by Daryl Banner
There is no answer.
“Perhaps she’s not home,” suggests Scot. “The more I think on it, the more I like the idea of sitting by the canals. Have you ever just listened to the flow of water before? It’s ever so peaceful. Up in the Westly, there was a small fountain from which—”
Mercy grabs the ring again and, again, slams it on the door three times in a row.
There is still no answer.
As Scot starts to say something else, Mercy descends the porch stairs and comes around the side of the house. There is a soft light from two of the side windows, so she knows someone is home. She discovers a tall brick wall that encloses the backyard, but its gate is unlatched, so she pushes her way in carelessly, strolling across the grass like she owns the place. Once I have the bitch by the neck, I will own this place. In the back, she finds no swimming pool or garden or fountain; it is merely a stretch of boring grass with a small cement slab for a back seating area, upon which two white wicker chairs are set between a tiny glass table. There is what appears to be a dog’s squeaky toy and a ragdoll in the lawn, but no dog.
And the back doors are wide open to the night.
Well, this foolish Hightower certainly made it easy.
Mercy passes by two large windows on her way to the back door, and though the inside of the house is lit, she sees no sign of the woman—not that she knows what this woman looks like at all. She saw briefly the daughter on the broadcast, Queen Erana, the Queen of Very Dull-Looking Eyes. If her mother looks anything like her, she will be easy to recognize.
Mercy crosses the threshold into the house, and her eyes are assaulted with … lots and lots and lots of crap. The air is much the same as it is outside: cool, dry, and with a hint of the “slum spice” in the air, which is just another way of saying “slightly shitty-smelling”. The house is laden with oversized furniture and small spots of utter mess—stacks of boxes full of odds and ends, piles of clothes, broken-looking appliances, a random assortment of colorful lampshades that are missing their lamps, a basket with spools of thread and balls of colorless string.
The clutter gets worse the farther in Mercy walks, which brings pause to her movements as her wide, disbelieving eyes take in the sight of the messy house. She sees a narrow grey mattress leaning against the wall of the dining room, next to a wooden statue of a naked muscular man pointing at the sky, next to an ornate one-of-a-kind seven-foot-tall chair that has no reason for being precisely where it is. To Mercy’s other side, she sees a kitchen with stacks upon stacks of plates, bowls, trays, and cups, none of them looking clean enough for even her to risk eating or drinking from. There is a drip coming from the faucet, which has one beautiful, golden handle on the hot water side, and an old rusted thing for the cold. A ridiculous, gaudy chandelier hangs over the kitchen counter, with a spray of ritzy diamonds hanging from its peculiar design, and every diamond looks a different size and shape. A spider’s made a home between the hanging gems, and seems to have already caught its breakfast, lunch, and dinner in its web. What the hell happened here?
“Oh, oh, oh, oooh!” comes a singsong voice from afar. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! It’s you! It’s yooou!”
Mercy, bewildered, turns around to face a curving staircase.
Every step of the staircase has an object on it: a child’s toy, a doll with a missing eye, an unopened box of candles, a platter of half-eaten moldy cookies collecting flies, a gorgeous piece of glass art that could be sitting in a prestigious Lifted manor, a saucer with a fancy-looking teacup, on and on and on. Mercy won’t dare ascend a step of that cluttered madness.
And at the top of the staircase, there stands a woman. She has a cocoon of teased, wrapped, twisted, bound, braided, and knotted hair that is nearly two feet tall, decorated with gemstones and ribbons. It looks as if her whole head might have been styled by Atlas’s greatest hairstylist, then left untouched, untreated, and unmanaged for over three months, pieces of it coming undone, a gem hanging loose by her ear, and a general sort of frizz developing at the top.
And as for the rest of the woman, Mercy can make no steady judgment. The woman looks as if she fell into her closet and came out wearing six different dresses, all somehow sewn together, or maybe she’s even wearing all six at the same time. She has on two different shoes, and upon every finger is no less than three rings, glittering and flashy and boastful.
This is a slum woman with dreams, who has fallen into sudden and very plentiful gold that she has spent to excess.
“Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho, hooo … ha!” The woman laughs and lifts a glass that Mercy did not notice at first—a glass of alcohol, of wine, or of chemical, she can’t say. “You, you, you, you!” The woman makes a strange little light-footed dance as she comes down the staircase. Her great, billowing purple-and-blue-and-red dress misses some of the objects on the steps and overtly kicks or knocks over others. “Yes, it’s you, it’s you, oh, ho, ho, hooo!”
Mercy backs away cautiously from the foot of the stairs as the woman comes down. One backwards step too many sends Mercy tripping over the foot of a life-sized doll that sits in the entryway for no reason at all. She clambers back to her feet, then stands near the front door, having backed herself against it.
“Ho, ho, ho, yes, yes!” sings the woman as she comes to a stop in the middle of the entryway. “Are you my new designer? Are you my lovely new designer? I’ve been waiting for so long for you!”
Mercy stares at her unblinkingly. “I … I …”
Help me. What the fuck is going on?
“Yes, yes, oh, of course, oh, yes, yes, yes!” The woman reaches out a limp hand toward Mercy as if to offer to have her ring kissed, but she is standing so far away that she might as well be offering her hand to an imaginary person right in front of her. “My name is the one and only and most-fabulous world renowned artist of paint and glass and dreams, the one and only Desura Sparrow, the one, and the very, very, very only.”
Mercy peers down at the woman’s hand, at all the glittery rings. They look so big, Mercy can hardly see the woman’s fingers.
Before even waiting for her introduction to be acknowledged, Desura then spins about and saunters gaily toward the kitchen as she hums a tune to herself. Mercy watches her, uneasy, as the odd woman settles in front of the sink, cranks on the water, and starts to rinse her hands while humming, humming, humming. She must stand there for a solid five minutes while she hums and rinses her hands with the hot water.
The water even starts to steam, the steam coiling and bathing the woman’s face and hair, and the woman doesn’t seem to notice, humming and lolling her head from side to side.
Mercy notices Scot standing by the back door. Without another word to Desura, Mercy crosses the entryway, steps over an emerald necklace on the floor that’s probably worth a thousand gold alone, and stops in front of Scot. “Queen Erana’s mother is a fucking lunatic.”
“A worshiper of the moon?” asks Scot lightly.
“She is crazy.” Mercy points back at the kitchen, the soft hum of the woman’s bizarre, nonsensical song reaching their ears. “She … She lives in a nest of treasures and garbage and filth. She … She makes nonsensical words, calls herself a world-renowned artist, and she thinks I’m some kind of fucking designer.”
Scot shuffles his feet, then gives a shrug. “We could still visit the canals.”
“Fuck your canals!”
“Excuse me,” comes the woman’s voice.
Mercy shrieks at the sudden sound of the woman by her ear, who was only a second ago at the kitchen sink rinsing absently her hands. Mercy spins around and pulls out her knife automatically, lifting it up in defense.
Desura, her hands dripping wet, her eyes glassy and faraway, says, “You must be my new designer. I’m so happy to have you here, I’ve waited so, so, so very long. Oooh, ho, ho!” Desura doesn’t even seem to notice the knife pointed at her face. She only giggles, then turns her eyes onto Scot. “Oh! And your lovely boyfriend! He is so, so, so adorable! So blond he is
!”
Mercy frowns, gives one look at Scot, then says, “He is not my anything. He’s—”
“Your assistant! Oh, you’ve come so far, I haven’t even made dinner yet! Shall we order? I know a lovely place, they deliver, even until as late as middle-night, oh, it is such a pleasure to have company again, to have company. Have you seen my daughter?”
Before waiting for an answer, Desura spins around and dances back into the house. She picks up her glass of—whatever—which she had set gently on the floor, tips it back with a giggle, slurps, then sets it down precariously balanced on the edge of a tall, slightly leaning box. Desura carries on humming as she heads back to the kitchen, and then the sound of running water fills the house again.
Mercy can’t close her mouth, staring after the crazy woman.
“Well, which is it am I?” asks Scot quietly from behind. “Your boyfriend, your assistant, or your nothing?”
