by Daryl Banner
Wick chuckles briefly, then meets Rone’s sapphire eyes again. All at once, memories of their last interaction flood his mind. “I’m so sorry about what I said to you.”
It’s almost like Rone needs a second to remember what Wick’s even saying. “No, no, no. I’m the one who ought to be apologizing. I mean, fuck, we’ve been to the brink of death, you and I. They were just words said in anger to each other, nothing more. I’m … ever glad they were not our last.”
“Far from.” Wick smiles as he tosses the dagger from one palm to the other. Weapons find your hand, Anwick …
Rone’s gaze drops. “My sister didn’t make it.”
Wick freezes, stunned by the sudden news. His smile crumbles away. “Rone …”
“The part I left out … was how I got the nightmare serum.” Rone sits down on the ground next to Eerie, who regards him with a tired, half-lidded glance. “She … gave her life guarding it. Froze to death in a sort of … cooling room. A voice led me to her, a voice from some girl I couldn’t see yet. She told me she stayed with my sister until the end, gave me a syringe filled with the serum, and passed on a message from my sister—a message telling me, in a cryptic, indirect way, what to do with the serum. Like a riddle. It was a riddle about a weapon in our arsenal beneath the floor. I … came up with my own conclusion what her riddle meant, but …” Rone’s eyes well up, then he looks at his friend, in pain. “I don’t think it was meant for Impis.”
Wick frowns. “What do you mean?”
“When the Dream Tear fruit knocked me out months ago, here in the wild, the day I met Eerie … I had …” Rone swallows hard. “I had an epiphany of sorts. My mind cleared in my unconsciousness. I think that … I think that the serum was meant for Kendil.”
Wick loses his breath at the sound of that name. He hadn’t given that boy a thought in too long a time. “Kendil …?”
“He was a ‘Weapon’ in our arsenal … beneath the floor of the Noodle Shop. I think …” Rone sighs as a tear escapes his eye. “I think she meant me to incapacitate Kendil with the permanent nightmare. To save all of Atlas. The invisible woman kept reiterating those words my sister said … that the serum would save Atlas. Is Kendil a threat to Atlas? How would my sister possibly know? I think I failed her last wish. She left me a riddle I was too dumb to understand.”
Wick sits down, too. His mind races, sifting through thoughts. The most obvious one comes out of his lips: “Why did she leave you this strange riddle …? Cintha. Why didn’t she just pass on a message through that invisible woman of exactly what to do with the serum?”
Rone considers it. He is making an effort not to cry any more than he already has. Ever since their reuniting and catching up, enough grateful tears and pained tears have been shed between the pair of them to fill an ocean, it seems. “Maybe it’s something to do with that invisible woman …?”
“Maybe Cintha worried what the woman would do with the serum herself,” considers Wick. Then a thought bursts forth. “Maybe the woman knows Kendil.”
Rone nods slowly, mulling it over. “My sister must not have trusted the invisible woman.”
“Yeah. Cintha would have to encrypt her own message to you. It needed to be something only you would understand.”
“That must be it.” Then Rone’s eyes falter. “And I failed.”
“We don’t know that yet.” Wick takes his friend’s hand and gives it a squeeze. “We may never know your sister’s true plan.”
Rone looks up through the trees, perhaps to see if he can catch sight of the moon. “Oblivion … endless skies … the wild … There is an abundance of things we do not know about this world.”
“Perhaps there is more than one way to save Atlas.”
“And more than one way out of it,” Rone adds with a quirk of an eyebrow.
Wick smiles briefly, then frowns as fast. “If only we … had as many ways to get into it.” He lets out a light chuckle. “I remember a time I held your hand, pretended you were my lover.”
“The day we went to that pleasure house to interrogate a certain pleasure boy named Edrick.” Rone remembers it right away. “I spent a bit of time with him after learning of my sister’s fate. He nursed me back to health, helped me through my grief … or drowned me in chemical. I’m not sure. It’s foggy. Something about Edrick reminds me so of a male version of Victra. The two could be twins.”
