Outlier: Reign Of Madness

by Daryl Banner

0213 Arrow

  The red fire glows in the distant sky, a bolt surging there, a bolt surging somewhere else, a bolt surging yet somewhere else, and then the red fire goes to sleep. The bolts come more frequently now.

  Arrow sits in his makeshift control room surrounded by his charms, which have been silent since Wick and the others left the train and boarded some sort of lift, judging from the mutterings under Lionis’s breath. Communications became fuzzy as they went up, and then they ceased at once. Arrow has spent the last day and a half trying not to panic. It doesn’t mean the worst, he tells himself. My charms have never tried to speak at such a vertical height. Even in the sixth ward tower, my reach would sometimes fail me.

  But then he finds his eyes locked onto a certain other charm that he made back at the Noodle Shop, a cup-shaped bit of metal whose sister fell down into the sewers. Is there an organization of power that they must stay wary of other than the one in the sky? Is there truly some sort of world beneath their feet, too?

  Against his better judgment, Arrow heads out of the room and goes down the narrow stair to find Prat. The kitchen feels so empty and unused without Lionis here. He sighs as he passes it, wishing either of them paid more attention to Lionis’s work in the Warden’s tower so that they might better prepare their own meals instead of constantly going over to the neighbor’s Iranda and Auleen, who seem to eat eight times a day even with a little baby to take care of.

  He finds Prat in the front yard sitting under the big tree, a spread of papers on the grass around him. “Hey.”

  Prat looks up and gives Arrow a mild nod. “Any word?”

  “Nothing,” mumbles Arrow. “I overestimated my charms.”

  Prat smirks, a worried look in his eyes. “Do you think someone has a Legacy that can … neutralize charms? Like, turn them back into just bits of dead metal?”

  “Maybe. I have no idea. All I know is, the Marshal of Madness has a hand-picked selection of Legacies up there. Fully curated, a lot of useful, unique, capable Legacies. He’s bound to have neutralizers of some kind. It’s just a matter of math, really. And besides …”

  When he glances back at Prat, he realizes Prat’s returned his attention to his papers. Even after he’s stopped talking, Prat doesn’t seem to be listening, writing something on one sheet of paper, then drawing lines on the other.

  Arrow sighs lightly, watching him, then decides to engage him elsewise. “You made an office out here in the yard?”

  “There’s a desk inside, but it’s in Wick’s parents’ room, and … well, y’know. That’s weird. I can’t be in there.”

  “Okay.”

  Prat drums the pencil against his thigh as he speaks. “I’m trying to recall as much as I can from everything we had in your system in the sixth. I’ve drawn and redrawn the maps so many times, there’s a lot I know from memory. Some of the stuff from Athan is gone, since I’ve only really drawn out parts of the Lifted City once or twice.”

  “Hmm.” Arrow leans against the back of the tree, staring down the street and wondering if Wick and the others will just appear with word from the King that everything is alright, that some agreement has been made, that some semblance of peace can be known. I’m a fool to wish for any of that. A bigger fool to expect it.

  “She’s with Auleen and the baby,” says Prat suddenly.

  Arrow furrows his brow. He knows Prat’s talking about Ivy, but he puts on a nonchalant air anyway. “Who?”

  “You know who. She’s become obsessed with the baby. I think it focuses her, you know? Like, after the loss of her family and all the bad stuff she’s been through. She really needs the distraction. It’s hard to even hold a conversation with her, what with her jumps.”

  “Her jumps?”

  “She jumps sometimes.” Prat nods languidly, then gasps with the memory of something hitting them and scribbles down a note on the paper. “Eastly and Sunrise, that was it. Not Sunshine.”

  “I’m gonna go back and listen some more,” mumbles Arrow.

  “Damn, wish I’d asked Athan these questions before he left,” says Prat, as if not hearing a word. He scribbles something else down, then draws a circle on one of his papers and writes a name in the middle of it, wrinkling the acne-pocked skin of his forehead as he concentrates.

  Arrow pushes away from the tree and makes his way back to the house. Just when he reaches the door, Prat says, “You should see her, Arrow. I think she’d appreciate it.”

