Rogue

by Gina Damico

  “Uncle Mort,” she said.

  “What?” Driggs tore his gaze away from her face to look at the photograph on the wall. He frowned when he recognized it as a duplicate of one of the photos in the library in Croak, one of many taken of the townspeople every year at the Luminous Twelfth celebration.

  “Go get Uncle Mort,” Lex said, still staring, not blinking.

  “Why? What’s—” Driggs got up and moved closer to the picture, trying to figure out what she was looking at, what it was that they’d never noticed before in the photos back home.

  He squinted.

  Moved closer.

  Found Uncle Mort as a grinning Junior. To his right, Skyla and LeRoy. And to his left—

  Driggs was physically shocked back into transparency. Now a hovering shade of white, he whipped back to Lex. “I’ll go get him,” he said, holding a hand out to her, as if she might try to run. “Stay here.”

  But Lex wasn’t going anywhere. She stood up and took Driggs’s place in front of the photograph, keeping her eyes on the same spot until she felt Uncle Mort walk up beside her. And even then she didn’t stir, just went again down the line of the four Juniors: LeRoy, Skyla, Uncle Mort, and Abby. Abigail. Gail.

  When she spoke, it was only a single word, her voice no more than a whisper.

  “Mom.”

  12

  Lex and Uncle Mort sat next to each other on the floor. They faced the windows and looked out into the darkness of the Kansas plains. Lex wanted to believe that the stars here were even brighter than the ones in Croak, but the grayness of the Afterlife made them impossible to see.

  “She was a couple of years older than I was,” Uncle Mort said.

  He hadn’t cracked any jokes. He hadn’t made excuses. He’d just sat her down and started talking, no sugarcoating involved. As she listened, Lex couldn’t help but feel that he’d been waiting for this moment for a long time; he sounded relieved. As if he appreciated that she hadn’t flown off the handle as she usually did.

  As if he owed her the truth.

  “When I came to Croak as a Junior,” he said, “I took to it immediately, just like you did. I made friends fast, which had never happened before—I was the weird, violent kid whom everyone hated and who got in a lot of trouble.” He let out a sharp laugh. “You have no idea how similar we are, Lex.”

  “You bit your classmates too?”

  “I set fire to my classmates. Well, technically it was a chemistry experiment gone wrong, but parents were called, suspensions were issued.” He snorted. “In school, I was hated. But in Croak, I was revered.”

  He scratched his head. “But as much fun as I was having, I started to feel a bit uneasy. And it didn’t take long for me to figure out that a few of my fellow Juniors had the same sort of . . . inclinations that I did. The sense that even though being a Grim was what we were all really good at—and really enjoyed—something about all of this was fundamentally wrong. That human beings should never have been entrusted with the weight of this responsibility in the first place, shouldn’t have been allowed to touch it with a ten-mile pole. And that eventually the system would crack. Your mother agreed. And thus was born the tank-smashing plan.”

  He looked at Lex. “She was the kingpin, Lex. I mean, the schemes that girl could come up with . . . they were diabolical. But they would have been nothing without her drive, the desire to actually see them come to fruition. Your mother was the one who made it all happen. Your mother was the one with balls.”

  Lex just shook her head. “She made me keep a swear jar in the kitchen. She despised it when I got in trouble.” She swallowed. “I mean, for shit’s sake, she’s a history teacher!”

  “Well, no surprises there. She was the best Afterlife Liaisons employee Croak ever had, until Elysia,” he said. “I’m not surprised she retained some of that residual love for the ex-presidents.”

  Lex let out a puff of air. She should have been able to figure it out. But how could she? How on earth could she have known?

  “But Mom didn’t come from a crappy family,” Lex said. “My grandparents were perfectly lovely people.”

  “Having a troubled home life isn’t a prerequisite for becoming a Grim,” Uncle Mort said. “It’s just that those particular kids are more likely to really throw themselves into the Grimsphere, since they have nothing nice to go back to. Plus—well, there’s no way to say it without sounding callous, but it’s true: They’re less likely to be missed once they’re gone.”

