by Daryl Banner
He knows he isn’t supposed to, since he’s hardly recovered as fast as they said he would after the poison wrecked his muscles, turned his skin into sandpaper, and stole away his perfect vision and voice, but he gently swings a leg over the edge of the hospital bed anyway, testing it on the ground. It supports me. He brings his other leg around, ignoring a severe pinch of pain that runs up his thigh and makes a thunderstorm of aches in his belly to match the bigger one outside. Both feet on the ground, he braces himself for precisely five seconds before lifting himself off the bed.
Then he collapses.
Fuck. Before even acknowledging the pain, he worries first if anyone heard him. He cringes, clenching shut his blurry eyes and listening intently for approaching footsteps. After a short handful of seconds, he decides that he’s safe, then slowly begins the process of pulling himself back onto his wobbly, weak, stiff-as-stone legs. He can’t stand not being able to move as he used to, easily and freely.
The window, he decides, his goal, his destination. Just make it to the damned window.
He pushes one foot, sliding it along the tiled floor. Good, one step. He pulls the other, sliding it similarly. Another. He keeps a grip on the wall for balance, running his fingers along the dusty surface of a shelf. Keep going. His foot catches on something sticky on the floor, but he pushes past it, at last making it to the window with only a slight shortness of breath and needles of pain poking all up and down his thigh and his right arm, which took the force of his fall.
Through the window, he sees a blurry landscape of the eleventh ward. They are a train ride and a half from the Guardian dormitories, so the Forsaken Ward is not visible. He’d so grown used to the sight of that outside the window of his old dorm, but finds he doesn’t quite miss it. He squints, trying to make out more than just vague shapes of buildings and streets and unpowered railways.
I have the sight of a hundred-year-old and I’m not even a fourth that age. Even if the window itself wasn’t blurred by rain, Halves would still have difficulty. His eyes are not fully recovered. Doctor Turtle said he’d get his eyesight back in a matter of months, but a “matter of months” has passed and he still can’t read the chart that hangs on the wall across from his bed not ten feet in front of him. I’ll never get it back, Halves knows. They are lying to comfort me. That’s all the men and women of Eleven Wings have to offer: words of comfort as hollow and useless as my voiceless throat.
The shuffling of feet startles him, but when he hears no voice, he knows who it is and that he’s safe from a scolding.
“Not a pleasant thing, this rain.”
The sound of Ennebal’s voice is smooth, deep, strong and full and commanding. And seductive, Halves is almost ashamed to admit.
She crosses the room and leans against the opposite side of the window, staring out with him. Halves can’t help but bring his eyes to her thick, womanly form, even if a lot of it is blurry. He can still pick out the shape of her wide, plush, sexy lips and her too-close eyes that stare out the glass with a severity he knows so well.
But the joy turns sour so fast. How can he possibly trust her after hearing what might have transpired—or might still transpire—between his brother Aleks and her? The word of warning came from his dead partner Pace, and now that he’s gone, there’s no chance of further explanation or evidence. Yet still, Halves can’t think of any reason to doubt it. He is broken; his brother is not. He was sent on missions with Pace; his brother was sent on missions with her.
“Just returned from the mess out there,” she murmurs dryly. “Aleks was almost taken in the head by a large man with an iron barrel. I shot a neon into his belly and now he’s a glowing large man, and the barrel fell upon his own head. He’s been apprehended.”
Halves smirks, listening.
“But if I’m being totally honest,” she goes on, shifting her heavy, booted feet, “I’m worried that we’re making a muck of all the chaos instead of fixing it. I mean, without a Keep or a Cloud to send our arrested, we’re already near capacity. Rooms to keep the criminals, rooms to keep the wounded … How are we supposed to make a life of it here if we’re filling up our beds with brigands and cripples?”
Halves flinches, his eyes flitting back to the window, jabbed in the gut by her words.
“I didn’t mean you,” she blurts, sounding annoyed that Halves appears hurt. “Obviously we need you. You’re one of us. And once you’re better, you’ll be back out on that street at my side.”