  He stops in the opened doorway, turns his head slightly. “Huh?”

  “Ivy. She’d appreciate it. She’s kind of confused about you.”

  Arrow feels an icy chill run through him. He’s suddenly very aware of the weight of a gun that still lives wedged in the back of his jeans, a gun with six bullets still in its chambers. “Confused?”

  “She wants to know why you saved her.” He hears Prat shifting, perhaps looking up from his work or dropping his pencil down. “For that matter, why did you save her?”

  Arrow doesn’t owe that answer to Pratganth. He owes it to Ivy Caldron, and even then, does he really? Her life is saved. His dad’s life is not. Why does it matter the reason for his saving her? The last thing he feels like is a hero. I went there to kill every last member of a family, not to save one of them. I’m not a hero.

  “Hey, that’s fine, don’t answer, I don’t exist, no big deal.” Prat snorts and returns to his work.

  Arrow ignores the slight and heads back into the house. He also ignores a growl in his stomach, figuring he’ll just skip a middle-day meal and go for a dinner from the finger foods and bins of slum stew that seem to emerge every night when the parties in the streets begin. It truly is a party every night out here.

  An hour later, he’s still sitting in the room that used to belong to one of Wick’s brothers surrounded by his charms. He picks up the cup-shaped one, which hasn’t uttered a word since that moment it caught voices in the sewers. “Probably just a crazy band of mentally-warped sewer dwellers who feed on rats and worms and smell of things worse,” Arrow decides. “Just the musings of idiots who are as sick and deluded as the Mad Fool in the sky.”

  He had left the front door of the house open, so when he hears the footsteps come up the stairs, they startle him. A few more soft footfalls and he feels the presence of a person standing at the opened doorway of his little control room.

  He knows it’s her before she even speaks. “Arrow?”

  Arrow picks up another charm, suddenly deciding to appear very busy with it. He is very, very busy doing busy things, busily. He regards her with a grunt of greeting, but doesn’t turn his head.

  Ivy doesn’t take a step into the room, as if some magic power keeps her from entering. “I … I was wondering if … um …”

  Arrow drops the charm he was holding, having fumbled with it, then grabs another one, turning it over and over in his hand.

  “Never mind,” she says, leaving the room.

  He stops turning the charm, then sighs. When the girl’s made it halfway down the short narrow stairs, Arrow says, “What is it?”

  She stops. From the staircase, she speaks softly, but her voice still carries in the silent, cramped house. “What were you doing that day in the sixth?”

  Arrow feels the cold wet fingers of the five murders he did not commit that day taking hold of his neck, slippery as noodles. “What are you talking about?” he mumbles lazily.

  “You weren’t supposed to be there.”

  Arrow squints, not following. “Huh?”

  “Everyone in—Rain, is it?—Everyone in Rain was angry with you. You had no missions in my part of the ward. The woman with the frizzy hair and … and the bald man, that’s what they said. And Prat, too. No one knew why you were in my neighborhood.” A few footsteps brings her back up the stairs and to his doorway again. “So now I’m asking you. Why?”

  Arrow can’t tell her the truth. He’ll never tell her the truth. The only way the words would slip past his lips is if Ivy lay dead beside the rest of her
family. You cannot burn, he’d say if he had the nerve, but you can still bleed.

  “Why?” she repeats. “You show up in my part of the sixth ward unannounced, no purpose in the world at all. Then the Laughing Finger strikes. And you’re there to … to rescue me? It cannot just be all a coincidence, Arrow. I don’t style myself a suspicious girl, but … it just doesn’t make sense. Please. Help me make sense of it.”

  Your father hired Guardian to rape and ruin my family forever. All of you stood by and laughed when my father was ridiculed for his good work—whatever that work was. You are as guilty as the men who broke my sister and spilled my father’s blood and soiled my mother’s bed. I wish the Finger took you, too.

  “Or don’t,” she says softly, and it doesn’t sound cruel, the two words. “Maybe I just have to put my grief somewhere. I suppose I’m just greedy. It isn’t enough that you saved me. Now I need you to save my mind from going insane with doubt and suspicion. I’m just asking too much.”

