Beyond Oblivion

by Daryl Banner

  Ello swallows, steels himself for exactly two seconds, then jerks his shoulder away from Forge’s hand. The man says nothing, but all the fear that just a moment ago sat in his eyes seems to convert to resentment in the space of seconds. Without another word, he turns and heads back to the giant, creaking rotary, his weary feet having miraculously cured themselves.

  Forge gives one look at the man who was sitting next to Ello. The next instant, the man is up on his own feet too, chasing after Ello to rejoin him at the rotary, pushing on a free lever as the giant mechanism goes round and round and round by the twelve who operate it, rotating about the enormous metal column like a clock.

  Dander clears his throat. “There is a reason you’re in charge,” he mumbles quietly to Forge.

  Forge doesn’t respond. He only watches the men and women as they walk about in their perpetual circle, the giant metal generator rotating before his eyes, almost hypnotizing.

  Ten and a half minutes later, he finds Aphne seated on a bench just outside the Great Hall. Her legs are spread, her hands are lazily resting upon her lap, and her jaw is slack, eyes staring at nothing.

  He plops down next to her. “Quite a day,” he mutters.

  “Quite a fuckin’ day,” Aphne agrees exhaustedly. “I could really use Rhine’s lips right about now. I don’t care where they choose to kiss, whether up here or down there.”

  Forge closes his eyes and thinks of Ellena. “Soon we’ll …” But he can’t finish the sentence. I lack the numbers to know if it’ll be true.

  0240 Halvesand

  Hours into the middle of the night when half of Guardian is quiet and studying in their rooms, and the other half is patrolling the streets, Halvesand finds himself freed from his errands and escapes to the training room.

  There, he sweats gallons under his greaves, boots, chestplate, and neck armor. He lifts his sword high, then swings it mightily at the target before him.

  Sparks fly as metal licks metal.

  He is on fire tonight. He swings his body about with grace to lock another hit on the other side of his target. Electricity dances in his face, purple and white and red. It is ever so satisfying.

  “You’re getting good at that,” remarks Aleks from his place on the observer’s bench, resting his chin on the pommel of his own long sword as he watches.

  Halves turns, spins the sword in his grip, then strikes the target and lets go. The sword cuts through, hissing in place as the dummy vibrates from its defeat. After a moment, the dummy turns to dust, and Halves’ hand is out to catch the sword the moment it falls.

  His brother laughs appreciatively. “Back to your old self, huh.”

  Halves smirks, shrugs using his hands, then lightly elbows the control panel at his back. Another dummy materializes before him.

  “Putting your muscle back on, too,” Aleks notes. “Your swing is as good as it’s ever been, but you gotta turn faster. You’re inhibited because you can’t turn your neck, I know, so you have to turn your whole body quicker whenever you—” He makes a gesture, as if to demonstrate. “Quicker. Gotta do it much quicker.”

  Halves might be able to avoid a slice at the neck, but he cannot avoid his brother’s words. I envy Ennebal’s Legacy of deafness at a time like this. He keeps his eye on the target and ignores his brother. He didn’t ask him to coach him. If it was up to Halvesand, he would spend all his hours of training completely alone. Halves swings his sword, hacking the dummy’s head off in one clean sweep. It’s gone.

  “You remember when we used to play Slummers & Sky Guards in the backyard?” asks Aleks, his voice turning wistful. “We had such fucking fun, didn’t we? Anwick was still a baby, the days before we learned of his … well, before he was two. Lionis was too young to play with us. We couldn’t have been more than six and seven.”

  Halves remembers it well, but he shows nothing on his face as he elbows the control panel again. Another dummy emerges.

  “Do you remember when I swung too close? I was playing the Sky Guard. You, the Slummer. I nearly nicked your ear. As it was, a small lock of your hair came off with my sword. I didn’t even realize it was sharp enough to cut hair, but it was. Your hair was long back then, to your shoulders. Remember?”

  Halves lunges at the dummy, skewering it in the abdomen. The thing buzzes, sputters, then fizzes away. He elbows the panel again.

