Outlier: Reign Of Madness

by Daryl Banner

  Ellena’s breath stops short at the muscular, beautiful sight.

  “I’m no longer in the sky or Sky Guard … because I was bad.”

  With his knuckles digging into the grass upon each footfall, he crawls toward Ellena until she’s pushed back upon the grass and his meaty body is over her, his face bearing down with deep, deadly want in his sharp green eyes.

  “My reason for ogling you so is because I am … very bad.”

  I’m so wet. “Gabel …”

  His mouth crushes into hers, shutting her right up. Heat flares between their bodies. Her hands shoot up to his chest. For a moment, she doesn’t know whether she means to push him off of her, or pull him closer to her body so that she can feel his every inch.

  She opts to pull him closer.

  And she feels every hard, throbbing inch against her thigh.

  Their mouths detach. She stares up into his eyes, out of breath. He breathes heavily upon her face. “Do you want this?” he growls.

  “Don’t ask,” Ellena whispers desperately. “Please don’t ask.”

  “If you don’t want this, I will stop.”

  “Don’t stop.”

  “So you want it?” he persists. “You want me … inside you? You want to feel every inch of me buried into every inch of you?”

  Ellena clenches shut her eyes, unable to bear looking up into his gorgeous ones. “Please stop asking me.”

  “Say yes and I’m inside you.”

  “We’re on the street,” she breathes. “People are … are …”

  Gabel makes a sudden movement. Ellena flashes open her eyes in time to watch a thick blanket fling over their bodies by Gabel’s hand. It drapes over even their heads, covering them. Warm breath and darkness become Ellena Lesser’s unknown world.

  It is a darkness that has many shades. It is an uncertain darkness and an exciting darkness.

  Gabel shifts some more, and she feels the weight of armor, of pants, and of other things slipping off his body. Only tiny slivers of light that peek in from the edges of their dark world give hints to the muscular form that now hovers over her, and the plentiful meat that eagerly awaits near her hips, throbbing and ready.

  “Say … yes,” Gabel whispers, deadly close, into her ear, “and … I’m … inside you.”

  Ellena squeezes shut her eyes. Please don’t ask me, she’d begged him, but soon her lips betray her, and in the darkness granted by a slummer’s lost blanket, Ellena parts her lips and whispers, “Yes.”

  0180 Forgemon

  “He just … left?”

  Forge spots a long, thick fissure in the roof of the cave as they pass through. He makes a mental note to add more braces in this tunnel. “Yes,” he grunts.

  Aphne is so fidgety, picking at her hair and letting her eyes flit about everywhere as she panics. “Why? The fuck is he thinking?”

  “Something to do with vengeance. And how he values that over keeping any peace here.” Forge stops, picks up a shiny stone off the ground, gives it a casual dusting off with his other hand. “I’m not sure I could have convinced him to stay.”

  “We have it so good here. He’s not the only one with unfinished business on the surface. We all have fucking unfinished business.” Aphne kicks the jagged rock wall, sending a spray of dust into the nearest hanging lamp. “Coward.”

  Forge keeps the bit to himself about how their former King of Bones insisted that Forge would make a good leader. The last thing he wants is to lead anyone.

  Or maybe, more accurately, the last thing he wants is to unleash the madness in his head that he’s kept so expertly imprisoned.

  “People can’t find out. We need to execute this perfectly.”

  Forge lifts an eyebrow at his friend. “Execute what?”

  “A shift in power. If the wrong people realize he’s gone, they’ll take advantage. We’ll have some power-hungry tyrant step up in his place and it’ll be like the Keep all over again.” Aphne looks at him pointedly. “We need to stage a succession.”

  Forge scoffs at that. “What are we, the Lower Sanctum?”

  “Yes. And you are the King of Bones’s successor. I’ll verify. So will half the mining crew once I tell them. And so will—”

  “I decline. You’ll be successor.”

  “Decline? Fuck you, Forge. You’ll lead.”

  “No, I won’t.” So much for me not being styled the next leader.

