Outlier: Reign Of Madness

by Daryl Banner

  This becomes her routine with every crisis the Sisters stumble upon, and there are countless. Mercy does not move toward the hopefuls; she has nothing with which to relate to them. Mercy does not even acknowledge the ones who simply need a meal; she’d made meals of the ever-poisonous andragora root for weeks after Dran’s execution at the destructive fingertip of Metal Hand. Mercy works alone when she approaches the dying, the pleading, the gasping for life, the short of breath, the bloody-beyond-grasp.

  Mercy wonders if they know they’re being approached by an angel of death. “Please,” begs a teenage boy, his eyes searching for something to look at as he bled away blindly. “She was … just a g-g-girl. She was just a g-g-girl. Oh, please, make it end.” And so she makes it end with another soft kiss, and she never learns who was just a girl.

  A woman is propped up against the wall clutching her severed belly to keep her insides inside. “When I die,” she hisses at Mercy, unable to speak above a strangled whisper, “I’ll haunt the Mad King and laugh when he dies, and then I will haunt him in the beyond … laughing and laughing for eternity.”

  The woman’s final memory was not a laugh, but Mercy’s kiss.

  “All I wanted was … was to live a peaceful life,” whimpers a big man in blue work clothes whose face is so pale, he looks bathed in mother’s milk. “Tell the Sisters I lived well. Tell them I did good.”

  Mercy tells them neither, giving him the gift of mercy instead.

  Every person she kisses is Dran, no matter the gender, or the sound of their voice, or the look in their eyes. Goodnight, she tells each of them in her head, in her heart, in her kiss. I will be with you soon, Dran.

  For one of these times that the sky glows red, surely one of these times the Red Light will find her, and she won’t need to suffer another moment in this wretched city.

  “I … can’t … breathe,” hisses an old lady, gasping for air.

  Kiss. Goodnight.

  “Will the journey be sweet? The journey to the other side? The journey to the Sisters? Is … Is it as sweet as they say?” asks a man who is paralyzed, unable to move a finger or a foot, his eyes looking up at Mercy with hope, with longing, with fear.

  Kiss. Goodnight.

  There is a woman Mercy happens upon who can’t speak at all. She sputters and she spits on herself in her desperate effort to make words. Mercy hushes her gently, cradling her head and running a hand softly over her forehead. The soothing motion of her hand on the woman’s face calms her, and then the two are merely staring into each other’s eyes. For a moment, Mercy might think she even knows this woman, the strange connection they have as they both stand at the very brink of life, the very brink of death.

  To the woman’s wordless face, Mercy says, “My fiancé Dran was taken from me by a finger. Not by the Finger of Madness, no, but by a metal one—the finger of Metal Hand, who obliterated his existence with but a simple touch. Dran was my life and my love and my everything. You will see him when you reach the other side. He has black all around his eyes and he has black in his hair and he’s as beautiful as an uninterrupted night sky. He named a star after me.” Mercy stares down at the woman’s head in her lap, the dying woman whose eyes drink in every word of her story, comforted by them, curious by them, drifting to her final sleep by them. “When you see him, tell him I’m coming for him soon. Tell him that one day, after his ring is returned to my finger and my work is done, I will be the last person to receive my own mercy.” She runs her fingers through the woman’s greasy hair. No smile touches Mercy’s face when she says, “Tell me when you’re ready, brave woman, strong woman, silent woman … Tell me and I will send you to the other side, and it will be as peaceful as drifting from one room to the next in a house filled with friends.”

  The slightest hint of a smile touches the woman’s lips, and then she closes her eyes. And so Mercy gives her lips the softest kiss yet, knowing it won’t take much to finish the job.

  When Mercy pulls her face from the woman’s, her eyes meet those of the soft-eyed Scot with the perfectly-parted yellow hair that shows with his big grey hood hanging off the back of his head. He watches from only a few feet away, crouched next to the corpse of someone he tried—and failed—to save.

  The two study one another, neither looking away. Mercy is left to wonder if he heard any of her words.

  The Sisters stop at a temple to rest their feet and seek a dream or two from the Goddesses—or so directs Lady Agdanagon. Mercy feels the damp, cheek-warming embrace of bloodlust and justice fade from her soul when they sit in the cobblestone room with a hearth burning before the wooden tables where the Sisters sit. Temples of Three Goddess are like an antidote to my poison, and an antidote is not what I need.