  Like Driggs. He wasn’t missed at all, and probably wouldn’t have been even if his parents had lived.

  “But your mom was such a natural, the mayor at the time simply couldn’t pass her up. Certainly came to regret that, I bet.” He let out a long breath. “It smelled like paint, I remember. Under the Bank porch, where we hid right after the attack, when they were looking for us. Someone had recently repainted the wood, and those were the fumes we were breathing when your mom begged us to rat her out. Make up some excuse, do whatever we could to be absolved of our crimes, as long as the full brunt of the blame ended up on her. Because someone had to take the fall, she kept saying. Someone had to take the fall so that the rest of us could keep rebelling against the system from within, keep planning for the final strike that would finish what we started. And even though she loved the Grimsphere just as much as we did—maybe even more—she was willing to give it up, erase every memory she ever had of the place in order to save the Afterlife—her beloved presidents, all those souls.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “So we did it, for her. We turned ourselves in: four accused, but only one guilty. We stood up on that fountain in front of the town and loudly lied that yes, your mother forced us into it. It was all her idea. Wipe her memory. Exile her.”

  He sighed. “And that’s what they did.”

  Lex recalled something he’d said at the end of last summer. “Is that why you broke your Lifeglass?” she asked. “So they’d never find out what you guys planned?”

  He smiled, pleased that she remembered. “Yes.”

  “Still—why didn’t she get the Hole?”

  “They went easy on her because she was a Junior. Tried as a minor, I guess you’d say. The mayor back then wasn’t nearly as harsh as Norwood, sentencing kids to the Hole left and right.”

  Lex fidgeted at the memory of that awful room, those wrenching screams.

  “But I cared about your mother,” he said. When Lex raised her eyebrow at him, he shook his head. “Not in . . . that way. Skyla and I were already christening rooftops all over town, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “But your mother had become a sort of older sister to me. I couldn’t stand to see her thrust back into civilization without a clue, without knowing where the hell she’d been for the past few years or even how to be an adult out there in the real world. So I did what I do best. I schemed.”

  “How?”

  “Well, I had a perfectly good big brother sitting around.”

  Lex’s jaw dropped. “What? They always told us they met when he tripped and spilled ice cream down her shirt!”

  “Who do you think pushed him?”

  Lex just sputtered.

  “They never suspected a thing,” Uncle Mort said. “My brother had an inkling that I was mixed up in something weird—as he still does—but he didn’t know his soon-to-be wife had ever been a part of it. And thanks to the massive dose of Amnesia she got, neither did she.”

  Lex thought on this for a moment.

  “So you knew what you were doing,” she said quietly. “That if my parents had kids, those kids would be direct descendents of a Grim—”

  “And that those kids could possibly be the most powerful Grims ever born. Yes.”

  “But not if you followed the Terms, which say that relations of Grims aren’t allowed to become Grims. You brought me to Croak. You made me a Grim.” Her breathing was getting faster. “You didn’t have to do that. You could have let me just stay i
n my old life. This entire clusterfuck could have been avoided, and—”

  “And you’d still be miserable today.”

  She looked up at him, anguished. “Do I look happy to you?”

  “Okay, you’re still miserable, but it’s because you’re fighting for a cause you believe in. Look around you, Lex.” He gestured at the room. “You’ve got friends over there who are willing to die for you. You’ve got a boy who adores you. You’ve got me. And you’ve got a life that you were born for. So was it worth it? You’ll have to make that call for yourself. But I’d say it was.”

  Lex said nothing.

  “And what’s more,” he went on, “I think that if your mom knew what you’d become, she’d think the same thing. I think she’d be damned proud of you.”

  Something akin to tears was brewing inside Lex, but there were still too many thoughts whizzing through her head to properly disgorge them. “Still,” she said in a low voice, “you used me. You knew what I might be capable of, that I would go through all the agony of Damning, the hell that my conscience has put me through, and you didn’t even care. As long as you got my Damning ability in the end, to defeat Grotton.”

