by Daryl Banner
Kid smiles suddenly. “When I was six, mommy said she’d be right back. I never sawed her … never saw her again. Then someone knocked on my door that night. Daddy told me to go hide. I did. He answered the door and the mask men … masked men came in and killed him. I watched.” The smile on Kid’s face has died. What lives there now is a fierce look of determination as she looks at Ames. “I want to see them again.”
“Where do you live?” asks Ames quietly.
“Burbs of the tenth. By the Wall. Edge of Atlas. Have you ever being there?—ever been there?”
Ames shakes his head. Link gives her shoulder a rub, drawing her attention back to him. He gives a short nod. “To the tenth we’ll go, then,” he decides, then turns his head to Faery, who watches the exchange wide-eyed. “Do you want to come with us? No one will see you as long as we all hold hands. You will be safe. You don’t have to live down here in the shadows of the canals all alone.”
To that, Faery smiles, her eyes alight. “Yes,” she murmurs softly.
Link seems to breathe a sigh of relief, returning her smile. Then, he extends one hand to Faery and the other to Kid. “You know the way. Take the lead.”
She gives a nod, feeling a burst of hope in her chest that she’s long been missing. Then her eyes fall down to the dead body again and she frowns. “What do we do with the bad man?”
The four of them stare at the corpse. No one moves or says a word.
Then a furious cry comes out of Ames, scaring them all, as he throws his body at the man in an effort to move him. It isn’t enough to roll him over, so Ames does it again, putting all his weight into a second angry shove. The man finally slides over the ledge, the tails of his stylish leather jerkin slithering across the stone as he drops. The rushing water swallows him with a loud splash, then carries him away. The pool of blood has stained the walkway where he’d died, and it now spreads in the water below as he drifts away, carried off in a cloud of crimson gloom.
After the man has floated out of sight, Ames speaks in a low, solemn voice. “Thank you, Baal, for the gift of time that your brother took from us. We will be sure not to waste it.”
Link gives Ames a meaningful look, which Ames then returns with the hint of a smile. He reaches out, and the boys clasp hands. Link reaches to take Faery’s, who accepts it quickly, her eyes soft when they look upon Link’s.
Kid skirts the bloodstain upon the floor and takes Faery’s other hand, who seems to jump at the touch. “Don’t let go,” she warns her, to which the strange girl nods.
Then they vanish from sight, and in their own private world, the four travel together, unseen.
0187 Arrow
“Good as new, isn’t it?”
Arrow nods wordlessly, letting some of his weight down on the bad leg. The bandage is wrapped tight about his thigh, giving him a spring to his every other step.
“Keep your weight off it for a few days,” the healer suggests, his buzzed-short grey hair in addition to his wormy face making him look like a prickly cactus from the dry gardens. “Keep on your bum. Two sunrises, I think you’ll be good to walk on it. Aye?”
Arrow nods, then grunts a quiet, “Thanks,” before departing the house.
The celebration that was supposed to welcome the Lessers back home has gone on for a day and a half now. No one seems to mind much, considering the amount of laughter and levity that rings down the streets. Despite Arrow’s greatest efforts to try and shield himself from letting in the merriment, it finds a place in his heart anyway and makes him feel light. He won’t dare show it on his face, but he can privately feel the mild, floating joy within him.
“Try these,” says Prat drunkenly when Arrow meets him in the middle of the street where a table full of communal finger foods has been erected. It’s a platter of what appears to be berry paste on tiny leaves. “There’s alcohol in the paste,” Prat whispers. “The distilleries in the tenth are at our disposal. Nothing’s being sent to the Lifted City. Arrow. All that spare stock … all of that’s the slum’s, now!” He hiccups and then laughs in Arrow’s face for no reason, which is both annoying and unsettling at once.
“It’s true,” mumbles Lionis.
Arrow glances up. He hadn’t noticed Lionis lurking on the other side of the table chewing a berry paste leaf with a deadpan stare. Lionis’s cheek is still bruised pretty bad, having shifted to a more purplish color as it slowly and agonizingly heals. He wonders if the brothers always fought like that and if Lionis is used to carrying a bruise or two.
“Hi,” says Arrow flatly. “Is this what it’s always like out here in the ninth?”
