Outlier: Reign Of Madness

by Daryl Banner

  There is silence after that. Arrow closes his eyes, then runs a finger along the charm, putting it back to sleep and unwilling to hear any more. Now, only the sound of noise from his other charm pulls through the room—the mystery noise. Arrow listens to it, suddenly finding himself reminded of Yellow’s sigh in the lemon that came through in a burst of noise, how it sounded so much like wind …

  And then Arrow’s eyes flash. “Wind,” he whispers.

  0155 Kid

  Big Blue chews louder and snaps his jaw far more obnoxiously than she does, which makes her smile. Things have been good for nearly seven sunrises. Even Blindy seems content, despite growing increasingly fussy with the food scraps they feed him. Nothing lives up to the fish they procured a month ago, and Kid fears nothing will.

  Kendil still seems utterly uninterested in finding Kid’s friend, so she’s taken to telling him every little detail about her that she can, thinking something’s sure to resonate. “We were at the orphanage together,” Kid explained excitedly, “and we convinced the head mistress that she hadded super powers.”

  “Had.”

  “And I’d be invisible,” Kid goes on, ignoring the correction, “and then I’d pick up objects around Aryl and move them in the air while keeping them visible, and—”

  “You’re becoming better with your words,” Kendil notes calmly, slurping on the last morsel of a chicken bone.

  Kid smiles proudly. Then she shrugs off the compliment. “Aryl called you the Big Blue, but she didn’t knew it was you.”

  “Know,” he corrects patiently, tossing the emptied bone over the ledge. They’re sitting on the roof of a building that they presume has recently been burnt near-to-nothing by the Mad King’s red light. Kid feels like the building is still warm.

  “She called me Red.” Kid absently brings a hand to her lap where Blindy sleeps, scratching his ear while sullenly staring out at the city, which seems to issue smoke in the desolate sunset. “She wanting—wants to see you. Maybe you’d like her as you like me.”

  “Every breath the Rain Frog breathes is a failure to my heart. Just now, another breath he takes. And now, another,” says Kendil, his lip twitching in half a scowl. “Another. Another.”

  “What if he is already died? … dead?” Kid keeps scratching the cat’s ear, who flips and twirls his tail more and more irritably by the second. Kid ignores it, fueling her own frustration. “Maybe some big rock from the Lifted City fell and crushed him flat. Maybe the red light burned him right up like toast.”

  “No. His fate isn’t fire. It is cold, the ice-cold embrace of my—”

  “Yeah, yeah, but what if we’re too late?”

  “I will know when Obert is dead.”

  Kid looks up, meeting Kendil’s dark, beady eyes with her own. His messy hair, so much longer and out of sorts now, hangs over his left eye and down to his chin in black, inky tangles.

  “Obert?” She’d nearly forgotten the Rain Frog’s real name.

  “Obert Ranfog will die with the winter’s kiss in his eyes.”

  Kid thinks on the Masked Men and the last words of her father and her mother, both of which seem to change each time she strains to recall them. “But what then? After the Rain Frog is killed dead. What will you do? You will have frozen yourself.”

  “Maybe I’ll keep him alive and take from him every single thing in this world that he loves. Maybe I will show—”

  “And then what after that?” Kid persists, ignoring the growing look of annoyance on Kendil’s face. “Does your mission ever end?”

  Kendil’s hand moves to his chest. Kid watches.

  “I have more than cold in me,” he says, and though it might just be an innocent reminder, Kid can’t help but worry that there was a threat hidden in his words.

  And she knows his secret, the one right there at his chest. The cold boy showed her the precise nature of his wintry Legacy, which is as contradictory as winter itself—sweeping in with its cold breath, while inspiring a hundred fires to burn in hearths across the city.

  “Yes,” Kid agrees quietly, “I know.”

  And there is something else she knows that, perhaps, she should have realized so long ago. Kendil will never help her find her friend. Maybe she knew that. Maybe some subconscious part of her chose the comfort and protection of Kendil’s power over the reckless pursuit of her friend all on her own. That was a mistake, Kid realizes.

  Blindy hisses at her. Maybe she was scratching him too hard. Or maybe all the kindness and patience is leaving her in this very instant that she realized she picked safety over saving a friend.