The mention of her name hurts. Even more news I’ve yet to spill on Rone’s shoulders. But Wick figures his friend has endured enough mental somersaults for a day, so he withholds the rest of his catching up and simply leans against Rone’s side, the pair of them watching the blanket of stars over their heads and listening to the distant muted sounds of chatter from Gaea over the pasture.
“She was a Goddess,” murmurs Rone, deciding it. “The invisible woman. She was Three Sister herself, come in human form, to guide me away from Death’s greedy arms.”
Wick chuckles at that, then adds a thought of his own. “The … The Lifted don’t build tombs to bury their dead in, by the way. They burn them, or in the case of a dead King or Queen, let the sad corpse rest in the Royal Sepulture Grounds of Cloud Keep.”
To that, Rone seems to stew awhile. “Is that so?” he finally says. Then the two of them sit in silence until, an hour later, they decide to leave Eerie be to sleep. Together, the two join the camp for dinner.
0264 Sedge
Sedge listens as the door downstairs opens, a footstep or two, and then it shuts softly.
The night sky beams darkly through the window at his back.
Only stars and one lonely moon.
And a streetlamp.
And me.
His heart races. He struggles to maintain his composure and his shape. He takes one breath, then lets it out silently and slowly.
Soft steps now come up the narrow stair.
Sedge blinks once, hard.
It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. He’ll love it. He’ll love you. He might cry, but then he’ll ask to cuddle you tonight, and then you’ll get to hold him for real.
Everything changes.
Everything always changes.
And for tonight, for Sedge Arwall, it’s about to change at long last for the better.
The door opens. Athan Broadmore enters.
Sedge puffs up his chest. “Hey there, Athan!” he says cheerily.
Athan takes one look at him, flattens himself to the door, eyes wide.
Sedge wants to say Athan is staring with disbelief, awe, longing, and maybe a touch of fear.
Sadly, in truth, it only seems to be fear.
Terror, in fact. “Wh … What the …” Athan can barely speak. He is permanently glued to the door, trembling.
Sedge smiles at him. “Hi, baby,” he says, then realizes his voice is all wrong. Anwick would talk deeper, he decides, never having heard the boy’s voice himself. He tries to broaden his throat where the voice comes from. “H-Hi, baby,” he tries again, much deeper.
Athan’s eyes scan down Sedge’s body in disgust.
The look in his eyes causes Sedge’s heart to sink. It isn’t a look of admiration like he’d hoped. And I tried so hard. I made sure every little detail was just right. I had to guess a bit at the nipples and muscle definition in the abs, but—
“What the fuck are you doing?” blurts Athan. “Is that you? Is … Is that—”
“Yes,” Sedge exclaims, clinging to the question. “It’s me, baby. It’s your Anwick. It’s—”
“I meant Sedge. I know it’s you, Sedge. What the fuck are you doing? Why—?” Athan already has tears in his eyes. Oh, no. This is going all wrong, all wrong. “This is … This is fucking cruel of you. Is my grief some sort of fucking joke to you?”
Sedge can feel his face losing shape. He puffs up and tries to maintain it, despite his crumbling confidence, but can even feel his body height diminishing by the second. “I … I th-thought you’d like it. Seeing him again. I … I … I thought I’d make you feel good
by—”
“Get out of it. Get out of his body, or … or whatever fucked up thing you’re doing.” Athan chokes on his last word, then yanks open the door.
“No, wait!” cries out Sedge. I knew he’d be upset at first. It’s okay. “You haven’t given me a chance. Touch my skin. It’s all real. I can—”
“Get out of my room,” Athan barks, his voice deadly. “Get out.”
“My lips are even as soft as his, I’m sure. I-I mean, I’ve never—” You sound like yourself. Try to sound like a man grown, damn you. He broadens his throat again, speaking deeper. “I’ve never met him, but I know you like strong boys, and I know you like—”
“Get out.” Athan isn’t even looking at him anymore.
“Please. Give me a chance.” Sedge’s arms turn into noodles. His legs are shrinking back to their normal shape. “Just one night.”
“The very sight of you makes me want to turn out the dinner we just ate not an hour ago.” Athan’s face is red with fury, his eyes glistening with tears. “Leave.”
