Beyond Oblivion

by Daryl Banner

  A cool breeze pulls through the room, blowing the door open farther, slapping it against the wall. Something stirs on a workbench. The walls groan.

  Athan doesn’t shiver despite the breeze. “What is my Legacy?”

  The stone girl doesn’t reply. Of course she doesn’t.

  Athan brings a hand up, as if to touch her, then stops. He feels his heart racing in his chest. But is it the normal kind of racing, or the kind that happens only when he’s about to narrowly avoid a great and terrible danger?

  He brings his hand closer, then stops again.

  His heart beats so aggressively in his chest, it could break a hole right out of his body.

  Athan grits his teeth, tears almost in his eyes.

  He’s always listened to the racing of his heart. He always chases the instinct. What if, for once, I don’t …?

  What will happen if I touch this girl?

  “Athan?”

  Athan turns at once, dropping his hand to his side, then hastily deciding to shove the both of them into his pockets.

  Standing at the entrance of the creaky shed is the cute and quiet form of the orange-haired boy Nickel. He wears a close-fitting white tee and ripped jeans today that, though they fit well enough in the waist, bunch up upon his big shoes, the material pooling, crinkled.

  He puts his own hands in his pockets, mirroring Athan. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

  “What’re you doing here?” asks Athan not impolitely.

  Staying right there at the doorway, Nickel glances about the inside of the shed, his little eyes bouncing, before he shrugs. “I … just wanted to see what it’s like. Your life. Your world.” He swallows, then seems to grow lost in a thought.

  Athan glances back at the statue once more, then faces Nickel. “Not here.”

  The boy looks up. “What?”

  “Let’s go for a walk, then.”

  To that, Nickel gives a hopeful smile. “A walk, then.”

  The boys make their way from the shed and stroll the streets of the outer ninth ward neighborhoods. They don’t talk much, except for Nickel asking a question now and then, and Athan not knowing the answer. One such question being: why aren’t the streets out here named? His other questions involve asking how many people live out here, whether any of the houses are abandoned or for sale, and whether it’s true that the ninth ward people are truly a free people and don’t require paying any rent or dues to the Warden.

  “You don’t know so much about these parts,” Nickel notes, his voice a little light and meaning to be humorous.

  Athan shrugs. “Well, I’m not of here.”

  “I know. You’re Lifted.” The boy squints at the side of Athan’s face in curiosity. “In what part of the City did you grow up, by the way? I’m just curious.”

  “The Glassen, just outside the Eastly,” answers Athan. “Often I simply say I’m from the Eastly, to avoid confusion. Born and raised.”

  “Is it true that the Westly is the poorest area of the City?”

  Athan chuckles. “I had a number of friends from the Westly. My sister, too. I doubt any of us really felt that way about the people on the other side of the Glassen. Eastly folk, though, they …” It’s like he was just living in the Lifted City a day ago, how quickly all the memories and feelings come forward. “They can sometimes be the most self-important. I heard that Kings and Queens and old Marshals who retire, they’d retire to the Eastly because of its various luxuries.”

  “Like Lord’s Garden?”

  The words give him pause. He glances over at Nickel. “What are you getting at?”

  “Is it true there’s a Lady’s Garden? I’m just curious.”

  “You’re curious about a lot of things,” Athan observes.

  Nickel stops by a streetlamp, which is turned off and gathering energy at this sunny time of day. He glances back at a house on the side of the street where a little girl is sitting on the grass playing with a dirty doll made of discarded scraps of dyed linen. A tight look of frustration creases his face, forcing out a dimple in his left cheek.

  “You were asking about housing here,” Athan prods him. “Was there a reason?”

  “I want to get my mother out of our house.”

  “And … you were considering moving here with her?”

