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The fallen structures still smoked. People, the majority of them students, were doing their best to make their way across toward Claret Hall, where one fire had started.

Soldiers were setting up a perimeter, rolling or having stitched carry barrels of salt. Other members of the teams were either helping to get the salt flowing freely, sticking trowels and shovels into the barrels, or they were using brooms to mix the salt with the slime, so the Hag Nerve on their side of the salt was thoroughly killed.

We picked our way over the rubble. Many of the others from the ship had come running when the walls had come down. They’d run into the Hag Nerve and they’d found their own way through, helped by the rubble that had cascaded down onto the fields.

There were enough of us that we couldn’t take one path without stretching ourselves out too thin. Our forces fanned out, to the extent we could with the Hag Nerve around us, many of us armed.

The groups that flanked us approached the defending forces, the soldiers and Doctors that were moving away from the wreckage and devastation. Many of the defending forces and Academy natives were shell-shocked, rattled by the devastation around them, and they didn’t put up a fight.

Off to our left, there was some gunfire, suggesting it wasn’t all that easy.

Claret Hall would be harder, even beheaded as it was, but Claret Hall could come later.

We made our way to the tower, stepping from slab to slab, chunk to chunk, and along areas where the slime had been parted by the force of falling masonry and that same masonry then dammed it off. Everything was wet; the moss that had grown on parts of the wall and slime that had splashed up now made footing precarious. I had to stop several times, because even with my legs tired from carrying Jessie and from the climb, I was still better at it than some.

The Wyvern had stunted me. It had inhibited my growth – I was only as tall as Lillian, and Lillian wasn’t tall for a woman. Jessie hadn’t grown in the usual way because Jessie lacked some of the hormones for puberty, and she was still taller than me.

I looked back at her, and saw her asleep. Lillian was directly behind Mary, helping Mary to limp along – the two of them had hands gripping the stitched’s belt. I really hoped it wouldn’t tip over and send all three girls spiraling onto the slimy, smoking fragments of wall.

I’d been stunted in other ways. I was still the boy. In personality and in other ways, I hadn’t grown up. It was ironic that the Wyvern that made the acquisition and loss of skills so rapid left me with the ability to climb and walk tightrope-narrow walltops and bridges as young boys did. It wasn’t because I was better at it, but because the fears and hesitation that held so many others back were muted in me. One had to learn fear and caution as they learned any skill.

I’d seen Mabel somewhere, I was pretty sure. I could watch Lillian and Jessie picking their way through the ruins, and I could follow that thought to its conclusion. I hadn’t grown in the ways I needed to, in order to maintain a proper relationship with a girl. One had to learn to navigate relationships.

In contrast, however, I had grown in a way that let me see this through. It wasn’t my childhood home, not quite, but it was my childhood, and I’d left it in shambles. The army behind us watched for my hand to move, saw me gesture, and they hurried to catch up.

“Yes?”

“Is Junior with us?”

“He was talking to Duncan, last I saw.”

“Can you bring him?”

“Yes sir.”

Sir. A title for a man.

We were one of the most powerful people in the Crown States when we took Hackthorn hostage.

We supplanted others and raised our standing when we took the lesser aristocrats, the lowest of the visiting Nobles, and the various small Academies. We became a power on par with any but the Infante when we gathered our army.

We beat the Infante.

“Everything okay, Sy?” Lillian asked.

“The path gets a little less clear here,” I said. I pointed.

“In more ways than one?” she suggested.

“No,” I said.

We were just past the dormitories now. The tower was on a raised area of land, but there was a dip before then, and that dip was flooded. A slash of overly still water, twenty feet across, cutting through the road.

The tower itself was illuminated here and there. I didn’t see anyone in the windows, but I did see the orange and yellow lights shift as people moved this way and that.

“No,” I said again, hammering it in.

“I know your memory is bad,” she said. “I’m going to say it again.”

“There’s no need,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” I said.

Junior reached us, with Ashton, Duncan, and Helen in his company.

“You have the stuff?” I asked.

“I recruited help and made extra, just in case, because I did not want to run back a third time,” Junior said. “You can thank the rest of the old gang.”

