Outlier: Rebellion

by Daryl Banner

  “I don’t …” Wick shuffles uncomfortably. “I’m—”

  “Well don’t waste it.” Rone swipes the glass back from Wick and downs it himself.

  He’s still hard. I’ve seen more of my friend in the last five minutes than I’ve seen in the last five years. Staring forcibly into his eyes, Wick asks, “Why did you invite me here?”

  “Aren’t—Aren’t you having fun?” Rone hiccups.

  Wick sucks in his lips. “Not as much as you.”

  “What’s that ugly thing on your head?” Rone points belatedly and hiccups again. His eyes are glossed over, dulled a moment.

  Wick brings a hand to his forehead, winces. “Bruise, I guess.”

  Not hearing Wick’s response, or perhaps forgetting he asked a question in the first place, Rone nods at the woman on the floor. “That one’s Victra. Her name is Victra and she can see through others’ eyes … so mind where you’re looking!”

  “Stop telling him things,” she whines, her face half-muffled by a pillow. “I don’t know if I like him yet.”

  “He’s going to join, so you must like him. We must all like each other because that’s the rule,” declares Rone. “That’s the rule I made up just now.”

  “Join?” Wick realizes he’s backed himself up against the wall. “Join what? Is this some kind of club?”

  “I can’t tell you just yet.” Rone pulls up his pants, saunters back to the woman Victra, lets them drop again. “For now, why don’t you kick back and have yourself a swig of chemical? It’s paid for. It’s all good. C’mon. Stuff’s not so easy to come by. Victra, my wiener’s still awake.”

  Wick stares at the skinny bottle of chemical. In truth, he’s never tried it, nor even properly seen a whole supply of it in person before. He’s heard it tastes salty and sweet and burns the chest from inside as it’s swallowed. After it’s in your system, however …

  An entirely different, thunderous voice disturbs the scene. “Rone Tinpassage! Victra Kingsword!”

  Wick spins, finds a bald middle-aged man with spotted lemony skin and wetted eyes standing at the top of the stair. His expression suggests he is less than happy with the scene he’s happened upon. The man is hunched over a cane, despite not likely being over forty or forty-five years old. A back injury maybe, or a disease of the spine … How could Wick tell, anyway? He’s no expert of the body; that’s his mom’s knowhow.

  “You just said—He just said my last name,” Victra complains to Rone, who’s now frantically pulling his pants up over his still-invited-to-the-party boner. “I … Didn’t I just say I didn’t want this Wicky knowing my things? Hey, he said your last name too!”

  “He’s a friend,” Rone explains, zipping himself up. “We … We … We grew up together, and—Listen, he’s not just some guy I pulled off the street—”

  “You two,” the man projects, his voice hard and loud. “Explain the meaning of this person, now.”

  “Recruit,” the sister offers quietly.

  Everyone turns, as though just now noticing she’s been in the room, still picking at her nails by the stair and not looking anywhere at them, her eyes glued to her fingers.

  “A recruit?” asks the man of Rone firmly. “This kid? You’re the recruiter now? Is that how this works? Are you making the decisions around here?”

  Rone holds a hand against the wall, realizes it’s the tapestry and not a wall, falls over. Getting clumsily back to his feet, he takes a few steps toward the man. “I didn’t tell him anything. I brought him here just like I was brought here once. Just like Sarra and Juston and the others. He doesn’t know anything. I … I left that to you.” Then he draws silent, rubbing his eyes.

  The man turns to Wick, appraising him vaguely. He then crosses the room, cane stabbing the floor with every step, and pulls out a chair. “Sit, kid.”

  Wick doesn’t argue. He drops into the chair by the large window, the only view in this room. He takes a glance outside. Below, there’s an alley where a pair of black cats fight as children watch, and above, the greasy-bricked buildings of the edge of the ninth ward squat just low enough to reveal the ominous shape of the Lifted City pressed dark against the haze of a starless night sky.

  The man takes a chair directly across from him, locking eyes with such intensity it makes Wick swallow hard. “Listen well, kid. My name’s Yellow, and my power allows me to make you forget that. In fact, I can make you forget how you got here, why you came here, or how to get home. It would be in your best interest to cooperate and I will not muddle you. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did your friend tell you that persuaded you to come? Tell me. What is it you were hoping to find?”

