Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls - Jane Lindskold [78]
Reaching the ladder, she begins to ascend, aiming for a platform that’s more stable. I shift slightly so that I can see her. I say nothing, wanting only to hear the rest of her story.
“I showed him, though, news clips, photos, other stuff. Dr. Aldrich left me alone with him a lot because he was my brother—something nobody else knew. Dr. Aldrich liked keeping who his Wunderkind were a secret. Gave him an edge, you see, Sis.
“Essentially, Dylan caught on that he wasn’t the sorcerer for noble houses, but the blackest of necromancers for the vilest of merchant princes. I take some pride in this—I mean the boy was so naive that he thought that sex was the weekly jerking off he did for the sperm bank. Try and get someone like that to understand what makes war or rape or robbery terrible.”
Gripping Betwixt and Between so tightly that their back spines cut my hand, I lean forward to see her face.
“Why? Why did you want to do this to him?”
“I wanted him to kill himself, of course,” she says, coming to sit on the platform edge. “He didn’t though—not right off. He loved living too much. But he thought he found a way to live and yet stop serving evil. Like me he grew up with stories of little Sarah who wasn’t good enough ’cause she was crazy as a bedbug and couldn’t talk.”
“Yeah, don’t try and rub it in, Dr. Haas,” I answer curtly. “Jersey told me that Dylan messed up his throat and couldn’t talk and all the rest. What I still don’t understand is why you wanted Dylan dead!”
“You don’t, do you?”
Her emerald eyes study the Reaches with fixed, unseeing intensity. “I wanted Dr. Aldrich to train me, to bring out my abilities. And he would have if Dylan hadn’t forced the Institute to get linked up with Jersey. Then, well, then you became an option again, and when Dylan hung himself, plans were made to recover you. Bring you from the Home to home.”
She giggles and her hands pluck restlessly at one of the Web cables nearest to her. From my gently swinging hammock I can feel the dull thrum of her motion; it vibrates through me like her pulse in my body. After a few smothered giggles, she continues.
“I nearly stopped them, though, getting you discharged from the Home. Figured you’d die out there, nameless, voiceless, but when Dr. Aldrich started checking, he learned that you’d been sighted. Eventually, when the street people didn’t turn you in—seemed to protect you even—we went after them.”
She stops. “Why am I bothering to tell you this?”
“Bragging,” I offer. “Couldn’t tell anyone else and I can’t rat on you unless someone comes here, so you’re showing off.”
“Maybe,” she says conversationally, “because you’re a safer confidante than even you may have thought.”
She brings her hand up and then down hard and I see the flashing silver edge of the cutting tool she’s had concealed in her hand. Quick as thought, I understand and, worse yet, I believe what she has been doing while she talked.
With her handsaw, she had been sawing away at one of the cables that supported the part of the Web from which I swing. With the anchor rope sawed through, the ropes holding me sag. I lose my balance and fall, tumbling toward the hard metal and dirt floor, recalling too vividly the mutilated body of the Institute guard who had died just this way.
In a futile gesture, I roll myself into a ball, protecting my extremities as even the newest Cubs are taught and praying that I will land on something to break my fall. Jolting off still-strung lines, I resist trying for one to break my fall, knowing that it would more likely break me and that the damage—or death—would be as real as I believed it to be.
I am bracing against death even as my body hits, bounces, and lands. My breath is knocked from me but I am basically unharmed enough to realize that I lie among the ruins of Head Wolf’s tent.
Sprawled amid the rugs and cushions, snapped tent poles and painted canvas around me, I laugh and laugh. My face is buried in pillows, muffling the noise. Still, there is a maniac note