by Daryl Banner
She sits on the balcony and stares through a railing of wrought iron at the street below. Two children, boys, are chasing each other through shadows and trashcans and dim, buzzing streetlamps.
They didn’t make it back to the eleventh in one quick go of it. Too weary from the visit, likely, Ellena, Aleks, and Gabel decided to stop at a hotel at the wrong end of tenth along the way. The man at the front desk was nice enough, but both Gabel and Aleks seemed to intimidate him past the use of common courtesy, and their welcome was more strained and cold.
Much like she’s feeling now. Strained. Cold.
She is very much dreading the bringing of this news to Halves back at Eleven Wings. She almost wonders if there’s a way she could keep the truth from him. It wouldn’t harm him not to know, she then reasons, her knees hugged against her chest as she leans into the iron railing, curled into half a ball. Maybe the sickness of wondering was far easier to manage than the sickness of knowing.
Footsteps bring a figure to the doorway behind her.
She knows it isn’t the footsteps of her son Aleks.
“Please,” she says to the silent person behind her. “Not now.”
“I won’t say anything,” Gabel responds softly. “I only—”
“Not now.”
A silence persists, a silence in which nothing is said at all and no feet move. Then, softly, Gabel brings himself out onto the balcony and sits on the rough concrete ground opposite her at its other end. The two stare off into the street for quite some time, neither saying a thing at all.
And then, from Ellena’s lips: “I’m certain I could have prevented this.”
Gabel is stirred from a thought of his own, turning his head.
“I know what you’d say to that,” she goes on. “That it isn’t my fault. That I couldn’t have known what trouble my sons were …” She sighs. “… were involved in. Had Atlas not fallen apart, the pair of them would be considered enemies of Sanctum.” Ellena glances at Gabel, who is staring right at her with his fierce green eyes that so vividly shine amidst his handsome, chiseled, dark chestnut-colored face. “They would be two criminals that a man like you would have arrested and sent straight to the King for a sentencing.”
“Ellena …”
“I’m not accusing you.” She looks back to the street at the sound of the children laughing. “Guardian has a duty. Halves and Aleks … they both would have had to arrest their own brothers. Their own … Their own blood.” She closes her eyes. “If I had stayed home, I could have prevented this. If I had spoken up and not let Anwick leave …”
“Mom?”
Ellena opens her eyes and turns her head around to find Aleks, half out of his Guardian armor, standing just within the door.
She ignores the fact that he might have heard a lot of what she just said. “Aleks, sweetie, could you get me a cup of water? I saw a spring machine in the lobby. My throat is parched.”
Aleks frowns. “The water won’t be cold.”
“I mind it not. Please, sweetie.”
After a moment, he gives her a soft nod, then departs the room. She listens as the door opens, then clicks shut.
Gabel speaks the moment her son is gone. “I would never have taken advantage of you, Ellena, if I had a thought that your husband could still be alive.”
Her eyes clench shut. “I said not now.”
“But even months after the Madness has fallen …”
“Gabel,” she warns him.
His deep, rich voice persisted on. “There hasn’t been word at all from the Keep. Not from the Guardian there, nor the keepers, nor the communications. Of course, there is always a chance, but … but why have we not heard a word from them?” He’s moved from his spot on the balcony. He sits next to her now, mere feet between their faces. “There is still a network, still a system in place, and yet silence from the Keep. Nothing. Ellena, I would not have knowingly touched you with knowledge, with proof, that your husband is alive. But no such proof exists. No such—”
“Stop.” Her hand is on his chest. She meant for the touch to stop him from speaking, but instead, she’s only become aware once again of how strong Gabel Wayward is. His firm, muscled chest. His sharp jaw. His deep eyes. Ellena closes her own. Stop noticing these things.
“I will stop,” he promises her. “I’d never touch you, not without you permitting it so. But know that I have only meant … that I only meant to …”
Ellena’s legs have been squeezing together since the moment he started to speak. Even his voice ignites a green fire deep within her, despite everything that’s happened.