Three canisters. Each was as large as a single dewar flask, like the ones many Doctors used for long-term chemical storage, or as many civilians used to stow a kettle’s worth of tea or a multiple-person serving of hot stew. Too large to really serve well as a grenade.

“Alright,” I said. I pointed. “We’ll need to get through. It should kill the Hag Nerve, shouldn’t it?”

“Should,” Duncan said. “There’s a risk of it multiplying back into the body of water, but that water will be tainted. I doubt it’ll be mobile, even if it’s soupy.”

“I’m glad Abby isn’t here,” Ashton said. “She’d be so sad.”

“It doesn’t have a brain,” I said.

“Neither do I. Neither does Wendy. I’m not sure about Abby.”

“It doesn’t have anything brain-like,” I said.

“Neither do you,” Lillian said.

I reached out to pinch at her cheek, and she caught my hand.

Junior got to work, flipping a switch on the flask before uncapping it. The gas began billowing from it, rolling out before us.

The fact that the wall had come down and was now at our backs allowed the wind through. It rolled out and brought the gas with it, carrying it over the Hag that covered the ground and filled the moat.

“How are you doing, Mary?” I asked.

“I don’t know how soldiers can use those things with any regularity.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I used to always like this spot,” Mary said. “In the very beginning, when I was in Hayle’s custody, after you recruited me, Lillian would come visit me. Then it flipped around. I would walk Lillian to her office, or go to see her, or I’d visit the dorms here. I used to be hereabouts, past the thick of the buildings, only a few students around, rain falling, and I’d get a happy, anticipatory feeling.”

“And now?”

“Dread.”

Duncan drew in a deep breath.

“Duncan?”

“I felt like I could stand a little taller, while going to see Professor Hayle. I was recognized by one of the best students in class and one of the top Professors locally. Huzzah for you, Mr. Foster. Stand here, look forward and…” Duncan swept his arm out, fully extended, palm forward, as if wiping his hand along a picture, “…you can see that black coat. You can see your way forward, that has you on an even footing with major aristocrats, below only the Nobles.”

“It always terrified me,” Lillian said. “For different reasons. By the time I got used to it, we’d lost Jamie.”

I looked back at Jessie. I reached back and adjusted her hood, and let the back of my hand rest on her temple.

Lillian let go of the hand she’d been holding since I’d reached back to pinch her cheek.

“Two gods to slay, hm?” Lillian asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

The sound of the rain changed. I tilted my head, listening to it.

“I think I had an inkling that one of your big abstract gods was lurking here even from the beginning,” Lillian said.

“I think you might’ve,” I said.

“I think that was why I found it all so intimidating,” she said.

“I think-”

She put fingers to my mouth.

I drew in a deep breath, then nodded.

“My first memories are here,” I said, after she lowered her fingers. I drew my hand away from Jessie. “Being terrified, needles up my nose and around the sides of my eyes, to reach the brain, poisoning my brain, pain that seemed like it was so incredible that it wiped everything away. I was scared too, once upon a time. Then I figured out how to put that fear in a box and promptly lost it. It was only the fear for others that was left, and fear of what I might do to those others.”

“Us?” Lillian asked.

“You. Lambsbridge. The… group from the sticks. Radham. The world. But I forgot a lot of the familiar faces. I’m only really good at remembering the people I see regularly.”

The change in the rainfall suggested the Hag had relaxed. The rainfall on the bodies of water sounded more like rainfall was supposed to. The appearance of the water, too, had changed, rippling and splashing more with the heavier raindrops or collections of droplets.

I gestured. I was the first to set foot on the path below the scattered rubble, layered by an inch of water.

It wasn’t overly slimy. Slick, yes, but it served.

Our soldiers charged forward, sloshing through the water. I carried on walking, as they ran past. Faces appeared in the windows, staring at the scene.

“Be on your guard,” I said.

The Treasurer, running past me as I spoke, called out the same words, “Be on your guard!”

The scattered few stitched we had were first through the door, at the instructions of the Treasurer and Bea. The students in quarantine outfits were next. Once the calls came back from the people inside, a large portion of our soldiers stormed the tower.

They hadn’t ever been here, it struck me.

So odd, when the place was a staple in my memory.

“I always hated this place. Hated the doctors,” I said. An extension of my earlier comments.