“No.” Lionis glances at the squatty house behind him, his greasy face shining in the light from a nearby fire pit. “Wick and Athan have been in that bedroom for days, it feels like.” He shakes his head and rolls his eyes. “Didn’t realize it just takes a dick in your mouth to make you forget about everything important in life. Like rescuing a city from a Mad King.”
Prat’s eyes are glassy as he pops another treat into his mouth. “You don’t think love is important?”
Lionis appears to want to respond hatefully to Prat’s question, judging from the irritated roll of his eyes, but then he seems to reconsider. He gives it an honest thought. “I … guess it is. I just never took my brother to be much of a lover.”
“Everyone’s a lover!” Prat exclaims ecstatically. “Arrow loves his charms. I love my maps, yes I do. Wick loves Athan’s dick. You love your brain so much you’d fuck it if you could.” He lifts his eyebrows at that, surprised by his own words. “Sorry. I get vulgar when I’m touched.”
“Touched?” Lionis shakes his head disapprovingly. “What are you, sixty years old? Drunk. High. Those are the terms for it.”
“Sixty years is a beautiful age. I bet it’s Gandra’s.” Prat giggles at his own words. “If I look anything like her when I’m sixty …”
“She’s fifty,” mumbles Arrow.
Prat and Lionis turn to him, as if they had already forgotten he’s standing there. Arrow is used to that.
Arrow turns to Lionis. “Speaking of, I heard it’s your birthday.”
“A few days from now,” Lionis confirms unenthusiastically. “I’m not a celebrator of births. Too many of them in this city, if you ask me. I don’t mind twenty. Twenty-one, though, isn’t a number I like. My dad loved it. Threes and sevens are his favorite integers.”
It takes Arrow a moment to make sense of that. Seven made three times is twenty-one. “I would’ve liked to meet your father.”
“If the rumors are true and the Keep has split open, you may very well get that chance,” Lionis muses.
The comment stings Arrow as it makes him recall something he had heard from a charm in the Noodle Shop—the charm that had accidentally fallen down a sewer grate. The Undercity … resources … waiting for the right moment … Arrow heard the voices clearly, but he never put together the pieces of the puzzle nor has he bothered to share them with anyone. What’s the point in sharing them if he can’t make sense of the whole thing himself? Is there a community of sewer-dwellers who are planning and plotting amidst foul rivers of the slumborn’s piss and shit? Good luck, thinks Arrow humorlessly, not envying their seemingly proud underground residence.
But what if those people were from the Keep? What if those people had escaped the Keep, or if the rumors of all the prisoners breaking out are true? Arrow listened, and Arrow heard.
Fuck the sky; people could be plotting beneath our feet.
“Of course,” Lionis goes on drowsily, “by that very same logic, I can’t imagine a reason why my dad’s first destination wouldn’t be here. Which means one of two things. He’s found another family to keep him cozy, or he’s dead.”
Arrow studies him for a moment, feeling strangely bitter at Lionis’s words. For half a minute, Arrow decides not to say a thing. Then, just as Lionis is about to say something to Prat, Arrow lets go the words before realizing anything has come out of his mouth at all. “You are so
very, awfully contradictory at times.”
Lionis lifts an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
Listen. Swallow the words … yet here is Arrow not listening once again and swallowing nothing. “You try much too hard to remind us all the time how very interesting and smart you think you are,” says Arrow, his eyes half-lidded and his mouth tight. “And I’m left to wonder … why? Should I be impressed by your offhandedness with regard to your father, who might be coming home when others’ fathers will never again return to them? Pratganth’s? Ivy’s? Athan’s? Rone’s? … Mine? Should I be impressed with your incessant need to tell us how very unimpressed you are with … everything? Is that supposed to impress me? Is that supposed to impress Prat, here? Your feelings about love? Mocking your brother and the happiness he’s found in Athan? Mocking your father, who might be dead?”
Ten very flustered looks cross Lionis’s face as he blinks several times, opening his mouth and closing it over and over again as he changes his mind about what it is he wants to say back.
To Lionis’s ruffled face, Arrow leans in and says, “May I suggest a piece of advice?” His eyes narrow importantly. “Listen, Lionis. Listen. And swallow all of those smart, golden words you are most dying to spill on our ears.”
