by Daryl Banner
Wick drops his head back, clenching shut his eyes. All he hears is Lionis’s words, over and over. We had a sister you killed. We had a sister you killed.
Killed.
Killed.
Wick gnashes his teeth and brings his fists to his eyes, trying to swallow the rage that keeps generating within him, not letting him go. If he were to get on his feet again, he doesn’t trust that he would not simply launch himself at his brother yet again. The fury is so strong within him—at his brother saying that very harsh thing—that he feels no remorse whatsoever for the pain Lionis is feeling right now. Part of him can’t even stand that Athan’s over there consoling Lionis and not him.
We had a sister you killed.
Wick takes a deep breath, suddenly finding himself exhausted enough to drift away to sleep instantly if he let sleep’s persuasive arms wrap around him and take him away.
“Wick?”
He opens his eyes to Athan crouched over him. “Did I kill him? Did I fucking kill him?”
Athan sighs. “We can’t … We can’t fight like this. We need—”
“You did hear what he said to me, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You heard what that self-important fucker said to me?”
A look of pain crosses Athan’s face. “That self-important fucker is your brother,” he says softly.
“He’s an asshole.” Wick sighs away the urge to scream, trying with all his might to calm down. If there’s any favor that’s been done, every ounce of grief he had earlier has now been completely converted to anger. Thanks, Lionis. “He’s an asshole. I didn’t kill my sister. Kill would imply that I meant to.”
“No, you didn’t,” agrees Athan gently.
“It was an accident. He even knows that. You FUCKER,” spits out Wick, half-sitting up. “You FUCKING KNOW THAT.”
Athan’s hand rests on Wick’s chest, but he’s glancing back at Lionis with a saddened crease to his brow. Lionis has sat up too, and it’s only now that Wick sees the trail of blood that runs from Lionis’s nose down his jaw, down his neck, and disappearing under his loose grey shirt. A red welt has already formed on his cheek, to which Lionis has tentatively placed a hand. Lionis seems to be looking at anything but Wick. Shame, Wick decides. He better fucking be feeling shame for what he said.
“I’ll be first to admit,” says Athan suddenly, his voice still calm and gentle. “My brother and I never fought like this. We did have our disputes when we were younger, though, and they led to some ugly arguments. But with his Legacy, he always had a way to manipulate a sense of calmness into effect. I wish I had that Legacy. I’d …” Athan loses track of his words, his eyes drifting. “Without my brother, I kinda feel like I’ll never be calm again.”
Those last words sober Wick. He sits up completely, drawing Athan’s saddened attention to him. He stares into his boy’s faraway eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Wick whispers to him.
Lionis tries to talk, then spits up blood on his chin instead. He coughs through it, holds his cheek, and asks, “Where’s my apology?”
Wick stares at his brother. “You’re choking on it,” he answers.
A muffled burst of static echoes down the underpass, and the three boys turn to look at Juston’s body. The muffled sound is then followed by a series of other tiny little emissions of noise, the Legacy that lives eternally within his corpse waking up suddenly for the first time since the Dark Abandon.
With a grunt, Wick lifts himself up from the hard pavement and staggers over to Juston. He crouches down by his side, then starts to stroke his dead friend’s blond, shaggy nest of hair. “Good morning, Mr. Markmake.”
He is determined not to be creeped out by the strange nature of auto-borne individuals, whose Legacies persist beyond their death. Instead, Wick will see it as endearing—Juston’s little way of saying hello to them from beyond the plane of the living … and reminding them that life is short, that it can be given or taken in the blink of a slummer’s eye, or in the burst of a sound, or in the flash of a red, angry light from the sky.
0174 Sedge
Another person hangs in the air by the telekinetic power of Yoli, who only needs to stare to keep a person in the air.
The day ends without Ruena. A body drops from the sky.
Splat.
The shattered Crystal Court has become a favorite spot of Sedge Arwall’s, and he can’t quite deem why. No one seems to come here. Despite the offputting atmosphere, it is remarkably calm. During the day, the sun is beautiful and glimmers through all the glass pillars and walls, creating a light show across the seats and the stage.
