect to our short lifespans.

Something to worry about later.

“I was surprised you seemed to drop out of that conversation,” Gordon observed.  He was watching the people on the other side of the room, who were watching us  while they talked with Fray.

“Me?” I asked.

“You.”

“Thinking,” I said.  “Trying to decipher what she said.

“Do tell.  Thinking aloud is a good thing.”

“Not a mutiny, but similar.  She said she couldn’t convince that many people.”

“Yes,” Gordon said.

“Okay.  Turn that around.  What’s the bare minimum she needs, in order to turn the tide of the battle?”

“Bare minimum?” Mary asked.  “Five hundred people?  Once they start shooting, they don’t know who is friendly and who isn’t, it throws everything into disarray.”

“Fewer,” I said.  “Fewer.  Didn’t one person just risk derailing this entire thing Fray was trying to accomplish?  Cynthia walked away.  She’s waiting to execute her own plan.  Fray doesn’t know what to expect.  What if… what if Fray only talked to two or three people?  And the secret experiments, but…”

I trailed off, thinking.  Experiments.  Why?  They’re the ones who provide information, they execute critical missions, they wipe out stragglers…

I was staring off into space the same way Fray had been, sitting a matter of feet from where she’d been standing, and smiled at the realization.  The difference between her situation and mine, however, was that I was asking a question which had a very real answer.  Fray had had to invent an answer.

“Commanding officers?” Gordon asked.  “They’re the only people here with enough clout.”

I nodded.  “Yeah.  But if you give orders and the people you’re ordering balk, then you lose that clout.  You need to convince them…”

Weapons of rhetoric.  How to make people act the way they wouldn’t normally?  Rage?  Easy but not applicable here.  Revulsion?  Took time to sell a seeming ally as truly repulsive and deserving of acts beyond the pale.  Terror?  No, not quite, and I couldn’t imagine a way of creating that sort of effect.  Grief?  Mauer had tried it, using the deaths of children to turn the people of Radham against the Academy.

More complex emotions, then.  Outrage, cornered-rat feeling, horror, empathy, desperation, devastation, disappointment…

…Betrayal.

I looked up, meeting Gordon’s eyes.

Betrayal, panic.  Hadn’t I just been thinking recently about how I kept going back to fire and destruction?

“You have an idea,” Gordon said.

I watched Avis leave the room.  Ready to give the signal.

I would’ve liked to follow behind and interrupt Avis before she could follow through, just to see the look on Fray’s face, but it would have been too obvious.

All of the tension in the Academy’s ranks, it was building up to a crescendo.  The people on the wall, guns in hand, cold, waiting for a battle to start, they were coiled like snakes, ready to strike.

Their eyes faced forward, but when the attack came from the sides, from allied ranks, it would be pandemonium.

“Just the commanding officers and sufficient chaos, so the rank and file look to the leader,” I said, my voice low.  “And all you need to convince the commanding officers is to assure them that the blame can be pointed at the man who is nominally in charge.”

“Who everyone hates,” Gordon said.  “How do you create sufficient chaos?”

“Without Dog and Catcher-” I started.

Fray cut me off, from the other end of the room.  “Lambs.”

We turned our full attention to her.

“I’m trying to convince these men that you’re trustworthy enough to have behind us,” Fray said.  “It’s a hard argument to make when I’m not sure myself.”

“Percy convinced me to hold back and treat you gently,” Mauer said, “Hearing your response to him, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just have my soldiers shoot you.”

Some of the men shifted their grips on their guns.

I could see the look on Percy’s face.  The man looked troubled.

“He doesn’t seem convinced.”

“Sometimes we have to sacrifice a friendship in the name of being a true friend,” Mauer said.

Percy scowled.

“This would be easier if you agreed to come,” Fray said.

“And our deal?” Mary asked.

“If you’d rather remain here and try to convince the Academy you were acting in their interest and not mine, feel free,” Fray said.  “Otherwise, I might leave this up to the Reverend Mauer.  No deal.”

“I’m not a Reverend any more.”

That is a problem, I mused.  If there was treachery afoot, and if any experiments did find themselves in question, people would wonder about us.  We were badly situated for that.

She was genuinely nervous, now, and it came through in how ruthlessly she was throwing her weight around to remove uncertainties.  Fray was a perfectionist, she overthought her plans and covered every base, until she was capable of managing any crisis that came up.  But when two came up at the same time, the loose ends of the Lambs and the issue of Cynthia acting on her own, then she couldn’t be sure she had an escape route or sufficient distraction to escape.  Too many angles to watch.

That wouldn’t do, not for her.

No, for this to be a true success, she needed to walk through a battlefield and disappear.  That could only happen if she had a measure of control over every side present.

“What do you think?” Gordon murmured.

“Option one is to reassure her that the Lambs aren’t a threat.  Join her, give up power and the little advantage we hold,” I said.

“Option two?” Mary asked me.

“We make her more unsure,” I said.  “I like option two more.”

“How?” Gordon asked.

“Last chance,” Fray declared.  “Come with us, or-”

“There’s a problem with that,” I said.

“I thought you’d say, not demonstrate,” Gordon hissed in my ear.

Fray spoke, “Mauer, you can tell your men-”

“We disarmed one of the bombs,” I said.

She stopped.

I saw her eyes fix onto a point in space, as she turned over the possibilities in her mind.

She didn’t detonate every bomb in the city when she paved the way for the Brechwell Beast.

She had the experiments patrolling the city at night, perfect for setting up more bombs.  Explosions in friendly ranks, from bombs placed in the tops of attics like the one we entered, detonating through the rooftops, multiple commanders shouting that it’s friendly mortar fire, maybe even shouting about fire from once-friendly teams, the insecurity of new teams joining, unfamiliar faces, and the intelligence gathering bodies turning tail and giving false info or helping Fray navigate her way through, while all the smoke and debris blocks the view of the street…

Pandemonium.  The man at the top gets blamed for not having control of an uncontrollable situation.

Fray looked up, meeting my eyes.

Searching for the lie.

But if one bomb doesn’t explode, she can’t predict the situation.  The tide of the fight can’t be predicted.  One side could be free to open fire on you.

“Warren,” she said.  “Find Avis.  Stop her from giving the signal.  Run.”

Warren charged out of the room.  The man with the cat warbeast leaned close to Fray, and got one word out before she indicated for him to go too.  He and his cat fled the room.

“Mauer,” Fray said.  Her eyes didn’t leave me.  “If he doesn’t say which bomb the Lambs disarmed-”

“You’re going to have to come to us for a way out,” I said.

I could see her thinking her way through the options.

She didn’t get a chance to finish her train of thought.

Nearby explosions rocked the building.  Guns fired.  I could see the concern on the faces of the others.

Had Avis given the signal already?

“That would be Cynthia, charging for freedom,” Fray said.

Then, one by one, other explosions sounded.  I could hear the tumble and crumble of falling masonry.  Shouts, gunfire, distant but so unanimous that it had to be the forces arranged at the perimeter.

“That would be your bombs,” Gordon observed, dryly.

I cleared my throat.  “Now, please, give me the damn books, Miss Fray.”

Tooth and Nail – 7.15

Mauer drew his gun.  He aimed it at Lillian’s head.  Just beside me, Lillian went rigid.

“Let’s talk,” the man said.

“Oh man,” I said.  “I’ve really been looking forward to having a conversation with you.”

“Focus,” Mauer and Gordon said, at the same time.  Lillian’s whisper-quiet “Please” sounded a moment later.

“He’s posturing,” I said.

Mauer fired.  The bullet struck hard against the wall just above Lillian’s head.  She yelped.

“Posturing with good aim,” I said.

“Don’t tempt me,” Mauer said, his voice controlled, sounding for all the world like we were talking over tea.  “Let’s focus on the matter at hand.  We may need to compromise.”

“Typically,” Gordon said, his voice dry, “A compromise involves both sides getting something, just enough that both walk away unhappy.  It’s not one side threatening to take something away.  You’re looking for a different word.”

“Negotiate, then,” Mauer said.

Gordon spread his hands.  “I assume you’re threatening to pick off the Lambs one by one until the survivors agree to lead you to safety.”

“Seems reasonable to me,” Mauer said.  “Counteroffer?”

“It won’t work,” Gordon said.  “You heard us talking to Percy.  If you shoot one of us, every last one of us will stare you down while you empty that gun in the rest, one by one.”

Gordon reached up to fix his hair.  He didn’t signal until his hand was at his side again.  Scatter.

We weren’t going to stand still if it came down to it.  If they killed one of us, the rest of us would make a break for it, and we’d make their lives hell until the attacking forces wiped us all out.

“Lillian won’t stand there and take it,” I pointed out.  “The one you’re aiming at.  She’ll freak, if she isn’t already dead.”

Lillian shot me a horrified look.

“Except Lillian,” Gordon agreed.  “But she doesn’t have the know-how to get you out of this.  She’s a supporting role.  Trust me, Mauer, the only power you have in holding a gun to her head is the power to end us and end the lives of everyone else in the room by proxy.”

Mauer didn’t waver.

Something hit the side of the building, exploding.  Not close to the windows we were near, but enough that it made everyone in the room flinch.  Mauer retained his composure and balance enough that his aim didn’t falter.

The smoke that billowed from the explosion obscured the rays of light that had been filtering out over the tops of the tables at the windows.  The room dimmed.

“He’s right,” Fray said.  “We gain nothing and lose time by trying this.  We have to act, now.”

Mauer didn’t lower the gun.  “Give them the books and have them lead us to safety, then.  You’ve had your shot, you made promises, and those promises have been broken.  If you want to contact me about moving forward with some specific elements of the plan you’ve been proposing, I’ll be open to it.  For now…”

He moved the gun away from Lillian, gesturing toward the window with the barrel.  For now, the war.

“I think it’s very possible that my plan stands and will still work,” Fray said.  “Nothing guarantees the Lambs’ way is any better.  I’m sorry, Sylvester, but I’m not convinced, and I’m certainly not convinced enough to give up any degree of insurance I might have.”

“Agreed,” Mauer said.

I spoke, “We lead you out of the battlefield by channels we specifically arranged ahead of time, to guarantee that we had a way out, Catcher might have mentioned those in his note…”

“He did,” Fray confirmed.  “I assume the timing changed in much the way the timing of your arrival was.  Without your cooperation, we won’t know which shots are paving the way and which are a prelude to a barrage.”

“Yes,” I said.  “That gets you to the perimeter.  Your choice whether you want to move on from there or stay put and hope there’s a window to go further.”

Which there wasn’t.  There was a small army beyond the most immediate perimeter.

“You’ll guide us to North Road Main.”

“I don’t know what that is,” I said.  “But no, we won’t.  The deal is to take you to the perimeter.  From there, you’re on your own.”

“North Road Main is one of three roads that leads out of the city.  With the majority of forces coming from the train station to the southwest or the Academy to the northwest, it gives us an easy route out,” Fray said.

“The perimeter, no further, in exchange for the books,” I said.

“And the other requirements I mentioned,” Mary said.  “The changes to the books.”

And Percy, Mary had left it unsaid.

Bullets struck one of the tables that had been propped up against the window.  They didn’t penetrate the thick wood.

“Not good enough,” Fray said, eyeing the table as it shifted slightly.  “The North Road.  I’ll also settle for you contacting Catcher.  He can provide some assistance.  I’ll write a note.  If you lead us to the perimeter, there’s no guarantee we won’t find ourselves in the most dangerous, difficult to penetrate area, with you signaling your allied forces to descend on us.”

I didn’t flinch or let my expression drop, even though I wanted to.  I could see her assessing me.  I’d considered the notion of luring her into a difficult spot.  Halfway because I thought it would work and hand her to the enemy in a tidy little bow, halfway because I wanted to see how she worked to get out of it.

Gordon spoke, “When we disarmed the bomb, we disrupted your ability to get to the perimeter.  We’re offering to fix that, in exchange for concessions.  Letting you get that far is a pretty big one.  If you’re not that confident in your own plan, for getting to wherever you’re going, that’s your own fault.”

Good old Gordon, landing the heavy blows.  He was such a bother to argue with.

“You’re moving us to a different location in the walls,” Fray said.  “How do you expect us to get from one point on the perimeter to the place we want to be?  What about time-sensitive elements?  No, if you’re going to make that argument, then we need more.”

“Deal with it,” Gordon said.  “That’s our offer.”

“Deliver the note to Catcher and-”

“No,” Gordon said.

Fray stood straighter, glancing at Mauer.

“I don’t think we should trust them, but I do agree with his point,” Mauer said.  “If you can’t convince them and convince me they’re worth listening to, then figure out a way to get us where we need to be to make our way out.  If you can’t do either, then perhaps you can print your books yourself, and worry every step of the way that my forces may inadvertently interfere.”

Fray didn’t respond to that.  Avis, Warren, and the doctor with the cat warbeast returned.  It gave Fray a moment to pay attention to them and pay attention to the current situation.

Having Gordon on point made sense.  When I spoke people immediately started thinking about where the traps and deception were.  Gordon portrayed a more trustworthy, straightforward image.

Which wasn’t to say he couldn’t lie or be clever.

That said, I was cringing inwardly.  I wanted to give him pointers, to tell him that Fray was in charge and her ego demanded a need for a sense of power.  That he could make a small concession and win her over.

But Fray, Avis, Warren, Mauer, and Percy were all talking among themselves, in a hushed, hurried way, while watching us very closely.  Gestures wouldn’t go unnoticed.

“Sy was right, there’s a chance we might side with you someday, if we can reconcile what you’re doing with what we all want,” Gordon spoke, breaking the silence.  “Taking our offer leaves that door open for the offer to happen.”

“And pushing my point closes it?” Fray asked.  “A very subtle way of framing an ultimatum.”

Also a very subtle way of preying on Fray’s desire to win people over and have everyone on her side.

“I don’t need to tell you you’re running out of time,” Gordon said.  “What you did, stirring things into a frenzy, people are going to calm down.”

Not soon, I thought.

“There’s still time,” Fray said, echoing my thought.  “But you’re right, there isn’t a lot of it.  If everyone agrees, we should move.”

“You actually trust them,” Mauer said.  “I don’t.”

“I don’t either,” Percy said.  “Even if one of them is mine.  I’m sorry, Mary.”

His eyes met Mary’s.

Not quite so harsh as Mary’s request that Percy be put down, but it did suggest he was stepping away, cutting ties to a similar extent.  I had little doubt the apology was genuine, but he’d made a decision that if it came down to it, he’d sacrifice Mary to save his own hide.

A gulf stood between them.

“If I may,” Fray said.  She approached Mauer.

He tensed as she drew near, then in the moment she took another step, he pointed his pistol against her side.

She raised her hands back and out of the way.  “Dolores is on the table back there.”

I turned my head.  The air-breathing octopus-thing was on the table a bit beside me.  Helen was poking at it, letting its tentacles coil around her finger in response.

Mauer watched Helen and Dolores for a moment.  He didn’t speak or move a muscle.

Hands still held back out of the way, Fray leaned close.

She said something.

Seven or eight words.

Then she stepped back, slowly lowering her hands, until they were clasped in front of her.

What’s she saying?

I want to know what she’s saying.

“What did she say?” Percy asked.

“It’s sufficient,” Mauer said.  “I’ll tell you later.”

Percy frowned, but he nodded.

“Helen,” I murmured.  “What did she say?”

“I didn’t hear.”

“Were you listening?” Gordon asked.

“Yes, and I didn’t hear,” Helen said.  She put on an annoyed expression.

Fray approached us.

What did she say?

“Coordinating an attack on us?” Gordon asked.

“No,” Fray said.  “We accept your terms.”

Gordon glanced at me, and I nodded.  He glanced at Mary, and Mary nodded.

Gordon indicated the door.  Fray stepped away from the group, heading toward the octopus.  Helen was faster, snatching it up.

“Got it,” Helen said. “I’ll bring Dolores.”

Fray didn’t say anything, apparently content to leave that situation be.

As one, we headed out into the hallway.  Soldiers were standing at attention on either side of the hall, no longer waiting tensely for things to get underway.  Less disciplined than Academy soldiers and cadets might be, they let concern show on their faces.

They weren’t convinced this situation was entirely in control, and they hadn’t seen any of Fray’s doubts or the arguing over options.

Lillian had taken out her pocket watch.  She showed Gordon, who checked, then gestured.

Good.

The second message we’d written had acknowledged the tight time limit and we’d left a request to drop additional shots after the fighting started.  Things were a touch more chaotic than I had anticipated, however.  I was really hoping that things weren’t so bad that we didn’t have an escape route, or that the soldiers we were counting on to drop the bombs and provide cover of smoke and dust weren’t on Fray’s side, disobeying because they had switched sides.

It sounded worse than it was.  For them to disobey and effectively sabotage us, they had to be on Fray’s side and simultaneously aware we weren’t.  The commander who we’d talked to had sent us to go talk to Dog and Catcher and the other experiments.  He’d heard the horn, and would have drawn the connection to the experiments.

To be on Fray’s side, know we weren’t, yet be unaware of the fact the horn had helped us?

Questionable.

That a bomb had obliterated them or the infighting was distracting them too much?

Less questionable.

I couldn’t let my nervousness show.  Eyes forward, walk with confidence, pretend everything was going according to plan.

There were gaps in this plan, but Fray’s plan was still intact.  She had believed she would have a course she could walk to freedom, with the forces on the perimeter sufficiently occupied.

A variant on that plan, how much more dangerous could it be?

It was so annoying, being a child.  We had soldiers behind us, Warren to the left of us, and to the right and a little in front of us, we had Percy and Mauer.  Visibility was limited by the fact that people were taller, and I couldn’t help but feel surrounded.  It didn’t help my growing feeling of anxiety.

This would either be marvelous or it would fail marvelously.

“The men from the other room?” Fray asked.  “If they aren’t ready now, then-

“They’ll be ready.  Get them,” Mauer said.

One of his lieutenants broke away, opening a door.

More soldiers filed into the hallway alongside the soldiers at our back.  These ones wore uniforms, but they weren’t the uniforms of the rebellion.

Cadet uniforms, military ones.

To add an element of confusion?  Or to achieve a certain goal?

It didn’t matter.

We reached the doorway.  The final group of soldiers was there, one man crouched by the door.  It was cracked open, and he peered outside.

“The situation?” Mauer asked.

“Cynthia’s group took drugs,” the man said.  “They started grinning, mad smiles, wide-eyed, veins sticking out on their faces.  No combat drug like I’ve ever seen before.”

“I know the one,” Fray said.  “Rictus grins, a full body rush.  Enhanced strength, reflexes, adrenaline.  It also demolishes the mind’s ability to manage inhibitions.  The Academy discontinued it, and it saw use in the black market for a time.  People liked how confident and invincible it made them feel.”

“It shaves off years of your life with every use,” Lillian said.  “It isn’t very sustainable to sell on the streets when four or five uses can ruin a thirty year old’s organs so badly he looks ninety inside.  Even the Academy can’t fix the kind of damage it causes.”

I gave her a curious look.

“I know stuff!”

“The cost in lifespan isn’t something Cynthia cares about,” Fray said, looking at our group’s medic.  “Nor was it the reason the Academy stopped using it.  They didn’t like the fact that less disciplined soldiers fired at friendlies, and how bad the crime rate became.  Cynthia is liable to shoot at us if we cross paths.”

“Hmm,” Mauer said.  When he spoke, it was to the assembled army of sixty-some soldiers, forty in rebellion uniforms and twenty who weren’t.  “From here on out, we shoot at her or her men on sight.”

There were one or two cheers, which drew quiet the moment Mauer shot a sharp look back.

Not much lost love.

We waited by the door.

Gordon met my eye.  He wasn’t gesturing, but I got the impression he was trying to communicate something.

Something hit, close by, the force of it making Fray and the soldier on watch work to keep the door from flying open.  Gordon had taken Lillian’s pocket watch, and the moment he was done covering his head and ear, he checked it.  He shook his head.

He met my eyes with purpose.

What are you doing? I thought.

Mary was looking between Gordon and me.  Lillian looked terrified, very small while surrounded by opposing forces, shrinking down.  Helen stroked the octopus she was carrying as if it were a dog.

Gordon didn’t break eye contact.

I looked at the open watch in his hand, checking the time while it was upside down, and then looked back up at him.

Not a flicker in his expression.

“Through the door, two by two,” Mauer was addressing his men.  “Don’t press, keep one pace behind the pair in front of you.  If you rush, you’ll get stuck in the doorway or you’ll start pushing the people in front of you, and you won’t be following them, you’ll be directing their movements.”

I saw Warren place a hand on the shoulder of the stitched girl.  He pointed at Avis.

He’s too big to pass through with someone else, I realized.

“I’ll lead the way,” Gordon said.  He finally broke eye contact with me.  “Listen to my instructions.”

An explosion sounded, a mortar shell, very close by.  The door was only open a crack, but the smell and taste of smoke and gunpowder in my mouth was enough to gag me.  I imagined my spit was a brownish-black.

Gordon watched the pocketwatch.  Then he closed it.  His lips moved slightly.

He made eye contact with me again.

I can’t read your mind, however you’d like me to.

“Sy,” Mary said.  She reached back and touched my hand.  She smiled.

“No codes, no gestures, if you please,” Fray said, sternly.

Code?  Gesture?  She’d caught something I hadn’t.

Not a gesture.  In fact, Gordon had been avoiding gestures since the beginning, except when Fray was very clearly occupied.

Code?

Before I could reach the end of the train of thought, more shells came down.  A trio, blasting into road and sending rock and mud cascading into the air, an earthen geyser.

“Now!” Gordon shouted.

The door was heaved open.  Two by two, we passed through.  Fray in the lead with the man who’d been watching the front door, Gordon and Mary, me and Lillian, Helen with Hubris and the octopus-thing, then Fray’s group, with Percy and Mauer.

The smoke had darkened the sky, the smoke was thick, and I couldn’t see ten feet in front of me.

The code.

In a way, it was like the gestures.  Our signs were abstract.  We’d started with the basic directions and six very general signs that encompassed a very wide variety of things.  The closed fist for aggression, violence, force, attack, impulse, anger.  Then we’d expanded that, adding new signs, modifying old ones.  There’d been too much need to communicate silently.

This was very similar.

Sy.  He’d been focused on me.  Not trying to read my mind or make me read his.

My mind.  My strategy, my way of thinking.

A ploy, one he couldn’t easily share in the midst of things.

I exhaled as slowly as I could, as I ran forward, blind.  I could extend that trust to him.  He’d done it often enough for me.

“Reverse direction!” Gordon called out.

I stopped before Lillian did, but I’d been expecting something.  My shoe slipped on the cobblestone road, but I caught myself.  I tugged Lillian, reached out, and prodded Helen’s side.  Giving her a nudge.

The order was called out, passed down the line.

We stood in smoke and in the line of fire, while the order for the forward charge was called out, passed down.

It took twenty seconds before we were back inside.  I was surprised it was even possible.  Humans were so naturally disorganized, and even with Mauer’s warning, I’d expected a jam.

They listened to him like nothing else, it seemed.

The door slammed closed as Fray returned inside.  The man on watch cracked it open a moment later, peering through.  The rest of us knelt or crouched on the floor.  More explosions sounded outside.  There was a warbeast on the loose on the rooftops, by the sound of it, smaller than the Brechwell Beast, larger than the cat.

“What the hell was that?” Mauer asked.  “A test?”

“Yes,” Gordon said.

“This isn’t a joking matter.  Every second we spend out there is a second we could get shot.”

“If you happened to kill us the moment you thought you had a way out, then you would have been stranded,” Gordon said.  “Now that we’ve done that, you know you’re reliant on us.  At least until we get to the perimeter.”

“Games,” the doctor with the cat warbeast said.

“Strategy,” I said.  “I assume you’ve given thought to what happens when we actually reach the perimeter?  I was working on the assumption that they wouldn’t have time to waste, or that they wouldn’t be willing to risk attacking us if we could call for an alert.”

“Lillian,” Gordon said.  “Your bag?”

Lillian shrugged off the strap for her satchel, then slid it across the floor to Gordon.

He opened it, reaching inside, and grabbed a canister.

Mauer reached for his gun.  Several others did too.

Fray reached out, extending a hand, a signal to wait, holding back.

It was a grenade, like the ones we’d used to set fires, back when I’d set Cynthia on fire, as a matter of fact.  A long lever ran down the side, and a pin was jammed in the top.

Gordon handed it to Helen, who had to disengage from the octopus.  “Hold it tight.”

She nodded.

He pulled the pin.  Nine out of ten people flinched.

“There,” he said.  “Don’t drop it, unless all is lost, okay?  That’s our insurance.  If you loosen your grip on the lever, then we all go up in flame a second or two later.”

“I have a good grip,” Helen said.

I could tell at a glance that a large number of the more important people here, Mauer, Percy, and Avis included, did not like us having insurance to this degree.

Gordon opened the pocket watch.

“Is the next one going to be a ruse too?” Percy asked.

“We’ll see,” Gordon said.

I nodded slowly.

The smoke outside was a problem in that it limited visibility and increased the chances of us making a mistake, but it was a problem that had small benefits.  Fray couldn’t look outside to clearly see the damage from her bombs or the troop movements on the roof, and the people up there couldn’t see us clearly.  Fray having people wearing Crown uniforms helped muddy the waters.

Fray liked having nine of ten degrees of control, with that tenth part being something she was free to manipulate and control.

This didn’t feel like a nine of ten.  A solid two out of ten factors in play were outside factors, the chaos of battle, the fighting atop the rooftops, and an environment I did not feel comfortable navigating.  But Gordon’s trick here had bumped us from a solid five or six to a seven.

Seven was fairly comfortable territory.

So was our seven running headlong into a wall and dipping into the twos and threes.

Gordon looked up.  He met Mary’s eyes, one hand going to his ear, protecting it.

Seconds passed.

An explosion.  Close, but not as close as the last had been.

“Go!”

We were out.  Running.

This was the one.

If I was the indicator he looked to to signal trickery the index and middle finger extended, together, Mary was the straightforward one.  The extended thumb with the hand left more open or closed.  The thumb didn’t necessarily indicate the target, but the opposite direction to the target.  One of the earlier signs, the execution, the job, the focus.  It meant to watch, prioritize.

I found myself unconsciously making the sign with my right hand, as I ran blindly through smoke, my other hand on Lillian’s upper arm.

“Stop!” Gordon called.  His voice was almost drowned out in the sound of rain, the irregular staccato of gunfire, and the distant roar of the Brechwell Beast.

We stopped.

My eyes were wide open, and I couldn’t see much of anything past Fray and the soldier at the front of the line.  There was too much smoke and rain, and the vague shapes I did register were impossible to make out at first glance.

I realized why Gordon had called the stop and I shut my eyes, turning my head away, my hand losing the gesture to cover my ear.  My forehead touched Lillian’s as I bade her to turn.

I really hoped the shock of the hit wouldn’t cause Helen to drop the incendiary canister.

I also really hoped there was a second hit.

A bullet struck cobblestone not far from where we stood.  I saw the flash of light or a spark as it bounced off.

A moment later, as if the bullet had been prophetic, the shell hit ground.

We ran through the debris, and I saw Gordon and Mary stumble on the irregular ground, where cobblestone street had been thoroughly shattered.  I was more balanced, expecting it, and helped steady Lillian.  The ground was particularly hot in one spot I stepped, and I wondered if I’d burned or melted my shoe.

Going from being unable to see through the smoke ten feet ahead of me to having the building there was a shock, as if it was lunging forward at us, rather than the other way around.

We passed through the window, Gordon perching in it to help me and Lillian up.  I let Lillian go first, looking up at the fighting on the roof.  Discrete groups, shouts, ongoing fighting, and a ape-like Warbeast standing between two groups, threatening both.

We really weren’t on their radar.

I took Gordon’s hand, and he hauled me inside.

Fray’s group, Mauer, and Percy made their way inside.  The soldiers gathered with their backs to the wall.  There wasn’t enough room immediately inside.

“I’ll take that,” Fray said, to Helen.

“Aw.”

Fray took the octopus.  It crawled up to her shoulder and wrapped itself loosely around her neck like a scarf.

“The books,” I said.

Fray looked at the stitched girl.  “I suppose it’s time.  Give the books back, Wendy.”

Wendy approached.  She handed me the backpack.

“As to the other part of our deal,” Fray said.

“What’s this?” Mauer asked.

Fray set her eyes on Percy.

Boots tramped on the floor above us.  Everyone looked, worrying we were about to face soldiers.  A gun fired, a body fell.

More boots stomped on floorboards.  Nobody came downstairs.

Mary was staring at Percy, her jaw set.

The other part of the deal.

It would be an advantage, a win for the Academy, for us, a hit to the enemy, a benefit to Mary in a way, even.

All I had to do was let the lie to Mary continue.

Less than an hour ago, Lillian had suggested I was like an abusive husband.  Manipulating, coddling, baiting people closer and then pushing them away.

I wasn’t sure if this was bait or a push.

My finger touched the ring at my thumb.  There was a faint ‘x’ on the knuckle.  I’d written it to remind myself of something.  Damn it.

“It’s awkward to admit, and I know this will cause friction,” Fray said, “But-”

Right, had to focus on the matter at hand.

“Wait,” I said.

Fray stopped short.

The Lambs looked at me.

My breath was frozen in my throat.  I couldn’t bring myself to breathe, let alone speak.

But…

When I swallowed, it was a difficult swallow.

“I lied to you, Mary,” I said, my voice soft.  I stared down Percy.  “About Percy.  There was no command phrase, he didn’t abandon you, he did intend you to lead.  When he confessed his sins to you earlier, he was lying too.”

Mary stared at me, then looked at Percy.

“He cares, Mary.  I know we might lose you by me admitting it, but- he cares enough to let you hate him, if it means you’re happier in the end, with us.  Assuming I understood that right.”

Percy straightened a little, as if he’d withered in the time since he’d been rejected by ‘his girl’.  He lowered his head in a short nod.  “You did.”

“Okay,” Mary said.

I glanced at her.

Her expression was flat.

“You were going to sell out my acquaintance?” Mauer asked Fray.

“We never formally agreed on that.  It came up, and I planned to discuss it here, before we parted ways.  Keeping in mind they don’t have much leverage anymore, beyond Helen’s promise of mutually assured destruction.”

Helen held up the canister.

The Brechwell Beast roared outside.  It was closer than it had been.

The two were talking, but all of my focus was on Mary.

I’d confessed a grave lie that I’d kept for a year and a half, and she wasn’t giving me anything at all.

No anger, no tears, no outrage.

Was she stepping away?  Figuring out how to leave?  Or, worse, was she staying, while attacking me in the worst way possible, by shutting me out and denying any and all connection between us?

“Gordon’s right, Sy,” Mary said.  “You’re really terrible at being honest.”

I don’t know what that means!  I screamed, internally.

Externally, I didn’t move an inch or make a sound.

Mauer drew his gun.  Percy reached for one as well.

“This doesn’t need to go this far,” Fray said.  “Sylvester confessed the lie, there’s no reason to hold to that part of the deal, am I right?”

“Kill him,” Mary said.  “Percy.”

“What?”  Percy asked.  “You heard what he said, he-”

“I heard,” Mary said, voice cold.  “What he just said makes more sense than what you both were saying, back in the meeting room back there, the story I heard in the past.”

“Then- this is about the children?  The work I do?  It bothers you so much?”

Mary shook her head.  “No.  You shaped me, honed me into a tool, a weapon.  You could kill a thousand children a year and it wouldn’t bother me.”

“Then why?” he asked.  There was a note of anguish in his voice. “You want me to die?”

“It bothers her,” Mary said, pointing at Lillian.  “And she’s important to me.”

