by Daryl Banner
“I’m going to get out of here,” she decides. “I’m going to visit Lionis at my sister’s. I’m going to visit my house in the ninth. I will reunite with my neighbors and see if there is any news of Anwick and Link. I am going to get out of this fucking prison.”
No one is there to respond to her sad self-coaching, thankfully, so she leans against the window and allows herself to enjoy the quiet and peace that this hallway always brings her at this hour.
Then, from down the hallway, she hears a shout and a bunch of arguing. The voice is familiar, yet at first, Ellena can’t quite place it. Stirred up, she hurries in the direction of the bickering.
The closer she gets, the more familiar the voice. And after a turn of the corner, Ellena faces the brash woman standing at the counter arguing with a wide-eyed, curly-haired nurse. “Of course I’ve a right to know! He’s my nephew! Tell me now and tell me true, is it by your authority that you disallow me seeing my own family, or—?”
“Cilla,” Ellena states, cutting her off.
Cilla turns, her arguing ceased at once. Ellena’s sister is thinner than when she last saw her. The woman, despite the ugliness of their last interaction, breathes a dramatic sigh of relief. “Oh, dear sister,” she sings happily. “You are alive after all! Lionis is here, yes? Is this where my sweet boy Lionis ran off to? I want to see him.”
0238 Wick
Chief Korah Cagemont is a beautiful young woman of twenty-nine years with tiny, bony shoulders, a small, short frame, and two very intense, needlelike eyes. Everything she looks at, she stabs with her sharp grey irises.
“We should not entertain this idea again,” argues Barley to his friend in front of everyone. “The only viable options are to bring that Wall down, or burrow underneath the damned thing. We should not waste another minute of our time discussing any of these ‘creative ideas’ of yours.”
Kraag, whose latest creative idea involving a mess of Legacies, some trees, and a means to fly over the Wall was just shot down, sits back in his seat and glowers, red-faced.
Korah, having let the old pair of friends have their verbal spar, steps forward. “Atlas is a fool’s dream.” Her eyes move across the faces in the room, landing finally on Kraag. “And as it happens, we do not have an endless supply of lives to spare.”
“No,” Barley agrees stonily, then eyes Kraag. “We do not.”
Dran and Wick share a look at each other from across the room and sigh, shaking their heads.
“And even if we entertained the idea,” Korah goes on, jabbing a finger at the sprawling map on the table, “we have no intel—at all—of what the city’s like. No one’s come through the portal since Wick.”
“And what a disappointment that is,” mutters Puras, a copper-skinned young man with big, bulbous eyes and a long, lanky body who is always dressed in next to nothing but a strip of weave-leaf over his privates. His remark is met with questioning stares, to which he lifts his face and clarifies, “I-I meant about us not having intel. Not about Wick. We love Wick.” His big eyes blink innocently. “Sorry, mister sweet beautiful dude from the ninth.”
“Love you too, Puras,” Wick throws back dryly, to which a few others in the room chuckle.
“So come now.” Korah lifts a hand at Dran. “Out with it.”
Dran’s eyebrows twist upward. “Out with what?”
“You’re the one who called the meeting. You wanted to discuss Atlas, and some new idea to return. You’re the one wasting our time today with this fantasy, so let’s hear it.” Korah survey’s the others’ faces in the room, her eyes tired and annoyed. No, Dran is not her favorite person. “So out with it, black eyes.”
He squints at her. “You know I hate it when you call me that.”
“So what’s your plan?” she asks, ignoring his remark. “I’m still waiting to hear a decent one from your like.”
“I never claimed to have a plan. I only meant to … prod the beast of progress.” He tilts his head. “I’m bored of hearing how it’s best for us to stick around here, explore, gather food and survive until we die. Sorry. Doesn’t excite me as much as charging back into Atlas and being like, ‘Hey, fuckers. You thought we were dead. We’re back.’ If you tell me that doesn’t have a satisfying ring to it, you’re lying.”
Korah is visibly unamused. “We can sit here and dream all day long, Dran. A plan doesn’t become a plan until you’ve a reasonable, tangible, actual way to get us beyond that Wall. Otherwise, we are staying put, just as we have.”
