by Daryl Banner
The ninth is behind Arrow Fyrefellow in full force and trust.
Whether helping restore the ninth and its adjacent wards from the Madness was ever part of Arrow’s plan, he isn’t sure himself. All he knows is that after all he has seen, he wishes the Madness over, he wishes the corrupt Sanctum brought to an end, and he wishes all of his remaining friends to have happiness.
He also wishes Ivy Caldron dead.
That’s a bit of a contradiction. This much, he knows.
“Any luck with the charm?” comes a voice at his back.
It’s the ever-bothersome, ever-bushy-haired, ever-tall Pratganth. Who else would it be? “No,” answers Arrow shortly.
“What a view,” breathes Prat as he—uninvited—sits cross-legged next to Arrow upon the roof, plopping right down with a tiny grunt. “Your vantage here is so … superior. I wonder whether any of the Lesser boys took advantage of it …?”
“None of them are left to speak on it,” Arrow answers coolly.
Prat glances at him. “For the longest time, I thought there was only the one. Wick never mentioned he had any other—”
“Well, they’re gone now, however many.”
Prat shuts up after that. Then, as if by a strange coincidence of timing and Sisterly humor, the pair of them catch sight of a certain someone treading slowly down the street. He is a muscular young man with bright golden hair and a short, languid gait. The familiar red sleeveless hoodie he’s taken to wearing hugs his form like a second skin, opened to reveal his chest. He pays mind to no one. Even as he approaches the house, he doesn’t once glance upward to notice Arrow or Prat staring down upon his golden head of hair.
“I feel so bad for him,” mumbles Prat.
Arrow shakes his head. “Don’t. If anything, Wick’s death gave him a purpose. He is stronger. He provides. I can’t tell the Lifted Boy apart from any other slummer now. He even looks like Wick in that hoodie, though he’s a touch more bloated with muscle.”
Prat faces Arrow with sullen eyes. “Why must you be so cold?”
“I’m not cold.” Arrow lifts his gaze from the streets and peers up at the dark, silent underbelly of the Lifted City, still tonguing at that one spot between his teeth. “They are. They say nothing for months and months. The sky, they show no remorse. They lend no hand to any other. They watch us in derisive silence. They are a suffocating blanket upon the slums, every last one of them.”
“Some say Impis is dead.”
“Some say he’s just bored,” Arrow returns hollowly. “Some say he found Ruena’s corpse, wherever she did herself in. Some say he cooks a little piece of her for dinner every night and puts her in a stew for his Posse to share. Some say the entire Lifted City is actually a great big mechanical beast that’s come to life to swallow the idiots on its back, all, including Impis and the whole of his Posse.” Arrow shoots Prat a look of contempt. “Do you really believe all you hear?”
“I didn’t exactly say I believed the Mad King is dead,” Prat spits back defensively. “He just … H-He might be biding his time.”
“As are we.” Arrow curls the fingers of one of his hands, balling it into a fist. “And I’m growing increasingly impatient.”
“Do you want a pick?”
Arrow frowns at Prat. “What?”
“For whatever’s caught in your teeth.”
Arrow hadn’t realized he’s been still sucking at it.
Before he can answer, the two turn their faces at the crashing sound of metal against metal in the distance. Amongst the youth who are training in the field, two men are face to face with brandished swords, arguing about something. A third joins the fray, hollering out. Then another takes a side, spitting curses and giving one of the others a shove.
Arrow sighs. Never a dull moment in the ninth. He rises from his perch, Prat left unanswered, and moves toward the roof hatch to deal with the situation. On his way out of the house, his gaze catches one fleeting glimpse of that giant, ugly metal disc thing through the back kitchen window.
He’s had to manage the people’s tempers far too often, leaving him less and less time in his day to work out the puzzle of that charm in the Lesser’s backyard.
It’s no matter now.
In only eleven minutes’ time, Arrow is walking away from the fields, which are now returned to peacefully training and playing. Two young men with baskets of greens in their arms nod their heads as they pass by. A woman, Ms. Paarsi, gives Arrow a little wave from her porch. Two men—Jaslor and Jidore, twins—give a grunt and a fist to their chest as they pass Arrow, showing their respect.