  “I didn’t want to be Sky Guard after that. I never wanted to play the role again. I always insisted on being the Slummer from that day forward. Did you notice?” Aleks shifts in his seat, his sword scraping the ground from his movement. “I’ve always had your back, Halves.”

  His hands are too occupied with hacking dummy after dummy that he can’t be bothered to acknowledge his brother’s words.

  “Those were the days.” Aleks chuckles lightly. “I hated school. I always thought our life would’ve been more interesting in the tenth. Isn’t that where Uncle Redge lived? Or was it also the ninth with us? I always get him and Aunt Cilla switched about. So strange, having her here. Mom and her don’t get along well, do they? Such trouble, when siblings are at one another’s necks in a time like this. Swing quicker, Halves,” he coaches him again, unasked. “Aye, aye, like that. Whole body has to move with your arms.”

  Halves stops abruptly and slowly turns his whole torso to give his brother eyes.

  Aleks lifts a challenging eyebrow. “Hey, you’ll thank me later. It’s not like Obert’s here to smack you around and ask annoyingly rhetorical questions like, ‘Is your blood thick enough, Lesser?’ Poor fool will be lucky to live another week.”

  It is true enough. The bedridden Former Lead Officer Obert’s days are numbered. They’ve been numbered for the past six months, but now the man can’t even rise out of his hospital bed.

  “I guess we’re well enough without him for the time being.” Aleks slowly rises from the bench and begins strolling about the room. “Order’s pretty much restored in the eighth, last I heard. That is some seriously major progress, don’t you think? I mean, the red bolt of madness hasn’t struck since before winter. No one has seen a single broadcast from Sanctum. Some believe that the Mad King’s own Posse tore him apart in a fit of mania. Does that not make sense, that he’s dead? I think he’s dead. I think they’ll kill each other up there scrambling for the throne. And I just know every corner of the slums is grooming a new Queen or King for the throne, as if it’s up for grabs. Well, then again, with all former living Marshals being deceased, and the Court … shit, Halves, it’s a nightmare.”

  Halves points up at the ceiling with his free hand, then touches his temple, then sweeps his hand to the side.

  Aleks understands. “The new Marshal of Order? The Upstairs? They’ll be lucky to find themselves a Queen or King in another six months. Wishes and words. Of course, being Guardian, we are the last surviving organization that most closely represents the interests of Sanctum. We ought to be the thing that everyone—slummers and Lifted alike—will respect. Not a Slum King in the first. Not rumors of a Shadow Queen in the Abandon. Not this peaceful alliance in the ninth. It’ll be our official one. If we name a King or Queen, that is the one whose word counts. I guarantee you. It’s just a shame that …” Aleks sighs deeply, stopping by the weapons rack. “That Ruena … Oh, to think on the foolishness of Ruena … I still can’t believe it.”

  Halves felt nothing when he heard the news months ago, and he feels the same now. I’m not surprised that Ruena took her life, he thinks coolly. The Madness destroyed her. The Sanctum she knew fell. Her last living relative King Greymyn died before her with a sword through the throat by her trusted Legacist Impis. He can’t imagine the last thought that went through her head before she took her own life. He isn’t even sure how she did it, only that she did. At least four individuals from the Upstairs witnessed it, plus a whole score of Guardian who saw her corpse. There was no denying it then, and there is no denying it now.

  “Is Atlas forever broken without her?” Aleks wonders aloud. “Was she the o
nly one the people were prepared to trust? Will we, despite all our prestige, still have to fight for the city to accept a King or Queen of our choosing?”

  That’s a lot of rhetorical questions, muses Halves as he slices off a leg of the next dummy, sending it flying across the room. Another materializes behind him. Halves spins at once without turning his neck, landing his blade into the dummy’s abdomen.

  “Quicker than that,” Aleksand schools him yet again.

  Halves ignores his ever-so-helpful brother and awaits the next dummy, his sword brandished and at the ready. It appears at the other end of the training circle. Halvesand pulls out a second blade from his sheath, then approaches, double-wielding.

  “Careful there,” Aleks teases. “I don’t know of many two-bladed Guardian who still have all ten of their fingers.”