  Wick’s eyes wander to Rone and the woman, both whom clutch each other in an effort to stay standing as they witness this exchange. The woman, Victra, appears bored, more blue-powdered eyelid showing than actual eye. Rone’s sister waits at the other end of the vast and smudgy window now, still quietly studying her fingernails.

  The answer comes almost automatically. “A world without a screaming King, I guess.”

  Yellow leans forward, curious for a spell. Then he opens his thin lips and says, “Are you sure? What would our fine city of Atlas be without the Banshee King? You do realize that’s treason-talk, don’t you.”

  “Yes.” Wick nods, incensed. “I know.”

  “And still you say it? A world without a screaming King?”

  Wick’s eyes flit nervously to Rone. Is this a trap? He clears his throat and decides to offer a few more words. “What I know is, my mom and dad both work full-hour jobs, sometimes my dad works well into midnight or past. My mom comes home aching with dirt across her face and my—and my brothers all work, and—” Wick swallows hard, finding his mouth has gone dry. He licks his lips from left to right before continuing. “No matter, it’s hardly enough to live. We’re slave rats beneath that Lifted City. The people up there, they shit on us.” He eyes the bald man for a reaction, chagrined to find none. “They do,” he insists, squinting. “The flowers my mom picks and the plants she grows and the seeds she sows, they’re for the people in the sky. Not you and I. And the weapons and the armor and the metalwork of my dad’s slave labor, it’s all sent upstairs. To the King. And what do we get? How are we thanked? … With threats? Laws? With … with starvation?” The resentment starts to sour the back of his mouth, rushing up and threatening to free his dinner. I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud. “I don’t want to be a slum rat my whole life. Why is it a King up there we have to fear? Some nights I can’t even—I can’t even rest,” he says, his heart giving a jump because he almost said another word, “because I can still hear the echo of banshee cries in the night sky.”

  The bald man’s eyes never leave Wick’s face, eating his every word. The oily, lemony skin on his cheek twitches, his mouth parting. “Aye.”

  Wick swallows again, licks his lips yet again, can’t seem to wet his own mouth properly. I’ve said too much. Figuring it a last and desperate measure, he adds, “But I would never try anything stupid. I wouldn’t attack a … a Guardian. Or plot some … some kind of plan to kill the King. You can’t kill him. There’s no way. Lowborn like us don’t even have access to the Lifted City, so … I wouldn’t … I wouldn’t do that. I just want—”

  “Wouldn’t you,” replies the man, his eyes narrowing in a strangely nonthreatening way. “And why not.”

  The bald man’s voice is flat, his questions sounding more like statements. Wick suddenly doubts everything, uncertain on which side, exactly, these people stand. I’m being riddled. Maybe Rone’s pulled him into something greater than he’d imagined. Kill the King. The words echo in his head, echo, echo, echo. Kill the King. Did I seriously just say that?

  “Is it fear that holds you back?” The man lifts his chin and pulls on an ear, idly toying with it. “If you had the means and no repercussions were to find you, would you, in fact, kill the King of Atlas? Answer plainly. You may not remember this conversa
tion when we’re through. You may not even remember me.”

  Kill the King. Wick’s breath has gone so shallow, he has half a second of fearing he’ll pass out. “N-No.”

  The thin, papery mouth of the man seems to make a smile, though Wick can’t be certain. Then the man leans back and says, “This may come as a surprise, but I wish the fucker dead. The city’s unjust. The King’s corrupt … and he will fall. And so will the three Marshals. Taylon, Janlord, Impis. They’ll fall too. And the Council and the Court and the Lifted City itself, all of it.”

  “A world without a screaming King,” Rone echoes softly, drawing Wick’s attention. Rone’s said it to Victra though, his eyes alight, burning blue as he kisses her on the cheek. She just rolls her eyes, unreciprocating.

  “We may not be the ones to do it,” the bald man adds, bringing back Wick’s uncertain gaze, “and we care not. We don’t work for glory or credit. We are provokers, kid. Understand that? We are inspirers. Muses. We want to wake the world.” The man’s voice has gone hard, his every word a smack to the face. “If it isn’t by our blade, it’ll be by someone else’s that the King’s screaming tongue is finally and justly cut.”

