by Daryl Banner
Link gives her a soft shaking of his head, “No,” and then lifts his eyes to the upstairs window, where he sees a light flicker off. “But I think I’ve an idea of how we’ll get into Sanctum.”
0268 Wick
It’s in Wick’s cabin where he just awoke, the pair of them sitting on the makeshift bedding area, that Rone is told the rest of it all.
Wick is surprised at how oddly well Rone takes the news. He nearly seemed to be expecting it. “She was always very brave,” Rone murmurs softly. “I know she went out kicking … that Victra. What a sad day for Rain, to lose two brave souls. Indeed, it falls from the sky. Rain. I guess we just foolishly assumed something else was supposed to fall before us. Or with us.” He shakes his head in pity, his eyes searching the wall opposite them where the sunlight burns the wood a fierce amber color. “I hope her last sight was something beautiful.”
Wick has an arm around Rone. He hugs him tighter from the side. “I’m sure it was.”
Rone nods slowly. Wick studies the side of his face awhile. He knows his friend has grown strong, maybe even numb to certain losses, considering all he’s been through, but Wick would be a fool not to think the news doesn’t devastate Rone deep inside. Though Rone and Victra were always more an item of convenience rather than love, the loss of her still stings.
“And Juston was auto-borne?” murmurs Rone. “Fascinating.”
“Indeed, the pesky noisemaker he was.” The boys chuckle, then grow silent too fast. “I didn’t know him too well. Always thought we would have more of a chance to just kick back and … be friends. Y’know, once the whole war was over with.”
“Didn’t we all?” Rone huffs. “And it was Tide’s fault that—?”
“It’s complicated. There was … lots of wind. I pulled Tide’s wind from him, which caused the warehouse to collapse, but …” Wick sighs. “I can’t say whether it was his wind or mine that killed Juston. It pains me that I don’t know.”
“Don’t blame yourself, man. Tide put you in that fix.”
“Yeah, well, add to that the fact that he doesn’t remember anything about Rain. Yellow got to him. It was like he hadn’t seen me since school, like Link and I were still his bully-playthings from the schoolyard. All that progress we’d made in Rain, Tide and I …”
“Don’t mourn it too much. Tide isn’t worth crying a tear for.”
“That much is true.” Wick nods slowly. “We dug graves behind the Noodle Shop. Right under Mr. Gateward’s tree.”
“That’s beautiful. But really, we should stop calling him that.”
“We should,” agrees Wick.
“It’s an insult, really, to be so relentlessly referred to as Gandra’s husband. He probably has a pretty wife someplace in the ninth.”
“We may never know, now.”
“Hey, don’t say that.” Rone nudges his friend. “We’ve come this far, haven’t we? Don’t let Dran or that Korah woman take down the spirit in you. I’m going to find a way past that Wall.”
“Rone, it’s pointless. Do you know how many damned people are out here?” Wick gestures out at the windows. “Not one of them has figured a way back into the city. Some have been out here for years, Rone. A band of fools went and tried crossing the desert a year ago, I heard. Two came back, nearly dead, and the rest did die.”
Rone shrugs. “So we can go around the sands. Even through the wilds, perhaps, from where I came. I know a lot of the land.”
“That would take weeks, maybe months, to circumnavigate the desert. You’re sorely underestimating Atlas’s size. And besides, even if we do make it to the Wall, once again we face the troubling issue of how exactly we get on the other side of it at all.”
“Perhaps you’re sorely underestimating me.” Rone flashes Wick a grin. “I did just cross half of the Oblivion and survived with a giant fanged cat from the wild at my side.”
Wick snorts. “I doubt it was half.”
“What Legacies do we have out here at our disposal?” Rone is, as usual, ever persistent when his mind’s on a thing.
And it’s especially tiring to deal with on a not-fully-awake mind as Wick’s. “Not many useful ones, in terms of beating that Wall.”
“Maybe the people of Gaea need an inspiration. Y’know, to free up their ideas. Think we should try distilling the fruit I brought? I know I’ve been sober from Chemical for however long, but wouldn’t it be fun to chase a high every night out here in the Oblivion? I can’t think of a more appropriate bliss to share with my best friend.”
