by Daryl Banner
“He might be alive.”
Athan opens his eyes to find Prat looking at him again.
“I mean …” He clears his throat and shifts on the bed, his maps crinkling in protest. “I mean … when Arrow gathered up his charms and crap from the Noodle Shop … he … he noticed something.”
The way Prat says Arrow’s name, he pours all his hatred into it. “Noticed something?” prompts Athan.
“His little tracker charms. Little chips he injected into some of us from Rain. He put one into Wick, you know.”
“I know,” says Athan, impatient. “What’re you getting at?”
“Well … his computer … it showed coordinates … for Wick.” Prat lifts his chin, as if proud of himself. “Arrow thought you shouldn’t know about it, but I think you should.”
Athan’s heart pounds. He isn’t sure why; he doesn’t understand what the fuck Prat is even saying. “Coordinates …?”
“It shows that Wick’s location is somewhere far, far beyond the Wall of Atlas. Somewhere out in the Oblivion.”
Athan rises from his stool at once, staring down at Prat, hard. He can’t even explain his reaction when his face goes red and all he feels is furious anger and confusion. His fingers have curled into fists and his jaw is shaking.
“What?” Prat cowers slightly. “It’s what his dumb charms said.”
“The fuck are you talking about, Prat?” Athan fires back at him, trembling. He’s out of his mind. Arrow’s charms are broken and old. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. “How could you say that to me?”
Prat opens and closes his mouth several times before speaking. “I’m just … I’m just telling you what his charms—”
“Well, you’re wrong. And they’re wrong. And Arrow’s wrong. Anwick Lesser was destroyed by Metal Hand. I saw it happen. I was not … I wasn’t …” Athan is breathing heavily. Could Axel have made me imagine that Wick was touched by Metal Hand? Did it not actually happen? Is that mind-fucker’s power that strong? “I saw him die.”
“I-I-It was probably an error,” states Prat suddenly, bristling, and then he gives a big, demonstrative shrug, spreading his hands. “Even Arrow said he didn’t understand it. Maybe his tracker chip thing got warped at the …” Prat has difficulty saying it so bluntly in front of Athan. “… at the time when … when Wick was, um …”
“He’s dead,” states Athan again, his voice shaking. “He’s dead, and that’s that. He is dead. My Anwick is dead.”
“Please keep your voice down,” whispers Prat. “Rip’s still asleep.”
Athan clenches his teeth. His left leg is bouncing in place, and tears have come to his eyes, tears that won’t yet fall. He stares at Prat a good, long while, unsure whether to yell at him, punch him, or cry.
Instead of any of that, Athan simply nods, whispers, “Anwick is dead,” back to Prat, then quietly leaves the room.
0330 Wick
A bird caws loudly over his head.
Wick opens his eyes and sits up, then watches as a bird soars across the sky, its wide, grey spread of wings flapping. We’re close, he realizes, then turns to face the rising sun, filling the dark blue of the sky with its rich warm rays.
Throughout the day, the land beneath their weary feet changes from sand to thick dirt to patches of grass to thicker overgrowth. They push through forests of grass taller than any of them, bat away bugs that seem to fly straight for their faces, then find themselves in the shadowy holds of a forest that surrounds them out of nowhere.
“This way,” says Ferra, taking the lead and orienting them in the direction of the Wall.
None of them have eaten in two days. Not substantially, at least. With Ferra’s hot, glowing fingertips and a thing or two Puras spotted in the lowlands, they were able to eat a handful of crispy insects, two cuts (by Wick’s dagger) from a thorny desert plant that held water in its greenish-yellow body, and berries off a specific bush that only cropped up once since they got out of the worst of the desert.
But a few off-putting insects and some berries are nothing on a belly that’s been used to eating in surplus for months. It is evident that the lack of food is making all five of them irritable. Rychis bit off Ferra’s head earlier when she warned him to watch his footing in the tall grasses. Wick noticed Chaos appearing more annoyed lately than flattered at Puras’s constant attention. Not to mention the slowed progress on account of Chaos’s injured foot from the battle with the white wyrm.