Another person hangs in the air—a man with long, curly hair. Yoli concentrates, his wide eyes and furrowed brow keeping him there.
The day ends without Ruena. The man falls. A scream.
Splat. The world is a splat.
Sedge is afraid of and in awe of Impis Lockfyre. He sees him so seldom lately, which gives Sedge both a sense of sadness as well as deep relief. He isn’t sure what he expected his life to be like up here with the new regime. Sedge didn’t quite have a plan when he freed them from their cells that day long ago. In fact, he’s not even quite sure he remembers making the decision. The day seems to change shape in his mind each time he recalls it, as if even his memories have a way of shape-shifting.
One evening when Yoli is occupied keeping another poor soul afloat over the edge of the city, the rest of Impis’s Chaots gather at the foot of Cloud Tower, which now leans slightly, and from the highest balcony, Impis stands proudly, his silks flowing in the wind and his vibrant colors visible even from down in the courtyard, which is littered with the likes of broken stone and shattered glass that has blown here from the Crystal Court, giving the courtyard the look of a great, dry plain of ruins—one single tower jutting out from its center at a slight angle.
“More powers!” Impis cries with delight, his voice carried to the people in the court by the Legacy of one of his Chaots, which Sedge doesn’t know or care for the precise nature of. “Legacies! Powers! Give me more powers! More, my Chaots! More, more, MORE!”
Sedge assumes the word “Chaots” had come from some random exchange of words where a fool tried to say the word “Chaos” and got tongue-tied, and ever since, the people took to calling Impis’s Posse his “Army Of Chaots” instead. Sedge doesn’t care if that story isn’t true; he’ll believe it over any other he hears.
“MORE!” shouts Impis, and the crowd of seventeen—or has it since dwindled to sixteen?—cheers him on. More, more, more …
Another day passes without Ruena. Another body falls.
Splat.
One day, Sedge Arwall himself could be standing at the top of that tower, though he might invest in a few strong builders to right its unsettling lean. It’d be an unfortunate way to start his Kingship by conducting court, only to have the whole of Cloud Tower tip right off the edge of the Lifted City, landing somewhere in the third or fourth with him and his Council and appointed Marshals inside it.
‘If you want to rule, you need to take strength, be near strength, or become the strength.’ Sedge read that once in school, and he always thought the wording to be peculiar. Why is taking strength the first suggestion? Being near strength made sense, as one might learn from it, much in the same way that Ruena was always running away to Cloud Keep to speak to her grandfather (it always annoyed him so much that she never took him with her) and becoming strength also made sense, as one fought to become strong.
But taking strength …?
He finds his answer in the least likely way he could possibly have expected. Sedge finds himself standing in front of the Mirand-Thrin Palace, which still sits in the same place it’s always proudly sat. The pearl statues are in the yard. The grass is even still green. The dazzling midday sun pierces the windows and makes the palace glimmer before him.
Just like old times, he morphs into a shapeless blob and slips through the grate at the side of the atrium, and from
a pool of flesh and Legacy on the cool tile, he forms back into a boy. Sedge walks the inside of the palace, eerily quiet—even more so than it was when he used to slip in here without Ruena even being home. He moves into the enormous foyer, through which a spiral staircase gives access to the second floor, to the landing of the third, and then farther up into a sun tower in which Ruena used to read.
He stands in that foyer for a very long time staring up at that staircase. He tries to picture Ruena descending the steps hurriedly to answer the door. ‘One minute, Sedge!’ he’d hear her voice echoing. That makes him smile the most.
He finds his way to her room next, and from her closet, he pulls the prettiest, longest, silkiest silk he can find. It’s a shade of lavender and blush, mottled together as if the silk can’t make up its mind of which color to be. That’s okay, Sedge tells it. I can never make up my mind of which shape to be. He tosses the silk around himself, draping it over a shoulder and loosely knotting it at the neck.
