by Daryl Banner
There is a possible security breech, the messenger explains. Rumor has touched the ears of Lifted City officials that members of the rebel groups responsible for leading the uprising have somehow infiltrated the Lifted City. Yes, even beyond both the Outer Gates and the Heaven’s Stair.
Just to the left of her door, the bodyguard is stationed, and Atricia nearly mistakes him for a statue before his eyes move the slightest, taking in the messenger and hearing with irritated eyes the messenger’s news. He looks such an animal, as though beneath his layers of armor there are, yet, layers of bear fur and stench. Yes, if I am in trouble, you are in trouble too, you big ugly thing.
“And where is Guardian, my protectors?” she asks, whipping her attention from the thing called Tauron to her messenger boy. Why must such a message reach her at a time when her heart is already racing? She can’t separate sexual exhilaration from menacing matters of life and death. Or maybe they’re quite the same. “Guardian,” she repeats, annoyed. “Where is Guardian, the very people charged with the duty of eradicating such rebel groups?”
Most of them are tracking down any signs of the rebels, admits the messenger. “Yet others,” he goes on, visibly shaking, dreading his next words, “have turned out to be traitors themselves. Six members of Guardian have been taken into holding so far … and they await your judgment.”
“So far? Won’t be long before all of Atlas is awaiting my judgment,” she gripes bitterly. “Alright. Thanks for your message, messenger. Go and get Janlord, get the Marshals, get all of them. This has to be put to an end. Today.”
The messenger goes, and the bodyguard’s eyes sit heavily in the dark. She hardly addresses the brute, simply sighing, then lets shut her chamber door with a tinny thud. The meat still sprawled naked across her bed, his face buried in a pillow and his rippling backside facing her, Atricia drinks in one very long look at him, drinks in the beautiful sight, just as beautiful as the hundreds before him. How long will it be until these sights are no longer beautiful? How long will it be until these sights are no longer mine? She drinks up the man until she chokes, his back muscles, his tight ass, his thick calves and slippery feet. She drinks with her eyes until her eyes drown and she sees nothing at all.
A beauty in my bed to protect my heart, a beast at my door to protect my life. The meat in her bed stirs, peering up from the pillow like a puppy and blinking his eyes. “My Queen?”
She isn’t even finished with him, still clutching a silk sheet to her breasts, covering up her pride and her majesty, if there is any left. Uprising, they say. Her once-brethren coming to eat her up. Her once-kin, swelling like bacteria at her feet, climbing her every inch microscopically. These once-friends, now already tasting her blood on their queen-craving tongues.
“You may leave.”
The next day when she sits in the throne room among her men and her women, her eyes search the Court the way one surveys their own face for imperfections. Pressing a finger to the cheek, to the nose, lifting eyelids and pulling ears … I feel the liars and the betrayers and the treasons like an itchy rash. I will scratch you all out the same. Janlord gave his counsel earlier, that she should put on her gentlest face and give her best to the people, pour her gold into their happiness the way she pours brew into a glass, but what message does that send? Defy your authorities and be handsomely rewarded?
No. Queen Atricia has birthed overnight a far simpler solution.
The criminals brought before her, men and women and children, are all given a fair and just opportunity to speak on their crimes. “The least lives you take, the better,” urges the Marshal of Peace Janlord, but he has no worries, surely not. None of these greedy rebels will be dying today.
She doesn’t lift herself a hair off the throne when she asks of the men, of the women, of the children brought before her one by one, “Would you truly wish your Queen Of Truths to die?”
“By a knife through your neck,” says the man.
“Horribly and alone,” cries the woman.
“Starving, the same way my daddy starved,” threatens the child.
Staring into the man, into the woman, into the child … through them, to their brains where synapses fire and make left or right of all choices, she lets glow the modest strength of her Legacy and says to them: “But why would you wish death on the Queen Of Truths, whom you love?”
The man flashes the whites of his eyes. The woman’s mouth gapes in realization of her error. The child flinches, stirred by a sudden change of heart.
“I’m so sorry,” says the man.
