Outlier: Reign Of Madness

by Daryl Banner

  “I can’t,” whispers one of the Sisters, drawing attention. She says nothing further, terror in her eyes as she brings a tiny hand to her mouth and shakes her head, traumatized by the idea of leaving.

  Lady Agdanagon regards her with a soft, sympathetic glance. Then she lifts her gaze to the others. “The only comfort I can give you is, we will be together. All thirty of us. Even …” She steels herself before them, her posture straightening and her mouth tightening. “Even I. Do you not realize I haven’t stepped foot outside of this very building in over thirty years? This is no small decision, but it is one that I must make with the whole of my heart. If we are truly Sisters Of Sisters, if we truly follow the selfless, giving, tireless ways of the Goddesses, then we must devote ourselves completely. Mind, body, spirit, and will. Atlas is wounded right now. Atlas is hurting. Atlas is desperate for the healing that we are able to give it. You,” she says, a nod at one of the women. “You,” she says, a nod at another. “You. And you. And you. And you.” She nods at Mercy. She nods at the boy. She nods at her real sister and the other Sisters. “You can save a life. You can save a city.” She smiles. “We are the shield against the madness, my Sisters.”

  Some of the women need a hug after the spiel. Some of them need a private pep talk of sorts. Some just need their space to grieve the loss of their own comfort and security.

  The decision is made to have one final dream in their rooms, after which they will leave an hour before the next sunrise. “Speak to the Sister of Dreams, and seek what it is you truly envision for the welfare of Atlas. Think as a Sister thinks, and know that we are but vessels for the comfort and love and peace of others. Others first, always. Others’ happiness. Others’ care. Others’ needs.”

  When Mercy is in her room, she spends the whole of her five hours preparing. She slips on the jeans she’d arrived in weeks ago, keeping them as a secret beneath her grey and greyer robes. Always be prepared. She wedges Dran’s gift of the retractable knife into the back of her pants, feeling its cold handle against the small of her back like Dran’s fingers when he’d hold her there, pull her into him, and plant a kiss upon her lips, from which she’d hold back the poison. I’d never poison you, she says to him, closing her eyes to picture the kiss for one fleeting moment.

  She pulls out her tiny container of ashes from the small drawer and pockets them after giving the lid a short kiss. Next, she grabs her fingerless gloves and pulls them on one at a time. She does it with a ceremonious air, feeling the material as it covers her palm the way Dran’s hand would cover hers as they went for a stroll in the ninth or the tenth. They were invincible together. ‘I name the star right there, right by the moon …’

  Mercy chokes back a sob, annoyed at herself, then lets the long sleeves of the grey robe fall over her hands, hiding the gloves as well. She reaches into the drawer for her final possession.

  ‘I name it the black star of mercy …’

  Her hand finds nothing.

  She cranes her neck, bending to peer deeper into the drawer. She feels around, panic racing up her spine. She checks the pockets of her jeans and the folds of her robe. She inspects her gloves. She opens the container of ash, looking inside. She glances down at the floor, lifting her feet and pulling her grey robe out of the way.

  Mercy stares at the drawer. Dran’s ring is gone.

  The next instant, she’s stalking down the hall of chambers. Each door is closed up for the night, not one of them open. One of them took it, she knows. The nosy one. Or the Mother’s sister. Or another.

  Or Lady Agdanagon herself, the one who innocently changes their linens, who found the retractable knife under her mattress by “accident”. Mercy’s eyes narrow. She knows better than to trust any of these fools.

  She raps on the woman’s door three firm times.

  It opens softly. Lady Agdanagon’s face meets hers, and concern crosses it at once. “What’s wrong, Sister?”

  “It’s your sister, Sister,” says Mercy, deciding to be clever in her accusation. “She’s taken something that belongs to me.”

  The Mother looks affronted for a moment. Then, she slips out of her room and closes the door behind her. “Come, come. To the galley upstairs,” she whispers, lifting a lantern off the wall as she hobbles away. “It’s much too quiet down here.”

  Mercy follows her down the hall and up a flight of stairs. They stop at the foot of the dining table at which they eat their meals when Mercy puts a hand on the Mother and spins her around.

