by Daryl Banner
“Triggered the memory?”
“It triggered everything.” She pulls away from his chest. “Please be kind to little me when I start to talk. It might take a strict, angry cold boy in the slums later in my life to set my speaking straight.”
“Noted,” says Link.
0220 Rone
Edrick brings him another cup of sour-tasting leaf water. Rone slurps on it, then spits half of the helping back into the cup. “Really,” Rone complains drowsily. “This tastes like piss.”
“It totally is,” Edrick returns flatly. “It’s my piss. I’m serving you my piss.”
Rone snorts, a part of him deep down appreciating the pleasure boy’s dry humor. He decides to try the leaf water again, wrinkling his nose as he drinks it. It’s supposed to be healing, but it seems to make him dizzier the more he swallows.
“Lifted folk call it tea.”
“It’s leaf water,” Rone says back to him. “Or it’s piss. One of the two. It’s making my head spin.”
“I put chemical in it.”
Rone’s eyes flash open, face lifted from the cup as he gapes at the pleasure boy. “You’re lying.”
“Nope. You know how easy it is for a boy like me to happen on the stuff?” Edrick sprawls out on the bed upon which Rone is lazily seated, taking up the opposite end. He’s wearing nothing but a skimpy pair of red bikini briefs. His body is lean, long, and fit like a cat. “I practically piss it every noon and night.”
“So I am drinking your piss,” Rone japes, though his voice is far tighter than it is loose and humorous.
Edrick studies Rone’s expression. “You really want it, huh?”
Rone drinks the leaf water with a bit more fervor than before, swallowing it in three big gulps and pushing past the sour, sickening taste. “It’s the only thing that keeps me from feeling. It’s the only thing in Atlas that numbs everything. The pain. The memory. The anguish.”
“Have you tried dying? That works too.”
“I’m too dumb to die.” Rone extends the empty cup, his vision blurring from the chemical chasing through his system. “Give me more.”
Edrick pretends to be taken aback, a hand going to his chest. “My, my. When I picked you up off that street, I wasn’t expecting to be adopting a baby I had to take care of.”
“It’s not milk I want from your teat,” says Rone. “It’s chemical.”
“Chemical’s not good for babies,” teases Edrick.
Rone drops the cup onto the bed and leans back, closing his eyes as his head hits the pillow. A fountain of colors and stars swirl about in his mind like a hurricane of beauty. He feels a smile invade his face as he swims in the wonder. This is what I needed, he realizes.
He feels a hand on his thigh. He ignores it, swimming in the world behind his eyelids that has been generated by a river of chemical in his veins. He hasn’t felt this good since his days in the loft with Victra riding his cock. I miss Victra, he realizes. Maybe she would take me back. Maybe Rain is still an option.
But nothing happens to his heart when he thinks on her. He is trying not to think of Ruena, the Queen who has run from him. She got herself caught, then broke her way free. Of course she’d break free, Rone thinks with happy amusement. No one can contain that beautiful, powerful storm of a woman.
The hand climbs his thigh, reaching the inner side. It feels good a little and it tickles a little, considering how thin the material of Rone’s pants are. Is he still wearing the silken pair he found in that mansion in the sky, or did he since change back into his jeans? He doesn’t remember and can’t feel anything, the chemical swimming through him.
When the hand slips over his cock, Rone flinches, sucking in air.
“It’s alright,” comes Edrick’s voice. “Small price, I’d say.”
Rone’s eyes flap open. He realizes what’s happening quite suddenly, the chemical letting go of him for this one moment when he lifts his head. “W-What’re you doing?”
Edrick is bent over Rone’s body, a hand on Rone’s crotch. Ah … My old, weathered jeans, he answers his own question from before.
“You expect me to just pump you with chemical for free?” The pleasure boy’s voice is light and silky. Rone wonders if Wick would have found Edrick attractive, if they hadn’t come to this place only seeking information months ago, or if Wick’s heart wasn’t wrapped up exclusively with the Broadmore boy.
“What are you gonna do with my cock?” asks Rone in a voice that’s a touch more dry.
Edrick hasn’t let go of it through the loose, soft material of Rone’s threadbare jeans. “Whatever I want,” he answers. “Just like the customers I serve who get whatever they want.”