All of his flustered expressions become one—a wide-eyed, lip-hanging, offended one. Then, after closing his mouth and giving a nearly undetectable smirk, Lionis turns away and strolls across the street importantly, catching the eye of a circle of neighbors who call out to him and pull him into a chatty storm of laughs and half-hugs. Arrow watches him awhile, and despite the tiny victory he just had over Lionis, he feels defeated. I miss my dad, he realizes. Would he be proud of my decision to join Rain, or furious at my abandoning mom and sis? She’s with someone else now in the tenth, a metalworker. She’s taken care of, isn’t she? I wouldn’t have left them otherwise.
“You don’t think that was too harsh?” asks Prat, coming up to Arrow’s side.
Arrow doesn’t answer, still watching Lionis across the street thoughtfully. In watching him, his own eyes suddenly drift a bit to the left where he spots Ivy leaning against a tree near Wick’s house with her arm halfway around it, as if she had gone to hug the tree and decided instead to lazily slump against it. The awkward pose itself draws Arrow’s curiosity.
A few seconds’ more observation reveals to him the reason: she’s crying. Is it the loss of her family? Good, cry all the tears your little Hightower body can possibly generate. Is she feeling lonesome and emotionally broken? Good, perhaps then you’ll know the years of anguish I felt taking care of my broken sister and my mourning mother while bearing the weight of my dead dad’s ghost, who haunted me. I still have a bullet for you, Caldron girl. I still have a bullet. My job isn’t done. You and I have business that a Red Light in the sky did not finish.
And yet still, staring at her sobbing against that tree from across the street, Arrow feels a hot and inconvenient stab of shame for his thoughts. He can’t hate her while she’s crying. Resent her? Maybe. Feel annoyed by her? Definitely. But he cannot hate her.
At least not tonight.
“I’ll try one of those berry treats,” decides Arrow, speaking to Prat who isn’t listening, as he snatches the closest one off the table and thrusts it past his lips.
0188 Wick
The two boys stroll down the busy street as the partying and the chatter and the laughter continues to crash around them like a storm. “I didn’t know so many people lived out here,” observes Athan with half a chuckle.
Wick takes a swig of spiced apple from the bottle, then says, “I didn’t either. Lionis was saying something about how a shitload of scared Lifted folk flooded out of the Lifted City when the Crystal Court was thwacked by Impis and his people.”
“We kinda did,” murmurs Athan.
Quit pulling his mind back there, idiot. Wick blinks and then slaps a wet kiss on Athan’s cheek. “This spicy apple stuff is making me dizzy.”
Someone calls out from a nearby yard. Wick glances and sees a man he remembers who lives down the road, some friend of his parents. He just gives him a wave, which inspires five other waves and hearty shouts from other men and women who are standing on his lawn. Wick keeps walking with Athan, opting not to engage in too many conversations tonight. Something inside Wick is feeling anxious, like he needs to stay next to Athan this whole night. Just the thought of separating from him sends a chill of deep terror down to his stomach.
If Wick were to guess, Athan seems to feel it too, since he hasn’t let go of Wick’s hand the entire time they’ve been out in the street. Wick finds he very much appreciates his Lifted Boy’s clinginess and cuddliness, especially tonight.
Athan comes to a stop and faces Wick. “I love you.”
Wick, caught off-guard, laughs. “I know that, Athan. I love you too. I—”
Athan’s face crashes into Wick’s right in the middle of the street. Wick feels the world spin, as if this kiss was their very first. His own arms are in the air, floating, unsure where to go, while Athan wraps his own around Wick’s slender form, squeezing him like a tube of smithing oil. Wick has no balance of his own, the apple drink making a spin of his head, but Athan holds him right in place as their mouths assault one another.
Then Athan thrusts his tongue out, surprising Wick anew. He is a fierce beast, Wick decides, grinning into Athan’s kiss as his own tongue comes out to make a mess of their faces. The boys taste one another’s lips. Their tongues wrestle tirelessly, and then the bottle in Wick’s hand finds a new home on the pavement, shattered. Wick hears applause and laughter behind him and he revels in it, his freed arms now wrapping around the muscular, broad-shouldered build of his boy. Wick’s breath beats against Athan’s cheek while Athan’s kissing is more calculated, controlled, focused to the point of almost being angry.