King Sedge, the Silk King.
He prances to her vanity, opening her colors and her powders and her jewels. He tries on each and every ring, filling his ten fingers with ten dazzling gems. He gives his hands a wiggle in the reflecting glass, holding them at his chubby cheeks and blinking dreamily. He imagines his life upon a throne in the sky, kicking up his feet.
King Sedge, the Jeweled King.
He rubs the rouge upon his cheeks, sucking them in like Ruena once taught him. He draws purple upon his eyes, then dusts the blue of sapphires to his temples, like wings.
Sedge dances across the room in Ruena’s heels, and the clacking they make along the tile echoes through the house like castanets. I know what castanets are because of Ruena and her music and her love for the Ancients, Sedge tells himself, humming a made-up tune from the music Ruena once played him in her secret glass basement. And I know what a viola is, and a clariflute, and a pianochord, and a taiko.
His dancing ends at the full-length mirror before Ruena’s bed that they used to cuddle in and share stories. He stares at his chubby cheeks and his round belly and his stubby fingers.
The silk looks ugly suddenly.
The color on his face, hideous, out of place, ridiculous.
The heels, oversized and clumsy.
Sedge takes a step closer to the reflecting glass. He can’t stop seeing a stupid boy dressed in a woman’s clothes. His eyes drift to the shiny heels, to his weird belly, to his sunken shoulders. He sees a boy who gave up his only friend for a reason he can’t even name.
The taste of the makeup on his lips repulses him suddenly. The smell of Ruena—in her silks, in the makeup, in the light perfume that haunts the whole room—invades him like a sickness.
He unknots the silk, lets it drop to the floor. He pulls off Ruena’s rings and lets them drop to the tile one by one—ten tiny crashes. He kicks off the heels, letting them fly across the room, forgotten.
Sedge Arwall stands naked before the mirror. He watches his shape, dreaming, longing, lonesome. Slowly, and with the careful, delicate effort of a sculptor, Sedge watches as his body changes. He morphs his chest into two breasts, the best he can imagine them, having seen so few. He morphs his belly in, his hips out, and his legs a touch longer. The effort begins to exhaust him, sweat decorating his brow and appearing like tiny diamonds. He strains to lengthen his arms and bend his shoulders properly. He lets his hair grow long, long, longer, and the sensation is not unlike a person pulling upon his hair with anger.
His face is the worst of work. He forces his cheekbones up, which hurts. He pulls his lips longer, wider, which aches like a smile held in place for hours. He lets his eyebrows lift and his eyes shrink, and his nose pinches like a pretty button.
Sedge stares at himself in the mirror. A warped, deformed, odd, clumsy, elongated version of Ruena Netheris stares back at him.
Queen Sedge, the Unforgiveable Queen.
Queen Sedge, the Betrayer Queen.
Queen Sedge, the Freak.
He takes one step. With his unfamiliar feet, he collapses to the floor in front of the mirror. At once, his shape begins to revert, his legs shortening, his belly pushing out, his breasts pulling in, and his hair sucking back into his skull. He moans, feeling sick as his body rebels against him, exhausted of the shape he was trying to keep. By the time he settles, he’s curled up on his side, staring up at a mirror and seeing his pudgy little form staring back.
Why is shapelessness so easy? Why is becoming a human being so hard?
“Don’t cry.”
Sedge lifts his head at once, then melts into a puddle on the floor—a puddle with eyes that stare up at Arcana, the mind reader who stands by the door in a white, skintight suit that covers her body from ankle to neck, only her ebony hands, feet, and face showing. He glares at Arcana, furious that she’d found him. Did she follow me? Did she watch me dancing in Ruena’s clothes? Can she read my mind when I don’t even have a proper brain in this form?
“Yes,” she answers, “I can.”
Sedge slithers his form underneath the bed, hiding from her. His eyes keep a firm connection to hers, just so he can continue glaring.
“You’ve missed a meeting with the King,” she announces.
Sedge makes no response, partly because he’s without a mouth, and partly because he does not wish to admit that he didn’t know of any meeting today.