“Don’t let your hate color your actions,” Lillian said.

Walking, limping, or otherwise waiting for the others, the Lambs reached the door. We passed within. I could see our soldiers heading up the stairwells. Some were hanging back, getting lanterns out. Others were going down the hallway, investigating the various rooms and labs on the ground floor. Students and Doctors were hauled out of rooms, threatened with guns, made to kneel.

I knew where I was going.

Sub Rosa stood by the door. She looked mournful. I’d seen her wear an expression like that, once.

I stepped through that door to Jamie’s old lab.

“Sy?” Lillian asked.

His Professors were there. Soldiers I didn’t know were making them kneel. The throne was there, like a tombstone, and there were the glowing tanks with the cloths thrown over them. The walls were lined with bookshelves, and the bookshelves were lined with diaries.

I let my fingers trace the books as I took my time circling the room.

I didn’t recognize the Professors, but the stark fear on their faces suggested they knew me. That was good enough.

“Is Fray around?” I asked. I had to ask. It would be silly and dangerous not to.

There were shakes of heads.

“Starting this out by lying to me is not a good idea.”

“We haven’t seen her. We weren’t looking out until the wall came down, but- we’d have noticed.”

I nodded. I took in the room, where Jamie and his successor had spent so much time.

“I’m thinking of a specific time and place,” I said. “I’m really hoping you’re all thinking of that same time and place. I think it should go without saying.”

The Professors were silent. Jamie had had so many. An incredible team. There were specialists too, and Doctors.

“I remember how little you all seemed to care,” I said. “You looked right past me. You stepped over me. I found a scalpel and came after you, and one of my friends stopped me. You barely seemed to care. You just wanted to get back to work.”

I saw old men clench their jaws.

“Did you keep working, after he left? Are the brains working?”

“You did so much damage, taking him away,” a woman said.

“That’s not an answer to my question.”

The man who responded was the oldest one present, enough that even the Academy measures he’d used to restore his vitality were only partial at best. It gave him a ghoulish appearance, almost a caricature. His hair was overly dry and unkempt. “They work. Loss should be minimal. Our work has been interrupted as different members of our team were pulled away for other projects, but we kept in communication. At Headmaster Hayle’s urging, we committed to stay when the Crown States were abandoned. Discussion to date has been where to take the project next, and we’ve been laying groundwork and outlining what we’ll need over this past week. We were thinking about a vat-grown body. Transplanting what we have to an empty vessel.”

I looked at the throne, then at the vats and the various tubes and cords that connected them. Spines and brains in jars, tubes of fluid, a living thing interrupted, like a carcass.

Transplating what they had. An empty vessel.

I didn’t dare let myself hope.

“Would that bring him back? The Jamie who put those memories there in the first place?”

“What?” the old man asked. He sounded indignant. He almost spat the word, “No.”

One of his colleagues, a middle-aged man with spectacles, reached out to touch the older Professor’s arm, urging him to be calmer.

I hadn’t wanted to let myself hope, but it was still painful to hear.

I could have killed that old man for that.

“It’s muddied,” the middle aged man said. “It wouldn’t have been possible if we’d had a vat-grown body ready the moment we lost the original Caterpillar, because so much depends on original brain structure. Beyond that, the brains are a stew of the original Caterpillar’s catalogued memory and the memories from eighteen appointments the second Caterpillar had. There’s reduplication, meshing, the sorting mechanisms…”

He trailed off, as I gestured, beckoning.

Jessie came to stand beside me.

One of the younger ones, a grey coat, spoke up with his eyes wide, “That’s the Caterpillar?”

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s in stasis, until we can get her to a point where she isn’t losing the memories anymore.”

“I- we can’t. You know that, right? That wouldn’t be possible, especially at this stage.”

“Redefine possible,” I said, and I said it with venom in my voice. “Do it like your welfare depends on it.”

“You’ll want to call her Jessie, not Caterpillar,” Duncan said. “I’m reasonably sure that Sylvester wouldn’t kill you for referring to her as ‘it’ or calling her by the project title, but he’d make you regret it. We have people we’ve been talking to and utilizing. We’ll introduce you to them shortly, all going well.”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice soft. I reached out to touch Jessie’s hair. “Why don’t you go get settled in the throne, Jessie?”