  “I won’t be going with the lot of you,” she states to the startled Mother’s face. “Your piety is a mask. Their smug sense of altruism is not only fake, but only lasts as long as their measly comforts do. I’m not a woman of comforts. I have been dragged by my teeth through the deep tunnels of emotional torment. I have felt suffering deeper than any of these foolish, cowardly runaways could possibly dream up in their five hours a night. And among their self-righteous toil, there stands a thief who has taken something precious from me.”

  “I … I just don’t understand how you presume to know that it is my sister who’s stolen from you.”

  “Because your sister knows my name.”

  Lady Agdanagon’s eyes were not wide before. They are now. “H-Had you two met before?”

  Mercy gives her the benefit of the doubt. If she’s playing dumb, Mercy will know soon enough. “Not to my knowledge.”

  She frowns, her lips pursed with heavy thought. “Mmm.” She leans against the table and lets down the lantern, which burns like a little fireball, their only source of light in this darkened hall. The dark wrinkly skin of her face glows rosy and warm in the light. “Mmm, a curious plight.” Her lips draw thin and her eyes, thinner.

  “Not so curious,” says Mercy. “Open her room and get my ring.”

  “And if you are wrong, my sister may take offense. I know her to be no thief.”

  “Then you must know her to be a spy,” Mercy decides, pushing the subject. “She knows my name. Her and … the one who sits next to me during mealtimes. They’ve whispered my name between them and others have heard.”

  The Mother takes the information the way one takes on a bag of fifty onions, her body physically drooping when she hears it. “Dear.”

  “If this breaks the ‘sacred’ rules of your Sisterhood, I care not. I’ll be on my way—as soon as I get my ring.”

  “No. I will not exile you for a name, so help me. I might as well exile myself for the sake of no one being able to properly pronounce mine.” She huffs irritably, completely rattled, then lifts her chin. “I hope you are certain of what you know, Sister. This will be quite devastating to me if your claim is proven true. Perhaps more so if it’s proven false. A stroke of discord can unravel all the Sisters, and they are so fragile already after today’s news of the Red Light. I feared half would leave during the night.”

  “Half of them may,” Mercy agrees. “One of them with my ring.”

  Lady Agdanagon sighs. “Cannot we trust that, maybe if the ring was stolen and not merely lost—”

  “It was not lost.”

  “—that it may turn up in time anyway?” she finishes. “Give it to tomorrow. Upon our move, a ring may not be easy to conceal. You’ll keep your eyes open, and so will I. The thief will out. Remember,” she says, reaching out to take Mercy’s hand. Mercy pulls away, not letting her. The Mother lifts her half-lidded eyes, weary. “Remember, these possessions of ours, they don’t come of use while we serve the Sisters three. We’re not the material things we have. We are the immaterial love we keep.”

  “Aye,” agrees Mercy, “and that immaterial love of mine is in that ring. And I will have it tomorrow.” With that, Mercy turns her back on the Mother and stalks the dark halls alone, returning to her room.

  This night, she dreams with her eyes open.

  0193 Halvesand

  He sits at the end of a table in the cafeteria, surrounded by the noise of fellow Guardian as they chat and eat an early-morning meal. The atmosphere r
evives Halves in a way that no medicine or kind words or treatment ever could.

  The guys across from him are talking about a bunch of dumb kids in the tenth who are pretending to be Mad Kings themselves, racing from street to street setting things on fire. All of them have been apprehended and celled up somewhere on the first floor, but none of them will confess to whose idea it was to do what they did; whenever they’re asked, they all start laughing maniacally in unison. Halvesand grins the whole time they’re talking, listening to the story and feeling elated to have any part of it—even if he can’t respond. He is regarded sometimes as more of a patient of the hospital than as a fellow Guardian, but they all trained together in the eleventh under the strict tutelage of Obert Ranfog, who gave them all hell at some point or another, and the camaraderie between the men and women fills Halves’ heart.

