by Daryl Banner
Lionis breathes heavy, blinking indignantly and sputtering words at Arrow and Prat, as if trying to blame her words without a speck of apology for his own.
And despite all of that, Athan still feels his breath catching in his throat. I need to get to Wick, and I need to get to him now. “Lionis …”
The three boys turn to look at Athan. Arrow steps forward first, lifting a concerned eyebrow. “You have that look in your eye, Athan. Are you … having the shakes again?”
“I just need to get out of here.” Athan doesn’t know where to put his hands, so he jams them into his pockets, feeling his tight shirt tug at his shoulders when he does so. “I can’t calm down. I’m … I’m having a h-hard time … h-hard time …”
“Breathing,” finishes Arrow, concern in his wide, knowing eyes. He comes up to Athan and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Wick is fine, alright? I’m pretty … I’m pretty sure he is. And … Wait.” Arrow studies Athan’s face, alarm starting to show in his own. “Are we alright? Are we safe? That look in your eye …”
“Yeah,” Athan says at once, his jaw tight. “Y-Yeah. No. Yes. I …” He shakes his head, dropping his gaze to the floor. His eyes pick up every little glint of light that reflects off the shattered pieces of glass. He sees a speck of dust between the cracks in the tile. He sees a stain from a botched dinner he tried to cook with Lionis weeks ago. “No.”
“No?”
Athan swallows jaggedly, then shuts his eyes, begging the soul of his brother Radley to calm him somehow from beyond the grave. He doesn’t know what he’s saying anymore.
“I’ll take him,” Lionis states, still sounding a touch too confident, even after what just transpired. “The two of us will go. I know the route that Wick and Juston took. Pratganth has his maps. I’ll take an earpiece, just in case they show back up after we’ve gone.”
Arrow isn’t done with him. “Athan …?”
Athan doesn’t meet Arrow’s eyes, for fear that he’ll see the deep concern in them. “Yes. I’ll go with Lionis. I need … I need to breathe. I need air.” Athan steps over the glass on the floor, then takes Lionis by the hand, finding it sweaty and not caring. “Let’s go.”
Lionis lets his hand slip from Athan’s grip, then pats him on the shoulder stiffly instead. The gesture is odd coming from Lionis, but he punctuates it with a confident nod anyway. “Yes, let’s.”
The moment they reach the street, Athan feels his nerves relax. Cool air touches his skin, and he breathes a sigh of relief, though still no smile comes to his face. I’ll smile when I see my slum boy again.
0157 Ellena
It’s through back alleys and side roads and long narrow paths that they traverse for quite some time. The boy impressively never loses his aim on Ellena, but if she’s perfectly honest, she has so little care or trust in the boy to actually pull the trigger. Try shooting me, a part of her mind dares him. I’ll just move the fatal wound right back onto you.
Hours must have passed since they fled the hidden Guardian complex. They stop under the awning of some closed-up restaurant on a dark, unpopulated street. Bee swings a bag off her shoulder that holds small rations of food. To Ellena’s surprise, the tall, emotionless woman even hands her a bite. “I don’t want you dragging behind us like deadweight on our ankles,” spits Bee, ruining what Ellena was hoping to take as an act of kindness. The rations are dried, processed vegetable patties that are about as unseasoned as a brick of cement. I could cook something better than this, Ellena gripes, chewing.
She assumes there is about an hour of night left before the sun rises. Her knee feels no better than it did when they’d left. Countless times along the way, she considered putting her knee into Gabel or Bee, crippling them somewhat, and then making a grab for the boy and his weapon, turning it on the others. She visualized it in her head so many times, she’d even say it became a comforting fantasy.
But she never did it. Sitting here eating the most unpleasant brick of food, she figures she’s in a better situation than she’d be in if she were on her own, trying to survive in a city that’s being slowly ripped apart by fiery beams of red light, endless uncontrolled looting, and rebel groups reveling in the chaos.
