by Daryl Banner
Halves gives him one long look. My first partner Grute was killed by Obert Ranfog himself on account of my tattling. My second partner Regory Pace was killed by the revenge-seeking girl Mercy on account of pure bad luck and unfortunate timing. You, my friend, do not want to be my partner.
Nevertheless, Halvesand finds he enjoys Cope’s company, even if the dialogue is all one-sided. Cope goes on and on, spilling all his life’s secrets and dreams and curiosities and stories, even a story about a girlfriend he had back in school, but who broke up with him on account of not wanting a boyfriend ‘in a profession where he may at any point in time die without warning.’ “Well, I told her, to be fair, that’s actually any profession in the whole world,” Cope went on to say, to which Halves gave a humored smile, unable to laugh.
From then on, Cope joined Halves for every meal, pushing their way through the crowded cafeteria to claim their space at the end of some random, unoccupied table. The insufferably clingy boy was so enamored with Halves, he even insisted they go together to the bath chambers each night, and then as either one sat in an adjacent tub of lukewarm water, Halves listened to more of Cope’s silly stories about his life, his past girlfriends (there were “three and a half”), and how overly protective yet loving his mother is. Then, after they’d step out, dripping: “I’ll dry your back, and you can dry mine!” Cope would insist, the world’s most devoted sudden-best-friend.
It isn’t the worst thing to have. Halvesand, in truth, misses the closeness of having four brothers on top of him all the time in his tiny house back in the far reaches of the ninth.
Though, also to be fair, none of his brothers offered to dry his backside after a bath.
After every bath.
There is one part of Fortress that is not underground. Right in the center of the whole structure, there is a part on the uppermost floor with no roof. It is a courtyard of sorts with a spread of old gym machines, straw and wooden dummies for sword-practicing (a far less technologically-impressive system than the one at Eleven Wings or his old eleventh ward dormitories, which generated holographic images and simulations before his eyes), and small patches of dirt on which men and women can wrestle each other, train, or box. The perimeter of it is a path around which many jog to keep fit, and one story above that, lining the stone walls, is a walkway that overlooks the whole square between crenels along the parapet. The Grounds, they call this place.
It’s late on one particularly overcast afternoon (any time seems dark and overcast here in the Abandon, even the top of noon), that Cope and Halves are jogging laps in the Grounds, both wearing just a loose set of jogging shorts, boots, and nothing above their waists save Halvesand’s thick neck armor.
“Lord Liaff is still in a cell somewhere,” Cope tells him. “Bee said he wouldn’t swear loyalty, not trusting anything here. He’s Lifted, so you can’t blame him; they don’t trust anything,” he adds in a whisper.
On their fourth lap, Halvesand happens to glance upward, and he spots a figure between two of the farthest crenels. It’s a woman, slender, pale skin, and long dark hair, bluish-black, almost shiny as it catches stray bits of light from the gloomy, overcast sky.
The sight of her slows his jogging until he comes to a total stop, focusing his eyes, squinting at her, curious.
She was slowly walking as well, but when he stops, so does she, and it’s then that he realizes she was watching him from afar.
He can’t make out a face. Who is she …?
Then, quick as that, the woman turns away and disappears into some unseen door.
“The Shadow Lady,” murmurs Cope.
Halvesand turns to him, a question in his eyes.
“You haven’t heard of her? Oh, well, I suppose many haven’t. I only overheard once at dinner—you weren’t paying attention—about a woman with hair as black as night and skin as pale as the moon. She walks along the parapets here, but is rarely seen. No one knows who she is, or her purpose. Some say she’s a sorceress with a dark, demonic Legacy. Some say she’s one of the Three Sister. Some say she’s a ghost of the Abandon, and if you happen to see her, then death will soon be upon you.” He lets out a short chuckle. “I doubt that last bit’s true, otherwise a good portion of the fools here will be dead quite soon, including you and me.”