  Last night, he just got the approval he’s been waiting for. “Yes,” the nurse had said, his eyes glowing with the lightness of the good news he was about to deliver, his hand gripping the clipboard tightly. “You are cleared of your bedridden state, Mr. Halvesand Lesser. Your only restriction will be a cane, which has in its base two controls, see? Right here. Allow me to demonstrate, sir.”

  One control is used to stabilize the cane upon the ground, turning it into a rigidly upright post that cannot fall over, which Halves can use if he were to fall over. The other control can issue a loud sound, which simultaneously alerts a nurse or emergency medic to his exact position in case he is in need of immediate help, since he is without voice and cannot properly call out for it.

  “Dude, do that thing it does,” says Marte, the guy sitting across from him at the table.

  Halves smirks. He rests his cane on the ground, then taps the control. In an instant, the cane flips upward, standing straight up at once with a whirring metallic sound.

  “Fuuuuck,” groans Marte appreciatively. “Dare you to do that in front of your brother. Make the cane knock him in the nuts.”

  The others at the table laugh at that. Halves cannot join in the laughter without feeling the razor-cutting agony in his throat, so he simply smirks appreciatively and gives a nod, then returns to sipping on his vegetable juice, which tastes like celery and tomato when it hits his tongue, then turns into something bitter and awful as he swallows it down past the damage in his throat.

  “Doesn’t that suck?” asks the guy at his side after nudging his elbow, which makes Halves wince since his skin is still annoyingly sensitive. “Like, to only be able to drink all the time? Can you really never eat solids again?”

  “Dude, he can’t talk, idiot,” blurts Marte.

  “Oh yeah. Does that suck?”

  Marte throws a spoon at him, and then the guys start spitting teasing insults at each other, and Halvesand grins ear to ear with laughter he can’t let out.

  Suddenly, a hand rests softly on his shoulder. Halves ducks from it slightly, then turns his head.

  It is Ennebal. She looks down upon him, her face framed by two curtains of dark, perfectly straight hair cropped at her chin. “Sorry,” she murmurs, retracting her hand.

  The grin on Halves’ face fades away. He gives her a small nod of forgiveness, then tries to smile. It feels flat on his lips.

  Ennebal leans in toward his ear. Her lips tickle when she says, “Can we talk?”

  Halves studies her eyes, the flat attempt at a smile fading away too. He nods, slipping out of his seat with his hand gripping the cane and his other palming the decanter of vegetable juice—the remainder of his lunch. The guys at the table have drawn quiet, likely watching as the pair of them leave, Ennebal walking slowly as Halves moves with his cane one step at a time.

  They come to a stop at an elevated crosswalk that runs over the main lobby of Eleven Wings. The banisters are as smooth as Lifted City chrome, polished and shiny too. Their view to the left is a lobby below them, and to the right is a wall of glass that overlooks a road that runs deep into the eleventh, likely running straight to the Dark Abandon itself. Halves experiences a strange moment of wondering what this view looked like centuries ago when there actually was a twelfth ward they could walk to if they continued down that road.

  “Halves.”

  He brings his gaze to Ennebal, who leans backwards on the banister with her elbows propped up. The pose accentuates what little breasts she has, hugged in a formfitting black leather jacket. Her legs are squeezed into black leather pants that shine like rubber. All the black of her attire and her hair makes her fingers and face glow as pale as a ghost, and her lips flush pink as roses.

  “I need to tell you something.” Her mouth tightens as she looks away, apparently figuring that this “something” she needs to tell him is not a thing she can say while looking him in the eyes. “I had to wait until you were better again.”

  Halves isn’t sure he’s ready to hear this. You’ve been with my brother, he’d say at once, interrupting her and saving her all the trouble. You made a sweaty play at him in the dormitories. It’s why Aleks was so guilty-looking when he saw me wake up that day long ago after I was recovered from the Lifted City half-dead. It was Pace who told him, his old partner who died at the knife-bearing hands of that same poisonous street rogue who did this to Halves. He already knows. He doesn’t need Ennebal to push her own knife into him; he’s already had a knife pull across his throat, and that’s enough knifing to endure for a lifetime.

  He turns from her, aiming his stony stare toward the window as he studies the skyline and the Lifted City that interrupts it. He stares at its tiny needles of exhaust pipes and power cables and Pylons that run down to the slums like long black teeth, cutting into the sky.