Anwick is gone. Lionis is gone. Forgemon, her one and only, may be gone just as well. There is no confirmation. There is no proof of life nor death.
And her very bones ache with remorse.
“Ellena … I only meant to—”
It doesn’t matter what he meant to do or not. He never finishes the sentence before Ellena has moved to press her lips against his, shutting him up.
Gabel’s body turns to motion the moment their mouths touch. He reaches about her waist, pulling her tightly against him.
Their breaths crash against one another’s faces as they kiss with feverish intent. Ellena grabs Gabel’s armor, tugging on it, wrestling with the heavy thing, then gives up as she wraps her arms around him and thrusts her body against his.
Armor or not, she feels the firm gift between his thick thighs.
She reaches down hungrily and grabs hold of it through the thick material of his pants. She gives it a squeeze, and the throbbing length of it responds with a flex of its own.
“Ellena …” he breathes against her face, even that one uttered whisper full of his deep, resonant strength and hunger.
She topples him. Atop his body, Ellena straddles his waist, his throbbing meat beneath her, and rides his body with the material of their clothes being the only thing in the way.
Then at once, the two stop moving, and they look at each other, Ellena down upon Gabel, and Gabel up toward her, his green eyes glittering with bewilderment.
A sound from within the room makes the two of them separate at once, their backs slamming against either side of the balcony in seconds, out of breath.
Aleks appears at the door of the balcony, a cup in hand. “Mom,” he says for a greeting.
Ellena takes the cup from his hand with such quickness, Aleks nearly jerks back in surprise. She downs the whole thing in three choked gulps, wipes her mouth, gives herself a second to relax, then gently hands the cup back to her son with a muted, “Thank you.”
He gives befuddled eyes to his mother, then reluctantly goes back inside, taking the plain, emptied cup with him. Ellena then sits herself back down where she was, slowly and quietly, and turns her flushed face back to the streets. The children have gone, run off to some other place to make their fun.
Gabel stands there like a statue of armored muscle and strength at the other end of the balcony. He stares down at Ellena with two shrunken, glassy eyes—wordless, breathless, lost.
0261 Kid
The pair of them stand at the door to the freezer room.
Until now, there was nothing much significant about this room at all. Link thought it was only where they stored certain chemicals, food, and odds and ends. Kid assumed the same.
But beyond the metal door, locked by a keypad and eye scanner, lies the frozen corpse of a woman on a table.
Kendil’s mother.
Subject Meta.
The Meta.
“She’s auto-borne,” Link reads off the screen of a computer. One of the doctors forgot to turn it off, returning to her duties and giving Link and Kid the opportunity to quickly hop on and search the files. “Lenida. No last name. All it says for her Legacy is ‘Meta’. I … don’t know what that means.”
Kid is reading the words off a computer print-out elsewhere in the room. She is a very slow reader, and several of the words are a total mystery to her, so she skips them.
But there�
��s one word that she pulls right off the page. “Legacy. Mirror. Rev … Revere … Reverse …” Her face wrinkles up. “Reverse?”
Link lifts his face from the computer. “What are you reading?”
“I think she has a … mirror, reverse, backward … Legacy.” She meets Link’s eyes. “What does that mean?”
He rises from his chair and comes over to meet Kid by the other desk, peering down at the papers. His eyes skim the page. “Subject Meta. Fifth class.” He grunts to himself. “Fifth? There’s only three classes of Legacy, not five.” He goes on. “Exomorphic, exopsychist, or exoempathic, results unclear. Effects include: mirrored, reversed, backwards, lateral, or inverted Legacies of those in direct contact. Likely had a range of effect when subject was alive, now notably diminished to direct or molecular contact while subject is … deceased.” Now it is Link’s face that wrinkles up. “The fuck …?”
“She has some kind of special Legacy?” Kid blinks, trying to put it all together. “What is all this about ‘classes’ …?”