  Greedy, yes. Quite greedy, you are and have always been. He does not need to have known her over the years to know the type of girl that stands close to him. She is the kind who has been served her whole life by lesser people, even being of the slums and not the sky. People in the sixth ward, they are warped, thinking themselves to be entitled to special treatments and respect.

  And that expectation has made her hungry for all the comfort and consolation she can possibly find. Clearly she’s found it in Prat for the last few weeks—or however long it’s been. Arrow has had to suffer the witnessing of Prat growing close to her, floating away with her from the Warden’s tower like the real hero, holding her close, standing by her, speaking up boldly for her. Arrow knows damn well that if the Finger Of Madness struck this far out here in the ninth, Prat would be the first to piss his pants and run for his life, abandoning Ivy and all his friends.

  But Arrow won’t say any of that. Listen first. Swallow all the words you most wish to say. He swallows hard, all his resentments moving so slowly down his throat, he’d swear he’s swallowing the whole planet.

  “Arrow?”

  “I lost my family,” says Arrow vaguely.

  Ivy doesn’t respond, but he feels her body grow still, listening.

  Listening.

  “And Athan?” Arrow goes on. “He lost his family too, every last one of them. Poisoned by a mystery poisoner. Wick’s family broke apart, his mother missing, his father imprisoned for life. Victra …” A flash of her face hits him so hard, he shuts his eyes as if that could block him from the sight, but it only emphasizes it worse. “Did you know Victra’s a distant descendant from the Kingsword bloodline?” he murmurs, eyes still shut as the image of a blindly fumbling Victra is before him. He keeps talking despite his throat’s constricting. “Her great-something-or-something was a p-past King or Queen. She’s … She’s got cousin’s blood, though, so it kept her slumborn her whole life. I wonder …” The image of Victra changes. She seems calm. They are at the Noodle Shop loft together, sitting across from a table. She lifts her heavy, blue-lidded eyes to him. ‘What’re you lookin’ at?’ she asks, smirking. “I wonder how differently she’d have lived if she was born on the other side of the family. If she’d be alive today or not.”

  The silence from Ivy feels chilly, as if her self-important sixth ward self can’t bother to acknowledge any pain that they are all going through, too obsessed with her own. She’s probably even trying to remember which one Victra was, since we didn’t even have a body to bury because of me.

  Arrow grabs two of the charms, angry suddenly, and pitches them out the back opened window. He hears the soft catch of grass or tree limb as the useless charms find new homes in the backyard.

  “Fuck it all,” he grumbles, burying his face into his hands.

  He wishes Ivy would just go away. He doesn’t even care anymore that she survived. Let her survive. Let her suffer with the rest of them. Maybe it’s a more fitting punishment than the bullet he had planned for her.

  “I do understand everyone has suffered,” the girl in the doorway goes on. “I’m no different. I had sisters. I had a mother and a father and a plan for my life. Now I have … nothing. I don’t even have a home. I’ve been wearing these same clothes for weeks. The showers are insufferably cold. The food is boring. I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t really know any of you. I’m out here in the middle of … of the ninth … and I have nothing and no one.”

  “Nothing and no one,” Arrow repeats back to her coldly.

  “I mean …” Ivy sighs. “I have you and Prat and the brothers and Anthean, whenever they return, but I don’t—”

  “It’s Athan,” recites Arrow, his voice turning colder. “His name’s Athan. The brothers are Wick and Lionis. They have names, too.”

  “I know, I knew them. I just—”

  “And nothing, you say?” Arrow has risen from his chair. Ivy’s eyes flash by his change of demeanor. “Nothing? You don’t have this roof over your head? You don’t have the comfort of walls and doors and shelter? A street full of friendly, laughing people who embraced you the moment you arrived? Women a door down who have a baby that they let you hold and feed and play with? Nothing?”

  “I didn’t mean nothing, Arrow. I just meant—”

  “You live in the slums, and you can’t stand the life of a slummer. No, you had it so much better in your Hightower in the sixth.”

  Ivy’s jaw drops. “I resent that word!”