“Am I your pleasure boy now?” asks Rone drowsily, the sweet and sour influence of the chemical starting to reclaim him.
“You’re my pleasure boy now,” affirms Edrick.
Rone’s head drops back to the pillow. He can’t even muster enough energy to make a joke about it all. It’s all very funny, in some way or another. Good luck getting it hard. As his jeans turn loose and slip down his thighs, and while Edrick’s skillful lips play on Rone’s soft cock, Rone feels a swarm of beautiful numbness flow through his body, and then he is adrift in a colorful array of stars and laughter. In that laughter, Rone feels tears release from his eyes.
“This is a lot more fun for me if you’re not crying,” says Edrick tersely.
Rone doesn’t listen, swimming away in a starry wonderland of color and feeling and nothingness as the tears season his cheeks.
0221 Arrow
When he is in the front yard, sitting in the grass and leaned up against the reading tree, he hears a voice to his side. “You share part of a name with the Mad King.”
Arrow lifts an eyebrow. Auleen stands two paces from him, the baby in her arms sound asleep.
“Come again?”
Auleen smiles. “Fyrefellow, isn’t it? Your last name?”
Prat and his big mouth. “Yes.”
“Aye, and Impis Lock … fyre. The Fyre part, see? It isn’t just a coincidence, my friend. Perhaps there is a branch of your family tree, far in the past, that’s connected.”
Arrow can’t help but chuckle. “Perhaps I ought to point out the chalky white powder of Impis’s face and the dark chocolate of mine,” he mutters with half a roll of his eyes. “There is no relation. Just as a hundred names have the word Lock or Fellow in them, it doesn’t remotely imply that we share blood.”
“Well, we all share blood, of course. Oh.” She fusses with her baby for a moment, who stirs in her arms. After a second, she smiles lightly, relieved. “Ah, yes. Back to sleep. You ever wonder what they dream? The little ones?”
Arrow thinks on what Wick dreams. Maybe Wick dreams of sexy boys raining down from the sky. Maybe he dreams of fire and destruction. Maybe he dreams of rainbows and ten-foot-tall flowers. “I don’t wonder,” he lies.
“Of course you do,” she fires back. “You are the wonderer of the group. You are most necessary. A wonderer has the ideas. When the whole of your family and friends are stumped, you think up the answer. I envy your like.” She kisses her baby’s head, gently rocking the little one in her arms. “Don’t lie to me, Arrow Fyrefellow. I will sniff you out for the wonder-filled genius you are.”
Arrow smirks, picks a blade of grass out of the soil and flicks it into the breeze. “Leave the genius term for the likes of Lionis.”
“Aye. But he’s dependent on his books, a slave to what he’s told. He does not think. He does not wonder. The worst kind of genius, the one who only knows what he learns.” She gives Arrow a knowing wink. “You could be a King someday, y’know.” She nods at the sky carelessly. “After all this is over with.” Then the woman gently walks her baby back to the house, Arrow watching after her curiously.
The sun begins to set earlier than expected, leading Arrow to assume the winter days are upon them soon. In the waning light of the evening, Arrow tries to make himself a decent dinner of chopped veget
ables, but finds half the stalks wilted. He eats them anyway, his eyes squinting against the bitter taste.
He considers going outside to watch the sun go down, but stops at the front window of the house when he notices Prat and Ivy in the yard. The two are standing side by side in the burning orange of the sunset, their shoulders touching. Prat turns just his head and says a few words to her, probably something to the effect of, “Isn’t it such a beautiful sunset tonight?” And Ivy turns her face to him too, offering him a timid smile and a flash of her pretty, Hightower eyes. “It is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” she probably says back to him. The two look as if they could kiss and declare their love for one another, the way they’re melting into each other’s eyes. The sight is enough to make Arrow lose his recent meal all over the glass.
Then his attention is caught by an approaching figure down the street. He pushes out of the house, ignoring a startled Prat and Ivy, and stands at the front of the lawn. Coming down the broken road is the unmistakable figure of the woman who took Wick, Lionis, and Athan to the Lifted City to meet with the King. She has next to her a short, round fellow dressed in flowing silk—some spoiled Lifted boy whose face shines in shades of rouge and gold with the hint of old makeup. They walk alone.
