by Daryl Banner
“Good. Thought for a moment you stopped here for some lunch before the procedure.”
“No, no,” she insists, straining to keep her voice even. “No rest until our work’s done.”
The man grunts his agreement. “The subject’s prepped. The rest of the team awaits your skillful hands.” Then he leaves.
The doctor, Terrabeth Wise, lifts her chin and swallows all her tears at once. After one short, tightened breath, she turns and heads for the door. She flicks off the lights, and then the door shuts at her backside heavily.
Link and Kid watch the back of that door, dwelling in the silence and darkness left by her departure. Neither speak for a time.
Then Kid whispers, “I think we found our target.”
“Indeed,” agrees Link softly in the dark, then goes for another bite of his sandwich.
0246 Arrow
The Greens of the ninth spread out before him for miles and miles, the darkness pierced by a bright lamp every so often. Even the Wall stretching across the colorless horizon is hardly remarkable, with so much greenery growing before it.
Then he is brought farther out, and the reality becomes known.
“The problem is getting worse,” notes Arcana at his side.
“I see,” mumbles Arrow, squinting against the bright light of the nearest lamp, which shines brighter than the damned sun itself, even at the dead of night. He even brings a hand up to shield his face.
“And they’ve no clue what’s its cause,” she says. “Or its cure.”
“So I’ve heard.”
The Greens farther out are dead or dying. The plants are curled in, wilting and brown. Even the soil is strange and discolored, as if some sort of earthen venom seeps up from deep within the planet, drowning the crops in its liquid death.
Arrow comes up to a wilted bush and reaches out his hand, letting a wrinkled, dead black pepper rest on his palm. He grimaces in a mixture of disgust and pity.
“There … is something else,” murmurs Arcana.
Arrow tilts his head, his eyes scanning the rows and rows and rows of peppers—and very actively trying to ignore what it is that Arcana wishes to discuss. Don’t even think about it, she’ll pull it right out of your brain. He forces himself to stare at the rows of peppers. He even makes observations about it, distracting himself from the very thoughts he’s trying not to think. Yes, yes, only three peppers are the rich, red color they ought to be, the rest wrinkled and black, yes …
“I won’t ask of it,” says Arcana anyway.
“Of what?” Arrow throws back flippantly, then tilts his head the other way as he continues to observe the rows of peppers.
“Haven’t you considered that over these past several months, I’ve, several times over and over, pulled the thoughts of what you truly meant to do to Ivy?”
Arrow pretends not to have heard her, and yet: That’s very likely true, he realizes. It must be. I’ve thought of it on many occasions.
“But along with those thoughts,” Arcana says, “comes the very reasons behind them. I know your whole horrible story. You needn’t feel guilty. If only you knew the thoughts others have, when they—”
“What was the something else?” Arrow interrupts, wanting her to say nothing more about the matter of Ivy Caldron.
She shrugs. “It’s about our little disease here in the Greens.” She bristles. “And … about the Slum King.”
Arrow sighs. This must be the thirteenth time this week Arcana has brought him up. “I don’t want the ninth mixed up in the politics of the rest of the slums, or that self-inflated King or Queen.”
Her voice tightens. “Now isn’t the time to be stubborn.”
“I am not being stubborn. I’m being …” Arrow finds he doesn’t have another word.
“I know the Slum King’s Legacy. Arrow, he could help us. I’d—”
Arrow turns on her. “Then let him help us, and watch as his war for Atlas becomes ours.” He slaps at a bug on his arm irritably. He isn’t even sure there was a bug. “Do you realize he is anti-Guardian? Do you realize he wishes to take Atlas for his own?”