Halves opens his mouth, forces out a word. “I …” But just the one tiny syllable sends razorblades and fireballs down his throat, and the effort is ninety times more agonizing than trying to cross a room. “Am …” he persists, an army of knives trying to burst from his neck with each word he pushes out. Already, he feels like his ears and neck are going to explode from all the exertion.
But Ennebal stops him by gripping his wrist, pulling herself in, and pressing her mouth to his. He forgets everything—what he was angry about, what’s happening between her and Aleks in the other rooms of the Eleven Wings, the state of the world, the streets, the sky—and he forgets what he was even trying to say.
Ennebal ends the kiss abruptly, her face close to his. This close up, he can see the shimmer of her eyes and the quirk of her smart, knowing lips. “Stop trying to speak,” she warns him, her voice deep and steady. “You know damn well that any word you say might rip open your throat and send all that poison into your belly, killing you. Doctor Turtle said so. No speaking, Halves.”
He presses his lips together, annoyed and furious and turned on, all in the same moment.
She sighs. “Are all you Lesser boys so damn stubborn?”
Halves’ eyes are drawn back to the window when a flash of lightning catches his attention, arresting his heart for a second. It was white light, that of natural storms. It wasn’t the red light. You’re safe.
With the blur of shapes through the glass, he can almost picture his home in the ninth ward. He and his brother Aleks had always been friendly rivals growing up, but then they hit a certain age when girls became more interesting and suddenly everything became a matter of life and death. After months of chasing the same girl, Aleks and Halves finally made a bet: the one who won a race would get the girl. They didn’t seem to care which one of them the girl herself preferred, too incensed by the rivalry. Aleks used his Legacy of heavy feet to give his every stride a longer pull, making his footfalls carry weight only when airborne to lend himself momentum. Aleks had gained such a lead that he stopped, tauntingly, and let Halves catch up. When Halves was in the lead, Aleks utilized his talent once again to push himself towards his inevitable victory.
But Halves was furious by the mockery. Just as Aleks was about to close the distance between them, Halves stood in front of his brother and stopped cold in his tracks. Aleks realized his brother’s plan too late, his eyes flashing with terror as he crashed into Halves, who did not budge—as solid as a brick wall.
Aleks broke his arm in three places that day. He dislocated his shoulder too, and broke four ribs. Their mother Ellena could only absorb so many of the wounds before she, too, was bent over in pain. Forge rushed the pair of them to the ninth ward hospital, Lionis left at home to watch over little Anwick and Link. Ellena recovered after simply an hour’s rest, thanks to her Legacy, but Aleks’s situation was far more dire. Halves overheard his dad being told that it was very possible Aleks would not be able to pursue his dream of enlisting in Guardian, since some of his wounds might not heal completely.
Halves didn’t feel as much remorse as he thought he should. He just watched like a ghost from the hallway, listening to the noise and the business of the hospital, and he wondered why he wasn’t as sorry as a brother in his position ought to be. Wasn’t he responsible? Didn’t he do this to his brother? I just wanted to win, he had thought to himself, staring at his broken brother in his medicine-induced state of unconsciousness. Halfway through the race, it wasn’t even about the girl anymore.
&n
bsp; It’d been a race their whole lives. Many races, over and over. Do I even care about Ennebal, Halves wonders, bringing his blurry stare back to her face, or is she just another race I’m trying to win?
She moves suddenly quite close to him, then slips a hand down his pants. He sucks in a breath at the touch of her icy fingers. “Your voice may be broken,” she says, “but your other parts are not.” And then she begins a race of her own within his pants, her rough hand working his tender cock.
Halves grunts under her touch. Even just the grunt is a knife in his throat, giving him cause to wince in anguish.
Ennebal stops moving her hand. “Stop?”
He shakes his head desperately, eyes clamped shut.
“Keep going?”
He nods, and so she does.
0142 Wick
The room is so tense, the innocent buzz of a fly’s wing could end someone’s life.