She wonders if the Greens are a place of peace right now. She can smell the cloying fragrance of andragora seeds when she closes her eyes. Even the muds she misses. It was hard work, but it was rewarding to come home to a house with Lionis’s cooking, Wick’s soft sleeping in his room, Link’s brooding on a laundry-filled couch, and waiting for Forge to return from the metalshops. Years before that, she’d enjoy the banter between Halvesand and Aleksand as they traded stories about Guardian—Aleks telling some exciting tale, and Halves excited to soon be moving into the dormitories. Where has all the time gone? Everyone has grown up and gone away.
What if Forge is alive? What if she was seduced by the hard, muscled proximity of a handsome young man with hungry eyes, and didn’t give an honest consideration to whether or not her husband might have, indeed, survived the Fall of Sanctum and its residual crushing of the Keep? Maybe he’s being held in a certain kind of custody himself, just like her. But Gabel said that Forge is dead.
Still … Maybe even if Forge is alive, he’s found a woman to keep him comfortable down there. There are women who are arrested and sent to the Keep for life, too. It isn’t unreasonable, Ellena tells herself.
Don’t be a fool. Forge is dead. Stop trying to revive him. Stop trying to make him exist when he is dead, dead, dead.
The guilt cuts Ellena like a knife. I shouldn’t have let Gabel inside me. But even just thinking those words makes her heart race and her thighs clench tightly at the memory, instantly craving it again.
She shuts her eyes, at war within. It’s madness in my belly.
“You’re not going anywhere, Lesser.” Chewing sullenly, she listens to Gabel’s words while staring off at the lifeless face of a building across the street with thoughts of fidelity and infidelity and sore hearts and lost loves swimming in front of her. She doesn’t dignify the man for whom her thighs currently tighten with even a glance. “You hear me?” his commanding voice persists. “No matter how undone this city gets. No matter what lowly slummers invade our Guardian strongholds. No matter if there’s twenty Guardian looking after you, or five, or us three, or just me. You are not escaping our custody. You are not free.”
“Damn right,” mutters Bee in agreement, having finished her ration a moment ago and standing watch with her gun at the ready.
“You will have your justice met,” Gabel promises her, his voice seeming to be right in her ear, reaching into her and touching her core. His voice carries so much strength, she can still feel his hands on her breasts, groping her, massaging her, giving her nipples cause to harden, making her wet down below. “You will be tried for your crimes, Lesser, and no undoing of the city will stop it. There will be order, no doubt about it. This … Madness … is not a free ticket to run, pillage, or murder. Each and every one of these brigands will have to face the justice in the end. Every rebel. Every killer. Every thief.”
“Every cheater,” murmurs Ellena.
Gabel’s breaths fall heavily on Ellena’s neck as he sits behind her. “Excuse me?” he mutters, a touch softer.
“Cheaters are the worst. They’re all three: rebel, killer, and thief. A rebel of heart. A killer of trust. A thief of love.” Ellena shakes her head, then stares up at the dark, ominous underbelly of the Lifted City. “My son once said it was a crime against marriage, back in the times of the Ancients. Adultery, they had called it. What an unusual word …”
“Love?” he whispers, speaking so that only Ellena can hear. A dry chuckle escapes his lips. “That isn’t what happened between us, Lesser. We’ve made that perfectly clear. All I needed—”
“Was my body, yes, right, of course. Like in the way you’d need a tissue to wipe your nose.” Now it’s Ellena’s turn to laugh dryly, her voice raising. “Oh, the fool I’ve been ever since I left the ninth. A fool to m
y sister. A fool to my children. A fool to myself.”
“Fools, indeed,” comes another voice—and it’s neither Gabel, nor Bee, nor the boy who utter the words.
Ellena looks up. A large teenage girl with enormous breasts squeezed tightly into a white top that cuts off at the belly, and a pair of loose beige pants hanging off her hips stands before them. A very formidable-looking crossbow rests in her clutch, aimed at Bee. The girl’s eyes glow, and they almost look curious, perhaps due to the way her eyebrows are cocked.
“Don’t,” she clips the moment the boy reaches for his gun, which he’d let rest on the ground to eat. “Nope, nope. Steady there, all four of you. I’ve only one question to ask and then we’ll all be on our merry way.”
“A question you get,” Gabel spits back at her. “So ask.”