  “She is depressed. Miserably depressed. I lost my brother and sister. Everywhere around us in that house are … are memories of the son she lost, of the daughter. Dad’s been gone since I was seven.” He says all of this while looking off toward the girl. “I feel like I need a friend. I feel like my mom needs out of that house. And if there truly are houses out here that are just sitting here, unused, unclaimed …”

  “They are empty for a reason,” explains Athan to the side of his face. “Some went away during the Madness. Some were killed. Some are separated from us here in the ninth, possibly slain on the streets or taken in by the Slum King or lost in the Abandon for all we know. I live in one such house where all its occupants have scattered about the city. It isn’t truly our house. We look at it as …” Athan thinks of the right word. “… as caring for the houses until their rightful owners return. We may never know if they’ll return or not.”

  “Can I see your house?” asks Nickel, bringing his eyes back to meet Athan’s. They are watery and uncertain, meek and yet hiding a particular sort of slum boy strength behind them.

  Athan wonders if the all-too-curious boy has already been there and is just playing dumb. Nickel reminds him so much of a friend of his brother’s from school, many years ago, who acted innocent and was all smiles in front of their mother when Radley would bring him home. Then, when it was just the boys, they were never up to any good, laughing and making a prank of their sister Janna, or splashing in the pool out back. Innocence is a difficult thing to trust at times …

  “Sure,” Athan decides without giving it much more thought at all. Reckless is his new tack. Impulsivity, his new friend. “Let’s go.”

  The boys pass seven streets, then make a turn down the one with the cracked intersection. Dirt is being kicked up in a grassless field where a bunch of men, women, and children are training, to which Nickel’s eyes go, widening with a mix of fascination and fear.

  When they push through the door, Edrick and Ivy are gone, and the house appears empty, save for Arrow who is still in the backyard fussing with the teleporter charm. He is such a dedicated man.

  “You said this wasn’t your house, but one you’re … caring for?”

  “Right,” answers Athan simply.

  “Whose house is it?”

  “My lover’s.”

  Nickel looks at Athan importantly. He stands near the counter and grabs his elbow with his other hand, limbs hanging limply. “And when …” Nickel swallows. “When is he coming back?”

  Athan moves to the sink, fetches two glasses from the cupboard, and fills them with water. The pipes groan from the effort, and the cups fill slowly. Then he sets one on the counter in front of Nickel and takes to drinking his own. Nickel only watches, his eyes heavy as he seems to make a beverage of his own in drinking in the sight of the Lifted boy as he chugs, chugs, chugs.

  Then Athan sets the glass down, brings his gaze to Nickel’s, and answers, “He isn’t.”

  Nickel casts his gaze down, gives a short nod of understanding, then lifts his own glass to his lips to drink.

  0267 Link

  Link and Kid hold hands as they stare through the window of the Lifted City manse.

  “I would never have guessed,” whispers Link.

  “Me neither,” whispers Kid back.

  Through the front window, they watch as the red-eyed doctor, now dressed in a silken lavender gown, sits on her couch with her lover, and the pair of them are watching the broadcast. A setting sun casts stripes and cords of orange and yellow light through the room.

  The red-eyed doctor does not have a husband.

  She has a wife.

  And it’s a familiar large woman who is also
not in her doctor’s coat, but now a loose lilac t-shirt and blue silken pants. The pair are cuddled up on the couch and sharing a bowl of some kind of dried fruity snack.

  “Terrabeth and Emery …” murmurs Link. “Well, I suppose having a wife in the same secret profession as you makes a number of things rather … convenient.”

  “They never have to lie to one another,” agrees Kid, reasoning it out. “And they can go to work and come home together. Convenient.”

  “Convenient.”

  “Maybe they met while working together at Facility. Maybe it was a love that blossomed there.”

  “A love that blossomed over the screams of their patients.” Link shudders. “Forgive me if I’m not overflowing with love for them. After all, the red-eyed one did bury a blade in my neck.”

  “She mentioned she had a child.”

  “She did,” Link remembers. “Perhaps that was a lie as well.”

  “Perhaps,” agrees Kid.

