by Daryl Banner
And then the door gently opens. No one seems to notice. Athan pokes his head out, two bright blue eyes find Wick’s, and he smiles, almost shyly. “Hi.”
Everyone’s silenced at once, all of them turning to finally notice Athan, stunned.
“Didn’t mean to interrupt,” he says apologetically. “I was … I was just wondering if I could have a little something to eat? Maybe a sip of something? I haven’t eaten in several hours and the room’s getting a bit, ah … Well, I don’t want to seem ungracious, but … ah …” His face goes red and he bites his lip.
No one seems able to address the blaring question on everyone’s mind, so Wick himself does. “How’d you open that door? It’s … It’s locked.”
“Oh.” Athan squeezes the handle. “The last person in … Rone, is it? You, ah … you left the door unlocked.”
Everyone is still staring blankly, but a few eyes turn to Rone, stupefied. “And—And you stayed in there?” Rone finally asks. “Despite the door being … unsecured? You stayed in there this whole time?”
Athan looks confused a short moment. “Well … I, ah … yes.” His whole face is flushed, his eyes watery and glistening. “I was told I’m not allowed to leave the room. And … so I, ah … haven’t.”
“I’ll get you something,” Wick cuts in. “Just … relax and … and I’ll bring you something from downstairs.”
The silence at his back, Wick hurries down the two flights of creaky wooden stairs. In the kitchens where he fetches two bowls of spicy—can’t let him eat alone—the broadcast shows Athan Broadmore’s bright smile again, begging to be found. The reward is upped one thousand from yesterday. One thousand?? Wick gawks, speechless. Really, how much is one Sanctum life worth?
How much is mine?
0030 Ruena
At the break of morning, the crystalline spires and marble domes and pearl parapets of the Lifted City are cried upon by tiny beads of pretty liquid glass from the burnt-orange sky, pretty to everyone but Ruena. Glaring at the rain, she waits and waits until it’s a little less deadly for her to leave the Mirand-Thrin Palace.
She needs a very specific part to finish her machine, and the ill-timed, stupid rain keeps her inside.
She was always good with electronics, even when she was five. Always regarded as the obnoxious know-it-all in the back of every class, her hand shooting up at the professor’s every quizzing and question, even the lords of the Lifted City schools had had enough of her by her third year. They negotiated with her parents, paying them to have her out of the class. She scored high on all her tests, every last subject, and graduated from the schools at the tender age of twelve.
And now, six years later, she watches rain out her basement window, which stretches the width and height of the entire wall. The basement hangs like a bat under the Lifted City, giving her a view of the vast north end of the slum Greens, not far off from the textiles sector. She pretends that the basement is actually the top floor of a very tall tower … only with no floors below it.
So high above the city, even this basement window, and yet the top of Cloud Tower is miles higher.
A sudden bolt of defiance cuts through her. Rain is an awfully stupid thing to submit to. She crosses the basement and throws open the wardrobe, whips out a milky-white silken shawl to wrap over her head, and a cute cream-spotted gown that drapes down her long pale legs. Yes, even in the rain, she knows how to dress like royalty. Before leaving, she studies her face close-up in the tall-as-the-heavens looking glass of the dining hall. Gently, she runs a curtain of her endless white hair to the right to cover the bald, ungainly scar that curves like a path of blight from the top of her head, around her ear, and terminating abruptly at her jaw. She’ll often wear lavish hats instead, but storms aren’t friends to such hats. Really, the scar is plain visible no matter what effort she takes, so only the blind are lucky enough to be spared.
The guards are at the front of the Palace and the back, so it is through the side garden that she makes a sneaky exit. She peers into the morning light. The rain’s stopped completely, so Ruena flings the umbrella aside like it’s nothing. She unhoods herself and, draping the shawl across her shoulders, struts across the garden with her crystal heels stabbing the stone walkway carelessly. The scent of rain and lavender is thick.
Of course she pretends she’s left the Palace alone, but the guards are paid too well for that. Ten follow her like a silent shadow, seven armored men and three armored women who keep a healthy distance, but healthier eye.