Nevertheless, they push through the trees until long after the sun has set. In the semidarkness, they keep to the edge of the wilds as best as they can. It made no sense to any of them to go farther into its depths than they had to, not when they knew only half of what lived in it: feral dogs, fanged rats, toothy tree-swingers, screeching birds with talons and beaks as sharp as razors …
And maybe a particular Wildercat named Eerie with a vendetta.
The thought pulls on Wick’s heart, making it heavier than it already was. Rone, why did you have to leave in such a hurry? Why couldn’t you have just waited a few more days so that we could be together in this mess?
It must be well after middle-night when they finally stop to rest, giving Wick the chance to sleep. But the woods, with all its noises and small critters on the ground and thicker air, Wick is barely able to catch an hour or two of rest.
No dreams find him this night, and perhaps that is the worst punishment of all.
When they push through the edge of the wilds the next day, their progress is far quicker. There are even clearings throughout the woods where the sky breaks through over their heads and they are able to make a quicker move through the grass. Perhaps the wilds is giving them each a breath of encouragement, though the atmosphere at times seems more like a trade of one set of obstacles for another.
Rone handled these obstacles. The five of us can do the same.
I just wish it was six of us.
But the world out here is far too vast to expect to run into his friend a second time completely by chance. Something deep inside Wick realizes that, unless Rone is lucky enough to somehow find his way back into Atlas, the two of them may not see each other again.
He survived out here—alone—for over half a year. He befriended a fucking Wildercat. There is nothing Rone Tinpassage cannot do.
He is still alive out there, and I will believe nothing else.
It is on the fourth day of walking through the edge of the wilds that Puras starts the Dream Game: “When we’re back in Atlas, I’m going to see my brothers and sisters and give them each a kiss.”
A long silence follows where only their footsteps crunching through the undergrowth and the fallen leaves and the dead twigs and branches can be heard.
Then Ferra picks up his lead: “When we’re back in Atlas, I’ll find my childhood home in the tenth where my parents and aunt live. I’ll be like a ghost returning from the dead.”
Rychis says his in an uncharacteristically tender tone. “I’ll find my wife and baby boy … and I’ll kiss the two of them, and I’ll make sure they know that I love them with all my heart and will never, ever, ever leave their sides again.”
A long time later, Chaos puts in: “When we’re back in Atlas, I’m taking a fucking shower.”
The others share a short-lived chuckle at that, even Rychis, who seems to have revived his spirit by the silly game Puras has started.
Wick is last to contribute. “When we’re back in Atlas, I’m going to reunite with my friends and family in the ninth, build an army to destroy Sanctum once and for all … and I will find my lover Athan.”
The five continue for some time. The afternoon sun is soon covered by clouds, and then a gentle rain taps along the leaves and the branches over their heads, and then soon the gentle rain becomes a heavy one.
All five of them, like a unit made of one brain, stop and lift their faces, and the water bathes them in more ways than one. Wick parts his lips, drinking in the raindrops. Chaos and Puras laugh and smile broadly as the water slaps upon
their faces, whatever irritation that had grown between them now forgotten. Ferra is the most solemn of all, enjoying some private, spiritual thing as her face is tilted up with her eyes closed. Rychis stands similarly, eyes closed, slouched, the rain catching and looking like diamonds in his beard.
It is the following day that the shadow falls upon them. When the morning sun rises, they know nothing of it, cloaked in the longest shadow they’ve ever seen. Until midday, they get none of the sun, and it is only when the sun begins to set behind them that they reach a new edge of the wilds and discover the source of the shadow.
All five of them are stopped at the edge of the trees, staring at a vast space of grass and dirt and crumbled stone ahead of them. The plain stretches on for a mile at most, where it ends.
At the base of the Wall.
“Already …?” breathes Ferra, jaw-dropped.
Rychis drops to his knees, staring up at the impossibly tall, dark, metal-and-stone monstrosity that now stands before them. After all they have endured, after all the days upon days of travel and terror and weariness, they now meet their worst obstacle yet.