“Not happening,” grunts Rychis from the back of the room.
Everyone’s heads and bodies shift—Puras, Korah, Wick, Dran, two women named Nance and Ferra, an old man named Trovis, and the still-glowering pair of Kraag and Barley. It’s as if everyone in attendance had utterly forgotten the brooding bearded man in the back of the cabin, seated and simmering in the heat from his own disturbed, contemplative, and audibly unrested breaths.
Korah lifts her chin—and her voice—in her response: “Mr. Bard, you have been climbing up my ass about getting back into Atlas for three fourths of a year now. If you were so determined to get back into that stinking city, you would have offered a better idea by now than just breaking that enormous Wall with your Legacy, which cannot yet even split the very soil beneath your two ugly feet.”
“It can do a fuck lot more than that,” Rychis barks back, insulted by the way she speaks to him.
Small as she is, Korah shows no pity or weakness in the face of his anger. “If you want to give a go at the Wall, Mr. Bard, you are more than welcome to try. I would take delight in seeing your genius ass figure a way across that desert.”
“My Legacy will move that fucking desert for my loved ones. I have a wife and one baby boy in that city, and—”
“And you broke a machine at your job. We’re all aware,” Korah snaps. “Tell us something new, Mr. Bard, before I toss your ass out into the middle of that desert myself.”
At once, the whole cabin starts to tremble. Literally. Rychis grits his teeth and clenches his fists, the whites of his eyes flashing with anger as the walls creak and items on the table shudder.
Dran is by his side in the next instant. “Rych, buddy, come on. You’re doing us no favors pulling your dick out like this.”
The room grows still the moment Rychis rises from his chair in a movement so fast, the chair flies back. Then with a growl and an obscenity under his breath, the earth-mover throws open the door to the cabin, seeing himself out. The bright warm golden sunset bursts inside for a brief and beautiful moment before the door slams shut, leaving them with just the two candles burning next to the map.
“Poor guy,” mumbles Puras, staring wide-eyed at the door.
“Nothing poor about a man with a temper,” retorts Dran as he returns to his spot by the wall with a shake of his head. “It’s the very thing that got him touched by Metal Hand.”
“Don’t speak Metal Hand’s name,” murmurs Puras darkly, then frowns. “Fuck. You just made me speak his name.”
“And with a temper like his,” Dran goes on, ignoring Puras, “it’s perhaps a blessing the man’s shit with his own Legacy.”
Korah’s eyes go wide. “Dran,” she scolds. “He just shook the whole cabin.”
“Aye, and that’s all his sorry ass can do. Do you see him in the wilds, Chief?” Dran glances at each of them in the room. “Have you seen him train? He is weak. His mind and body don’t connect with his Legacy in the way they ought to. He fumbles with it like a wet rag, and all that happens is shaking. Trembling and stirring and all for nothing. He won’t be able to put a damned crack in that Wall, let alone bring it down.”
“And even if he could,” chimes in Puras with a dull and deflated tone of voice, “he’d need to do it from a very far distance to be safe. Otherwise, he could bring the Wall tumbling down over all our heads, squishing us flat. Splat. Keang. Akrak. Minol.”
Dran wrinkles his face. “Stop it with those weird words.”
Puras sneers
at him. “They’re only weird if you’re ignorant of the tongue.”
“Everyone in this room is ignorant of your second ward tongue.”
Puras slouches. “Oh. Good point.”
Chief Korah puts a fist to the table, getting everyone’s attention back. “I suggest we keep all our energies on building our camp here. Even if we had a means back into the city, or if we get intel sent to us through the portal, we still are unprepared to make a journey into Atlas, and I refuse to waste our energies dreaming on a way in. I’ve been, too many times, let down by such dreams. We are not an army, not yet. And that portal’s given us nothing and no one in half a year.”
“Can we not call it that?” mumbles Dran with a roll of his eyes, pushing away from the wall and coming up to the side of the table. “It’s hardly a portal. Calling it so implies one can go both ways.”
A strange silence befalls the room after that. Korah purses her thin lips in thought, then slowly turns her eyes to Wick.