“Um,” Duncan said. “Here, I’ll instruct you. Someone had better come and talk us through this. It’s been a while since I kept up with this project.”

The young man I’d been threatening and the old man both got up, hurrying over to the dais that the great throne stood on. The young man pulled off his coat and used it to dust the apparatus off.

“Hayle,” someone at the door said. “At the top floor.”

“Is he in a position to come down to meet us?” Mary asked.

“Are they?” I asked. “Plural. Fray has to be there too.”

“Are they in a position to come down to meet us?” Mary asked.

“I don’t know what you mean,” the soldier said, sounding bewildered.

“I had a mental picture of one or both of them with a device or creature at hand, or an apparatus, a weapon, or-” Mary started. “Nevermind.”

“We’ll be up shortly,” Lillian said. “Unless there’s an immediate concern?”

“No, Doctor.”

“Then we’ll be up shortly,” she said, again. There was emotion in her voice.

I watched as Jessie was situated. The cords and tubes were pulled into their rough positions, but not attached. They dangled, holding position by dint of habits formed long ago, poised like snakes ready to bite. Jessie slept on, and the stitched that had served as her arms and legs stood behind the throne, following Duncan’s orders when he needed something brought to his waiting hand.

Lillian drew close to my side, rubbing my back.

“Jamie was lovely,” she said. “Jessie had her good points too.”

“Has,” I said. “Has her good points.”

“Okay, Sy.”

“They’ll fix her. They should have followed my project enough to know I’ve got a great imagination, and people as smart as them should know I’ve got reason to despise them to the core of my being. I’ve got motive, opportunity, means and more means. As mean as you get.”

I said it loud enough to be sure they heard.

“I’ll stay,” Duncan said.

“Hm?” I made an inquisitive noise.

“Unless you need me. I’ll stay. I’ll watch Jessie.”

I stared at him, trying to figure it out.

“You can trust me,” he said.

“That’s not what I was thinking.”

“The pill-”

“Again, not what I was thinking. I was just… thinking about logistics. My head is in a different place right now.”

“You can’t trust they won’t try something, like taking her hostage, not unless you have someone who knows their stuff. You could have one of your rebel doctors watch over things. We have some who followed along with the preliminary work we were doing with Jessie, but… short of Lillian, I’m the one most familiar with her. And Lillian wants to confront Hayle.”

“You’re sure?” Lillian asked.

“I’m sure,” Duncan said. “Just leave me some soldiers.”

Mary called out some names. Lillian and I stood back while people got arranged.

Ashton and Helen approached. I messed up Ashton’s hair.

“Rude,” he said. His hair stayed sticking up. “I’ve got my hands full of Helen.”

“And no cause to be concerned for your safety,” I said. “Many a lad has wished to be in the position you’re in.”

He looked at Helen, then made a face.

“No,” he said. “No, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about that.”

“A joke, young sir,” I said. “Because the alternative is too hard to bear.”

“Okay, Sy,” he said.

I settled my hand on his head, partially patting the hair back into place.

“If Fray isn’t here-” Mary said, looking away from the soldiers she was directing. The Professors were working out who would be permitted to do the preliminary work and who would hang back, corralled and held at gunpoint.

I shook my head. “She’s here.”

Go. End this.

“Bye, Jessie,” I said.

Someone threw a switch. Turning on a machine. I flinched and turned away.

We left Jessie and Duncan behind. We ascended the stairs, and we passed Gordon and Hubris’ old lab.

We passed the room where Mary’s staff had worked from. I watched as Mary touched the door in passing.

The hallway was one that wound up the tower exterior like a spiral staircase. The windows looked out on the city. Wreckage, harvester-modified surfaces and homes, innumerable bodies, and shapes that might have been clusters of bodies or warbeasts. Rain obscured everything. If it hadn’t, I might have seen some sign of black wood or the countermeasures against it in the distance. Whether black woods or a burn circle, the effect on the landscape was much the same.

We passed Ashton’s lab, closer to the top.

Hayle’s office had no need for hallways along any side but the one with the entrance. The windows provided an expansive view of the city. He sat at his desk.