Halvesand frowns and looks back up at the parapet. For some unexplained reason, he finds himself wondering right then how Queen Kael handled the news of her niece taking her own life. Did she shed a tear? Is a woman like that even capable of tears?
Why am I thinking of this just now?
Then Cope says something, Halves doesn’t hear it, and soon the two boys resume their laps while Cope talks on about something else entirely—weather, training, a cute girl he saw in the cafeteria. And each time they make it around, Halvesand sneaks another peek up at the parapet, but he doesn’t see the Shadow Lady again.
0304 Wick
Wick tends to the crops, which he only recently started learning to do. It’s a pastime he never took much interest in, but when it was pointed out that he’s from the outer ninth neighborhoods, and thus, basically half a Greensman, it was decided he needed to work on waking up his green thumb.
The long and short of it is: he has none.
“I kill everything I touch,” he mutters to Nance, whose tiny eyes disappear into her pudgy face each time she blinks at him. “I have no skills in the Greens. It was my mother who had the skills. I never—”
“Your heart is broken.” Nance sighs with pain for Wick. “First, you’re ripped from your love in Atlas. Then you’re reunited, and again ripped from your buddy-love here in Gaea. Your heart is—”
“My heart is fine,” says Wick, and then he’s quite done with doing any crops or Greenswork at all.
He tries to occupy himself in the armory cabin instead. He sits on the workbench next to Barley, who hasn’t uttered a word since Kraag’s gruesome death, and finds he rather enjoys the unsettling silence more than he does the chatter of other cabins.
But after carving away at his third chunk of wood, Wick realizes his heart isn’t into this work either. He can barely focus on anything at all.
Suddenly, everything about Gaea feels wrong. The people. The air that pushes the grass and the dirt outside. The trees that sway in the night. The fires that burn over sticks and stones in the clearing between the cabins.
The chatter over mealtimes. The nervous glances his way.
None of it feels right anymore. None of it feels good anymore.
After giving up Greenswork and woodswork, he finds himself loitering outside the medic cabin, staring in at the young man named Chaos, who is sitting up in his bed and drinking from a cup of water. Puras is in a chair next to his bed talking softly about something. His words cut off when he notices Wick. “Hey there, buddy. Come in.”
“I’m quite alright.” He gives Chaos a nod, who looks his way. “Hi there, Chaos.”
The young man with the black, red-tipped mess of hair returns the greeting with a sullen-eyed nod. “Anwick.”
“Just Wick,” he corrects him. The only ones who ever call him by his whole name is his family and Athan, all of whom bring Wick great pain to think of. “Is there anything I can do, Puras? Something I can procure? Something … I don’t know … medical? I know the area of the Wilderwoods where the herbs and fruits are.”
Puras gives a light shake of his head. “I would never send you into those terrifying Wilderwoods. All the herbs we need are grown here, now. We even have some seeds we gathered from the, um …” He gestures off somewhere. Wick knows he means the Dream Tears, yet somehow can’t say it, as if afraid the mere mention of Rone will set Wick off. “I think we’re all good here.”
“Great.” Wick gives them each a nod, then turns to go.
“When Chaos is recovered,” Puras calls out, “which may be as soon as tomorrow, perhaps tonight, he would like very much to see you use his, um … well … to do what it is you do.”
Wick turns to them, eye
brows lifted.
Chaos clears his throat, shifting in the bed. “I heard what you … what you are able to do. But more so, I heard that you sometimes can find new ways to use someone’s Legacy. Ways they didn’t know. I’ve only known destruction and mayhem with mine. I wonder …” He lifts his strange, glassy eyes to Wick’s. “I wonder if you can help me see mine in a new way.”
And what if one’s only destiny in life is destruction and mayhem? Wick looks upon the boy with red in his hair. He says, “Some powers are only destructive. It’s just a matter of discovering their potential.”
“Potential, then,” says Chaos, perhaps not grasping the fact that Wick doesn’t want to do what’s being asked of him. “I’d love to find my potential. Something the Mad King refused to appreciate.”