  Still, Arrow doesn’t listen to his own advice, for once opting to spill all the thoughts in his head, including the words he most wants to say. “You don’t know what nothing is. You want to try a taste of nothing? Walk the streets and find your own damn meals for a week. Dodge arrows aimed at your face instead of appealing for sympathy and explanations from the Arrow standing in front of you. My point is sharper than any of the ones you’ve ever had to dodge your whole life, if any at all, you privileged, spoiled rotten, Sanctum-licking—”

  Ivy has turned to run away, her face reflecting more indignance than hurt. Even in her anger, her footsteps down the stairs are so dainty and light, it annoys Arrow all the more.

  “I’m not finished with you!” he shouts out, his little, tired voice booming somehow. He tries to ignore the dark, double meaning in his words, the weight of a gun at his back and a mission he’d set out into her neighborhood in the sixth to accomplish. Impis did four fifths of the work for him. The final fifth just took off out of the house, unable to face her own demons. Just like a typical Hightower, Arrow decides heatedly. First to demand, last to supply.

  He collapses into his chair and stares at the silent, dumb charms. With a sweep of his hand, he knocks them all off of the table and pounds a fist into the wood, infuriated. “I’m tired of listening, dad,” he hisses at the desk, resentful, unnerved. Every time he speaks, he regrets his words. Listen … Listen … Yet all he hears is silence and his own pulse in his inflamed ears.

  0214 Kid

  It took undoing all the braids to realize that her hair is so long, it touches the backs of her thighs. On a morning when Fae complains of being so exhausted and having back aches, she asks Kid if she can distract herself by playing with her hair. Kid shrugs, not caring, and sits on the floor in front of Fae with her back turned while the young pregnant woman slowly and gently braids the whole length.

  The next morning, Kid finally breaks her silence. “The neighbor woman knows we’re here. Her and her husband, probably.”

  Link and Fae stare at her, as if not hearing the words.

  “But I think we’re okay,” Kid goes on. “She … only knows I’m here. And she saided that I could stay as long as I want. They own this house and are looking for a … buyer? She even saided I could—said I could eat at her house sometime. She was nice.”

  Link sits on the floor with such weight, he issues a short sigh. His eyes stare ahead in a blank stupor.

  “I’m sorry,” murmurs Kid to a wide-eyed Link who can’t seem to respond. Tears start
to fill Kid’s eyes. “I messed up. I should have gone invisible when I went to the neighbor’s pool. I should’ve—”

  “It’s okay.” Link presses his lips together as he glances back and forth between a teary-eyed Kid and a worried Fae. “Maybe … Maybe it’s actually better. Maybe …” Link puts a hand to his cheek, thinking it through. “Maybe it’ll even help hide us better. If the neighbor knows that someone is staying here, she might be less inclined to … hunt for a buyer. Maybe she thinks she’s doing you a favor, letting you stay here.”

  Kid wipes the tears from her eyes. “R-Really?”

  “We’ll see.” Link gives her a reassuring wink. “Only time will tell. Really, what’s the worst that can happen? We’ll just group up, all three of us, turn invisible, and find another place to stay.”

  “I like this place,” mumbles Kid.

  “Of course you do. And we will return again. We won’t give up on you. We’ll see your parents again, Kid. I’m kinda curious to meet them myself, after all this buildup. They better be really cool people,” he teases.

  The humor lightens Kid’s mood at once, and suddenly she runs across the room and hugs Link, grateful that he isn’t angry with her. Link rubs her back, and soon Fae joins him at his other side, and the three of them stay there, cuddled in the corner of the room as the light shifts through the windows, indicating the passing of the day.

  More weeks turn into more months, and soon Fae is so large in her belly that she looks too big to even move. “Are you gonna give birth to twins?” asks Kid one afternoon when the two of them are sharing food while Link’s upstairs. “Or triplets? Or—”

  “I certainly hope not,” teases Fae with a light giggle.

  “You will need to think of three names,” Kid decides smartly.

  “What’s yours?” Fae says, wrinkling her face with curiosity. Kid hugs her knees to her chest, as if withdrawing from the question. “I know what you like us to call you, of course, but you’ve never told us your name. Your … true name.”