  Aphne cuts in front of him and grabs his shoulders. “You are the only option. People fear you—but for a good reason. You have a good heart and you’re full of love.”

  “Shut it.”

  “Full of love,” she persists, “and, above all, you know things.”

  Forge huffs, shaking her hands off of him and moving down the tunnel where it opens into a huge cavernous room, multileveled, around which a single walkway circumvents the chasm. Bins-on-wheels are filled with ore and stone. Pickaxes are scattered about one wall where they lean. A rope-pulley elevator shaft leads to a level one above them and a level one below.

  Forge comes to a stop at the wooden railing before the chasm, peering over into the endless dark. Beyond the floor below them, he wonders how deeply the chasm goes. He knows that no one in all of Atlas’s history has—or even can—build beyond the Wall, since the world is decimated and utterly inhabitable in the Oblivion. That is why the city is built upward and downward—the Lifted City, and the Keep, and the Catacombs even deeper, and the mines. But how deep does it truly go?

  Staring into its depths, Forge wonders a hundred possibilities. He realizes that the structure of the city above is compromised if too much is hollowed out down here. The slums could fall inward, the entire city swallowed up into a great sinkhole. The Earth beneath our feet is what we should fear, Forge thinks, seeing the slums crumble as they drop inward. Even the Lifted City would fall with it, its pylons that hold it up depending on the stability of the ground below. Fuck what the Bone King said. It isn’t Fire that’s our end; it’s Earth.

  “Just think it over,” Aphne urges him when she comes to his side and leans against the rail, peering down into the abyss herself. “I know how you are. You panic first, then you think it through, and then you see the aim in it all. It’s how your math works, isn’t it?”

  Forge itches his beard, staring up at the stone ceiling. He feels a cold air dancing across his bulging arms as he scratches the hairs on his cheek, squinting at the stone, a thought coming to him. Beasts in a cage. Monsters under the world. One exit. Forge wonders, wonders, wonders … We need more exits.

  “Hey, Forge? The hell?”

  Forge’s eyes are zeroed in on the ceiling, spotting yet another deep fissure in the stone. That crevice steals all his attention as his mind starts to recall each and every exit that once existed, the ones that caved in included. He remembers old probabilities he deduced—the number of people down here, the number of prison guards, the number of tunnels …

  “Forge?”

  And newer numbers: the capacity of these caverns and the commons rooms and the food storages, the amount of food they have, the number of weapons and of armors …

  The ratio of food to people, of equipment to people, of able-bodied, of less-abled, the ratio of space to person, person to space …

  The number of greedy eyes he’s seen, the causality of their rebelling against the King of Bones had they dared, the probability of others joining, the resulting possibility of others defending the weak, the possibility of them not, the likelihood of a war brewing in their midst amongst the people hungriest for power and hungriest for peace, and one exit should any choose to flee …

  The possibility of trampling, the possibility of death, the amount of space they have, the amount of space they don’t, and one exit …

  The delicate balance and the likelihood of that balance tipping, and one exit …

  That fissure in the roof of the cave, the possibility of that fissure drawing itself longer, the likelihood of the earth itself rebelling, all the earth and
stone around them turning against them, just as likely as the people contained within its depths, and one exit …

  And one exit …

  “Forge?”

  He blinks. The madness in his mind is already returning. He sees so many things at once, he finds himself backing away from the railing, dizzied by the racing thoughts. His back finds the stone wall—as well as the uncomfortable handle of a pickaxe, if he’s right—and he stares ahead at nothing, the numbers racing by.

  And one exit …

  “Forge, talk to me. I’m here. I’m right in front of you.”

  “We need to get out,” Forge says at once.

  Aphne’s startled eyes are in the peripheral of Forge’s awareness, despite them being directly in front of him. “No, we don’t.”

  “One exit …” Forge murmurs. “Only one.”

  “Forge. Look at me. Listen to me.”

  “We’ve been freed, yet still we’re prisoners of the earth,” he says to the numbers, to the calculations that are still feverishly working—like an office full of frantic workers pulling papers from computers and tripping over themselves to draw their conclusions, to draw their predictions, to figure precisely what could come.