To that, Wick says, “I think he appreciated your ‘potential’ quite enough,” before stepping out of the cabin.
He doesn’t say any more, for fear of letting slip a word or two he may regret.
Come the evening, however, Wick finds that Chaos is not the only one curious of their power. “I am sick of dirt,” grumbles Rychis, leaning against the back wall of his cabin, staring off at the edge of the west woods, which thicken into the Wilderwoods farther in. “I’m sick of playing with tiny granules, with clumps of clay, with mud.” He slams a fist into his palm. “Just do what you do, Wick. Show me. When the day comes that we arrive back in Atlas, I want to be ready. I want to fight. I want to break the ground beneath Atlas itself and bring Sanctum down upon its own head.”
Wick sighs. Greens failed. Woodwork failed. Medic cabin failed. What’s left but helping others train? My father was a trainer to me …
“Fine,” says Anwick Lesser of the ninth, who once claimed he could smell things. “Ready your weapon, then. Your inner one.”
After an hour, all he smells is the stink of Rychis’s sweat as the hairy, bearded man growls and pounds into the ground, feeling with his power as he pushes the soil. The ground seems to tremble, even the very trees near him.
They had to move some distance from Gaea so as to not damage the cabins or the camp itself, and out here in the thinner trees, the sun is starting to fall too low for comfort, slowly dragging away all the light with it. “It’s almost nighttime …” Wick begins to say.
“And I’m not yet done!” Rychis growls.
“Aye, he’s not done,” comes the voice of an onlooker named Hal from behind them.
To that, Wick rolls his eyes. Their practicing out here has drawn a crowd of bored men and women, including Puras and Chaos both, who sit in a glade of short grass and dirt, watching while sharing a bowl of stew (and a blanket over their nearly cuddled forms) from the dinner that was served an hour ago.
A dinner Wick and Rychis have not yet had a taste of. “You are too focused on the result,” Wick coaches him, exasperated beyond measure, annoyed beyond measure, tired beyond measure. It’s no wonder this dummy can’t stir the earth; he has no spirit. “Concentrate instead on the … the …” Crouching down, Wick slaps a hand to the hard earth. “This. Here. Feel it and listen. Can’t you ‘see’ it? I can see it. Where the earth is weak. I can see it with your Legacy.”
“Fuck you.”
Really, it’s a term of endearment. If Rychis Bard doesn’t say the words three times a minute, he’s dead. “You have to close your eyes.”
“Yes,” calls out Puras. “Close your eyes. Feel the earth …”
It’s clear that Puras is teasing him—or else mocking Wick’s own words—but it does the desired trick of making Rychis grit his teeth, press a fist to the ground, and clench shut his eyes. A long, thick silence befalls the crowd of nine as they wait and watch.
Soon, the earth begins to shake. The trees sway without wind. And then a split forms in the ground right before Rychis. It’s a very thin—paper thin—fissure along the dirt, almost mistakable for a thick black strand of hair, but it’s there nonetheless.
“Way to go, Rychis!” cheers Puras, at which Chaos lets out a tiny, weak laugh.
Rychis, even despite the seemingly small victory, appears rather satisfied with himself. His face lightens up, he meets Wick’s eyes, and the first look of joy that Wick has ever seen on this man makes his face fall apart with relief.
“See?” Wick smiles and puts a hand on Rychis’s shoulder. “You are feeling the earth, now. You’re listening. It isn’t about pushing your way into it. It isn’t about forcing the element to do what you want. When you use force, you only disturb the weakest parts of the earth. If you want to truly make your power quake, you must respect it like a proud companion. Invite yourself, like this …”
Wick sets his hand on the hard, tough ground.
“And then feel for the weak parts, and listen for the strength …”
Wick closes his eyes, reaching with Rychis’s Legacy.
“And somewhere in the earth, somewhere deep down, almost out of reach, you’ll find where you need to grab hold of. Somewhere deep … that is where you’ll discover your …”
Then Wick feels it.