“I’m assuming you can’t be convinced otherwise?” Mauer asked.

“No,” Mary said.

Mauer nodded.  His sonorous voice carried, even as he spoke to himself, “That’s problematic.”

“Mary,” Percy said.  “You’re important to me.”

Mauer turned, and with the crack of a pistol shot, he put a bullet through an anguished Percy’s head.

Percy’s body crumpled to the floor.

“We could have found another option,” Fray said, looking down.

“I’d like to go,” Mauer said.  “It’s a loss, but one I’m willing to live with if it means leaving the city before a small army closes in on us.  You’ll owe me something in compensation for expediting matters.”

“As you wish,” Fray said.  She turned to the rest of us.  “Another day.”

“Another day,” I said.

She turned her back to us, taking Warren’s hand as help to make it through the broken window.

Letting them go…

Helen held the grenade, making motions as if she was gauging her ability to accurately throw it through the window at the small army massed outside.

Gordon reached out, putting a hand on her wrist.

“No?” she asked, sounding mournful.

“Cats and cockroaches,” he said.  “Some would survive, and it would be the most exceptional ones.  Not worth it.  Besides, they could have done the same to us.”

He held her wrist firm while he took the pin from his pocket and put it through the slot.  He took the weapon from Helen.

“Doesn’t stop us from sending everything we can after them,” I said.  “For all the good it’ll do.”

“We can try,” Gordon said, nodding.  He drew in a deep breath, then exhaled.  “We’ll have to see how-”

Mary, standing beside Gordon, tilted her head to one side, until it rested against Gordon’s shoulder.  Her arm reached around his waist.  Her eyes were fixed on Percy.

“…How bad it is up there.  Are you wanting to stay?”

“No,” Mary said.  “I like being like this, but the mission comes first.”

“Mary,” Lillian said.  “You doing that for me, you didn’t-”

“You’re my friend,” Mary said.  She smiled a little.  “It’s okay.  I feel better than I have in a long time.”

“If you’re sure-”

“Mm-hmm,” Mary said, nodding, her head rubbing against Gordon’s shoulder.  Just being like this, she was closer than she’d been getting to him for a while.  Gordon seemed to be taking it in stride.  She spoke, “Thank you, everyone.  Sy especially.  I appreciate this.”

“If you’re absolutely sure you’re okay-” Gordon said.

“I will stab the next person to ask if I’m okay,” Mary said.

“Are you okay?” I asked, without missing a beat.

She moved her head off of Gordon’s shoulder, turning my way.

“Wait,” I said, “hold on.”

She approached me, drawing a knife.

She was a few feet away when she stopped.

Looking up at the stairs.

My first thought was that the enemy had circled back or come down and found us.

Worse.

Two young individuals stood on the staircase, twelve and thirteen, going by appearance alone.  I knew better.

One had red hair, parted to one side, wearing a white collared shirt only, despite the cold weather, with dark brown slacks.  He had a folded umbrella in one hand.  He had freckles on his face, and his eyes- the eyes were intense, amber colored, more like that of a wolf than a person.

Those eyes were the most alive part of him.  Helen, even in the earliest days, was better at looking like a proper human than he was.

Beside Ashton was a familiar face, dressed wrong.  The hair was still long, but it was combed straight back.  The glasses had changed, and were oval, slender, more like reading glasses than anything else.  His shirt had a high collar, not folded, with a ribbon around it, and he wore a coat with a hood, but carried no bag and held no book.  He held himself differently.

His eyes, as he looked at us, showed no glimmer of familiarity.  Recognition, yes, but not in the way it counted.

“You let them go?” he asked.

Tooth and Nail – 7.16

It’s him.  Not him.

Worst timing possible.

Greet him with a smile.  Figure out what to say.

My expression remained blank, eyes turned up to the pair on the stairwell.  No words left my lips.

Something screamed atop the rooftops.  The gunfire was incessant.

He came down the stairs, with Ashton following just a step behind him.  He stopped at the base of the stairs, looking us over.

Hubris growled.  Gordon touched the dog’s head, and Hubris went quiet, though his posture was still aggressive.  He moved closer, until he was between Gordon and the pair, on guard.

He reached into a pocket, withdrawing a flat leather case, thinner than most wallets, and no longer than his hand was.  His fingers curled around the end as he held it up.

“I’m supposed to give you this,” he said.  “But seeing what we saw-”

“It’s complicated, Jamie,” Gordon said.

“I’m sure,” was the reply.

That’s not Jamie.

He took a moment, considering, feeling the weight of the little package, before tossing it ten feet over to Gordon.

Gordon unzipped it.  He handed out vials small enough that a finger couldn’t slide into them.  One to Mary, one to Lillian.

“Sy doesn’t need one,” the boy with Jamie’s face said.  “Helen either.  That’s three days of doses for the rest of you, Hubris included.”

Gordon nodded.  He removed the stopper from the vial and downed it.  He grimaced.  Lillian and Mary did much the same.

“I know,” the boy said.  “It’s just for a little while.”

His eye moved over to Percy’s body.

“What did you hear?”  Gordon asked.

“Why don’t you tell me what happened, first?” the boy asked, calm.  “I’ll see if it matches up to what we saw and heard.”

He was confident, wary.  Jamie had always hung in the background, quiet, nose in his books.  Jamie’s confidence was a different sort.

“Sy?” Gordon asked.  “Feel up to taking a stab at explaining?”

The words caught in my throat as I stared at the boy.

Anything else, I could have managed.  I could have found the words, braved my way through, been clever, whatever needed to happen.

But he was here, staring at me with Jamie’s eyes, no familiarity, loaded to bear with accusation.

That, I couldn’t deal with.  It penetrated every defense I had to hit me right where it hurt most.  A part of my mind and feelings I hadn’t figured out how to patch up the missing pieces, fix the pieces that weren’t working with, or even muster the feelings I needed to cope with it at all.

“Guess not,” Gordon said.  “Sorry.”

I shook my head a little.

“Might be for the best,” the boy said.  “I’ve been reading the books, trying to get caught up.  I’m not sure I’d believe what Sy said.”

“Not being sure about Sy?  Eighty percent of what you need to learn, when it comes to Sy,” Gordon said, a light smile on his face.  “Realizing you have to take that leap anyway?  That’s another ten percent.  The rest is crammed into the remaining ten percent.”

The boy smiled a little.  Too similar.  I looked away.

“Um,” Lillian said.  “Hi, Jamie.”

“Hi.”

“I’ll try explaining?  Because I’m probably the worst liar here, I think?”

“That would be great.”

“It’s good,” Gordon said.

“A while back, Fray reached out to us, too, back-”

“Dame Cicely’s,” the boy said.  “It’s in the books.”

Lillian nodded.  She fidgeted nervously with the strap of her satchel.  “We didn’t take that offer.  But she reached out to Dog and Catcher and some others.  They switched sides.”

The boy’s eyes narrowed.  He looked up at the ceiling.  “Dog and Catcher told us to wait here for you.”

“Did they say anything else?” Gordon asked.

“Yes,” the boy said.  “They said, ‘it’s a shame we have to say goodbye so soon after saying hello for the first time’.”

“They’re leaving,” Mary said.  “We found them out, they can’t stay, so they’re going to do what they have to do and then disappear.”

“It makes sense,” the boy said.  “The tone, the wording.”

He said it like it was a prompt to keep going.

Lillian fidgeted more.  She glanced at me, then looked away, the eye contact equivalent of touching a hot pan handle.  “We realized we were in a bad situation, that what’s happening up there was about to happen.  No way to avoid it, unless we left the area and abandoned the mission.   We debated whether or not to take her offer to join, and we decided not to.  But the fact that she’d asked, it meant we could get close.”

The boy nodded.

Lillian continued, “Being there was better than being here, especially when we weren’t sure how she would get bullets to start flying and bombs exploding.  Being there in the other building meant we could talk.  Mary could talk to Percy, we could talk to Fray, try to guide things…”

“We got them to kill Percy, at Mary’s request, and we got information, coming from there to here with each side holding the other at gunpoint, in a manner of speaking.  We let them go because there was nothing we could do against their numbers and the kind of force they could bring to bear,” Gordon finished.  “They left us behind because Fray wants to keep an open dialogue.”

The boy looked between each of us, then looked back at Ashton.  Ashton was giving Hubris a a pat on the head.  He looked at his companion, and very softly said, “It makes sense?”

The boy in Jamie’s skin nodded in response.  He was agreeing, but still didn’t look sure.

“I know it looks bad,” Gordon said.  “But there weren’t any options that were great, once we realized what was happening.”

“I know,” the boy said.  “I believe her, and I know what you mean, about the options.  I’ve read the books.  The ones I had, that is.”

“Ah,” I said.

One syllable, that was better than nothing at all.

I took the backpack, and I held it out.

He crossed the distance, and he took the bag from me.  He checked the weight, then handed it back.

“Keep it for now?” he asked.  When my expression was one of confusion, he said, “I’m tender.  Too many days in the chair.”

I nodded.  I took the bag, and slung it over my shoulders, stepping back.  Lillian touched my upper arm.

“Like I said, I read the books,” he said.  “I’ve got this mental picture of each of you, all from words on the page.  Months and years of writing and notes.  Mentally, I can sort it, the dates, I can pull all the details together into something that should be…”

He gestured, unable to find the word.

That was odd.

“Three-dimensional?” I asked.

He smiled, a soft, easy expression.  “Thank you.  I haven’t met any of you, and it feels flat in my head, even if I try to pull it all into a shape.  I know the particulars, how the Lambs operate, how each of you operate, the hand-signs, the details of past missions, but it’s all still images, broken up.  I know exactly what you mean, about the issues you run into during a mission, except in a very page-turning, pen-on-paper way.  I understand there aren’t many great options, sometimes.  That we scrape by when things get bad.”

“You’ll pick things up,” Gordon said.  “It’s good to have you both with us.”

Gordon extended a hand.  The boy shook it, then pulled Gordon into an awkward sort of half-hug.

Then he hugged Mary, Helen, and Lillian in that order.

I was the last one he approached.

In the background, Helen was greeting Ashton.  “It’s so sad!  They gave you red hair!”

“Helen!” Mary rebuked her, while keeping one eye on my imminent exchange with the new boy.

“Everyone says that a man can’t be truly handsome if he has red hair!  And freckles too!”

“You don’t say that to his face, Helen.”

Oblivious to the ongoing conversation behind him, he stood a short distance from me.

“Ashton doesn’t mind,” Helen said.

“I don’t mind,” Ashton said.

My view was partially blocked by the boy who stood in front of me, but I saw Helen throw her arms around Ashton, hugging him.  He stayed there, arms limp at his side, as she rocked him back and forth.  She said something I guessed to be ‘little brother’.

I returned my focus to the boy.  Everyone that wasn’t Helen or Ashton seemed to be watching us.  More pressure.

There were a hundred things that were going through my head, things I could say and every single one of them had bad implications.

Whatever.  I would try one.  Starting simple.

“Is there something I can call you?” I asked.

“Jamie,” he said.

I flinched.  My eyes found the ground and I couldn’t bring myself to look away from it.  Not even his feet.

“Oh,” he said, realizing.  “It’s the name they gave me.  I think they would be annoyed if I used a different one.  I’m sorry.”

I couldn’t respond to that.

He would have to be Jamie.  Just like there were other Sylvesters in the world.  A different person with the same name.  He just so happened to have the same face, voice, and expressions.

It was hard to breathe, like I somehow had the weight of ten bags of books pressing down on my chest.

“Did they keep, find, rebuild anything?” I managed.

“Not the things you’re asking about, Sy,” he said.  “They gave me lessons, while digging for the key things.  How to walk again, how to speak, how to read, how to get dressed.  When it got too hard, they focused the lessons on re-teaching it from scratch, hoping that I’d be able to dredge up those memories if I could meet them halfway.  Some I did, others I… learned how to do all over again.  There are gaps, simple things I’m still re-learning, but they thought I was ready enough.”

“That’s why they didn’t want you to see us?” Gordon asked.  “Because you might have met us halfway to rebuild memories?”

“They thought it would muddy the waters.”

I looked up, meeting Jamie’s eyes, “Then there’s a chance that, if you have an appointment after this, having met us again…”

I realized what I was saying.  That weight on my chest wasn’t going away.  I faltered, falling silent again.

“I think, if that chance existed, they wouldn’t have let me out to see you.  They’re more focused on other things.  Skills, background knowledge.  How efficiently knowledge can be pulled from the tanks when the slate is clean.”

I could still hear the muffled violence and noise outside, fire, destruction, screaming, unheard orders to do this or do that, all while men died.  It felt like  a pretty good match to what I was feeling inside of my chest.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I nodded.

“You’ll have to tell me about him,” he said.  “Okay?  About the first Jamie?”

I exhaled, a long shuddering breath.

Okay.

Somehow, the fact that he’d asked that question, it made this bearable.  Meeting halfway.

I extended a hand.  I felt Jamie’s hand in mine as he shook it.

That done, I stepped around him, putting him behind me.  I approached Ashton, who Helen was now hugging from behind.  The heel of one hand wiped tears out of one eye.  The heel of the other hand wiped at the other.

Ashton.  He stared at me with those amber-yellow eyes.

My voice didn’t come out at full strength or even half-strength as I spoke, “Hi Ashton.  I’ve been wanting to meet you for a really long time.”

“Hi… Sylvester?”

I nodded.

“You’re sad,” he said.

I felt like my voice would catch if I spoke out loud, so I just nodded.

“I can make you happy again.”

“No you can’t, dum-dum,” I said, my voice still faint and hoarse.  “I’m immune to you.”

“Oh.”

“Me too,” Helen said, still hugging Ashton from behind, rocking him slightly from side to side.  “But that’s because I’m not human.”

I extended a hand.  Ashton took it.

“No,” I said.  “Like this.  Firmer.  Grip harder.  Keep your wrist straight, not floppy.”

It took three tries before it was right.  On that one firm shake, as was proper between men, I pulled him closer, into a one-armed hug, a little more graceful than Jamie’s had been with Gordon.  Helen let him go just in time.

He received it with the same enthusiasm and effectiveness as a wet rope.

I released him, backing away and stepping to the side, turning around to look at the Lambs as a whole.  Helen reached out to pat down Ashton’s hair where it was sticking up, post-hug.  Then she wrapped her arms around him, one cheek pressed against the side of his head.

“He’s so new,” Helen said.  “Like a newborn calf who’s learning to stand, or a chick fresh out of the egg.”

“He’s doing a lot of the learning-from-scratch I’m doing,” Jamie said.  “We had some of the same lessons.  They sent him with me because they thought he’d learn better in the field than in a sterile room.”

“We’ll make do,” Gordon said.  “Speaking of…”

“What’s next?” Mary asked, more to finish Gordon’s question than to ask it.

“We could hunker down, keep our heads down, and wait this out,” Gordon said.

Please no.  Not with Jamie here.  Too difficult.

“Or we could go after Fray,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.  “That.  Great.  Let’s do that.  She said the North road.  I don’t know where that is, but we can figure it out.”

“I do,” Jamie said.  “The road, I’ve seen the city’s map, I know the layout.”

I felt a momentary dissonance.  How could I forget we had that resource, when I’d been having trouble remembering we didn’t when he wasn’t here?

“Okay, alright, that’s great, of course,” I said.  Speaking too quickly.  Calm down.  “We’ll have to catch up to her, anticipating her route, we still have to figure out a way to deal with the small army that is keeping her company, and we need to get away alive afterward.  But that’s not too hard.  The Lambs have done worse.”

“Not easy,” Gordon said.  “We’re in a warzone.  The rooftops aren’t free to roam on.  We’d have to take the streets.  Keeping in mind she made a few shortcuts with those bombs.”

“Where?” Jamie asked.

“I couldn’t tell you,” Gordon said.  “Not off the top of my head.  General direction, maybe.”

“Then it doesn’t work,” Jamie said.  “If she’s more familiar with the shortcuts than we are, then we’re not going to catch up.”

“We can,” I said.  “We can figure it out on the way.”

“No,” Gordon said.  “My heart doesn’t feel great, Hubris was nudging my hand earlier.  If we were sure, I’d go for it, push just a little while longer, but we aren’t sure.”

Damn it, no.  I don’t want to stay cooped up here, feeling like I’ve got a weight on my chest and someone’s hand around my throat, pushing my Adam’s apple in.

“It’s more problematic than that,” I said.  “The other experiments turned coat, they’re leaving.  In the wake of all of this, we’re going to come under scrutiny.  If we don’t have actual results, something a little bit better than Percy’s corpse, then that’s going to hurt us.”

“That bird has flown the coop,” Mary said.  “We’ll manage.”

“No,” I said, my voice firm now.  “No.  Not like that, not like this.  We’re not giving up like that.”

“You think we can catch Fray?” Gordon asked.

“No,” I said.  Then I thought again.  “Yes.  It depends.”

“On?”

“Everything that’s going on up there,” I said.  “We should split up.  Two groups.”

Mary spoke, “Sy, I understand if you need space, but-”

“Listen,” I said.  I’d been too forceful, in saying it, like I was telling her to shut up.  I was letting emotion seep into my words, fighting too hard to avoid being sad, speechless, useless.  I wanted to do something.  “Listen to me, treat this as part of the mission, then decide if I’m doing it for ulterior reasons.”

“Okay, Sy,” Mary said.

“Two groups.  We need to balance the groups.  Group one, Ashton, Gordon, Helen.”

“You sure?” Gordon asked.  The quickest on the draw, at least while Mary was still slightly preoccupied with Percy’s death.  “You-”

He saw me start to react.

“Listening,” he said.

“My group, Mary, Jamie, Lillian.  You’re up to climbing?”

There were nods.

“I’m not athletic, but I’ve been exercising, trying to keep the scars flexible, so the sessions in the chair are easier,” Jamie said.  “I’m pretty sure I can climb.”

It was another person in Jamie’s body.  I couldn’t remember Jamie ever putting in extra effort to exercise, nor did he like talking about the scars.

Had he, I reminded myself.  Past tense.

The books on my back felt like a dead weight, devoid of personality, or even familiarity.  There was no association anymore.  The thirteen year old boy that stood a few feet away was a constant reminder and yet the furthest thing from a comforting presence.

“Sy?” Gordon asked.

I’d been staring off into space, thinking too hard.

“We’re listening,” Mary said.

“Gordon, you and Helen are babysitting Ashton.  Get him to the allied command.  He’s going to stretch his legs, practice in the field for the first time.  Let’s see how good of a manipulator he is.  We’re ending this conflict.”

“Easier said than done,” Gordon said.  “Bullets are flying, we don’t know what the battlefield up there is like.”

“You can get across fairly easily,” Jamie said.  “We got up and made it this far, but there’s a hole in the roof up there, and we needed the help of Dog and Catcher to get from the roof to the safer part of the top floor.”

“Show us.”

Just like that, we were making our way upstairs.  The Lambs, greater in number to what had been originally intended.  Minus one Evette, plus one Sylvester and a Mary.

And a dog.

The second floor was empty.  A living room, a kitchen, filled with dust and black smoke, to the point that our footfalls were swiping away stretches of soot and powder.

The roof had been blasted open.  The attic-level floor was just as dirty, with floorboards scorched black, blackened lumber still smouldering, lying scattered here and there.

“That side is harder to climb.  My group will take it.  You guys, go the opposite way.  Keep going until you find someone in charge, at least two people at the highest points up the ladder who’re directing the armies are in Fray’s pocket, perpetuating this stupid civil war.  Get control over that situation.  It shouldn’t be hard, once you find them – I doubt they want their own people getting shot any more than is necessary.  Fray’s superweapon moles are going to be running by now, there shouldn’t be too much interference.”

“And then?”

“Once that’s settled, catch up with us,” I said.  “We’ll see how well this works.”

“Okay.”

“Good luck.”

Gordon gave me a mock salute.  Helen, meanwhile, had Ashton climb on her back, arms around her neck, while she prepared to climb.

When I turned to look at the slope of wreckage my team had to scale to get to the rooftop proper, I realized Jamie was staring at me.

Focus on the mission.

If I focus hard enough to block everything out, and my effectiveness is going to skyrocket.

“You’re sure it’s safe?” I asked.

“Not sure, but we weren’t getting shot at.  The focus seems to be along different flanks.  Two pairs of major groups limited in movement by the destroyed rooftops, focusing on each other,” Jamie said.

I nodded, turning to stare out at what mostly amounted to a ring, loosely circling Fray’s building.  I could see smoke here and there, and damage elsewhere.  Muzzles flashed and fires periodically sprung up.

“Let’s go.”

It wasn’t fast going, but I was fixated on the task.  I checked every handhold and foothold as I scaled the blackened rubble.  Some was still hot or warm to the touch.  Other parts of it were slick with a mingling of damp and the film on the burned wood.

Once I was firmly on the rooftop, I stood straight, surveying the battlefield and the city beyond, squinting to try and make out what I could of the city at large.  Rain streamed down through my hair and down my face.  Refreshing and cold.  Very, very cold.

The Brechwell Beast was close.

The others finished climbing up.  Mary and I both gave Lillian a hand.  Mary helped Jamie.

We ran as well as we were able, heads down, making sure to keep our balance where we could, skirting around a hole in the roof.

The nearest group of soldiers were aiming guns at us by the time I was able to see them.

Badge in hand, I held up my hands, slowing to a walk.

I could see the confusion on some of the soldier’s faces.  I could see bodies strewn on the rooftop behind them, the furthest point from their front line.  This was only the rear guard.

“Take me to your commander,” I said.

“Who the hell are you?”

I wasn’t in the mood for this.  I extended the badge in their direction.  “I’m the only person here who knows exactly what’s going on.”

He took the badge, squinting at it.

“While you’ve been shooting, the people you were supposed to be watching for got away.  That building down there is empty now.  Partially your fault, partially ours, but I want to remedy that.  Take us to the person in charge.”

“Stay put,” he said, before turning to the other men.  “Watch them.”

He took my badge away with him.

I didn’t like that.

I didn’t like standing still.  I was very aware of the people behind me.

“Lillian,” I said. “Can you help the wounded?”

“I can,” she said.

“You stay put,” one of the soldiers said.  “And stay quiet.”

I closed my eyes.

That last part.  The ‘stay quiet’.  I appreciated that.

It meant I didn’t have to talk.  Didn’t have to explain.

Mary and Lillian were huddled together, both wearing raincoats.  They were talking.  Saying a lot that I wasn’t privy to.

I doubted they had ever been closer.  Mary doing what she’d done, for Lillian…

Even the fact that Mary had put her head on Gordon’s shoulder, that was something.  She’d been gravitating towards him, a stiff arm’s-length relationship, she hadn’t let herself get close.

And then, all of a sudden, with Percy gone, she’d let down that guard.

She’d decided.  Closure, something that had been agonizing her put to rest.

I looked at Jamie, who was staring off in the direction the others had gone, standing straight, hands in his pockets.  Water had beaded his spectacles to the point I doubted he could see through them, but they were the reading type, easy enough to look over, with a change in the angle of his head.  His hood was up, but his hair was still getting damp at the very ends of the very front.

Minutes passed.  I was glad for the quiet.  I was disappointed to see the soldier that had ordered us to stay quiet stepping away.

Well, perhaps not the worst thing.

“Which way to the North Road?” I asked, breaking the silence.

There were no barked orders or threats.  The other men were too cold, stressed, and scared to be bothered, it seemed.

Jamie glanced at me.  Then he turned, taking in the city, and pointed.  His finger traced a line, and I matched that line to the curve of one street.  Now that I looked, it was twice as wide as the others.

“Sy, are you sure she went that way?” Mary asked.  “Fray could have deceived us, said one thing, while planning another.”

“When under that much stress?  No.  At most, she’s expecting us to expect that.”

Mary nodded.

“It’s gone quiet,” Jamie said.

I looked at him.

“The gunfire from that end.  It’s faltering.”

I nodded.

“Already?” Mary asked.

“It’s Ashton’s specialty,” I said.

“Does that mean you’re going to adjust how you operate again?” Mary asked.

“No,” I said, with a heavy heart.  “No need, not yet.”

“You,” a soldier spoke behind me.

Mary and Lillian stood.  Jamie and I turned.

It was the officer we’d spoken to earlier.  He was with another man, blond, young, and wearing a very ornate outfit with less decoration on the breast.  Less medals, less accomplishments.

The most hated man in Brechwell?

I took my badge back.

“Does this man serve under anyone but you?” I asked.

The blond man raised his eyebrows.

“No,” he said.  “Why?”

“Then he helped instigate this infighting,” I said.

I saw the man’s expression change, and in that flicker of surprise, I knew I was right.

“He what?” the Headmaster General asked me.

“My colleagues are already rounding up one or two of the others.  We’re about to find out half of the superweapons are gone, if not more,” I said.  “Working with the enemy.  I’ll explain in time.  For now, I would recommend arresting him.”

The Headmaster General looked at the man, who was turning red, visible even in the rain and the gloom.

“Lies,” he said.

I didn’t flinch, only waited.

Everyone wanted something, everyone had a weakness.  I’d identified Brechwell’s weakness fairly soon after visiting.  Which reminded me…

“He helped goad the friendly fire, he helped enemy forces slip through and operate unnoticed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he helped let the people through when the Academy was set on fire, or changed what was stored where, to help the flames spread,” I said.

“The fighting has stopped,” Jamie said, just behind me.  “You can hear there aren’t as many bullets being fired, and the explosions are slowing down.”

“You lose nothing by arresting him now,” I said.  “Question him later, after facts have come to light.  You’ll find he’s trying to make you look bad.  You can blame us if we’re wrong, and take the credit if we’re right.”

The man’s face was getting redder still.  For all that people seemed to hate him, the Headmaster General seemed to be holding his composure.

“Arrest him,” he ordered the men.

There wasn’t a fight.  Face red, glaring, the man was quickly seized by four lesser officers.

“I hope you’re right,” the Headmaster General said.

“There’s another part to this.  The allied forces and reinforcements are coming from the southwest, primarily?”

“Yes.”

“The enemy is gone, they’re making a run for it.  Let’s make life harder for them, or see if we can’t reveal some more of your traitors.”

“How?”

“Have the men in the towers direct the Brechwell Beast along the North Road.”

He stared at me, analyzing.

“If people in the towers shoot to change or confuse its course, then you know they’re on her side.  You can’t have people like that at your Academy while you rebuild,” I said.

The Headmaster General nodded.  He leaned close to one of the remaining officers, whispering orders, and then sent the man scampering off.

“I’m staying with you, until this is all resolved,” he said.

“It’s as resolved as it will get,” I said.  “We pick up the pieces, now, and pay mind to the aftermath.”

It wasn’t fast, the transmission of orders, or the initial movement of the Beast.  Despite his promise to stay with us, the General stepped away to coordinate the passing on of messages.

Jamie pointed the way, figuring out the routes Fray might have taken, the places she could be, assuming she was making a beeline for freedom.

“This won’t stop her,” Mary said.  “A surprise attack by the Brechwell Beast?  It won’t remove her from the picture, she’s too canny.”

“Her?  No.  But she has a small army with her.  Can all of them get to cover?  There’s got to be an inverse to the cats and cockroaches principle.”

“We don’t have one,” Lillian said.

“You need one,” I said.  “Always count on some degree of incompetence, in a sufficiently large group.”

The Brechwell Beast was moving.  Picking up speed.

“It’s on the North Road,” Jamie said.

It had been quiet too long, my focus elsewhere.  The sound of his voice made my heart leap, then fall three times as far as it had risen.

I had never missed my best friend more.

“Lowering its head,” the General said.  “It spotted something.”

It took three seconds.  One attack.

Then the Beast continued on its way.

“We’re done,” I said.  “Nothing more we can accomplish here.  Let’s go find the others.  You can break the news to them, Jamie.”

“The news?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

My heart was heavy.  “I know.  I’ve figured it out, why they would go for Ashton and not Evette.”

“Ah, yes.”

“What?” Mary asked.

“Redundancy,” I said.  “Two social manipulators, two people who can fight.  Why?  Think about it.”

“I’m thinking about it, but, they don’t expect any of us to die?  Or are they- they’re not canceling a project?”

I could hear the alarm in her voice.  I could see the relief as I shook my head.

A few ‘pops’ of gunfire suggested that things hadn’t entirely settled down in Brechwell.

“They’re going to split up the Lambs.  Or at least prepare for it to happen soon,” I said.

Enemy (Arc 7 – Boys)

Ashton

“Here we go again,” Sylvester said.

Ashton stared at the boy, uncomprehending.  Here we go again?  What did he mean?

He said a lot of things that were hard to puzzle out.

Understanding was important, the people back home kept saying.  Had to learn, had to study.  Ashton was here to study by experiencing.  But Ashton had more questions than there was time to ask.  If he started asking then he might never stop.  Jamie didn’t mind, but Jamie wasn’t the only person here.  The train car was packed with people, and people that listened to Ashton speak for too long had a way of acting funny and getting concerned.

Then he had to make them less concerned.

But that was a problem too, Jamie said.

Click click click click.  Hard shoes tapped the floor of the train car.

Here we go again, Ashton realized.  It was the woman again.  He turned his head, looking up, just as she came into view.  She was tall and pale and had dark hair.  She was more like the pictures of pretty ladies they had shown Ashton than the pictures of the ugly people.  That was a hard thing to figure out.  If he paid too much attention to what made people pretty, the parts of the face, then he still made mistakes.

Jamie had figured that out first, after watching Ashton’s class on people, faces, and acting.  Jamie had found a medical textbook and showed it to Ashton, and Ashton had called the woman in that book pretty.  That upset a lot of people.  They asked him questions and Jamie said that the way her face was shaped, the shape of her eye, the look of her eyebrows, nose and mouth all seemed right.

But the drawing of the woman in the book had a problem with the eye.  The woman here had no scar on her face, no missing parts, no pocks or poxes.  She looked young and smooth and wore makeup with a uniform that meant she was a member of the staff.

She put a hand on Ashton’s head as she leaned in between the two benches the Lambs sat on.  “Can I get you anything?”

“No,” Gordon said, sounding tired.

“We have biscuits in the staff’s car.”

“You’ve mentioned the biscuits,” Gordon said.  “No thank you.”

“Something to drink?”

“No,” Gordon said, firmly.  “Thank you.  We need some privacy, please.”

“The train arrives shortly.”

“Thank you,” he said, for the hundredth time.”

“I’ll give you a hand when you step off the train.”

“No need.  Thank you.”

“No need,” Ashton echoed Gordon, voice soft.  He was bad at controlling his volume for different situations, so he spoke quietly just to be sure.  Most people listened when he talked.

The woman walked away.  Ashton stared at her, watching her go.

“What’s that,” Sylvester asked.  “Thirty times?”

“Thirty-one.  Close,” Jamie said.

“Bully for me,” Sylvester said.

“You need to learn some control, Ash,” Gordon said.

“Okay,” Ashton said.  “It’s a problem?”

“It’s annoying,” Mary said.  “We’re supposed to be covert.  Having people flocking to us?  Not covert.”

“I could push her away.”

“Don’t,” Jamie said.

“I think that would be a horrible idea,” Jamie said.  “Look.”

Ashton stared at the point of Jamie’s finger.

“No,” Jamie said.  His expression and tone were patient.  Ashton remembered that lesson.  “Imagine a line, drawn along my arm and out past the point my finger extends, where does that line go?”

Ashton knew his brain didn’t work like a human’s did.  When he imagined something new, he had to work to do it, and the things he imagined overwrote the things he saw.  The line appeared, red because Ashton preferred the color red.  He followed it, head turning, and had to work to correct it so it was mostly straight.