“You and your Chemical!” Wick laughs. “A true love story!”
Rone can’t help but laugh, too. “Hey, not all of us can have the legendary love that is you and your Sanctum boy!”
Wick lets out a light, obligatory chuckle at that, which quickly dies to nothing as his eyes detach.
Rone backpedals at once. “Sorry, Wick. I shouldn’t have—”
“No, no. Don’t get dumb and sensitive on me.” Wick shoves his friend’s side playfully. “I’m so happy to have you here with me. I … I almost feel like I’m dreaming. Like you’re this dream I’m not waking up from.”
“Nope. I’m afraid you’re wide awake, my friend.”
“Rone, you’re the piece of life I’ve been missing out here on my own. And …” Wick considers it, then shrugs. “And yes, of course, my life would be even more complete if Athan was out here with me. Then I’d only miss my family, I suppose.”
“Always another piece missing in the end. Your brothers. Then your parents. Then we’d worry on our friends who were left behind. Then the fate of all of Atlas …”
To the fate of Atlas, Wick only shrugs again. “I still feel the same way I did before, when Athan and the others and I were out in the ninth, slumming it at my house. I don’t want to save the world, Rone. I just want to be back home in the ninth with my loved ones and let someone else do the dirty work. I don’t even have that sting in me anymore, that sting that craves vengeance.”
“Oh, come on. Your spirit isn’t so dead.”
“Yes, it is. Perhaps big, mighty Metal Hand can destroy things with his touch. He destroyed my spirit.” Wick sulks.
“Don’t say that. He destroyed nothing.”
“What’s the point of it all? What’s the point of trying?”
Rone eyes him hard. “The point, my friend, is how joyous you’ll feel when you stand over Impis Lockfyre’s dead corpse, assuming he isn’t dead already. And how it’d feel—how it’d really feel—to live your life and know that the King or Queen over your head is a decent, good, loving human being. To know that they work for you. To feel true peace. True happiness. True inclusiveness. Prosperity. Richness in the soul and the heart—two places better to feel it than the wallet. Imagine if Atlas was ruled that way, Anwick. By a decent human being. Just imagine it, just for a little while. Dream it.”
Wick, somewhere in Rone’s words, feels a smile crawling over his face. It isn’t difficult to dream such a thing when the words come from Rone’s inspired mouth.
“Can you imagine such a world?” asks Rone. “One in which the words ‘The Kingship is kind, the Kingship is good’ don’t carry a tone of sarcasm? A world in which those words are true?”
Damn him, Wick thinks with a smile on his face. Damn him for, once again, inspiring the flame in my heart that first made me choose to join a group called Rain. “A King no longer screams.”
“No longer,” agrees Rone solemnly.
0269 Tide
No one is in the Ferns this morning.
The sun’s barely risen, and through the small circular windows of the Ferns, a rich, molten orange strikes through and fills the room, painting all the wood and the plants a deep copper hue.
As Tide stomps down the stairs, the thick clay and wood they’re made of creaks and settles as he goes. He descends all three floors of the Slum King’s den, then pulls open the cellar door to the dungeon below where there rests seven cells. Outside of the farthest one sits a lump of a guard
in a chair. He wears a linen shirt and loose, earthen pants. He holds a plain wooden spear, barely sharpened at its end.
“Dismissed,” says Tide.
The guard looks up from his book and frowns. “By whom?”
“By me.” Tide nods at the stairs irritably. “Go, then.”
The guard gives him two seconds of defiance, then relents with a tired shrug. “I’m overdue for a breakfast, anyhow,” he grunts as he hands off his spear to Tide, who doesn’t take it. “Well? Needn’t you a weapon? Fuck it.” The guard tosses the spear at the bench on which he was just sitting, then starts up the stairs heavily, pushing past the cellar door, which shuts at his back. Now, only Tide remains in the warm brown room three floors beneath the earth.
Well, almost alone. “Such a big, bold fucker you are,” comes her low, raspy voice from the cell.