  Maybe the Rain Frog is still alive and Aryl is the one who’s dead.

  “I can let the invisible monster hurt me,” says Kid, her gaze hovering at Kendil’s chest, right where his secret lies, “but I want to fight it more than become it.”

  “You still have that option. You haven’t become a monster yet. Some of us have no choice.”

  “We all has a choice.”

  “Have.”

  “WE ALL HAVE A CHOICE!” Kid screams, on her feet in an instant, dumping Blindy onto his startled legs and causing him to bolt halfway across the roof in fear. “AND MINE WAS TO FOLLOW YOU AND LEAVE MY FRIEND! I MAKED A MISTAKE!”

  Kendil stares at her, not unsettled in the least by her outburst. Then, after too long a time, a cool-tempered smile creeps onto his pale, half-hidden face. He lifts his pointy chin. “You are too young. You haven’t suffered at all. Not truly. You’ve had freedom most of your little life to do as you please, to go as your please, to be what you please. Until only a few short months ago, I had no freedom. I was formed into a weapon—the Weapon—with which Sanctum did as they pleased. I was but a tool. I was a toy for the mighty in the sky.” His hands clasp one another. “And then I got away.”

  And then he got away. She watches him, feeling her heart race within her little flat chest, and she swallows hard.

  Then, his eyes glaze over, staring through her. His face wrinkles as his eyes dart around, looking for her; she’s turned invisible.

  “Hey,” he says, reaching out for her with his voice. “Hey, Kid. You playing some kind of game?”

  She backs away slowly, soundlessly, holding her breath each step of the way.

  “I’m done playing,” he says, and there is worry in his eyes, real worry. We all have a choice, she encourages herself, keeping herself hidden, keeping herself away. “No more games, Kid. Come back to me. You know I can find you. You know I will find you.”

  Her foot kicks into the ledge of the building as she backs away. She stops, her heart jumping. I won’t be free if I fall off the building, she reasons. I’ll be another flattened slum girl on the pavement of another slum street.

  “Fine. Go, run,” he says quietly, the darkness of murder and rage in his shallow eyes. “Let the world see me for the monster I am.”

  Kid swallows. “Y-You’re not a monster,” she whispers.

  He glares in her direction, his eyes still reaching for her, looking for a girl he’ll never again see. “Then for all the time we’ve spent on the streets together, you don’t know me. You haven’t learned a fucking thing, girl. Do you even know who I am?”

  “You’re not a monster,” she repeats, retreating slowly.

  “I’m Kendil, the Weapon of Sanctum, the fire and the cold, the death and the birth. Kings and Queens fear me. Whispers of me still drift on terrified ears in the endless nights …”

  “You’re not a monster.”

  “You don’t think I’ll turn on you like I turned on my defenseless mother? Like I did my father? I could freeze you in one instant. I could turn you to ice in one mad instant, girl.”

  “You won’t. I believe in you. You’re not a—”

  And in one mad instant, the world changes. The darkness turns blinding white. The cold that swallows Kid feels searing hot, and in the furious storm of energy that wraps around her—whether visible or not—Kid emits a scream so ear-piercing, so bitingly anguished, s
o inhuman, she can’t even recognize it as her own.

  And as quick as the whiteness envelops her, a sharp, dark dagger cuts through the cold, and then it is Kendil shrieking out in a broken, furious voice. For one wild instant, Kid imagines that she willed a great sword into existence, a sword that just hacked into Kendil’s ankle.

  Kid falls back like a stone block, her bush of hair so cold, it’s become a frozen-solid nest of indistinguishable curls and tangles. She forces her limbs to move despite them protesting in cold, bitter agony, and climbs to her feet, running away from the scene.

  It was Blindy, she realizes as she races, unseen, toward the fire escape, swinging down the loud, metal stairs with clumsy footing and stiff joints, her teeth clattering from the icy assault. Blindy attacked him and set me free.

  She misses the first step of the last staircase and goes tumbling down to the pavement below. Numbed by the cold, she feels nothing when her face hits the pavement, but a deep red cut is now drawn down her arm. She gives it exactly one second of her time, her eyes growing wide, and then she scurries away, fleeing the scene and the cat and the cold boy forever.