Sitting across the aisle was a family.  The two younger children and the mom were staring at the Lambs.  The mom raised her hand in a small wave, smiling.  Behind the family was a window, looking out on fields and trees.  An orchard.

“I’m pointing at the family.”

Ashton nodded.  Nodding was the thing people did when they wanted to say ‘yes’ or to agree, but didn’t want to say something.  He was supposed to nod if he would say yes more than twice in a very short time, which was often when he was getting a lot of instructions.  He wasn’t supposed to talk too much until he learned how conversations worked, so he’d chosen to nod.

“If you try to make people go away, it makes them feel uneasy, scared, sick, or angry,” Jamie said, his voice quieter than before.  Jamie’s hand had gone back to his lap, and the red line that stretched out from his fingertip was pointed at the train car wall under the window.  “If you do that in this train car, where people have been breathing you in for a long time…?”

Ashton looked around.

“Chaos and panic?” Sylvester suggested.

“Yes,” Jamie said.  “I was asking Ashton, though, because it was a teachable moment.”

“Ah, right.”

Chaos and panic.

Ashton watched as people all around him started getting up from their seats, hitting each other, pushing, trying to get away.  He could hear them as they made noise.  They weren’t real people, only his imagination, and he wasn’t good at imagining people.  The blood-stained pictures in his mind’s eye were distorted, the faces weren’t symmetrical – that was the part about the one-eyed woman’s face that the acting teacher had explained was important – and some had only one eye, or eyes in the wrong place, or stretched out black circles for mouths.

He’d seen a lot of blood spatters during and after the fighting in Brechwell.  The organ structures in his head, described as coral-like in appearance by one of his doctors, were busy calling those images from his memories, painting them around the train car.  Sometimes the scale was wrong, or it was the wrong angle, against the wrong surface.

But he was supposed to practice, and it was pretty enough to look at, so he let the images and the spatters and the dead bodies keep overlapping, even though none of it made sense anymore.

Jamie was talking, he realized.  He made the imagined-hallucinated screams stop so he could understand.

“-when he gets more control.”

“Nuanced,” Sylvester said.

“We hope,” Jamie said.

Ashton nodded.  He wasn’t wholly sure that he understood what they were saying, but sitting still and doing nothing bothered people sometimes.  Jamie said he was supposed to practice when and how he spoke and participated, even if he got it wrong, but only with the Lambs.

“It’s interesting,” Sylvester said.  “Figuring out how to move this particular game piece, with all of the inherent problems it brings to the picture.”

“Game pieces?” Lillian asked.  “Is that how you see us?”

“Only when we’re playing a game, Lil,” Sylvester said.  He looked to one side and then groaned.

Click click click click…

“I have mints in my purse, if you’d like-”

“No,” Gordon said.  “Thank you, miss.”

“Okay, I just thought you should know the train is stopping now.”

“Thank you,” Gordon said.

“I’ll help you with your bags.”

“No need.  Thank you.”

Ashton turned his head to look up at the woman.  His imagination had the father from across the aisle swing the smallest of the children by one ankle, the head cracking open against the back of Ashton’s seat.  Blood flew into the woman’s face.  She didn’t move or flinch.

That was false.

He was supposed to practice.  He imagined it happening again, her expression changing.  What were the right emotions?  Disgust and fear.  The two put together, what was it?  Horror.

He watched the scene replay, over and over, trying to piece it together until it looked like something that should happen.

“Ashton,” Gordon said.  “Pay attention.”

Ashton realized the woman was gone.  The scene broke down into constituent parts, those parts scattering.  He turned back to Jamie.

“Don’t forget your umbrella,” Gordon said.

“Don’t open it until we’re out of the train car,” Jamie corrected.

Ashton bent down and picked up his umbrella.  The others were getting their coats on.  He didn’t have one, because using an umbrella was easier than remembering how to get dressed in a way that didn’t draw attention.

“Try to focus, okay?  I know you and Jamie aren’t facing the same danger as the rest of us, but what comes next matters.”

Ashton nodded.

Focus.  He stopped practicing.  The images went away, one by one.  He looked across the aisle, and the images there went away too.

The train stopped before he was finished.

The Lambs made their way out, grabbing their bags from the compartment by the door.  The man at the bottom of the stairs down to the train platform helped each of them, smiling at Ashton as Ashton stared up at him.

There was a group waiting for them.  Ashton’s doctors were among them.  The department heads, the new Academy Headmaster, Professor Hayle, Professor Ibott, and a number of others Ashton didn’t recognize stood at a point just past the exit from the station.

“Hoo boy,” Gordon said.

Ashton watched the family that had been across the aisle walk past.  The youngest child’s head was imagined-hallucinated to be broken apart from when his head had been smashed against the back of the seat, contents leaking out.  Brains were gray but they looked pink when seen fresh because of the blood in and on them.  Ashton left the little boy like he was, because it was pretty, and because red was his favorite color.

Gordon

Gordon’s hand reached down to find Hubris’ head.  He gave it a pat and a scratch, more for his own security than for Hubris.  Mary stood beside him.  That was security of another sort.

Scares like this were bad for his heart.

“Lord Duke, Lord, Headmaster, esteemed professors,” Gordon greeted the committee in his best guess at order of hierarchy.  There was a new noble as part of the group, and Gordon didn’t recognize the man.

The Duke and the new noble were wearing hunting clothes, pants clinging to their legs, long jackets.  The noble in the Duke’s company was younger, no older than eighteen, as far as age could be estimated by appearance when a noble was concerned.  He had a pointed, jutting chin, stood tall at seven feet, narrow and long-necked.  A swan turned human.  Graceful, imperious, and, Gordon knew, swans were absolute bastards when met face to face.

Like the Duke, the man’s hair was long and golden, but his hair was straight and flowed straight down his back, more supple than hair should be.  He wore a checkered scarf in yellow and black.  His teeth, as he smiled, seemed wrong somehow, too uniform and white, and his fingers were especially long, poking out of the embroidered sleeve of a hunting jacket.  The nails were long and sharp, and the fingers were marked with jewelry.

He wore a sword, Gordon noted.  Noble anatomy, modified to be stronger, faster, inhuman by most measures.  Gordon couldn’t say why, but he had the vague sense that the man could and would draw and use that sword to dispatch anyone who insulted him.

Sylvester would be able to say why he gave off that impression, Gordon knew.  All Gordon had in this situation were his instincts.  He’d heard of the mad nobles, the dangerous ones, and this one felt more dangerous than even the Duke.

Please don’t talk, Sylvester.  Don’t say anything.

“This is the Baron Richmond,” the Duke said.  “A cousin.  We were near Brechwell when we heard of the situation in Brechwell.  Genevieve Fray spotted and effectively cornered.”

Lower in status than the Duke by six orders of nobility, Gordon estimated.  He wouldn’t speak out of turn.  That was good.  Gordon could imagine the man establishing his presence through violence and the making of examples.

“Walk with us,” the Duke said.  “Your bags will be looked after.”

Gordon’s, “Yes, my lord,” joined a number of others.

He didn’t even wait to see if the Lambs listened.  The Baron fell in step beside the Duke with no trouble.  The pair walked fast enough that their retinue and the other professors had to work to keep up.  For the Lambs, especially the smaller ones, Ashton and Sylvester, that was doubly difficult.

The crowd parted, people already had their heads and eyes toward the ground.  As the Duke advanced, people of all social classes dropped to their knees on the damp road.  It was as though an invisible wave preceded him, knocking people down.

“Who have we lost to her side?” the Duke asked.  He didn’t turn around.

The Baron was watching over one shoulder.  Gordon felt uneasy.

“Out of the superweapons, Dog and Catcher, to be sure, my lord.  Petey was confirmed.  Most of the rest, but we can’t be sure who,” Gordon said.

“The Baron has been arguing that you’re more liability than asset,” the Duke said.  “We don’t know where the Lambs stand.”

“The Baron is wrong,” Sylvester said, adding a belated, “My lord.”

Gordon momentarily closed his eyes.  Hearing Sylvester speak, even before the sentence was finished, had Gordon’s heart skipping a beat.  Cognitively, he knew Sylvester had gauged the situation and no doubt gauged it well.  But there was no room for even small errors, not here.

The Baron had a dangerous look in his eye, but he hadn’t spoken.

“Do you think so?” the Duke asked.

“Yes, my lord,” Sylvester said.

“I said much the same thing.”

“Yes, my lord,” Sylvester said.  Gordon could hear the note of smug satisfaction in Sylvester’s voice.

“Provided we decide you’re trustworthy,” the Duke said.  “You’ll give your report to the professors, the Baron and I will look over the written transcripts, and we’ll give the final judgments.”

“Yes, my lord,” Gordon said, before Sylvester could speak.  He couldn’t let Sylvester take command of this conversation.

“My sisters will want to participate as well,” the Baron said.

“Do you think so?” the Duke asked.

“They’ve been so bored, and have complained about being left out of the hunting trip.”

“Very well, the twins as well.”

The twins.  The words were akin to a bell in Gordon’s memory.

Gordon had heard of the twins.  To be exact, he’d heard about them in the context of the mad nobles.  On the flip side, mention of mad nobles as a general topic invariably meant mention of the twins.

“Little Helen, I think the Baron, Baronets and I would enjoy your company after all is said and done, should you be cleared of wrongdoing or dissent.  You and Professor Ibbot shall join us.”

“Yes, my lord,” Helen said, curtsying without slowing so much it mattered.

“I’m honored, my lord,” Ibott squawked.

“Yes, yes,” the Duke said, sounding annoyed the man had spoken.

“If they aren’t cleared of wrongdoing, we should have them join us for company all the same,” the Baron said, still staring at Sylvester.  “As I said, my sisters have been bored.”

“I wonder if I haven’t read a fairy tale about something like that,” the Duke said.  “It seems unwise to invite a group of assassins over for company and amusement, especially if they’ve been proven as traitors.”

“One at a time, then.  Or send their creators in with them.”

“Perhaps.”

Gordon could see Ibott react to that.

Hubris touched his nose to Gordon’s hand.

Gordon’s heart was thumping.  It was a limping struggle, one side stronger than the other.

By all rights, he should have stopped walking and let it calm down and find its rhythm again.  He kept up the pace.

“That in mind, I would recommend we err on the more conservative side of things,” the Baron said.

The Duke, still leading the group as they walked up to the Academy, smiled at that.  “I’d ask if you meant conservative in the sense of preserving more of our Academy’s hard work, or conservative in avoiding potential traitors in our midst, but it would be a rhetorical question, dear Richmond.”

“I’ll be paying close attention to the verdict,” the Baron said.  “If I’m dissatisfied with the result, I’ll see that corrections are made.”

If he doesn’t get the guilty verdict, then heads roll.  Or whatever he and his sisters do to amuse themselves.  The Baron was a mad one too, then.

That would make for a fairly emotional discussion.  Some of the people in the meeting that were discussing whether the Lambs were too dangerous or not were in danger regardless of what happened.

Jory, Gordon’s head doctor, glanced back, offering a worried look.  He was one of them.

No trust.  Mary got along with her doctors, at least to the point of being able to have conversations.  Jamie did too.  Had and still did, presumably.  Sylvester… didn’t get along with most.  But Gordon’s team was a big one.  The conversations had been limited to small talk, a duty that seemed to be rotated between staff members to the point that little familiarity was established.

“Tell us,” the Duke said.  “A prelude to the interrogations.  What did you accomplish?”

“We know her plan, my Lord,” Sylvester said.

“The creator of the Ghosts is dead, my Lord,” Gordon said.

“That would be my creator,” Mary said.

“Mary had a strong hand in how that unfolded.  We couldn’t have done it without her,” Gordon said.  “With that settled, we can hope they don’t have the resources to keep developing and improving on that project, which we know was tying up our resources.  With luck, the project might die altogether.”

“And Fray herself?” the Duke asked.

“We didn’t have the manpower to stop her ourselves, with our forces distracted and other experiments turning coat, but we were able to make a last minute maneuver and steer the city’s superweapon her way.  A number of her people were injured.”

“Was Genevieve Fray?”

“No reports of such, Lord Duke.  She has Avis, wearing wings, as well as a brute of a man in her company, they could have scaled to a safer height or forced their way through a set of doors or a window.  We were talking about it earlier, but it didn’t sound as if she was successful in forming the alliance between the different factions,” Gordon said.

“Explain.”

This was where he bent the truth.  He didn’t have the deserved reputation of a liar that Sylvester did.  He had the undeserved reputation as the honest one.

“Lord Duke,” Gordon said.  “In part, our actions disrupted the already tenuous negotiations between Genevieve Fray and Cynthia.  Cynthia split off to charge through the Academy’s lines.  Mauer’s side was displeased with how things were going before that, we killed one of his lieutenants, something that wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t come to Fray’s meeting, and our final move, delivered with the Brechwell Beast, primarily hurt Mauer’s elite group of soldiers and may have even hurt Mauer himself.”

“You believe he’ll be at odds with her?”

“I believe, my lord,” Gordon said, “that he won’t be as sympathetic to her as he might be if things had played out otherwise.”

“And here I’d actually thought I had to invite my cousin to visit in order to hear someone tell me so very little of substance with so many words,” the Duke said.

“You wound me,” the Baron said.  The Duke smiled, but it was faintly derisive.  Gordon wondered if even close friendships in the Duke’s world were combative and bitter.

Hubris nudged Gordon’s hand again.

It’s okay, boy.

“I’m sorry to be vague, my lord,” Gordon said.  His heart hitched, and he bit back a gasp.  “I’m aware that if I’m too specific, and something contradicts the specifics, it will look bad.”

“Very true.  I have missed the Lambs.  I so often find I have to hunt for intellectual company, even among professors and supposed geniuses.”

“Yes, my lord,” Gordon said.  “Thank you.”

They were approaching the Academy gates now.  The armed guard at the gate parted, the gates opening as that invisible wave of presence extended out to touch it.

“We’ll be taking our leave.  I did promise Baron Richmond a hunt today, we’ll be visiting the underground labs to see what can be loosed.  Keep the Lambs separate, watch for their hand-signs, see to their appointments after or during, so we can be sure they won’t coordinate or correct one another’s stories.  Though I imagine they would have already, were they lying.”

“Yes, my lord,” Sylvester said.

Both the Duke and the Baron looked back at Sylvester.  Most of the Professors did too, the ones with their lives on the line looking aghast.

“If we were lying, my lord,” Sy said.  “We’re not.”

“You are very fortunate you amuse me, Sylvester,” the Duke said, sounding far from amused.

Then the Duke was gone, talking to the Baron as they walked.  The group remained where it was, the crowd that had parted remained still, almost as if it was in shock, unsure if it was safe to resume going about their day.

“Indoors,” the new Headmaster spoke.  “No talking.  It’s bad enough some of my superweapons have turned, I’m not about to lose my head, or half of my staff.  Radham Academy has to recover from this.  We do this perfectly, giving the Baron no excuse to target us.”

It wouldn’t matter, Gordon knew.

Claret Hall wasn’t far from the entrance.  Some staff broke away to look after other business.  The Lambs weren’t among them.

Gordon’s left hand went to his chest, rubbing at the sternum, as if he could somehow massage what lay within.  It wasn’t settling.

Beside him, Mary took his other hand.  It was only when he felt the warmth of her hand that he realized how cold he’d gotten.

His interaction with her had happened so gradually he wasn’t sure when it had unfolded.  She’d started expressing interest some time after he’d broken it off with Shipman, through little gestures, going out of her way to spend time with him, to practice, showing him her knife throwing so he could improve his own.

He’d stayed at arm’s length, because he knew Sylvester had feelings of his own for the girl, as well as a kind of possessive attachment.  With anyone else, there might have been problems, but she’d kept him at arm’s length, too.

It had just been that.  A pretty girl, regularly in his company.

But then Sy had started paying more attention to Lillian, and Gordon knew there was some manipulation there, Sy playing some matchmaking game, providing signals.  Gordon had let it be what it was and stopped worrying about hurting their friendship.

Then this thing with Percy, and Mary had drawn close.

It was awfully easy to let her.  All the rational reasons not to were suddenly very hard to bring up.  She wasn’t some common girl, he could never stand the usual girls, not the ones nearer his own age at Lambsbridge, not the ones he’d seen associating with the mice, not the pretty ones at Mothmont.

He liked Mary like he still liked Shipman.  Both were girls who demanded a special kind of respect, instead of being content to receive ordinary respect.  Smart, dangerous, strong in their individual ways.  But all of that was dressed up in girl.  Not girlishness or femininity, but in the distilled reality of girl.  He wanted to see more of them, hear them speak, touch them, taste them as he kissed them.  The way Mary’s skirt moved as she walked made him feel like he’d just stepped outside to sun and fresh air, after years and years of rain and Radham air that smelled like smoke, blood, and manure.

Helen’s explanation of her own desires were scarily in line with his own when put forward as an allegory for how strong his own feelings sometimes were.  What had she said?  ‘Feel every part of them with every part of myself?’

He glanced at her.  She gestured.  Strength.  Courage.

“None of that,” someone barked, behind them.”

Mary lowered her hand.  She smiled at him.

They would get through this.  Looking at her like this, he could appreciate why people drew together, formed pairs, even with all of the difficulties of being in a relationship.

He imagined her face, contorted with a special kind of grief as she looked down on his body.

His desires and the new feeling of guilt joined the anxiety of the moment, the imminent questioning.  The feelings didn’t mingle or mix, but remained discrete.  A jigsaw set of emotions for a jigsaw body made of individual pieces that just so happened to be put together.

The Lambs were so similar in that way.  The distinctions between each were clear.  Yet the Lambs were to be split up.

The symbolic parallel gave him an uneasy feeling, as the Lambs were invited to sit on either side of the hallway, more than ten feet of space separating one Lamb from the next.  The doctors and groups of doctors positioned themselves to better block line of sight.

He spent so much of his time worrying, these days.  It would be so nice to stop dreading what came next and just focus on the present.  The closer Mary was to him at a given point in time, the more he felt like he could do that.  Probably why he’d been dwelling on her so much in the last few minutes.

“Sylvester first,” Hayle suggested.  “I somehow feel like we’ll want to take what he says and keep it in mind as each of the other Lambs speak.”

So much worrying.

Enemy (Arc 7 – Girls)

Mary

Four nobles.  Augmented physiology, augmented minds.  They were, as Mr. Percy would have said, ‘top notch‘.  Absolute monsters.  Depending on what unfolded, the Lambs might find themselves in a fight by the day’s end.

It wasn’t a situation the Lambs would survive.

She had to trust Sy and Gordon to figure out if there was a way out, and handle her part of the questioning as well as she could.  What she could figure out was a way to make things easier.  If they were called in, the girls were likely to be called in first.  Helen first of all, the appointment was already made, then Mary herself, very possibly, or Lillian or maybe Sylvester, but Mary was likely.

The professors and assistants in the hallway were blocking Mary’s view of the rest of the group, while Gordon was inside, giving his answers.  She could only stare out the window, at the people, or gaze at the floor while she worked out a strategy.

Mr. Percy had always encouraged ‘mental practice’.  Picturing where her body would be, the motions she would make, the weight of things, and all the details, sometimes over and over, before she acted.  Then she would act, perform more mental practices, adjusting for how things had felt, and the loop would continue until the actions and process were distilled in her mind’s eye.

Helen would probably die, if she was first.  If Sylvester or Lillian were second, then they would die next.  That would hurt more.  She cared about Helen, but Lillian was her best friend,  worth killing Percy for.  Sylvester was important to her for different reasons.

She had to steel herself for that.  Prepare herself by putting the emotions aside, lock them away.  If she was going to use them, it had to be in rage or in desperation, a forward push to get past any pain or bodily harm she might feel, past poisons or drugs or whatever else they might do to her.

The Twins were torturers with a retinue of doctors and madmen who catered to their whims.  The bodies might well be on display.  What was left of them, if they were lucky enough to be dead.

Mary felt cold inside, hollowed out, but she was able to drive out the feelings of fear and panic.  Those were useless, dangerous feelings, ones that robbed her of precision and control.

She had to prepare, be ready.

The Nobles were tall.  They liked that, being above the common people.  Mary was far from full grown, with a three-quarter foot to grow, if she compared herself to the woman who was supposed to be her mother.  The legs would be her best target.

But that wasn’t the whole story.  The jackets the Duke and Baron had been wearing were heavy, and they flowed oddly as they walked.  There was something in them, armor.

She had to attack from the front, knowing that the one she chose as her target was quicker, faster, and very aware of what was going on around them.

Best to attack while her back was turned.  Use her head to distract and drive one foot back and up, to target the knee.  If she could topple one, then she could target the neck.

Easiest to do if she had a knife, but she suspected she would be searched.  They knew her methods too well.

There was a disposable scalpel razor in the lining of her coat, and another blade in the tongue of her shoe.  Small enough she could put them up her nasal cavity or in her mouth.  The nose meant a risk of bleeding if she slipped, but she’d done it before.  The mouth, hm, they would search her mouth if they had any sense at all, but she suspected she could embed the blade in the flesh behind the last molar, pointing toward her throat.  Easy to miss if the lighting was wrong, and she could swallow the blood.  If she threw up from that, then so much the better, it only gave her more opportunities.

Maybe both.

Topple her enemy, target the spine.  She tried to picture the scenarios unfolding.

Not the throat or the jugular, unless she could do that as part of something else.  The spine was a better target.  Cervical four, third bundle was a likely target, but would only shut off breathing, freezing the diaphragm.  She would get pulled away, the doctors would swoop in.  They would fix the noble in the time it took them to die from a lack of breath.  Depending on how their bodies had been changed, that could be a very long time.

Thoracics one through four had places she could drive a blade in to shut off the heart, lungs, and larynx.  Drive in the blade, do as much damage as possible, shut off heart function or ability to breathe.  Hard to do if the back was armored and protected, if the twins might have open backed dresses, or she could reach in past the collar.  It was worth keeping in mind, reciting that play in her head as a possibility.

If she could drive the blade in, knowing how small it was, then it would be harder to fix, the damage more severe.  It would require something harder than any one part of her body.  Something from the environment.

She could do it if her hands were bound, it would be harder but possible.  But being restrained was the least of her concerns, as she imagined different factors.  They might not fall, even as she leveraged a kick that could break ordinary bone into one of the more vulnerable parts of the human body.  Their spine might be protected.  She might not be able to access and keep a blade.  Her hands might even be bound, which wouldn’t stop her, but it could cost her the time she needed to grab the blade and follow through.

She would die.  That bothered her less than the cold hollow emptiness that Helen had articulated so well, the loneliness that took hold inside her even now at imagining Helen’s dead eyes staring off into space, or Lillian in horrible pain.

She would die, but even if she tried, if she was clever about it, the nobles who remained might think twice about giving personal attention to the Lambs who remained.  If they deferred to another method of execution or torture, then the remaining Lambs might have a chance to escape that they wouldn’t have with the nobles.

It was a chance, however slim.

Hope for the best, trust the Lambs, anticipate the worst.  She and her knives as the final measure to turn to when the talking and strategy drew to a close.

So often, her way of showing her affection for others meant killing people.  For Percy, it was always the plan.  For Lillian, she’d killed Percy.  Now she might have to kill a noble, a possibility few even dared to contemplate.

The Lambs were too important to her.

She could see glimpses of Helen through the crowd.  Helen seemed utterly at ease, but she didn’t broadcast her feelings like others did.  She could see the sort of situation that Mary had imagined earlier, the Lambs dead or mutilated, and smile and act like nothing was wrong.

Mary liked to think that even if Helen smiled and acted normal, she would seek revenge if it came down to it.  She had spent a lot of time stressing out about Helen, until months of close proximity and sharing a room had forced her to come to terms with her feelings.  Helen was a lot easier to understand as a creature when Mary stopped looking at her as a human, and more as a reptile or a cat.

Even cats and snakes had a measure of loyalty.

That made her think of Lillian.

Mary had never had a friend.  The depth of her feelings for Lillian spooked her, sometimes, sometimes on par with her early feelings for Sylvester, in a very different way.  Sylvester had been like a leap over a gap between rooftops, dangerous, uncertain even when she was fully aware of her own ability.  She knew he was a manipulator and liar, and that had made him interesting.

It still did.  More than any of the Lambs, the little things and the patterns of Sylvester promised to complete her.  They were in step, he could carry out a plan and she didn’t feel uncertain.  When she faltered, he was there.  When he faltered, she knew she had the opportunity to shine.  It was rare for her to experience the concern about Sylvester’s plans that Gordon so often commented on.

She had spent a long time feeling very incomplete, as if she was working hard to fill a void with Percy’s approval, and someone who conformed to her as easily as Sylvester seemed to do was tempting.

But it had always felt dangerous.  Always promised betrayal down the line.  Idly, she had sometimes wondered how she would kill him if it came down to it, because she couldn’t entirely convince herself that it wouldn’t.  Even as her trust in him approached that ninety-nine point seven or ninety-nine point eight percent, she had harbored faint doubts.  That was who he was.

Lillian was a better, safer match.  They were similar, the academic and the assassin, both dedicated to their individual crafts.  With Lillian, she didn’t feel that heady sense of invincibility.  With Lillian, she felt like a girl.

Whatever that was.

And to Lillian, she imagined, she was a girl, a friend.  Lillian lacked guile enough to lie about that.  She could share everything with Lillian.  Even talk about Percy without feeling like she was betraying the Lambs.

Hearing Lillian speak about Percy and Lillian’s horror over what Percy had been doing had scared Mary more than any number of monsters or guns.  It had led her to make a decision.

And Gordon.  Gordon was the best of both worlds.  She knew it, she just wasn’t sure if she felt it.  Imagining kissing him made her heart pound, as did thoughts of feeling his hands around hers.  She’d drawn nearer and nearer to him, testing the waters, waiting for him to reject her, waiting for the feelings she had to clarify.  She just wasn’t sure if she truly liked him, or if it was only that her feelings for the other Lambs were so poignant and confused by other things going on in her head and her heart that he paled a shade in comparison.

Lillian was her only friend ever, and filled that hole in Mary’s breast that even Percy hadn’t been able to promise to fill.  Sylvester was Mary’s counterpart.

Gordon was… what?  He promised to be the only thing that wasn’t mixed in with those complicated other thoughts.  He understood her, he was a little bit dangerous, he made her feel like a proper girl.  The thought of him dying made her think in all seriousness that she might react like Sy had to Jamie, and that somehow made her more anxious than the idea of losing all of the Lambs together, or any of the Lambs individually.

Because it felt most real and imminent, she told herself.

Was that love, fledgling love or otherwise?

The door opened.  Mary looked up, just in time to see Hubris running ahead, zig-zagging.

“Hubris!” Gordon called.  He changed the pitch of his voice, apparently annoyed, “Hubris!”

Hubris made his way across the hallway, in Sylvester’s direction.

“Hubris, come!”

Hubris looked back, pausing, then changed direction.  The dog moved through the crowd of doctors and guards, making a beeline toward Mary.  Sitting on the floor with her back to the wall, she couldn’t get up and move in time to get out of Hubris’ way.  He pressed his face against hers, licking.

“Good boy,” Mary said, “It’s okay.”

“Get your dog under control,” one of the doctors said.  “No tricks.”

Gordon sounded exasperated as he explained, “He’s worried.  The people inside can tell you, I informed them at the start of the questioning, and several times throughout, my heart is acting up.  He’s trained to tell me when there are problems, which is why he kept nudging me, and when I won’t or can’t listen, he’s trained to tell the other Lambs.  My doctors are here.  They can tell you.”

Hubris whined.

“We didn’t train him for that last part.”

“You didn’t, I did.  It’s what he’s for,” Gordon said, patiently.

“Enough,” another doctor said.  “Who’s next?”

A man Mary couldn’t see spoke.  “Mary Cobourn.”

Mary didn’t move at first, and Hubris leaned forward to lick her again.  She imagined the actions she would need to take to attack the key targets here.  Soldiers, key doctors, and people that stood in the way.  It wasn’t as simple as it might have seemed on the surface.  Crossing the hallway to get to Gordon or Sylvester could open up possibilities, in having more fighting strength and having more problem solving ability, but it was more distance to cover, and the Lambs needed to get to the other end of the hallway.

Her hands gripped Hubris’ collar, and she found a roll of paper slipped into the fold of the collar.   Moving her hands suggested there were two more.

No time to read it.

She pushed Hubris off her, and stood.

Mary offered Lillian a reassuring smile.  Head up, chin high, back straight.  Hubris hadn’t made it to Lillian, so Lillian lacked the small reassurance the piece of paper provided.

Gordon was being led the opposite way, leaving for his appointment.  Mary watched him as they approached one another, each mostly surrounded by soldiers and scholars.

She met his eyes.  They were warm, the colors not entirely matched between the two – something she had only noticed after over a year of paying attention to him.  On a dark, gloomy day,  there wasn’t enough light to distinguish between them, but on a brighter day, when the light filtered in through the window, one eye was more chestnut than hazel, with flecks of gold.

A nod would be a giveaway.

She looked away, and her hands smoothed down the front of her top and her skirt, then went up to her collar, fixing it.  She resisted the urge to let the hands linger a moment too long.  He would understand.  He knew her habits and mannerisms.

He had managed to direct, even without obvious cues.  She suspected a hand signal, then tones of voice to change Hubris’ direction.  It was possible there was another mechanism.  She would ask later, given the chance.

For now, knowing there were options if they needed to fight their way out was reassuring.  Knowing Gordon was thinking and working to help was reassuring.

Sy had been silent since stepping out of the room.  He wasn’t starting anything, hadn’t made any comments.  It didn’t mean nothing was wrong.  He could be biding his time, instead of working to signal the rest of the Lambs about the problems.

For now figuring out the right moment to read the note and answering the questions was the best thing she could do.  If it went badly, she would turn her thoughts toward making sure the small blades were in place should she need them to kill a noble of the Crown.

One chair faced a table.  Ten people sat around the sides and back of that table.

Headmaster Travers, Professor Hayle, Professor Ibott, and several other prominent professors sat around the table.  So many had been pulled away during the war, and the table was mostly empty now.

The doors slammed shut behind her.

I have already figured out how to kill all of you if necessary, Mary told herself.

She relaxed.

I am a young lady of Mothmont.  I am a skilled killer.  I am a step above.  I can handle this, and with the Lambs at my back and sufficient preparation, I can handle anything this world might throw at me.

She smiled.

“Tell us,” Travers spoke, “What did the Lambs do wrong?”

She kept the smile from faltering.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You failed in your duties, you let Genevieve Fray get away.  Obviously the Lambs weren’t perfect.  What happened?”

Mary estimated what the people of the room could see, and scooted her chair forward a fraction.  They wouldn’t be able to see over the table.

“Stay right there, please.  We know what you’re capable of-”

You don’t know the half of it.

“And we’d just as rather you stay where you are.”

“Okay.  I’m sorry,” Mary said.  With one hand, she unrolled the paper at her knee.  She dropped her eyes.

‘Y syG Y gW Y’  The ‘y’ had a curve to the upper prongs.  She wasn’t familiar with the shorthand.

“Mary?”

Mary raised her head.  She thought through the possibilities as her mouth opened, and said, “I don’t like to badmouth the other Lambs.”

“If you can’t critically assess their performance then there might be deeper problems,” one of the doctors said.  “In which case we might want to consider sacrificing them for the greater good of Radham.”

Sacrifice.

“To save your own hide, you mean?” another Professor spoke.

“Calm down,” Hayle cut in.  “You were saying, Mary?”

Mary remembered the hand sign for sacrifice.  Thumb folded in, fingers curled forward.  It was the thought that connected to the paper Gordon had given her.  The letter G.  It meant to sacrifice, a pawn, to put something at risk for greater reward, a gamble.