  Halvesand ignores the jape, swings about one long blade, then follows his own swing with another from the second shorter blade. Both cause a spray of sparks before his eyes. There is something quite gratifying about metal begetting electricity and tiny daggers of fire. He grits his teeth—which is pretty much all he can do with his neck armor on—and swings his blades like a windmill as he comes in for another attack on the undefended dummy. It protests with one squawk of crunching metal, then shatters apart onto the floor, after which the remaining chunks disintegrate into dust.

  “Halves.”

  He turns to his brother, breathing heavily from his efforts.

  “Is something on your mind? Is something the matter?” Aleks wiggles his fingers. “Talk.”

  Halves has never liked using his hands to speak, and especially not to his brother Aleks, who seems to hover around worse than his own father might have, had he been here. But seeing as Halves can’t nod or shake his head, he simply sheathes his second sword and gestures across his neck, then waves off toward the sky.

  “Sanctum? The Madness?” Aleks sighs and shakes his head. “I’m telling you, the Madness is over. That’s not who we’re—”

  Halves waves his free hand to shut up his brother, points at the sky, clenches his fist, then brings it down to his chest, then lifts it to his head and draws a circle.

  Despite Aleks understanding him perfectly a minute ago, now he looks clueless. Aleks is always the most difficult to communicate to using hand language. “Crown? Queen? Oh! You … believe she’s still alive? Ruena? No, brother, she’s definitely—Oh, wait.” He puts a fist to his own chest, mimicking his brother’s gesture and processing the other meaning of the hand signals. “Fight. You’re training for the streets. The Queen’s absence … Yes, it’s made many criminals.”

  It’s not quite it, but it’s close enough.

  “I told you, I’ve your back,” says Aleks. “I know you’re training. But if it’s between us, I’m the one who ought to be out there. Not you. It’s a deadly task nowadays. It isn’t like before. There’s peace and there’s order, but the criminals that remain are far more daring now. Cunning. Deadly.” His voice grows soft. “This is not Slummers & Sky Guards, brother. We’ve more to risk than a lock of hair.”

  Annoyed, Halves sheathes his remaining sword and, choosing very much not to listen to any more of his brother’s patronizing, makes his way toward the locker room.

  “Halves …” calls out his brother, but on Halves goes, ignoring him. When a dummy suddenly appears in front of him—appearing suspiciously like Aleksand himself—Halves walks around it without a care, his departure uninterrupted.

  In the locker room, Halvesand changes out of his combat boots, greaves, and then his chestplate, which thankfully doesn’t go over his head, since managing any sort of material over his neck armor is too much an effort to bother. As a result, he quite often goes without wearing anything above his waist other than a chestplate, letting his Two Answers tattoo show proudly across his shoulder blades.

  He was warned many months ago that he’d require assistance when bathing. However, Halvesand is a Lesser, and as one, he is insufferably stubborn.

  Without any damned assistance, Halves steps into the nearest shower and twists on the water. It’s cold at first and doesn’t warm up much after that. Halves lets the cold water pour over his head anyway and run down his neck. Tiny cool fingers of water seep under the neck armor refreshingly. Its metal is one that does not corrode when wet—some sort of Lifted alloy he doesn’t care to remember the name of. He only closes his eyes, lets the cool stream run down his body, and focuses his thoughts.

  His focus is short-lived. From the opposite end of the showers comes two voices bursting through the door. “—have no fucking idea what’s going on in the first through fourth wards,” a deep-voiced male is in the middle of saying, “since no one has the balls to get close to that so-called Slum King idiot. Who the hell styles himself as ‘Slum King’ anyway?”

  “A fool who’s like to get his self-important head lopped off by a bunch of hungry slummers, that’s who,” jokes the other voice, likely Vicks or Renn from the now defunct Quadrant Three, though Halves can’t tell. “Did you get assigned to five or six?”

  “Neither. Lead Officer Forrest is hiring a crew to make for the Core. Between the three outposts, they hope to reestablish a central communications unit for all the recovered sects.”

  A distant shower knob twists on, its old handle screeching like a bat. “Why ain’t I heard of that?”