  0156 Athan

  His heart races.

  He’s sitting perfectly still and trying to read a book Lionis had recommended to him when suddenly the panic invades him again, but it is so much stronger this time, overwhelmingly so. And when the feeling intoxicates him like this, rushing through Athan’s system like a great flood, bad things happen.

  His family died soon after he felt this way.

  Lord’s Garden fell.

  He was knocked in the head and fell into the pool as a boy, his last sight being Radley at the other end staring at him in fright.

  “Stop,” Athan begs his heart, his eyes quivering with fear. “Stop racing, please. Stop, stop, stop.”

  Athan departs the chair he’d made a home in, then trips when he finds one of his legs tangled around a blanket in which he’d been swallowed. He kicks it away and pushes out of the room, storming through the halls and rooms of the ninth floor. Ninth, ninth, ninth, always the ninth everything.

  He pushes his face flat against the wide, dirty glass window that overlooks the east side of the building. He tries to see something other than panic and danger and alarm and fear and worry.

  It’s your anxiety attacks. It isn’t related to your family or to Lord’s Garden or to anything that explodes or dies or loses life. Calm, Athan. Just like your brother used to do to you with his Legacy. Calm, calm …

  Oh, how he misses Radley. So, so much. Athan clutches at his chest, finding himself short of breath suddenly. “Calm,” he says in a sad attempt to mimic his brother’s voice. “Calm, calm …”

  He can’t seem to still his heart; it keep racing, racing, racing. I won’t need the Eastly Gym at all, Athan tries to joke to himself. I am a living cardio machine, working myself without taking a jog or lifting a weight at all. But when he swallows, his throat is so tight that he can barely breathe.

  Athan pushes into the next room for a drink of water, hoping it could bring down his anxiety. Victra and Prat are seated at the desk, neither of them looking up at Athan’s entry. He fumbles with a glass in the cabinet and it comes crashing to the floor, shattering.

  “The fuck?” says Victra, looking up from the desk. Prat turns too, his bushy hair belatedly turning with his head. “Seriously?”

  “Sorry.” Athan looks around for a broom, then remembers that they’re kept in the closet Wick sleeps in. Wick, who still isn’t back from his mission with Juston. I can’t go into that closet. “I’m having … I’m … I’m having my … my …” Athan can’t even seem to put his words together, swallowing air every couple of syllables.

  “You okay, man?” puts in Prat, rising from his chair, concerned.

  “Yes. No. Yes.” Athan squeezes shut his eyes, then wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of a wrist. “Y-Yes. Fine. It’s just … It’s just …”

  Victra sighs. “He’s having one of his panic things,” she mutters to Prat in a low voice, but Athan hears it perfectly. In fact, he feels like he hears everything in perfect clarity. When he opens his eyes again, his vision is so sharp, he feels like he can see a smudge on the glass of the window even standing here at the counter.

  That is, a smudge on the glass of the window across the street on a neighboring building. Athan blinks several times, breathing so quickly that he feels dizzy. Adrenaline, he tells himself.

  “LIONIS!” calls out Victra in her less-than-patient voice. She comes up to the counter and starts brushing up the glass with her foot, lazily kicking and brushing the shards into a pile. “Come here, Lionis! Athan needs you!”

  “N-No, I’m fine,” Athan tries to assure her, despite resisting the urge to double over. He fights a sudden urge to cry. Radley, Janna, mother, father …

  Arrow enters the room instead, his eyes stony and faraway. “Is something—?”

  “No,” Victra cuts him off. “We need Lionis, not you. He’s like a Wick clone. He’ll calm our Lifted Boy down.” She gives Athan a half-condescending pat on the head, being a head taller than him. Athan takes offense to neither the head-pat nor the term of endearment, but they don’t do a thing to slow his hammering heart. “You’ve been holed up in your ears all damn day, Arrow. Something up?”

  “No, no, no,” Arrow answers too quickly, wiping his mouth and staring at the floor. “I was just … just bored, really. Um …”

  Athan’s eyes dart to Arrow at once, and his heart feels its first moment of reprieve. Why? “What’s wrong, Arrow?” he asks.

