Outlier: Reign Of Madness

by Daryl Banner

  “Don’t be terrified.” Ruena reaches and takes Erana’s hand. She clenches it tightly, her thumb rubbing the top of it soothingly. “You are not alone.”

  “I am not alone.”

  The young women stare out the window, which bathes them in its pure, golden sunlight. The warmth spreads onto every inch of their skin until it seems nothing cold or wicked or otherwise can touch them at all.

  Then naked Rone leaps through the wall next to them, and the girls jump—Erana shrieking and Ruena’s eyes flashing wide.

  “Impis has a lot of things,” Rone agrees, a chrome platter of food in one hand and a flagon of brew in the other, “but we … have the element of surprise.” He gives a wink at the women, then lifts the platter. “Breakfast, anyone?”

  0170 Arrow

  “Oh no, oh no, I’m going to die, I’m going to die.”

  Arrow rolls his eyes. “Shut up. It’s just a cut.”

  “I’m going to die.” Desperate tears spill from Prat’s face as he consoles himself in the corner of the room, embracing his wound as if his whole life is spilling out of his neck. It isn’t. “What have I done to deserve this?? I’m bleeding out. I’m bleeding … out …”

  “Just hold the shirt to your neck and stay still. You’re fine.”

  It’s Arrow’s shirt, which he donated to Prat to wrap around his neck and apply constant pressure to minimize the bleeding. Arrow’s kept his arms folded ever since, feeling exposed; he’s never been the type to walk about the streets shirtless. Leave that to the seventh folk.

  “Bleeding … ugh …” Prat descends into unintelligible muttering and whimpers.

  Arrow rolls his eyes. He hasn’t even given proper attention to the deep puncture in his own thigh from the tip of the very arrow that had ended Victra’s life. He wrapped a long sock around it and let it go from his mind, too swallowed up in the desire to get as far away from the sixth as possible. The more Prat cries, the less Arrow wants to. Listen first; feel later.

  Standing on a crate by the door, Arrow peers through the slit of window at the top of the wall that aligns with the level of the street. He feels an inch tall through the slit of glass, as if he was a tiny bug on the road. There’s a group of young teens gathered by a nearby trash bin bragging about how they don’t have to go to school. Arrow hears them juggle rumors, like how all the schools are closed until further notice, or all the professors died in a violent accident, or King Impis himself ordered that no lessons needed to be held while he is in power. Two of the kids firmly believe in that last one, thanking the Sisters for King Impis and his freeing them from the chore of going to school. Arrow wonders what the little fools will think when their homes and families are leveled by the great red light in the sky. I wonder if they’ll still be thanking the Mad King then.

  “Any word from Athan or L-L-Lionis?” asks Prat miserably.

  Arrow’s fist clenches the ring charm tightly. “Not since the last.”

  “This isn’t how I wanted to die. Oh no, oh no …”

  “Of course it isn’t. And you won’t.” Arrow glances across the room tentatively, but not to look at Prat. The Caldron girl stands against the wall staring at her hands downheartedly, her eyes riddled with worries. Arrow wonders what’s going through that mind of hers. Is she asking all the same questions as Prat? ‘Do I deserve this?’ and ‘Who’ll save me?’ and ‘Is this how I die …?’

  “Gandra?” prompts Prat, his voice quivery. “Yellow?”

  “Neither.” Arrow returns his attention to the slit of window, his eyes turning into narrowed slits of their own. “We’re on our own. I doubt we’ll ever hear from their like again.”

  Prat’s shuffling and sniffling goes still at his words. “You … You don’t mean that, do you? They—”

  “They have been dead in the water for months, Prat. Wake up.” The kids in the street are laughing at a boy who’s gone and thrown a shirt over his head, prancing around like Impis and threatening to turn them all into toast with his fancy red Lifted light made of liquid gold. “The only person Gandra ever served was herself.”

  “B-But she’s been there for us …”

  “I overheard them talking. She’s been trying to avenge the death of her child … her child who died two Kings ago. Even Yellow was trying to make her see what she’s done to us. This whole Rain thing, I doubt it’s anything more than just a sad woman’s attempt to move past the death of her child. We were her instruments of grief and nothing more. Rebellion?” Arrow hisses contemptuously, infuriated by the whole thing. It was all a ruse. “Gandra Gateward is a fraud.”