  “Did you miss the briefing? Or were you too busy sticking your head up Undrah’s ass?”

  Water slaps the tile floors. “Fuck you. Undrah’s pussy is for other women, not the likes of me. Now what’s all this news about a central communications unit? Is it to unite the Guardian?”

  “Think of it like an all new Sky Guard, but in the slums.”

  “The Sky Guard protects the one whose ass is on the throne. In case you didn’t know, there ain’t an ass on the throne.”

  “Aye, but soon, perhaps there will be. Upstairs held an election, I overheard. A King’s been named.”

  “I’ll believe it when his ass is on the throne greeting me through the broadcast. Until then, I’ve no time for rumors and—”

  Halves, his peace disturbed anyway, twists off the shower and slings a towel about his waist before stepping out of his shower cell.

  “Who’s there?” calls one of the Guardian.

  The two of them have drawn silent. Several cells down, they look Halves’ way, and no more words come from their mouths which were so unafraid to say anything at all a second ago.

  “L-Lesser,” mutters one of them finally, sheepishly, as he offers a tiny nod—a tall brute with messy blond hair to his shoulders.

  “Lesser,” says the other, a shorter, more muscled young man with a buzzed head of hair and a blunt, beat-up nose—the one who is actually in the shower, water dripping down his naked form.

  Halves can’t nod, but he does give them a moment’s glance to acknowledge their greetings before heading to the lockers to give himself a dab of his towel and a thrust of his legs into a pair of loose pants. The two men’s voices carry on, but at a volume so low, Halves can’t pick out a single word.

  That’s because they talk of you, Halves tells himself. Everyone here knows you now. Everyone sees you as a walking corpse—a person who ought to have died ages ago. You are a reminder of their own mortality.

  You are Death, alive.

  Perhaps that thought is what motivates Halves to visit Former Lead Officer Obert Ranfog before the day’s light runs out. He had planned to earlier, but procrastinated all day.

  Ascending the floors of Eleven Wings hospital via a stairwell authorized only for Guardian use, Halves arrives at one of the top floors where he walks down a dimly-lit hall toward Obert’s room. Nurses who pass by give him a tight nod. For once, he wishes he could go back to being a nobody—another number in the ranks—but he’s the freak with the pocket of poison trapped in his neck, which of course no one can ever forget when a thick shield of metal is semi-permanently affixed to it.

  Also, he is likely the on
ly person who regularly walks around shirtless or clad in just a loose chestplate most of his days due to the armor making it such a bother to put on a shirt. No one seems to mind, despite how much it makes him stand out like a half-naked fool on the streets of the eighth.

  When he arrives at the room, however, he finds the bed empty with a red-haired young female nurse smoothing out its sheets.

  She looks up when Halves enters, then quirks an eyebrow. “Looking for Mr. Ranfog? I’m afraid you’re too late for the night. He’s in the treatment unit. Again. Might be there a few days, yet. Complication with his breathing conduit.”

  Halves stands at the door, his eyes dropping to a pair of slippers that sit at the foot of the bed. Obert never gets out of his hospital bed anymore; Halves doubts they’ve been worn in two months’ time.

  “I’m sorry you’ve missed him. I do expect he’ll recover, but …” Her lips form a rueful smile, and she lowers her voice. “He’s really not much longer, yet.”

  Halves meets her eyes.

  The nurse sighs, as if reading the question from his stern gaze. “He’s only got a few days. Perhaps a week, if we’re lucky.”

  Halves’ gaze detaches.

  “Obert asked why we bother so much and not just let him die,” the nurse goes on, folding a sheet, “but the new Lead Officer Forrest insisted that we … well … maybe it’s not my business to say, really.”

  Then the nurse gives him a light smile on her way out of the room, brushing past him with linens draped over her arms, but not before her eyes drift to his chest, then to the floor as she walks away.

  Halves watches her disappear down the hall. He feels a heavy stone sitting in his chest—a stone made of Ennebal’s hardness, made of Aleks’s unwelcome coaching, made of thick blood he supposedly has in his veins.