  Wake the world … For one uncomfortable moment, Wick remembers the dream he had long ago where his Legacy was flight, and he flew to Cloud Keep to make a souvenir of the Banshee King’s tongue. Maybe I have more in common with this bald man than I realize.

  “Rone says your professor tells you to dream big, kid. Is that true? … What’s your dream?”

  What’s my dream? He couldn’t admit it out loud, even to Rone who has been his friend all these years. Even his little brother doesn’t know his true Legacy. He hides what others proudly boast of, what Sanctum might reward … Outlier, he hears them chant mockingly in his nightmares. Anwick Lesser, the Sleeping Outlier …

  “I have no dream,” he finally says.

  “You’re lying. But I will share mine anyway, kid. I dream of a world of laughing children, of riches for all … The beauty of life’s luxuries in everyone’s hands, in anyone’s hands. A world of full stomachs, hot meals, no worries on the day’s eats. A world freed from the tyranny of a Screaming King and his three precious pawns of power, such sick dominion they keep. We do not answer to the hands in the sky.”

  “So what is this?” Wick’s eyes search. What has Rone gotten me into? Wick thinks of his dad who might open his bedroom door tonight, who might expect to train. What am I doing here? “What is this, Rone? Are you part of a … a rebel group? Is this—?”

  Victra answers instead, her voice a tad too sharp. “We’re not a rebel group. Those are for bratty kids with toy swords. We’re a force. A belief. Agents of peace.”

  “True guardians, we are,” agrees the bald man. “Not the violent, unjust and corrupt tool called Guardian who work for that Screamer in the sky.”

  “May they be spat on from all directions,” Victra sings, laughs hollowly, then scowls.

  Wick’s eyes flick away for this one tiny moment … a tiny moment for him to bury another secret of his, that not one, but two of his brothers are members of said violent, unjust and corrupt tool called Guardian. Kill the King. Wick swallows hard and eyes the skinny bottle on the table. I wonder if chemical quenches thirst.

  “There are more of us,” continues Yellow. “We are only four of us in this room, four of many, like-minded and like-willed. One day, the corrupt Sanctum and all its tyrannous men and women in the sky will know our pleas. They will fear us. Wick … Is that your name? Wick, we’re going to change the world.”

  It is an easy seduction, really. There is such unrest in Wick’s everyday life, such daily grief, anguish, all due to the oppression of Sanctum … How can he not be swayed to their cause? Though it sounds a bit more like a child’s dream than a real, imminent thing, what else can a faction of slummers do but cling to it? Dream big, she said. But what if Professor Frey knew what rebellion she was, in fact, encouraging her students to dream?

  Kill the King. “Rebellion is punishable by death,” says Wick. “Even my knowing of your existence is criminal.”

  “If it is awareness of us that scares you,” answers Yellow, “then merely ask, and I will happily remove all memory of what I’ve just told you. I may do it anyway.”

  “He will,” warns Rone. After a dark glance from Yellow, he shuts up, plopping down on the pile of pillows. “I wouldn’t mind forgetting this evening at all.” He starts absently itching his junk.

  “It’s your choice whether or not to take with us,” the bald man says, “but I will need your decision and I will need it now.”

  Wick gives it so little thought, it’s laughable. It is like this opportunity is one he’d been patiently waiting for his whole life. How his mom looks at him every day, as a baby, a weakness … We will wake the world. His dad too, training him with weapons because he has no weapon in himself. No real Legacy. Wake up. Wake up. Even Link discounts him, his bullied brother. The way Tide took him down without more than a flick of wind. A world without a screaming King.

  This can be his chance to stop dreaming as a boy … a chance to wake up a man.

  Wick quashes what few doubts stir in his chest and states: “How do I … How do I join?”

  “I’m going to ask you three questions. I want three answers. First. Do you live for gold, or glory?”

  “Do I have to pick one of those? Or—”

  “Second.” The bald man has moved on to the next question, which puzzles Wick since he didn’t quite answer the first. “Do you love your enemies?”