The girl’s voice is a deep and raspy monotone, devoid of joy. “Which Wall Breaker gave you permission to eat in our ward?”
“Wall Breaker? Who the fuck are they?” he asks.
“I take it you don’t have permission, then,” she says, “And that must mean, assumedly, you have no permission to be in our ward.”
“Your ward? The wards belong to Sanctum. All twelve of them, even the ruined one. I answer to Sanctum, not to the likes of you.”
“Sanctum is broken. So you must mean you answer to a Mad King who’d laugh as he killed you.”
“Sanctum will be revived. The Mad King will be thrown from his place in the sky,” Gabel states, as if it was a fact. “I am a Guardian official. You have no authority over me.”
“Oh, but I do.” She tightens her hold on the crossbow.
The little gesture doesn’t seem to faze Gabel at all. He takes one single step forward, a word about to escape his lips.
The bolt looses from the crossbow so quickly, Ellena doesn’t see it until Gabel shrieks out in pain and drops to one knee, the bolt poking out of his thigh like a tiny third arm.
Bee is quick and has her gun up and pointed. The girl is just as fast, her crossbow aimed at Bee. The world turns silent and still again, but for the tiny heaves of pain from Gabel and Ellena’s own heart racing in her ears. The boy remains unmoving, his gun too far to quickly reach without being shot first or risking Bee getting the next bolt lodged in her chest or face.
“You are on Wall Breaker territory and you are eating our food,” the girl states, her voice flat and drab. “I don’t care if it was food from your own ward, or from a market square legitimately purchased, or from your dear grandmother’s crockpot. If it is within the boundaries of the seventh, it belongs to us.”
“Like hell it does,” Bee bites back.
“Surrender your food and make your way out of our ward,” the girl demands. “Also, we’ll be taking those pretty weapons from you. If you don’t comply, the next place I shoot will complicate your sex life for the rest of your days.” She tightens her grip on the crossbow.
Gabel’s tight breaths fill the street as he remains there, rigid of body and down on one knee. Every other breath, he sucks in air through his gritted teeth. Bee keeps her gun aimed at the girl with the glowing eyes, her own breath even and her long eyes squinted in concentration.
Ellena rises from her chair. “I, for one, am tired of being with these Guardian fools.” She smiles at the glow-eyed girl who stands but a few paces before them. “Hi. I’m Ellena. These idiots are keeping me in their custody, and really, what’s the point with the madness all around us? I’ll more than happily surrender my rations—and theirs—in exchange for a place among your Wall Break—”
“Shut it. I don’t make deals with thieves from the street.”
“Oh, I’m no thief. Dear me.” Ellena gives an innocent chuckle of delight. “I couldn’t dream of stealing a thing. These Guardian have me for the wrong crime. It was a most unhappy misunderstanding for which I’ve paid the unwieldy price of—”
“I said SHUT IT.” The girl narrows her eyes, the glow pinched between her lids and making them seem all the more brighter. “I will have your supplies now or else I will have your lives.”
Ellena sighs. “Well, it was worth a shot,” she says.
And then she lunges at the girl without warning. So caught off-guard by her mad dash, the girl shoots her crossbow, but her aim is off, and the bolt ricochets off Bee’s gun, dislodging it from her hands and leaving her otherwise unscathed. Ellena makes it to the girl before she’s able to reload and, in the next instant, the large girl is toppled. Ellena reaches deep into her with her power and plants in there every possible woe and ache she can find within herself.
But a sore knee is nothing to a spritely teenager, who shoves Ellena right off of her like she weighs nothing. She fumbles with the crossbow and brings it up for another firing, quicker than a cat.
Unbeknownst to Ellena until she turns her head too slow, Gabel has made a charge of his own for the girl, and the second bolt that fires from the weapon buries itself deep into Gabel’s chest.
He drops to his knees, mouth agape, a death rattle quivering out of his tightening throat that can draw no air.
Ellena clambers toward him desperately, then feels the glowing-eyed girl gripping her by the ankle, not letting her get away.