Judging from the tightness in Wick’s pants, that angry focus is a major turn-on, and Wick makes a mental note to get Athan angry next time they’re closed up in his room on that old dusty mattress.
Wick’s hands rush down Athan’s firm backside, coming to rest on his boy’s meaty butt. He lets Athan’s cheeks fill both of his palms. Athan’s chest presses even harder against his in response, his two pecs meeting Wick’s, and their hips are drawn together like magnets. He’s so hard, Wick chants inside his head. I’m so fucking hard too. The two of us, foolish slum lovers making a bone out of ourselves in the middle of the street.
“Get a room!” teases one of the neighbors. “Get a hard fuck on!” shouts a drunken lady, inspiring cackles from her friends. Wick does not bother to wonder whether these neighbors who shout lewd and vulgar suggestions at him have known him since he was a little kid. I wonder if any of them changed my diapers. The thought makes him laugh as he continues to push his face into Athan’s and his hands in the gift of his boy’s ass.
Wick and Athan pull apart at once, out of breath, then gaze into each other’s eyes. Wick will never get used to those two bottomless pools of crystalline grey-blue wonder. He will never get used to the golden-yellow glory that is Athan’s mess of hair, which he gives a quick run-through with his fingers.
Athan seems to stare wonderingly into Wick’s eyes in return, and he has no smile on his face. He wears an expression that is so deep, so serious, so focused that it makes him seem strangely bold and hardened—not unlike the things that have hardened beneath their waists, pressed between them like prisoners.
“Something on your mind?” Wick asks gently.
“You.” Athan still doesn’t smile, his eyes piercing so fiercely into Wick’s that it makes his heart thrash excitedly.
Wick is the one who smiles. Maybe it’s the spicy apple that has him feeling so loose and dreamy. “What about me?” asks Wick, his tone light and playful. “Is it my fabulous fuckin’ hair?”
Athan snorts with amusement, but his lips remain straight and his eyes, needlepointed upon Wick’s. “Your hair’s a mess, baby.”
“Oh, I got another guess. It
’s my cock, isn’t it?” Wick flexes it in his pants, pushing it against Athan’s thigh. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
Now Athan smiles, his straight-faced expression broken as he chuckles. He looks so fucking beautiful when he smiles. His whole face lights up. Athan is a fire, he always was.
“My cock’s on your mind,” Wick teases him, giving him a little push. Athan giggles, pulling Wick into his body again, refusing to let any distance exist between their hips. “Addicted to me?”
Athan lifts his chin cockily. “I think you have it backwards.”
“Oh, do I? Is that the way of it?”
He gives Wick a cheeky lopsided smile. “Tonight, when you’re asleep, I think I might have to take advantage of your helpless body and …” Athan purses his lips, glancing down between them. “I might just have my way with you, and you won’t know, lost in your dreams for six whole hours.”
Wick lifts a challenging eyebrow. “Mmm, yeah? Not sure sleep works that way. I can be woken up, you know.” Wick gives Athan a smack on his tight ass, which straightens the Lifted boy’s face right away and inspires a playful growl from him. “And if I wake up with your mouth on my cock …”
“Oh, my mouth will be everywhere,” Athan promises him. “I’ll have covered every … inch … of … your … body … by the time you come back from dreamy-land.”
Wick wrinkles his face in mock sadness. “Gonna leave me all out? Gonna have the whole party without me?” He smacks Athan’s ass again, his face turning devilish. “Can’t let that happen.”
“You’re driving me crazy, Anwick Lesser.”
Then their faces glow red.
Wick and Athan look upwards. The laughter and noise of the street dies down at once to nothing. All eyes lift to the reddened sky, the Lifted City aglow with the threat of an imminent strike.
Wick’s eyes are wide. The boys are frozen in place. The street shimmers with the red glow of the impending Finger Of Madness as they wait with held breath to learn where the lightning will strike. No one seems to breathe. The sky stares back soundlessly. Is this when their lives end? Is this their final moment?