Stitch in Time – 4.7

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“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.

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Stitch in Time – 4.6

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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.”

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Stitch in Time – 4.5

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

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.”

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

 

Stitch in Time – 4.3

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

“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.”

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Stitch in Time – 4.2

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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.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Stitch in Time – 4.1

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

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.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Lips Sealed 3.10

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

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.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

 

Lips Sealed 3.7

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

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.”

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Lips Sealed 3.6

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

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.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Lips Sealed 3.5

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

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.

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