  Sounds like a trick question. But the red memory of Tide’s laughter echoes too freshly in Wick’s ear for him to answer any other way. “No.”

  “Third. Why?”

  He shrugs, says, “He hasn’t earned it, I guess.”

  “No, he hasn’t,” agrees the bald man, rising with his full weight on the sturdy-as-steel cane. “Return tomorrow night, Wick. You’ll undergo training and briefing then. You’ve a lot to learn.”

  “What’s—wait, wait.” Wick’s gotten to his feet, suddenly alive with questions. “What’s involved? What exactly do you guys do? I … I don’t want to kill anyone.”

  “Did I not make it clear? Our enemies are up there.” Yellow pokes his cane at the window, at the city in the sky. “Your concerns will be addressed. Go home.”

  “But I never answered your first question,” Wick points out, “about the gold or glory.”

  “You did,” says the bald man at the stair, turning around to add, “and like you, I live for neither.”

  It’s twenty minutes later when Wick is brought down to the bottom floor for a small plate of noodles before hitting the road. Rone’s sister Cintha sits nearby and studies him as he eats. “You like watching me shove food in my face?”

  “My brother always asks my opinion first,” she says so quiet Wick has to lean in to hear, “before he invites someone. I trust no boy … but I trust you.” Wick pauses between bites to ask why she trusts him. “I take you to be a boy of other boys, and I find that comforting.”

  “A boy of other boys?”

  “It’s okay if you like Rone, even though he likes girls.” Her face squirms into smiles Wick never thought possible from her. “I had an … experience … with my Legacy when it came. I haven’t trusted a boy since.”

  Wick has no idea what she means, as Rone never mentioned what his sister’s Legacy was. Not wanting to pry, he shifts the focus instead and says, “Rone and I are just friends. Honestly, I don’t … like him that way.”

  “I don’t like him when he drinks,” she confesses.

  Wick forks another delicious gob of spiced noodle, the best bowl of anything he’s tasted in years. Through his immodest mouthful, he quietly admits, “Until this night, I didn’t know he did chemical.”

  She puts her chin on the counter, stares up at Wick with smiling eyes and dimples.

  And at that precise moment, Rone scares the hell out of them both by phasing through the wall like
a happily leaping ghost. Still shirtless and tenting in his jeans, he shouts, “Training starts tomorrow night! Buddy, you’re in, you’re in, you’re totally in!”

  Dream big, she said …

  0009 Halvesand

  Halves has a lot of catching up to do if he’s going to outdo his brother in Guardian training.

  His brother Aleks is nearly his same height—which is basically a head taller than their younger brothers Lionis, Wick, and Link—but Halves has kept a bit more meat on his bones. Aleks tends to shed it all off, leaving himself more skinny and long of limb. Like most of his brothers, Halves has a full head of dark brown hair, though he tends to keep it styled, raked to the front and trimmed short. He was so tired of being called his brother’s twin, for how alike he and Aleks look. He always yearned to stand on his own, be his own, speak his own … and not vanish in the witless shadow of his lookalike brother. He even pressed ink into both his shoulders, a design that cut down his left blade in artful branches, and a matching bit up his right. The Two Answers, he named his tattoos, because whenever he’d ask dad for advice, he’d be left with two answers and a tough choice to make.

  Good, bad. Right, wrong. Life, death. Two Answers.

  Joining Guardian, first thing he hears is how there’s many, many ways to die in the city, and until Guardian’s job is done proper, exactly zero ways to live. Yeah, many, many ways to die in the city, Halves always thought, and many, many more when it’s your job to protect it.

  He will be paid a modest fistful to do the Sanctum duty of ridding the streets of criminals. But there is one area of Atlas that they do not touch. It is called the Dark Abandon—or Sector Zero, depending on who you ask—which is a place so beyond repair that even grown adults will say it’s haunted, that anyone who goes in never comes out. Not even the King bothers to touch it; he refers to it as the Forsaken Ward. And like a gift from the King himself, the unobstructed view from Halves’ dorm window is of that Dark Abandon. He’s thankful not to have his younger brother’s Legacy of sleep; with this view, he’d have himself a fresh nightmare every night.