by Daryl Banner
“Think bigger.”
Sedge feels himself oozing out from under the bed. His hand takes hold of the silk, pulling it over his form like a great silken bed sheet. “He wants his Twenty-Two back.”
“Bigger, Sedge. Bigger, bigger.”
He rises slowly off the floor, holding the silk over his shoulders until soon he’s himself again, standing before Arcana with Ruena’s prettiest silk wrapped around his body.
“Outliers,” he finally says.
Arcana’s eyes are alight with intent. “Impis has sent Chaots into the slums with the lists he’s made from every Legacy Tour. He wants them gathered and their minds bent to his will. Of course, you know this already because you were with me at the top of that tower.”
Sedge feels himself grow cold. “Yes, I was. He did the same thing with the Weapon of Sanctum, didn’t he?”
“Yes. His precious Weapon that got away from him. Yes, you know of it. So Ruena has not kept you entirely in the dark, it seems.” Arcana gives a wink at him.
He doesn’t return it, still unsure whether he can trust her. He holds the silk tighter around his body, his eyebrows pulled together as he stares at her cautiously.
“With each soul Impis brings close, it’s another power at his disposal. He will amass an army of Outliers to do his bidding. Forget his Posse, dear Sedge. Forget his Twenty-Two. He’ll become a King with Ninety Legacies to play his games with.”
“Ninety …” Sedge can’t imagine where he himself fits into this grand plan. He feels so alone suddenly, so outnumbered, so lost in the nightmare of his own creation …
“Don’t be afraid.” Arcana takes a step toward him. Sedge takes a step back. She smiles ruefully, then says, “Don’t be afraid, for I have a plan. And my plan involves one of those boys on one of his lists … a boy who slipped through his fingers in the ninth.” Arcana purses her lips, blowing Sedge a kiss. “Wear your colors proud, my doll. You are a beauty this world has never known.” She turns to leave the room, her feet softly padding along the tile.
Sedge stares after her. “How will this boy help you?” he calls out to her, his voice echoing down the throat of Ruena’s empty palace as he follows her to the front door. “What is your plan?”
Arcana stops, turns her head, then says, “It isn’t much of a plan if I don’t get to him before my sister does.”
The doors to the Mirand-Thrin Palace close softly behind her. Sedge stands there in the enormous foyer with hope burning in his chest, and Ruena’s long, colorful silk hugging him as tightly as a lost friend’s consoling embrace.
0175 Rone
Rone stands at the island counter with juice dripping down his chin from the fruit he’s taken too big a bite out of. Ruena watches on the other side, her eyes curious and full of thoughts.
“Delicious,” he says through the bite, flecks of juice spraying onto the counter between them.
Ruena bats at his hand playfully. “If you want to be a proper Lifted Lord, then you will learn to not speak with your mouth full.”
Rone screws up his face. “Lifted Lord?” he blurts through a full mouth of fruit. “Lord Rone? … Really?”
“Lord Tinpassage, they’d call you. And you must own a home in the Lifted City. And your father must be a Lord. Those are the rules.”
The mention of his father brings his mind instantly to a dark moment in his life. If Rone blinked, he’d see it all in one fast, painful instant. The Lifted City man who was being robbed. Rone’s father, who saved the man and chased off the robber. The Guardian who came, and the wrong assumption that was made. Rone’s father being arrested for the robbery. The Lifted City man who didn’t speak up to correct the mistake of the Guardian. The Lifted City man who only looked down at young Rone and said that all slum rats are the same.
“What’s wrong?”
Rone lifts his eyes, realizing he’d let his face go as dark as his mind just did. “If one’s father must be a Lord, then how does one born of the slums ever advance to the Lifted City?”
“A Lower City citizen,” she corrects him, “would prove himself in a Legacy Exam. If that opportunity doesn’t appease him, he could attain a job under a Lord or Lady, eventually working himself into a position of due respect and reward. He—or she—would be deemed an honorary Lord or Lady, and may find a place in the Westly, or in the Glassen District. Once he or she has a child, then that child will be a proper skyborn, and in his or her life, will earn the Lord or Lady title when they come of age.” She smiles, proud of her rhetoric.
