Outlier: Reign Of Madness

by Daryl Banner

  When the first one emerges from the shadow, Gabel’s piercing green eyes find hers.

  “We have to relocate, Lesser,” he tells her, his square jaw set so tensely, a dimple Ellena never gave time to notice pops out of his cheek. “Can you be trusted, or must I shackle you in chains?”

  Ellena doesn’t respond, lost in his eyes and feeling the wind in her hair.

  The other figure approaches, the thin-as-a-plank woman named Bee with the long, feline eyes. “She’ll be a hindrance in chains. Slow, loud, and inconvenient.”

  Gabel doesn’t turn to acknowledge his partner, keeping his eyes trained on Ellena with an intensity that borders between distrustful and lustful. Or maybe it’s just the way Ellena hopes to be seen, her lip suddenly caught between her teeth as she waits for him to decide to trust her.

  And he does. “No chains. If you so much as blink without my express permission …”

  But he says nothing more. Perhaps he realizes they don’t have many options, not without a secure holding unit, or a functioning Kingship, or a Keep, or backup Guardian … unless there is something else that Ellena is not aware of.

  “Let’s move,” orders Gabel with a lift of his chin.

  The boy keeps his gun aimed at Ellena as Gabel and Bee pick up the rear, ensuring Ellena moves with them. She gives an uncaring glance at the building she’s been kept in ever since her Legacy broke a boy into pieces. She won’t miss it … or the linens, or the soap, or those fucking dehumanizing gloves.

  Gabel comes to her hip as they walk, matching her stride, his handsome face pulled taut with stern guardedness, his full, watchful eyes upon her. Well, maybe there are some things I’d miss.

  0154 Arrow

  Yellow and Gandra stand over the body of the unconscious girl. The scent of smoke and ash still hovers in the room.

  “You disappoint me, Arrow.”

  He doesn’t look up from the floor as he listens to Gandra’s stern words.

  “We are in a dire situation here,” she tells him. “Two of our own are missing and you were not able to be reached. And you took no earpiece with you …? The very person who creates them?”

  He has no answer for her.

  He feels her staring at him with such cold intensity, it sounds like she’s not even breathing. “Instead,” she goes on, “you secretly took to a street in the sixth. For a reason you’ve yet to disclose. You felt it took priority over Rain. And you’ve returned … with this girl.”

  Arrow keeps his mouth in a tight line, his eyes unable to leave the girl on the floor. He keeps focusing on her hands for some reason. They’re so delicate and smooth, he wonders of this girl who’s his age, maybe a year more, maybe a year less. Why do I notice this?

  He can’t seem to focus on a single damn thing but that girl.

  “We’ve lost all communication with Wick and Juston,” Gandra states. “You need to regain that communication. Now. Get us ears in that warehouse, Arrow. Inspect your charms and find out why our boys aren’t back home yet.”

  Arrow nods, his eyes still stuck on the girl.

  “We will watch the girl,” says Yellow, and hearing his voice for the first time jerks Arrow from his hypnosis. He lifts his gaze to meet Yellow’s stony, watery ones. “Whoever she is,” he finishes.

  “Thank you,” murmurs Arrow so quietly, it’s nearly a whisper.

  When he turns to leave the room, he nearly crashes into the big, burly figure of the Warden of the sixth, whose eyes are heavy-lidded and whose stare is harder than any diamond in the Mechanoids. He has a beard that touches his chest, at which more hair sprouts, tufts of it coming out from the opened button-down shirt he wears, its sleeves loosely bunched at his elbows. He is a man who used to wear his clothes strictly buttoned, but everyone says that since the death of his wife, he has changed. There is warmth in his heart, but only ice in his eyes, and Arrow feels that none of that warmth is reserved for any of their like, regardless of the arrangement they’ve made.

  The Warden regards Arrow for precisely one and a half seconds before trudging into the room. “Yellow. A word.”

  Yellow nods. “Of course.” He gives Arrow an expectant glance.

  Arrow ducks away, and the door shuts at his back. He passes Victra and Prat at the table, who are poring over his hand-drawn maps to devise some plan that has to do with circumventing the “ever-cocky” Wall Breakers, despite the deal being in place that Gandra and the spritely Quin had secured. Arrow never met Quin in person, since he didn’t attend the actual meeting, but he heard every word from headquarters through his charms, and he was reading the area for suspicious activity too. Other than a couple of cats fighting in the alley, he heard nothing during the meeting.