“Didn’t you learn this in—? Oh.” Link slaps his own cheek. “I’m a fool at times, forgive me. It’s a lesson you relearn each year when your year begins at school, starting around … well, around your age, actually. There are three classes of Legacy.”
Kid smirks. “You’ve stopped giving me lessons yourself.”
“Haven’t we been a bit busy since the Masked Men killed me and dragged my body to this wretched place?” Link leans against the desk. “I’ll give you the lesson now. Three classes. Mentalist, which means their power is of the mind, also includes Psychists and some Sensors. Second class is Morph, who can affect or change their own body. Elementalists are the third, and they can move or manipulate certain materials. Third class also includes Charmers, which I don’t know much about. I guess there is also the Empath class, but it’s considered a special class, and not really a part of the other three. Oh, maybe they’re considering it the fourth? It’s the rarest of the classes, as they transfer something to and fro another person or thing.” He leans in. “My mom is an Empath. She can absorb others’ wounds.”
Kid thinks on that for a second. Link’s mom … is my grandma. “Empath …” she murmurs, curious.
“Not that I expect you to remember all that. But …” He bites his lip. “It seems like these doctors want to believe there’s another class. A ‘Meta’ class … or something.” Link thumbs through a few more of the papers, his eyes skimming. “It’s … Hmm. It seems it’s a Legacy that can affect others’ Legacies. How strange. Looks like these people are trying to define the new Meta class as much as they’re trying to define the woman’s Legacy itself. Hm. Both things confounded them. Apparently there are no other documented cases of such a Legacy, and it works in such a way that it doesn’t fall into any specific class, not even Empath. There’s a whole fifteen pages here of some special Dr. Lodestone analyzing it all.”
Kid thinks on it a second. “What class am I?”
Link observes her. “I … suspect you’re a Morph. You can make your body become invisible somehow. Unless …” He shrugs. “Well, I guess it just depends on how you make yourself invisible. Do you trick others’ minds into not being able to see you? In that case, you would be considered a Mentalist. Psychist, more specifically. Or … perhaps you manipulate the particles of matter around your body, rendering yourself invisible via physical illusions. That’d make you a powerful Elementalist.”
Kid frowns. “The same could be said about any Legacy. How do we know how any of them work? You might be tricking people into seeing other colors, which makes you a Psycho. Or—”
“Psychist,” Link corrects her quietly.
“Or you might actually change the colors of things, which … I … I forget which one that makes you.”
“I heard of these tests rich people do to find out that very thing. Tests that can even figure if you’re auto-borne or not.” Link eyes her. “That’s when your ability persists after your death, like it lives in your body somehow or … well, I don’t know how that works.”
“So you know nothing, then?” Kid is growing more annoyed by the second, though she can’t say with what. “These doctors? All they do all day is just … guess stupid things? They know nothing?”
“Akidra …”
“STOP CALLING ME THAT!”
A noise at the door causes Kid’s hand to instinctively slap onto Link’s arm, pulling them—and the papers he holds—into the realm of the unseen. A doctor pushes into the room.
A doctor with red eyes.
Kid and Link watch her knowingly as she crosses through the room with a book to her chest. Her flat shoes tap along the tiled floor as she goes straight for the freezer door. She bends down to line her eyes up with the scanner, permitting her access.
The door opens, and in she goes.
And in Link and Kid go right behind her.
The room is a large and very cold space, a mist settled upon all the surfaces they see. The doctor strolls past two tables in the middle of the room, which look like exam tables that each hold a covered body. She stops at a shelf, squinting through the chilly mist at the contents of a plastic bin, fetches a bottle of something, and sets her fiery red eyes upon the label, reading it carefully. She shakes her head, puts the bottle back, then goes for another and reads its label.
Kid stares at that doctor with a racing heart. It’s the woman that examined Link and took the sample of skin and blood from him—a sample she fetched by burying a sickle-shaped blade in his neck. She remembers the name another doctor uttered when speaking to her.
It’s a name she doesn’t forget.