Gandra is seated at the head of the table with Wick to her left and Lionis to her right. Against the wall in the dark of the room where the lantern’s dancing kiss doesn’t quite reach, Athan, Juston, Victra, and Yellow stand, poised and ready.
Everyone’s eyes are trained on the other end of the table where the three curious women sit. To the left, a skinny girl with viper eyes and a sword belted to her back. To the right, a larger woman with a plump chin and sagging breasts, her eyes aglow with the gorgeous luminescent pink color of a Guardian’s neon gun.
And between them is perched a spunky girl with a smart, cocky smirk on her elfin face. She could pass for a pretty boy, her hair short, choppy, and green and her chest flat as a board. Red vine-like tattoos run up the left side of her face like poison bramble.
Her name is Quin.
“Despite our clear differences in opinion,” states Gandra, tilting her frail head and casting her frayed, tangled curls to one side, “it still remains a fact that rogues from your ward are assaulting our people and thieving from us.”
“I know nothing of it,” Quin replies lightly.
“Both of our wards are enduring this madness,” Gandra goes on, ignoring the denial. “And I mean the madness from upstairs.”
“A terrible thing,” Quin agrees flippantly.
“This siege with the sky is indeterminate. It could last but a week more. It could last for a decade. Usurpers have been known to hold a throne—even in times of chaos—for impressively long reigns. You’d know that if you studied your Histories.”
Quin considers her for a moment, squinting. “You sound just like my old, fussy professor in the seventh.”
Gandra, formerly Professor Frey of the ninth herself, squints right back at the spunky girl. “I take your jab for a compliment.”
“It was meant as one,” she insists, smirking confidently. That smirk never leaves her face, no matter what’s being discussed. Wick wonders for a moment if she wears that same face in bed when she’s got a lover between her legs. “Sadly, we Wall Breakers know nothing of these rogues and thieves you so complain about. Have you considered that you might have thieves among yourselves? Little sixth warder rogues, lashing out at the madness, lashing out against their stuffy, insufferable parents? Not my problem.”
Gandra smirks, leaning forward, unbothered by the girl’s cocky demeanor. “If we want to survive this siege, I think it a smarter tack to work together and find a harmony.”
“Harmony.” Quin chuckles at that word. “Do you know what our harmony sounds like? Growling stomachs and dirty clothes. Overflowing toilets. Sewage and trash lining the streets. There’s a reason they call us the Skinny, more than just our ward being the shape of a long neck between the shoulders of the sixth and eighth. You want to talk about working together?” Quin tilts her head. “How about we talk about the food and resources you’re drowning in over there in your cushy sixth ward palace?”
“We are willing to trade,” says Gandra, “but not to donate.”
“Can’t find it in your heart to share with your lowly neighbors?” Quin taunts her. “Telling us to starve through your fattened cheeks? I took you to be a far more generous woman than that.”
“A survivor is not generous.”
“A survivor is also not stupid,” Quin returns. “It’s an open world now. Your pocket is my pocket is my people’s pocket.”
Gandra’s back straightens. “So you confess to and condone the thievery?”
“You are no judge or Queen or Council,” snorts Quin. “We don’t answer to anyone but ourselves and Three Goddess.”
“You certainly will answer for your crimes,” Gandra counters, losing some of her temper. “Need I remind you there’s a man in this very room who could make you forget your very name?”
“Oh, I know all about the Yellow man,” says Quin cockily, not even dignifying Yellow with a glance in his direction. “Everyone’s heard about the Yellow man and his memory games. The one that concerns me is the white one.”
“White?”
“The one dressed all in white, head to toe, who singlehandedly united wards one, two, and three. They call it the Coalition.”
Gandra’s eyes narrow. It’s clear this information is new to her, which gives Wick’s heart a jump. New information is never good information; Gandra’s supposed to know all.