  Prat doesn’t respond to that. The sound of the young teens in the street bleeds into their room. Then Prat sighs jaggedly, another wave of tears hitting him as he says, “Oh, Sisters help me, my maps! All of my maps … oh, Arrow, my fucking maps …”

  “You’ll make new maps. Better maps.” Arrow sucks his tongue, trying very hard to keep his cool and still ignoring the pain in his thigh. Everything is shit. Swallow all the words you most wish to say. Only listen. Remember. “If we don’t hear from the others …”

  “Oh no, oh no … they’re all dead, even Wick and Juston. Oh … even Victra, even Rone, all of them …”

  Arrow closes his weary eyes and lays his head against the brick beneath the window. He keeps seeing the look on Victra’s face, that last look of total trust she had in Arrow’s guidance, and fear of the darkness before her eyes. She died in fear. She died alone. She died in the dark. Arrow shivers, his chest drawing so tight, he worries he’s just a step away from becoming the sniveling, quivering, slobbering baby that Pratganth has withered down to.

  Maybe that’s why Arrow resents him so much. Maybe Arrow wants to be the weak one, curled up on the floor and mourning the death of Victra. Maybe Arrow wants to be held and told that it’s all going to be alright.

  Listen, Arrow. Listen, and then listen some more.

  He chokes back a sob, or else he was about to vomit on the wall. Arrow slips a hand to his belly, praying he can keep from retching.

  The other hand bearing the charm comes up to his mouth. His eyes still closed, he speaks into it. “Lionis? Any word?” There is only silence. “Athan?” No answer either.

  He pockets the ring and steps down from the box with a wince. Prat looks up, alarmed. The girl drops her hands and glances up too, her eyes still wet with fear and her mouth parted.

  Arrow stands near her, his heavy gaze fastened to the damp stone floor and not at either of them. “I think we should leave.”

  “Why?” blurts Prat. “I’m wounded, here!”

  “Your neck is. You can walk. We need safer shelter. The path is connected directly to the sixth, to the Wall Breakers, to the violence from which we just fled. It’s very likely that they’re—”

  “Where will we go?? We can’t just—We’ll die in the streets!”

  “We’ll die here. And we won’t be in the streets, not for long. We need an actual safe haven and I think I know just the place.”

  The girl takes a step toward Arrow. He lifts his gaze, startled by her approach. “Can I come?” she murmurs softly.

  Arrow squints, pained. She thought I was leaving her? “I …”

  “Yeah,” blurts Prat, gently rising off the floor while holding the shirt tightly to his neck. “You c-can totally come.”

  Arrow shoots him an annoyed look, which he doesn’t seem to notice, his watery, tear-soaked eyes fully focused on the girl.

  She turns her delicate head, regarding him for a second, then lifts her cherry cheeks and pouty lips, her striking eyes invading him. “I won’t be in the way. I have no one. The light took my family … my home …”

  Arrow looks away from her, bitterly resentful at once that this Caldron girl—who he won’t even dignify with a name—has the nerve to talk to him about family and loss and having no one. “Keep up, then,” he grunts, moving toward the stairs leading to the street.

  He doesn’t look back for her reaction. When he hears th
e shuffling of two pairs of feet behind him, he knows both Prat and the girl are following. It makes no difference to him whether he has both or neither of them.

  The sun is breaking its brave light from over the Wall by the time they reach the closest edge of the ninth, and Arrow is muscling through each and every step, refusing to let his thigh slow him. It burns like fire by the time he passes the train station that Rain so often utilized. Of course it doesn’t operate now, not without power. Its windows are dark and its train—still on the tracks—is asleep indefinitely. He passes the third block, then the second block, and finally turns onto the all-familiar first. After a moment of being relieved to find the building standing at all, he peers through the large front window, ensuring that no one or nothing dangerous lurks inside. He sees nothing, so he reaches for the door and gives it a pull.