  Minutes after the Sisters fall into their silent prayers, Mercy is already outside again, standing on the steps of the temple, which resides right by the elevated tracks of the nine train. She has pulled out a root of andragora she collected from an overturned vendor’s bin at the last site they visited, and it’s from that root that she makes her middle-night snack, chewing on the end of it and letting the familiar bitter taste coat her tongue. Out here in the vicinity of the grimy ninth and tenth wards, Mercy feels at home. Every shadow is a face she half-remembers, every slight stirring of wind is a friend’s footstep in the dark, and every buzzing, spluttering self-sustaining streetlamp is a memory in her heart.

  “It’s quieter without the trains.”

  Mercy turns her head from the elevated tracks she was staring at and finds meek-eyed Scot by the door to the temple.

  She swallows her bite. “Aren’t you supposed to be inside?”

  “I’ve done enough begging for a day,” he confesses with a shy smile, finding a spot on the wall near the door to lean back against. He looks up at the elevated rail. “The Sisters have not listened to me this day. They let every man, woman, and child that I touched die.”

  “Perhaps they died because the Sisters were listening.” Mercy takes another bite of her root.

  Scot frowns as he faces Mercy. “Is it true that you were Dran’s to-be-wife?”

  Mercy stops chewing. Her eyes harden.

  Scot’s sputters, straightening his posture. “I-I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. I only heard you on the street earlier today when you were speaking to that woman about—”

  “I know you heard me,” Mercy says, cutting him off.

  He takes a few breaths before speaking again, perhaps gaging whether or not to push the matter further at all. “I only … asked … because I saw his trial at the—” He swallows hard, cutting himself off yet again. Is this fool Scot going to make a habit of saying things he wishes he could take back every time we meet? Mercy wonders if it would be a mercy to offer him a kiss that would shut him up forever.

  “Well, go on,” Mercy prompts him coldly. “You saw his trial on the broadcast. Want to tell me about it?”

  “N-No.” Scot shakes his head so fast, his parted hair dances.

  “Want to remind me of the sound of his cries when the Banshee King screamed his brother Fylan to death?” asks Mercy, tilting her head. “Or maybe you’d like to remind me of Dran’s last words that fateful day when he spoke into the camera of the broadcast, telling all of Atlas—”

  “Make it fly, Shye,” murmurs Scot. “I’d … I’d always wondered what that meant. I-I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “Make it fly, Shye?” Mercy takes a step towards him. “You never heard of Shye? The Key To All Locks? Shye, the Quick? Shye, the Unseen? Shye, the Question and Answer?”

  “N-No. I haven’t.” Her advancing on him makes him sink into the wall. “Is … Is that what they call you? Y-Y-Your friends? Shye? Is that—?”

  “If you must ask who Shye is,” says Mercy calmly when she’s standing right in front of him, the bottoms of their grey-and-greyer robes touching, “then you’ll never know who he is.”

  “He …?” Scot averts his eyes, clueless.

  Mercy gives up
on him, moving away and taking another hearty bite of her andragora root, staring up at the elevated track. Then, after a sweep of her robe, she nods. “Yeah. Too quiet without the trains, I’d say.”

  The night air softly taps upon their skin for a while. Moments later, Scot heads back inside without another word, and Mercy stows away the other half of her root, saving it for later. Then, she sits upon the ground and stares up into the sky, feeling like a big messy pile of grey fabric, swallowed up in the ugly robe. She pulls back her hood, lifts her gaze, and searches for the black star of mercy and the moony face of Dran.

  0201 Tide

  Regardless of the understanding they came to, Tide still can’t trust his emotions around the boy. Every piece of food he eats is suspect, but he doesn’t have much of a choice, confined to the house and dependent on the boy for his every bite of food and swallow of water. Why just food? Tide wonders. Is it that emotion must transmit through something living? And if that’s the case, why doesn’t Dog just transmit the feelings directly, person to person?

  His questions about the boy’s Legacy go unanswered, but other questions do not. “I think I may have located her,” Dog says when he comes home after a run for fresh produce.

  Tide takes the basket of vegetables. “Where?” he grunts, picking out a banana to eat. He’s hardly ever eaten them in his life, but ever since staying here in the first ward where they harvest them from their own self-contained mini-Greens, he has come to develop a taste for the curved yellow fruit.

  “Well, it’s simple, really. I was getting our fruit and inquiring about fabrics in the market when I decided to start asking if anyone had seen a Gin. A girl cornered me on my way out of the market and asked me who was looking for Gin, and I told her that I was. She then asked what I wanted with her, and I told her I just needed to speak to her. She gave me a place and a time, then told me that if I showed up armed, I’d be gutted.” Dog smiles proudly.