“So you’ve heard. Rumors and fearmongering. He is also a man of peace,” Arcana points out. “And he is a man who—”
“We have an alliance with Guardian. They’re our … friends.” A sigh escapes his lips. Even the word “friends” is too polite a word to dignify the tentative relationship they have. “I don’t want to make a move that could compromise our agreement with them. If I allow this Slum King to restore our Greens, and Guardian finds out, they may consider our alliance betrayed, then storm us from one end to the other with whatever remains of the might of Sanctum. It’s bad enough they likely suspect that all those associated with Rain dwell in these parts.” Arrow’s throat restricts just then, fear clutching him tightly. “Never mind where its leaders Yellow and Gandra fled to.”
Arcana folds her arms and shakes her head, lips pursed.
Arrow wonders why he wastes such effort in talking to her; she could just as easily pull all these thoughts from his mind and know where he stands on the matter.
“I don’t know why you come to me with this,” mumbles Arrow, eyeing her. “You clearly can do as—”
“You think I’m able to do as I please.” Arcana eyes him. “You are about to—once again—play down your role here in the ninth. That you are not its King. Or its leader. Or its interim Warden.”
“I’m none of those things.”
“Yet you have united and kept us together since the Madness. Is that worth nothing, Arrow Fyrefellow of the ninth?”
She unexpectedly puts a palm softly on his cheek, causing him to flinch. The cool, knowing eyes of Arcana connect with Arrow’s warm ones. The pair of them grow very still. Arrow’s hand that was shielding the lamplight from his eyes slowly lowers, as if forgotten.
“I … I don’t—” Arrow starts.
“I know,” Arcana cuts him off. “I’m not touching you to gain your affection. I wish to gain your attention. We need your smarts, Arrow, but … we also need your guts.” She brings her face close to his. “I need you to be as daring as they think you are.”
“Daring?”
“All of them. Your friends. The folk of the ninth. The folk from the Greens. They think you’re daring. They think you’re brave. They think you’d stand in the face of Impis and laugh louder than he.”
“I wouldn’t. I’m not—”
“They think you would. They think you are.” Arcana’s caress of Arrow’s cheek tightens, becoming nearly a grip on his jaw. “We need to take a risk. The Greens is the only thing keeping us independent. We can even make do without the grid’s electricity, which was once provided by the workers of the Keeps beneath our feet. But we can’t do without food and water, which the Greens provide. We need—”
Arrow pulls away from her grip with a jerk, then steps away from her, turning his back. He gathers breath, then says, “I’m not even of the ninth. I’m of the eleventh.” He wipes the back of his wrist over his jaw where her hand gripped him, resentful. “Who says this Slum King fool would even come if we called for him?”
A gentle night breeze pushes lazily over the field, disturbing all the dead and dying plants. The dry whisper it makes is unsettling.
Arcana then says, “A little known fact is that I and my sister grew up in the fifth.” She pauses, then adds, “So did the Slum King.”
He faces her. “You know him?”
“Knew him. As children. And not so well.” She crosses her arms suddenly. “Do you find it unseasonably cold?” she asks. “Like winter is in the air again?”
“It can’t be. It only just passed a month ago.” Yet Arrow finds he is also fighting a shiver. “It is just a night breeze, nothing more.”
“Of course.” Arcana gives a nod toward the path. “Should we be heading back?”
“Yes,” Arrow decides without hesitation.
The two slowly return down the winding path that cuts through the Greens. As th
ey go, the vegetation at their side seems to turn from dead and sickly to bright and lively, like a jagged gradient of brown colors to green. Soon, their feet are upon thick dirt and rock again, with old farm houses and chrome silos and greenhouses scattered on either side of the road.
Arrow says, “We’ll cut the dead crops and build a big barricade down the center lane. The disease may be able to be contained.”
Arcana’s face tightens, but she doesn’t argue the point further. “If that is your order.”
“It’s not an order. Kings give orders, and I’m not a King. It was a suggestion. Why didn’t you reveal to me sooner that you knew this Slum King from your childhood?” he asks suddenly.
She shrugs as they stroll along slowly. “You are not a King, and thusly, I didn’t have an obligation to tell you.”
Arrow shoots her a look.
Arcana smirks, satisfied with herself.