Warren stood to one side- except it wasn’t Warren. A Bruno, but its head hung forward and was revealed as a mask, no skull or anything behind the flesh. It was a husk, and it was a lifeless one. Soldiers stood by, weapons at the ready. Three guarded the Bruno.

Fray stood by the desk. She was preparing tea.

“Invisible gas and antidotes in the tea?” I asked.

Fray shook her head.

“Anything fun?” I asked. I examined the Bruno. “Anything in the Bruno suit?”

“Useful for getting around when Genevieve Fray couldn’t. The face is interchangeable. I would periodically use Warren’s face, and sometimes something more generic.”

“Copying me?” Lillian asked.

“No. Coincidence, Doctor Garey, and barely a coincidence, at that,” Fray said. “It isn’t strong. It just moves the way I want it to move when I wear it. Avis designed the mechanisms for connecting my physiology to it.”

“It sounds wrong when you call me Doctor.”

“Be that as it may,” she said.

I was aware that the soldiers were watching the exchange. The Treasurer was in the hallway, with Gordeux.

I looked at Hayle. The old man, lines etched deep in his skin. He made me think of a gargoyle. In his natural process of aging, he looked more like an experiment than most of the experiments present.

“I’d appreciate it if the room were less crowded,” I said. “The Treasurer and Gordeux can stay.”

“I have a name,” Gordo said.

“Guys, give us some breathing room. Stay in earshot, in case anything happens,” the Treasurer said.

The soldiers left the room, passing by the Treasurer and Gord, who remained just outside the door. Mary sat in the chair across from Hayle, because she didn’t look up to standing much longer. Ashton sat as well, getting comfortable with Helen in his lap. I stood beside Lillian at the back of the room.

The two gods remained on the other side of the desk.

“I wasn’t sure if you heard,” Fray said. “I was glad to see it was you. It would have been such a terrible fate for this to unfold and for it to be the likes of Mauer.”

“There would have been something just in Mauer finally getting his win.”

“It would have been a waste, Sylvester. I think you know that,” Fray said.

I know.

I nodded.

Hayle had yet to speak. That was fitting, given the god he represented.

“I always feel so glad to see you all,” Fray said. “Less so when you arrange to have me chased down, but I get by. I’m fond of you all.”

“Sy says it’s because you made them,” Mary said.

“That’s not what I said, exactly,” I said.

Fray smiled, red lips parting to reveal just a bit of her teeth. She looked at me. “What did you say, exactly?”

“I’m the wrong person to ask if you want exact recollection,” I said. “But… I said we were your project.”

Fray smiled again. She looked down at Hayle, who sat to her left, then back at us. “You were.”

The rain drummed against one side of the tower.

“I can’t say I expected it to go this way,” she said. “But that’s you, isn’t it, Sylvester? Unexpected.”

Hayle finally spoke, his voice far older than I remembered it, which I didn’t, really. “I wish you hadn’t destroyed my Academy.”

The other Lambs were watching the exchange, tense. They were as tense about what I was going to say as they were about anything.

“Did Helen, Jessie, or Duncan make it?” Fray asked.

“Helen’s there,” Lillian said, indicating the parcel in Ashton’s lap. “Duncan and Jessie are in the lab downstairs.”

“An uphill battle, I imagine,” Fray said.

“You imagine right,” Lillian said.

“What a shame about Helen. She was a work of art.”

“She will be again,” I said. “We have Ibbot. And, you know, we have pretty much everything else, this side of the King’s Ocean.”

Gunshots sounded elsewhere in the city. Mary craned her head to look, perhaps in hopes of seeing who was shooting, and in what directions. She eased back down. She had a knife in her hands, where she hadn’t before.

“Well, I suppose Helen’s current situation simplifies the desserts I might serve with tea, then. It was why I asked as to her whereabouts. Who am I serving?” Fray asked. “I recall you turned down my invitation, the last time we talked, Sylvester.”

“No tea,” I said.

Mary and Lillian refused.

“I’ll have tea,” Ashton said. Mary gave him a stern look. He changed his mind, saying, “I won’t have tea.”

Genevieve Fray served herself and Hayle. She opened a tin and put a biscuit on each saucer with the cups.