Tide faces the thick wooden door where, from a small barred opening, the ugly face of Gin appears. Her hair is grown out much longer than it was before, and it is an unkempt, tangled mess. Her face is bumpy and raw, as if she’s taken to a hobby of pinching it with her fingers in her boredom. Since her attempted assassination of Slum King Chole six months ago, she has been behind this door, occupying the largest of the cells. As they hold no other prisoners, she has been alone down here, save whichever guard is on duty.
Tide snorts at her. “It’s by your own stupidness that you are in this cell and not free.”
“Stupidity,” she spits at him. “Not stupidness. Stupidness isn’t a word. Stupidness is something that a stupid person would say.”
He takes a step toward her cell. “All you had to do was swear fealty to the Slum King and you wouldn’t be in here. But you are stubborn. And therefore, stupid.”
Her fingers cling to the edge of the window, weaved between the bars.
Tide steps back.
A twisted, knowing grin spreads across her face. “Afraid I’ll fuse my fingers to your face, trapping you here until someone comes to fetch you?” She snickers mockingly. “Such a big, bold fucker. A big, scared fucker.”
“And why not swear fealty?” Tide goes on, ignoring her remark, as well as the passing moment of fear she did just strike into him. “Is the Slum King so awful to you? You could live like a Queen in this fucking ward, Gin, and you know it. You chose not to. You chose this.”
“I didn’t choose the Queen of the Abandon holding my sister’s life hostage until I completed the task of killing your boy King.”
Tide swallows once at the mention of the Queen.
Gin notices. She notices everything.
“You still fear her,” she realizes. She grins that nasty grin again. “Of course you do. You fear turning into just another statue in her great hall. A big, dumb, muscly pearl statue. Do you remember their faces?” she asks, her nose pressed against the bars of her window. “I wonder if you can imagine how many of them there were. All those pearl-white faces. All those bodies. Countless. Legion. There were so many of them, watching as you walk past them on your way to the Queen of the Abandon’s throne. Do you remember? They will all become your new friends, forever.” Gin lets out an amused titter. “I sure hope you like where you are placed among them, standing there for all eternity.”
“Shut your hole,” Tide finally says.
“Y’know, some people believe they aren’t even dead,” she goes on. “The Queen’s pearl statues. Some believe that the statues live on, forever and ever and ever, like ghosts trapped in the stone. Forever standing. Forever posed. Forever watching. Forever frozen.”
“Forever talking,” Tide mocks her. “On and on, your nauseating voice, on and on, forever not-shutting-the-fuck-up.” He crosses his big arms. “The only thing that makes me stupid is believing that you had any chance of changing your mind. You will rot down here like the fettered remains of the middle night meal you refused. You will rot and you will die alone.” He turns to leave.
“No, you didn’t come down here to see if I’ve change my mind,” her voice rings out, stopping him. “You’ve come here seeking a sign of my forgiveness.”
Tide is at the stairs, staring back at the cell, from which she is awkwardly straining to keep her eyes on him through the restrictive bars in the opening of her door.
“And you’ll never have it,” she hisses at him, low and harsh. “I’d be watching your back if I were in your stinking shoes. You’ll never have my forgiveness. When I am out of here, you’ll be dead, Tide.”
His jaw tightens at those words.
“You’ll be dead,” she repeats, a touch louder. “I swear it!”
A superior smirk returns to Tide’s face. “You’ll be a corpse, Gin, before you ever step foot out of that room.” Then his feet carry him heavily up the stairs.
“Tide!” she calls out. “TIDE!”
The cellar door shuts out the rest of her shouting.
0270 Erana
Erana Sparrow sits in a bath at the edge of the Cloud Keep gardens, overlooking a spread of freshly planted violet everblooms. She stares at her toes, which poke out of the soapy, scented water. Tiny droplets drip, drip, drip from her hair.
She could get used to this Queenly pampering.
Then Dregor coughs, standing at the other end of the tub and staring off into the garden. Yoli, standing next to him and similarly staring anywhere but at Erana, shifts his weight from one leg to the other, his bald head gleaming under the moonlight.
Well, if it weren’t for the two men at the end of her tub, destroying the illusion.