  “That was only a contingency. Sealing the portals was my main plan. The Grotton-destruction thing is gravy, something I only dared to hope for.”

  “So what? It was still part of your plan, even if it was a long shot. You needed me to do your dirty work for you.”

  Uncle Mort grabbed her wrist and held it up in front of her face. “I don’t see any handcuffs,” he said. “Did I drag you here at gunpoint? Did I ever once force you into a single thing you’ve done? Every decision you’ve made since you came to the Grimsphere was yours, Lex. You made your own choices, and you could have left at any time. Any time, and I wouldn’t have stopped you. But you chose to stay. It’s what your mother would have done, had she the option. Every time you’ve caught another blow—and you’ve caught a lot of rotten blows—you stayed, you rebounded, you fought even harder. There is honor in that.”

  Lex tried to come up with an argument, but couldn’t. Even though it was easier to feel like the victim, to feel as though she had been lied to and manipulated, the truth was . . .

  She had wanted to stay. She had wanted to fight.

  She looked back at the photograph of her mother—young, smiling, her arm draped over the shoulder of Skyla. She’d given up everything she’d loved—everything that her daughter now loved—in the hope that things would get better in the future, that her sacrifice wouldn’t be in vain.

  “It’s funny,” Uncle Mort said. “Once the tank-smashing thing failed, we realized—the old Juniors, my old crew—we realized that our time was up, that the next generation would be the ones to fix it in the end. But I never dreamed we’d get such a strong, loyal, smart group of kids. I hoped for it, sure, but never truly believed they’d live up to my expectations, let alone exceed them like you kids have done.”

  He took a deep breath. “I won’t lie to you, Lex: It’s going to get harder. And when it does, you’re the one the others are going to look to. You’re going to have to step up and lead. You’re going to have to make the hard decisions. In short”—he put an arm around her shoulders—“you’re going to have to be awesome.”

  She swallowed. “How do I do that?”

  “I don’t know.” At this, he finally smiled. “But yelling has done wonders for you so far.”

  ***

  Lex awoke to more gray, the Afterlife outside just as gloomy as it had been the day before. She’d fallen asleep on her stomach, but out of the corner of her eye she saw something resting on her back.

  She rolled over. “Oh. Hey.”

  A cloud full of Driggs lay atop her. “Hey, yourself.”

  She sat up and rubbed her eyes. “Pretending to be a blanket, are we?”

  “Nah. Just wanted to be on top of you.”

  She cracked a grin. “I’m not complaining.”

  He rolled off, lay down next to her, and put his hands into hers, literally. Lex studied him. “Were you watching me sleep?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Is that weird? It’s weird.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe that’s what boyfriends do.”

  “You just looked so pretty, dreaming like that. Peaceful, happy, not wanting to kill things.”

  “I was probably peaceful and happy because I was killing things.”

  “Good point.” He tried to squeeze her hand, though of course she couldn’t feel it. “Are you okay? After everything Mort said?”

  “You heard?”

  “Yeah. Actually, everyone woke up in the commotion and . . . we all did,” he said guiltily. “We couldn’t help ourselves.”

  Lex shrugged. “It’s okay. I would have told you all anyway.”

  “I know.” He glanced toward the other end of the museum. “They’re ready to go. They wanted to give you your space, but we’ve got to get moving soon.”

  “Okay. Tell them I’ll be right there.”

  A few minutes later Uncle Mort raised his eyebrow as Lex walked up to the front desk, tucking a scrap of paper into her back pocket. “If I didn’t know any better,” he said with a sly look, “I’d say that’s the expression of a person who just cut museum property out of its frame.”

  “Oh, calm down,” she said, patting him on the cheek as she walked by. “A little vandalism never hurt anyone.”