  “Have you not noticed the lack of chains about our legs, Forge? Look at me.” She snaps her fingers. He still stares ahead, the workers in his mind racing about. “There are chains we can see, and chains we can’t. Chains in our minds. Chains in our hearts, our souls. Oh, Forge … the strongest chains are the ones that aren’t made of metal.”

  Number of families broken apart by who’s down here and who’s up there. Number of lovers desperate to reunite. Number of vengeances yet to be realized. And one exit.

  “Just break free,” Aphne urges.

  “Free,” murmurs Forge, seeing the bodies pile up as everyone in the Undercity flees, and soon their only way out is blocked like all the others, except in place of fallen stone and rock, there is flesh, bone, and kicking legs. “We have to leave. To survive. Now.”

  Aphne’s body slackens, the words finally reaching her. In a tone that’s soft and faraway, she says, “You’re seeing the math again.”

  Forge nods sullenly. She sighs, her breath brushing over Forge’s face. He smells the brine on her tongue from their lunch an hour ago.

  “He told me to mind the madness in my head,” murmurs Forge, pushing away from the wall, “and yet told me to rule in his absence. But the madness tells me to leave.”

  “Then we leave,” Aphne decides, stating it to his back while he stares into the chasm. “I trust your math more than my … passions.”

  “You are not a person of passions,” says Forge, turning to give her a look. “You’re a person of instincts. And we need them, Aphne. We’ll need each and every one.”

  A look of determination tightens her face. “To the surface.”

  “To the surface.”

  But twenty minutes later, before they even reach the tunnel that ascends through a network of hallways and stairs towards the one and only exit, the news reaches them. “It collapsed!” cries out one of the fifty guards on duty, a gash across his forehead. “The King of Bones, I saw it! Fought his way through and blew up the walls!”

  “How the fuck did he manage that?” cries a fool from the crowd. “There’s no bombs anywhere!”

  But the question has no answer, lost to a symphony of shouts and other ignored questions. Forge and Aphne stare at the crowd of scandalized men and women, each spitting their own protests and suspicions and theories. Forge stares at the smoke that hovers in the busy air, the madness in his head working hard to adapt to this unpredicted change in numbers. “Zero exits …” he whispers.

  0181 Ruena

  Ruena feels weightless with disbelief. Her hair may literally be floating at her back.

  “W-What do you mean he’s gone?” Ruena asks.

  Erana stands there, wearing only her glasses and a silk around her waist—Ruena’s silk, at that—and she can’t seem to say anything at all. She seems to be in as much shock, unable to process the reason behind his sudden departure.

  Ruena moves to the wall of rubble that keeps them in as well as keeps others out, and she puts a hand to it, feeling the energy she’d buried there before. She wonders which wall he’d passed through. Was it the one they leapt through to get inside, or another entirely? Why would he just leave us?

  “Maybe he went to get more food,” reasons Erana meekly.

  “Oh, to the Sister’s depths with that fool!” Ruena spits, furious at once. “We have more than enough here! We have a kitchen and a pantry full of … of sustenance that would have lasted …” She can’t even complete her own thoughts, a hundred of them racing past her flitting eyes. Why would he leave?

  Suddenly a madness has taken Ruena, and she begins feeling each wall in the house, trying to discern what’s on the other side. He has gone through a wall, she keeps repeating to herself, and I will find it. He has gone through a wall and I will find it. He has gone …

  He has gone. He left them. He knew the food would last longer without him here and the two women could comfort one another.

  “There are no other walls he could have gone through,” Erana points out, anticipating the point of Ruena’s mindless rummaging.

  Ruena ignores her, moving into the indoor garden and studying its layout. The way into a formal dining hall is blocked by a collapsed roof. The outer two walls face the brim of the Lifted City, on the other side of which is just a very far fall to the slums. He would not have leapt out these walls, she knows, stating the obvious just so that it can be stated and so that the fact can somehow calm her.