Rone simply stares at her, somehow even further incensed by the long, annoying explanation. Thoughts of his father only further redden his anger. Ruena has lived a life of privilege and wealth. She may sympathize with the lowborn, but she doesn’t know what being lowborn means … and she never will.
“So he must jump through fire, cast a magical spell, and then wish upon a star? Is that how a slum rat like me becomes Lordly?”
Ruena picks up on his sarcasm, her face reflecting it with due sourness. “Well, I didn’t very well create the system, now did I?”
And now she sheds herself of any guilt. What a typical Lifted thing to do. “No. You simply lived in it on the daily,” grunts Rone.
“It was going to be part of my Queenship to change that very system,” she argues lightly, propping her elbows upon the counter.
She snatches the half-eaten fruit from Rone’s wet hand, helping herself to a dainty bite. He watches her, his heart pushing through a tunnel of anguish in which he keeps seeing his dad at the end of that alleyway and a haughty Lifted City asshole telling him who he is.
“What’s that?” she asks suddenly after swallowing.
Rone follows her eyes to the small vial he’d taken out of his pocket. He snatches it back into his palm, gives it a rueful look, then says, “My last swig of chemical.”
“Chemical?” Ruena lifts a suspicious eyebrow. “Do you mean … illegal chemical?”
“It is quite common in the slums. And no King’s rule I know of outlaws the imbibing of this tasty, necessary substance.” His words carry a bite, as his mind still dwells in that fateful alleyway with his father and that heartless Lifted man.
“Let me have that swig,” Ruena decides suddenly, her back straightening. “I feel I’ve earned it. I want to know what it tastes of.”
“No.”
The cold word seems to startle Ruena, as if it’s the first time in her life she’s ever been denied something she’s asked for. “I believe that the Queen has requested your last swig, Rone Tinpass—”
“I am saving it for when I find my sister,” he answers, the play and the humor gone from his voice as he stares down at the vial, his eyes hardened.
Ruena doesn’t seem to regard his emotion, taking another loud, demonstrative bite of the fruit. As she crunches away, Rone thinks on the first several swigs he’d taken from this vial, and the day he realized he had but one little pinch remaining within its glass walls. I’ve one swallow of chemical left. I’m saving it for when I find you.
“And you think Greymyn would’ve approved of your change in the system?” asks Rone, pocketing the vial and folding his arms over his bare chest. He cocks his head, staring at Ruena’s confused face. “Y’know, your little system for how a slum rat can climb their way up to the city of gold? You think that screaming buffoon in the sky would’ve liked your ideas, Queen of Unity? The very one who likely executed my father that day long ago for a crime he didn’t commit?”
Ruena stops chewing. Her eyes dry up and she swallows her bite. “Excuse me?”
He hadn’t told her the story. She knows nothing of his father, yet Rone goes on anyway. “The truth is, this city only works when the rich are kept rich and the poor grovel at your pretty feet. Work for a Lord or Lady? Impress them? Play a lottery of Legacy Tours? The skyborn should be grateful our kind exist. That fruit you’ve got in your pretty little hand?” he blurts out, pointing at the fruit like an accusation. “That fruit was picked from a garden
in the Greens by a hardworking slummer with sweat on their brow and so little money in their pocket that I doubt they could even afford to buy the very fruit they’re paid to pick. We starve. You feast. We work. You bathe in pools twice the size of my living room.”
“Rone,” she says sharply, dropping the fruit onto the counter.
“Don’t like what you’re hearing? How about this: In the slums, I was a member of an elite group of rebels called Rain. And our one and only mission—”
“Rain … Let it rain …” murmurs Ruena pensively.
Rone continues over her words, ignoring them. “Our one and only mission was to find our way up into your precious city, get into Cloud Tower, and rip out the tongue of the Banshee once and for all. We lived, worked, and bled by that dream.”
Now Ruena looks as if he’d reached across the counter and slapped her. “That’s my grandfather you’re talking about.”
