by Daryl Banner
It’s the reign of madness. There will never be a King or Queen again, not while I’m alive. “There is nothing proper about a Sanctum trial. My husband Forge—”
“Is dead.”
Her mouth opens, stunned by his bluntness. She finds she can’t speak for a proper moment, staring at his eyes and seeing nothing. Then the minute passes and she says, “I … I know that is … is likely.”
Gabel swallows hard. A look of pain seems to cross his bright, green gaze. Does he regret his words?
“But,” Ellena goes on, “I also heard that the Keep collapsed. And I also heard it didn’t, and the prisoners all killed each other. And yet I also heard the Mad King set them free. I’ve heard a hundred things. They all could be lies. He could still be alive. Gabel, I—”
“Sir,” he corrects her. “You will address me as sir.”
Ellena stares at him hard, unable to say anything else suddenly. Gabel stares back, his gaze drifting to her mouth, then to her chest, and finally back to her eyes, appearing twice as fierce as before.
“Then allow me to make it clear to you,” he says, and his voice is softer. “The Keep is no more. The occupants of the Keep are dead. All of them.” Gabel’s jaw tightens. “Your husband included.”
Every pinch of resolve Ellena had mustered is gone. And so is he, she decides, her body afloat in a sea of doubt. Forgemon is gone. The love of my life … is truly gone. Perhaps she knew that already.
“Ten,” she repeats back. “Sir.”
“Twelve.” Gabel gives her a nod, then turns to leave.
“One request,” she says quickly, the sound of her voice stopping him. “Please … s-sir.”
He turns just his head, lifting one blunt eyebrow.
She drops the gown back into the basin and lifts her hands, which have been locked into two thick gloves that come up to her elbows. She’s been forced to wear them since the very day she was arrested, months ago. “These,” she mutters miserably. “They are inhumane. And not to mention humiliating. Please. My hands are pruning from moisture within them. I cannot work as efficiently with these on. I beg you. I can’t even use the toilet or bathe alone because that stupid tree trunk of a woman has to supervise and help me. Did you hear me right? She helps me use the toilet and bathe. Do you even know how humiliating that is? How degrading …?”
“Her name is Bee. You will address her as—”
“I don’t give a damn what her name is. I want to be able to shower like a normal, decent, respectable human being. I can’t even feed myself. Am I really to be treated less than an animal? Am I really deserving of such … such … such disregard?”
“Perhaps you should note that assigning Guardian to watch over you and feed you and bathe you is a rather enormous amount of regard. It’s a downright nuisance at times.”
“If I’m such a nuisance, free my hands so that you don’t have to keep feeding me like some caged animal. Release my hands so I can work with them … with my actual hands.”
Gabel makes no expression on his face. He simply keeps his eyes locked upon hers, not a word escaping his full, stern lips.
So Ellena pleads further. “Don’t you understand the limit of my Legacy yet? I have no physical wounds. That equates to me being unarmed. My hands are not dangerous. I am not dangerous. Please, Gab—Please, sir, let me have my hands back.”
Firmly gripping the handle of the door, he purses his lips once more, tasting that sweet thing again, then says, “I like feeding you.”
The answer startles Ellena, casting a bolt of excitement—and a shiver of fear—through her system. Her lips open and close, unsure what to say to that.
Gabel straightens his posture, then nods astutely and says, “I’ll be back in two hours’ time with your next meal.” Abruptly, he closes the door behind him.
Ellena stares at the door, lost in a whirlwind of feelings, none of which she can process. I said physical wounds, she realizes, because as far as emotional ones, there are a plethora. The thought goes unvoiced as Ellena distractedly returns to her work, with clumsy, gloved hands that tediously slow her process.
Two hours later, just as promised, Gabel is sitting before her at the rickety metal table by the machines, feeding her spoonful after spoonful of tasteless vegetable mash. She stares ponderingly into his strong eyes as he slowly feeds her, his full lips set in a permanent, unspeaking half-pucker that almost looks like a scowl of frustration.