It’s the first bit of attention he’s gotten in a while. It’s almost discomforting. “What?” Wick blurts.
The longer Chief Korah stares at him, the more intense her stare becomes. “Portal,” she finally states, unblinking.
Wick blinks, not following.
“Both ways …” Korah glances between him and Dran. “Wick. Have you tried to … focus your Legacy on the portal point?”
Wick frowns. “I don’t see exactly what I’d find. The portal point isn’t a person. I wouldn’t have any Legacy to feed off of.”
“But it’s where Metal Hand sends his victims,” she goes on, her eyes alight with inspiration. “He has some kind of connection to it, to that exact point. It’s where everyone teleports. He must be somehow connected to it. Why that precise point? Why doesn’t he teleport a person elsewhere?”
“I …” Wick feels a stab of uncertainty as everyone in the room stares at him with equal parts excitement and fear in their eyes. “I … I don’t know. I guess I could try, but—”
“We must. And we must do it now before the day’s sun is gone completely.” She’s already to the door before her sentence is finished.
Wick and Dran exchange a look.
It’s worth a try.
But when they reach the portal point, which is a ten minute trek into the lightly wooded area east of the camp, Wick feels nothing as he reaches his mind for any semblance of a Legacy. The only ones he feels are those of the people surrounding him.
“Come. Try harder,” pushes Korah.
Wick’s face is red from the effort. He even reaches with his actual hand toward the portal point, desperate to feel anything, desperate to be the answer they’ve been looking for all along.
Yet five minutes later, he’s still reaching, and still, nothing.
“Maybe there’s too many of us here,” Korah suggests after a quick survey of everyone from the cabin who’d eagerly followed them out here to watch the show. “We’re distracting him from what he’s looking for. All our Legacies are interfering. Go,” she commands of Kraag and Puras and Ferra and Nance and all the others, Dran included. “All of you. Go. You’re interfering with his work.”
“By that logic, so are you,” Dran murmurs smartly.
She narrows her eyes at him. “Go, Dran, you, most of all. My Legacy is the least distracting. He can hardly grasp mine as it is. Go.”
Whether annoyed or inspired or otherwise, the others in their company turn around and leave obediently. Dran is the last to go, of course, lingering for a moment as he watches his friend work. From several paces away, Dran calls out, “If you find a way through Metal Hand’s portal, make sure you come out of his anus on the other side!”
Wick smirks, fighting a laugh, as Dran finally departs. Only the two of them remain, Korah and Wick, as he reaches and reaches and reaches, desperate to find a way through to Metal Hand. If he could just tap into a tiny speck of Metal Hand’s ability, he might be able to simply teleport their whole crew back into Atlas. He imagines them all popping right into the throne room, pouring over the Mad King’s head and wreaking a sweet, surprise revenge.
Minutes tick by as he reaches. Minutes tick by as he starts to get a headache from the effort. Even more minutes, and his arm shakes tiredly, aching, burning.
The sun is down by now, and the song of crickets comes in all directions. Korah has taken a seat by one of the trees. Neither of them have eaten.
Anwick at last gives up, dropping his hand to his side with an exhausted huff. His limbs ache from hunger. His legs are even feeling flimsy, as if he did a hundred squats.
She lifts her face from staring at the grass. “Why’d you stop?”
“It’s useless,” mumbles Wick. “A good idea, but a failed one.”
“No. I won’t accept that.” Korah rises and comes to his side. “Try again. Reach differently, if you must. Don’t see it the way you see it when you borrow our Legacies up close. You must reach through the effects of his Legacy. Reach—”
“I can’t. Chief, I—”
“Reach!” she snaps, annoyed. She points off toward the general direction of Atlas, though it’s obscured completely by the trees. “You must look beyond the trees, beyond the grass, beyond the sands, and beyond that fucking Wall. Reach, Wick. Metal Hand opens the portal with a touch. Do you remember what that touch feels like?”
Wick’s jaw tightens. “I’ll never forget it.”
“Where’d he touch you? The forehead, like me?”
“The forehead,” confirms Wick bleakly.