“Well, it doesn’t much matter what our purpose was anyway, now does it? Someone’s gone and done the job for us.”
Ruena’s gaze drops. At first, she seems to want to refute what he says, a certain storm brewing in her eyes. Even her hair seems to grow disturbed, as if electrical charges were building up inside her like an automatic defense mechanism.
Instead, she takes a short breath, then says, “I’m sorry.”
She says the words sullenly to the counter. Rone wants to accept the apology, but he knows not for what she’s apologizing. She could be sorry she ever let the slum likes of him inside her. She could be sorry that he was born in the slums at all. Perhaps his life—and hers—could have been so much more different had he been born to a quaint, adorable, slipper-wearing family in the Westly. How lovely their lives could have been, sharing polite afternoon cups of tea and pretending to listen to each other over the pomp and clatter of silverware during family dinners.
“You were going to save the slums?” he asks, though his tone hardly indicates his words as a question. “That was your plan as the next Queen of Atlas? To save the slums?”
Ruena still doesn’t look at him. Her sadness is starting to look a lot like sulking, which annoys Rone even worse.
“But then you gave up, didn’t you?” he keeps going. “You let a madman take the throne. Now where are all your wishes and plans? Who’s going to save the slums now? … or my sister?”
“I never wanted to be Queen.”
Rone watches as the young woman before him seems to wither, her eyes mourning the fruit she’d just dropped onto the counter. She takes another short breath, then steps away from the counter and leaves the kitchen.
He follows her halfway into the den. He watches as she moves to the side of the den that’s fallen in. The ceiling is folded downward, becoming an unintended wall of rubble and cracked stone that block anyone’s way in or out. She puts a hand to that ceiling, as if listening to some tale of heartache it was silently sharing. Maybe it does have such a tale. Maybe it knows its occupants and mourns their loss, every day. Maybe it despises its new tenants, how they disrespect the memory of the Lifted family that once lived here, how they bathe and fuck in their pool, how they lie about and fuck in their den, how they grope each other and fuck in their indoor garden, how they eat up their food and fuck.
“We could end Impis,” murmurs Rone across the room, curious if his words can still touch Ruena, or if his bitterness has gone too far. “You, me, Erana. We just need a plan. A really good plan. We are here. We are here and they … Impis and his crazies … they are right outside our door.”
“We can’t do anything.”
“You have storms in your fingers. Walls and doors are nothing with me. Erana permanently knows every detail of what she saw the day of your coronation, down to the very color of Janlord’s shoes.”
“Don’t you speak of Janlord,” Ruena hisses, her eyes shut and her palm flat against the rubble.
“Good. Be angry. I’m angry, too. And it’s that anger that will get us into Cloud Keep. It’s that anger that will fight for justice. It will get my sister back. It will mend this Lifted City. It will pacify the slums. It will get your throne back.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Then it will rid the throne of a madman and allow the buttocks of a better Lady or Lord upon its cold surface. I don’t care. I just want my sister so I can finish off this last swig of chemical, and the only man knowledgeable of her precise whereabouts is dead.”
He only just now notices the hum in the room. Ruena’s hair is starting to stand on end, and her hand has not left the wall. Rone takes a few steps back from it, suddenly ready to phase himself if the To-Be-Queen decides to have an unplanned ejection of electricity; he’s been in its path before and only narrowly escaped its full charge.
“Ruena?” comes a voice from the garden.
The hum in the room begins to subside. Ruena’s hair is almost fully risen, all of it floating about her as if held up by invisible strings. She turns, her eyes faintly aglow, and stares at Erana with a weary, emotion-wrung face. The women watch each other for a long while, neither of them seeming to even draw breath.
Then Ruena does, and with her breath she says, “And what is your take on it, Lady Knowledge?”
“I-It would be Lady Sparrow. That is, if I were a Lady, which I’m not. I’m slumborn, too. Sixth ward.”
“Do you prefer to fight a temporary war with a King, or enjoy a temporary peace here with a Queen, Erana Sparrow of the sixth?”