And in those infinite green eyes, which focus so deeply upon his every movement, upon every bite he gifts her, Ellena can see the anguish buried deep within. It is an anguish she knows, with the knowledge that her husband is, without a doubt, truly gone. Ellena suspects she’d already come to terms with that possibility long ago, and perhaps that is why there are no tears left in her to cry. We both have the kinds of wounds that can’t be touched by a healing hand.
0145 Athan
There is madness in his mind. And darkness. And anger.
But the love is stronger. ‘The Marshal of Peace must be a man of peace,’ his brother Radley once told him over two crystals of lemon’s tears before he joined the King’s Research, ‘and how can I be a man of peace when I don’t have a girlfriend to suck my cock?’ The joke had made Athan laugh so hard because it was so uncharacteristic of his kind, proper, well-meaning brother. He knew if Radley met a girl to fulfill his heart, she’d be more than just a mouth for the toy in his pants. Love, that’s what Athan remembers the most of all. He can’t mourn his family yet because he doesn’t truly feel like he lost them. They’re still in the sky, he tells himself, feasting on delicacies and chatting about the coming turn of the throne. Just like the time after he fell from Lord’s Garden, he’s simply on a vacation to the slums.
The sight of their cold, dead faces that fateful night hits him.
A flash of his brother’s lifeless eyes staring at nothing from the floor. His sister’s head resting on her half-eaten food.
Athan shakes it all away, frustrated with his mind. Love, he tells himself. Love is immortal. All he feels when he thinks of them is love. Even Janna loved him in her own cold sort of offputting way. And he loved the Eastly Gym—the smell of the machines, the clean pull of air that would refresh him no matter how sweaty he got, the flash of sun in the windows while he lifted and grunted with the weights.
And the coin he let loose over the ledge every day.
His dead father on the floor, and his dead mother.
The ringing silence in the dining hall that night. The death.
Death, death, death, death.
He did meet someone, Athan reminds himself suddenly, thinking of his brother. He met someone to fulfill his heart, even if she never got the chance to. She almost fulfilled his heart, too. Her name is Ruena Netheris, and she was almost Queen of Atlas.
Almost. That’s a theme that’s pervaded so much of Athan’s life. Almost a slum boy, but not quite, since everyone at Rain still sees him as a Lifted Boy. Almost a Lifted, but even his own family saw something wrong in him, something strange and dirty and touched.
The sight of his cold dead father. His brother’s lifeless eyes.
Janna and her half-eaten dinner.
Almost powerful, Athan pushes on, forcing his brain to focus and not wander into the darkness. Everyone in Rain has accepted that his Legacy is some sort of strong, otherworldly sense of survival, but no one can quite explain what, precisely, he can do. Panic attacks, Athan decides. My Legacy is anxiety.
And he remembers how his heart raced that night when he found them all dead. His heart raced like mad and his eyes focused to needlepoint precision. Death, death, death …
“Your boy’s asleep?”
Athan looks up to find the electric blue eyelids of Victra at the door, staring at him from across the dim front room in which he’d claimed a spot by the window. He thought he could find some time to be alone, since everyone else was in the food room eating and Wick was cuddled away in the closet, asleep. He enjoys cuddling with Wick for a
time while he sleeps, but six to seven hours does get quite long to endure on a daily basis, and sometimes Athan cannot keep the darker, heavier thoughts from invading. He’d slipped from Wick’s arms and left him alone in the closet, retreating to this space by the window in the front room where no one goes. He enjoys the company of all these abandoned desks and cabinets that likely were used by employees of some long-abandoned slum business.
“Yes,” Athan finally answers.
“What are you doing here in the dark, Lifted Boy?”
Athan tries to smile. If he’s completely honest, he’s furiously tired of being called that. I’ll never be a Lifted Boy again. But will I ever truly be a slum boy? And if I’m neither, then what the hell am I?
“Oh, nothing, Victra. I was just …” He glances out the window, searching for some innocent lie.
“If you want to be an asset here,” Victra says, her voice hard, “then you need to be there for Wicky so that he doesn’t have to carry the weight of both of you.”
