Outlier: Reign Of Madness

by Daryl Banner

  Then a hand is on his shoulder, grabbing him by the collar like a cat by the scruff, and yanking him out of the room. He turns to find Victra pulling him away from the noise and shouting words at him.

  “WHAT?” he screams out, unable to hear her. There is only a painful ringing in his ears.

  Her mouth repeats the words.

  “WHAT??”

  And then she’s pushing him across the room, pulling on his shirt as they make their way toward the stairs. They move down the floors so fast, Arrow can hardly keep up his step. Twice they stop as Victra uses her Legacy, watching, searching for eyes in the vicinity.

  “Gandra and Yellow have gone out the back,” Victra says, her voice coming to Arrow as if through a thick pillow, muffled and so far away.

  He listens desperately to her every word as they hurry down the stairs. “And Prat? And the … the girl?”

  “Your girlfriend’s with Prat. They’ve gone out the window.”

  “Window?? She’s not my girlfriend,” Arrow adds, annoyed.

  “Yes, obviously the window. Prat’s floated with her to the big fat abandoned building across the street.”

  Floated. Of course. And the Caldron girl likely weighed nothing at all, making it so much easier for Prat to float with her. It wouldn’t have been possible for him to float all of them across the way. Prat uses his Legacy so seldom, Arrow often forgets he has one at all.

  They finally reach the first floor, and it is utterly ransacked and deserted. Tables are turned over. Papers lie everywhere. Not a soul is in sight. The Warden of the sixth really did take his team and escaped the premises. They’ve betrayed us to the Wall Breakers.

  “Look with your eyes,” suggests Arrow quietly. “The Breakers could be in here already, hiding in the—”

  “Shut up.” Victra and Arrow crouch behind a desk in the corner, the front entrance to the building in plain sight. A side door to the alley is closer. “I don’t feel any eyes. We’ll go out the side door.”

  “No eyes at all?”

  “None.”

  “Victra, reach farther. There’s no way they’d just let us walk out of here. They’re waiting for us. They have ranged weapons. They … They might ambush us outside.”

  “How the fuck would you know all that? Your charms betrayed you worse than the Warden did,” Victra hisses back.

  “Because,” Arrow reasons, “if it were me, and we were trying to scare out our enemies, we’d wait outside and we’d—”

  “Fine.” Victra lowers her head and strains. Arrow can visibly see as she struggles, reaching as far as her Legacy can go.

  Meanwhile, Arrow lifts his head slightly over the desk, taking a quick view of the room. There are two windows in the front, out of which he sees nothing but the darkness of night. Pratganth took the Caldron girl, he tells himself, as if needing a reminder, and I don’t even know her name.

  “Oh,” Victra finally breathes. “I found someone.”

  “You did? What do you see?”

  Victra looks around, confused. She glances up awkwardly, as if she’s become the person whose eyes she’s looking through. “I … I think I see … I think I see those brothers. The ones who work the front desk for the Warden. I’m out on the street. I see … I see …”

  Arrow listens, waiting. Victra says nothing, her brow furrowing as she stares intently somewhere, seeing something she won’t yet reveal. Her lips part, a word resting on her tongue.

  “What?” Arrow finally blurts, impatient.

  “I see Quin,” she whispers darkly.

  Quin? “That Wall Breaker girl you guys met with? The boyish flat-chested one?” He remembers many of that girl’s words, and how brashly she spoke to Gandra during that meeting. The girl’s got balls, he remembers thinking at the time.

  “Yes. I see her. I … Oh, fuck. She’s armed. She’s—FUCK!” Victra blinks, backing away from whatever she sees so fast, her head hits a nearby metal filing cabinet. She shrieks, grabbing her head. “FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!”

  “Hush, Victra!”

  Arrow tries to cradle her, but she swats his hand away, her eyes shiny and wet with fear as they dart around everywhere, lost. “I’m blind. I’m fucking blind. Arrow. I’m fucking blind.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They killed her. Oh, Sisters, oh … whoever it was. I can’t see, Arrow.” Victra slaps a hand over her mouth, her eyes flitting in all directions. “This … This hasn’t happened to me since … since …”

  Since her own sister was killed while she was looking through her eyes. Arrow knows the story well; Victra was blind for weeks. “This is problematic,” mutters Arrow unhelpfully.