Every now and then, it still baffles Arrow how the ninth came to set him on such a pedestal. I am no leader, he’s told himself twelve times a day, but it makes no difference.
An hour later, Arrow is standing in the kitchen of the Penlings—Auleen and Iranda, next-door neighbors to the Lessers—while a pot of greens and roots cook and fill the room with steam. Arrow listens as the two women banter back and forth with Hadie—a woman from two streets over—and Locke—her slender, man-of-few-words brother whom Arrow never quite trusted for some reason or another. He is evasive. His Legacy is an enigma, something to do with cloaking and protecting one’s mind from attacks. He comes and goes from day to day without a word to his sister Hadie, or anyone, really.
But this ward is a free ward, and Arrow denies no one its peace.
Least of all a shady figure like Locke, apparently.
“Arrow,” shouts Auleen over the noise in the room when she spots him. “Hon, can you check on little Rippy for me? He ought to be sleeping, but I want to be sure, you know, before we settle down for middle night mealtime.”
Arrow didn’t realized how late it’s gotten. He gives her a quick nod, then moves out of the kitchen to the short hall leading to the back bedroom where Rippy’s crib rests against the wall and window, overlooking a far better kept back lawn than the Lesser’s.
It isn’t only eight-month-old Rippy Arrow finds in the room.
Ivy, slender as a pole save her two pert breasts, wide hips and thick, gorgeous thighs, and her abundant, reddish-brown hair that frames her shoulders and delicate head like a mane, stands before the crib staring down at Rippy as he sleeps. For a moment, Arrow nearly forgets who she is, staring at her longingly.
Then he remembers her last name. Caldron. The family who sent an envoy of Guardian to his home to murder his father, rape his mother, and break his sister’s head.
Somehow, those thoughts don’t anger him the same way they used to. How can a person like Ivy Caldron be from a family like that? She is caring. She is quiet. She asks before taking food at the table. She smiles when anyone looks her way.
And she doesn’t even know who Arrow is.
She doesn’t know her family was responsible for destroying his.
She is as oblivious as the worst of them, Arrow thinks ruefully.
And yes, at times, she reveals a bit of her privileged sixth ward demeanor. Yes, at times, Arrow catches a flicker of disgust in her face when she is offered an inadequately-cleaned garment or slummish item of food she’s never had before. Yes, at times, a thing or two Ivy says reminds Arrow why he still carries a gun with six fateful bullets.
But those times are far fewer nowadays. Might I daresay I have grown soft on her?
Ivy looks up suddenly from the crib, spotting Arrow. “Oh.”
“I’ve only come to check on Rip.” Arrow stays at the doorway, his arms folded. “Middle night meal is almost ready.”
Ivy nods, her eyes stuck on him. “Thank you. Rippy is fine.”
“That, he seems.”
“I wonder what he dreams of.” Ivy glances at Rippy once more, then returns her curious gaze to Arrow. “Any luck with the charm?”
Her and Prat are one voice coming from two mouths these days. Arrow bristles and lets out a short sigh before replying, “No.”
“I … didn’t mean to annoy you by asking. It was only—”
“I’m not annoyed
.”
“It was only that Pratty was saying you were working hard, and I’d only hoped—”
“Sorry to disappoint,” Arrow snaps. Pratty? He could spit at that. Since when did she take to calling him Pratty? “Middle night meal is almost ready.”
“You’ve said that already.”
“Best leave little Rip be, lest he wakes. He’s only got so much time left to sleep before he never sleeps again.” Arrow turns to go.
“All this time, and you can’t bear to give me just a little hint as to why you hate me so … so f-fucking much?”
Arrow barely stops to gently throw back the words, “A delicate word like ‘fucking’ doesn’t suit your tongue,” before he’s gone.
The tension is still taut as a rope when Arrow is seated at the second end of a long L-shaped table. It’s been set up in the front lawn where twenty-one folk sit to eat under the dark, starry sky and the pale light from nearby street lanterns. The chatter is lively and full of laughter, which only further accentuates Arrow’s glower and silence. Ivy, mercifully, is sat no less than seven seats away from him, sandwiched between Pratganth and the squat, round, rosy eleven-year-old boy named Sedge, whom Arrow has still gotten to know so little about. There is an empty seat one down from Arrow where a certain golden-haired someone should be sitting, but he’s busy lying on the floor of Wick’s old room “meditating” and is thus absent.