His words silence, and a force like none other he’s ever felt pulls out from within him.
He isn’t even aware of the ground beneath his feet shaking until he hears the shouts from behind him.
Wick rips his fist from the earth and flaps his eyes open just in time to watch a great, yawning crack cut straight through the woods. The dirt crumbling and the stone snapping and cracking, a jagged path of rock opens up before them. It races directly for a tree ahead of them no less than fifteen paces, where then the crack terminates, and the earth slowly settles. The tree, slowly at first, leans sideways, its roots exposed by the great crack that now lives in the ground, cutting through the woods. After a second of uncertainty, the tree then falls the rest of the way, slamming to the ground with a great, crunching crash, and settles.
All the onlookers stare, wordless, breathless. Even Wick stands there with his mouth agape, astonished at what he’s just done.
Quietly, Puras finishes Wick’s earlier sentence: “… potential.”
0305 Mercy
I am blood and bone and poison in the shape of …
The house is exactly the way the stupid Lifted Lady described it. Almost comically so. The porch, indeed, is purple.
Fucking purple.
Who paints their porch purple, except for a stupid slum mother whose daughter won the lottery of Legacy Tours, yanked out of their well-enough sixth ward dwelling, and thrust to the skies, where that dear lucky daughter then shits a bunch of gold down below for her mother to dance in?
It’s perhaps not the prettiest of images, but it’s the one Mercy thinks of. And she thinks of it with a grimace as she stares hard at that stupid purple porch.
“Can we talk?” he asks quietly from behind.
Here we go again. “Not now.”
“Mercy … I want to talk about what happened.”
“And I want the woman inside this stupid house with the stupid purple porch.” She crosses her arms, studying the porch from across the street with as much precision as she can. No cameras …
“Yes, I understand, but …” Scot sighs one of his long, annoying sighs. “What’s the plan, exactly? It’s really not too late to change our minds. I think it’s still perfectly reasonable to go back to the fourth, reunite with Sister Agdanagon, and—”
“Hightowers and Lifted folk are the same.” She ignores Scot’s words outright. “They are gullible. They are weak. And they are, for all their riches, needy.”
“Needy …?”
Mercy pulls out her knife from her tight back pocket where it lives—a retractable knife, Dran’s last invention—and she kisses its sharp, deadly tip.
I’ve a plan, and it’s the same as it’s always been, Lifted boy. She advances across the street.
Scot hurries along next to her, staring at that knife with wide-open eyes. It’s like he can see his own reflection in the flat of the blade. “Let’s … Let’s go look at the canals. The
water that runs along them is so peaceful. We passed them, remember? Let’s go to a bridge that runs over the canals and stare down into the water and cast our wishes into it. I have a wish. I have two, in fact. Let’s follow those canals all the way to the tenth, back where you’re from, and maybe our wishes can come true. What are you doing, Mercy?”
Mercy stops in front of the purple porch. “I’m finding out what this needy bitch needs.” After another kiss on its tip, she pockets the knife and starts up the steps.
The door, mercifully, is not purple. It’s a warm mahogany wood, and a simple ring of chrome metal hangs at its center—chrome, just like the Lifted. Mercy only had so little a taste of the City, and it was just enough to validate how little she thought of Lifted scum.
“Please don’t,” begs Scot.
Well, how little she thought of most Lifted scum. “Why?” Mercy faces him. “At least in this Hightower house, you don’t have to hide your Liftedness. You can flaunt it for all she’ll care.”
“I really need to talk to you about what happened.”
Fine. “I poisoned a crew of women who hated me, who hated Lifted folk, and who were in our way. I did us both a favor.”
“Your humanity, Mercy. We talked about this, didn’t we? Up on that roof of the Lifted Lady? I care about your—”
Mercy grabs hold of the ring and knocks with it three times, shutting Scot right up. Each metal bang against the wood slams back at Mercy’s ears, loud and horrible. Even Scot winces from the sound.