Perhaps we picked the wrong sympathetic doctor.
“Doctor Emery,” says Kid.
The doctor gasps at once, flattens herself against the shelf in fright, then looks all around her for the voice, wide-eyed.
Link stares down at Kid in disbelief, then shakes the hand of hers he holds in frustration, furious with her outburst.
“Who … Who’s there?” breathes the red-eyed woman, her eyes still darting around the freezer.
Kid looks up at Link expectantly, then quirks an eyebrow. She knows he will take action; he has no choice now.
Link gives her one more frustrated look, then lets go of Kid’s hand, making himself visible and known. “Doctor Emery,” he says, taking up Kid’s lead.
The woman’s eyes zero in on him. “Shye?”
“Yes. It is Shye.” He straightens his back. “I told you, I would be haunting you until you assist me in all I need to know.”
“I’ve nothing more to tell you.” Doctor Emery now appears far more furious than she does scared. “You are not supposed to be here. Why did you follow me here?” She frowns suddenly. “And who was it that said my name at first? It was not you. The voice was higher, a girl’s. Teenaged. I heard her voice.”
“You heard only me,” Link boldly asserts.
Kid, unbeknownst to either of them, slowly edges around the room. She gives a look at the nearest table, certain one of them holds the body of Kendil’s mother. She wonders if it’s the one she’s next to, the one she could easily touch if she just reached out a hand.
The woman huffs. “Do you realize how much trouble I was in?” she asks suddenly. “I had to lie to my superiors. I told them …” The woman is so angry, she shivers. “I told them I had to burn your body because it had grown contaminated from exposed chemicals, possibly a Legacy of one of the Nether caused it. I had to blame one of those creepy fuckers. Imagine the flack I got for that. I dare you to try and imagine what my life’s been like.”
“It will be worse,” Link states, clearly unsympathetic, “if you don’t tell me more about where Subject Dreamer is, and how I can get to her.”
“And why are you so invested in her, Shye?” The woman, just as clearly unafraid of Link, advances on him in three slow steps, her teeth nearly grinding between her words. “Before I tell you anything, I think it’s only fair that I’m told a little.
Like, for one, how did you get in this fucking room?”
Kid glances back and forth between the two exam tables. She crouches down, curious if either of them are labeled. Which one of you is the Meta …?
“I am Shye,” Link declares, “the Breaker of Locks, the Key to all Doors. Advance one more step, and I’ll end your meager life.”
The doctor stops, though it is difficult to say whether it’s in fear, or simply to oblige him.
Then, at once, Emery’s red eyes turn sympathetic. “You care for her. Subject Dreamer. You’ve … You’ve come to rescue her.”
Link doesn’t answer. He only stares back at the woman, hard.
“I can only assume you’ve grown fond of the woman,” Emery murmurs, like her statement is half a thought to herself, her words soft. “And I must assume you do realize she is not of this world, yes?”
Link swallows once and lifts his chin, attempting (and somewhat failing) to appear brave. He still does not speak.
The cool white mist swirls and dances around the feet of Doctor Emery’s lab coat, nearly making her look like some ethereal spirit.
Kid moves closer to one of the tables. She realizes it isn’t a body, but rather a bunch of objects covered by a loose, filmy tarp, crystals of ice hanging from its edges.
“Poor, poor Shye. The woman is incapable of love. Subject Dreamer, if she is what we all believe, is a creature of opportunity. She doesn’t feel an ounce of human emotion for you. She merely used you for your weak and simple human body. She is finished with your like.”
That is all it takes to unwind Link’s resolve. “You are lying.” His words are hard as hammers.
“It would be far more interesting if I was. But alas.” Emery lifts her free hand in surrender. “Subject Dreamer is merely an object of scientific interest, now. She is with Sanctum, untouchable by even my superiors, and certainly untouchable by me.”
Kid approaches the other table, curious if she can sneak a peek under the covers without being noticed. Even despite being so cold that she’s shivering, her curiosity grows deeper and deeper.