Arrow takes a strange solace in that. At least I’m not the only one miserable here in the ninth. Perhaps the Lifted boy and I ought to enjoy one another’s misery more often together.
“There was a woman with a complaint from the Greens,” says the one sitting on Arrow’s other side, the shady man named Locke. “She is disturbed by the tillers from the eighth. Something to do with sentimental items or treasures she’s buried.”
It takes Arrow two bites of his stewed cabbage—and basking in the noise of a hundred other conversations happening at the table—to realize he’s the one Locke is speaking to. “If it isn’t new seeds she’s burying, it’s wasted Greens space,” mumbles Arrow between bites. “They are having trouble planting crops near the Wall, last I heard. Something to do with a plant disease. She can’t waste Greens space.”
“That may be so, but she refuses to cooperate.” Locke eyes the side of Arrow’s face. “We could just as well dig up all her treasures anyway to make room for the crops and be done with the whole foolish mess.”
Arrow smirks. “That doesn’t seem the most peaceful option.”
“Peace isn’t always the most peaceful option.”
“So we will let Arcana question her,” states Arrow. “Arcana can give a look into the Green woman’s mind and have an answer.”
“Well, I suppose. If you trust the likes of her, I’d say.”
I’m not so certain I trust the likes of you, Arrow would reply, but instead chooses to hold his tongue. His eyes drift to the opposite end of the table where Arcana, regal as a queen and with eyes like two sharp needles, sits eating between the bantering Iranda and the softly bickering Auleen. She returned with Athan Broadmore and Sedge that day long ago when the deed in the Lifted City that ended Anwick Lesser and Lionis Lesser’s lives happened. If she hadn’t returned with Athan, Arrow would have no reason to trust her or little Sedge’s words. Perhaps that is why they brought Athan back at all, he has since figured. Insurance.
“You froze.”
Arrow flinches, turning his gaze back to Locke, then returning his attention to his plate. “I trust her,” he decides before slipping another forkful of cabbage past his lips, then chewing slowly and methodically—both on the cabbage and his thoughts.
“Arrow,” calls a voice across the table.
He lifts his face to the likes of Prat and Ivy, who both look his way. It was Prat who spoke. Arrow lifts an expectant eyebrow.
“Auna and her dancer daughter here were just asking about the charm behind the Lesser house,” Prat announces. “Do you have an update for the team?”
Arrow furrows his brow. Team? … Team? What the fuck “team” is he speaking of? “You’ve already an answer,” drones Arrow. “Same as I gave you not an hour ago. And Ivy, ten minutes ago.”
“Yes, but I was curious of a more precise progress.” Prat smiles at the few who sit near him, including the round-faced, unimpressed, bored-looking Sedge. “Arrow is always so buried in his work, he oft doesn’t check in with the rest of us until the turn of the moon. Pity, yes? Ah, such a pity, as we do like to keep informed.”
Prat. Pratty. He’s even starting to sound like a spoiled Lifted boy. Arrow narrows his eyes across the table. “Aye,” he returns. “How about you update us on your precious projects, Upgold? Is the whole of Atlas mapped out yet? Every ward? Every street? Every Pylon?”
The chatter of the table cuts in half as everyone pays attention. Prat drops his jaw, just like a snobby Privileged who’s been insulted at dinner in front of his guests. “Y-You know I wasn’t able to grab all my maps from our old sixth ward headquarters,” he whimpers in a wounded, scandalized tone. “That’s a very sensitive subject for me.”
Arrow ignores Prat’s outburst, and instead decides to address the rest of the table. “Deciphering another Charmer’s charm is like making sense of a child’s doodling, or a scribble of nonsense from a senile man. Working hard as I may be, I would be lucky to figure its connections in another year’s time.”
“A year??” Prat hoots.