Athan lifts his eyes to hers. For a second, he wonders if she’s joking. Then he remembers who he’s talking to. “I carry my weight,” he protests lightly.
“Gandra won’t say it because she’s too weak,” Victra mutters, crossing the room, “and Yellow won’t say it because he’s too kind, but I am neither weak nor kind. I’m just honest.” She stops in front of him and leans against the window. “We’re waiting for you to crack.”
“Crack?”
“All of us. Every single one of us. Juston, he thinks you keep from breaking down on the daily. Prat, he’s afraid to talk to you because he feels guilty for interrogating you about the Lifted City so long ago when he was first making his maps.”
“Oh, I didn’t mind. Really, I—”
“Lionis probably resents you that his father is stowed away in the Keep for life. Even Wicky too, maybe, though I doubt he’d ever in a million years admit that.”
“I …” Athan swallows hard, trying to find a way to refute any of her claims.
“We’ve all had our losses, Athan Broadmore. Did I weep for my dead family? My sister? Do I push through my days longing for what was, for what is, and for what could have been?” She folds her arms tightly and narrows her eyes. “We’re warriors here, Athan. We don’t wait for the world to fix our problems. We are the fix.”
“I’m not waiting for anyone to fix my problems. I’m really sorry if you … if everyone thinks that I’m just … here. Or not pulling my own weight.” Athan considers making a light joke to diffuse all the tension about the Eastly Gym and how very practiced he is at pulling weights, but can’t seem to let it fly off his tongue, his stomach twisted into a knot.
Victra sighs. “There was a time when you were so ready to be rid of that life upstairs,” she muses coolly. “Now you got your wish. Losing loved ones is sort of a slum rite of passage. Really, you—”
“Rone said that once.”
The name instantly reels her eyes upon Athan. At first, he fears he should have held his tongue. Then Victra’s gaze softens and her posture slackens, as if the name somehow crippled her.
Athan tries to smile again, his lips pulling tightly. “He said that to me—or maybe it was to Wick—the day my family died. He said it was a slum rite of passage, losing the ones you love. That I have the slum life now, or something like that. It was the last day either of us saw him.” Athan swallows, thinking of it.
Victra seems to consider him, her breathing steady and soft. She doesn’t say anything. Athan wonders if the two of them—Victra and Rone—were ever truly a couple, or if they were just convenient sex partners who enjoyed the company of each other’s stiffening private parts and shared swigs of chemical.
“Do you think of Rone a lot?” Athan bothers to ask.
“No.” Whether it’s a lie or not, Athan can’t tell; Victra isn’t the easiest person to read, hiding the most of her feelings behind those blue-colored eyelids of hers.
“I think about him often, mostly because I knew how close he and Wick were.” A sudden gust of nightly wind pushes against the window, causing it to groan. The two of them glance at it, their attention pulled. “I have to believe he’s still out there and doing okay. Wick doesn’t. Wick thinks he’s dead.”
“Rone? Pfft.” Victra smirks. “He’s invincible, didn’t you know?”
Athan stares at his hands, thinking of Legacies and lies he tells himself. “No one’s invincible.”
“Just give Rone a jug of chemical and he’s as good as godly.”
“He had one last swallow left,” Athan remembers, thinking of something Wick sleepily told him one night several weeks ago in the closet. “He was saving it for when he found his sister Cintha.”
“That’s a swallow he’s never like to take.”
Athan studies her for a moment as she stares out the window forlornly, her blonde curls covering half her face. Then, chasing a sudden impulse, he rises from his creaky office chair and comes toward her. Victra stares at him like he’s lost his mind as he wraps his arms around her.
“What are you doing?” she asks stiffly.
“Just let it happen,” he mumbles into her shoulder, hugging her.
She doesn’t quite return the hug, her arms pressed to her sides and her body as rigid as iron. “I don’t do hugs.”
But she lets him. And for a solid minute or so, the two stand there in the dim room by the window, half-embraced in each other’s arms, lost in thoughts of their passing loves and things that could have been, and things that’ll never be.