0306 Kid
A lot of time has passed.
But not enough to convince Link of her plan. “No,” he says.
Kid sulks as she leans against the wall of the closet. “This is just like Facility all over again. Watching, watching, watching. No doing.”
“Except it’s not. These aren’t patients, and the people kept down here are not here by their own will. They—”
“Neither were the ‘residents’ at Facility!”
“But these are interrogations. And Kendil …” Link sighs. “Kendil is part of the problem here. He is dangerous. We can’t—”
“Why not? What are you afraid of?” Kid gets in Link’s face, her eyes burning. “Are you afraid he’s an Outlier, like me?”
“You’re not an Outlier. No one’s an Outlier. It’s just a word.”
“Just a word that might be your brother Wick?” Kid prods him, daring to press his buttons and incite him to action. “Just a word that might be Faery? Just a word that might be me? Or a Weapon of Atlas under strict Sanctum control? Maybe you’re terrified there’s a word that actually links a person like me to a person like him.”
“A Weapon of Atlas … under strict Sanctum control.” Link eyes her. “Why do you think he’s under ‘strict Sanctum control’? He is a danger to the city, and if he didn’t have Sanctum regulating him …”
“You really think he’s the ‘fire’ that ends the world? The ‘fire’ that the mad time-walker Baal went on about?” Kid asks.
Link’s mind seems to go to a dark place at the mention of Baal. “He was insane. He spoke of five kings and fire. He’d probably seen a hundred different outcomes, leaping into the future, hopping around time like the years are stepping stones in a river.” He pauses. “But …”
“He knew enough to convince you at the time,” Kid retorts.
“I was also younger at the time. I was scared. And Faery …”
“If his words didn’t move you, then why be afraid of Kendil at all? I know you believe them, as I do. Maybe Kendil isn’t the fire. Maybe Kendil—the Cold Boy—is the answer to the fire.”
Link’s face tightens, just a shadow of his eyes visible in the dark closet. Only a strip of light beneath the door gives them any vision at all, highlighting the edge of a stack of empty buckets, the trim of a long metal shelf, and Link’s eyes. “Maybe the fire has already passed, Akidra,” Link then says. “What if the Madness was the fire?”
Kid’s gaze pulls from his as she thinks on that. “No,” she decides after a thought. “Baal met us during the Madness. He said the fire is in our future. It’s a fire that hasn’t come yet.”
“The Madness might grow in our future. The bolts of fire that rain from the sky might just be the beginning. The truth is …” Link draws his face very close to hers. “We don’t know what the fire is.”
“Then you agree.” Kid gestures at what lies beyond their closet door. “Kendil might be the answer. We’ve seen him as the Weapon. We’ve seen him as the enemy. I traveled alongside him on the streets of Atlas as a girl. He might be the hero this city needs, Link!”
“It’s an awful risky jump in logic to make.” Link shakes his head. “No, we have to think this through some more.”
“No, we don’t.” She jabs a finger toward the door. Again. “We do not have limitless time. We’ve had our time. Time’s out. We need to free Kendil from the hands of Sanctum and recruit him now.”
Link crouches down and pulls Kid down with him, then brings his face even closer and whispers, just over a breath. “Think of it, Kid. In our future, he will meet you on the streets, and you will travel side-by-side. You and he had a bond, I know. You related to one another. You protected one another, much like you’re protecting me. You had a cat named Blindy. You’ve told me all of it.”
“Blindy …” murmurs Kid, thinking of that dear, one-eyed cat.
“But then you told me the rest,” Link goes on. “You told me how Kendil became increasingly angry. How he scared you. How he would turn violent in seeking his revenge against the Rain Frog, who murdered his family and took him to Sanctum. How he exploded at you that day in a burst of ice that nearly froze you to death, ice you claim to still feel within you at night, if you think on it enough. He almost killed you.”
Kid’s face contorts with a store of emotions from her time on the street with the Cold Boy. Perhaps she is dreaming a bit, when it comes to the boy with the dark hair and death-pale face and sullen eyes. Maybe she just wants him to be good so badly.