“You’re right … What came over me?” asks the woman.
“They made me do it. I don’t hate you, I don’t want you to starve, please, I’m sorry,” begs the child.
They will all love me, Atricia realizes, her face brightening. Every last rebel, turned from her worst enemy to just another desperate lover. Every single one of them must be brought in front of her now. She will turn this uprising the other way, press back into the grime below the wash that’s come up. They will love their Queen, and lovers do not kill the ones they love.
Already, half the men of Atlas are madly in love with her. Why not add the rebels to her ever-expanding fandom?
“Broadcast these judgments to the whole city,” the Queen later orders her crew privately. They listen, heavy of eye and nervous of ear. “Broadcast to all of Atlas the love their Queen bears for her greedy, gold-hungry people. They wish her to die, you heard them … but she will not die … and instead, Queen Atricia, Queen of Truths, the Slum Queen gives them her love …”
She pretends not to notice Janlord’s downcast expression, his silent dissent, the misgiving that hangs on his face like heavy skin. Let him doubt, she thinks acidly. They all doubted me since I was a girl, and here I am. On a throne the height of a city, at the summit of Cloud Tower, high above the wispy Cloud Keep, higher still than the Lifted City, so high the slums are but a sour spread of darkness beneath her … there sits on the greatest chair a girl they call Queen.
A girl from the slums.
Commanding that adjustments be made to the cameras before their next broadcast, the Queen also adds to the light that hits her throne, sure that the glass tiles and the mirror-clean walls of the room reflect her flawless complexion. It’s really important for a Queen to appear flawless, no matter the sickness wrestling in her bowels like fidgety snakes. “Bring the camera close,” she instructs a man, “but not too close.”
She judges each rebel the same as she did before, except now it’s broadcast to the entire city. Every citizen will watch as each rebel is brought before her and shown the sweetest mercy. “I see the truth now,” they sing. Yes, yes, she shows them truth. Each of these once-uprising and violent men and women … now reduced to tears of affection and pleas for the heavens. “I’m so sorry,” they beg. “I love my Queen,” they realize. “Forgive me, please, please,” they chant.
Just like another lover in her bed, these men and women and children fall in love with her before the eyes of the world. They fall in love with her and they confess their guilt, confess their allegiance, confess how their whole life has been empty until the Queen filled them up with her cold-hot nectar … a nectar that almost tastes of truth, if one closes their eyes.
“You may leave,” she tells each.
Sixty men and women and children pass through the throne room, each of them judged, each of them pardoned, each of their minds twisted by the Queen’s Legacy. She watches each as they leave, a changed person, another lover she’s dismissed. The whole Last City of Atlas will love me, one by one … The word ‘rebel’ will be another one cast to the Ancients’ books, the histories, the forgotten.
The next man is brought forth by two of her guards, just as all the others have been today, and it has been a long day. He’s dropped to his knees before Her Majesty, his dark head of hair bowed down. It is a fit young man, his toned arms sweaty with the exhaustion of being held in the dungeons, awaiting this moment. She smiles down on
him the way a hungry child looks down on a treat. She’s near to licking her lips when the man slowly raises his eyes to meet hers …
And the world stops.
She stares, her lips part. The breath she might’ve drawn is not there, caught prisoner in her throat. She stares and stares and stares.
The world stops and her heart with it.
Chole.
“You are knelt before your Queen, of all of Atlas,” announces the old and deep-throated Marshal of Order Umber. “Confess your crimes and await her merciful judgment.”
Her eyes have become as glass as the tiles at her feet, as the tiles of the wall, and the room … the impossibly tall and unfathomably long throne room becoming small somehow, suffocating her … the walls bending in.
Chole raises his dark head of hair, chin pointed up, eyes still affixed to the Queen with such malice it scares her. It truly, truly scares her. He doesn’t say a word, and the world waits, waits, waits for his confessions.
Atricia swallows once, her broken mask of confidence still donned as though it will save her, as though no one sees how the sight of this man has so shaken her, she wriggles out the single word: “Well?”