  The way to his gadgets room is through the kitchen, in which he spots Lionis, but he isn’t cooking; the know-it-all is kicked back in an old metal chair with a book in his lap. Arrow’s passing through doesn’t inspire Lionis to look up or even flinch.

  When the door shuts behind him, he sits in the dark, only the dim green light from one of his machines illuminating a corner of the room in which he puts himself. After a quick check at the door to make sure no one’s eavesdropping, he slides his chair to the far end of the room and pulls a lemon-shaped paperweight from the drawer.

  With a rub of his thumbs, the metal paperweight speaks. “… my son,” comes the Warden’s voice from the charm. “I advised against it, but … Ryke needs a friend. He has a connection with her, and—”

  “Are you sure it’s wise to let it happen?” comes Yellow’s voice. A grunt of assent comes from Gandra, though she says nothing. “I know that you’re at the whim of his desires, but as his father—”

  “Ryke and this Quin person share a wound. They both lost their mothers. How can I take that from my son? Ryke has never looked happier.”

  “Not to be crass,” says Gandra, “but do you think Quin has really lost her mother?”

  “Of course,” retorts the Warden at once, a tone of offense in his deep bellow. “How else would—?”

  “I’ve dealt with her. Direct negotiations. She has a manipulative bone or two in her, I know it. She is … energetic, yes. She seems kind, yes. And I don’t doubt that her and your son, being so close in age—thirteen now, is he?—may get along. But until our deal was struck, her people were robbing yours. The very reason we negotiated with them at all was at your request, Warden. Do you not see it as a conflict of interest that the boy befriend an alleged leader of—?”

  “Quin is no leader. She was but an envoy of the mastermind, likely the crooked Warden of the seventh herself, if I trust it right. The King ought to have screamed in her face long ago, had I the way of it, or perhaps it’d be a more fitting farewell if Metal Hand touched her forehead and we could all enjoy her instant destruction. And the only conflict of interest I see is the very arrangement we have here. A known band of criminals—”

  “We are not criminals,” Gandra spits back at once.

  “Criminals—who I must hold within my protected tower, with my people, due to a threat that the Yellow man hangs over my head. To Sister’s depths with you and your conflict of interest.”

  “It is no threat,” adds Yellow calmly. “It was merely a favor.”

  “A favor, aye. We’ve different terms for it, then. Favor. Threat. Blackmail. I’m sure you’ll wipe my mind the second you’re finished with us, make me forget you cashed in on the favor already.” The Warden snorts, amused with himself. “Unless this is me paying back the favor a second time already. Or a third. How would I know?”

  “You wouldn’t,” teases Yellow in his dry voice, likely in a sad attempt to ease the tension of the room. “I suppose you’ll just have to trust me.”

  “A sick joke in that, too. To trust a group named Rain. My wife died in the rain, you know. Sick joke in that.” The Warden huffs, the sound of his feet shuffling on the floor coming through Arrow’s charm like a sighing of clothes. “If I were smarter, I’d take all I hold dear and head for the Mecha
noids. It’d make a safer dominion than this tower, which the Mad King could—at any day—strike down.”

  “Let us pray to the Sisters he does not,” murmurs Yellow.

  “To hell with the Sisters. I’ll have a talking to with Ryke. I’m not sure I’m keen on this Quin. Maybe you’ve a point.” The Warden grunts. “My son is at that age where he looks at girls. The damned—”

  The door at Arrow’s back opens, and with a quick swipe of his finger, the lemon-shaped paperweight charm is silenced and dropped back into the drawer. He turns to find Prat’s head poked in.

  “Yes?” prompts Arrow, annoyed at the interruption.

  “Can I sit in here with you?”

  Arrow narrows his eyes. Maybe after I finish eavesdropping on Yellow and Gandra speaking with the Warden, then you can happily sit in here with me and be no help at all. “I’m in the middle of—”

  “Finding our boys?” Prat finishes, letting himself into the room.