  ***

  The layout of the Residential section of Necropolis called to Lex’s mind a shopping mall, with apartments instead of stores: the units were situated around the perimeter of the building, with a soaring open-air space in the center. Crisscrossing footbridges spanned the distance, a few single- and double-story staircases were scattered about, and grayish light streamed in through the gigantic window wall.

  As the Juniors furtively scooted along one of the wraparound hallways, Lex snuck a glance over the balcony. They’d reached the food court section of her shopping mall metaphor; Necropolis’s famed restaurant district stretched below them, with several dining balconies jutting out into the open space. They were just in time for Saturday-morning brunch too, Lex guessed, judging by the multitude of orange juice flutes and jazz quartets. The district had a loud, festive atmosphere. There was even a Ferris wheel.

  Way down at the bottom, many stories below, was a large patch of trees. Little pathways wound through them. “Central Park,” Uncle Mort said. “They don’t get to experience much nature in here, so it’s the best they can do.”

  Joining Lex at the railing, the other Juniors gaped at the attractions, each of them no doubt wishing they had more time for sightseeing. Bang’s eyes were bugging out of her glasses at one restaurant that looked like a library, and Pip’s fingers were itching at the sheer heights he could be climbing.

  Driggs longingly stared at one of the jazz combo’s drum sets. “I miss my drums,” he said, adding bitterly, “not that I could play them.”

  Lex tried to ignore this little pop-up reminder of The Sadness. She was thinking, studying the Ferris wheel.

  “Come on,” said Uncle Mort, yanking them away from the railing. “We’re too exposed, and we still need to figure out how to get up to the Executive section. So unless anyone plans on sprouting wings for the next twenty floors, we need to get on that.”

  “Should we break into someone else’s apartment?” Elysia asked. “Try to return to the Backways?”

  “Screw the Backways,” said Lex, stealing a glance upward and disregarding the jarred looks on everyone’s faces. “I have a better idea.”

  Uncle Mort wanted awesome? She’d give him awesome.

  She brazenly began walking down the hallway without a thought or care as to whether people might recognize them. Anxious, the Juniors followed.

  “Holy titgoblins, Lex!” Ferbus hissed, nervously hurrying to her side. “What are you doing?”

  “Getting us up to Executive.” She could feel Uncle Mort preparing to fire away an equally rude comment, so she turned to him
and issued a preemptive strike. “You said I need to step up and lead, so I’m doing it. You trust me?”

  Uncle Mort hesitated, then nodded. “Lead on, kiddo.”

  “Thank you. Now, break up the group a little,” she instructed as they walked. “Little clumps of fugitives will attract less attention than a gaggle of fugitives.”

  “Gaggle of fugitives is a good name for a band,” Driggs said.

  “See? Look how well this is working out. You got any money?”

  He stuck his hands in his pockets, but as neither his hands nor his pockets were tangible, it didn’t have much of an effect. “Sorry. Plum out.”

  “Okay. Make yourself as transparent as you can,” she told him. “Uncle Mort, money?”

  “You haven’t filched any from unsuspecting tourists yet?” he asked, digging into his pocket and sneaking a few bills into her palm. “Have I taught you nothing at all about fiscal responsibility?”

  Lex counted the money and folded it into her palm, then reached into her bag and tucked something into her other hand. “Follow me.”

  With her head held high, she walked up to the hostess stand she’d been eyeing. Her fairly alarmed crew gathered behind her. “Hi,” she said to the hostess. “Seven, please.”

  “Sure!” the girl perked, not looking up from her appointment book as she grabbed a stack of menus. “That’s one whole pod, then.”

  A peppering of gasps erupted behind Lex as the Juniors realized which kind of pod she meant: a car on Necropolis’s legendary Ferris wheel café, the Circle of Life.

  “This will end poorly,” Uncle Mort whispered to Lex, but she shushed him.

  “Would you like—” The hostess finally looked up, dropping the menus once the recognition set in. “Oh no. You’re them.”