Prat mutters at his back. “Is that—?”
Arrow ignores him and takes a step forward. “Where is Wick?” he calls out at the pair of them, still partway down the street. “Where is Lionis and Athan?”
The woman named Arcana does not respond from a distance. She finishes her long, unhurried walk down the street. When she finally comes to a stop, it is several paces away from the yard, poised upon the broken road. She is beautiful and regal, her shape fitting perfectly in the skintight shiny outfit she wears that covers her from neck to ankle in an off-white. Two green bangles rest at her wrists, and her smooth chestnut face is adorned with a stud piercing at her upper lip that sparkles—a definite indication of a Son or Daughter of Sanctum. The pudgy silk-wearing boy is at her side with a crooked, uncomfortable scowl on his annoyingly rosy face.
Soon after their approach, Arrow notices the third figure, who ambles carelessly and miserably, slouched and soundless as he trails behind.
When he comes within reach, Arrow’s voice softens. “Athan?” But Athan doesn’t acknowledge him, simply moving past him and going straight into the house. Arrow stares after him, confused by the cold silence.
“Well?” says Prat, trying to appear more brave than he sounds, the voice-cracking fool that he is. “Speak, mind reader!”
Arrow turns back to face Arcana, who turns her head slightly in either direction, taking note of all the others who recognize her from her last visit and are emerging from their homes to witness her unsettling return, mixed looks of curiosity and worry on their faces.
“Where are our friends?” repeats Arrow evenly.
When Arcana’s eyes meet Arrow’s, a flicker of emotion finally breaks her otherwise cool, untelling demeanor. “We need to speak in private,” she says with a tilt of her head.
A man from across the street speaks up. “Whatever you have to say, Lifted woman, you can say to all our like.” “Yeah!” chimes in a woman from down the street. “Out with it!” “Where’s our Lesser boys?” comes another. “Speak!”
Arcana faces Arrow, a hint of her hardness returning. “I have brought you back Athan. I am here because we need to plan. I am here because—”
“Because you’re running,” intuits Arrow, studying her face. He feels his mouth going dry as he puts together the pieces of what he’s seen: Athan’s vague nothingness, the lack of Wick and Lionis, the strange Lifted boy, Arcana’s evasiveness. “Did … D-Did something happen up there?”
The look in her eyes ought to say it all, but Arrow is no mind reader, and his “wonderer’s” imagination is far too wild to settle on any one explanation. He imagines Wick and Lionis stripped of their powers, awaiting a rescue. He imagines the brothers being dragged off to the Keep—or some semblance of one, a trail of blood drawn on the ground as they go. He sees the brothers boldly taking a stand against the King, and then he sees Lionis not holding his tongue as he spouts off a hundred smart things, then gets his tongue lopped off for a consequence. He sees Wick reaching for a hundred Legacies.
“They’re gone,” she answers.
Arcana ceases all his thoughts with those two words. The sound of shuffling feet and whispers in the crowd dies out. Even the wind seems to stop blowing. Arrow eyes detach as he stares at nothing, uncomprehending, too slow to process what she just said. Gone? his mind seems to challenge. Gone? How so? What does she mean?
There’s no way they could have lost both Lionis and Wick. “But they were …” Arrow starts to say, then gets lost in his own head.
No one in the crowd seems able to issue even a word of anger. They are stunned to silence, men and women exchanging stares of disbelief and sadness between them. Arrow notices the couple from the house with the big porch down the road hugging each other, the woman sobbing silently and trying to hide her face. The news does not hit anyone lightly. They all grew up with Lionis and Wick. They knew them since they were babies.
With a calm and even voice, she tells the story. She keeps her composure and tells it moment to moment, perhaps for the benefit of the others, to whom she likely feels she owes Wick’s and Lionis’s final moments of life. Her sister and Impis set the madness into the brothers, which turned into Lionis’s end. Then Impis’s heart seemed set, perhaps seeing Wick as a threat, since he had the potential to mimic Impis’s madness, or Axel’s mind control, and so decided he was no longer interested in him. Athan witnessed it all firsthand. A girl who both Wick and Athan knew sacrificed her freedom to ensure that Athan, Arcana, and Sedge made it out of the Lifted City, destroying the only path on their way down.