Denial is a powerful thing.
The Eastly glistens as though made of tiny diamonds after the fresh rain. The pair of green goggles wrapping around her wrist like an emerald armlet is her proudest invention. One never knows when a thing may require microscopic inspection, and that’s just one feature of her green goggles. They also allow perfect vision in the dark and double as an x-ray, stripping anyone of secrets with just a looksee. And when she wears them to view a broadcast, they display psychedelic colors and deformities, which isn’t intentional, but that kind of thing is expected. All her little creations are flawed and curious, as they only work when she operates them. That’s probably because they only function with the assistance of her own Legacy, which in itself is difficult to pinpoint.
One of the ten guards trips with a grunt, staggering and quickly righting himself. Ruena pretends not to hear.
Her first professor surmised that Ruena’s Legacy was a kind of electromagnetism in her mind, rendering her a Mentalist … unless you think of it as a power from her brain to somehow control these inventions of hers, which makes her a Psychist—which is really just a fancy word for an Elementalist-Mentalist, but few people use the word because, well, it’s stupid. Another professor disagreed, arguing that she has flowing electricity in her blood—like she were some sort of living battery—which of course would put her in the Morph class, which is neither Mentalist nor Psychist. Yet another said she’s simply a classic Elementalist, able to manipulate electricity and nothing more.
To be honest, Ruena doesn’t care what the hell she is. She just wants to find this stupid part and get home and make her machine work, preferably before the heavens decide to rain again and put her life in danger.
Dressed proudly in her silks and draperies and cinched skirts and knee-high boots and sharp-as-knives heels because she can afford them, Ruena knows she is not embracing the same fashion sense as her peers. As she strolls down the street, she is not oblivious to the stares and the occasional chuckles or mocking chortles from other Daughters of Sanctum.
Let them laugh. Ruena holds her chin high as a Queen’s, even if she isn’t one yet. Besides, with just a squint in her green goggles on her wrist, she can see through their stupid clothes, right down to the roadmap of their nervous system scattering through a web-like network of lightning bolts and tree branches. Maybe one day she’ll invent some sort of machine to shut them up too, their laughter and their empty ridicule.
The sky growls, a steady threat of thunder. Ruena is not afraid. Let the sky growl.
From one store to the next she goes, each of the storekeepers greeting her with knowing kindness and asking how she fares, but not having what she seeks. Ruena nods her head to each, refits the lush silk across her shoulders and strolls on to the next destination. The stores may be proving fruitless, but when she passes the bakery, she makes sure to buy their cinnamon tarts. “Quite expensive, Lady Ruena, but—” Please, none of the Lady stuff. “Money’s not a bother,” she replies. “I’ll have a dozen of them. Ten for my guards who don’t know I know they’re there, and one for myself, and one for you.”
The baker is unsure whether to smile or laugh or apologize.
Ruena’s never been skilled at the whole ‘acting a proper Lord or Lady’ thing that her parents tried to drill into her when they were alive. She never took a liking to the stiff way people of the city regard one another, as if everyone’s bones were glass. She had one bad experience at a ball, all the pretty dresses and
frills—Ugh, never again. Her true coordination—the only thing she knows rightly and properly—is at the fingertips, at the ends of wires and closings of circuits. Not in her feet, moving in triangles and two-stepping nonsense and closing toes.
“Is it truly necessary,” one of the shop owners asks, “to get the exact right piece for your work? With your—ah—flexible Legacy, wouldn’t just anything do?”
“Just as any man, girl, or idiot could sit a throne and call themselves ruler of Atlas. Wouldn’t that do?”
The man drops his gaze. “I meant no offense, Lady Ruena. I’m … I’m sorry about your Aunt Kael. She was a fine lady—”
“Lady Kael Mirand-Thrin,” she corrects him with a cold squint of her eyes, “and don’t speak of her like a ghost. She is not yet dead.”
With a sweep of her silks, she casts herself out of the shop. Simply nothing will do in the streets; she will have to take the extreme measure she was hoping to avoid. With due fervor, she struts in her crystal heels across the vast and tiresomely long Pearl Plazas, all seven of them, to reach the colossal chrome walls of the Cloud Keep, just beyond the reach of the Crystal Court where she has attended enough live broadcasts of the Marshals and the King With The Mouth to last her ten lifetimes.