“Of course you wouldn’t know. It was spontaneous.”
It is so infuriating to not have a human’s right to the privacy of one’s own mind.
“Are we not friends, Sedge?” She pulls the chair out from the vanity, angles it toward the bed, then sits in it. “Do you not trust me? Is my sister Axel too scary for you?—what she can do?”
He tries to keep his mind as blank and thoughtless as the cool tiles beneath his amorphous pool of a body.
“Would you like to learn a secret?” Arcana crosses her legs. “My sister cannot control your mind unless you’re in human form. I can only read your mind because, well …” She shrugs. “I suppose I’m just better at what I do. Maybe my method of accessing the mind differs from the method my sister employs in … manipulating it.”
Sedge forms a mouth at the other end of the mass he’s become, opposite his eyes, simply to say: “Go away.”
Arcana narrows her eyes, nearly looking like a cat folding back her ears. “That secret was meant to comfort you.”
“Go away.”
She sighs and gives her head a shake, the one tight ponytail she keeps her hair in jostled for a brief second. “I think you mislike me because I heard your thoughts about Ruena Netheris, the runaway Queen we are killing one person a day to recover.”
Sedge looks up at her, listening.
“You think I’m going to hold that over your head. You think I’m going to run to King Impis and tell him your doubts. You think your place here in the sky is at stake due to the truth I can supply him.”
Sedge doesn’t need to think at all; Arcana can confirm or deny her own claim with just a peek into his mind, wherever it is.
Arcana leans forward in her chair. Her voice, despite the taunt behind her words, is calm and soothing. “I have no intention at all of revealing you to King Impis. I would be a fool to do that. Do you feel your sanity, Sedge? Do you feel that control you have over your dear and precious mind?”
Flaps of flesh draw over Sedge’s eyes to resemble his narrowing eyelids as he studies her, answerless.
“Me too,” she murmurs. “We still have our will. We have not given into the mania … and for a reason. Impis needs us. He needs us to think. He needs us to work. He is surrounded by idiots … and then he has you, and he has me.”
Sedge wonders why she doesn’t include her sister. Does she feel animosity toward her? Are the sisters secretly enemies?
“I wouldn’t say that much,” says Arcana, answering his unasked question. “But her heart and mind is filled with more darkness than I can stomach. It pains me sometimes to feel her thoughts … especiall
y while she controls another’s. It’s a dark irony for a mind controller like her to have so little control of her own. To think so little with it.”
Sedge always thought Axel seemed more malicious than her sister. He noticed it ever since he saw them work on that boy in the slums with the claws-for-fingers, the one who was made to pull out his own father’s heart—his mind robbed, not knowing what he was truly doing.
“My sister has an especially cruel talent of being able to plant ideas,” Arcana goes on to say. “Sometimes, the effects of her Legacy can linger in the minds of those she touches. It’s scary. I can feel their brains pulsing with her power long after she’s let them go.”
“Why are you telling me this?” mumbles Sedge from his mouth, which slowly creeps over to his face where a few fingers and a chin has formed.
“Because I want to be allies with you, Sedge Arwall. I did not mislike the To-Be-Queen Ruena, not like my sister and Impis did. I believed she would be the change that our Last City of Atlas needs. I share your thoughts, Sedge, and like you, I cannot voice them. And, like you, I carry a certain …” She searches for the word. “Admiration. I carry admiration for King Impis. I fear I do not mislike him either.”
“He was my idol,” mumbles Sedge miserably.
Arcana heard that one word. Was. She nods knowingly. “He will be again soon, Sedge. Make no mistake. Impis himself is not his madness. He knows precisely what he does each day he spreads his chaos and his abandon and his reckless influence into the world.”
“More, he kept chanting. More, more, more.” Sedge shivers in fear each time he hears that word.
“More, indeed. Do you know what he seeks more of?”
“Power,” answers Sedge, two nostrils popping into existence under his eyes, soon shadowed by the bump of a nose.