It echoes, echoes, echoes through the hall. That single, stupid word.
Then at long last, Chole parts his lips, takes a breath, and says, “I’ve committed the crime of …” His eyes drift, surveying her like a basket of fruit at the market, head to toe. Atricia’s heart races, feeling his gaze move down her body like an invisible spread of hands. So many years have gone by, but his face is just the same as she remembers. He could’ve gone ugly, could’ve lost his charm, could’ve grown wrinkled with hate and age and carelessness. Instead, he’s grown firm, grown strong, grown handsome as a prince.
“…wanting too much,” he finishes at last, bringing his eyes to meet hers again.
A deep and manic chill races up her front and tickles her neck so suddenly she has to clutch at it. For a short while, it looks like she’s choking herself.
She cannot use her Legacy on him. She swore in their youth she’d never bend his will, and for some insane reason, by some sick force she cannot sway or influence, she keeps her promise. If it’s the only decent thing I do, damn it.
“The Queen Of Lies,” he says, still at his knees, two black pools-for-eyes pouring into her like she were the bit of bacon at the end of the hall, and he, a hungry pup. “Yeah, I see your truth. I’ve seen it since you abandoned your own truth … your life in the lower city. Ever since you traded truth for that ugly throne. Tell me, is your ass as comfortable in that chair, knowing it was given to you by the starving lowborn?”
“Put an end to his words,” advises the droning Marshal of Order. “Let him see the truth, Your Majesty, as you have shown the truth to everyone else. Let all of Atlas see the truth through him.”
She can’t do it. She won’t do it … Not to him.
“Those diamonds that decorate your hand,” Chole goes on, “were cut from the Mechanoid Mines by men with big axes—slum-born men. Your robes are made of silks weaved by slum-born, blushed the off-white hue of lunar landscapes by tailors in the Hightowers of the sixth ward below. Have you met them? Have you thanked them? There—” He nods at her chest, his big lips pouring these words Atricia will not stop. “—at your neck, a pretty rope of fine gems, a necklace braided by sweating women and men in another slum factory to the south. Where’s their due credit, Queen? Where’s their ‘Lift’ …?”
“Enough,” says Janlord in as patient a voice as only he can muster, and he urges Atricia to make her judgment, to enforce her power of truth, but it is the Queen who raises a hand to him—her eyes not for a second leaving Chole’s face—and she says, “Let him finish.”
“You wish me to finish?” Chole smiles, and the effect it has on his face sets something afire deep within Atricia … it is a fire that is neither pleasant nor kind. “If I were to finish, I might disturb the Queen’s belly … which is likely full of her morning fruits … which, by the way, were likely grown and produced in the Greens and the gardens of the slums, farmed tediously by the hungry and the overworked. Perhaps you didn’t think it necessary to feed them in return.” His gaze is all the way lifted now, his jet hair in a fury, his eyes bleeding the devil’s black. “No one in this world needs sleep any longer … Maybe we don’t need food either. Maybe we don’t need thanks. Maybe we don’t need skin, or hair … clothes or gold … or air … or our lives. Why don’t you take those too?”
He spits at the floor, inspiring gasps from the Court. A strand of his saliva hangs from his smooth, pale chin. Atricia watches it the way one warily studies a spider web … a silken thread … a trap. His wide lips, his button-nose … You haven’t aged a day, Chole.
“Why don’t you take our lives?” he asks again.
Janlord speaks once more, warns her. The camera presses close, close, closer. The lights, the blaring lights … Have they gotten brighter? The walls are still bending inward, like millions of ears and eyes leaning in for a closer listen, for a closer looksee … Chole’s big ears, they haven’t stopped listening either, not since the day long ago when the two of them, Attie and Chole, parted as teenagers.
When I left you behind, I took you with me. If you only knew.
Janlord’s warning voice: “Queen.”
The Marshal of Order’s deep grovel: “Your Majesty, please …”
The voice of millions of still-unconvinced citizenry, the voice of anger, the voice that was once her own, a chanting for change, a wish in the sky … from a time in her life when the underbelly of the Lifted City looked so ugly, so dark and ugly. Sunlight used to be my friend, as Chole used to be …
As you used to be.