Y would be the hand signal with pinky and thumb extended.  Cunning, trick.

The basic signs.  W would be… had to be three fingers raised.  Thought, plan, strategy.

Gordon’s plan.  Scapegoat Sy?  This is a trick.

“Sy was struggling,” Mary said.

“Struggling?”

“The thing with Jamie, it threw him off, emotionally.  He was adapting how he operated, trying to compensate for the lack of Jamie, and he was stressing about Jamie coming.  When Jamie did come, later on, it was a distraction.”

“Sending Jamie was our decision.  If you’re trying to shift the blame-”

“No,” Mary hurried to answer.  “No.  Not at all.  There were other problems.  Sylvester made other mistakes.  It stemmed from similar things, but also, you know he operates best when things are fresh in his mind, and if he picks up something new he forgets other things, or it slips away from him.  We were months out of practice, the situation escalated too fast, and Sylvester was spread too thin to compensate.”

“I see,” the headmaster said.  He looked frustrated.

It dawned on her why.

Sy had an excuse.

“Let’s talk about Percy…” another Doctor said.  “How did you encounter him?”

“We got access to the building he and Fray were holed up in,” Mary said.  Best to tell the truth when she wasn’t sure.  Lie only when it counted.  “Fray let us walk in.  Sy said she would, we believed him.  Percy was one reason it worked.  He was attached to me, still, and didn’t want me to come to harm.  If someone had, it would have hurt their alliance.”

“Tell us more about what you understood of Fray’s reasons.”

Helen

“Her reasons?” Helen asked.

“Yes.”

“I look at faces,” Helen said, narrowing her eyes as she looked at the headmaster.  “I’m a very good student of faces.  I had to learn it all from the beginning, like Ashton is doing now.”

“We know this,” Professor Ibott said.  His face was annoyed.  She would probably get talked at in a mean way when this was over.

“This information might help for our replacement hires that aren’t familiar with the Lambs,” Hayle said.  “Go on.”

“I saw things in her face.  What Sy said, she wants to be right.  She has a mission and nothing’s going to shake her from that mission.  But she’s very insecure deep down.  She was really insecure when we ran into her.  Sy did a lot of that.”

“Sylvester,” Ibott said.  “Use his full name like a grown up girl.”

“Sylvester,” Helen said.

“Explain.”

“She lost Cynthia, that was because of us too, I think.  Cynthia didn’t like us being there, and she wasn’t happy being there to start with.  And there was something about her not liking not being on top if Fray’s plan works and the Crown loses their grip on the West Crown States.  I’m not sure.”

“Be sure,” Ibott said.  “This isn’t the time or place for suppositions.”

“I wasn’t listening,” Helen said.  “The others can tell you.  I was focused on the room, making sure to listen to other things that were being said.  I’m still not used to my new ears, but I wanted to make sure we weren’t attacked.  There were a lot of dangerous people there.”

“That’s not good enough,” Ibott said.

“It will have to be,” Helen said, firmly.  “The Lambs work like a puzzle does.  The pieces fit together one way.  I’m a piece that does certain things.  What I do is I watch.  Especially when Jamie isn’t around.  I wait, I look for opportunities to attack, and I use my ears better than anyone in the group.  They all had their ears pointed one way, and I had my ears pointed the rest of the ways.”

“You need to keep track of what’s happening,” Ibott said.

“I did,” Helen said.  “Like I said, I kept enough track to know that Cynthia didn’t like it if everyone got those books and she wasn’t special for knowing stuff anymore.”

He was upset.  She knew that.  She knew how to act to make him more upset, and she knew how to act to make him less upset.  She was less certain about why he was upset.

She’d known him longer than she had known anyone, and she still didn’t understand him a lot of the time.

“Nothing she’s saying is contradicting what we heard from other Lambs,” Hayle said.

“It’s how she’s saying it,” Ibott said.

Oh.

Helen knew how to fix that.

She straightened her back, folding her hands in her lap.  All of the right expressions and postures were very well organized in her head.  She put the other ones away and brought these ones out.  The tones of voice, the ways it affected how people treated her, it was a big, elaborate, spider’s web of a puzzle she had long ago figured out.

The trick to that puzzle was that everyone wanted something.  Sy was good at making people want different things, or taking what they wanted and using it to make them do what he wanted them to do.  Gordon wasn’t as clever about it, but could figure out what people didn’t want and hammer at that weak point until they gave.  Even if it meant being troublesome to the point that they just wanted him to go away or told him what he wanted to know just to make him stop.

He didn’t get to do it much.

Helen could figure out what people wanted and be that.

The doctors and professors were conferring among themselves in whispers.  There were parts of their voices that sounded too sharp, where her ears hadn’t quite adjusted to the very high pitches that voices could reach, that normal ears didn’t always catch.

She couldn’t hear all of it, but she could put the pieces together from one word in five that was being said.  They were talking about focus.  Priority number one was to verify if the Lambs were traitors.  For some, the word ‘if’ was replaced with ‘that’.  Verifying that the Lambs were traitors, as if it had already been decided.

All of her attention was going towards the act, reading expressions, paying attention to the glances that were cast her way and the faces people wore both when they did the glancing and after the fact.

Many parts of her brain were built around this kind of thinking and attention-paying.

“Did the Lambs at any point split up?”

“Yes, sir,” Helen said, voice crisper than before, but musical enough to be pleasing.

“When?”

“The night before last.  Sylvester suggested we split up.  Then he went after Fray.  He was in there for a time, then he came out.  That was how he knew we could get close enough to Fray to figure out what she was planning.”

“You’re talking differently,” Professor Ibott observed.

“Shh,” the Headmaster shushed the man.  “Is it not possible that Sylvester could have acted against the Academy during this time, collaborating with Fray?”

“No, sir,” Helen said.  “He was acting funny.  We had an argument about it after.  He was acting different, hurrying things along, and making small mistakes.  I said, and I said this to everybody, he was trying to replace Jamie.  Not on purpose, exactly, but subconsciously.  He was too sloppy to do the sort of thing you were talking about.”

“This role you’re putting on,” Professor Ibott said.  “It’s different from the infantile, ‘cute’ behavior before.”

“That was a role I put on for the Lambs, creator,” Helen said.  “They were worried and anxious ever since our first meeting with Genevieve Fray.  I tried to inject humor and positivity into things.  I was more open about the thoughts that regularly cross my mind, but in a way I thought they could accept.”

“You’ll cease that immediately,” Professor Ibott told her.

Helen tilted her head a little to one side.  “I already have.  You said you didn’t like how I was talking before, Professor.  I adjusted my behavior to match this room.”

“You’ll cease that too.  Present yourself to the room as you are, without the act.”

Helen nodded.

All of the details went away, the facial expressions, the considerations, the balances and her judgments of people around her.  Her expression faded, until she was only staring.

She looked at each of the people around the table, assessing them.

Ibott spoke, and he sounded a little smug, having shown off his control and his ability to make her go quiet, “Now, focusing on the matter at hand, tell us about the mental state of the others.  You reported Sylvester was acting strange.  None of the other Lambs stepped in, forcing him to hand over the reins?”

She didn’t have to make the mental adjustments to fit his feeling of superiority into her ‘act’, because there was no act.

Helen stood from her chair.  In her assessments, she’d found and fixed her eyes on the man at the far left of the table.  A young man in a military uniform with the Radham crest on it.  A manager of the local armies, organizing and training the local troops, probably.  He was, as she had things put in her head, outward facing, a book man, locked in, a decider.  She couldn’t help but visualize the notecards that had taught her about faces and people as she deciphered him.

At a glance, she assessed him as the strongest person in the room.  He could probably destroy her in a fight.

She felt her hearts beat a little faster and harder.  She could feel spurting as chemicals flowed from glands in her body.  A rush, adrenaline, as if she was about to pick a fight.  It all built up to a warmth in her middle.

She imagined wrapping her arms around his chest until he stopped.  Feeling her cheek against his chest as it went from warm to cool.  Going to sleep like that.  She wanted to put her thumbs on his eyes and press in until they gave away.

Her hands reached out, touching the table.  She leaned forward, hair hanging in front of her face.

“Helen,” Ibott said, making it a reprimand.  “What are you doing?”

“Thinking,” she said, her voice monotone, glancing only briefly at her creator.

“We’re asking you questions.  Sit down,” Ibott said.

“What are you thinking?” Hayle asked, voice calm.  He was gesturing to the men at the door.  Helen remembered they had guns.

“About him,” Helen said, pointing at the man in the military uniform, and that rush she was feeling did change her voice slightly from the monotone.  She could have controlled that if she had wanted to, but this still wasn’t an act.  To the man, she said, “I’m very flexible.”

“Uh,” he said.  “You’re-”

“I’m thinking,” Helen continued, “About if I can crawl into your open mouth.  Things would tear apart , of course, but you’d be warm and you’d flop around and I want to see what it would feel like if you were doing that while I was most of the way inside you.”

The man’s hand went to his gun.

Ibott’s chair screeched on the floor as he stood.

“Enough of this,” he said.

“You told me to stop acting, I did.  The acts were the only thing keeping me sitting still,” Helen said.

“Stop,” he ordered.

She went still.

“This is over,” Ibott said.  “She’s having her appointment.  I need to figure out what’s wrong.”

“We’re not done questioning.  Helen, you can speak,” Hayle said.  “Tell us-”

“I wanted to muck about in Fray’s insides too,” Helen said, interrupting him. “And Percy’s, and Mauer’s, and the others.  That would have been lovely.”

She knew the cadence and even the fact that she’d chosen the word ‘lovely’ was very strange and offputting.  She didn’t mind.

Hayle didn’t finish his sentence, only glancing at Ibott.

“Suggests she isn’t a traitor, unless she’s looking to do that with her friends, too,” one of Sylvester’s doctors spoke.

Ibott rounded the table.  He comprehended the sentence just before grabbing Helen’s upper arm.  “You don’t touch or attack me.”

“I would never,” Helen breathed.  The rush was still coloring her words, maybe even her face.  She felt like a coiled spring, a catapult ready to fire, a gun with the trigger cocked.  But getting release meant feeling parts of someone break in her arms.  It was the best feeling.

“Good,” Ibott said.  He steered her around, marching her to the door.

“I would never,” she repeated herself.

“Do us both a favor and shut up,” Ibott said.

“Because,” Helen said, “I only feel this way about strong people, and powerful people.”

Ibott stopped in his tracks.

“Ibott?” Hayle asked, from the other end of the room.  “Problem?”

“It wasn’t relevant to the topic at hand,” Ibott said.

His grip was tighter, the march more forceful than before, as the doors opened and he steered her past the Lambs.

Helen glanced at Gordon as she walked by, smiling, her eyes wide.

One hand went to her hair, tossing it back over one shoulder.

Her fingers lingered briefly at her collar, as she tugged on it.

Better to do this, than to let the questioning continue too long.  The more questions she answered, the more chances there were of her giving the wrong answer.

Lillian

“The problems only became apparent when the mission was underway,” Lillian answered.

She was sweating, she kept fidgeting and telling herself to stop, only to resume again without fully realizing it.

“Why?”

“High stress situation, and we knew Jamie was coming, and that added more stress to things?  The Lambs are people, we- they had reasons and plans.  Sylvester had something to prove to make up for losing to Fray last time, when the whole thing happened with the water supplies.  Mary was fixated on Percy, but she saw that one through when she killed him.  Then there was Jamie, and he was coming, but I said that part-”

“Shh, calm down,” Hayle said.

Lillian made a concerted effort.

“Have you reported on everything that’s been happening?” another Professor asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Mental issues, health issues…”

“Yes, sir.  Everything as it’s come up, even irrelevant things.”

“She’s been thorough,” Professor Hayle said.  “Helen’s apparent… precociousness, and Sylvester’s failings during this mission, they raise concerns.”

“Yes, sir,” Lillian said.

“Start with Helen.”

“She’s been changing gradually for a very long time.  She presents one face to us and there’s more going on beneath the surface, which we only glimpse.  She has never indicated any problems.  During the mission, she provided a good assessment of Sylvester and if I’m remembering right, helped us capture a Ghost for Petey, before we knew he was a problem.  We later heard it inconvenienced him and Fray, because he had to lure off some Ghosts and take them out of play to keep up the undercover ruse.”

“Alright,” Hayle said.  “Mary, and Percy?”

“I’m close to Mary, it feels lousy to say stuff when she shared some of it in confidence-”

“It’s your job,” the military man on the far left of the table said.

“I- it- I-” Lillian said.  She couldn’t find it in her to put a coherent syllable together.  She’d had nightmares about this sort of thing, being on trial when there was no right answer.  Except usually it was an oral exam.

“It is your job, Lillian, to look after the Lambs, to monitor their performance, and report anything the Academy needs to know,” Hayle said.

“As- as a friend,” Lillian said, “She told me things about Percy.  About how it was hard to let go.  He was like a dad to her.  She was always worried he would show up again.”

“She told you she was considering betraying the team and you didn’t report it?” another Professor asked.

“No,” Lillian said.  She was screwing this up.  Everyone had been confident in leaving the room and she was saying all the wrong things.  Half the words that left her mouth, she felt like it was the wrong answer before she’d even spoken and felt like it was a worse answer after she’d heard herself say it.

“No, she wasn’t considering betraying the team, or no, you didn’t report it?”

“I mean, she wasn’t.  It never came up, not like that.”

“It sounds as if it was pertinent,” a professor jumped in.

“It wasn’t, not for the job, not for what she was doing,” Lillian said.  “She- she just didn’t want it hanging over her head, I mean.  I think, that was the reason, I think?”

A stutter of the brain had made her say ‘I think’ twice in the same sentence.  She was pretty sure that was cruel irony.

They didn’t look happy, and they didn’t look convinced.  Professor Hayle leaned closer to another professor so the man could whisper in his ear.  People at the left end of the table were talking to each other in a babble of low voices.

Lillian had the slip of paper in her sock, she’d looked at it while she waited for her turn – second to last – and she had no idea what it meant, which terrified her.

She’d heard of the Twins.  She’d seen pictures of the Twins’ victims.  She’d seen their pet warbeasts and had heard about their Doctors, one had a name that recurred in urban legends and scary stories, told in candlelit dormitories after dark.  She was pretty sure it was the same person, and all of the legends and stories weren’t necessarily just stories.

The stakes had never been higher, and in her attempt to give an explanation that should have sounded good, she’d fumbled and made it sound weak.

This wasn’t what she was good at.

She was good at studying, and she was good at putting people back together.  Even if she needed help with some of the hard stuff.  Most of the rest she did was try to keep up.

“That will be all, I think,” Headmaster Travers told her.

It sounded ominous.

She started to rise from her seat, then stopped.  “Where am I going?  The others went to their appointments, or other places, and I’m not sure if I’m supposed to go to the dorm room, or wait, or-”

“Sylvester and his doctor should be waiting outside,” Professor Hayle said.  “We talked it over between questioning Ashton and questioning you.  If Sylvester is performing badly, then I feel the most important thing is to maintain routine.  We’ll wrap things up soon, but for the time being, I would like you to look after Sylvester for his appointment.  We’ll need you to be able to administer doses in the field, for longer engagements.”

“Depending on how the last series of questions go, it might be helpful if we know exactly where to find you,” the Headmaster said.  “It wouldn’t do if we had to scurry around to figure out where you’d gotten off to.”

For the nobles.  He might as well have said it, it was clear as day.  If this went badly, the Lambs would be handed over.  Some or all.

Lillian turned and left the room, only belatedly realizing she hadn’t said farewell, or any pleasantries at all.

Sylvester was indeed waiting in the hall, talking to the thuggish man that was his doctor.  She’d never liked the man, after seeing him cuff Sy far too hard for a smart-assed remark.

Sitting across the hall was Jamie, who had a book in his lap.  He was writing, and didn’t even look up as she approached.

“I’m supposed to come with you,” she said.

“I know,” the doctor said.  “Do you think I’d be waiting here for some other reason?”

“For good conversation with me?” Sylvester suggested.

“Mm,” the man made a noise.  He looked at Lillian, his eyes traveling all the way up and down her body.  “If you learn this, I have to deal with him less.  I’m bad at judging ages.  How long until I can buy you a drink as thanks?”

“Three years,” Lillian said.

“I’ll probably forget by then,” he said.

Lillian wondered if the man had been asking out of any interest, but the thought creeped her out, and her mind was frazzled from a full half-hour of questioning.  She wanted to ask so many questions and get feedback, and she didn’t dare with the doctor in earshot.

“Bye, Jamie,” she said.

Jamie looked up from his book, silent, and raised a hand in a wave, giving a brief smile.

She’d liked the old Jamie more.  He’d shared books with her and talked to her.  They were both bookworms, happier in darkness and quiet than in noise and chaos.  This Jamie made her uncomfortable for reasons she couldn’t put a finger on.  It wasn’t entirely his fault.  When he was around, everyone acted different, and she could see the pain on the faces of some of the people she cared about the most, Sy first among them.

The big man that was Sy’s doctor had an umbrella of matching size.  The moment he was outdoors, he lit up a cigarette, then opened the umbrella, inviting the two children to stand beneath, Sy to his right and Lillian to his left.

Standing too close felt weird, especially when she wasn’t sure if he’d been offering the drink out of gratitude or as a roundabout way of asking her out, or if he’d genuinely wondered about her age.  Keeping that invisible, wary wall between them meant standing so that one of her shoulders was out in the rain, the rest of her under the umbrella’s cover.

The walk to the Tower wasn’t fast enough.

Just before they reached the door, the doctor finished his cigarette and lit another.

“Are you going to expect us to stand around in the rain while you finish that?” Sylvester asked.

“Don’t care,” the man said.

“Can we wait inside?”

“Don’t care,” the man said.  “You finished answering their questions, so I figure my obligations about watching you are done.  I spent forever standing around in there with nothing to do and nobody I wanted to talk to, craving a burn.  I’m going to have two, maybe three.”

“Make it three, and I’ll make this one easy on you?” Sy suggested.  “And to look good for her?”

“You mean you won’t be a baby and a little ass dribblet?” the man asked.

“Neither.  I just want a chance to talk to her and get caught up on things.”

“Fine.  But you’re owing me a few no-nonsense appointments,” the man said.”

“Three, then,” Sylvester said.

The man nodded.

Lillian’s heart jumped as Sylvester reached out to grab her wrist.

He tugged on her arm, pulling her inside.

Alone with Sy.  Why did this make her anxious in a good way when she’d slept in the same bed as him the last two nights?

Her heart was already unsteady, she decided.  She was in a shaky place and it didn’t take much to tip the scales.  She looked at his wet hair and his narrow shoulders.  His shirt clung to him, translucent where it touched the skin.  He was about as tan as anyone could get in the rains of Radham and Brechwell, which wasn’t much at all, but it was something.

There were beads of water on the back of his neck.

“How did it go?” he asked.

She remembered how it had gone, and the emotional high became an emotional low.

“Bad,” she said.  The low came with a feeling like she wanted to cry, and if she cried, then he would call her a crybaby.

“How bad?”

“I panicked, I didn’t know what to say, I tried to defend you guys and make you out to be confident, like you knew what you were doing.  But they kept attacking you, and I lost track of what I was saying, and-”

“You defended me?”

“Yes!  Of course!”

“You got the paper from Hubris, right?”

“Yes, the paper.  What did the paper mean?”

Sylvester half-turned, staring at her.

“It was important, wasn’t it?”

He held up his free hand, gesturing.  He wasn’t halfway done before she realized what he’d meant.

“How the hell was I supposed to figure that out!?  And why should we sacrifice you?”

“Because,” Sy said, “They’re not going to screw over the Lambs because bad science and logistics on their part made me sloppy.  It would hurt them, they’d be hurting themselves if they went to the nobles about that.  Especially when the Duke likes me.”

“Oh.”

“And I didn’t expect you to figure it out.  It was Gordon’s plan.  A pretty good one.  I hope you didn’t do too good a job of defending me.”

Lillian huffed out a short, one-note laugh.  “I really didn’t.”

“Good.  Helen made a play too, but I won’t know what it was for sure until I talk to her.  I’m really interested.”

“Are we going to be okay?” Lillian asked.

“I don’t know.  Probably.  A very likely scenario is they target one or two of us, in some attempt to clean up the roster and make it look like they’re doing something effective.  In which case I’m probably the sacrificial play.  I get benched, not killed, and you guys actively suck at the job until I return to the picture.”

“That’s… not so bad.”

“Like I said, good plan,” Sylvester said.  He stopped at a door, opening it.  “My office.”

“The doctor’s office.  You’re the patient.”

“I’m impatient,” Sylvester said.  He let go of her wrist and hopped up onto the desk at one side of the narrow room.  It was barely bigger than a closet, with lots of bookshelves and both preserved and living animals of various poisonous and venomous varieties.  Jars lined shelves.   “I want to hear how things went, and we won’t for a while.”

“I know,” Lillian said.  “Was there more you wanted to ask?”

“Ask?”

“About the questions?”

“Nope,” Sy said.

“But you asked him to stay for a while, and he was already going to finish a cigarette, and…”

“And I’m tired of being ferried around and told here to go and what to do and what questions to answer.  I feel cornered.”

Lillian felt cornered in an office that was about two long paces long and an even shorter length wide, with furniture crammed in it.  Murky light filtered in through a narrow, barred window, casting a raindrop-dappled light into the otherwise lightless room.

She had to admit she would have felt more cornered if the doctor was also present.

“That doctor of yours creeps me out,” Lillian said.

“Yep,” Sylvester said.  “I’ll be sure to tell him that.”

“Don’t,” she said, punching his thigh.  He was sitting on the desk with his legs dangling.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said.

She looked up at him.

He was so fine-boned, with high cheekbones, and a narrow chin.  She could see the individual parts of his shoulders.  His hair was wet and swept away from his face, wild and always looking like it was tangled, though it so rarely was.  His eyes were an insane green color, very dark, framed by long lashes.

When he looked at her, she felt naked.  Stripped bare.  Not in terms of clothes, but in terms of what was going on in her head and her defenses.

It was ten times worse since she had shared a bed with him.  She felt very aware of him, and doubly aware of his awareness of her.

He was glad she was here?

Words like that seemed so very meaningful, coming from someone who seemed to see her so clearly, understanding who she really was.

‘I know everything about you and I still enjoy your company’

Her face was hot, and she knew she was blushing.  She turned to look out the window, and saw only a smirk on his face.

She would have hit him, but that would have meant admitting that she’d seen and facing the teasing that followed.

He stuck his feet out, one foot pressing against her belly, the other against the small of her back.  She managed to make herself turn and give him a curious look.  The feet dropped away.

“I’ve been feeling really lonely, since Jamie… went.  And especially since this Jamie came back.”

She nodded.  If he kept talking like this, she’d get a lump in her throat, or end up crying.

“It’s… nice that you’re here,” he said.  “You do a good job of making me not feel lonely.  You’re good company.”

Again, that look.  She felt the heat rise to her face, more intense than before.

“I think I might go and see if I can get a bit of tea.  Do you want some?  I’ll bring some,” she said.  She turned to go.

She felt a sharp tug at the side of her head.

She turned and saw that Sy had grabbed the length of hair that normally framed one side of her face.

“Stay,” he said.

She swallowed hard.  Her heart drummed.  She couldn’t find words.

“It’s okay,” he said.  “Come here.”

She approached, and watched as he reached out to take hold of the other lock of hair.

“I’m going to kiss you,” he said, staring down at her with those penetrating eyes.  “If that’s alright.”

Her lips moved but no air passed through them.  She gave him a nod.

“Then stand on your tiptoes,” he said.

He tugged lightly on her hair, urging her up and forward, to meet him as he leaned down.

She obliged.

Somewhere, in her fantasies about kissing boys, she had most definitely thought about what kissing Sy would be like.  A part of her had told her that no, it wouldn’t be great, first kisses never were, and Sy was usually terrible at something until he’d had a little practice.

He was a good kisser.  His lips were cool to the touch, but he was gentle.  His lips brushed hers, then pulled away.  She raised herself up a bit further to kiss back, and he kissed her again as a reward.  It wasn’t long until she was standing on the very tips of her boots, leaning forward, hands on his thighs, trying to meet him, only to experience feather touches of kisses.

Then, like he was hungry, a real kiss, full lipped instead of a simple touch, while her entire body was straining up and forward, as if everything led to that contact.

The knuckles of one hand that held her hair brushed against her cheek.  It was so nice and she’d already been so close to crying earlier that she wondered if she might tear up.

If she dropped down, she knew, it would probably tug her hair against his hand, and it would hurt and it was probably the least of the reasons she didn’t want to stop straining up and forward, the least of the reasons she didn’t want this to end.

He pulled away, then kissed her, pulled away, and stopped.

Teasing.

“More,” she whispered.

Sylvester cleared his throat.

Lillian dropped down to the ground, spinning around.

It was worse than she’d thought.

Not just Sy’s doctor, but Hayle as well.

“Lillian,” Hayle said.  “A word?”

Lillian remained frozen, a deer in the headlights.

Sy leaned down, his mouth by her ear.

“Tonight, if you come to my room, I’ll give you another.”

The worst.  He was the absolute worst.

But it was reason enough to flee the room.

She knew she was blushing bright red for Professor Hayle.  The professor closed the door.

He pointed, and the two of them walked a distance down the hall.

“Do I need to worry?” he asked.

Lillian shook her head.

Then she remembered the greater situation.  “Do- do we need to worry?  The Lambs?”

“We’re waiting to talk to Jamie tomorrow.  He’s having an appointment now.  The others want to talk and figure out what questions to ask, as he can provide us the clearest perspective, for what he’s seen, if nothing else.”

Lillian felt a sinking feeling in her gut.

“I know,” Hayle said.  “I think things will be fine.”

Lillian didn’t feel convinced.

“I came to ask a question.  Now I feel we might need to have a discussion.”

“Please no,” Lillian said.

“You’re a favorite student of mine, with all the promise in the world-”

“Please, sir.”

“Okay,” Hayle said, raising his hands.  “Alright.  Just let this old man say his piece.”

Lillian couldn’t stop blushing.

“There was a time, not so long ago, where I worried about Sylvester.  All of the Lambs, but Sylvester was among them.  When it came to… interest in others.”

“What do you mean?”

“When a youth comes of age, it can be hard.  Hormones surge, judgment isn’t always there, unfamiliar feelings… if you combine the intensity of feeling with the natural ability of the Lambs to get what they desire, through trickery, problem solving, or sheer charm, keeping in mind Sylvester meets all of the marks, that’s a difficult issue.”

“Yes sir.  I don’t think he’s dangerous.”

“No, but he’s been retarded in physical and emotional growth by the chemicals we inject him with.  He’s a late bloomer in everything but mental faculties.  I worried that he would be a danger if he were to turn his attention toward someone in the public, but then he seemed to turn his sights to Mary, and if anyone can defend themselves, it’s her.”

“Yes sir.”

“I don’t want to sound as though I don’t have faith in you, Lillian.  But, the Lambs being what they are, it warps them in many ways, in growth and emotion and other things.  The arena of love stands to be very dangerous ground.  Enough that I considered chemically emasculating the boys and doing much the same for Mary.”

Lillian swallowed.

“I’m not going to do that.  I won’t tell you not to do this.  But I wanted you to know how, looking at the bigger picture, I was wary.”

“Yes sir.”

“I would like you to be wary.”

“Yes sir.  Um.  The other question?  That you came to ask?”

Professor Hayle sighed, as if she’d disappointed him somehow.  She hated that.

“The Lambs will be splitting up, depending on how the verdict goes.  We’ll find a way to broach the news to them tomorrow, but-”

“They know.”

Hayle paused.  “I should have figured.”

“Yes sir.  I mean, sir, I didn’t mean to sound like I was saying you should have, only that-”

“Yes, Lillian.  I know.  Do you have any recommendations, from students in your age group?”

“I don’t have many classes with students in my age group.  But I could give you names.”

“Thank you, Lillian.  Your parents are coming to visit in a month, I’m having them to my place.  I expect you’ll come?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If there’s anything you need,” Hayle said, glancing in the direction of Sy, “You’ll let me know?”

“Yes, sir,” she lied.

Bleeding Edge – 8.1

A carriage passed us, the wheels cutting through the golden leaves that had collected at the street’s edge.  The man atop the carriage looked down at us and tipped his hat, smiling.

Weird.

I watched as the carriage continued down the long, well-maintained road.  The properties on either side were well spaced out, each one less than a proper manor, but more than a mere home.   Walls both short and tall surrounded each.  Stitched in servants’ uniforms were busy raking up leaves and pruning some peculiar trees with charcoal black bark and autumn-yellow foliage.  I wondered if the grass was a similar type of affectation, because it wasn’t green, but a color comparable to wheat.

Peaceful, idyllic, every scene an image from a painting, juxtaposed by the contents of the carriage – a large cage with a dozen people and one monster crammed within.  A young child gripped the bars with both hands, staring back at me as the beaked monster peered over her shoulder.

She let go of the bar, reaching out in my direction.

I lifted my hand, as if to take her hand, but she was already ten feet away, the gap growing.

I’d pulled ahead of the others, so I turned and started walking backward, looking at the Lambs.

Our contingent of Lambs were dressed up.  It wasn’t a huge change for Jamie, who wore a shirt with a straight, stiff-necked collar, a jacket, and slacks, but Gordon had really come into his own with the finer clothes, dressing up in very much the same, but without the jacket.  His shirt was tucked in, and a stylized belt buckle drew the eye.  Even Hubris was groomed, his short coat brushed until there wasn’t a stray hair.

Lillian, though, had gone the extra mile, with a new dress, navy blue and pleated with a folded collar and a coat stylized after the doctor’s lab coats, new, fashionable, and nice enough that it could be worn in high society.  She had a daub of makeup on her lips and the ends of her hair were curled outward and up.

It wasn’t her.  She was prettier than I’d ever seen her, unless I counted some mental images of her in a nightgown, lit in just the right way by the light from the window, but I found myself itching to mess up her hair or clothes.  I didn’t want to see her upset, but surprised would be nice.  Smiling would be better.

I wasn’t sure how to reconcile the feeling or how to make it happen.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You had a look in your eye.”

“Lies,” I said.

“You did,” Gordon said.

“Can confirm,” Jamie said.  “Perfect recall.  In prior moments when you’ve had that look, you’ve been up to mischief.”

“Okay, okay!” I said.  I turned around, taking exaggerated steps to the left and then the right, before letting myself crash into Lillian’s shoulder.  “Minor mischief.”

Lillian looked at me out of the corner of one eye, wary and getting warier by the second.

“You look nice,” I said.

“You said as much, just ten minutes ago, when you saw me come through the door,” Lillian said.  “Are you saying it again because you want to distract me from what you were really saying or thinking?”

“So paranoid!” I admonished her.

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a partial yes.  The two ideas are linked.”

I watched her turn her eyes forward, picking her way through the possibilities.

No blush, but I could see the change in her expression as she connected the dots.

“Be good,” she said, suppressing a smile.

“Never,” I said, reaching down to take her hand.  I squeezed.

“I’m serious,” she said.  She didn’t pull her hand away.  “This is really important to me.  If you play around or mess up here, then I’m going to be really upset.”

I swung our hands back and forth.

“I know you want to, Sy.  I know how your brain works, as much as anyone can.  These people are as important as people can be, without having the power to cancel the Lambs project or call in favors to end us.  They are probably the most important and powerful people you can get away with practicing your own Sylvester brand of villainy on, without repercussion.”

I started swinging with more and more vigor.

“Now it sounds like you’re trying to convince me to do something.”