  Inside, the Noodle Shop is dark and its air is thick with dust and mildew and neglect. He sighs, wondering where all the workers have gone, or the owner. Prat closes the door behind them after the girl reluctantly comes in, crossing her arms and glancing around with a mild look of repugnance wrinkling her nose. Arrow turns from the pair of them and gently pushes past the swinging kitchen doors. The back is abandoned too. He hears a scuttling, which alarms him until he spots the rat hurrying off the counter and into a hole in the wall.

  “What’s that smell?” moans Prat, arm lifted to shield his nose.

  Arrow ignores him and starts poking through the cabinets. He finds them all cleaned out. Someone’s been through here, a looter or a scavenger. He pulls open the fridge, expecting to find an array of spoiled foods; instead, he finds empty shelves. Even the perishables.

  He pulls open the door leading to the cold basement where they once kept the Weapon of Atlas, but can’t even descend the steps, as the entire basement is filled with water. A pipeline broke, or else some other thing connected to by that secret passage has flooded the whole way, Arrow deduces, wondering with a chill if anyone was down here when the passages filled. At least this is one less exit to secure.

  He pushes past Prat, who has come up too close behind him to get a look himself at the flooded basement. The sunlight is easing through all the smudged windows now, filling the kitchen and the main restaurant area with rich, golden egg yolk. Arrow finds himself appreciating the warmth of color very much after the stark, horrible night they just endured.

  He sees Victra’s helpless face again. Her wide, unseeing eyes.

  He blinks the image away.

  Arrow pushes open the panel behind the front counter and, after a grunt of remorse for his stinging, furious thigh, he ascends the narrow staircase hidden there. His progress is slow, and soon he has to resort to hopping up the steps on his good leg. Prat, ever on his heels, doesn’t ask if he’s okay. The stairs grunt with Arrow’s every hop. The first landing shows the bedroom Wick used to sleep in, the mattress flipped up against the wall for some reason, the bedframe exposed and rusty. Arrow ascends farther to the loft.

  The hanging silks and tapestries are gone. The armor racks along the wall are bare. One of the panes of glass that make up the long, wide window on the closest wall is shattered, perhaps by a thrown brick from outside. The room feels haunted and colder than usual, air whistling in through the broken window. Arrow stands at the top of the stairs, his insides sinking at the sad state of the loft. We used to call this headquarters …

  “Arrow?”

  He doesn’t turn at the sound of Prat’s voice. He keeps staring ahead, pain and heaviness making a nest in his belly. He can’t seem to pull his eyes away from the sad, old table around which all of Rain used to gather. Weren’t there so many of us once, long ago? Arrow wonders. Maybe I should never have joined. Maybe I should have stayed home with mom and sis, looked after them, been there for them. I wonder what they’re doing now.

  “Arrow, I …” Prat clears his throat. “I found Mr. Gateward’s key under the loose floorboard by the front register. I locked the doors, both the side door and the … the entrance. I left the scullery open.”

  Mr. Gateward is what they called the owner of the Noodle Shop. It’s not his real name. They used to tease that Gandra and he were secretly a married couple. Arrow never found the joke very funny because it always made him wonder what Mr. Gateward’s real wife was like. Did she run another Noodle Shop elsewhere in the ninth? Did she stay home and look after the house? Did she exist at all?

  Arrow’s eyes land on the loose metal rods of the armor rack. “I’ll make charms,” he decides. “We’ll need ears everywhere.”

  Without waiting for Prat’s response, he crosses the room and starts to disassemble the rack, gathering as many parts from it as he can manage. Anything metal will work for his purposes.

  “The emergency one’s missing,” mumbles Prat, having opened a hidden panel in the wall by their small holding room that once held Athan long ago, just after he fell from Lord’s Garden. “Someone must have taken it.”

  Arrow grunts an acknowledgement, then takes his rods and bolts and screws of metal, getting to work. He pairs them up, focuses on each individual piece, then carries the sisters in his arms to place them outside. He passes the Caldron girl on his way down the stairs. She watches him, wide-eyed, as if wishing he’d stop and chat with her and tell her sweet, encouraging things. You and Prat can console each other, he thinks darkly.