Erana lifts a hand out of the water, her good hand. Then, slowly, she lifts her other hand—her not good one—and studies it. She recalls vividly and with perfect detail the moment it happened, when Ruena Netheris and her made their escape from their half-collapsed house at the far end of the Lifted City they shared with Rone. There was a threat to Ruena. Ruena pulled upon her Legacy and emitted a great flash of light.
And Erana’s hand took half the charge.
It has healed, but it is all wrong. Scarred and burned, her whole palm is bumpy and discolored, pale and sickly in spots, red and ugly in others. I never blamed you, she’d say if she saw Ruena again, but the new, grotesque look of her hand makes her feel the hurt she has, all this time, been trying to expertly push away. Alas, all her memory is retained permanently, and she can never forget that day.
“Well, well, I hope I’m not interrupting.”
The three of them turn at the sound of the cold woman’s voice. Axel stands there with a towel hanging from her fist, garbed in her skintight bodysuit, this time a bright blue one that cuts off at the knees and elbows, her wrists and ankles decorated in bright bands of azurestone and aquabark and coral. Her dark hair, braided into one thick, long braid, hangs down the front of her left shoulder like a lifeless pet snake, coming down to her thigh.
Erana drops her hands under the water.
“Axel,” greets Dregor with a tightened jaw.
She turns to him with irritation. “Haven’t you any Peacemaker duties to attend to?” she asks him with her eyes flashing. “I don’t think the Lifted folk here trust us any better than they did when we first put an end to Ruena’s coronation. That needs to be rectified.”
Dregor’s back straightens up—yet again, considering his already perfect posture, it’s a microscopic thing to notice—and he asks, “Isn’t that a thing easily rectified by your Legacy?”
“True belief in our cause is always preferable over a false one. Didn’t Slum Queen Atricia Sunsong prove that very point?”
But the first thing you did was warp the minds of the disloyal when Impis still reigned, Erana would argue had she the voice or the nerve, but she finds she has neither, and so she keeps her silence.
Dregor, after a breath, indulges Axel. “I will organize a troupe of our friendliest to go door-to-door and … make friends, as it were. Anything else, Marshal of Order Axel?”
The use of that title carries a pinch of mockery, Erana notices. But Axel, whether too proud or too thick to catc
h it, simply replies, “No, Dregor, that is all.”
Dregor gives them each a stiff nod, then strolls out of the room through the opened archways to the gardens, his booted feet tapping along the chrome tiles, then the stone walkway as he descends into the gardens and is off.
Axel’s voice is cold and empty. “I’ve come for the Queen.”
Erana’s feet drop into the bath with a tiny splash. She brings her eyes up to meet Axel’s. “For me?”
“We’ve a matter to handle. Yoli, you’ll come with as well.”
The bald man simply gives her a half-lidded glance for a reply, to which Axel bristles and returns a dignified nod.
It must frustrate Axel to not be her twin and, thus, not know what the mysterious man-of-few-words Yoli is really thinking.
That privately amuses Erana.
Erana, Queen of Shit and Lies and Nothing.
An hour later, Erana is dressed in a lavender robe and strolling between Axel and Yoli through the Glassen Square. Some folk cower as they pass, whether out of fear, suspicion, or wariness, Erana can’t tell. And if it is in fear, which of them do they fear?
Probably all three of us.
They arrive at the Westly Wish, a clinic just three Lifted blocks (which are significantly larger than slum blocks) and a marketplace away from the Crystal Court. When they enter the blue-grey chrome doors, a cool wash of air rushes over their faces, as well as the medicinal scent of herb mixed with bleach, and the distant sound of music playing—a harpist, it seems.
Without even stopping at the front desk (where a wide-eyed and fearful male nurse has watched their arrival, pale-faced and sweating), Axel leads them down a short, curving, window-lined hallway with a rounded ceiling to a small, dim room.
Erana would have liked to go farther down the hall to the cafeteria where the harpist is playing to enjoy some of the music, but knows better than to pull away from Axel’s lead.
When they stand by the sweat-riddled bed in the room, the purpose of their meeting becomes clear.