  “I have a baby in me.”

  Halves doesn’t hear her. For a solid moment, he thinks that she has changed the subject and wants to trade gossip with him. His lips part when it occurs to him that that’s the news she’s brought him.

  “It’s true,” she says. “We’re in a hospital, after all. I’ve confirmed the state I’m in. It’s a fact that a little life is growing inside me.”

  He doesn’t need a diviner from the ninth to distill the blatant fact from her words. He and Ennebal have not had sex since before his abduction and near-death experience. He knows already who the father is.

  Or does he? Has Ennebal been busy since Halves went and got himself broken? Has she made the rounds in all of Guardian? Halves can only assume so, with a flippant attitude like hers. So, you’ve had countless knocks on that pussy of yours and now one of them’s stuck in you. Congratulations.

  Her hand touches his arm, feeling like it’s made of needles.

  He turns his head to her. Ennebal’s eyes are as cold and flinty as they always are, but her eyebrows are drawn together pensively and her lips are pursed.

  “I know this isn’t what you asked for. It certainly isn’t what you needed. Hell, it isn’t what I needed.” Ennebal blows air past her lips as she turns away, her hand slipping off of Halves’ arm and sending a wave of nauseating sparks down his body. “I also could have told you sooner, sure. But if I’m perfectly honest, I didn’t even notice that I’d missed my bleed. Took me two damn weeks to get a check with the doctor. I thought I had a damn disease. You’ve been clinging to the edge of death for the past two months, I couldn’t tell you. I had to keep this information to myself. Well, myself and my Lead Officer, who isn’t Obert anymore, by the way. Some cocky fucker from the sixth is giving us orders now.”

  Halves is staring at Ennebal, stunned. Even if he had a voice, he’s not sure he’d be capable of using it right now. She’s known of this for two months? Ennebal’s been pregnant since before … all this?

  Ennebal meets his eyes again. “No, I haven’t told your brother. If that’s what you’re thinking. Sure, he’s my partner, but fuck him. He gets on my nerves and he’s always showing off. He doesn’t need to know of his impending doom as an uncle someday to some little boy or girl. That’s assuming you want me to go on with this thing.”

  Halves s
taggers a step away from her, stabbing his cane into the ground and letting his thumb mash into the control that keeps his cane upright. He doesn’t feel capable at all of keeping himself up suddenly, his head spinning.

  “Too soon?” she asks with a subtle lift of an eyebrow.

  He grips his cane with both hands, balancing himself. Then he shakes his head.

  “My sister was baked in her own clay casket before she ever got the chance to experience motherhood. I figure I owed it to her to at least try it once.” Ennebal folds her arms and sighs, staring off at the lobby below. “If it’s a girl, I hope you don’t mind if I name her after my sister. Jenevin.”

  She is putting on an air of indifference because it’s the way that Ennebal Flower deals with any stress or heartache. She shields her feelings with hardness, much like she does when using her Legacy of rendering her body impervious. Halves wonders if she’s ever shed a tear in front of him or if she ever will. Can he ever truly connect with a woman so guarded as Ennebal, a woman who will mask every one of her weaknesses and never let him soothe her? And on that note, can he even soothe her in his new physical state? He wonders if he’ll ever be able to fuck anything again, even his own hand.

  “Jenevin Lesser,” she goes on, musing. “Nice sound to it, if you prefer the baby to take on yours. Not that I’m planning to hook you for life, Lesser. Unless you wanted that.”

  Halves feels his knees trying to give away, and he finds himself suddenly very thankful for the cane upon which he’s putting all of his weight. Surprisingly, the unassumingly wimpy rod of metal holds its ground, keeping him completely upright.

  “Weddings your thing, Halves? Ever been to one?”

  He coughs suddenly, then brings a hand to his chest, giving it a bit of a rub. He forgets that he’s holding the decanter of vegetable juice in that hand, pressing it to his chest as he rubs. He shakes his head no to her question without looking at her, his eyes cast to the floor as he rubs and rubs. His breaths are drawing short.