On the way, a round milky-white boy is hopping and yelping little unintelligible words, trying to get her attention. She regards him the way one regards a loud keening dog: not at all. The round boy, named Sedge, grew up with her, but he’s seven years younger and has always been madly obsessed with everything she does. “Show me how that works, please, please,” he’d beg. “Hey, can I see what you’re doing? What’s that do? What’s that?” And that, and that, and that. He’d even play dress-up, donning her silks and strutting around her room, asking her opinions and craving her womanly flattery, even when she was just a girl herself. “You have the best colors,” he’d say, frolicking around her basement. One day she got so tired of him, she balled up her fists and clenched teeth and watched as his hair slowly rose. It wasn’t until a pair of neighborhood girls starting laughing that she realized her own long hair was standing too, and she abandoned the static she’d built at once, releasing it in a series of little shocks and cracks of light, then marched off to design her latest divination of the week.
At the steps of Cloud Keep, the guards move aside and bow slightly as Ruena passes through its gates. Little round boy Sedge can’t follow, stopped by the guards, and he just calls after her pitifully. The ten that followed me from home can take watch of him, she thinks humorously. Yes, even the ten that followed cannot pass into Cloud Keep. Now, under the protection of the King’s men, she is truly by herself, and no denial is needed to convince her.
She passes through the tall pearl archways and chrome corridors that scan her eyes for identification. Each one malfunctions when they attempt to scan her, which happens every single time—some kind of electric interference—but with the aid of her Legacy, the keypads do not deny her, and doors let her through.
She avoids the tiredly tall Cloud Tower—wishing very much not to bother with its millions of steps and stairs and lifts—and instead turns a corner to access the Arsenal. With a squint of her eye and a tapping of fingers, the security mechanism outside its massive iron doors permits her access, sliding open. Inside, she surveys all the different weapons of history: guns, lasers, photon and plasma and charge beams. All matters of weaponry are here, save the explosive type which were long ago outlawed. The last time a bomb was used, it decimated an entire ward, laying it to waste. They now refer to that as the Zero Zone, but she knows other names were given to it by the people: The Forsaken Ward, The Scar, The Dark Abandon … No guns or bombs have been used since, and it’s been well over three hundred years.
On a shelf in the third aisle by the photon generators, she finds exactly what she is looking for. “A gift for the birthday that will go uncelebrated,” she sings, grinning, and pretends not to hear another roar of thunder outside.
When she makes to leave the Arsenal, a shadow is standing in the doorway. “The security room showed an unauthorized authorization,” he announces queerly.
Ruena nods. “Marshal of Peace Janlord, my friend. Have I given you reason to worry?”
“Not in the least, Ru-Ru.” He smiles. “You find what you’re looking for here in the King’s toy box?”
She turns the part over and over in her hand, smiling a tiny smile. “I suppose I have.” She looks up, squints at him. “There will come a day when calling me a ridiculous thing like Ru-Ru will be against Sanctum Law.”
He laughs—one quick, breathy thing. “Then I’d better try and get away with it while I still can.” He offers her a little wink, then moves to the side. “I don’t mean to block your way, but I must make note of the item you’re taking. You know, for the—”
“Why doesn’t the King ask me himself?” She smirks, puts a hand to her bony hip. “Or does he prefer the company of moons and clouds and nothing else?”
“The King grows more tired by the day,” Janlord confesses. Ruena hears the sad tinge in his voice, the pity. She doesn’t care to address the worry it stirs in her, much preferring to ignore fears and duties and bothers. “It is a great effort to descend the Tower. I’m sure you could understand, a man of his great age …”
“He’s going to die,” she says simply. “I know. The world knows. Some claim he’s already dead, the words going left and right by my ears. Such an old man, soon to pass the crown.”