“He’s giving birth to an all new Atlas,” the spunky girl goes on. “He’s even appointed his very own Marshals. But I trust it not.” Quin quirks an eyebrow at the others in the room warningly. “And neither should you. His new Atlas is an Atlas that only benefits him. All of us are merely in his way.”
“I’ve never heard of this White,” mutters Gandra skeptically.
“His name is not White. They call him the Slum King.”
Gandra finds that to be the most amusing thing ever, snorting with derision. “Marking himself after Atricia Sunsong? Seriously? And he leads all three wards without a cloud of mockery following him? I doubt that very much.”
“Doubt all you like. Doubt will not make him disappear.”
“And I suspect, neither will my doubt in you,” finishes Gandra.
Wick doesn’t realize he’s gripping the table with his fingers so tightly until they begin to cramp, alerting him. His eyes dart into the shadows searching for Athan, who he finds staring at the green-haired girl with an odd mixture of pain and indifference creasing his face. He wears that expression a lot lately.
“If there is, in fact, rogues and brigands in my ward,” the girl presses on, “then perhaps they can be … placated. I suspect they are impeding your passage to the rest of Atlas, too. We can sniff out a Hightower any day of the week, I’m quite sure. You stick out like a neon-struck chest here in the lowly seventh.”
“It has become quite a nuisance,” Gandra admits, “seeing as we share pockets and all. An open world, you said we live in?”
“Not so open for you lately.” Quin’s smile grows tighter. “You’re in quite the pincer it seems, old lady. The Coalition whispers at your back, and brigands taunt you at your front.”
“I find the arrangement rather cozy,” Gandra replies with mild humor. “Besides, we’ve made out well passing through the Core to access the other wards instead of the seventh.”
“The Core? Really? Provided you aren’t crushed by a falling piece of the Lifted City on your way, that path only grants you easy access to the ward opposite you. Is that your secret source?” she asks mockingly. “The eleventh, where the only establishment left with electricity and supplies is Eleven Wings? I doubt you’re chummy with the Guardian there. I hear the whole of them keep headquarters there in that very hospital. No, even those righteous fools wouldn’t share as little as a linen bandage, I suspect. How about the Forsaken Ward with its dead Kings? Perhaps your secret plan is to trade food and supplies with … with ghosts?”
The comment earns her a chuckle of amusement from the skinny one to her left. The plump one to her right only stares unblinkingly with her deep, glowing eyes. Wick watches them both, his stomach turning with the frustration that he can�
�t just reach over the table and turn one of their Legacies against them. For one, he doesn’t know what they are and would need a second to experiment. Secondly, Gandra has expressly forbidden him to reveal his power to others just yet. ‘A smart woman brandishes a big blade, and keeps her deadliest dagger cloaked,’ she had said. Wick supposed she meant him to feel flattered by the words, but they only annoyed him. I am not a deadly dagger; I wield deadly daggers.
“We know you’re responsible for the burglaries and looting,” Gandra fires back, incensed at once. “I don’t need your confession to know it. My one and only purpose here is to discover what, exactly, you want, and how we might placate your roguish selves so that you are less of an irritation for our operations.”
Quin leans back lazily, all five-foot-nothing of her. She is clearly amused by Gandra’s loss of composure.
“What is it you want?” Gandra finally asks. “Our conversation may prove more fruitful if you are direct. I do have other things I’d like to do with my life than sit in this room chatting with children, so help me. I already have enough greys on my head.”
Quin gives one short chuckle at that, then unfolds her hands. “Alright. You want peace? I suppose I can do my part in making your folk’s lives more … peaceful. Stopping the robberies, the thieves, the hindrances … but in exchange, I want a share of your resources from the Mechanoid Mines.”
“Metal?” Gandra lifts an eyebrow. “I thought your people were starving? Do rats eat metal for breakfast?”
“You wanted to strike a deal, that’s our deal. Metal for peace.”
Gandra frowns. “Metal. And for what purpose? You want to make weapons? You have a deal with the metalshops of the ninth? You’ll need access to them to make any decent use of the metal.”