  Arrow shakes his head, suddenly looking a lot more convincing. “Nothing. I said nothing’s up. I’m just bored. I, uh, heard this cat hissing through a charm I have in the tenth, and … funny thing, really, I think the cat—”

  “Wick and Juston are in trouble?” Athan asks at once.

  Victra and Prat share a look of confusion, then the pair of them turn to Arrow, curious. Arrow swallows hard. “I …” His gaze moves from one person to another. “Did Gandra say something?”

  Athan feels his stomach turn. “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened,” Arrow blurts. “Nothing, I swear it. It’s just that my charms in the eleventh are failed or … or disabled somehow. We’ve just lost communication, that’s all. They’re on their way back, I’m sure of it.”

  Athan, however, isn’t sure of anything at all. He looks over at Prat, who seems to be swallowing a few words of his own. “Prat?”

  The bushy-haired brain lifts his face, startled by the call-out. “I don’t know anything. I was trying to guide them with Arrow’s—”

  “It’s because Arrow ran a little errand of his own in the sixth,” puts in Victra, sneering at Arrow. “The fuck, seriously? If you were here, we’d know what the hell happened to Wick and Juston, and—”

  “Something happened to Wick?”

  Everyone turns. Lionis stands at the doorway, a red pot hanging in one hand, an opened book pinched in the other.

  Victra sighs, giving a great rolling of her eyes. “Seriously. Can anyone just keep their damn mouths shut?”

  A look of indignance crosses Lionis’s face. “No, they certainly can’t, and they shouldn’t. Rain doesn’t keep secrets. Someone needs to speak up. What’s happened to my brother?”

  Shaky of voice, Arrow says, “Nothing. He’s on his way back.”

  “You don’t know that,” spits Prat, leaning against his desk and staring at the floor in despair. “Oh god … what if it was the red light? That noise …”

  “Noise?” asks Lionis.

  Victra huffs so loudly, it turns three heads in her direction. “Stop being so fucking dramatic. Remember that time in the fifth when Juston lost his earpiece then, too? Or when me and Prat went off to the Mechanoids? It fucking happens. Big deal.”

  “Excuse me, but that’s my brother you’re so flippantly talking about,” says Lionis, “and if something happened, or if he’s in trouble, I’m going out there to help
.”

  “Is that so?” asks Victra, smirking. “And what’ll you do to your enemies? Give their arms a tan with your sweaty hands?”

  “I’ll burn their f-fucking faces off,” Lionis growls back, sounding far more afraid than he does brave.

  Prat sighs. “I’ll … I’ll go. I’ll go to the eleventh and check it out. All of you can stay here. Give me an earpiece and—”

  “No. You’re the map guy,” argues Lionis, his voice lifting in that way it does when he tries to take control of the group. “You stay here with Arrow. I’ll go with Victra. I’ll need eyes.”

  “I’m not going with you,” she says back, her eyebrows cocked and a laugh tickling her lips. “You and I are not a team. I stay here to check the surrounding eyes and make sure we have no intruders or brigands or spying faces. Gandra’s orders.”

  “Then I’ll f-fucking go alone,” blurts Lionis, slamming the red pot down on the counter next to Athan and tossing his book into it. His shoes crunch in the shards of the broken glass on the floor.

  “Don’t curse. It doesn’t become you, and you stutter every time you say fuh-fuh-fuh-fucking,” mocks Victra.

  “At least I’m brave enough to say it,” he shoots back, “instead of avoiding saying the name Rone because I’m weak and scared.”

  Victra lunges at Lionis so fast, she becomes a blur of color and one swinging fist. Prat intercepts first, but earns Victra’s elbow to his cheek, causing him to shout out in pain. Arrow goes to stop her from planting a fist into Lionis’s haughty face, which quickly crumbles to fear as Wick’s brother cowers away from Victra’s red wrath. The moment is brief, and when Prat and Arrow both succeed in putting distance between the two, Victra finally huffs and departs the room, knocking the red pot off the counter on her way out. It crashes to the floor to make friends with the half-swept broken shards of glass.