“Yes, and Kael Mirand-Thrin is missing.” Janlord sighs, his gaze looking so much like pity. If there’s anything she hates, it’s pity. “Ru … Ruena, you do realize what it means if—”
“She’ll return.” Ruena carelessly throws the silk over her hair, hooding herself. “She’ll return and the King will live another ten years and we’ll all be happy. Anything else, Marshal, or may I make my way home?” Janlord nods at the thing in her hand. “Something necessary,” she answers. “You can tell the King I took something necessary.”
Somehow, the answer appeases Janlord. Ruena makes her leave of the ever-chrome Cloud Keep through malfunctioning keypads and beeps, and manages to get home quickly. In the basement, she installs the final piece to her project. Only twice does it shock her. She licks her finger and studies all the work, curious if it’s ready to go.
“Don’t do it.”
Ruena looks up. “How’d you get in?”
The ball of a boy Sedge is posted at the doorway to the basement, doesn’t let himself any further in, so scared even his cheeks shiver. “Please, please don’t do it. I know what that is. Please.”
Ruena rolls her eyes and fusses with the wiring of her beautiful thing. Sedge yelps, squeaks, then says, “Please, please, I know you’ve been building a bomb. I know what a bomb is, I’ve seen pictures. You’ll destroy the whole Lifted City with that thing, please!”
“It’s not a bomb,” she snaps, annoyed to her every hair follicle. “Calm down or I’ll zap your ears, silly boy. I’ve never been interested in things that go boom.” She reconnects the circuit and the whole thing hums with anticipation. “It’s ready. Now listen, I’m going to turn it on. If you want to be a part of this—” He eagerly nods, nods, nods. “—then you need to keep secret what you see here. This cannot leave the room, cannot leave your mouth, can’t even leave your mind. You promise?”
“I vow on my life,” he says, then obviously not thinking it enough, adds, “and my mother’s life. And my mother’s cakes and pastries, even the berry ones. And my brother’s. And my brother’s girlfriend and all her family. And my cat Lucy.”
She frowns. “You’ve a cat? Aren’t they dirty?”
“Not mine. No thing I take care of is dirty … I’m the greatest caretaker of Atlas. I’m vowed to be Guardian for a King someday. I’m brave and clean and smart.”
“And annoying,” she adds without humor. “Good, you’ll need to be plenty annoying if you’re to guard a King. But for now, just start with guarding our secret.�
� She winks—which seems to inspire all of a blush and a giggle and a squeal from the boy—and turns back to her contraption. “Now let’s make this beauty sing.”
She doesn’t wait for him to deliver another annoying speech of readiness and excitement. With no ceremony, Ruena pokes the button with a long white finger.
And then music.
Sedge gasps sharply, then says and does nothing else, frozen by the sound. Ruena smiles, enjoying his reaction, and takes a step back. A soft music, soft and blended as an old portrait. Suddenly the world is no longer there.
She closes her eyes. The instruments begin to swell.
Music from the Ancients, music from thousands of years ago when the world hadn’t fallen apart, when humanity still clutched the whole of the Planet, the oceans, the lands, the hills and beyond. Music that has lost its name, its history only existing now in sound.
Ruena pulls the diamond pin from her hair, flings it at the wall like it’s nothing. Her white hair unravels and falls, a curtain of snow, except for the small patch her scar steals away. She moves with the music, spreading her hands. The music swells …
Sedge laughs joyously, the happiness too much, he can’t keep it in. Ruena lets it all go: her Aunt who fell from Lord’s Garden, who is still missing and may be dead—and what that means for Ruena—and the King’s violent cry, and the stirring of noises beneath her feet in a place of slums and cats and dirt, and the big empty Mirand-Thrin Palace that may now belong completely to her … Farewell to it all, to it all, to it all …
She opens her eyes. Sedge is wiggling and spinning around and around. She pulls off her long milky-white scarf, swings it around Sedge’s neck, surprising him, and they both laugh and spin around and around. The music swells. How can music keep swelling and never burst?
Sedge wraps the scarf around his face, struts across the room, giggling. Ruena tosses a lavish hat of hers, it lands perfectly on his little head. He cries out in laughter, the both of them lost to the joyously deafening swell.