“Athan …”
The next instant, Athan is upon him. Sedge lets out one yelp before Athan’s grabbed a fistful of Sedge’s shoulders, then pulls him straight out of the room. Sedge cries out as Athan drags him down the narrow stair. Even the way he holds me now is tender, Sedge tells himself. Even the way he pulls me out of the house, he doesn’t mean to hurt me. He is caring, even in his anger. I love him so much. I love—
Then Sedge trips over his own foot at the front door, Athan dragging him too fast, and the soil of the Lesser front lawn meets his face. Sedge twists around just his head, a grotesque capability of his Legacy, and catches one last glimpse of a red-faced Athan before the Broadmore boy sweeps away back up the stairs, not bothering even to slam the front door on him.
Staring through that opened door, Sedge breathes slowly, the air of the empty house feeling so like his lungs right now—vast, empty, shapeless. He slowly reverts back to his own shape, naked except for the pair of underwear he put on for modesty’s sake when he was in the shape of Anwick.
When Sedge turns away from the house, he finds a number of people on the lawn staring at him. Each of them has a worse look than the last. Queer looks. Puzzled looks. Repulsed looks.
Embarrassed looks. Pitiful looks.
Sedge clambers to his feet and darts through the house and into the backyard to hide. An overgrown bush in the corner with spindly yellow leaves and a single unbloomed flower is watered by his tears. He mercifully morphs away his mouth so no one can hear his cries.
0265 Mercy
I am blood and bone and poison in the shape of …
“It’s a very simple plan,” states Mercy to the room of listeners. “We go to this woman Desura Sparrow’s house, we hold her captive, we procure a means to communicate our ransom and our demands to the Lifted City directly—Hey, bitches, we have your Queen’s pretty mother—and then make an end of it.”
It’s all slumborn women in different shapes and sizes before her, eleven to be exact, save the one wimpy man named Scot who sticks to her side like a pretty blond wart with manners.
Mercy eyes each of the women. “I’m hearing silence.” She lifts her eyebrows. “What’s the issue? It’s a foolproof plan. I’ve already scoped the house. The woman keeps no guards, not even a husband or another son or daughter there to defend her. The woman is drunk all day long. She laughs at walls. She is the easiest target.”
The eleven women are seated at the dining room table of the Lifted Lady whose throat Mercy just slit. The Lady still sits in the old chair before the broadcast, though now a bed sheet “from the up” covers her form, a final dignity. That final, kind dignity is comically juxtaposed with her hot mug of water and kettle, which are spilled on the floor before her, the woman’s blood all over the mug and kettle, which are far from being hot any longer.
One woman in the back speaks up, a double-chinned thing with tiny hairs over her lip and short black hair named Liggie. “I’m not sure that gets us any closer to fattening our pockets.”
Mercy blinks. “How does it not? We will have the mother of the very Queen of Atlas. Sanctum’s bank, at our disposal.”
“Yes, but that only makes us a miniscule band of brigands,” the Liggie woman argues, her voice nasally and loud. “We’d be no better than the ones swarming the eleventh and the Abandon right now.”
“Brigands? Brigands??” Mercy scoffs at that. “Brigands steal old ladies’ purses and rob the grocers. We’ll be taking this False Sanctum by their very nuts.”
Liggie crosses her pudgy arms over her belly. “The Queen’s a woman. As it turns out, she’s got no nuts.”
The other ten women in the room chuckle at that, two of them reaching fists out to Liggie, who bumps them with her own.
Mercy looks over all of them. I could poison each and every one of you right now and you’d be dead before you could even utter my name. “The Queen’s mother … is in our fucking grasp. The Queen will do what we say. It’s the world’s greatest possible ransom.” Mercy hears the strain of desperation in her own voice, and it’s ever humiliating. “For fuck’s sake, what more leverage do we need?”
“Neither the Queen nor her mother are Lifted,” another woman at the table points out, to which everyone else grunts their assent.
“Yeah. Something ‘bout it all feels wrong,” mutters another.
“Like we’re robbing our own,” says the first.
Mercy’s head goes back and forth between the women, at her rope’s end. Fucking fools. “What’s it matter if she’s Lifted or not??” she exclaims. “She sits the throne of Atlas! She’s fucking Lifted now! Her fucking mother is here in the sixth, which is halfway Lifted!”