  Hours later, the two women are in the kitchen eating, and Link and Kid have snuck into the manse through an unlocked window in the back study. They wait and watch from a dark den, listening to the two women talk. Their view is somewhat obstructed through the furniture and by the vases, bowls, and business on the table at which the women eat. Neither Kid nor Link wished to risk getting too close, because they don’t know Terrabeth’s Legacy and whether it could put either of them in danger.

  For a long (and boring) while, nothing of much interest is said, their banter being too technical to understand or make sense of. Kid even sighs two or three times, making Link shake her hand with an admonishing scowl on his face, toward which Kid shrugs, bored.

  Then Terrabeth takes a long time to answer a question her wife posed to her. And finally, after too long a hesitation, she says, “I just wonder sometimes if … if maybe we are supporting a cause that … that might not … um …”

  The sound of silverware setting down hard on a plate startles Link and Kid. “Terra, I’ve said many times before …” starts Emery.

  “I know, I know. I’m not leaving. I know it’s not an option. We’d be thrown in the Keep or worse for abandoning our post, just like Dr. Kressa and Lodestone. But—”

  “I said never to mention her name again.”

  “Who? Dr. Lodestone?” A timid breath is taken. “Don’t tell me you still have feelings for the woman who betrayed you, made you defend your honor in front of the King himself, and—”

  “Yes, I have feelings, and they are all ire and fury and hatred.” Link catches a glimpse of Emery rising from the table in a huff, then moving to the sink to clean off a dish.

  Terrabeth stares after her, eyes sunken and full of emotion. “I’m truly distressed, Emery. I feel like we’re on the wrong side of—”

  “Enough.”

  “We’re on the wrong side of the battle. Don’t you feel that what we are doing is … is evil?”

  “Evil?” Emery sets her plate down on the counter and turns to face Terrabeth. “We are doing the King’s work. The Kingship is kind, the Kingship—”

  “Oh, come off it. You know the King has been … strange lately. It is like some sort of darkness has possessed him. Some sort of greed. You saw him just the same as I did the last time he visited.”

  “Outliers are a city-wide concern, Terra. You know as well as I do—don’t give me that look!—how important our entire research is to contain the threat of them.”

  Terrabeth’s face wrinkles up, tears in her eyes. She rises at once from the table. “You’re even starting to sound like her.”

  As Terrabeth storms off, Emery’s face collapses with regret. “Terra. I’m sorry. Come back. Terra, don’t be like—” When she sees that the cause is lost, she shuts her eyes—and mouth—and brings the dish towel to her face, sighing into it.

  Sometime later when the women have gone upstairs, Link and Kid sneak themselves a bite of food from the kitchen, then slip out the window and rest in the back garden, which is small for a Lifted City backyard, but still at least five times the size of Link’s from back home in the ninth.

  “I still don’t see how they’re going to help us get into Sanctum,” mumbles Kid, lying on her back and staring up at the stars.

  Link runs his hands through a spread of blue flowers. “We have to be patient. An opportunity is going to strike, and then we might be moving very fast. All of our goals can be achieved in one single day, if we time it just right.”

  “Time.” Kid crosses her legs in the grass. “Time, time, time. It always comes down to time. Traveling back in time. Slowly moving forward in time. Waiting. Not waiting. Time, time, time.”

  Link glances over at her, his daughter, his friend and partner and so much more. They aren’t touching, giving one another’s hands a reprieve, so both are visible. He catches himself smiling suddenly, as he often does lately, thinking on how far they’ve come on this journey together.

  Regardless of the progress they’ve made, he can’t help but fight the feeling that all their efforts are in vain. We’ll never step foot in Cloud Tower, he knows. We’ll never see Faery again, he knows. We’ll run around pretending to be Shye the Unseen, then time will catch up on us, run out on us, and I will turn to dust as Baron’s body expires.

  Then something occurs to Link at once. “We’re not touching.”

  Kid lifts her gaze to him. “I know.”