  “No shit, you stupid fuck,” she growls, furious. “My fucking eyes are gone!! Oh, Sisters, help me. I can’t fucking see.”

  “Use me. Hold on to me, Victra. We’re going to get out of here. We’re …” No eyes, he realizes. We can’t use Victra to guide us out. “We can wait here. I’ll look for a weapon. I’ll—”

  “Don’t you dare fucking leave me like this.”

  “Okay.”

  The two of them stay crouched behind the desk. Suddenly, Arrow realizes how deeply dependent he was on Victra’s Legacy, now that they are suddenly and utterly without it. Arrow thinks long and hard, trying to outsmart the situation they’ve been put in. His fingers run along the legs of the desk anxiously.

  And he spots the metal wheels on the chair nearby.

  Metal wheels. “Victra, I’m going to be right here. I’m just … I’m just going to make a charm really quick and toss one out of the door. If we don’t have eyes, at least we’ll have ears. And as soon as we know the way’s clear—”

  “Don’t leave me,” she whispers, her blank eyes still searching.

  Arrow takes a deep breath, once again weighing the options he has. The limited options. “Keep a grip on my shoulder, Victra.” She does—a tight one, claw-like. He grips the leg of the nearest chair and pulls firmly on the wheel. It pops right off. He discovered how easy (or rather, how flimsily) the wheels came off one evening when he nearly fell over in his own rolling chair at the computers. He pulls off another wheel, then focuses on them—one in his left hand, one in his right. He concentrates as he massages them with either hand, his Legacy whispering to them and listening, listening, listening.

  Arrow smiles when the work’s done. He always smiles.

  He rises slowly, letting Victra shakily lift up with him. Then he cautiously edges toward the side door. Soundlessly turning the knob of the door, he peeks his head out. No one is in the alleyway. He looks up, searching in the darkness for any figures or movement. There is nothing.

  “Victra,” he whispers under his breath. “Any sight back?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “No,” she repeats more forcefully, her voice trembling.

  Arrow bites his lip, studying the alley. He palms one of the wheels and aims it down the alley, rolling it as far away from him as he can. It manages to move an impressive amount of distance, nearly reaching where the alley touches the main road.

  He lifts the second wheel to his ear and listens.

  Listen close, he urges himself. What you hear can save or end your lives.

  “Arrow …” she whispers.

  “Shh,” he hushes her.

  “I do miss him.”

  Arrow stays focused with one eye peeking out through the side door and the wheel-turned-charm against his ear. He catches no voice and no footstep. Not even wind dances upon his charm. He watches the dark like a hawk and listens like an owl in the night. This is the worst anxiety I’ve ever felt, he realizes, growing more and more stiff the longer he waits, the longer he listens. Maybe I would’ve preferred the Finger Of Madness, burned out of existence in one quick, merciful instant.

  “I miss him worse each day,” Victra whispers. “I miss his eyes. I miss the chemical. I miss his stupid laughter.”

  “Quiet.”

  “And if I never see him
again, Arrow … if I never see anything ever again …”

  He still hears nothing through the wheel. Now may be their best chance. The Wall Breakers could be distracted with another door, or they’re already in the building, having crawled in through a higher window instead of the obvious entrance on the first floor. If Rain was truly betrayed, then the Wall Breakers know everything—including the fact that the entirety of Rain was residing on the ninth floor.

  “Please get me out of this,” Victra begs him in a breath. “Please don’t let me die. The dark is a horrible place to die. I’m so fucking scared, Arrow.”

  “You’re safe,” he whispers back without turning his head. “I … I think we’re both safe. I hear nothing.”

  “Nothing in the charm?”

  “Not even a footstep. Not even a shuffle.”

  “Absolutely sure?”