“Good. Remember it now. That cold finger on your forehead. The touch. The last touch that was nothing like metal. Put yourself back in that day when it happened … Put yourself back in the throne room of Atlas, the glassy, infinite throne room …”
A visceral, bone-chilling fear snakes its way through Wick’s body at that very request. “Chief …”
“Do it,” she commands. “Put yourself there. Feel Metal Hand as he stands over you, just as he’s stood over all of us here. Feel him.”
“Chief, please.”
“FEEL HIM. FUCKING FEEL HIM. PUT YOURSELF THERE!” She stamps her foot and points with more vigor. “Metal Hand is there right now. Metal Hand breathes. Metal Hand sweats in a suit of iron armor. Can you smell his disgusting musk? His sweat? Metal Hand pulls his stinking, smelly, sticky gauntlet off his stinking, smelly, sticky hand, and he touches you. Feel his touch. Feel it on your skin. Is it cold? Is it warm? That man touches you and you turn into dust and reappear at this very spot. FEEL IT, WICK. REACH!”
Wick doesn’t feel anything but chills and terror and an urge to let loose his bladder down his leg. He can’t explain to Korah that his Legacy doesn’t work that way. He can’t convince her that this idea—this insanely backwards, nearly silly idea—is not going to work. All he knows is that in this moment, away from everyone, he sees her desperation and yearning she doesn’t show anyone else, a yearning to be back in Atlas once again despite all her words about it not being worth the effort, about it being a waste of time, about it being impossible.
Despite all she claims out loud, the young woman wants in that city worse than any of them.
She has loved ones she’s left behind, too. Despite all her stoicism, Korah Cagemont wants dearly to be back in that city, and I and my “reaching” is her last and only shot.
So he decides to let her have the moment. “I’ll reach again,” he assures her, despite already having given up. “I’ll try several things. I’ll try all night if I must. We’ll do this together, Chief.”
Korah’s crazed, intense eyes stay on him as Wick extends his hand once again. He thinks of a moment—a moment that may never happen—when he will see Athan again. He thinks of how it will feel for his mother to embrace him in her long, Greens-working arms. He thinks of his brothers, all of them. Of his father. Of his friends from Rain, and of all his smiling neighbors in the ninth.
And despite feeling nothing, he reaches again anyway. For yet another hour, perhaps two,
he reaches and he reaches.
0239 Forgemon
The Great Hall echoes with the shouts, chatter, and jeering of exactly six thousand and seventy-two souls as they eat their midday feast. Eighty people are in the mines digging away and creating ten new tunnels, two of which are aimed to give them passage out of the Undercity and into the slums above, two of which may intersect a neighboring Keep, and the rest of which purely hunt much needed resources, like metal, fossil weed, gemstones, and slum crysts. Eighty more souls are taking turns pushing the rotary electrical generators, which have been rerouted and circuited to only supply electricity to the Undercity and not the slums above.
That, of course, was Aphne’s diabolical doing. “If we haven’t the upper hand, then what have we but two useless hands?” she had said.
Forgemon Lesser slowly walks the wide aisle between two rows of long, long tables. The Great Hall is a vast and enormous room formerly known as the Commons, but the people voted to name it something far more dignified. All the old names for their various quarters have been thrown out; in the Undercity, they enjoy the luxuries of the Lifted. Not a single cell door in the Keep has been locked in over seven months, all of them used as privacy rooms for each “citizen” of the Undercity to live in, like a small home, free to come and go as they please. Even the Catacombs, once terrifying and desolate a sight to behold, have been remodeled to fit more citizens and to be used as extra stores for food and resources.
Nothing is left anymore here in the Undercity that makes any person feel like a prisoner to Sanctum.
Except perhaps that, in some ways, they are all prisoners.
No one knows the fate of Atlas. Is there even still a city above their heads? What if all the other Keeps are collapsed, caved in, crushed, and they are the only souls left alive?
So many questions. So few numbers. So few answers.
The ones who were formerly guards of the Keep have since assimilated into the various tasks of keeping the place running like a sort of slum communion. Forge couldn’t even properly say which ones were criminals and which ones were guards anymore. Only a few incidents happened several months back when a former guard or two were ambushed by grudge-holding prisoners, but in the end, only injuries resulted and no deaths.