  Link stares at her. “Then how am I able to see you?”

  For a second, Kid is confused. Then she rises off the grass, pulls their bag of supplies off her body, and sets it to the side at once.

  And at once, Kid vanishes from sight.

  Link stares at that bag, then at the spot in the grass that holds his invisible daughter. “Akidra …” he starts warningly.

  “I thought it would come to use,” she says in her defense. “Don’t be angry. It may very well save our lives. It could be—”

  “Akidra … What is in that bag, Akidra?”

  “Stop saying my name like that. I’m not a child.”

  “What’s in the bag?”

  Link hears a soft sigh, and then, miserably, she answers: “I took a tiny bit of her hair.”

  “Her hair?” He glances back at the bag. “The Meta’s hair?”

  “I put it into a small empty vial I found on a shelf. Just a little bit. Just a little tiny bit.”

  Link frowns at the bag suspiciously, then reaches and pulls it toward him, curious. He opens the top, fishes through their things, then retrieves the small glass vial, letting it come to rest in his palm. He stares at the small, hand-length strands coiled up within it.

  The grass is disturbed as Kid, invisible, sits up at once. “Link! Look! The flowers!”

  Alarmed, Link glances to his side.

  All the blue flowers nearest to him are glowing vibrantly, as if all the blue petals have been sprayed with the same chemical agent they use in Guardian neon guns. The glow swells, sometimes pretty, sometimes eerie, sometimes so bright Link has to squint.

  “Is that what the Meta does to your Legacy?” asks Kid, her voice low, almost a whisper.

  Link’s attention is pulled to tiny dots all over the grass, tiny dots of yellow and white that start to glow, too, right by his hand. He lifts it to his chest, surprised, only to find tiny threads in his shirt reacting to the presence of his fingers, fine threads glowing bluish-white and greenish-white.

  He tosses the vial back into the bag, then keeps his hands in the air, as if afraid to touch anything. All of the flowers and threads and grass still glow, even without the presence of the Meta’s hair.

  “The opposite of your Legacy is making colors glow!” breathes the invisible Kid in awe.

  Link rises from his spot in the grass and steps away, observing all the glow from a distance. Slowly, he lets his hands drop to his sides. He can’t make proper sense out of it. How is making a thing glow the opposite to changing its color?

  There’s a sound at the back door. Link reaches out his hand at once w
ith a hurried, “To me, now!” hissed at Kid, who obliges him in the space of seconds, and the two are plunged from sight.

  Emery appears at the back door, her eyebrows furrowed with suspicion as she gazes over her backyard, likely having heard their little scuffle or Kid’s excited whispering. The woman glances left, then glances right, then seems to give up her pursuit and makes to retreat back into the manse.

  Until her eyes catch sight of the glow.

  “What in the …” she mutters to herself as she crosses her wide backyard, cutting through the flowers to the spot where the tiny blue ones glow. Link and Kid make sure—with soft, soft, soft steps—to be out of her way.

  Emery cautiously inspects the flowers, as if they might detonate. The petals illuminate her pale face and red eyes with their bluish, pulsing glow. She does notice the few blades of grass by her feet that have spots of yellow and white glowing on them, too.

  Clearly, the doctor doesn’t know what to make of it.

  “Strange …” she whispers to herself, then glances up into the sky, as if an answer might be written there. She turns and looks up at the one and only tree in her backyard, which is too far away to be the culprit. Emery bites her lip in frustration, then glances back down at the flowers, confounded.

  After some thought, she reaches down and plucks two of the glowing flowers, which retain their glow, then bring them with her back to the house. She gives the backyard one last suspicious glance, then leaves it forgotten at her back as the door shuts.

  Link can see through the giant back windows as she rounds the corner of the den, comes around the bend in the hallway, and then heads for the stairs, up which he loses sight of her.

  “Are you mad at me?” asks Kid, still holding Link’s now-sweaty hand.