“No!” Lillian said, her voice suddenly sharp.  She pulled her hand away from mine, letting mine flop to my side, while stabbing a fingernail at my throat.  It had been artificially grown or else glued on.  Lillian didn’t normally have longer nails.  Sharp.  “No joking.  No turning around thirty minutes from now and saying I convinced you to do it, no nonsense at all, Sy.”

The more serious and stern she got with me, the more I wanted to do something.  Seeing her all prettied up just made me want to tease her more.

I could kiss her and make her melt, and smudge that makeup that made her look less like our Lillian and more like someone else’s Lillian.

It was a nice mental image.

“Yes ma’am,” I said.  I smiled, but it might have looked more like a smirk.

Jamie turned to Gordon, pointing at his own eye, “Mischievous glimmer, right?”

“I saw it,” Gordon said, expression flat.

Lillian took that as excuse to stab my jugular with her fingernail again.  “Be good, Sy.  I want this.  One day, I’m going to have to choose what I do with everything I’m studying.  Professor Ibott wants to attend the nobles and have the most power a non-noble can have.  I asked for this job, we didn’t have to do it, you agreed to do this for me, they did too, but you agreed.”

“I’m entirely on your side,” I said.

“I don’t trust you for a hot bloody second, Sy, not when it comes to unfamiliar territory like this.  If I’m ever going to be a black-coated professor, I need friends, contacts, patrons.  I need to make friends, and I need to look like I know what I’m doing.  Please.  Please, please, please, I’m begging you, don’t muck this up.  Please.”

“We could have him wait outside,” Gordon suggested.

Lillian snapped her head around to look at Gordon, and I could tell that she was actually pleased at the notion.

“I don’t want to wait outside.”

“It’s a possibility,” Lillian said, not acknowledging me.

“I miss the old days.  When I had backup,” I said, staring out off to one side, at the houses and the trees.

“Jamie would have been backing Lillian,” Gordon said.  He looked at Jamie, “Sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Jamie said.  “If it matters, I don’t think we should leave anyone outside.  People like this, they’re liable to worry about subterfuge.  Not being able to watch or keep track of every member of a group of visitors?  I think it would put them in a warier mindset.”

Did he actually just back me up?

“That’s a good point,” Gordon said.  “Where did you pick that up?”

“A book series I’ve been reading.  Intrigue in noble courts.  Not like ours.”

“Huh,” Gordon said.

“I’ll be good,” I said, with emphasis.

“I wish I had something on you,” Lillian said.  “Something you wanted that I could take away, some weakness I could exploit, but you don’t leave any good openings.  It’s so one-sided.  How do I punish you if you ruin this for me?”

“I won’t.”

“You can beat him up, or wrestle him into submission and make him cry uncle and admit he smells like butt, or whatever you want him to say,” Gordon said.  “I’m pretty sure you could beat him in a fight.  He still can’t seem to grasp the basics.”

“First of all, not necessary, because I won’t do anything to deserve a beating, but she tried that this one night this past summer,” I said.  “I teased her too much and she-”

“We’re not talking about that,” Lillian said, louder than was necessary.

“-tried-”

“Not talking about it!”

I dropped the subject.

“Silent treatment, then,” Gordon said.

Won’t work, I thought with confidence, as I saw Lillian glance at me, working through the idea in her head.  She’ll crack before I do.  And I can make her break the silence.

“I’ll do it too,” Gordon said, “Silent treatment.  Solidarity.”

“Hey,” I said.  It’s like he read my mind and deftly countered my preliminary strategy.

“Me too,” Jamie said.  “If it’s deserved.”

“Hey!”

“We can pass on word to the others, too, just in case Sy got the bright idea of joining with the others the next time the teams got shuffled around,” Gordon said.  “Mary would play along.”

“She would,” Lillian said.

“Helen too, if we bribed her.”

“Yep,” Lillian said.

“Ashton, well, if Sy really wants conversation, I don’t think Ashton would really suffice.”

“You boys are the best,” Lillian said.  She put her hands on Gordon’s upper arm, then rose up on her tiptoes to give him a kiss on the cheek.  He had to bend down a fair bit to even allow it.  Lillian quickly skipped around to Jamie.  She didn’t have to bend down or even raise up on tiptoes too much to do it.  She beamed a smile as she looked at me.

“I’ll be good,” I said.

“You better,” she warned.

The rest of the way to our destination, she walked between Gordon and Jamie.

The properties to our right had given way to a downward slope and a view of a slice of beach and a lake filled with docks and fancy boats.  The cart that had passed us earlier was now parked by the water, the door open, occupants and monster gone.

The houses to our left grew greater and grander the closer we got to the water.  The modifications to each home changed, too.  Where the smaller houses were riddled with signs of the cheaper means of building, trees growing into and through them, the bigger houses were more carefully done, the growth and alterations set in the gardens and into the walls.  The stone walls had branches and vines creeping through them, covered in bright red berries and thin yellow leaves, crowned with greater clusters of golden yellow foliage at the tops.  More conventional, old-fashioned houses in more alien settings.

Those leaves would be security measures, I knew.  Poisonous to the touch, or covered in tiny fibers that would cause pants-crapping levels of agony for days on end.

The house at the road’s end was the capstone.  A true manor, larger than any of the rest.  The walls to the left and right of it encased rows of the black-barked, yellow-leafed trees, and the gardens were weird and wiry, more black wood and autumnal colors.  The house itself was a sprawl, the wood done dark, the highlights and shingles pale enough they stood out.  Stitched waited at the gates.

I tugged my shirt into position and straightened my collar as they began opening the gates, lifting and dragging them back and away.

Lillian appeared next to me.  She looked at me.

“Please, Sy.”

“Your lead, Lil.”

“Don’t call me Lil.  If they start calling me Lil because you did, I can’t correct them, and if this somehow works and I get an opportunity, I’ll have to live with that for a really long time.  I know you’d get the biggest kick out of that, but-”

I raised my hands, putting them over her mouth, cupping them so I didn’t smudge her lipstick.

“Lillian,” I said.

She huffed, then nodded.  I let the hands drop.

“I’m all agitated now.”

I turned to face the gate.  People were coming down the long path.  I wondered if it was more polite to meet them halfway.  Under my breath, I said, “Your own fault you’re agitated.”

“No it isn’t,” Lillian said.  She was facing squarely ahead as well, talking out of the corner of her mouth.  “Two years of experience have led up to this, Sy.  Gordon, Jamie, do I look alright?  I’m not all ruffled, or red in the cheeks?  Or-”

“You look fine,” Gordon said.  Jamie nodded.

“You look like a proper professor in the making,” I said.

“Don’t,” she said, focused on the approaching husband and wife pair.  She didn’t look at me.  “Please don’t raise me up just to make a bigger crash when you trip me up and I fall.  Any other time.”

“Said the frog to the scorpion, who was asking for a ride across the water,” Gordon said.

“You too.  Don’t make me nervous,” she said.  “Don’t-”

She let her voice drop off as the pair drew close.

I whispered, “Like I said.  Your lead.  You get to take point.”

Lillian gave me the smallest nod.

Husband and wife.  He was a middle-aged gentleman with obviously altered features, cut a little too sharp.  His face was clean shaven, his blond hair waxed to the point that it looked artificial through and through, as if it were finely carved of wood.  He wore a jacket with tails and thin slacks, and held a bone cane, more for style than out of any need for one.

She was a woman who’d had more work done on her body than most.  I might have taken her for his daughter, but she was wearing the open-front blouse that was so common to yesteryear’s high courts.  The cut of the dress bared the space between breasts, and the resulting picture was decorated with low-hanging jewelry and framed with ruffles and lace.  It would have been the style for Lillian’s mother when the woman was Lillian’s age or a few years older, if Lillian’s mother was born to a good family.

That dress told me a lot.  It suggested she was forty, for one, her apparent age cut in half by good care by good doctors.  It wasn’t unfashionable, but it took courage or reasons to wear it when she could have an easier time following modern fashion trends.  The risque styles of dress had been a reaction or signal of support to the Crown around the time the infighting between Crown and Church had started.  It was very possible that she or her entire family had a deeper stake in that particular fight, remembered even today.

She also had a tic, one finger moving rhythmically where she thought we couldn’t see, one hand in the other arm’s sleeve of her.  If I remembered right, it was a problem common to people who had had certain augmentations placed within their forearms.  A precursor to the same sort of thing that let Fray hide needles in her fingertips.

No, even from the way they held themselves, and the ease and care with which they moved, it was clear they were augmented from head to toe.  Grafts, physical alterations, drugs, changes to their biological construction at the ground level, and more.

They weren’t nobles, but by golly, they wanted to be.

“The so-called Lambs?” the man asked.

“Yes sir,” Lillian said.

“I heard stories, I inquired, and what I was told led me to expect monsters dressed up like children.  I was skeptical.  Now I’m not sure whether to be disappointed or impressed.  Are you the monsters I heard descriptions of, with particularly good craftsmanship?”

I bit my tongue rather than make a clever reference to Helen.  Three sprung to mind.

“We’re very good at what we do, sir,” Lillian said.  “Without knowing the stories, I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you.”

He looked us over.

“Very well.  This is my wife, Mrs. Adelaide Gage.  I am Everard Gage.  I am grateful to you for coming.”

“We’re happy to render any assistance we can,” Lillian said.

“I would request that the dog stay outside,” the man said.

“I’m sorry, sir, but Hubris stays with me,” Gordon said, voice firm.  “He’s a member of this team and a resource.  May I suggest that I leave and take a walk down by the water?  I can wait for the meeting to conclude, without bringing him inside or leaving him behind.”

The man studied Gordon, looked again at the dog, then shook his head.  “No, both you and him can come in.  Follow us, please.”

We followed the pair as they took the path to the front door.

I continued to bite my tongue.  Gordon is willing to suggest having me wait outside, but the dog, oh, no, the dog is a member of this team.

Heavy double doors of black wood opened with Everard and Adelaide’s approach, though there were no eyes watching through nearby windows, and the doors themselves lacked openings.  I glanced to one side as we passed through.  The man in a servant’s uniform wasn’t stitched, but something else, lacking eyes, ears and hair.  The man on the opposite side was a close match.

“In here,” Everard said, “This sitting room gets more light at this time of day.  Not that there’s much to enjoy these days.  All overcast gray.”

Lillian started to open her mouth, then stopped before voicing anything.

I stuck my elbow forward and to one side to push it into her back.

Lillian spoke, “If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, it’s much better than it is in Radham.  The rain never stops there.”

“I’d forgotten about that,” Adelaide said, speaking for the first time.  Even her voice has been altered to be younger and prettier.  “I’ve been, but it’s easy to forget it’s so incessant.”

“Yes, madam,” Lillian said, more enthusiastic now that a basic rapport had been established.

I would have slapped my hand across my face if I didn’t think it would get me in trouble with Lillian and the silent treatment from the rest of the Lambs.

Lillian continued, “It’s so rare that I can go outdoors without an umbrella or a raincoat that I feel strange without one.”

The woman offered Lillian a tight smile, chin drawn slightly in, and replied with a simple, “Quite so.”

Lillian glanced briefly at me.  She hadn’t missed just how quickly the mood had shifted.

“Would you have a seat?” Everard asked.  He indicated the chairs and loveseat of the little sitting room.

We sat.  I sat beside Lillian in the loveseat.

“Tea will be along shortly.  We called for it as you arrived at the gate.”

“Thank you, sir,” Gordon said.  He’d settled in a chair, and hand his hand over the armrest, scratching Hubris’ head.  He looked like a young aristocrat, entirely at home in this environment.

Lillian had lost her voice, it seemed, if Gordon was stepping up.  I guessed she didn’t know what she’d done wrong and she dreaded doing it again.

“Mrs. Gage, ma’am,” I said, “Mr. Gage, sir.  Can I ask what happened?”

“We wrote about it all in the letter to your, who was it?”

“Mr. Hayle,” Adelaide said.

“The man in charge of our project, yes sir, yes ma’am,” Lillian said. She’d picked up on my hint.

“That letter should have had the necessary details,” Everard said.  “Are you so forgetful?”

Right on the attack.  Defensive.

I gestured discreetly with my hand at my knee, watching the eyes of the pair to make sure they weren’t noticing.  At most they might take it to be distracted movements of the hand.  Paper.  Watch.  Hidden.  Word.  Paper.  Strategy.

“Sir, letters get intercepted, particularly those from people of your status,” Lillian said.  I could hear the tremor in her voice partway through the sentence.  Not something someone unfamiliar with her would have caught, but a sign that she was anxious.  “It wouldn’t be unusual to keep details out of the paper that you wouldn’t want your enemies to catch wind of.  But if we’re going to help, then we’ll need all of the details.  The work we do is dangerous, and a seemingly innocuous detail could get us killed.”

Good, I gestured.  You.

Everard and Adelaide exchanged a glance.

“You’re right,” Everard admitted.  “Well said.  I’ll be blunt, and admit our second daughter is missing.  She’s run away from home, and she’s done so in the worst way possible.”

“A gang of hooligans,” Adelaide said.  “In Lugh.”

“An hour’s ride away,” Jamie said.  “Lugh is a blight.  A harbor for rebels against the Crown and illegal trade.  I can see why it concerns you, sir, her being affiliated with such things.”

“Yes,” Everard said.  “A blight, I quite like that.  We’ve hired help to go find her and drag her home, but it’s a hostile place.  The Crown comes and stamps at them now and again, but the rats crawl into hiding, and they come out of hiding shortly after the Crown leaves.  If they send people to stay and try to defend the city, they find resistance and sabotage every step of the way.  We would send more people to recover her, but that would make this less discreet.  We wanted quality.”

“You’re too kind, sir,” Lillian said.  “I think you’ll be satisfied.”

Not how I would’ve worded the first half.  Would have dropped the ‘I think’ from the second.

Adelaide spoke, “She’s altered herself.  Threw in with artists and dock workers who tattoo themselves and go to back-alley hacks that alter their bodies.  She’s lost leave of her senses, and now her outside shows it.  Horns, altered eyes, tattoos, and who knows what else.  All easily remedied, thankfully, but if it’s linked to us…”

She fanned herself with one hand.  Her husband reached out to take her other hand.

“You’ll find her,” he said.  “Without drawing attention.”

“Yes, sir,” Lillian said.

“Good, good,” Everard said.  He paused, then gave Lillian a curious glance.  “What are you, then?”

“Sir?”

“The Lambs are creations, alterations, am I wrong?”

“Oh, yes sir,” Lillian said.  “But not me.”

“Not you?”

I leaned forward a little, “Lillian is purely human.”

I could see the disappointment cross Everard’s face.

“She remains one of Radham Academy’s top students, sir,” I said.  “She’s years ahead of her peers, she does errands for Radham’s professors, handles aspects of various Lambs projects, and assists us as a field medic and, I don’t want to say she’s our handler, because we don’t need explicit handling, but…”

“She’s the human element, ensuring we don’t diverge into problematic territory,” Gordon said, very diplomatically.

Everard nodded, looking Lillian over.  I wasn’t sure Lillian knew what to do with herself, finding herself put on the spot like that.

“If I may, sir?” Jamie spoke up.  “I’m sorry to change the topic.”

“If you may what?” Everard asked.

“You implied there were details that you didn’t include in the letter, sir.  You included nearly all of what you said here.  Is there more?”

My memory wasn’t so bad that I’d completely forgotten the earlier conversation.  I was fairly certain that he hadn’t implied any such thing.  Implications were the sort of thing I paid close attention to.

“Did I?” the man asked.  Then his expression changed as he realized what the rest of us had, that he’d verified that he’d at least thought it.  “Yes, there is more.”

“Anything and everything you can tell us is helpful, sir,” Lillian said.

“You’ve heard of these texts that are being shared around?”

Oh.

“These hooligans they’ve befriended, they’ve got one of them.  They’ve been occupying themselves.”

“Oh,” Lillian said.  “That’s problematic, but-”

“It would hardly be of concern, but for the harm it does to the Crown, and the severity of the charges that would be laid against her if she were caught by the full and proper authorities.”

“Yes sir,” Lillian said.

“…And the implications, with the alterations made to her,” Everard finished.

There was a bit of a pause.

This keeps getting better.

“What alterations, sir?” Gordon asked.

“She’s immortal,” Adelaide said.

“Immortal, ma’am?” Lillian asked.

“We don’t know the particulars.  The doctor who started her on the regimen left for the war and hasn’t yet returned, though we’ve corresponded by mail.  Exceptional fellow.  He says that the drugs he’s given her will extend her lifespan indefinitely, and give her some healing ability.  If it doesn’t, or if there are problems, she should last long enough for care to advance to the point of being able to fix it.”

“Some experiments have been done that seem to be pointing in that direction, sir, but the level of care required is high,” Lillian said.  “Immortality exists, but it’s paradoxically fragile, enough that even many nobles avoid it.”

“Her doctor thinks he’s unraveled it, and our daughter was the test subject.  We provided the funding.  There was and is a massive chance she’ll die from complications, but the chance to pioneer something like this, we had to take it.  Setting her above the rest.”

“Yes sir,” Lillian said, with less enthusiasm than before.

“It would be a grave disappointment if she were to figure out the particulars of that work and share it out at a lower cost, until it became common,” Everard said.

“We’d hoped for her to be special,” Adelaide said.  “Enough to draw attention.  Baron Richmond won’t be on this end of the Crown States forever.  He’s a bachelor, keeping the company of his twin sisters.  We need our daughter back in time to get her cleaned up and presentable, and we need it done with discretion.”

“Enough that the Baron doesn’t have to hear of it, perhaps?” Gordon asked.

Everard smiled, “We would be grateful.”

Lillian tried to speak and fail.  She did a fair job of hiding her quiet shock.

They really want to be nobles, I thought.

“We excel at discretion, sir,” Gordon said, making brief eye contact with me, as if challenging me to disagree.  Or maybe he was thinking of the Brechwell Beast.

“Very glad to hear it.  We can provide rides from here to Lugh and back, should you need it, and anything else you require.  Funds, to be sure.”

“Yes sir,” Lillian said.  “Thank you.  If it’s alright, we’ll confer between ourselves and then decide how to move forward?”

“You can do so here,” Everard said.  “Adelaide and I will see what’s keeping the tea.”

And confer among yourselves.

The two departed the room, gently shutting the door behind them.

I gestured quickly, to let the others know we were probably being listened in on.

Lillian looked at me.  She seemed a little lost.  I wasn’t even sure she’d registered what I’d gestured at her.

Then she smiled a little, and leaned across the loveseat to give me a peck on the cheek.

“Thank you for the nice things you said,” she told me.

“Always,” I murmured.  “Even if I call you a crybaby, I’ll have a hundred other nice things to say too.”

“I don’t know what to do,” she said.

“You’re going to do your job,” I said.  “You’re going to do it well.  You’ll make contacts.”

“But she-”

I gestured again.  Another reminder.

She nodded.

“We’ll figure out the particulars on the way,” I said.

Lillian nodded.

Then she leaned over and gave me another peck on the cheek.  Her hands found my right hand and held it.

I’d opened up the relationship with a kiss to save her and to save myself.  To cast doubt on her word when it came to me.  I’d let her down, in a way, hurt her in the eyes of people she very much wanted to impress.

This, I could do this much.  I would give her this in compensation.

Bleeding Edge – 8.2

The wind was strong, and even if it wasn’t for the chilly breeze, the water was bound to be cold.  The people on the beach weren’t going any further than getting their ankles wet, and even the ones who sat on blankets and wore swimsuits seemed to be using towels and blankets for added warmth.  I imagined it was fine so long as there was sunlight, but the wind whipped the gray clouds overhead across the sky and the sunlight was intermittent.

I saw Lillian shiver, though she was trying not to show it.  I shrugged off my jacket, and draped it over her bare legs, where her skirt didn’t reach down far enough.

“Thank you, Sy.”

I nodded, hugging my knees as we sat together on the slope that led down to the beach.  Lillian moved a bit closer and rested her head on my shoulder.

“Five minutes,” I said.

“Hm?” she raised up her head.

I reached over with my free arm and pulled her head back into position against my shoulder.  “Five minutes.  Then you should scoot over.  I think the Gages are the type that would think less of you if they saw you like this.  The twits.  We don’t want a repeat of the incident in the office.  Or the time you slept over, last month, or the-”

“Okay, Sy.  Okay.  Shhh.  Don’t ruin a nice moment.”

Jamie looked up at us and smiled, almost smirking.  I shooed at him, and he turned forward again.

The profile of face and neck, the hair, the work in the notebook, I recognized that person.  Then I remembered that it wasn’t him, and I felt a pang of loss.  My best friend.  I missed his talents when things were active and hectic and there was something to be done, and this new Jamie helped bridge the gap.  But when things were quiet, I missed him, and the new Jamie hurt rather than help when it came to that.

I could see some of the drawing he was doing.  Fine lines, wispy, each line assured and careful, more akin to the basic outlining a painter might do in ink before applying watercolor than anything else.  A different hand and style than the Jamie I knew.  He was drawing the boats, further down, and some of the ships he was drawing had long ago left the harbor.

Boats moved this way and that, like one of the puzzles Mr. Hayle had given us back in the day, until certain boats could slip through.

I thought of the child in the cage we’d seen on our way in.  Was she already on her way out, aboard a ship?

I didn’t like the idea, and I didn’t like that acting on it would ruin things for Lil.  Unless…

“Having second thoughts?” I asked.

Jamie looked up from the drawing.  Lillian looked up at me.

“The runaway.  It sounds like she had good reasons for leaving home.  Being pushed into marriage with a noble?”

“The Baron, no less,” Jamie said.  “The Duke got started early in terms of military strategy and leadership.  The Baron?  Sixty-four nobles would have to die before he got his shot at the Crown, possibly sixty-five if the Infante of Crown Hispana gets a younger sibling this year.  The Baron is closer to the Gages in social rank than to the Duke.  Five steps below the Duke, four steps above the Gages.  Few opportunities, few reasons to go out and do things.”

“He’s festered,” I said, my voice low.  “Gone stagnant.  Cabin fever, but his life is the cabin.  Nothing to do with himself but resent that he can’t climb higher and turn mean.”

Jamie gave me a nod of confirmation.  I could see Lillian wince.

“I’m not going to mince words,” I said.

“Could you?” Lillian asked.  “Really, about the mincing words thing.  I know the Lambs have dilemmas all the time, I know it’s hard, and you guys make the calls.  In Brechwell I made my voice heard, gave my input when I thought you were crossing a line or acting without all the information.  But… why can’t this be easy?  Can you help me make this easier?”

She’d lifted her head up from my shoulder, and pulled away a bit.  She still looked a little cold.

“You wanted to be a professor,” I said.  “This isn’t the last tough call you’re going to have to make.  I could lie to you, and take action on my own, and it would take the weight off your shoulders.  I could make decisions for you.  But I don’t think doing any of that would be making you the best Lillian you can be.”

“I’m fifteen, Sy.  These are decisions an adult would have a hard time with.”

“Fifteen is adult.  It’s been adult for a long time, to a lot of people,” I said.  “Fifteen or sixteen is when people have historically gotten married.  It’s when kids have finished school and gone to work, if they didn’t start sooner.  Don’t let that school of yours convince yourself that childhood somehow lasts until you’re older.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready.”

“Then let this opportunity slip by,” I said.  “I’d say no harm no foul, but it will hurt you.  Now, you’re not competing against any of your peers, because you are stellar and special.  But you’ll end up competing against the students who are eighteen to twenty now.  You’re going to find yourself in much the same position Fray was in when she was considered for a professor’s position.  If those eighteen year olds are making the hard calls now while you’re holding back, you’ll fall behind.”

“It almost sounds like you’re trying to convince me to go ahead with this.”

“Do you think I would?”

“No.  Which is why it sounds weird, coming from your lips.”

I looked back and over in the direction of the Gage’s home to make sure they weren’t approaching.  This would be a bad conversation to have someone overhear.

“I want to help the Lambs, Lil.  I want to help the people and the experiments who can’t speak for themselves, the children, the mice among foxes, even those mice who don’t know what that scratching means.  I’m on the fence about this too, but it’s because, on one hand, I want to help now, even if it’s a small thing, helping one person.  But on the other hand, I want to help you.  Because I think, I hope, that you as a professor will help more people in the long run.”

“Even if that’s a journey that starts with this?  Capturing someone that’s escaped a bad situation and a… horrible family, and sending her back?”

“It’s your lead, Lil.  This is your mission, first and foremost.  I don’t think we should sabotage the job, but it’s up to you, how hard you really want to try.  We could get her back to her family, but do it late.  It wouldn’t reflect so well on the Gages, it wouldn’t give you the same opportunities, but it would probably rest easier on all of our consciences.”

Lillian made a face, scowling at no one thing in particular.

“It’s your call.  We back you.”

“Yep,” Jamie said, dead sincere.

“I know I should thank you, but…” Lillian trailed off, then sighed.

I rubbed her back.

Gordon and Hubris were making their way down the dirt path that separated the yellow-grass covered slope from the beach.  He had one thing of luggage behind him, a smaller case set on top of it, and a third slung over his shoulder, resting against his back.  Hubris was strutting with the handle of one luggage case in his jaws.

That dope.  He was supposed to be walking the dog, not carrying stuff.

I might have gotten up to help, but he’d chosen to take on that particular burden, and I really didn’t want to.

Gordon’s approach made me miss the Lambs that weren’t present.

Jamie foremost among them.  I looked at the person sitting further down the hill and felt another twinge of recognition, followed by the stab of loss.

Having a bad memory sucked, sometimes.

“Jamie,” I said.

“Hm?”

“Can I have a piece of paper?”

He opened his book, flipped it over, using a finger to hold his page, and tore out the last page.  He had to crawl a couple of feet up the hill and extend his arm, while I had to do much the same, reaching down, before I had the paper.

“Need a pen?”

“I’ve got one, thanks.”

“Scheme?” Lillian asked.

“No scheme.  I was going to write Mary a letter.  We know where she is, right?”

“Yep,” Jamie said.  “She’s at-”

“Tell me later.  I won’t remember between now and when I address this.  Just wanted to get in touch, let her know where we’re at, what’s going on.  Make it so she doesn’t feel so alone.  Because being with Helen and Ashton, who are good company but not the best for actual conversation, and then there’s the new guy whatshisname-”

“Duncan,” Jamie and Lillian said at the same time.

“-who doesn’t have a doctorly name, it’s gotta be a little isolating,” I said.

“It probably is,” Lillian said.

“Unless you don’t want me to?  If it would be weird, me writing a girl a letter, when we’re sort of, you know-”

“You’re not writing a girl a letter.  You’re writing Mary a letter.  My best friend.  Are you honestly telling me that the clever Sylvester is this clueless when it comes to things like this?”

“The clever Sylvester is new to this sort of thing,” I said.  “He’s got some of it figured out, but other parts, he just wants to not screw up too badly.”

“He’s doing fine,” Lillian said.  “Mostly.”

“Mostly?” I asked.  I moved the pen over to the other hand, reached up, and tugged at her hair, where it hung in front of her ear.

Lillian swatted at my hand.  I saw her turn her head, looking for the Gages, then she leaned in and gave me a quick peck on the cheek.

“Stop smiling like that,” she said, jabbing me with a finger.

“I’m not,” I said, while suppressing a smile.  “I am going to start this letter with ‘Dear Mary, Lillian is telling lies and abusing me with pokes and prods.'”

“Don’t.  You saying that is going to make her miss us more.”

“True.  And we might as well edit it so it’s fine if someone gets their hands on it.  Like the Gages, who we’ll have to ask to mail it for us.”

“Yeah,” Lillian said.

“Dear Mary.  Miss you.”

“That’s nice,” Lillian said.  Jamie nodded.

Gordon joined us.  He settled down a short distance from Jamie, at the foot of the hill, setting down the bags.

“Hey Gordon,” I said.

“Hi, Sylvester.”

“How’s that heart of yours doing?  Pounding?  Feeling a twinge?”

“I’m fine.”

“Because exertion like that, especially dumb, muleheaded exertion, for no reason at all, can’t imagine it’s that good for you.”

“I’m fine, Sy.  No pain.  Hubris isn’t telling me there’s anything he senses that I don’t.”

I looked at the dog.  “And what happens if he says it isn’t, halfway here?  Are we supposed to come look for you, or do the Gages find you?  Because it reflects badly, you know, and you were being snobby earlier about how we’re all in this for Lillian and you had her back when I don’t.”

“I’m fine, Sy.  I’m strong.  The luggage has wheels.  It’s not a problem.”

“Uh huh,” I said.  “Right.”

“Right,” he said.

“The letter,” Lillian told me.

I reached over, and rubbed her thigh through the fabric of my jacket.

“Anything you want to add, Gordon?  Letter to Mary,” I said.

“Tell her I’ll practice.  I’ll land thirty-six out of thirty-nine, next time she gives me lessons.”

“Knife throwing?” Jamie asked.

“Yeah.”

“Land…” I said speaking very slowly.  “Twenty out of thirty-nine.”

“Thirty-six,” Gordon said.

“Right, twenty-six,” I said, as I wrote down thirty-six.

“Hubris.  Kill him,” Gordon said.

Hubris, panting from pulling the luggage, raised his head to look at me, hackles rising, teeth bared.  He got to his feet, and he snarled.  Lillian moved a little, just beside me, ready to throw herself out of the way.

“You’re such a faker, mutt,” I said, very casually.

The hackles went down, he closed his mouth, then flopped over onto his side.

I was nearly done the letter when a ship in the harbor blew its horn.  I looked up and out and thought again of the kid in the cage.

It made me think of the conversation with Lillian, the cost, the gamble.  How many small injustices did I have to let slide, to commit a greater justice?

I turned my head to look at Lillian, studying her.

She was the one who was going to outlive even me.  Not that I was going to live that long.

Had to do this right.  Build her up, make her strong, keep her happy and healthy.

Mary was more fragile in some ways, I was worse for Mary, but the damage done would be so short term.  Lillian would, extenuating circumstances aside, be an enduring presence in the world.

She noticed me looking.

“What?” she asked.  She flushed a little.

“This thing, right here.  Whatever we’re calling this job.  You have it in you to do it right.  But it’s going to be tough.”

“I got the gist of that,” Lillian said.  She turned to Gordon, “We were talking earlier about the moral dilemmas.”

“It’s your mission, you make the call,” Gordon said.

I gestured toward him.  See?  See?

“I know,” Lillian said.

“For the next part, I’m going to take lead.  Because I think we can find a middle ground, where there is one to be found.  I want you to pay attention.  Start thinking along these lines.  Looking for the less obvious roads.  If it’s the only thing I can teach you, let me teach you this much.”

She gave me a somber nod.

I finished up the letter, keeping to general topics.  The content of the letter didn’t matter – it was the fact it was being sent that mattered most, that she was being remembered.

We watched the ships for a little longer.  Idly, I reached up and tugged her hair again.

She licked her lips, glancing back over her shoulder, and jumped a little.

I looked.  It was the Gages.  Everard and Adelaide.

The Lambs stood.

“Everything alright?” Everard asked.  I didn’t get the impression he’d seen me pull Lillian’s hair, or that he’d understood what he’d seen.  No wry look in his eyes, no puzzlement, nothing in his tone.

“Yes, sir,” Lillian said.

“We’ve found a boat.  You’ll go from this harbor to the one in Lugh, sooner than you would if you reached out to your Academy.”

Antsy to get us going.

“Yes, sir,” Lillian said.

“I’ll show you to the appropriate ship.”

“If it’s no trouble, could you tell us about your daughter while you do?” Gordon asked.

Everard Gage blinked, a little surprised.

“If we’re expected to find her, we should know what we can about her, sir.  Age, appearance, name, interests, personality.”