“Gabel!” cries out Ellena. His eyes, far away, meet hers. The fear of death pumps through them like the lifeblood that pools out of his chest and thigh, quivering and filling with tears of astonishment.
When he can no longer support himself on his knees, he drops to the ground next to Ellena, gasping for air that won’t come.
She grips the bolt in his chest, leans down to his ear, then says, “This is going to hurt.”
The next instant, she pulls the bolt straight out, inviting a river of blood onto the cold pavement along with an earsplitting scream from his mouth. But she isn’t done. She makes a mad grab at the bolt in his thigh and yanks it out too—taking two solid tugs to dislodge the stubborn thing. The screams Gabel emits are deafening, but soon cut off. Touching his cheek and staring into his fast-fading eyes, Ellena closes her own and, with foolish abandon, goes to work.
The excruciating pain cuts into Ellena only for an instant before finding a new home.
The glowing-eyed girl, her hand still clutching Ellena’s ankle, shrieks as a wound, black and red, opens greedily upon her chest. Her throat, in its desperate attempt to scream, fast fills with blood and turns her voice into bubbling, offputting howls.
Gabel sucks in a lungful of air, renewed. His eyes flash open.
After twenty-two seconds of listening to the girl’s agony, her brief life comes to an end. Ellena turns over onto her back, exhausted and gulping deep breaths. With a tiny lift of her head, she sees that the glow has vanished from the girl’s eyes, turning them glassy and still. Her mouth hangs open, a stream of red drawing pools upon the road. Ellena collapses back, staring starry-eyed upwards, the view of the Lifted City underbelly filling her world. She spends a half of forever catching her breath. No one around her seems to move.
Then the boy’s boots shuffle nearby, helping Gabel to his feet. Bee cautiously draws near the girl, giving her a light kick in the side to ensure she’s done in.
And Ellena remains there, finally having caught her breath, but not having any success at catching her mind. Questions race through her troubled brain about why she did what she did. Another life, ended by a transference of pain. Another life, taken long before it should have been. Because of me.
Gabel’s is the next face she sees as he moves to stand over her, looking down at her while clutching his own chest, as if still feeling a wound there—an imaginary wound that doesn’t hurt, not truly.
“Lesser …” he murmurs softly.
Ellena can’t seem to acknowledge him. She can’t stop thinking about life and death and wounds and breaking bones that sound like celery stalks being snapped in half.
Gabel extends a hand. “Lesser. It … It isn’t safe here. We … We should really …”
“I met a boy once with black around his eye
s,” murmurs Ellena suddenly, still staring stonily at the dark and ugly underbelly of the Lifted City, a place that is responsible for so many of her woes. “He robbed me, this wayward young man. And then I touched him and took an innocent wound from his arm. Just a cut, nothing much. He repaid me afterwards by leaving the things he’d stolen from me on the street, just around the corner. I nearly tripped over them, I recall it vividly. And his eyes … his eyes …”
Gabel’s face wrinkles, an eyebrow lifted curiously. “Dran? The Wrath boy, Dran? The one who was executed alongside his brother on the broadcast, that one?”
“I’ll … I’ll never forget his eyes.” Ellena swallows hard, suddenly finding tears in her own. “How am I suddenly a killer? My ability has been healing, all my life. Healing, healing, healing … and now …” She swallows again, her bottom lip quivering. Every wound is a weapon. My weakness will become yours … if you stand too close. “Now …”
Gabel crouches down next to her, his green eyes soft. “I’ve been looking for justice,” he whispers to her, his voice bent with surprise, as if realizing the point he’s making just as he makes it. “The fatal wounds you’ve given … they are simply wounds sent back to the ones who afflicted them. You … you are the justice.”
0158 Link
He stares at his reflection as it dances on the surface of the water. It almost seems to mock him, the way his own face stares back—smirking one moment, smiling the next, then sneering, then laughing, then looking nothing like a face at all.
“We’re in the eleventh,” Ames tells him when they come to a stop at a fork in the Waterways where the great canal splits in three directions, adjoined by narrow cobblestone bridges that stretch over each stream. The other boys are talking to each other while Baron stands ahead of them, judging which path will lead them closer to the ruined twelfth ward.