  Arrow lifted his gaze again, double-checking the nearby roofs, even five or six stories up as they are. He lets his eyes drift from dark window to dark window, praying he sees no waiting figure with a ranged weapon. All it would take is for his eyes to miss one thing and both their lives can be forfeit.

  Arrow stares down the alley and spots the abandoned store across the main street. They’ll have to charge down the alley unseen, then push across the wide open main road. That store has a passage hidden in its freezer that leads to an underground web of halls that can get them halfway across the sixth. “We have to make a go of it,” whispers Arrow, “and we have to do it fast.”

  “Fast,” echoes Victra.

  “Take my hand. We will move faster. Think of it as …” Arrow is reminded suddenly of his sister, back when he used to hold her hand everywhere they went. To the store, he’d hold her hand. To a house across the street, he’d hold her hand. To school, before they finally dismissed her permanently, deeming her a lost cause and telling their mother that the girl needed a hospital or a Mentalist healer.

  “Think of it as what?”

  “Running through the dark,” he finishes finally, listening to his heart as it rages on, both in fear and in anger. “Just hold my hand as we go from here to the other side.”

  “To the other side,” Victra echoes.

  “Go.”

  They slip through the door soundlessly. With the wheel pressed to his ear with his right hand and clasping Victra’s hand with the other, the two hurry down the alleyway toward the main street. He keeps his eyes wide open, drinking in every sign of light or shadow, every movement, every sound.

  Listen, Arrow. Watch, Arrow.

  They finally reach the end of the alley as it marries the main street. He stops suddenly, his foot kicking into his wheel charm that he’d rolled and nearly causing Victra to crash into his back. Though he has walked it so many times, the street looks twice as wide as it normally is in this moment. It’s like a great cement river that they must cross. Safety is just on the other side.

  “Are we there?” whispers Victra.

  Arrow drinks in his surroundings with mounting paranoia. His eyes would scan every window, but there are hundreds. He glances upward, his gaze running along every rooftop for the third or fourth time. He breathes evenly, bringing his sight back to the goal: that store across the street with the busted front display glass through which the two of them will plunge.

  “Are we on the other side?” she persists, trembling, her hand so sweaty he’d think he was holding Lionis’s.

  “Just a little farther.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Just a little bit farther, Victra.”

  They break from the shadows and rush across the street. He looks to the left as they go, then looks to the right. Victra follows behind, keeping up pace, their hands joined. Arrow’s breaths become so short, he can’t help but breathe louder, every lungful becoming such an effort. This road is so wide, it’s damn near the size of a fucking plaza. They keep hurrying, running as fast and quietly as they can.

  And then they’ve reached the storefront. “There’s a lip here, one small step,” Arrow warns her, stepping upon it and placing himself where there was once a glass display window. He gives her hand a tug. “Lift your foot, just one little step, Victra.”

  Her eyes stare blindly ahead as her foot searches for the step. Her hands slip up Arrow’s arm, gripping him desperately as he guides her. Victra’s blonde curls of hair dance as she stumbles with her footing. She parts her lips to say something.

  The tip of an arrow comes out of her face.

  He lets go at once, Victra collapsing heavily into his arms and toppling him. Arrow screams out when the sharp point protruding from her face stabs into his thigh. He scrambles, trying to pull her and himself into the darkened store, driven to insanity in a second. He can’t seem to move out from under her, attached by the arrow through Victra’s head and his stinging, now-bloodied thigh.

  The second arrow misses him by an inch, flying over his scalp and landing in the pitch black store behind him. Arrow can’t see much of anything at all suddenly, the panic and fear blurring his vision. He jerks and pulls at Victra, suddenly very uninterested in carrying her and, instead, desperate to get her off of him.

  “Didn’t see THAT coming, did you, bitch??” screams a voice from somewhere up high, a girlish cackle following.

  Victra dislodges from his thigh somehow, dropping inelegantly onto the sidewalk. Arrow doesn’t even feel the blood oozing from his leg when he plunges into the darkness of the store, scurrying for the freezer. He hears the girlish cackling echo from the streets, and then a third arrow whizzes by and lands right by his head, pinning itself to the freezer door.