Erana lifts her little eyes at the full title of her slumborn name, seeming to be inspired by it. All her dark hair is pulled over her left shoulder, resting over her breasts. The hair moves with each breath she draws, which Rone can’t help but notice.
“Peace,” Erana answers simply. “I’ve never known the pleasure that I’ve known within these walls, all my life. Rone. Ruena. You two have given me more than a hundred permanent memories ever can. The usurper didn’t gain a throne that day. Not to me. You did, Ruena. He merely sits in it wrongfully. You are the true Queen. You are my Queen.” She pulls on her own hair, fiddling with the ends and running her fingers through it. “That’s my take.”
Ruena moves her faintly glowing eyes to Rone. “And you, Rone Tinpassage of the ninth?”
Rone presses his lips together, considering her for a long while. Then, almost lazily, he gives a short nod and says, “War. And peace.”
“And if you could pick just one?”
He considers. “You … are the only authority in Sanctum that I would honor. My heart may not be truly complete without knowing that my sister is safe, but …” He takes a breath. “I will make it my own war if it will not be yours.”
“You still have yet to answer the question,” she points out.
Now he feels the pinch of a smile on his scowling lips, enjoying how Ruena pushes him. “Peace. And I have known that I wanted it since the moment you threw lightning through my phased chest. You are Queen Netheris, the Queen of Unity.”
Her eyes smarten, listening.
“Unity,” he repeats, a touch louder, stepping forth. “As in, the one who will unify slum and sky … Lower and Lifted … peace and war …” He brings himself up to her front, unafraid of the charge within her. He puts a palm on her cheek. “Why can’t we have both?”
“Because one is the cost of the other,” she murmurs, “and I am so tired of feeling like the piece between two great forces … when I’d much rather be the peace.”
Even with the words sounding the same, the meaning is clear to Rone, who gives a short nod, then draws her in for a tight embrace. And it’s behind her back with his eyes locked knowingly on Erana that he makes the decision. I must leave our false heaven without their knowing. The quest to find my sister is my own. Not theirs.
0176 Link
He opens his eyes. Waterways. Round ceiling. A dome, perhaps.
He tilts his head to the left a bit. A glowing light from a lantern illuminates this domed room. He still seems to be in the Waterways. Water pours from a l
ong, rectangular hole in the ceiling, raining down in a smooth, gentle sort of waterfall that is nearly soundless.
Or perhaps it’s that Link’s ears are filled with water. He gives his head a tentative shake, confirming the theory. I’m all full up. When he finally sits up, he discovers precisely how “full up” he really is as water slowly pours out of his mouth. With only a moment of dread, Link finally turns himself over as best as he can and begins the laborious and annoying process of emptying all the water from his stomach and throat, coughing and heaving until he feels himself adequately emptied.
When sound returns to him, he hears a shuffling across the room. His eyes don’t deceive him; he saw the girl for just a moment before she hid herself from his line of sight, putting the wall of water between them.
He peers around the room. It appears to be a dead-end to one of the canals. He hasn’t until now realized any of the halls have an end. Link slowly rises off the ground, observing the room farther. There is a gathering of pots and clay vases in one area. Farther off, he sees a lived-in pile of pillows and blankets and clothes. The room is a dome of stone, and a channel of water—fed by the long hole in the ceiling—starts at the center of its floor and leads out through the only visible entrance or exit. Beyond that exit, Link only sees a single canal of water that disappears into the empty lightlessness.
He glances back at the waterfall, catching the girl peeking out again from behind it. She hides.
Link tilts his head, attempting to regain eye contact. He circles the waterfall clockwise. She does the same, keeping the gentle flow between them. “Hello?” Link calls out softly.
The girl says nothing.
Link stops, studying her figure through the thin waterfall. He can’t tell much, the wavy water distorting her. For the first time since his drowning, he finds himself thankful for Baron’s gift of unlife; there is no possible way a person could have survived being crushed in by a falling ceiling and being pinned deep underwater. Not many can say they’ve survived drowning twice.