  Arrow takes a deep breath, pushing closed the drawer all the way and resolving to stare at his other charms—all the broken ones, all the orphaned ones, all the misdirected ones—and figure that he ought to focus on finding Wick and Juston. It is, after all, somewhat time-sensitive. “Yes, of course,” mumbles Arrow.

  “What’s the plan?”

  Arrow stares at his charms. “I’ll … retrace the local ones,” he starts, giving his little pieces of metal a looking over, “and triangulate which are still connected in the eleventh.”

  “Good call,” agrees Prat, having no idea what Arrow just said.

  An hour later, he’s no closer to finding a sound of any kind in the warehouse Wick and Juston had gone to. Only one charm seems to be working, and all it produces is noise.

  “Do you think it’s Juston’s noise? Like, he’s making the noise?” asks Prat yet another hour later when he’s slipped into the chair right next to Arrow, annoyingly close.

  “No.” Arrow furrows his brow, listening with mounting tension. “It’s too constant.”

  “Hmm.” Prat leans against the desk, staring at the charm—a tiny screw bent a bit at the tip. “So is it just broken or something?”

  “Most likely.”

  “I’m really worried about Athan.”

  Everyone is. “I’m worried about Wick and Juston.”

  “You know what Lionis walked in on the other night? Athan was in the kitchen and he had, like, every damn ingredient we own on the counter. He had three mixing bowls out, too, and his face was covered in flour. He just looked up at Lionis and said, ‘I just wanted to taste their cooking again.’ Athan said that. Lionis had to coax him away from the mess he’d made, then helped him to the shower. Ugh, and then I had to hear it from Lionis, how much spice Athan had wasted. Then I got a lecture—me, for some reason—got a lecture for how much the spices were worth, how many runs we’ll have to go on to replace them, and then I got a history lesson on paprika and blue pepper and garlic. Lionis is such a smart-fart. Can’t stand him.”

  “Yes, but what he knows is valuable.” Even I hate admitting that. “Athan’s issues can wait. Wick and Juston need our help now, and so help me Three Sister they will get it.”

  “I have three sisters,” Prat blurts. “They’re why I joined Rain … despite my mom going rogue after my dad cheated on her with a teen girl at the ring shop. Name was Tiffer, the girl at the ring shop. Not that it matters. What a shitty man he is, my dad. And my mom, an irresponsible … impulse-chasing woman. My sisters, they …”

  Arrow closes his eyes and rubs them with his palms, ignoring the rest of Pratganth’s story—which he’s heard a hundred times before. He tries thinking of a solution to their problem short of going out to the warehouse themselves to investigate. He definitely doesn’t think about his own sister—brain-broken, deranged sentences, oddly hanging lip—and he doesn’t wonder how his mother is getting along with her new metalshop lover who is supposed to be looking after them both. He seals away any further thought of them.

  Or of the unconscious Caldron girl who Gandra and Yellow are currently babysitting.

  “Arrow? You alright?”

  He sighs. “I’ll be fine when we get Wick and Juston home.”

  “Need to consult my map of the eleventh?”

  “I have a rendering of it here already.”

  Prat blinks in the dark, the glint of green light from the machine twinkling in his eyes. “You do?”

  Arrow taps a button on his computer. It gives a muted groan, and then a copy of Prat’s map appears on the screen in an amber color. He taps the screen and the map expands, zooming in. Before them is a layout of the streets surrounding the warehouse where three bright yellow dots glow.

  “These dots are the charms I placed,” mumbles Arrow, pointing. “These two are unresponsive—completely silent, cold, dead. This one is the one that you’re hearing now. Noise. But it’s not Juston’s. I have no idea … no idea what to do. Wick had the only earpiece, and that has been crushed, by the sound of it. We have neither ears nor eyes in this place, and our team is in the dark.”

  “You should’ve been here.”

  Arrow presses his lips together firmly. I have been reprimanded enough by Gandra and Yellow, and I harbor enough guilt in me to fill a hundred gadget rooms. I don’t need to hear it from you, too.