An hour later, Athan is back in the closet. Wick still sleeps, his soft, deep breaths filling the cramped space. Athan carefully climbs under the thick woolen blanket Wick clutches, then slips an arm around his slum boy’s slender waist, getting comfortable.
Radley’s cold, dead eyes. Janna’s face in her food.
His mother. His father.
I don’t ever want to lose you, Anwick of the ninth. He squeezes his boy tightly, then closes his eyes and rests his face against his head, his nose buried in Wick’s brown, messy hair.
0146 Mercy
She kneels at the foot of the statue. She bows her head, brings two clenched fists to her forehead, then recites, “Sister of Want, may we always stay wary of our hungers. Sister of Chaos, may we always know the consequence of our hungers. Sister of Dreams, may we always employ the wisdom to overcome them.”
Twenty-nine other voices recite the words with her, all knelt at the stone feet of their own miniature statues. They each bring a hand to their left shoulder, their right shoulder, then their chest, and in a chorus of soft kissing, each woman brings their fingers to their lips, then presses them to the statue.
This is how every morning begins now.
Mercy and the women make their rounds. Twice, an elderly person vomits on her clean robe. Twice. There is a kid in the stone chambers who won’t stop crying. A woman begs for anyone to listen to her woes, then proceeds to pour out stories of the demise of her house when the Finger Of Madness struck it down. Mercy heard the story a hundred times from a hundred people. She’s numb to seeing their tears, especially when she hasn’t shed a single one of her own in countless days. Two screaming men are brought in with burns all over their bodies from yet another instance of the red lightning, then die holding each other’s hands not thirty minutes after being received. Mercy stares at their lifeless bodies and can’t bring herself to feel anything. She sees Dran as one of the men and herself as the other, holding each other’s hand, dying together in a bright, burning flash of red, angry light. There are worse ways to die, she decides.
Three hours later, she gets a question. “Where are you from?”
Mercy looks up from her bowl of soup. Ten of the women are gathered in the dining hall for the midday meal. It’s the one next to her, a frizzy-haired lady with gorgeous eyes and full lips who might be Mercy’s age or perhaps a year or two her elder. She’s a nosy one, constantly asking questions ever since Mercy donned the grey robe of the
Sisters Of Sisters.
“We aren’t supposed to discuss that,” says Mercy quietly.
“What’s your grievous sin?” the woman asks anyway. “We all have them. It’s no secret that none of us are pure.”
Mercy continues sipping her soup, most of her face hidden by the hooded grey cloak she wears—the same exact one as the other twenty-nine Sisters Of Sisters—so she outright ignores the nosy one at her side. The woman sitting across from Mercy, an older lady with a hook nose and a twinkle in her eye, winks with appreciation. No conversation here is private, Mercy knows. The idiot at my side will be first to learn that, and first to be excused from the Sisters Of Sisters.
Mercy isn’t so sure how long she’ll last here. Yes, she gets free shelter and free food. With the slums turned upside-down as they are, maybe it’s worth it to keep up the façade. All she needs to do to stay is not kill people—the opposite of what my life’s known thus far.
But it’s the nights that make Mercy want to crawl out of her skin and run away from this place. When the sun sets through the tiny hole of a window in her room, flashes of every murder she’s committed—and some she didn’t—cut through her mind.
The kind lady who lured her into joining the Sisters Of Sisters, the sweet thing with twinkly eyes who sits across from her each meal, she came to Mercy’s room one night and caught the look of panic on her face. Soothingly, she explained to Mercy that her past makes no difference here. No one’s does. One is absolved of all sin when they don the grey robe and greyer cloak. Grey, grey, grey. Neither black with hunger, nor white with want. Grey with balance, the kind lady told her. Wear it and let it shield you from temptations.
Temptations? To what? Slit another poor Guardian boy’s throat to secure his silence? Give another poison kiss to the Warden of the ninth, killing him in a fit of pleasure? Fall in love with another boy named Dran with black smeared around his eyes?