  She’s standing in the middle of the indoor pool, half submerged in its cool waters when the tears find her eyes. Her heart has sunken so deeply, she feels her own pulse at the end of every fingertip. She can’t stand the absence of his beautiful, sapphire eyes … of his lean, panther-like, muscular form … of his charm and his charisma and …

  She grips her hair and screams with frustrated rage so loudly, she wills the windows of the bathing atrium to shatter—but they don’t. She does, however, feel the water ripple and spark with the promise of her power, and that’s when she calms herself, not willing to risk summoning a storm; the last thing she needs is another ugly scar running down her head to match the first.

  “Ruena …”

  She turns her head. “Don’t get near the pool,” she warns.

  “I won’t. But I found a note.”

  Ruena turns completely, her eyes dropping to the little paper caught in Erana’s fingers. Her eyes seem to stare through the note, a burning wave of hope rushing through her that the note simply states that Rone will be right back, that he longs for the eternal companionship of both of them, that he has taken just a quick visual survey of the Lifted City for supplies and information.

  “Read it to me,” says Ruena, nearly out of breath. “My hands are wet. Read his words.”

  Erana lifts the note, wasting no time in reading Rone’s words. “Ruena, Erana. You deserve your peace. I may not deserve my war, but I will find my sister. If we are thirsty for a war when I get back, maybe we can fight together to make our peace less temporary.”

  Ruena shakes her head. “No, no. He can’t have. No.”

  Erana drops her hand. “Love, Rone.”

  “No,” mutters Ruena, staring at the floor, wide-eyed. “No, no, no. He … Where could he possibly …?”

  He’ll be combing the dangerous Lifted City for days, for weeks. He’ll be caught. He’ll be executed brutally. He’ll find his way back to the slums. He’ll be murdered. He’ll quest to the end of his days for his missing sister, who’s likely been secured in some hidden, faraway Sanctum chamber that even Ruena knows nothing of. Fears of every kind flood her heart. Peace? I’ll never know peace again.

  Erana sits by the bathing pool, keeping her feet out of it. She stares down at the note, letting it rest in her lap limply.

  “Fuck you, Rone,” mumbles Ruena, gl
aring at the glass of the window, which shows a darkening night sky full of stars she can’t appreciate … not without him in the waters by her side, not without Rone, who she’s grown to need as deeply as the air in her tightening, aching lungs.

  “Ruena …?”

  She closes her eyes, ignoring Erana. She moves to the far end of the pool and folds her arms over the edge, staring out the window and observing the tall, smoggy, lightless shapes of the city below as they’re slowly swallowed in the darkness of nightfall.

  “Ruena, please don’t do anything rash.”

  “I’m a Queen,” she says at once, narrowing her eyes, but even those words fall flat as her deflated heart. I’m not a Queen, she thinks the moment after she utters the words. And I don’t want to be. I just want a normal life. I want happiness, I want laughter, and I want sex.

  All three of which, Rone gave her. All three of which, Rone took away with one slip through the wall and a little note.

  0182 Arrow

  The decision to head for Anwick’s house at the other end of the ninth is one that is easily—and quickly—accepted by the group.

  But before they make their way, Lionis provides them with a new thought he’d had during the day while Anwick slept. “Perhaps there isn’t an Ashery that would realistically entertain our needs, with the electricity cut and the madness in the streets. I propose that we … honor our dead in the way of the Ancients.” No one seems to follow, so Lionis—ever ready for a lecture—spells it out for them. “I wish to dig two graves. One for Juston, and one for Victra. We may have just one of their bodies, but hers will be in her honor. It’s here that they devoted themselves, and whether the sky rained at all, or if it just rained upon us, I feel it only fitting that their spirits keep here.”

  “You wish to bury them?” murmurs Prat, slow to react, eyes wide and disbelieving. “Where? How?”

  Arrow catches the thought before Lionis can voice it. “There is a spread of soil out back around the corner from the scullery. A tree grows there that seasonally gives shelled nuts.”