“That’s not poison, is it?” I asked. “I think we deserve more than you two offing yourselves.”

“No,” Fray said. “I wouldn’t do that to you Lambs.”

“Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say ‘my Lambs’?” I asked.

“It could be. I’d be worried that Mary might kill me, with that look in her eyes.”

“Don’t kill her, Mary,” I said. I watched the knife disappear, then drew in a deep breath and sighed.

“I wouldn’t call you mine,” Fray said. “Whatever part I might have played. You are your own individuals. As a case in point, your war was rather more messy than I’d have done, Hayle’s Academy in ruins and all.”

“And the deaths,” Lillian said.

“Of course.”

“I think you’re going to have to explain sooner than later,” Mary said. “One of you. And I do hate that I’m talking about a plural ‘you’ with Sylvester and Fray included.”

Lillian didn’t look very happy about it either.

“I don’t know how it started,” I said.

“Hayle set the class a project,” Fray said.

“I’d like to hear it from him,” I said. “At least to start.”

“I had a good crop of students,” Hayle said. “I wanted to challenge them, and I wanted to be challenged. I set them the task of creating a better brain, or repurposing old projects to include one. It was something I’d done before, but I pushed it, even though it was something the Academy didn’t encourage or reward. In terms of advancement and funding, it was often a dead end. Genevieve Fray was my student, then.”

“I went looking for a way to approach my project. My journey took me to the Block, but not to the… full extent of the Block,” Fray said.

“They know,” I said. I glanced over my shoulder at the Treasurer and Gordeux.

She gave them a searching look, then said, “I figured a large part of things out. The copious amount of study drugs I was taking might have helped. That I started from a child slave bought at auction and sought to make an experiment that would complement the Nobles… well. Not a far cry.”

I bit my tongue.

“My project was Evette,” she said.

I’d wondered. I nodded to myself.

“Evette failed,” Lillian said.

“She did. I was overly ambitious, but some of it had to do with luck. Had she succeeded, I don’t know what would have happened. I took care to erase my background as team lead once we decided on a future course of action.”

Hayle joined in once more, “I called her to my office to speak about the failure. We found our way to the subject of the block, as she explained why she’d been so ambitious. Had she been anything but a favorite student, a circumspect one, and me a favorite, teacher of hers, both circumspect and harboring a desire for a greater challenge that he couldn’t articulate, one of us would have likely met our end after that talk.”

“But you didn’t,” Mary said.

“Unless you’re Stitched,” Ashton said.

“We raised the subject of the Lambs, a larger project with an ultimate end goal. The Academy was complacent. The Crown is stagnant, and it’s a stagnation that’s doing a great deal of harm. They’re content to bury continents and uncover them again after a century or more. They trust that any problem that arises is one they can solve,” Hayle said.

“When you say you wanted a challenge, you mean you wanted to raise one. Literally raise us,” I said.

“In effect,” Hayle said. “We adjusted the experiment, we created the idea of the Lambs as a gestalt of the best projects. We turned down Percy, because Percy’s idea, while good in its own right, was very much what we didn’t want.”

“Ironic,” I said. “That Mary’s here now.”

“What-” Lillian started. “What exactly did you want? What aren’t you saying?”

Fray smiled, and looked at me.

“I suppose I have to ask. How did we do?” I asked.

“You did just fine,” she said. “We’ll have to see how Jessie does, and if Helen can be restored, but I would venture to say you did perfect, getting as far as you did.”

“All according to plan.”

“Not even close to the original plan. I’d initially hoped you would accept one of my invitations. That I could guide you, nudge you. We tried to separate you when you started to run into problems, and our attempt to keep things manageable backfired. The, ah, crises I manufactured to pave the way and provide you something of an education got out of hand.”

“Mauer,” I said.

Fray smiled.

“Providence,” Hayle said. “That you would walk your own path and-”

“We ended up right where you wanted us,” I finished his sentence. I looked at the other Lambs. “Poised to become Nobles in our own right.”

“Nobles?” Lillian asked.

I could see the alarm on her face. The concern on Mary’s.

“Poised,” Hayle said, and he leaned forward, elbows on the desk. I imagined he was seeing over a decade of work come to fruition in this. “But are you willing?”

“Yes,” the voice said.

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