  But when he reaches the foot of the stairs, she speaks up. “Why did you save me?”

  Arrow stops, the metal pieces in his clutch clattering together. He doesn’t turn back to face her when he says, “You needed help.”

  “But … I mean … w-what were you doing there?”

  Six bullets. Five lives. “I was taking a stroll.”

  The girl doesn’t speak for a long moment. Arrow, for whatever reason, remains perfectly in place. He listens to her breathe for a while, waiting.

  Her feet shuffle, and he hears her descend several steps. From right behind him, she says, “Thank you.”

  Arrow’s mouth tightens, and then he’s away from the staircase without another word, pushing through the swinging kitchen doors and out the back scullery exit, heading into the alley.

  In the rich morning sunrise, Arrow circumvents the building, placing his charms in unassuming locations. He even plants a few across the street—a screw here, a stray metal rod there.

  When he has but one left, he considers the metal cup-shaped thing, not even sure what the hell it is, but it has a matching sister upstairs in the loft that will whisper to him everything it hears. He strolls around the block, wondering where he’s yet to place an ear.

  He trips over a crack in the road. The charm flings from his grip and clatters along the pavement. Round as it is, the freed thing runs away from him and plummets into the mouth of a sewer.

  Arrow frowns. Well, if we have a visitor from the sewer, I’ll know.

  He comes back in through the scullery door, then locks it behind him. He pulls the shutters over the windows, casting the whole kitchen into darkness. He moves to the front of the restaurant and gives a tug on the cord next to the front window, letting a heavy drapery down over the glass, protecting them from spies.

  “Will the red light come again?”

  Arrow feels his shoulders tense at the sound of her voice. His face wrinkles with aggression, his back remaining turned on the girl, who he quite wishes he’d left on that burning street in the sixth.

  “Yes,” he answers darkly. “It comes for us all.”

  “I’m immune to fire,” she says suddenly.

  Arrow stares at the dusty drapes as they slowly settle into place, still swinging and unrested, like his belly, like his toiling stomach, like his electric head. An arrowhead comes out of Victra’s mouth. Arrow blinks away the image. Victra … killed by an arrow.

  “It’s my Legacy. I … I can’t burn.” Her feet shuffle. Arrow keeps staring at the drapes as his fingers tighten into fists. “It’s how I got out of my house without a scratch on me. It’s why I survived and
my family … my family …”

  And is Arrow’s Legacy the reason he survived the attack on his family so long ago? While his mother was raped and his sister had her brain broken and his father was murdered … Arrow just listened.

  “Will you please look at me?” Her voice trembles.

  Arrow can’t stand another second of her. He moves around the girl and ascends the creaking stairs. He passes Prat on the middle level, who seems to have laid down the mattress and is inspecting its dusty sheets. Good. He’ll have yet another nice thing to bleed all over.

  He reaches the loft and plants himself in front of his symphony of charms. It’s here that he’ll wait. It’s here that he’ll do nothing at all but listen to all his pieces of art and wait for any of them to speak. The rings on his finger. The rods and screws and bolts in the street.

  The beating of his angry heart.

  The whistling of wind through the broken window.

  Arrow closes his eyes and curls up on the floor, ready to cry.

  He squeezes his knees up against his chest. Prat had all his time. The girl had hers. It’s your time, now. He wills himself to let out all his tears. He’s allowed himself this space and this time right now to get it all over with, to purge it from his system, to grieve.

  His dry eyes stare ahead, seeing nothing.

  Seeing nothing, like Victra.

  No tears come. He rolls onto his back, letting his legs stretch out frustratedly with a sigh. It’s not just Victra he’s let down, resulting in her death. He let Cintha away from him that day in the Core. He let her get away from him, and it was through a series of events set in motion by that one action that led to her being caught. Cintha’s gone and now Victra’s gone. If I ever see Rone again, I’m certain he’ll end my life in the most impolite way he can imagine.

  And then a charm speaks.

  “That’s why we wait,” comes a woman’s voice, sly and playful.