In a matter of minutes, the two are back on the all-familiar street of the ninth where everyone is a friend, everyone is amidst a party or a dinner or a training session, and no worries seem to touch any of their minds. The very first thing Arrow hears is laughter, in fact, from ten children chasing one another in a dirt field around a dirty assortment of dead kitchen appliances, crates, chains, and an old train wheel from the defunct nine-six that somehow found its way here over the months.
It’s a curious thing, the way children are all so oblivious to the state of the world. He doubts he was ever oblivious, even when he was their age. The Caldrons took that innocence from me the day they sent the Sky Guard to murder my father, rape my mother, and break my sister’s brain.
“Are you coming?”
Arrow didn’t realize he had stopped in the middle of the street, not advancing much farther than the broken intersection, distracted by all the playing children. “I … I will come.” He gives her a curt nod. “You go on. I have a few things to … mull over.”
She studies him, likely hears every bit of his thoughts anyway, then sighs. “Don’t mull too long, Lord Fyrefellow. There’s a chill in the air I don’t much like the feel of.” When Arrow scoffs, she smiles and says, “I’ll find a title that befits you someday. I’m sure of it.”
Arrow watches her walk away, mulling over things indeed.
0247 Athan
When the thick black material over his head is removed, Athan is bound to a wall spread-eagle. He’s in an office of some kind, a desk on the opposite end of the otherwise empty room. There’s nothing on the walls, no windows, and only one source of light: a single, buzzing thing over his head that reminds him of a streetlamp. Indoor lights are so rare after the Fall of Sanctum and the loss of electricity to the majority of the slums that Athan’s attention is drawn to it right away, more curious than anything. Where are we?
“We’ll make this really easy,” comes the voice of the man across the room from him, leaning against the desk. His forked beard moves as he talks. Two of his friends are by his side, which is two less than he had when he was confronted at the pits. “I have a needle-tipped dart pinched between my fingers. And I have excellent aim.” The man nods at Athan. “Tell me where your gold is. And each time I do not get an answer, I’ll take a throw at my personal dartboard: you.”
Athan’s heart quickens. Is he bluffing? Is he serious? What sort of answer is he expecting? He should not have thrown the gold at them. That was an obvious sign that gold means nothing to Athan, and if there is anything a slummer knows, it’s that gold means food, means survival, means life. And any fool who throws away gold is a Lifted fool, a person who has means, who has riches, who has promise.
Athan’s act of generosity, no matter its brash execution, painted a slummer’s target upon him.
Literally. “Where’s your gold, boy?”
He gives a feeble tug at his wrists. They’re bound to the wall with cord so thick, no amount of muscle could free him. His ankles are similarly bound, spread so far apart, Athan already feels the ache burning in his thighs. He can’t even tell what the cords are attached to that holds him so firmly.
“No answer? Alright.” The man pushes himself away from the desk and takes his stance.
Athan’s eyes flash. “Wait!”
The dart goes through the air so fast, Athan can’t even draw a breath to steel himself. It strikes into the wall not an inch away from his face with so much power, it sounds like a bullet from a gun.
Athan lets out a shriek of surprise before it even registers that the dart didn’t hit him. The shriek makes one of the two other men chortle to himself, the other remaining silent and stoic, unmoving.
Athan’s left ear rings from the bang of the dart landing.
Fork-beard saunters slowly up to Athan, plucks the dart from the wall, then returns to the desk. “I’ll rephrase my question. Where do you withdraw your tech funds from when you need some gold?”
Tech funds. That is a slum term for Lifted currency, which is often kept in a digital database by the Lifted City banks. The man already presumes I’m Lifted. “I don’t have any f-f-funds.” He can’t stop his voice from shaking. “System collapsed when Sanctum did.”
“Not an answer I like,” decides the man. He spins around and, unexpectedly, flings the dart again like a bolt of lightning.
Again, it misses by a hair, this time to the right of his abdomen. Athan sucks in breath and holds it, trembling all over. He has to look down to be sure he wasn’t hit, then notices the dart half-imbedded into the wall.