“It’s … It’s so …” Puras puts a hand to his mouth, overcome.
Wick takes a few steps, grass crunching beneath his feet, and he stares upward, taking in the daunting, terrifying sight. He looks to the left, and all he sees is the Wall stretching on and on, kissing the edge of the desert. He looks to the right, and the Wall runs infinitely that way as well, except it is hugged by the trees and the tall grasses of the Wilderwoods. He stares ahead where the low plain of grass and dirt stretches on like a road from his feet to the Wall … to that fucking impossibly tall, unknowingly thick Wall.
“We must keep on,” Ferra says. “We must keep on and search the very Wall itself. There may be—”
“—a door?” suggests Chaos sarcastically.
Puras walks some ways ahead, then stops, looking upward. He says nothing, but his slouched posture reveals all his doubt plainly.
We haven’t come this far just to balk and piss and fret. Wick takes a stand in front of everyone. “We knew it would come to this. Why are we looking so surprised and discouraged? We knew that we were going to have to face the Wall at the end of this journey.”
“I cannot break that,” says Rychis.
“My red bolt, even at full strength, wouldn’t so much as dent that Wall,” says Chaos, his confidence shaken by the very sight of it.
Wick stares between them. “That is why I am here! That is why we are all here at once! We unite our powers, Chaos, Rychis, three of us, three times the power.”
“We’d need twelve times the power to touch that thing.”
“So we chisel away at it!” Wick gets right in Chaos’s face. “You are not going to let that thing stop you. We will camp out here and cut away at that fucking Wall every single day, afternoon, and night until it is crumbled to nothing. We will burrow beneath the ground if we have to. We are returning to the Last City of Atlas at long last!”
Deep inside him, the slap of mental encouragement from Chief Korah Cagemont is felt all over again. The memory of all those long nights surfaces when she made him focus his Legacy on that portal point outside Gaea where Metal Hand’s victims appeared. Her drive becomes his drive right now as he stands before his comrades.
Chaos meets Wick’s eyes, and at once, there is fire in them.
“Yes,” encourages Wick, nodding, then nodding more heartily. “Yes, yes, yes. That’s it. Bring it, Chaos. Bring all of it.”
The boy steps forward. He is exhausted. He still limps. Both his cheeks are flushed, his dark hair pasted to his forehead from sweat.
Then Chaos lifts his hands to the dim blue evening sky.
And the sky slowly begins to burn red.
Wick, Ferra, Rychis, and Puras look up, their eyes filling with the red light in a mixture of fear and awe.
Chaos shuts his eyes tightly, lets out a belly-shaking war cry, then brings his fists out in front of him and screams.
There is one flash of blinding red and white light.
It crackles over them and chases its way into the distance, blood red and dazzling white all at once, and the world fills with fire and the scream of furious, unfiltered power.
The red bolt strikes the Wall right in its center, then is gone as fast as it came, the warm red sky swallowed again by the deep blue.
The five of them stare at the tiny, barely visible scratch the red bolt made, the rest of the Wall unaffected, unmoving, uncaring. Like a needle of red poking at a thick, dark fabric, the mark Chaos made stares back at them. It’s but one measly tap of a smith’s hammer into the middle of a large block of cold, indifferent metal and stone.
“It’s but a first step,” says Wick, turning his thoughts into words. A first step of ten thousand, his mind adds in frustration.
Rychis, however, is not frustrated by the effort. He rises off the ground at once and starts heading off across the plain.
“Rychis!” calls out Wick. “Where are you going?”
“Closer,” is all Rychis answers, pounding a fist of one hand into the palm of the other, and at that, the ground beneath all their feet trembles and shakes with the threat of his growing power.
“But the Wall!” Wick cries out. “It could fall over on you! Come back and let us try striking it down from a distance first!”
Rychis, ever stubborn and too full of valor, heads on, heedless.
Chaos shoots Wick a worried look. “Should I keep going?”