“I see,” Everard said.  He looked faintly uncomfortable.  He gestured for us to walk.

The Lambs moved down the hill to the luggage, collecting it, before catching up with the others.  I saw Lillian heading over to grab the case with her things, and shooed her off.  She could go empty handed.

I gave it to the mutt, instead.  He gave me an annoyed look, but took the handle between his teeth.

“She’s a good girl,” Adelaide said.  “Until this… flight of fancy.  She’s always done well in her lessons, though it took some convincing for some.”

“Which ones, ma’am?”

“I’d have to ask the tutors to remind myself, but there’s no time for that, is there?  There was an instrument she wasn’t fond of.  It might have been the violin,” Adelaide decided.  Then doubt crossed that young woman’s face.  “Or was that dancing?  It was the same teacher.  The fellow from Eire.”

“It might have been the dancing she took issue with,” Everard said.  “She wasn’t graceful.”

“Is there something she particularly enjoyed?” Gordon tried.  “In food, drink, treats, entertainment, hobbies?  Types of people she spent time with?”

I saw the look on the parents’ faces, as if they were utterly lost in the face of the simplest questions. If we pushed too much further, we risked offending them.

They barely knew their own daughter.

“Would it be better to ask the tutors, then get in touch with us by letter?” I asked.

“Perhaps,” Everard said.

It wasn’t a statement that should have ended the line of questioning, but it did.  The others had sensed much of what I had, or had taken my cue, because they weren’t pressing any further.

“Her looks?” I asked.

“Oh, she’s a pretty girl,” Adelaide said.  “Blonde, but she always wore her hair in that modern style, all curls, tight against the head.  I don’t know if she still will, it’s so much trouble to upkeep.  Not a problem at home-”

She went on at length about her daughter’s physical attributes, the particulars of dress, fashion, style, what looked good on her daughter, grace… I tuned out much of it.  Jamie would remember the key points.

The people’s ramp up to the docks wasn’t so far away from where we’d been sitting.  We made our way up, our footing swaying as a wagon cart made its way down.

The docks weren’t extensive, but they were nearly as crowded as the harbor was with boats.  People were moving things from ship to dock.  Construction material.  Building homes from scratch was expensive and the materials were so often acquired from elsewhere.  When you were going that far, why not go a step further and have the best wood, the nicest marble and stone?

I looked over the decks of the ships, searching, studying.

There.

The wagon cart, with a cage build into it.  The cage was empty, but the crowd of people matched.  Young and old, roughly half of them natives of the Crown States.  The other half were mixed, some white, some black, some Asian.  There were kids and youths in the group.  No chains bound them, but from the way they held themselves, the adults in particular, they might as well have had seven stone worth of shackles binding them from neck to wrist to ankle.

No, the monster that accompanied them was the shackle.  If they tried to run, it would get them, sure as anything.  There had probably been a hapless example.  Or there would be, when one of them worked up the courage to act.

Adelaide was still talking.  I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity.

“Lillian,” I murmured, putting a hand on Lillian’s shoulder, leaning close.  I spoke in her ear, just loud enough to be heard by others without being understood, keeping in mind that Adelaide or Everard might have had their hearing improved.  “That thing I was mentioning earlier, we really should…”

Adelaide had trailed off.  She glanced back at us.

“Is there a problem?” she asked.

“It’s minor, ma’am,” I said, “We would work it out ourselves, but in terms of doing this operation as well as it can be done-”

Her eyebrows went up, concern, irritation.

“Clothes, ma’am,” I said.  I pointed at the people on the ship.  “They’re slaves?”

“Indentured workers,” she said, archly.

Of course.

“Whatever you need, let’s get it over with, the captain is waiting,” Everard said.

Just like that, we were onto the deck of the boat with the slaves.

“If I may?” I asked Everard.

He gestured at me.  I was free to handle this.

“Captain,” I spoke to the man who gave off the impression he was in charge.  He certainly seemed like he was working least and worrying the most.

“Boy?” he asked.  Then he took note of Everard Gage, and closer look of my clothing.  “How can I help you?”

“The indentured servants.   Can I ask what happened?”

“Nonpayment of taxes,” he said, indicating the natives.  “Crime.  Those two families, a question of debts, purchased by the Crown.”

“Working off their sentences and debts to the Crown?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

“Even the children?”

“Except for that little criminal, yes,” he said.  He indicated one boy with pale hair that stood up in every direction.  One of the boy’s arms was shorter than the other.

Even the children, institutionalized and made to work to pay off the family debts.  Sins of the father.

“Where are they bound?”

“Would be Key Isle,” Jamie said.

“Key Isle eventually.”

“But you stop in Lugh first?” I asked.

I saw him hesitate.

It was only a guess, but it was an educated one.  I wondered if Lugh was the type of place that bred freedom fighters who would pay top dollar to free people from the Crown and get recruits, or if it was a question of business, offloading assets that ate more food and got more sickly the longer they were on a boat.  It would be nice to know, because it would inform how we approached a strange city.

I stepped closer to the child that I’d seen in the back of the wagon.  A girl, two or so years younger than me.  Maybe older, but shrunken from malnutrition.  I was brusque, checking her clothes, touching her hair.  She shrank back and I grabbed her firmly.  “Stop that.”

She froze, and looked up at her father, who wore a defeated expression, barely seeming to care about any of this.

“What’s this about?” Everard asked.

I leaned close to the girl, holding her hair to my nose.  While close, I murmured under my breath, “Say yes.”

She wore a puzzled expression as I backed away.  She started to speak, and I stuck a finger up, pressing it against her mouth.  I looked at the captain.  “How much?”

“Hm?  To buy?” he asked.  “Debt for that family is two thousand.  That one’s five thousand, the criminals are working for five years at a dollar a day, if I remember right.  Some for ten years, that one and that one.”

I pulled my finger away, pointing at the girl.  I asked her, “Do you know Lugh?  Have you been?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Good,” I said.  I turned to Everard.  “I want to buy them, sir.  Pay their debts and take them on.  All of the children of the debtors, the child criminal, and the parents as well.  It’s extra ears on the ground, we can wear their clothes off the boat, so we don’t draw too much attention.”

“You don’t have the means of disguising yourself already?”  Everard asked.

Yes, of course we do.

I grabbed the girl’s shirtfront, and sniffed it.  “It smells like the seaside, sir.  Sometimes we deal with people who have enhanced senses.  Smelling like we belong is critical.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Everard said.  “If that’s what you need to do, then do it.  We’ll see about convincing the captain of the boat you’re taking.”

“Do you have the wallet?” I asked Gordon, gesturing subtly at the same time.

“No, it’s in one of the bags.  I’ll get it.”

Everard made a ‘tsk’ sound, then said, “Captain, do you know who I am?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Gage.”

“I’ll pay you the next time you’re in this port.  You know I’m good for my word.”

“Yes sir,” the Captain said, trying too hard to avoid smiling.  He put his hands on the shoulders of different members of the group I’d pointed out, speaking to his pet monster, murmured orders.  Telling it not to act, to let them go.  He’d gotten a grotesquely good deal on this, I suspected.  “You have the means of controlling them?”

“We’ll manage,” I said.

“Mm hmm,” he said, in a very ‘it’s your funeral’ way.

Nine people ended up coming, six children and three adults, two men and a woman, roughly half the group black, the other half white.

I didn’t see Everard’s negotiation with the captain, but I did see the captain give the order to move one set of crates off the ship and onto the dock.  Making room.

I kept quiet and stayed focused, avoiding the puzzled glances of the parents and the children until the ship was underway.  Everard Gage and Adelaide Gage stood on the docks, watching us as the crew freed the ship from the dock.  There was probably a nautical term for it.  Unmoored?

“You’re free,” I murmured, to the little girl, gripping the ship railing and staring out over the water.  Lillian was standing right beside me, Jamie behind me.  “After you help us in Lugh, but you’re free.  Debt is paid.”

“Why?” she asked.

I didn’t answer.  The ship started moving.

“Before this is done,” I said to the little girl, “After things settle down and you find a home, you need to learn to fend for yourself, to be clever and be strong.  Because whatever your parents did to get into debt that bad, they’re going to do it again.”

I turned my head, meeting her eyes.

I saw a resigned look, one that suggested she’d long since accepted that she was doomed to rise and fall as her parents did.

“The next time, you can’t get caught when they do.  You have to be able to manage on your own.  Because I’m betting that one of the stops between Lugh and Key Isle is an Academy.”

“There isn’t,” Jamie said.

“Okay,” I said.  “Then they keep you at Key Isle until you know just how miserable existence is there, and then they tell you that you can leave, have your debt cleared, if only you accept doing some work for the Academy.  They’ll test something on you, and you’ll take that deal.  You’ll wish you hadn’t.”

She nodded.

“Go wait with your family below deck.  If there’s too many of us, the captain is going to get annoyed.”

She nodded again, then scampered off.

I liked her.

The ship rose and fell with waves.  Hubris’ claws skittered momentarily on the deck.

“Was that what happened to you?” Lillian asked, quiet.  “With the debt, working for the Academy?”

“Don’t know,” I said.  “Wouldn’t remember if it was.”

She nodded.  She took my hand.

“But it could’ve been what happened,” I said.  “Which is reason enough.”

Bleeding Edge – 8.3

I watched as Lugh came into sight.  For a city that seemed to have been named as a hybridization of ‘Lug’ and ‘Ugh’, the sprawl I saw before me seemed fitting enough.  It called the shims of Radham to mind, the poor, menial labor focused area of the city, but writ large and dashed across rocky seaside.

Half of the buildings were blocky and brutish, pure utility and the cheapest means of building put to use – stone blocks and the builder’s trees, which seemed to have been grown into and through buildings rather than used as the buildings were first put together.  Of the other half of the buildings, those that weren’t made out to be sloping off to one side by optical illusion and the jaunty slant of rooftops were actively working on falling over, with no optical illusion needed.

A thick, dark smoke rose from chimneys, a thin spitting of rain came from the clouds above, and the odd occupant of the city had a lantern out or a flickering light on and casting orange light, despite the fact that it was still early in the afternoon.

But the capstone, the element of Lugh that made people want to drift close enough to see, should they be on a boat, was the impressive sight of the great superweapon.  Or the ex-superweapon.  It had died at sea and drifted inland, or it had died at the coast and languished there.  Either way, it was too big to really dispose of, so it had been left to rot.  The armored exterior and the skin had proven too resilient for even vermin and disease to eat at, and much of it had calcified over the last decade or two, the remainder falling away.  As new buildings and sections of dock had gone up, they had done so under, over, and around the tendrils and tentacles that flowed from the armored carapace.  Here and there, wood had been grown and brickwork laid to reinforce the structure.

“Professor Ibott’s mentor created that thing,” Jamie remarked.

“Really?” I asked.

The waves were heavy in the bay, and the ship rocked this way and that.  We were heading for the dock, and it didn’t feel like we were slowing down enough to avoid crashing bodily into it.  I tensed a little and gripped the railing.

“They made the project a recurring one, they keep a pack of those things in the water, but the batches are smaller.  At a certain point, with size, you’re not getting any more effective, you’re just showing off,” Jamie said.  He smiled.

I felt like he was making a joke, and I didn’t get it.  That annoyed me, quite a lot.

Was it a short joke?  Because I was shorter than most boys my age?  Whatever my exact age was?

“Sure,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said, looking out at the city.

“S’alright,” I said.  Even after months, there were still bound to be growing pains.  I could take a short joke if it meant things would fit together better than they had been.

He leaned over the railing, resting his chin on the back of his folded hands.

I went still.

Bad, complicated memories were springing to the fore.

I swallowed hard, and I looked away, watching as the distance between the boat and the dock dwindled.  The crew of the ship were rushing back and forth, seeing to duties.

Lillian was further down the ship’s port side, crouched over, her arms around Hubris, talking to the dog while she looked at Lugh through the posts of the ship’s railing.  Gordon was below deck.

When he pulled away like that, I knew something was troubling him.  He’d be trying to rest so he could be in the best shape possible when we hit land again.

Talking to Jamie was a good thing, from a strategic standpoint.  I couldn’t just stick to Lillian and pester Gordon and call it a day.  Leaving Jamie out and off to one side wouldn’t breed loyalty or develop the firm bonds, and it would leave me in the dark about him and him in the dark about us when it came to knowing how each of us approached things and thought.

It was a good thing, but it was so dang hard sometimes.

“You’ve been quiet on the subject of bringing the runaway girl home,” I commented.

“I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other,” he said.

“Really?” I asked.

He raised his head up, which was a bit of a relief.

“Really, really?” I asked him.

“No,” he said.  The chin went back down, and he resumed watching the waves break to individual pieces against the rocky outcropping that was the closest thing to Lugh’s ‘beach’.

Leaning forward like that, that position of head and hands, talking while he scanned the surroundings with his eyes, baring a part of himself, even with a singular ‘no’, it was too painfully familiar.

I was tougher than this.

The real Jamie wouldn’t want me to be stewing in emotion to the point I couldn’t function.

“You’re not a stitched,” I said.  “You have a brain of your own.  We won’t bite your head off if you voice an opinion.”

“I know that.  I’ve read the books, I… cognitively, I understand things.”

“But not-cognitively?”

“Not-cognitively,” he said, breaking a small smile, “Not-cognitively, I feel like an impostor.”

“You are,” I said.

I saw him flinch.  He straightened, stepping back a little from the railing and from me.

It dawned on me that the words had actually flowed from my head and out of my mouth.

“That wasn’t what I meant to say,” I told him.

He looked away.  I could see on his expression that I’d hurt him.

This situation was a parallel to that one in more ways than how the tableau was set out.

“Jamie,” I said.

“I can remember,” Jamie said, very slowly, as if he was picking his words out, “What Mary said, back when we first met.  I overheard your conversation with Fray, Mauer, and Percy.  You confessed your manipulation of Mary, and she said, I quote, ‘You’re really terrible at being honest’.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond.

“We’ve been made into such warped, stunted people, haven’t we?” he asked.  “Fair is foul and foul is fair.  I’m someone that was propped up with memories and knowledge, only to be knocked down and forced to pick up the pieces.  You’ve been twisted around, so that it is the lies you tell that are the most just part of you, and the truths you speak-”

“Are the most unjust?” I finished for him.

“No,” he said.  “Not unjust or unfair.  But you’re really unkind when it comes to picking them out.”

If he’d wanted to strike me across the face, it likely would have hurt less.

“I didn’t really mean to be unkind,” I said.

“I know,” he said.  “Like I said, I’ve read the books he left behind.  I know how you operate.  I know who and what you are, in nature and personality.  I don’t think any less of you, I don’t blame you, and I don’t harbor any negative feelings.”

“That’s not-”

“I forgive you, Sy,” he said.

He reached for my shoulder, and I pulled back, without meaning to.  His hand froze where it was.

After a long second, he resumed moving his hand.  He gave me two lame pats on the shoulder.

I could remember tackling Jamie, the roughhousing, me getting his head under my arm, him getting my head under his arm more frequently.  The jabs, no holds barred.

This Jamie stood arm’s reach away, withdrawing his hand.

“I’m going to go down and let Gordon know we’ve arrived.  We might need to wrangle the indentured workers you purchased.”

I nodded.

He turned to leave.

I looked back at Lillian, wondering if she’d seen, or maybe to look for eye contact, to see someone’s eyes with warmth in them, familiarity, genuinely happy to see me.

Her attention was divided between Hubris and the imminent contact with the dock.

“I can’t seem to do anything right when it comes to you,” I said, to Jamie’s back.

He stopped.

“Sorry,” I said.

He glanced back at me.  “It’s alright, Sy.  I know that feeling very well.”

Only my white-knuckle grip on the railing kept me from falling over at the unexpected  contact with the dock.

When I stood straight again, I saw Lillian recovering from the light crash with Hubris’ help.  She stood straight and flashed a smile at me.

There it was.  That look.

I’d needed that.

I held out a hand.  She almost skipped a little as she hurried to take it.

Once she had it, I pulled her close.  She didn’t let go of my hand until I tugged mine out of the way, so the hug I gave her was a stilted one.

Needed that too, if I could admit that much.

“What’s that for?” she asked me.

I gave her a quick peck on the lips, then reached up.  My fingers mussed up her nicely-done-up hair as I put my hands around her ears.  Then I kissed her again, more meaningfully.

I’d expected one of the sailors on the ship to comment or jeer.  What a grave disappointment that was.  I could have made her blush.

I broke the kiss.

“Or that?” she asked.

“Do I need a reason?” I asked, moving my hands so she could hear me.

“You always have a reason, Sy.  For everything you do.”

Hubris pushed his head under Lillian’s hand.  She gave him a scratch.

Lillian’s hair was messier now, but she was still dressed nice, one button at her collarbone undone.  Her cheeks were flushed, her lipstick ever so slightly smudged, and she looked to be more or less in her element and happy, if only for the moment.  I wasn’t sure she’d ever looked prettier.

A reason.

Because you almost make an empty and cold part of me feel full and warm, you make me think it’s possible to leave old hurt behind and heal this wound, and that has nothing to do with your abilities as a field medic or doctor in training, I thought to myself.  Because you’re genuinely nice to look at and be with.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I told her.

“Probably not,” she said.  She shot me a look, serious and accusatory.  Then she smiled.  She linked her arm with mine.  “Let’s get changed.”

“I was going to say something about needing to remove all of that lipstick, first.”

“I was going to already, Sy-” she said.

I reached out, put a finger on her chin, and turned her head my way, so I could kiss her again.

“Oh,” she said.

There, right there, that was the bright red flush and the flustered look that was all mine to enjoy provoking.

“Not that we actually have time,” I said.

“And there it is.  The let-down after raising me up.”

“Barely,” I said.  “Cut me some slack.  And the mission does come first.”

“Except I’m dreading this one,” she said.  She looked up as a sailor pushed past us, breaking my hold on Lillian.

We had to hurry to get out of the way as others were pressing in, wanting to access the cargo belowdecks.  I made sure to keep our arms linked so we wouldn’t be separated again, and the two of us headed back to the corner where the others waited with our luggage.

I saw Jamie there.  I saw him smile at Lillian and I in greeting.

When he’d said he’d forgiven me, he’d meant it.

I wasn’t sure how to parse that.  But if it meant keeping the peace and working toward something better, I could do my best to simply take and accept that kind of understanding from him, where I’d never really accepted it from anyone in the past.

I was doing that a fair bit these days, trying to make amends by making changes in ways I wasn’t sure I could explain to the people in question.

☙

The people of Lugh were more heavily modified and tattooed than any group of people I’d seen in the past.  I tried to avoid staring as we passed a collection of six men with roughly identical builds, each with slabs of muscle, hunched-over posture, and arms as thick around as their legs, which were thicker around than I was.  Where the next guy could pick up a given maximum weight, these Brunos could carry two of those ‘next guys’ and the weights besides.

I knew the type – manual laborers, taking some cheap and freely available option to alter themselves.  Radham had one or two that popped up now and again, but for there to be six gathered together, and then more at the docks and some outside the bar down the street, and an eclectic assortment of other types nearby?

It made for very interesting people watching.

“Strategy,” Gordon said.  “How do we handle this?  Is it a kidnapping job?  Hunt and stalk?  Infiltration?  Sabotage?”

“Th-” I started.

“Shut up Sy,” Gordon said, without malice.  I doubted he’d even been sure I’d been replying, the way he was walking ahead of the group with Hubris and some of our recruited help.  “Lillian’s answering this one.”

“Someone woke up grumpy,” I said.

Gordon, Jamie, Lillian and I had dressed down for our exploration of Lugh.  Our clothes weren’t bad, but they weren’t nice enough to stand out.  Lillian wore boots, stockings, a dress, and a sweater with a run in the wool.  Gordon, Jamie and I each had simple slacks in muted colors tucked into our individual boots, simple white shirts, and jackets.  Gordon had donned a cap.

“Um,” Lillian said.  “Thinking about it, I’d rather avoid violence.  That’s not in the cards unless we put it in the cards, I think.”

“Okay,” Gordon said.  “Disappointing, but ok.”

“Who are you?” one of the adults we’d recruited asked.  “You haven’t really explained what’s going on?”

Ugh.  I wished we hadn’t had to bring them to get the kids.  The kids were at least willing to shut up and listen and see if they couldn’t figure things out for themselves, instead of looking a gift horse in the mouth.  When and if they did ask questions, I was betting they’d accept the answers they got.  Not so for the parents.

“We’re looking for someone.  If we find them, we get paid,” Gordon said.  “That same pay that let us buy you free of your debt.”

“There’s a hint in there, if you listen for it,” I said.

“What are we here for then?” the man asked.

“Sylvester had a plan for you, but he mostly wanted to be a nice guy and free you,” Lillian said.

“Lies, balderdash and fuckin’ bullshit, that last part,” I said.

“We’ll probably use you to gather information, Sylvester will walk you through it,” Lillian said, sticking her elbow into my ribs.  “Where you need to go and what you need to listen for, or things you need to say.  We’ll pay for your food and lodging, and when we’re done we’ll pay you enough that you can get where you need to be, or at least until you can get by.”

“Hmph,” the man said.  He didn’t sound happy, but that was an out-and-out lie.  I hadn’t missed the change in his body language the moment Lillian had said ‘pay you enough’.

“No violence, then,” Gordon said.  “What else?”

“Um,” Lillian said.

“You’ve been with us long enough to know how we do things,” I said.  “We need to find the target.  Girl with horns, not that that’s going to help-“

I could see two different girls with horns nearby, and I’d seen a handful since we’d left the harbor behind.

“-the parents didn’t give us a name.”

“They did,” Jamie said.  “You weren’t listening.  Candida Gage.”

“Oh that poor girl,” I said.

Lillian, Jamie and Gordon nodded.

“Okay, we need to find… Candy?”

“I have some ideas about the information gathering, but I don’t know which one is best,” Lillian said.

“What do we want, what are we giving?”

“Giving?” Lillian asked.

“Let’s say we put the word out, start asking questions.  Someone mentions to another someone that some kids and strangers were asking about whatshername.”

“Candida,” Jamie supplied.

“What happens next?” I asked.

“She runs,” Lillian said.  “Leaves the city, maybe, or makes herself harder to find, if she can’t.”

I nodded with approval.  “Question is, can we bait her in, or can we offer something that would make people want to come to us instead of Candida?”

“Saying her parents were hurt?” Lillian asked.  Then before I could shut her down, she shook her head.  “No.”

“No,” I agreed.  “The bond isn’t strong, and they’ve manipulated her enough she’s watching for it.”

“Family doesn’t work,” I said.

“Don’t go and give her the answer,” Gordon said.

“I’m not.”

“You are.  You have an answer in mind, and you’re picking and choosing and subtly pointing the way to that answer.”

I clapped a hand over my mouth.

“I bet you can’t keep that up for two minutes,” Gordon said.

I pointed at him and winked.

“Can’t be family.  Do we push or do we pull?” Lillian asked.  “Rhetorical question.  Thinking out loud.”

“You’ve been spending far too much time around Sylvester,” Gordon said.

“She’s going to run if we push, unless it’s the right kind of push, but I’m not clever enough to figure out how to do that.”

I poked her in the arm, hard, my other hand still in place over my mouth.  When she looked at me, I wagged my finger at her.

“You’re cleverer than you think, Lillian,” Gordon said.

I nodded, in a very exaggerated way.

“I’m a year or two older than most of you and I’m still behind you in terms of my ability to pick things up and put them together,” Lillian said.  “And I’m years behind a real, practiced doctor.  I know I have my strengths, but let me be self-depreciating when it’s accurate, okay?”

I poked her shoulder again.  She swatted at my hand.

“We disagree on how accurate it is,” Jamie said.

“Then let me be self depreciating when I think it’s accurate, then,” Lillian said.

I poked her again.  She swatted at me, and I grabbed her hand, my other hand still clasped to my mouth.  I held her hand and pressed it to her chest, over her heart.

“Sy’s trying to tell you something.  Because he just can’t resist,” Gordon said.

“I don’t get it,” Lillian said.  She tried to pull her hand free and I held on.  In a quieter voice, she said, “And you’re touching my chest, Sy.”

That was maybe the fourth most important thing going on here.

Maybe the fifth.

I let her move my hand away, and extended a finger, pointing at her.  I had to work against her to extend a single finger and tap it against her chest.

“Me,” Lillian said.  She shook her head.

I could see her expression changing.  The disappointment in herself.

I tapped that finger against her heart again.

“Sy’s going to have an aneurysm,” Gordon said.

Lillian’s smile and half-chuckle was more sympathetic for Gordon than anything.

I kicked at his leg.

Clod!  Jerk!  Look at her, read her!  Understand what she’s doing.  She’s frustrated and you’re rubbing it in her face.

“Me,” Lillian mused.  “What can I do that nobody else can?”

I was too busy avoiding Gordon’s retaliatory kick to give her further guidance.

Lillian continued to voice her thoughts out loud, “We know they’re working on something using the books.  What if… we tell them the truth?  That I know Academy science, I am- was a student of the Academy?”

Gordon and I turned our full attention to her.

“They might want help or details, if they’re working with those books.  Or we could tap into that, if we make it clear I’m looking for one of the books too.  Through that, we could find them.  It’s a slim chance, but it’s-”

“Brilliant,” I said.

“Ah, ah, ah!” Gordon said.  He smiled triumphantly.

“Eat your dog’s shit, Gordon,” I said.

“Wow,” he said.

“I hope you puke it up and you get that thing where it goes out the nose, too.”

“You amaze me sometimes, Sy.”

I ignored him, because he was in a prickly, surly mood, and pointed at Lillian.  “Good.”

She smiled, but it was a faltering smile.  “You ended up leading me to the answer you wanted in the end.”

“I actually was thinking along the lines that you could trade your services for information, at first,” I said.  “And I did jump to the idea you gave, but I was too busy with Gordon kicking me to actively lead you to it.”

“That’s sweet, Sy,” Lillian said.  “I don’t believe you.”

I sighed.

I turned and looked back at the two families and the one stray child that were all following us, in earshot, but far enough away to almost count as a distinct group.

They looked so confused and lost.

“Where are we staying?” I asked.

Jamie pointed at a building that loomed above the rest.  Where there were many buildings here that ranged from the dilapidated to outright shacks, the building Jamie indicated was one of the sturdier ones.

I spoke to the families, “Pass on word, ex-Academy student is looking for the book.  If they ask what book it is the student is looking for, they aren’t who we’re looking for.  If you find them, then you get a role in what follows, with a corresponding increase in pay.  We meet at that building at dusk if unsuccessful.  If successful, you can lead them to us at that building, or just take note of who they are and where they are, we’ll handle the rest.”

I saw a number of uncertain nods.

I had my work cut out for me.

“Start out by saying you’re looking for work.  Might be you find something for yourselves, which is great.  But mention that you have a friend who has Academy training, young and not sure what to do.  You can say she’s heard about a book or say she’s looking for a mentor.”

More uncertain nods.

I suspected I could give them a day’s worth of lessons about how to handle this, and they would still have doubts.

“You’ll figure it out,” I said.

“Go in groups,” Gordon cut in.

“Oh yeah.  Dangerous town, you’ll want to be safe,” I said.

“Pairs, trios, or as a family,” Gordon said.  “Keep an eye out for trouble.  We got you out of a bad situation, if you do decide to head off to greener pastures, maybe do us the favor of letting us know what you’re doing, so we don’t waste time looking for you?”

Less than committal nods.

People were so annoying sometimes.

“Go,” Gordon said.

The families scattered, staying to their individual family units.  One family was black, the other white, and the youngest criminal, independent of either family, immediately went off and ignored Gordon’s instructions to stay in groups and left on his own.

“We’ll stay in groups too,” Gordon said.

“Great,” I said.

“Lillian’s with me,” he said.

I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it.

“If I put you with her, you’re going to be distracted.”

“Scurrilous lies,” I said.

“Or you’re going to distract her.”

“Damn straight,” I said.

Lillian swatted my arm.  She was so physical like that.  I pitied the man who ended up with her, after I was dead and gone.

“If I take you with me, I’m not sure that pair will have any forward momentum,” he said.

Which was a fine way to say that a pairing of Jamie and Lillian were liable to get their asses kicked.

But, I thought.

I could see the look on his face.  There would be no negotiating, no pleas.

I looked at Jamie, my new partner.

“Right-o,” I said, after managing to muster up something resembling enthusiasm.

“Stay out of trouble,” he said.  Then to Jamie, he said, “Watch him.”

“I’ll try.”

“Best I can ask for,” Gordon said.  He whistled for Hubris.

I watched as he and Lillian walked away.  Lillian glanced back at me.

I looked at Jamie.

It made sense, doing things this way.  On a technical level, I knew it was for the best.

I was doing a lot of those failed, miserable attempts at convincing myself that things were ‘technically for the best’ too, these days.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Bleeding Edge – 8.4

Though it was chilly, without even the sun for light, the man had his shirt off, the straps of his overalls tied around his waist.  He had virtually no body fat on his frame, and more muscle in his forearm alone than I had in my entire body.  Tattoos covered him, his arms and back an artist’s doodle pad of fish tailed goats, mermaids, and other scantily-clad women.

I watched as he lifted a crate onto the bed of a cart.  The crate was filled with metal, and rattled, the cart’s end bobbing as it adjusted to the weight.

He was a ‘Bruno’.  While Bruno was slang for a brute, a guy that was more strong than smart, it also was the term used most often to describe the men and the exceedingly rare women who went to back alley clinics and walked out with more muscle than they’d had when they started.  Sometimes it was drugs, sometimes it was a rewriting of their physical makeup, and sometimes it was grafts, from vat-grown sources or from animals.

Most did it because the cost of the procedure was low, compared to the added dollars they could make being manual laborers.  It meant a year or two to pay off the medical expenses, then a few decades of living like a king.  Relatively speaking, anyway, in a place like Lugh.

But the drugs meant dependency and tolerance.  The rewriting of one’s makeup always had other consequences in the long run.  Grafts from animals meant possible rejection or having to take drugs, and grafts from vat-grown life didn’t always last that long, meaning more surgeries and replacements.

It amounted to the same thing.  A shortened lifespan.  Maybe a halved one.

Curiosity satisfied, I turned my attention briefly to Jamie.  He was studying the man too.

When old Jamie had been erased, had that been erased too?

“Alright,” the man said.  He turned and faced us.  “First off…”

“Sparing you the time you’d need to go buy yourself something,” I said.  I extended a hand into the bag Jamie had.  I held out a massive hunk of fresh baked bread with stuff crammed between the two halves.  Not quite a roll, but too crude to be a sandwich.  We’d bought it and a few more like it at a stall further down the street, for maybe half the amount that I would have had to hand the Bruno to get him talking comfortably.  Jamie handed me a bottle, and the man took that too.

He didn’t eat it, but put it on one corner of the cart for later.

“We’re looking for work,” I said.

The Bruno belted out a laugh.

Altered lungs, to go with an altered heart.  Adding seventeen stone of raw muscle to your frame means needing more oxygen to that muscle, and a heart to push that blood around.

“I’ll give you the rest of my pay for today if you can even lift one corner of the crate over there,” he told me.  “Either of you.”

“We’re friends with this girl, she was an Academy student.  Smart as a whip,” I said.  “We’ve been helping her out, she owes us one.  She’s going to find work here, she’s going to get us work, helping.  We’re helping look, to speed up the process.”

“Ah, my boy,” the man said.  He took a seat on the back of the wagon.  “Let me tell you, I think you’re in for a bit of heartbreak.”

“I think I’m more the heartbreaker type than the heartbroken type,” I said.

He laughed again, as if the idea of me being a heartbreaker was as ludicrous as me hauling a crate full of machine parts.