Then at once, Queen Atricia rises, her jewels and her robe and her hair jostled by the effort, tinkling like tiny bells. She points a long and accusing finger down at the boy on his knees … the boy whose hair is a messy pitch of night … the boy who is no longer a boy, but a man.
“Put this one in a cell of the Queen’s Keeping.” Her hand sweeps like a magician’s, calling for her guards. “That is my sentence. This man is not prepared to see the Queen’s truth. Not yet.” She squints at the cameras, making sure they capture her performance, the confident twinkle in her eye—praying the falseness and fears riling in her chest do not show. “This is the only mercy I can offer this … this man.”
Chole’s eyes never leave her as the guards take him by the arms, less than gently, and escort him out of the long glass hall. She watches him, posed ridiculously for the cameras in her final judgment of the day, watches until his shape becomes small, smaller, gone.
Queen Of Wishes
The bodyguard just outside, she finds she isn’t comfortable enough to disrobe for the night, no matter the assurance and security he’s supposedly tasked with providing. With that beast-thing outside her door, she feels the magical privacy of her balcony-side evenings somehow robbed, and by that notion she feels nothing but bitter resentment. That balcony and the wind is my only comfort, and you, people of the slums, wish to take that from me too.
Or maybe it’s that boy sitting in a cell all by himself seven stories below her … a boy with the night sky for hair. Maybe he’s the one that so unrests her.
“I must go,” she decides suddenly, telling the bodyguard just outside her door. “I will return later, but I must go and you cannot follow.”
“That is not allowed.” The bodyguard doesn’t move, still appearing as a statue affixed to the wall, of stone and metal. “I am charged to protect you. My Queen, there may even be eyes and ears in this Keep of yours that you need protecting from.”
Her eyes hover on his dark form, annoyed. He appears almost like a shadow, not a person, that bleeds against the stark white walls of the hall. The day’s long badgering of her soul has left her broken, and the last comfort she’d think to ask for is a dangerous-looking banged-up man charged to protect her, yet looking as if he’s been charged to eat her limb from limb like
a three-mouthed demon.
“There is no convincing you otherwise?” she asks coyly, the double meaning of her Legacy lost on the man-thing.
“No.” The man adjusts his belt, sword tapping his massive thigh. “There might be many who love you, yet still others who’d sooner put sharp things into you. I will come with you.”
She hesitates, genuinely considering whether to “talk” him into leaving her alone for good. She can do it with the ease of batting away a fly, considering her Legacy.
“Fine,” she says instead. Janlord and Umber and the rest were likely looking for a man with whom she’d have little to no sexual interest, which is quite a feat, to be honest. Indeed, their purpose was to keep her secure, not distract her with her more commonly-used medicine. “Protect me as you ought to, but stay behind, and stay away.”
She moves like a sudden wind, silks flapping behind her as she descends the smooth metallic steps of Cloud Tower. Her sweeping is punctuated twelve steps behind by the heavy footfalls of the armored bodyguard. Passing through six security points where codes and keypads must be fussed with, she arrives on the floor that was once called the King’s Keeping … that she, in her reign, renamed the Queen’s Keeping.
Within its eighteen large barred cells, there is only kept one single occupant. She finds him sitting with his back against the smooth metal wall, his knees pulled up to his chest. The shadows of the bars and the poorly-lit hall play funny shapes across the room, across his face, across hers.
For a while, she can’t say a thing, and neither does Chole even bother to lift his chin to look at her.
“I’m safe enough here,” she tells her bodyguard without looking away from Chole. “You can at least afford me a touch of privacy.”
“With that rebel back-talker?” questions the man-thing. Queen Atricia turns her eyes onto him, long and cold is her shocking stare. The bodyguard realizes his insolence, says, “Sorry, Your Majesty. Of course.” And he dismisses himself through the large steel doors that lock with electronic beeps and tones, to wait in the stairwell.