“By your logic …” Kid starts, though notably less brave, “he is doomed to be whoever he is, no matter what we do. By your logic, nothing we’re doing here is changing anything about our future. We might as well sit around at the bakery for the next year and get fat on chocolate pastries and golden sugar knots.”
“We may not change a thing,” Link tells her. “We may simply be observers here in the past. But that’s the point. We need answers. We need to bring these answers to the present, because that may be what saves us in the end. Knowledge.”
“Knowledge,” mutters Kid, deflated.
Link frowns and glances back at the door. Kid watches him, her eyes heavy. She wonders if he even believes his own words. Maybe, as odd as it might seem, Link truly feels like her father in times like these, and he has the fatherly struggle of wanting to have all the answers for his question-riddled daughter. Maybe Link’s frustration comes from the fact that he has no answers at all, that everything he thinks and knows is conjecture and curiosity and guesswork.
Kid gives him a sudden rub on his shoulder, stirring him from his thoughts, then rises up. “Let’s return to the observation room. We don’t want to miss any more opportunities to … learn things.”
“Yes,” agrees Link tiredly, rising to his feet as well.
A moment later, they stand at the window to Kendil’s door.
Inside the room, Kendil stands bolted to the wall, instead of his usual chair today. It seems to be back and forth with him, whether he is kept restrained in a chair, or restrained to a wall, or restrained to a bed or table of some kind. The Weapon, when he is out of reach of the mind-controlling twin sisters, is never left unrestrained.
He wears loose grey pants and nothing on his feet, and above his waist, he is shirtless.
And Kid observes the unusual thing she was shown only briefly, and only once.
Affixed to the center of his chest, slightly askew, is a hand. It is somewhat difficult to tell that it’s a hand at first, for it is covered in little shards of bluish-white ice that look almost like mismatched fish scales. In parts, it looks pale as dead flesh. The hand looks to be as much a part of his chest as his nipples on either side, or the bones of his ribcage that protrude from his lanky, tall build, or his belly button beneath them, or his protruding collar bone.
It is the hand of his mother Lenida, the Meta, the one who can reverse or alter others’ Legacies within her reach.
Or immediate touch.
It is singularly because of that hand on his chest that Kendil is known as the Cold Boy, and not as t
he Fire.
That very thought makes the insides of Kid’s chest run cold.
She wonders for a fleeting moment if this harsh treatment of the boy is what makes him so cruel later in life. The other possibility is that he was already cruel to begin with, and it is this treatment that contains him.
Either way, it leaves Kid feeling empty as she stares at him.
She hardly remembers how mean and aggressive he was toward her on the streets. Why is it that she only remembers the good stuff? Feeling like a pair of outcasts in the dead of night. The two of them plus her one-eyed cat who hated everything. Invisible beasts who let no Mask Men or Rain Frogs harm them.
Another moment later, the door around the corner opens, and down the hall comes Ames.
Kid and Link, used to the procedure, gently flatten to the wall to make room for him. Studious Ames, who has only somewhat gotten over his paranoia that evil Link and evil Kid are invisibly watching him everywhere he goes, carries a small tray of food today. The usual person who feeds Kendil is sometimes occupied elsewhere, and it is left on Ames’s shoulder to bring the Weapon his meals. As the boy with the scarred face keeps balance of the tray with one hand, he produces a small key from his deep pockets with the other, then lets himself into the room.
Unlike the usual people who feed Kendil, however, Ames does not check the door at his back—which has been left open a crack.
Kid notices.
She takes a step forward, but Link pulls on her hand, shaking his head no. Kid glares at him, then pulls forward anyway, and Link is given no choice but to follow her inside.
Their shoes scuffle.
Ames glances up from the table at which he’d set down the tray. He stares at the cracked-open door, suspicious.
“I’m hungry,” murmurs Kendil sullenly from his spot on the wall. His hands are bolted to the wall by his waist, his upper arms bolted to the wall as well. His thighs and ankles each have a cuff that attach directly into the brick at his back, and then there’s a wide one that closes over his neck, thickest of all.