Liggie rises from her chair. All eyes turn to her. “We had one simple rule, Mercy girl. One simple, simple, simple rule. And you’ve already gone and broken it.”
After barely half a glance at the living room where a certain body lies under an uneven blood-stained bed sheet, Mercy just rolls her eyes. “Lady Bitch had it coming.”
“We’ve all been completely open about our pasts and where our hearts lie.” Liggie squints at Mercy, folding her arms again. All of the women listen. They always listen to her, their assumed leader, their big monster of a woman whose boobs are so small and belly so swollen and hair so short, she looks half a man. “You, however, are a closed-tight book, aren’t you, my little angry green-lipped lady? You come out of nowhere to join us months ago. You disrespect our rules. You act—and kill, clearly—with no remorse for your actions.”
“No remorse? Who says I have no remorse?” Mercy gives a light gesture toward the dead Lifted Lady. “I placed a sheet over her body. I am clearly full of compassion.”
Liggie’s eyes flatten to slits as she glares at Mercy, unamused. “Passion,” the woman grunts. “I’ll give you that. Compassion, not.”
“So let’s make use of my so-called passion,” Mercy suggests, “by taking charge of the situation over our heads. I’ve planned it out. It’s foolproof. If we hold the Queen, then we hold Sanctum. This Queen of Unity bitch will pay any amount of gold to save her mother.”
“Oh, is it that easy?” Liggie cuts through the crowd of women, each of them parting to let her by as she closes the distance between Mercy and herself. “We only meant to obtain information from this Lifted Lady, to learn of her husband’s business, and to find the connection between her husband’s operations and funds invested by the Mirand-Thrin estate. Not murder the old crone.”
“Who cares of funds and defunct businesses??” blurts Mercy. “The information I got is better—and vastly more useful.”
“Oh, is it? Ransoming the Queen’s mother? Let us play this out, shall we?” Liggie’s voice is twice her size, boastful and disparaging. “You inform the Queen that we have her mother. She—and perhaps an army of a hundred—raid the sixth. Now you have an old woman with a purple porch … and you’re facing an army of the Queen’s Mad Hundred. Fuck Impis’s Twenty-Two
. You’ll have no less than a Hundred from this new slum girl in power. And then what?” Liggie looks among her women, as if fishing for an answer. “What do you think, ladies?” She brings her eyes back to Mercy with dark amusement. “Do you even realize the wrath you’d certainly draw our way? We would be overwhelmed in seconds by what remains of the Madness. Then the whole Mad lot of them up there will take this Desura woman out from under us as well as our lives for sport.” Liggie’s face is so close to Mercy’s, the woman could kiss her. I invite her to, so that she may learn how very deadly my “passion” can be. “Your plan doesn’t seem so ‘foolproof’ anymore, does it? No, rather sounds simply like a plan for fools. Well, one fool at least.”
Again, the room is filled with the muted giggles and chuckles from the others.
If there is anything that Mercy appreciates about the lump of dead, adorable meat at her side named Scot, it’s that he does not join in the others’ laughter. His silence is proof of his loyalty.
“But go right on ahead,” the big woman says, her stinking onion soup breath giving Mercy’s nose cause to recoil. “Dance with Desura. Laugh at the walls along with her. But my ladies will have no part in your reckless, thoughtless foolery.”
Mercy’s every muscle is tense as steel. Despite the impatience brewing in her, she would be an idiot to not consider the woman’s point—and she does have a point. There’s no telling what kind of brute muscle Sanctum could send to the sixth in retaliation. Even if Mercy hides the mother in a secret place and makes demands, she knows next to nothing about this Erana girl who sits the throne, and what she—or her unknown regime—is capable of.
Perhaps it truly is the best option to hold back.
“Good,” murmurs Liggie, seeing the surrender in Mercy’s eyes. “So you have some sense in you after all. See?” The woman backs off and turns to the rest of the room. “I have a sense for character. This is why the mystery girl has joined our like. She’s foolish at times, says a stupid fucking thing or two, but she has the bone of a warrior up her back.” The woman eyes Mercy. “But turn that bone onto me again, and I’ll have you under a sheet in a slummer’s chair next.”