  “Sorry,” says Prat, shaking his head in the dark. “Sorry. I’ve been a bit tense. I couldn’t work your charms when we were having a back-and-forth with Wick. Then our communications were cut and, well, nothing’s come since. Athan doesn’t know a damn thing about this, by the way. Neither does Lionis. I don’t want either of them to panic. Wouldn’t be good. For all they know or care, Wick and Juston are on their way back now. Do you know how fucking hard it is to keep a secret around them? Even Victra doesn’t know. Shit, and with her eyes, you’d think she knew everything …”

  Arrow nods once, then picks up the noisy charm and sets it in his palm, listening to it. Listen, listen, listen …

  Prat sighs, then slaps a hand onto Arrow’s back. “Update me as soon as you know anything, please. It’s driving me crazy. Juston is basically the brother I never had. We joined Rain around the same time, y’know? I need to know I’ll see him again.”

  “Look after Athan,” says Arrow simply, staring at the charm as it hisses and crackles in his palm, sounding not unlike the flames he, not half a day ago, was running away from. “And mind Lionis. He might be too brainy for his own good, but there are some in the world who would envy him that.” Arrow’s eyes go dark as he turns his head slightly, acknowledging Prat with another calm nod.

  Prat rises from his chair and departs the room. Arrow sits there and listens to the charm as it whirs with its shuddering, constant noise. The rhythm of the noise is familiar somehow, almost calming.

  After a glance back at the door—to ensure he’s absolutely alone—he opens the drawer again and, from its cluttered depths, pulls out his secret charm once again. With a rub of his thumbs, the object offers what it hears.

  “—isn’t something I’d care to listen to at all,” comes Gandra’s voice through the lemon, “especially coming from you.”

  Yellow responds. “No matter the blood you shed, you will never bring him back.”

  “I said I don’t want to hear it.”

  Yellow’s sigh comes through the paperweight like a brush of air, a burst of noise. Arrow listens. “You have put these kids through so much, Gandra. They’re pushed to their limits, fighting a ghost.”

  “Sanctum is no ghost,” Gandra spits back.

  It seems the Warden has left the room over the past few hours, yet Gandra and Yellow remain in it. Have they been bantering and debating and arguing this whole time? How much do these two childhood friends have to say to one another throughout a whole day before they run out of words?

  “We have lost so many, and so many whose minds I have had to rewire.”

  “Rewire. You word it so kindly to me,” mutters Gandra. “When in truth, you’re not
rewiring a thing. You’re burning their minds.”

  “You know that isn’t true. My Legacy is more like hypnosis than it is actual memory erasure, Gandra. So often you trade the truth for the easier-to-grasp lie.”

  “Oh, do I?” The attitude in Gandra’s voice does not relent; she’s clearly riled and uses anything she can to make her words sting him back. “Is that how you explain it? So long ago, you hypnotized your family into forgetting your very existence? Like your mother never had a son at all? Like she’s not actually a mother?”

  “A sort of hypnosis, yes. Why else would a simple dream have made Anwick suddenly unlock the memory of his sister, which I was sure I had wired his mind into never recalling?”

  “You are a special kind of cruel, Yellow.” There is a long silence. “I pray you never use your Legacy on me. I’d hate to forget.”

  “Gandra …”

  “But then again, think of Anwick. Imagine his life, had he lived it knowing what he did. The guilt. How it might’ve ruined him.”

  “And what of the ones whose memory we took and cast aside after their use expired?” Yellow points out. “Adamant, the short of temper? And Sarra, whom we cannot ever forget, as the others won’t even recall her being among us. There’s Jaena. There’s Fonden and Franklen, the green twins from the year Rain was first established.”

  “I remember each and every name. I remember and I honor each of them, Yellow. You know I do. Even their sacrifices. Don’t make me out to be some blood-hungry monster.”

  “We are all monsters. It is only some of us who recognize it so.”

  “Spare me your poetry,” grumbles Gandra, and there is a clink of glass. Arrow imagines Gandra pouring herself a drink.

  “The King who executed your child is long dead. The screaming King who followed is dead too, now. How many more Kings must fall before your son’s death is avenged? Just say the word and I will pull all of that suffering from your mind. Just one word and—”

  “How dare you even suggest that!” There is a piercing silence, which is only punctuated once by the heavy sound of a glass being set down upon a table. “We all have our pains and our pleasures. And for some of us, our pleasure is in feasting on that pain. You have yours, locked away in that memory bank of yours. I wonder if you ever mourn not being able to take away your own.”