Jamie moved, beside me, and I glanced at him.  But he was just shifting his weight from one foot to the other.  He wasn’t making a point, reacting to anything, nor was he trying to signal me.

The Bruno’s laugh quickly became a chuckle.

Jamie had reminded me of something pretty dang close to actual heartbreak.  I wondered if losing my best friend counted, or if it had to be romance.

If heartbreak by way of romance was worse, I wasn’t sure how the species had survived this far.  Just thinking about Jamie in passing was enough to knock the air out of me.

It wasn’t hard to put an annoyed expression on my face.  The trick was making sure the expression wasn’t too severe, or that it didn’t slip from annoyance to something else altogether.

“Girls are trouble,” the man said, as he finished chuckling.  “You’re in for disappointment.  It sounds like you gave your time and attention to the girl for a while, but nice and sweet as she seems right now, she’ll drop you in a heartbeat when someone says they’ll pay a fair wage, but they’ll take only her.”

It wasn’t so far off from the reality.

Lillian would leave.  She would work towards her black coat and hopefully being an exemplary professor, one that bettered the world instead of butchering it, but she had that dream she was following, and the Lambs would be a distant memory.  There was a slim chance she’d leave before the Lambs all expired, and with me being last to die, she would inevitably be leaving me.

She would be upset to do it, she would consider staying for us, whether us meant Lillian and me or Lillian and the Lambs, but she would go one way or the other.  Even if I had to make her.

“It seems like I struck home,” the Bruno said.

“She’s nicer than you’re making her out to be,” I said.  He seemed to want to see me as the naive child, so I would play that role.

“They all are,” the Bruno said.  “Very few people throw themselves into bad situations thinking that person is an utter bastard, or that group is a rotten bunch of you-know-whats.  They always make it seem like a good deal at first.”

I nodded slowly, as if I was taking it all in, then looked up, asking, “Have you heard about anything that might do?  A place where she might have an in?”

He didn’t sigh or try to shake any sense into me.  He did offer me a sympathetic smile.  I could see that some of his teeth had been worked on.  The color between them was slightly different, some very white, on contrast to his dark brown skin, tanned a darker brown somehow, despite the meager sun in Lugh.  “A hundred places where she might have an in.”

The only thing worse than not getting an answer to a question was getting too many.

“She’s good, a lot of the critical stuff is fresh in her memory,” I said.  “Do you know anyone good?  The whole… thing there looks well done.  Maybe the doctor who did it?”

The man smiled, looking down at his chiseled body.  I was pretty sure the compliment had struck home, but he didn’t show it.  “Uh huh, no, this isn’t top dollar work.”

I injected just a bit more of a childlike tone into my voice as I spoke, “It isn’t?  But I’ve seen some people and it looks wrong, the way they fit together.  They look ugly.”

“It’s not,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.  Playing at being younger than I was meant I could be more persistent.  “Could we maybe talk to that doctor anyways, then?”

“I don’t know if I want to send trouble to his doorstep.”

“Okay,” I said.  If I pushed, he might get annoyed.  “Drat.”

“Sorry,” he said.

“Can you point us in the right direction, at least?” Jamie jumped in.  “Not your doctor, but any one of those hundred places you mentioned?”

“I can.  You come in by boat?”

We nodded.

“You would have passed the market.  Open space between the four towers, the ones that-”

I was raising my fingers, two fingers extended on each hand, pointing straight up.   Two towers on each side.

“-Exactly,” he said.  He reached down, using a thick finger to draw a line between my ‘towers’, “If this is the road, then you want to go to the back corner here.”

I nodded.

“He does back-alley work, more in the way of taking away than giving or fixing.  For people who need money fast.  A few coins for blood or for letting him scrape away some of your body fat, he’ll take a slice of your muscle for more.  The deals he offers in taking away something more substantial, they sound good at first.  I don’t want you lads to think letting him work on you is a good idea, alright?  That’s not why I’m sending you there.”

“We’re not stupid,” I said, injecting some emotion into my voice.  Decrying one’s maturity or lack of stupidity was one of the best ways to seed the idea in people’s heads.

“Sure,” he said, sounding utterly unconvinced.  “Listen, if you let him take your blood, and if he thinks he can get away with it, he’s going to signal some others in that marketplace.  You’ll stumble off, lightheaded, not as focused as you should be, and you won’t make it where you’re going.”

I let my eyes widen.

“The reason I recommend him is he’s easy to find, and he knows the people around town.  Don’t trust him, get your girl and any other friends you can find together and don’t go unarmed, wherever he sends you.  If he’s asking you to meet some people tonight or tomorrow or any time that isn’t now, assume he’s taken all that time to gather his buddies together.”

“This might not be a good idea,” I said, while thinking, this is perfect.

“Might not be, but I’m assuming you don’t have people to look after you?”

I shook my head.  “Some of the other kids have parents, but…”  I trailed off, gesturing in no particular way, as if it was too complicated to voice.

“Yeah,” the Bruno said.  “I understand you.”

“Do you?” I asked.

“Not from experience.  For me, it was being born poor, going to war thinking it could get me out of poverty.  A woman was bound up in it too.  I’m happier to put it all behind me.  It’s good to be here, knowing that I’m putting food on my own table, sleeping in my own bed, and I know where I work tomorrow.  Might be in Lugh of all places, but at least here the authorities are very reluctant to try drafting anyone.  I don’t need to worry about going back out there.”

I nodded.

“I’m not a coward,” he said.

I shook my head.  Saying virtually anything might have prickled him, dashing any goodwill we’d built up.

“Out there, far from a well lit city, the light from the lanterns only reaches out maybe thirty, forty feet, and a lot of the time it’s so dark you can’t see a damn thing beyond that.  You know that if a fight starts, which it can, at any moment, then you and your buddies are just about the most vulnerable combatants on the field.  Not worth it.  Not for the pay, and not for the girl.”

“We-,” I started, “I know what you mean.  About feeling that way, in a dangerous situation.”

He stared me in the eye, as if challenging that assertion.

Then he seemed to accept it.

“You be safe,” he said.  “And I’m not just talking about giving blood to that rat-face bloodsucker in the market.  You’ve got to protect yourself from the ideas others have, the ones they push down on you.  Life’s too short to give years of your life to anyone but you.  Not to an army, not to a boss, and not to a girl.”

So you say, but do you know how many years those muscles you bought are going to take from you?  There are no old Brunos.

“Sometimes there’s no choice,” I said.

“Mm,” he said.  “Worst of the girls, the armies, the bosses, they’ll convince you of that when it’s not true.”

I nodded.  I let that go without a response from me.  There was a part of me that wanted to play with that some, toy with my expression, convince him that he’d changed my mind or at least started to.  It was the fastest way to win somebody over.  People craved making an impact on the world, especially positive ones.

But he’d been more than fair.  I liked him well enough.

When I next met his eyes, it was with my own, no act, no pretense.  It wasn’t enough of a change to disturb or throw him off, but it was genuine enough.

“Tell you what,” he said.  “If ratface tries to screw with you, let me know.  I’ll set him straight.  If he doesn’t, maybe keep an eye out for me, alright?  Say hi, tell me how it’s going with that girl of yours, and that you’re alright.”

“Can do,” I said.  “Thank you.”

“What’s his name, so we know him when we find him?” Jamie asked.

“Cecil,” the Bruno said.

“And your name?  We’re Simon and James.”

“Adam,” the man said.

“Thank you, Adam,” I said, with my own voice, as I extended a hand.  His hand enveloped mine, as he very gently shook it.

Jamie and I headed on our way.

We left the factory yard behind us.  Half of the people present weren’t working at all, but were drinking, talking, or playing cards.  Many had tattoos, or purely cosmetic changes to their bodies.  Gills, changes to their mouths, teeth, and jaws.  One had an arm similar to Mauer’s, though not so grotesque or non-functional.  The branches that stuck out of it were flowering.

The attitude seemed to be one where the bosses didn’t care, so long as the work got done, and the employees seemed willing to do their share.

“That was easy,” Jamie replied.  “You didn’t even have to manipulate him.”

“I manipulated him lots.”

“But you didn’t have to.”

I shrugged.  “It’s about setting the right context.  It’s late afternoon, bordering on evening, he’s got to be hungry.  That animal inside all of us craves basic food, shelter, and comforts.  If we meet those needs, we become happy.  A man can create a sense of false love in a prisoner he controls by creating that happiness and confusing it.  Give a hungry man a sandwich, frame things right, and that’s most of the work done already, just have to keep the greased wheels spinning.”

Jamie gave me a sidelong look.

“What?”

“What’s the real answer?”

“You’ve known me for maybe half of the four months you’ve-”

“Five.”

“Five months you’ve been with us, while we’ve been shuffling and restructuring teams for whatever missions we wind up doing.  I don’t think you’ve known me nearly long enough to be doing that kind of analysis of me.”

“Bullshit identification, you mean.”

“Whatever you want to call it.”

“Uh huh,” he said.  “What’s the real answer?  You got on with him pretty well there.”

I shrugged.

“You can distract the others, and they’ll forget to keep a topic going.  But I won’t forget, Sy.  I can keep bringing this up.  The books have answers and filled me in on each of you, but if there’s something I’m missing that makes me feel like I’d understand any of you better, you should know I’m going to go after it until I get answers.”

“But see, there’s a cost to doing that,” I said.  “If you’re obnoxious, then you’ll do irreparable harm to the relationship between yourself and whoever you’re interrogating.”

He raised his eyebrows, looking over his spectacles at me.

“What?” I asked.

“Think long and hard about what you just said.”

“I beg your pardon, sir Jamie, but I’m far from being obnoxious.  I’m playful, clever, I challenge-”

He cut me off.  “You’re obnoxious.  Sometimes.”

“Very rarely.”

“Often enough,” he said.

I held out my finger, pointing it at him, ready to retort.  He reached out, and pushed my hand gently down.

I didn’t want to jump away like I had earlier, when he’d tried to pat my shoulder on the ship’s deck, and in my recollection of that moment and all the negative emotions that had been bound up in it, I lost the retort I’d been planning.

He seized that moment of weakness.  “What’s the answer to my question?  What was going on there?”

I sighed.  He smiled.

“He’s like us,” I said.  “Close enough.”

“You’re talking about the shortened lifespan, with work of that scale.”

“In part.”

“An excellent doctor won’t run into that problem,” Jamie said.  Before I could make a counter argument, he provided it himself, “But he said it wasn’t top dollar work.”

I nodded.

“So he’s like us, but not just because of his short lifespan.”

“He talked about the trap he fell into early, being born poor, seeming to only have one path ahead of him, joining the military, but he made it out to be a mistake.  That he had a choice and he didn’t see the alternative.  I don’t think that’s true.”

Jamie was silent.

“The need to feel free is like the need for food, shelter, and companionship,” I said.  “At best, we do what he did, and tell ourselves that we’re free.  Or we let people convince us.”

“Giving a hungry man a sandwich,” Jamie said.  “Earning his devotion.”

I nodded.  I smiled a little, “It’s kind of funny.  He was treating me like he was the master, teaching the student.  Probably thought I was similar to how he was as a naive youngster.  But here I am, and I’m thinking he’s the one who’s a few years too early to realize that while he was complacent, someone else went and built walls around him to enclose him.”

We turned onto the main road that led down to the market.

I saw members of one of the other families.  The father was trying halfheartedly to get the attention of a couple walking down the street.  I made eye contact with the two girls that were with him, one of whom was the one I’d sniffed.  I beckoned.

“Are you trying to convince me or yourself, Sy?” Jamie asked, quiet.

The family started to make their way across the street.  With traffic mostly flowing up and down the road that sloped down in the direction of the harbor and the dead sea monster, they had to stop frequently to wait for a chance to pass.  It was all the more difficult because they didn’t want traffic to cut between them and separate daughter from father or sister from sister.

It got more difficult as a coach parked at one spot on the street, the man and the cases stacked on the top blocking light from one of the few streetlamps nearby.  It wasn’t night, but it wasn’t easy to track what was happening in the immediate vicinity while also watching one’s step for puddles, horseshit, and holes.

I didn’t answer Jamie’s question.

At least, this time, he seemed willing to let it lie.

The family joined us.  Father and daughters.  It was more numbers, dealing with someone more unscrupulous.  He might see us as less vulnerable.

“Just stick with us for a minute, let me do the talking,” I said.

The market wasn’t far, and it, thankfully, was well lit by the people trying to sell goods.  Food was predominant, and much of it was food of a very dubious sort.  Slabs of meat were laid out on racks, and meat-like substances laid out on more.  The vegetables in particular looked very questionable, handled enough that bruises were omnipresent, and this place was far from any nearby farmland, from the looks of it.

There was art, too, and one table of books that saw a surprising amount of attention from the crowd.  At two stands, in areas that were partially curtained off, artists worked to tattoo people, while others looked on.

I passed by the table of books, and I glanced back at Jamie.  There was a whole row of dime store novels, and more serious texts.  I let my fingers trail the illustrated covers.  The Monster’s Games.  The Red Haired Girl and the Killer Witch.  Mousetrap.  I felt like there were a half dozen conversation starters on the tip of my tongue.

But Jamie had no interest in the slightest.  His attention, instead, was on the nearest tattoo artist.

I wasn’t sure why it hit me as hard as it did.

I tried to regulate my breathing.  Deep breath, exhale.

It was such a small thing, so minor.  I should be able to deal with it.

Damn Gordon, for making me do this with Jamie.  I knew his reasons, he liked to brute-force solutions.  Jam us together, make this work.  If it couldn’t, it couldn’t.

But I couldn’t breathe.

I wiped at one eye, and to make sure it wouldn’t look weird, I ran my hands through my hair.  The drizzle from the sky was thin, not enough to make my hair wet much faster than it dried on its own.  But there was moisture enough to pull my hair back.  I stared directly up.

Jamie seemed to notice me looking skyward.  “Getting darker.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I managed to say it without sounding funny.

It was as though there were three Sylvesters in one body.  One that sounded and acted mostly normal, one that wanted to cry, and a third that wanted to overturn that table of books and do as much damage to as many things in arm’s reach as possible.

Anger at this situation, that Jamie was gone and yet still here.  Anger that I was having a conversation with him and there was no heart in it.  Every time we talked it was like he was challenging me, sticking me with the hard questions and situations.

As if that last conversation I’d had with old Jamie kept coming back to haunt me.  As if he’d never forgotten it.

Are you trying to convince me or yourself, Sy?

I managed to take in and release a breath without a hitch.

It wasn’t a question of convincing, but it might have been a question of conviction.

But there were other things to focus on.

Breathe.

That part of me that wanted to hurt things lingered, frustrated, latent, looking for an outlet that it would probably find.

It wasn’t the best way to approach Ratface Cecil.

The booth was where we’d been told it was.  He was in the process of picking bits of chicken off of a bone, while two bodyguards stood on either side of him.  One bodyguard ate, the other leaned against the base of the squat, blocky tower, his arms folded.  The one that was eating looked augmented.  He had claws on one hand.

This damn city.  There was no grace to it.

Cecil in particular, looked like the inverse of a proper doctor.  His nose was small, his mouth and teeth large, and he didn’t seem to have enough forehead between his thick eyebrows and his hairline.

That said, I wasn’t particularly inclined to like him from the get-go, so my perception of him might have been skewed.

‘Ratface’ choked down his food, scooting his chair forward, eager to see to a customer.  My eye roved over the tubes, tools, and syringes that lay on the table behind him.

“Blessings on you,” he said, in a way that came across as very insincere.

Religion.  Well, it would flourish in a city like Lugh, where the Academy held less sway.

“Blessings on you as well,” I said.

There must have been something in my voice, because I saw Jamie’s head turn in my peripheral vision.

“Well,” he said, “Look at you, look at you.  I don’t know if you have much to spare, with what I buy.”

“I was hoping to have a talk,” I said.

“So long as we’re talking, customers might be keeping their distance.  It’s a fact of the trade, people don’t want it to be widely known they need money, it’s why I’m tucked away in this corner, accessible but off the beaten track.  Now, if you have a complaint about a friend or family member of yours…”

“No,” I said.  “A business opportunity.  I want to sell someone.”

His eye turned to Jamie.  His head cocked.  “Slightly more substantial, I could draw a bit of blood without worrying about taking it all.  Are you a boy or a girl?”

“I’m a boy,” Jamie said.

“And he’s not for sale,” I said.

“One of them?  All of them?” Cecil asked.

“I’d like to sell an acquaintance.  A girl with Academy training.  She’s been asking around, looking for work.  If you arrange a buyer for her talents, I’ll set her up.”

Cecil studied me, and his eyes met mine.  The anger and frustration was still there, simmering beneath the surface, and I suspected he could see it.

“To my clients, this would be, how to put it,” Cecil said, “More economical, because her services wouldn’t be paid for on an ongoing basis?  Are you old enough to understand what that means?”

I nodded once.

“It’s possible,” he said.

As I’d done with Adam, I now spoke to Cecil in Cecil’s own language, reflecting the way he most likely saw the world, in terms of opportunity.

It wasn’t pretty, there were loose ends and issues to cover, but it would get the job done fast and cut straight to the meat of things.  We couldn’t dig through a hundred different back-alley doctors and groups to find what we were looking for.

I couldn’t do that, not like this.  Not with moments and things catching me off guard.

We’d start at the top, with the most unscrupulous person who had the most money and power, then keep carving away until we found what we were looking for.

Bleeding Edge – 8.5

I tried to avoid being shoved out of the way and lost as I worked my way through a jam of people.  A counter stood before me, and I worked to hold on, periodically driving an elbow or shoulder into the side or hip of someone beside me.  I smelled food, but it was nearly drowned out by the smell of smoke.

“Here,” I heard.  “For the little one.”

Little.

I pushed forward, reaching up over the counter.  The man at the counter handed me sacks, low quality cloth with steam pouring out through the weave.

“Get some money back if you bring the bags and plates on your next visit!” he called out, but I was already leaving, pushing to exit as the crowd pressed forward to the counter.

The agitation and frustration I’d felt earlier was lingering.  I’d been acting on it as I made the plan with Ratface, but it hadn’t helped.  Instead, the knowledge that a situation was imminent was maintaining the feeling and feeding that fire.

I made it through the worst of the crowd.  Jamie and our recruited family of helpers were waiting, sitting on a set of stairs at the side of a shack.  I deposited the sacks on a stair, and then started opening one up while Jamie handled another.

The plates and forks were frail enough to break in half with my raw strength, stacked three high in each sack, with the food on one plate sticking to the bottom of the plate above it.  It made for delicate, difficult handling as we distributed the plates around the group.

I ended up with a plate with a clean bottom by serving myself last.  Questionable and hard-to-identify meat was drizzled in an unidentifiable sauce.  The vegetables had probably been bought from a vendor, too bruised or manhandled to sell, cut up and grilled until the damage wasn’t visible.

I grabbed the bone and raised the meat to my mouth, biting in.

It was far from being terrible.

I was still chewing when I saw the others.  They were looking at the plates with skepticism, Jamie included.

“What is it?” Jamie asked.  “What animal?”

I shrugged.  I put the plate in my lap and forked some vegetables.  Those, I winced as I put them in my mouth and chewed.

Heapings of salt, but not bad otherwise.

Jamie gave the meat a try, starting with a nibble.

Question.  I gestured.  I pointed at the food.

His reply wasn’t a gesture, but the so-so wavy motion of the hand.

I nodded.

Sitting still was hard, even if it was for something as necessary as eating and taking in that necessary fuel.  I’d volunteered to grab some food to get away and try to find some space to think.

Finding that I could communicate effectively with Jamie, even if it was through gestures, was the first thing to ease that feeling, like I was some warbeast in a cage that was too small, throwing myself against the bars.

Not to say it was easy.

My eyes went to the ground.  I was willing to take a minor upturn in our interaction for what it was.  Just focus, don’t get distracted, don’t make this messy.

“Sy,” Jamie said.  “How much do you have on hand?”

“Food?”

“Funds.”

“Why?”

He indicated the family that was standing off to one side.  “We should get them food.  Food they’re willing to eat.”

“It’s doable,” I said.

“You’re saying that, but you can endure poisons that would put down a horse, your body is actively hostile to parasites, and most diseases won’t get traction in you either.  You could eat pretty much anything and not worry.  Don’t blame others if they’re a little more picky.”

I looked at the father and his two daughters.  They hadn’t touched the food.

I quieted that angry, restless part of me that wanted to make comments.

My finger touched the ring at my thumb.  I fished in a pocket and came out with cash.

“Littlest one stays with us,” I said.

The father accepted too quickly, taking the money.  It wasn’t much – not enough to buy a meal in Radham, but enough to buy a meal here in Lugh.

Jamie spoke, “There was a bakery just down the street.  It’s hard to screw up bread, and their sandwiches were decent enough, but you should expect a long wait time.  Don’t come back here.  Go to the rendezvous point.”

The man nodded.

I watched him go, one hand between his eldest daughter’s shoulders.

“Sy,” Jamie said.  “Before we move forward with this plan, you should tell Lil.”

“I was thinking about that.”

“You should tell her what she’s getting herself into.”

I winced.

Was there a way we could just communicate in gestures?  The simplest, most bare-bones method of exchanging information, a methodology mostly focused on exchanging basic ideas and communicating actions?  On coordination?

Could we do that for a few months, and see if the talking thing became easier?

Just a few sentences in, and he was pressing me, challenging me, putting me in a no-win situation.  Tell Lil, screw up the group dynamic, push, shove, do this, do that, you’re wrong, Sy.  Not that he was saying it outright, but it felt like he was on me like a dog on this haunch of mystery meat, biting deep, hurting, always seeming to communicate, ‘you’re wrong and your way of doing things is wrong.’

That restlessness was growing.  I felt much like I did after a dose of the formula, in the days after my appointments.

I chewed, while thoughts simmered and burned in my head.

I swallowed before answering, “Maybe.”

“You have to think about things from her perspective.  Even for a moment, if you pull this false betrayal, she’s going to believe it.  It will do irreparable damage, Sy.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Does that mean you’re going to tell her?”

“Maybe,” I said, again.  “She’s a bad actor.  It might do more damage if she gives away the show and the Lambs get killed and she gets sold into slavery, doing Academy stuff until the day she gets worked to death.  I’ll consider all of the options and make an informed decision.  Trust me.”

An imaginary warbeast within me slammed into the cage.  Onlookers wondered if the door would hold.

“Sy,” Jamie said.  “You-”

“Jamie,” I cut him off.  The word was angry and sharp enough that he stopped dead in his tracks.  “Stop.  Please.”

He drew in a deep breath and sighed.  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, then.  Do I keep my mouth shut when it comes to the team, the strategy?”

“Lillian did.  She hung back, observed, learned how the team works, and she’s an honorary Lamb now,” I said.  My emotions were coloring my tone, but I felt like the words were pretty dang reasonable.

“I know about Lillian, I’ve read the books,” he said.  “Why even say that?  Are you implying I’m not a Lamb?  That I haven’t gone through similar experiences, or that I’m somehow less?”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” I said.  “Not in the slightest.”

“From what I’ve seen, in how the group interacts with Ashton and how the group interacts with me, in how you interact with Ashton and how you interact with me, there are a hell of a lot more accommodations being made for him than for me, Sy.”

My mind was on five tracks at once, playing into the conversation from various angles, figuring out what I needed to say to get through to him, and four of those five tracks were dangerous ones.  Ones where I’d say something and immediately regret saying it.  No sooner did I banish one than the next popped up.

I was practically speaking through grit teeth now, as I tried to stay diplomatic, “There’s an adjustment period, Jamie.  Yes, it’s a bigger adjustment with you than with Ashton.  He’s still a puppy.  You’re-”

“Whatever the dog equivalent of spoiled goods are?” Jamie asked.  “A bad memory?”

“No,” I said.  “Yes, but not- that’s not the problem, Jamie.  The problem- the times when it’s hardest to accommodate, it’s when you act like you know us.”

“When I know you, you mean.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’ve read the books, Sy.  I’ve read about the Lambs, I’ve read about the past jobs.  I’m in a weird, freaky place where I’m new but not new.  I’m like him but not like him.  I rationally know what it is I’m supposed to be and do and the role I’m supposed to fill, and somehow that ends up being wrong.  It’s as if it’s impossible to do anything right in your eyes.”

Our food had been forgotten.  The restlessness inside me was too great, and I knew if I got emotive or started gesturing, the plate might fall to the ground.  I put it aside.

Breathe.

There were any number of escape routes, any number of ways I could just end this conversation.  Stalk off, cool my head, say something, do something.  But I felt cornered.  If I walked away I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to come back in a timeframe that counted.  If I said anything more, I wasn’t sure there was a way of coming back from that.

Out of the six or seven answers that sprung to mind, ways I might answer him, every single one felt like one I might regret.

If I couldn’t pick the right words, I had to at least say it calmly.

“Okay,” I said, “That’s a starting point.”

Speaking slowly.  Trying to pace myself.

He nodded.  He didn’t cut in.

“I know it’s hard for you,” I said.  My voice didn’t have any strength in it as I said, “It’s hard for me.”

Another nod.

“I want this to work, I want the team dynamic to be good.  I want us to remember his memory in a good way, in a way he’d want to be remembered.  Including that part of him that lives on through- as you.”

I worried he would buck, that he’d say something akin to, ‘That’s not my responsibility.’

“I wholly agree,” Jamie said.

I swallowed hard.  I had to actually work to unclench my fist, my fingers trembling as I did it.  Once I was done, I clasped my hands together, leaning forward, elbows on my knees as I sat on the stair.

“What you said, about the role you’re supposed to fill.”

“The part where I said ‘I know what it is I’m supposed to be and do and the role I’m supposed to fill, and somehow that ends up being wrong’?”

“That part, yeah.  That’s old Jamie.  We did without him for a while.  You can’t be him.  We adjusted, we adapted.  I-”

“You tried to fill his shoes and you struggled,” Jamie said.

“No,” I said.  “No, not that.”

I reached down, and I pulled the ring off my thumb.

“There’s a sketch of that in one of the volumes,” Jamie said.

I nodded.

“But you know that.  It was one of the books you, uh, borrowed from the office and took to Brechwell.”

I nodded again.  “Took it off of someone I killed.  She had pictures, a history, an existence.  It’s a reminder, that the people I’m dealing with… they have existences beyond this one moment we’re in.  The one crisis we’re facing.  It’s stupid and it’s incomplete, but it’s one piece of what I’ve been working on.”

“A piece of?”

“A conscience?  Building a better Sy?” I asked.  I shrugged and put the ring back on.

“I can remember exactly what you’ve said, the order where you’ve been saying it, but I can’t follow your thread of thought.”

I nodded.

I looked down at my hands, and moved the ring around my thumb.  More resistance than there used to be.  “Jamie used to always, I think of it as dancing.  Sometimes in step, sometimes not, but complimentary.  He would keep me in check, and he would back me up when I needed it.  I get the feeling you’re trying to do the same things, following the cues from your books.”

“Sometimes.  But I get the feeling you’re imagining me trying to do that when I’m just trying to be a member of this team.”

“I don’t need you to be my conscience, Jamie.  I don’t need you to challenge me or check me or question me, okay?”

“What am I supposed to do, then?  When it looks like you’re charging into a bad situation, or treating a teammate wrong, I can’t speak up?  I have to keep my mouth closed, when everyone else is free to do what they want?  I can’t be a shadow, Sy.”

“Not be a shadow, but shadow us.  Get to know me before you make assumptions about what I’m doing or how I’m operating.  I’ve changed from the person that appears in the books, and some of the stuff in there isn’t as accurate as you think it might be, okay?  There are gaps.  I know there are gaps, events he didn’t write down.”

Now I was thinking about the day I’d lost Jamie.  Our last conversation.  My face tried to screw itself up in emotion, I managed to fight it off.  Deep breath.

He studied me.  He was almost as incensed as I was, as his eyes scanned my face.  He didn’t clench his fists or hold himself like he wanted to throw a punch, but he was tense in a different way.

“Sy, you tried to emulate Jamie.  You tried to fill the gap, use improvisation and tricks to be him.  You studied those books and tried to use your ability to learn to… I don’t know what you had planned, build up your memory retention, at the cost of something else?”

I shrugged.

“I would just like you to consider for a moment, that maybe, taken as a whole, the books contain more information than you seem-”

“Fuck the books!” I said, lunging to my feet as I said it, bringing my hand down on the nearest available thing, the plate of cooling meat I’d set down on the stair, and sent it spinning skyward.  Jamie flinched as it came down a foot behind him, cracking on the step.

Jamie set his jaw, clenching his teeth, but he didn’t stand.

“I have changed from the person you got to know from the books.  I am changing.  And maybe I’m changing slower or I’m more twisted in how I grow than some…” I gestured at myself, “But don’t assume you know me.”

“There’s a code,” he said.

Breathing hard, standing on the stair, I looked down at him.

“It’s not something you’d pick up on a hundred reads, unless you had a perfect memory and the ability to pull it all together, or if you were actively looking for it.  A letter and number combination in a poem.  Words scratched into that scratchy style of drawing he did, that you’d only see if you knew the right place to look.  His words to me, spread out over pages, backward and forward.  Private thoughts.  Filling in details.  He knew the Academy would read the texts and there were details he didn’t want them to know, about the Lambs, questions of loyalty here and there.  About him.  About you.”

The anger was dying with every sentence.  I felt tears welling up.

“You borrowed the last book.  I know you read it, looking for insight or answers.”

I shook my head.

Read it over and over and over.

“There’s no entry just prior to his death, he didn’t have time to write,” Jamie said.  “But I know what he was planning on telling you.  I can connect the dots.  What you’re saying, I understand it.”

I shook my head again.  I wasn’t disagreeing, so I didn’t know why I was doing it.

“He wanted to equip me to be a real member of the Lambs.  And that’s part of why it’s so monumentally frustrating that you’re holding me back, keeping me at arm’s length.”

I wanted to ask.  I didn’t trust myself to speak.

“If the Academy found out, if you decided to use it against me, if something went wrong and anything slipped… it would end the Lambs project.  The dirty secrets, the trials and tribulations.  I thought I should keep it to myself, compartmentalize it, because it was and is such dangerous knowledge.  Now you know.  And so does she, I suppose.”

I turned my head.  Down on the lowest step, trying to be as small as possible, was the youngest member of the family I’d sent off to the bakery.

Forgot, I thought.

“I spent months,” I said, my voice hollow.  “Reading the books, studying how he described me, comparing how he wrote about me to how he wrote about the other Lambs.  I’ve agonized over it.”

“Good,” Jamie said.

The word was like a solid punch to the ribs.

“You had the answers all along?”

“Since we left Brechwell and I read the books you had.”

I almost cussed at him right there.

“Like you said,” Jamie told me, “You’d changed.  I had no way of knowing who you’d become in the months since.  If I told you the wrong thing, you might have told the Academy.  Or done something else.”

“What were you waiting for?” I asked.

“This, I suppose.  This conversation.  The point where I could be sure I was talking to the real Sylvester.”

I was still divided.  A part of me was angry again, wanting to cuss at him and throw a punch for holding that back.  Another part still wanted to cry.  The final part was rational, collected if not calm, capable of putting on a mask.  Clever Sy.

“I want you to understand, I have a greater understanding of what’s been going on-”

Angry Sy shook his head.

Jamie was silent for a moment.  Then he said, “You want to talk about him.  The old Jamie.”

I floundered.

There was nothing to ask.  No entry to inquire about.  We’d gone from my conversation with Jamie to hunting Avis, to a conversation with the Duke, straight to appointments.

“I wronged him,” I said.  My voice sounded simultaneously too loud and very far away.