He’s so like a petulant little brother half my age, except pale as mother’s milk, bushy-haired, and pocked with a teenager’s acne. “As of yet, I’ve achieved a drum of noise from one end of the Lifted City, and a squawk of noise from the other. Assuming it even is the Lifted City I’m hearing and not the alley behind some pleasure bar in the eighth. That thing in the Lesser’s backyard is a locked charm, likely to prevent the very thing I’m attempting to do. It is not a simple device. It is a very complex one constructed by a very advanced Charmer, far more advanced than me. Considering how long that thing’s been back there, its creator may not even be alive anymore to question of its use, purpose, or secrets.”
“So it’s useless,” concludes Prat, crossing his arms so fast that his elbow bumps his plate. “Useless as a bunch of abandoned maps in the sixth.”
Arrow’s retaliatory glance is deadly. “If you want your maps so badly, go back and fetch them. Just follow the dead tracks of the nine train past the Noodle Shop and along the rim of the Core. You’ll be there in a day and a half’s time, provided no rogues or meddlesome Guardian stop you.”
That shuts Prat up, though it doesn’t wipe the scowl off his face.
“As for the charm in the backyard, it isn’t so useless.” Arrow glances at Arcana across the way, then at Sedge, who watches all of this with a bored expression. “We have Lifted among us. They will readily help identify the location in the Lifted City of any noise I find. Also, I’ve been sending my own sound pulses through—”
“Sound pulses,” mumbles Prat under his breath, annoyed.
Arrow ignores him. “—through the charm. If there is a receiver or a sister charm in the Lifted City, it’s like to start pulsing back one of these days. And when it does, we will be that much closer to understanding its original purpose—as well as that much closer to my reprogramming the charm to heed my own Legacy. I said it might take a year, but I only meant to emphasize the difficulty in this task. A lot of the work is trial and error. We may be listening to Impis’s laughter as early as tomorrow.”
That unsettling notion seems to have sobered the entire table, Pratganth included. Ivy shifts her eyes to her plate, turning to stone, likely drawn back to that day her family was burned alive by Impis’s Finger of Madness.
Arrow thinks suddenly of the six bullets and the gun, and he wonders if he’ll ever even fire a single bullet before the city is restored. Now would be a chance time, considering Guardian is still self-managed and there is no stable Sanctum yet to hold anyone accountable, even if a criminal is arrested. I
might even get away with it, he thinks darkly.
That’s when his eyes catch Arcana’s at the opposite end of the table. He finds there is a sort of assuredness in them, as if Arrow’s words of figuring out the charm inspired her more than scared her. Arrow finds quite a bit of comfort in that.
Until he realizes Arcana has read his every thought—including his thoughts of Ivy and a certain gun just now.
A pinch of worry crosses Arcana’s face.
Yes, she heard that thought, too.
Arrow rises from the table the next instant, takes his plate, and excuses himself without a word.
No one stops him.
He finds a new place to finish his meal in private: his newfound perch on the roof of the Lesser house.
To his surprise, someone else has found the perch before him.
“Hello, Arrow,” murmurs Athan Broadmore without looking his way, staring off into the distance.
Arrow gives him a brief grunt before sitting a few feet apart from him and balancing his plate in his lap. Then, after a moment, Arrow offers, “Want some cabbage?”
“No, thank you.”
The pair of them don’t say a thing. Arrow slowly chews, bite after bite, while Athan does nothing much at all but sit there with his tired blue eyes searching the distance. Arrow finds peace in knowing that neither can read the others’ thoughts. Arcana is always around me, even when I am thinking of Ivy and my death wish upon her. Arcana certainly has surmised everything about everyone by now.
Still, he feels the unsettled spin of his stomach, which quickly makes him lose his appetite. It’s just as well, because after another minute of stillness and silence, Athan apparently changes his mind, finally turning to pluck a leaf of cabbage right off Arrow’s plate, then gnawing on it nibble by nibble.
Arrow watches Athan for a moment before asking, “What’s on your mind?”
Still chewing, he answers, “I met a guy tonight.”
Arrow lifts an eyebrow. He didn’t quite expect that. “Did you, now? Where? Who?”
“His name’s Nickel. No, I don’t want to make a fuck of him, nor do I even want to kiss him or hold him in my arms. I doubt I’ll want to do that with anyone ever again.”