  Yanking it open anyway, he rushes inside and is met by the stench of spoiled meat and rotten things. Gagging through the thick of it all, he pushes into the dark until his clumsy fingers find the hidden panel. Pulling it open, he slips inside and drops into the dark, forgetting to get a foothold on the ladder there.

  Arrow lands painfully on his side, grunting. He turns onto his back, staring up at the hidden freezer entrance so far above him. Get up, Arrow. Run. They will follow you.

  “Here!” comes a familiar voice.

  Arrow lifts his head, following the sound. A bit of ways down the passage where a dim, non-electric lamp burns tiredly, he sees a bushy head of hair.

  “Prat,” grunts Arrow, struggling to get to his feet. “They got her. Through the head. The head. An arrow. They’re ch-chasing …”

  “Come on!” Prat hisses from the lamp, not hearing Arrow’s words. “We have to get out of here fast! The girl’s with me down the path a ways.”

  Arrow’s on his feet and running towards his friend down the tunnel, limping every other step. “Prat … V-Victra …”

  “Hurry,” Prat urges, still not listening, and then soon the boys are running alongside one another, plunging into the dark between each of the sad little lamps. Blood soaks Prat’s shirt around his left shoulder. He wonders if Prat’s even aware of the wound. We are all wounded. Defeated. Rain is no more, Arrow thinks to himself, their means of communication broken. We are not Rain anymore. We are just the puddles in the street, and every power both above us and below step in them.

  0161 Link

  Link and Ames press their backs to the cold cement wall and keep perfectly still.

  “We can’t hide forever.”

  It’s Ames who says the words. Link glares at him. “But we must. I have what he wants, and until he has me, we are alive.”

  “Half alive.”

  “And unkillable. We must stay away from him so that he never takes back the unlife he gave us. He said it himself.”

  Ames rolls his eyes. “You fool. He feels you. He feels all of us.”

  The water is louder here again, since they had backtracked in their race away from the mad priest. Link isn’t certain he heard him right. “You mean …”

  “He knows exactly where you are. He knows where I am. He will find us no matter where we hide.” Ames sighs. “It’s all ruined. All of it. If you’d ju
st told him that you—”

  “I didn’t have the vision, you fool! And this is all your fucking fault!” Link spits back, pulling away from the wall to face him. Ames wrinkles up his reddened, damaged face with indignance. “It was you who told Baron. It was you who caused all of this.”

  “You should never have lied!” Ames hisses.

  Then there are footsteps that shuffle, cutting through the even and constant noise of rushing water. Link presses a finger to Ames’ scarred lips, his eyes alert and his ears perked. He glances to the left, then to the right.

  When the figure emerges, Link can’t believe his eyes. He blinks several times, thinking the Waterways are playing a game with him. Or maybe his vision has risen from the dead of the waters, haunting him. He must be deceived, surely.

  “Link?” calls the girl from afar.

  Link stumbles toward her, his eyes wide. He’s afraid if he blinks, she’ll disappear again, and this time, she may never come back.

  “That’s you, isn’t it?” she asks.

  Link nods quickly. “And you …? Why are you here?”

  “I … was looking for you,” she says, casting her eyes to the floor.

  Link watches her, concerned. Maybe she’s in danger too. Or else she’s just lonely. He can relate to and understand both feelings.

  Ames comes up to his side. “Who is she?”

  “A friend,” he answers simply, his eyes never leaving the girl with the crazy assortment of braids and curls for hair. “I … I need your help. Now, more than ever.”

  She smiles, a light in her eyes. “What do ya need?”

  “To hide.”

  Her expression changes. “Are … Are you in danger too?”

  ‘In danger too.’ She’s hiding as well. “There is a man. A bad man. He’s a priest of the Sisters, but I think he’s corrupt or … or possibly insane. He’s chasing after my … friend and I.” That word comes out with due reluctance. “He can’t get to us. Our lives are in danger.”

  Undaunted, the girl walks right up to Link, then takes both his hand and Ames’. In the next instant, they are all invisible. Ames gasps, but says nothing, as if suddenly as afraid of the ability as he is excited by it.