That fucking Rychis is going to get himself crushed. He bites his lip, frustrated. Then, with a sudden urgency, he turns to Chaos. “We can’t risk it. At this rate, the red bolts would take us many days more before we’re ever through. Maybe we can use the Wall’s strength …”
“Perhaps, for once, Rychis actually has the right of it,” mutters Ferra, catching on. “If we can’t break down the Wall …”
“… then we can burrow beneath it,” picks up Puras, “like four tiny white wyrms!” Then he shudders, his own analogy scaring him.
“And I can still chisel away at it with my light, to coax the earth into opening up for us,” decides Chaos.
The boys turn to the daunting Wall. Determination burning within them, the four hurry ahead after Rychis. The closer they get, the more Wick feels the power of the earth grow beneath his feet.
0331 Arrow
Three days have passed and no bright yellow-bearded soul has returned to the house to ask them in an indignant tone why they are here. Three long and tiresome days have passed with Arrow lying on the most luxurious couch in Atlas. Three days Ivy keeps tending to his needs, cooking small meals in the lavish kitchen, and feeding the both of them. She explored the mansion several times over, but keeps saying she feels uncomfortable invading another’s privacy. She said a day or two ago that the man had a wife and child, both of whom fled during the Madness, according to a journal he kept tucked under his pillow. The last entry was a week ago. The man described a deep and painful misery in him, a misery that could no longer be ignored.
And still Arrow has not answered her question.
Is it true? she’d asked him. Is what Pratty said true …?
Ivy brings two bowls of soup. She sets one upon the short glass table in front of the couch, then takes a seat in a chair across from him. She brings one spoonful after another to her lips, blows upon it, then slurps delicately. Arrow watches her eat half her soup before he finally picks up his own spoon.
“Do you think he took his own life?” asks Ivy, forlorn.
Arrow shrugs for an answer, then takes another spoonful of soup. Silence swells between them. It is late evening, and the sun has already set far enough to pull a deep blue blanket over the sky.
“I think he did.” She sighs. “He was sad his wife and child chose not to stick it out during the Madness. They were scared of Impis. They ran with a mob of others to the slums. For all he knows, they are hiding among the sixth, or the Core, or wherever the Lifted we
nt. He wishes he’d gone with them. He was incredibly sad.”
Arrow says nothing. He slurps upon another spoonful.
“Do you think Pratty is dead?”
His next spoonful stops halfway to his mouth at her words. His eyes meet hers. Indeed, she’s said the cruel yet honest thing to catch his attention at last. It worked.
After a moment: “I don’t know,” he softly replies.
“I don’t think he is,” Ivy decides, ever the optimist. “There were many who came to his immediate aid. He suffered a shot to his leg, if it looked that way, and a great fall from a roof. A shot to the leg is a bit like a knife wound, is it not? A …” She glances down at her soup, second-guessing herself. “A … very deep knife wound.”
Arrow says nothing more, and after another comment or two about the bearded man, Ivy decides to say nothing more either. Then two empty bowls are cleaned up, and the house falls to silence again.
Arrow pulls out the cup-shaped charm and takes to idly tossing it in his hand, a habit he’s started to pass the time on this couch.
By that middle-night, Arrow decides to be brave. He rises off the couch, alone, and slowly walks around the house. He must do it a step at a time, and he is always next to a wall or a counter or a thing to hold on to, lest he lose his strength or his legs give way. When he was this sick back at the Lesser house, he very nearly fell down the narrow stairs four times, catching the railing to save himself.
He finds Ivy near the front of the house where she is staring out a large window at the wide, smooth streets of the Lifted City. The house is so silent that the soft shuffle of Arrow’s feet is heard, and so she turns, stirred out of her thoughts.
“It is true,” Arrow finally tells her.
She doesn’t seem to react. She only stands there with a plain, nearly vacant expression on her pretty face.
“Did you hear me?” Arrow clears his throat. “I said it’s true.”
“Alright.”
Arrow frowns. “‘Alright’ …? Surely you’ve more to say than just ‘Alright’? Surely you’ve a question or a problem or—”