“He was strong until his last moment,” Arcana states. “If you don’t believe it from me, you may believe it from Athan, the boy whom Anwick Lesser loved and trusted with his life. I know you will need your time for grieving,” she goes on, “but I assure you, I will do whatever it takes in my power to grant you the retribution you so deserve. I have aided the Madness. I even helped in its kindling. But I cannot stand for what it’s become. Impis turned Sanctum inside-out. Impis cast away everything that was corrupt and horrible with the people of the sky … but he’s lost his way, lost his mind, and replaced it with something far worse. We can stand up against him.”
“The ninth don’t sit around,” grunts a man, one of Wick’s older neighbors with a huge mustache that wiggles as he speaks. “Nothin’ good came to the Lessers. From one end to the other, that family’s been wrecked. I’ve known them since Forge and dear Ellena moved into that house with just a pair of crying babies in their arms, little Halvy and Al.”
“I’ve been lucky to avoid the worst of it,” says a woman who holds the head of her terrified little boy against her hip, “and I’ll be first to admit that I’m no fighter. But I can’t sit around either anymore. Two of our own are gone. Who knows if the whole lot of them’s dead. We can’t … We can’t sit here and … and just …”
“We must organize,” says Auleen, back in her yard with her baby squeezed against her chest. “We must gather more from the neighboring wards. We need to build an army, that’s what we ought to do. Halves and Aleks and Innie down the street, they’ve all gone in the way of Guardian. We will be the new Guardian.”
“Soldiers of the slums,” shouts another man, inspired.
And while a number of them are quick to grab hold of the fire sparking in their eyes, there is still a large number of people in the crowd who can’t seem to be pulled from their stupor. It seems that the death of Wick and Lionis has hit too close to home for them.
In the noise of shouting voices, Arrow turns and makes way for the house, suddenly unable to handle any more of it. When the noise falls at his back and the door softly shuts, he finds Athan seated on the steps halfway up the narrow staircase. Athan looks up a
nd meets Arrow’s eyes. Arrow has never seen Athan look so expressionless before. It’s alarming.
“I couldn’t be in his room anymore,” Athan explains, answering some question Arrow didn’t ask. He lifts his forearm from a red jacket in his lap—which Arrow belatedly realizes is Wick’s—and he shows a nasty cut that runs nearly the whole length of it. “I think I bled all over his hoodie, but I can’t tell because it’s all red already.”
“Athan … I’m so sorry.”
“Me too.” Athan shakes his head. “I’m not sure if it could have been prevented. Maybe it was all supposed to happen. I thought for a second, maybe my Legacy really is survival. When Wick looked at me … right there at the end, in the last moment … I thought he’d grabbed hold of my Legacy, like throwing someone a rope who’s hanging from a cliff. I thought he’d grabbed on. I thought, surely, he would survive. My power would save him.” Athan’s voice is weak and broken, no life to his words, no enthusiasm. “I was wrong. I …”
Arrow takes a seat on the step below Athan, leaning against the wall to look up at him.
Athan slaps a hand to his cheek. “I don’t know what my Legacy is, Arrow. I don’t. I really, truly don’t. I can’t do anything. I’m not lucky. If I’m lucky, Wick would’ve been lucky in that last moment and survived. If I’m a survivor, Wick should have survived. What the fuck am I, Arrow?” His eyes turn to Arrow pleadingly, the first hint of life returning to his voice as it grows frantic with need. “What the fuck am I??”
Arrow parts his lips, but nothing comes out. He’s never been very good at comforting others. “I’m …” Arrow shakes his head, still in shock from the news. “I’m so sorry, Athan.”
If it’s not a machine or a scrap of metal, Arrow cannot seem to communicate well with it. There is no consoling Athan; this much, Arrow knows for certain. But he’s never really had any close friends, his whole life. He didn’t even know what to say to his own mother when his father was brutally beaten in their living room. He didn’t know how to console his mother after her own abuse that she endured at the hands of those vile Guardian. Oddly, his sister was the easiest to speak with, mostly because the brain damage from the Guardian’s assault had reverted her to something of a child. Why did they spare me completely? Arrow still wonders to this day. Why break everything around me and leave me whole?