With alarm, he glances up at the spot by his head where the dart had landed before. There is a deep hole there, much like a bullet hole.
Fork-beard, once again, slowly strolls to the wall, retrieves his dart, then returns to the desk. “I see you’ve surmised my Legacy. It’s unique, isn’t it? Anything I throw carries a substantial amount of speed along with it. A deadly amount, in your case.”
Athan pulls again at his restraints with a hundred times more desperation than before, frantic. The cords have zero give to them. His arms and legs aren’t going anywhere.
“One of these times, you know I am going to score. Oh, and it’s going to feel so nice.” The man chuckles heavily. “So, so nice. Well, nice for me. Not you.”
“I told you,” Athan blurts, his voice shaking, “and I meant it. I’m not a liar. I don’t have access to any b-b-bank gold. If I did, I would send some to you right now. All of it. It means …”
Nothing to me, Athan would have finished, but realizes too late that he doesn’t wish to emphasize the very thing that got him in this mess: that gold means nothing to him, that he’d give it away easily.
The man stands at the desk again and faces him. “Of course I’ve been playing with you up until now. Didn’t I claim to have excellent aim?” He gives the end of his dart a tiny, toying lick. “This next one will land. So tell it true, boy. How can I get my hands on your gold?”
Athan stares at the man, no answer coming to him.
Yet something else does. A feeling he hasn’t experienced in so long, he nearly forgot what it felt like. Athan’s heart begins to race, but not in the natural way. Every inch of his skin crawls with a sort of caution, a worry, a panic, an excitement, a … something.
It’s the same feeling that charged into him that day in their sixth ward headquarters when he and Lionis fled just moments before it was attacked.
It’s the same manic explosion that went off in his heart right before Lord’s Garden fell apart beneath his feet and the world he knew turned upside-down.
It’s the same terror that poured through his system when he sat down for dinner with his family for the final time.
And that feeling left when he acted on it.
And it’s back, right now.
“No answer?” The fork-bearded man shrugs. “Very well.”
“Please. Sir.” Athan chases the overwhelming panic in his body. It is all-consuming. It controls him. “You’re making a mistake. I have no gold. I can work an honest deal with you. I’ll fight for you in th
e pits. Every bit of gold I earn, it’s yours. I’ll be your fighter.”
“I’m not interested in crumbs of slum gold and folded paper. I’m interested in the vein of it that sits in this very room.” The man tosses the dart in the air and catches it. “And I’m interested in where I choose to put a hole through your body.”
The man to his right gives a cocky smirk, thirsty for his blood.
The man to the left, however, only stares at Athan evenly.
Athan notices.
For some reason, that stare grounds him. Something deep inside the Broadmore boy pushes his mouth towards other words. “You are making a mistake,” he repeats, speaking firmly through the panic that wracks his body. He could easily lie and tell them he’ll bring the lot of them to his secret hiding place. He could draw this whole thing out to buy himself time, yet something in him quashes out the very idea. In fact, he feels like saying anything other than the words he chooses to speak will end his life. He knows it as surely as he knows that dart is deadly sharp. “If you release that dart …”
“Then what?” challenges the man.
Athan’s stare is deadly. His muscles, taut and bound, tremble so much he can’t even feel them anymore. The panic within his body has turned into invisible gold, coating him like an armor.
Then Athan answers: “Then you’ll die.”
The fork-bearded man glances to his friend at the left, then his friend at the right, then back at Athan. No laughs live on their lips. No smiles, either.
He lifts the dart. “My poor boy,” the man mutters so deeply, his words are nearly a growl. “I think you have that backwards.”
Then he throws the dart.
And the hole ends up in the bearded man’s own arm.
“FUCK!” he belts out, grabbing at the hole in his arm and the blood that pours from it. His eyes flit about, baffled, wide, as he tries to make sense of what happened. The two others have jerked away from him in alarm, neither having caught the path of the dart.