Jamie nodded.

“I wronged him and then he went away.  He had no reason to stay.”

“He had a lot of reasons to stay, Sylvester.  But staying got very, very hard.  All of the details and knowledge made for a big burden.”

“And a little push-”

“No.”

The rain was starting to come down hard.  Jamie reached over and put three of the untouched meals into a sack, tossed his remaining food into the heaped detritus at the side of the stairwell, and put the plate over top of the meals to cover them from the rain.

“It got very hard to stay.  He stayed longer than he might have otherwise.  It was time to pass the baton.”

I shook my head.  Comforting lies.

“One of the last messages,” Jamie said.  He stood from the stair, flipping up his hood, and walked down to the dirt at the side of the stairs.  “Below the eye of a cat he’d drawn.  Lines scratched out in a cross-hatch style to deepen the shadows in the eye socket.  One of the more common forms of the code.  Five…”

He drew a line in the dirt.  Slanted.

Then another, different angle. “Seven…”

Then another.  “…teen.”

Another, horizontal, “Nine.”

“What’s the message?” I asked, impatient.

“Book five.  Page seventeen.  Line nine.  Word three.  Help.”

I winced.

“Book two.  Page two.  Line one, word three-”

“That would be the early days,” I interrupted.  Interrupting because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“Your first meeting,” he said.

Our first meeting?  Then-

Jamie said, “It was one of the very few imperatives he gave me.  I think he didn’t want to give me too many orders, in case I rebelled.  ‘Help Sylvester’.”

I turned my head, staring out across the streets of Lugh.  More lanterns and lights were being ignited, many set beneath covers and awnings to protect them from the rain.

“He cared about you.  Above all else, you were his best friend.  That came first.  Whatever you might have said, I think he knew you well enough to know your words or actions didn’t come from the heart.”

“They still hurt him.”

“Yep,” Jamie said.  “And you deserve to feel bad about that.  But I think you’ve agonized over it for long enough to do it penance.  If my opinion counts for anything.”

“It counts,” I said.  “I’m not convinced, but thank you.”

He nodded.

I watched as more lights went up around Lugh.  Some clever dick had had the bright idea of putting a large lamp within the eye socket of the titanic warbeast that loomed over the southwest end of the city, so it glowed as it gazed out over us.  The rain made the light form halos.

The tension was gone.  Angry Sy, Crybaby Sy and Clever Sy didn’t feel like such different creatures, anymore.

The girl still sat on the steps, trying not to participate or get caught up in the discussion.  She hunched forward, shoulders drawn forward, getting wet.

I pulled off my jacket, and I draped it over her.

Jamie reached out.  He put a hand on my shoulder, and I didn’t flinch or pull away.  I even found the courage to meet him in the eye.  I felt the now-familiar pain at seeing Jamie’s ghost.

The pain and the anger were there, to be sure, the warbeast still in its cage.

Maybe it was a beast I could tame, now, and grow easy with.

“We should reunite with the others,” Jamie said.  “It’s getting past time to rendezvous.”

I nodded.  “Come on, kid.  Let’s go find your dad and get you something to eat.”

She gave me a wary look.

All of that must have been so confusing, I thought.  My thumb touched the ring, a reminder.

“Sorry,” I told her.

The wary look remained.

“You mentioned helping to kill someone,” Jamie murmured, as we walked.  “She heard that.”

If the girl heard the murmur, she didn’t react.  Her eyes were fixed forward, her profile still small.

“Oh,” I said.  “They deserved it though.  They always do.”

If she heard that, then she gave no sign.

The others were gathered as we got back to the rendezvous.  They were warm and dry, sitting on the covered patio of a stout, sturdy building.  A tiny fire blazed on a portable stove between them, little more than a can with firewood in it and a grate over the top.  It looked like the others were finishing their meals.

The little girl I’d sniffed shucked off her coat, letting it fall to the ground, as she reunited with her sister.  Not so much her dad.

“Luck?” Gordon asked.

“I have a plan,” I said.

“Good,” Gordon said.  “Because we chased five different leads, and they didn’t turn up anything.”

“Sit down, Sy,” Lillian said, patting the seat on the bench next to her.  “Warm up and dry off before you catch your death of cold.”

I did, crossing the distance and plopping myself down.

Lillian rested her head on my shoulder.  The very top of her head pressed against my cheek.

“I’m wet,” I said.  “You’re going to get wet by proxy, getting close like this.”

“I know,” she said.  She dropped her voice.  “But I thought you might need it.”

Her left hand found my right hand and held it.

“I’m supposed to look after the Lambs,” she said.  “Keep ’em in the best shape possible.  I’m expanding my repertoire, when it comes to you.”

I nodded.  Jamie was taking the mystery meat and putting it at the stove’s edge to heat up again.

“You’re good at what you do,” I said, staring into the fire.

She made a happy sound.

Hubris was edging closer to the meat on the stove.

“I’ll give you some, Hubris,” Jamie said.  “Don’t worry.”

Hubris relaxed.

“The plan,” I said.  I immediately had the attention of the Lambs, minus Hubris, who was still keeping an eye on the meat.  “It puts you at risk, Lillian, front and center.”

“Is it a good plan?”

“Not a polished one, but it’s the best one I can figure out to get results.  If you don’t want to, we’ll figure something else out.  This is your mission, you take point.”

She nodded, giving my leg a pat.  “Okay, Sy.  How long do we have to figure it out?”

“‘Til midnight,” I said.  “We’re going to sell you into slavery, and I’m fairly sure the guy that’s buying has a small army of thugs under his control.  But he’ll have answers we want.”

“That’ll do,” Gordon said.  He reached forward to tear off a bit of meat and throw it to his dog.

Bleeding Edge – 8.6

We approached the meeting place.  It was down by the water.  The ‘head’ of the mummified sea monster of Lugh loomed over us as we made our way down to the warehouses.  A short bridge allowed easier passage over a tendril that lay across, between, and through buildings.  The smell of the ocean that filled Lugh was overpowered by a smell of rotting seaweed and fish.  I’d made the mistake of opening my mouth, and the smell became a taste, clinging to my tongue.  I wasn’t alone; Hubris kept snorting, as if trying to clear his airways.

Lanterns lit up a warehouse and a cast of figures.  Ratface was there with his bodyguards, standing off to one side, ostensibly the mediator, middleman and negotiating official.

The buyer was there too.  I’d briefed the others based on what Ratface had told us.  He went by Giles, and he had money to spend.  He owned several homes in one of the nicer parts of Lugh, up the rocky hills above the sea monster’s body, and had refitted several to be labs with dormitory-like setups for the people who worked for him.

The placement of the homes was interesting.  As far as I could tell, the setup meant that if and when the Academy got serious about cleaning up Lugh, they had to make their way through the entire city, past Giles’ eyes on the street, through the awkward little maze of routes that spilled out beneath the dead warbeast’s body.  That would get them as far as the foot of the mountain – they still had to climb the steep and winding road to get up the mountain a ways to the houses poised on the rocky edges.  By the time they got that far, the homes would be empty of anything incriminating.

Making one’s way down and away would be equally troubling.  The people who worked for him most likely weren’t given the freedom to make day trips to the city.

From a tactical standpoint, the little bit of information we’d been able to pick up told us that Giles was known to the local underworld as the Fishmonger.  He had a small army of thugs, and a set of modified humans as his elite soldiers.  One sixth of Lugh belonged to him, which wasn’t as much as some, but his sixth included the harbor.  Ships that didn’t pay the price to the men on the docks ran the risk of expensive collisions and complications.

Big bucks.

“Lil,” I murmured, “From here on out, I might be a bit of an asshole.”

“You say that like it’s new,” Gordon said.

“Ha ha ha,” I said, monotone, before turning back to Lillian, “A lot of this depends on how well you sell it.”

She huffed out a sigh.  Nervous.

I kept my eyes forward and didn’t touch her to reassure.  “Right now, this is an opportunity.  Think about how you felt when you were going to meet the Gages.  If you’re nervous, tap into that, these are scary guys, you’re a bit unsure now that you’re here.  Right?”

“Right,” Lillian said, quiet.

“When they close the net, seize you, whatever it is, you’ve got to tap into something else.  Do you remember the argument in Brechwell?”

“I remember.”

“You really, genuinely thought I wanted to support Fray, ignoring what you were saying about the dangers these books pose.  Might be a starting point.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t try to fake believing.  Let yourself believe.  Let the walls down.”

“I think I focus on reality too much to fall into the fantasy like that,” Lillian said.

“Would be easier if Helen was here.  She could give you good tips.  Here we are.”

We were getting close enough to be within earshot.

The Fishmonger.  He was average height for a man, but had a stooped posture and a strange shape about him that made him appear shorter than he was.  He was built like a lump, the edges of his chin merging into a thick neck, which merged into narrow shoulders in turn.  His fingers were stumpy as they stuck out of his sleeves, his thumbs hooked on the pockets of his coat.  His face was heavy, with jowls, a pug nose, and lower eyelids so thick and droopy they looked as though they’d been badly grafted on over his existing pair.  His thick coat hung down nearly to his ankles.

He didn’t look wealthy.  The wide-brimmed hat he wore and the coat were the same sorts the poorer people on the street wore.  I guessed he was the sort to pinch pennies, except where food was concerned.  If I assumed he’d dressed up for this, then he usually looked worse.

If he was looking to be incognito, he’d gone the wrong way about it.  Of the group of people with him, four were heavily modified.  Two had had their skin swapped out for thick scales.  One was covered in spines, and both spines and skin were a ghastly, unhealthy pallor.  The fourth was big, slouching against a wall, a head taller than the tallest of the other three beefy, augmented foot soldiers.  His skin was oil-slick black and glossy.

All four wore the same coats the six unaltered thugs of the group did, the one with the spines being the only one to buck a trend of heavy raincoats and brimmed hats.  Spines wore something more suited to winter weather, puffy, and wore no hat.  He didn’t look happy, and I wondered if it was solely because of the wet and cold.

“Glad you could make it,” Ratface said to me.  The look he gave me was intended to communicate something.  That the plan was still on, probably.  I was more focused on Giles the Fishmonger.

The Fishmonger extended a stubby finger, letting it rove over our group.  Jamie and Gordon were with us, as was Hubris.  Two of the adults from our recruited group were with as well.

Giles’ short finger pointed at Lillian.  “You’re her?”

“Yes,” Lillian said.

“Fifteen?”

“Yes sir,” she said.

“How many years at the Academy?”

“Three, but I took classes at a preparation school before.  I’m- I was a year and a half ahead of my peers.  I guess I still am?”

Good.  But she sounded terrified.  Uncertain, to the point where I could imagine Giles calling her a liar, and her reflexively agreeing.

“A year and a half ahead,” Giles said.  “That’s a problem.”

“A problem?”

Come on, Lil, stay on track here.

I would have elbowed her if I could’ve done it without being seen.

Instead, I raised my hand up, well within Lillian’s field of view, and fixed my hood.  The sudden motion made several of the Fishmonger’s bozos move their hands in the direction of their waistbands.

Fishmonger Giles wasn’t watching them, but saw Lillian’s reaction.  He turned his head and looked at his men.  “Don’t you worry about them.  You’re new to Lugh, you don’t have a grasp of the local politics yet.  Trust me, if you end up working for me, then you’ll be happy to have protection like them.”

Happy?  That rang out as a lie in my ears.  The only protection they would offer would be protecting Giles’ investment.

“You said there’s a problem?  Please, sir, we really need money.  We haven’t been able to get much, and it disappears so fast.  I’m hungrier than I’ve ever been in my life.  I’m good at what I do.  I’m a fast learner, if I don’t know something already.”

“You might be too good.”

“That’s not possible,” Lillian said.  Then she seemed to realize what she’d said.  “Sorry, sir, for speaking out of turn.”

That came across as real, but it was real.  It had dug past the act and the moment to prick at the real Lillian, the part of her that likely connected with Mary on a level.  She connected with Mary because the both of them believed that there was no such thing as being overqualified, too good, working too hard, knowing too much.  Though their paths were very different ones.

The Fishmonger wagged a finger.  Not as a reprimand, but gesticulating.  “I’ll show you.”

He gestured, and his altered bodyguards parted, opening a way.  Spines pulled a door open as he stepped aside.

The Fishmonger made his way into the building, raising one hand to beckon us with a finger.

The trap awaits.

“Sir?” Lillian asked, “Could you tell me instead?  We’re outnumbered, and-”

“It’s fine,” I said.  “That guy there-”

Ratface gave me a nasty look.

“Cecil,” Jamie supplied.

“Cecil said Mr. Giles was trustworthy.  We asked around before we met you at the rendezvous point, and he’s popular around town.  He’s the richest man in the city, which is why he needs bodyguards.”

All lies, but lies that made sense, built up my end of the scenario, that I’d put her to work.

“I understand, but-”

I reached out to take her hand.  “You promised, Lil.  That you would help us out.  We’ve gotten you food, we’ve kept you safe, don’t spoil this now that we’ve got a chance.”

Giles watched us out of the corner of his eye, waiting.

I squeezed.

“Okay,” Lillian said.

I let go of her hand and gave her a push.

Walk into the trap.

The key thing to do here was to keep options open.  I could have followed her, but if something happened, or if he had a specialized means of securing her, I didn’t want to get caught by it, whether it was a tranquilizer or a net.  I needed to be free to move to help her.

Instead, I followed her halfway, so she wouldn’t walk forward and see us standing still, my pace slowing as she got closer to the door.

She reached the doorway, and I saw her hands go to her mouth.  She made an incoherent noise.

My heart skipped a beat.  Against my better judgment, I approached, until I stood right behind her, Spines to one side of me, one of the scaly men to the other.

The inside of the warehouse was well lit, but the lights flickered and gave the interior a yellow cast.  I could see black things swimming in the liquid of the long lightbulbs, long and snakelike.

Lying across a table was a man.  He was strapped down, and now and again he jerked a limb, straining the leather straps to their limit.  His back arched, and I could see his naked torso, where something moved beneath his skin.

“He got on the wrong side of one of my other people’s experiments,” Giles said.  “Don’t know how or why, but the poor bastard might have thought he could steal from me.  Take in a parasite, make a run for the edge of town, get it out, and sell it.  Very valuable, these.”

The man wasn’t breathing.  Instead, his back arched, then bucked the other way, as his head rose up as far as he could manage, throat distending.

Ratface spoke, right behind me.  “He might not have been smuggling, might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Mm hmm,” the Fishmonger said.  “Which would mean security is lacking.  Something to think about.”

The man on the table heaved, to no avail.  The thing that wormed its way out of his mouth took its own time, revealing itself by flailing around in the air before wrapping around half of the man’s face.  Something like a leech or a maggot.  It was as big around than his head was, and half-again as long, but apparently capable of squeezing through small spaces.  The man thrashed, gasping for breath now, his head whipping from left to right, but he failed to dislodge the greasy blob of flesh from his face.  Arms pulled against restraints.

“This was to be your test, little girl.  Save him.  Preserve the specimen.”

“This is inhuman,” Lillian said.

“I don’t believe in humanity,” the Fishmonger said.  “I believe in what comes next.”

It was, in an eerie way, very similar to a sentiment I’d voiced before.

Lillian looked back over her shoulder at me, as if reading my mind, or thinking along similar lines.

I put a look of wide-eyed horror on my face.  No words I could say would help this situation or sell the gambit.

The parasite was working its way into the man’s ear.  Far too large an object for so narrow an aperture, but it was somehow doing it.  The man struggled, thrashing, raising his head up and smashing it down, as if he could kill the thing by smashing his own head against it, or swipe it against the table’s edge and dislodge it.

“But, like I said,” the Fishmonger said, finger raised, “A problem.  The test might prove too easy, if you’re as advanced as you say.”

“Please.  Just let me help him.”

“He tried to help himself, you know,” the Fishmonger said.  “Took a knife to his own stomach, trying to reach inside and get the thing out.  We fixed the damage and got it so he wouldn’t die before you got here.”

He drew a knife.

“No!” Lillian said.

“I’m severing the sutures, is all.  Back to square one, and-”

“Stop!”

The knife flicked.  A spatter of blood sailed through the air.  The patient screamed, voice hoarse.

“Now you have a time limit.”

Lillian hesitated.

“The longer you wait, the more he suffers,” the Fishmonger said.

Lillian shook her head.  She started rolling up her sleeves, running to the table, her satchel bouncing at her hip.

“There are tools ready for you.”

“I have my own,” Lillian said.  “Simon, help me.”

I was surprised she had the presence of mind to call me by my fake name.  I hurried to her side.

Bag out, on the table, and she was getting her tools out.

“I’m interested in the fact that you didn’t sell those,” the Fishmonger said, “Desperate for money as you are.”

Lillian ignored him.  She laid the tools out, and began getting little bottles.  The bottles were folded into a set, two rows of three in half of a box, held in place with ribbons, each box-half joined to the next with another ribbon.  Made to be bundled together, easily unfolded or stacked without getting lost or separated from one another.  She began removing and setting down bottles, one after another.

The man thrashed, the thing still working its way into his ear, halfway through now, and his arm struck at the bottles.

I was quick enough to catch the two that was knocked from the table.  I moved the row of bottles to one side, out of reach of the man’s arm and hand.

“What can you tell me about the parasite?” Lillian asked.  She was cleaning her hands with a solution from a bottle.

The Fishmonger was silent.

Lillian set her jaw.  She began cleaning the site of the injury at the man’s middle with the same product, ignoring the parasite for the time being.  It was a ragged injury, more like a crack in a pane of glass, branching off in every direction, and the edges were marked with the black thread of sutures.

“If it goes into his ear, where is it going?” I asked.  “Brain?”

“I doubt it,” Lillian said.  “If it went to the brain, the man wouldn’t be conscious.  There’s damage to his other ear.  It’s already come and gone from there, probably made it through the Eates tube, joins the ear and mouth.  There’s similar damage around the nose too, and one of his eyes is damaged.”

I looked.  It was hard to tell with how wild-eyed the man was, like a horse frothing at the mouth, too panicked to even see straight, but one of his eyes was indeed slower to move than the other.

“In and out of the socket?” I asked.

“Or it tried,” Lillian said.  “Third bottle.”

I found and handed her the third bottle.

“Second, I mean.  Order got mixed around when he knocked them down.”

Oh.  I’d put it back wrong.  She was letting me know I’d screwed up without saying it outright.  I handed her a bottle.

She drew out a syringe, injecting it.  Then she began her work, opening the injury wider, reaching in, and then feeling out the interior.  “Damage is shallow.  No organs damaged, but some bleeds.  This is mostly surface damage, made worse by the thing moving beneath and around it, before and after stitches.”

This was a nasty distraction.  We couldn’t let the man suffer, but the game plan we’d had laid out was well and truly out of sorts, now.  I glanced at Jamie and Gordon, who were hanging further back, watching through the doorway.

Escape routes?  Most of the windows were placed high, to let sunlight in, and the only one at ground level was boarded up.  There was a front door, and if there was a back door, the rows of shelves and stacks of wooden pallets blocked my view of it.  I could smell some of the products being traded, so I knew that most of the boxes on the shelves would be full.

That said, I doubted I’d find any weapons or tools sharper or more effective than a sweet potato, even if I had the chance to look, which I didn’t.

Six regular thugs, four altered ones, and the Fishmonger himself.  Ratface was watching from outside, but he and his two bodyguards were more assets arrayed against us.

This isn’t your first dance, Fishmonger.  You’re experienced, and you’ve preemptively handled more situations than this one with this heavy handed brutality and a total lack of humanity.

Lillian had tools.  Some were sharp.  But with all the eyes on us, it would be difficult to get my hands on them.  If I messed up in the slightest, I was betting the thugs would be faster to get to their guns than I would be to get to a scalpel.

While I surveyed the situation, I caught a glimpse of the Fishmonger.

There was a look on his face.  It was a smile in the technical sense, but there was no happiness to it.  I had trouble pinning it down.

Because of Lillian?

Because of the trap?  The idea that Lillian might as well be shackled already, being wrist-deep in her patient?

I glanced at the door.  The men who’d been on either side of it were now standing with their backs to it, blocking my view.  I looked between their legs for a glimpse of Gordon and Jamie’s feet, and didn’t see them.

If Gordon and Jamie had made a move, then the men wouldn’t be nearly that relaxed, blocking the door as they were.

Gordon and Jamie had been dealt with.

In saving this one man, we might have been doomed.

Couldn’t dwell on that.  I was focusing on the work we were doing, handing over tools as Lillian asked for them.  I couldn’t spare a glance to the Fishmonger, but I imagined that look on his face.

Setting up something like this, he had a mean streak.  The torture this man was going through?  No question of malice, here.  He also desired power and control, and he was careful about it, setting himself up in the houses on the mountain.

Except, was he looking at us with anticipation?

The Fishmonger had us.  He had absolute control.  The torture the man was going through was enough to satisfy just about any sadist.  The emotional strain Lillian was going through, it was gravy to this lump of a man.

What more could he be hungry for?

“Doing okay?” I asked.

“Trying,” Lillian said.  “Working out in my head how we might do the parasite, while I’m doing the tears inside.  There’s still a time limit, even after I sew him up.  He has only so much strength.”

That was it.

This was too easy.  The time limit wasn’t enough of a catch.  The cut in the man’s side didn’t do more than delay Lillian in getting to the parasite.  That could be a problem unto itself.  Lillian being set up to fail.

The other possibility was worse.

“Small scissors,” Lillian said.

I found and handed her the small scissors.  When she went to take them, I held for a moment.  My hand was there, one finger extended.

Alert.

“Got it,” Lillian said.  “Can barely hold onto this.  Hand wash?”

I got the hand wash.  I held the bottle in a particular way, gesturing as best as I was able while holding something, upending the bottle over her hands.  She rubbed them together and shook off the blood.

Trap.

“Don’t drop it,” she said.  “Your hands are messy too.”

“I won’t,” I said.  I changed my grip.  The gesture this time was for inside, caged, encapsulated.

She stopped where she was, her hands poised above the victim.  Her hands were trembling.

“I’d hope a third year student of the Academy could handle some surface wounds to the stomach,” the Fishmonger said.

I watched Lillian as her eyes roved over the man, top to bottom.

Then her hands came down, one on either side of the wound.  She shoved.

The man squirmed, fighting her.  The thing at his ear was mostly inside, but for a bulb of flesh at the end, the only part of it that wasn’t squeezed into a space as large around as a finger.  The flesh was stretched so thin I could see veins standing out against the surface of it.

Lillian released.  She huffed out a breath.  “Help.  And watch yourself.”

I put my hands together, one folded over the other, pressing against one side of the wound.  She did the same for the other.

“Three, two, one…”

We shoved simultaneously.  Blood gushed out, flooding the site of the injury.  I was pretty sure we tore the opening in the skin even wider.

Then it lurched out, a second parasite, flailing aimlessly, reaching for us.  I pulled my hands away just in time as it slapped out  against the victim’s lower abdomen.  Smaller around and perhaps longer than the other.

“A second parasite,” Lillian said, hands up, stepping away.

“Is there?  What a pleasant surprise!” the Fishmonger said, sounding entirely too pleased with himself.  His lie was such that it would be obvious even to a distracted Lillian, “I thought one had escaped, it’s good to know it will find its way back to me.”

“It was probably anesthetized,” Lillian said.

“This poor man has some wits, to manage that!”

A win-win for our sadist.  Either the prospective ‘hire’ has talent, or he gets to see her reaction when the parasite latches onto her.

It had been close, too.  He’d almost gotten her.  If she’d spent any more time rummaging around that particular wound…

I had a good imagination.  The mental picture was too real.  Lillian, with the parasite on her arm.  The Fishmonger taking action to keep her from using tools or chemicals on it, kicking me way, possibly kicking her to the ground, stepping on her free hand.  Watching while she struggled.  The begging, the frantic screaming.

From my estimation of him, he wouldn’t listen.  He would let it break her, then put her to work.  The damage to her body would be a reminder for the rest of her days, while a threat of a repeat performance would be enough to cow any dissent or rebellion.

I’d developed a profound sort of hate for this man in a very short span of time.

He would have to die horribly.  The parasites were too kind a death.  For that to happen, however, we’d first have to get out of this situation.

I saw movement and turned my eye to the door.

The group from outside were coming in.

Jamie, limp, was being dragged in.

Then the two adults we’d brought with us.

And finally Gordon.  He was dragged in by one arm.  Whatever had happened, he was groggy and sluggish.  A knife was embedded in that same shoulder, and each pull on his arm made the blood flow more freely.

Lillian didn’t even seem to notice.  Her eyes were fixed on her patient.

“Two points of attachment are making it hard to remove,” she murmured.  “The first, it’s a kind of anchor.  A tendril or some other form of attachment, reaching forward into a new hole, or reaching backward, into the patient.  One at each end, very strong, impossible to access without carving the patient up.”

“Sure,” I said.  I managed to sound calm, which helped keep Lillian from looking up and seeing the others.

“The second, it’s the grip on the patient’s skin.  The underside of this thing, or maybe the entirety of it, it’s covered in setae, or something like it.  Tiny hairs, providing an absolute grip, like a barnacle to the underside of a ship, but gripping and releasing and moving in a cycle, so it can inch forward.  Touch it, and you don’t get it free.”

“Short of removing the skin,” I said.

Lillian nodded.  “Which is why… I could deal with the setae alone, flay the affected body part.  But the anchors mean the thing can just reel itself in or hold itself in place.  I could deal with the anchor, cutting deep and surgically prying it free, wherever or however it’s latched on…”

“You can’t handle both at the same time.”

“I can, but it’s messy.”

“How?” I asked.  Keep her focused.

“Scalpel.”

I handed over a fresh scalpel.

“Okay,” she said.  She rummaged in her bag.  She found a cloth sack for a number of pills.  She dumped it out, handing it to me.  Then she found another sack.  This one had soap in it.  “Wear these.”

“Wear?”

She pulled the soap one over my hand like a mitten.  Then she gave me the other.  “I hope it won’t stick to you like this.”

“You hope.”

“I think.  Grab it, by the lowest possible point.  Haul it up and away.  Whatever you do, you have to keep your grip.”

I huffed out a one-note chuckle, “You know I’m not that strong, right?”

“Be strong,” she said.

Her eyes were somewhat wild as she looked at me.  Then she looked down at the patient.  “Please.”

I wasn’t sure if the please was for me or for a higher power.  Or maybe the parasite.

I grabbed the parasite.  The texture of it was different than I’d expected.  It looked slimy, smooth, but it was like the fuzzy sort of leaf, where it had a shocking amount of texture.  I nearly lost my makeshift mitten as it flexed.

My arms strained as I lifted it up and away.  My legs, inner core and arms were tight with exertion as I tried to lift it up and away from the table.

If the Fishmonger wants to fuck with us, all he has to do is nudge my arm, poke me in my side.

Lillian reached down into the wound with the scalpel, bare skin inches away from the parasite.

Then she cut.

Ichor went flying from the thing’s rear end as it lashed out, flipping around, fighting my grip.  It was all I could do to keep it away from Lillian’s skin as she pulled away, back out of my field of vision.

The more it struggled, the less it held on to the patient.  I maintained my grip, praying it wouldn’t whip around and find its way to the space of bare skin between jacket sleeve and mitten.

Then, all at once, it was free of the patient.  I stumbled, nearly losing it, then wasted no time in dropping both mittens and the specimen to the ground.

I looked to Lillian, and I saw her with the Fishmonger’s hand around her throat.  She struggled.

Catching my balance, I moved to help- and a thug grabbed my arms.  My struggles were in vain.

“I told you,” the Fishmonger said.  “Preserve the specimen.”

Lillian couldn’t even speak.  Her hands clutched at the Fishmonger’s wrist.

I saw that grim smile spread across his face.  A look of anticipation, as cold as a crocodile licking its chops pre-meal.

He was strong enough to lift Lillian clean off the ground.  I saw her scrabble for her collection of tools and come away empty-handed.

He wasn’t strong enough to keep holding her off the ground, but that wasn’t the intent.  His leg came forward, and when he brought her back down, it got in the way of her firmly placing her feet under her.  She went all the way down to dusty floorboards, hard enough to have the air knocked out of her.

Head a matter of a foot from the parasite.

It was a still tableau.  The parasite writhed in place, the Fishmonger held Lillian where she was.  I’d already ceased struggling, feeling how futile it was.  The Fishmonger panted.

Then the parasite flipped itself over.  It began to crawl in Lillian’s direction.

For his own enjoyment, or perhaps to see the look on my face, the Fishmonger loosened his grip enough to let Lillian voice that scream that had haunted my imagination just moments ago.

Table of Contents

Taking Root 1.1

Taking Root 1.2

Taking Root 1.3

Taking Root 1.4

Taking Root 1.5

Taking Root 1.6

Taking Root 1.7

Taking Root 1.8

Taking Root 1.9

Taking Root 1.10

Taking Root 1.11

Taking Root 1.12

Enemy (Arc 1)

Cat out of the Bag 2.1

Cat out of the Bag 2.2

Cat out of the Bag 2.3

Cat out of the Bag 2.4

Cat out of the Bag 2.5

Cat out of the Bag 2.6

Cat out of the Bag 2.7

Cat out of the Bag 2.8

Cat out of the Bag 2.9

Cat out of the Bag 2.10

Cat out of the Bag 2.11

Enemy (Arc 2)

Lips Sealed 3.1

Lips Sealed 3.2

Lips Sealed 3.3

Lips Sealed 3.4

Lips Sealed 3.5

Lips Sealed 3.6

Lips Sealed 3.7

Lips Sealed 3.8

Lips Sealed 3.9

Lips Sealed 3.10

Enemy (Arc 3)

Stitch in Time – 4.1

Stitch in Time – 4.2

Stitch in Time – 4.3

Stitch in Time – 4.4

Stitch in Time – 4.5

Stitch in Time – 4.6

Stitch in Time – 4.7

Stitch in Time – 4.8

Stitch in Time – 4.9

Stitch in Time – 4.10

Stitch in Time – 4.11

Stitch in Time – 4.12

Enemy (Arc 4)

Esprit de Corpse – 5.1

Esprit de Corpse – 5.2

Esprit de Corpse – 5.3

Esprit de Corpse – 5.4

Esprit de Corpse – 5.5

Esprit de Corpse – 5.6

Esprit de Corpse – 5.7

Esprit de Corpse – 5.8

Esprit de Corpse – 5.9

Esprit de Corpse – 5.10

Esprit de Corpse – 5.11

Esprit de Corpse – 5.12

Esprit de Corpse – 5.13

Esprit de Corpse – 5.14

Esprit de Corpse – 5.15

Enemy (Arc 5)

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.1

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.2

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.3

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.4

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.5

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.6

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.7

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.8

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.9

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.10

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.11

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.12

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.13

Enemy (Arc 6)

Tooth and Nail – 7.1

Tooth and Nail – 7.2

Tooth and Nail – 7.3

Tooth and Nail – 7.4

Tooth and Nail – 7.5

Tooth and Nail – 7.6

Tooth and Nail – 7.7

Tooth and Nail – 7.8

Tooth and Nail – 7.9

Tooth and Nail – 7.10

Tooth and Nail – 7.11

Tooth and Nail – 7.12

Tooth and Nail – 7.13

Tooth and Nail – 7.14

Tooth and Nail – 7.15

Tooth and Nail – 7.16

Enemy (Arc 7 – Boys)

Enemy (Arc 7 – Girls)

Bleeding Edge – 8.1

Bleeding Edge – 8.2

Bleeding Edge – 8.3

Bleeding Edge – 8.4

Bleeding Edge – 8.5

Bleeding Edge – 8.6

Next