  Tide stares at him hard. “This girl threatened you?”

  Dog nods. “It was the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me.” His eyes turn serious. “But, um … what do I do when I meet her? What should I say?”

  “You won’t say a damn thing,” Tide spits back, “because you won’t be meeting her. I will.”

  Dog gasps. “I can’t let you go alone. It’s dangerous.”

  To that, Tide laughs, peeling open his banana and chomping on the first bite. “And what the fuck are you gonna do to protect me? Offer everyone who threatens us a piece of fruit infected with fear?”

  “That’s an idea.”

  “I’m going to meet this girl. For all you know, that girl was Gin. I don’t know what the fuck she looks like, but when I meet her, I’m going to take her back home to the twelfth.”

  Dog’s eyes soften. “Y-You’re leaving? After you find this Gin girl, you’re—?”

  “Of course I’m leaving. You thought I was just going to … stay here with you? Hide forever? I don’t have that option, Dog. The very reason I’m here is to bring back a girl who’s doing that very thing: hiding here. You don’t abandon the Abandon. If you do, your life is forfeit. That’s how it works.”

  “You’re from the Abandon?”

  Tide finishes his banana, then tosses the peel onto the floor. He struts across the room, causing Dog to back away until his heels hit the door, jostling it.

  Towering over the boy, he glares down at him and says, “Yeah, I am. And I don’t got a choice about that either. Tell me where this girl told you to meet her, and I’ll get Gin and take her home.”

  “The Abandon is no one’s home,” whimpers the boy.

  “It’s my home. It’s my only home.”

  “But this could be your home. You don’t even have to hide. We could talk to the Slum King. He’d understand. He’s a good man, he really is. He’ll understand about your stealing. He’ll invite you into the Coalition. You’ll get a full meal at the Giving every single day.”

  “There’s only room enough for one King here, and that’s me,” says Tide. “Fuck his Giving. I’ll make it a Taking when I rule.”

  “King?” The boy can’t seem to bear looking up at Tide’s face towering over him anymore, his eyes stuck on Tide’s chest.

  “Yeah. The Storm King, they’ll call me. Tide Wellport, the Storm King.” Tide sees a flicker in the boy’s eyes. “I don’t give a slummer’s fart if there was another Storm King already. I’ll be the second and I’ll wipe out memory of that first one.”

  “You’d be the first Storm King, actually,” murmurs the boy. “The first you’re thinking of was a Storm Queen.”

  Tide screws up his face, wondering if he’d had it wrong this whole time. It was a Storm Queen in our past? Is that still against the Sanctum rules, to have the same title, but for the other gender?

  “So you’re a King?”

  Tide snorts, suddenly finding himself amused. He even cracks half a smile. “You’ll believe any damn thing I say, won’t you?” he teases, giving Dog a rough rubbing of his hair, then taking him into a headlock—which inspires half a grunt and half a moan from him—and dragging him across the room playfully. “Alright, Dog. It’s time you spill what you know. Where’s the girl? Tell me.”

  “You can still join us!” His voice is muffled by Tide’s arm and muscular side. “Consider it! The Slum King will p-p-protect you. I’ll protect you! P-Please don’t leave. The Abandon isn’t your home.”

  Tide squeezes harder, earning a choking sound from the boy. “Where do I meet this girl? Tell me before I pull your head off.”

  “Please!”

  “TELL ME.”

  The boy’s arms grip Tide in half a hug to support himself in the headlock. Finally, Tide feels him slacken with surrender. “At the east end of the market by the pottery. Midnight.”

  Tide lets go of the boy. He drops down to the floor at Tide’s feet, his eyes looking sullen and defeated. On all fours, the boy looks like half a dog. My little puppy to do my bidding, Tide thinks, amused.

  “You know,” he says down to him, “you could join me.”

  Dog looks up, rising to his knees. “You?”

  “When I get this Gin girl. Come with me to the Abandon. Be my little sidekick. Be my gofer.”

  Dog swallows hard. He looks like he wants to cry. “I … I can’t.”

  Tide snorts mockingly. “What is it? You afraid?”

  “Yes. Terrified. The Abandon … No one lives in the Abandon. Have you … H-Have you not heard anything I said?”

  Tide glances out of the window. The sun is nearly set. It’s such a marvel, to be in a place where both the buildings and the Lifted City aren’t eclipsing the sky. I have about five hours, I reckon, before it is midnight. Five hours.

  “Tide is your name?” he asks suddenly, his voice soft.

  Tide turns, dropping his eyes to the boy who still kneels on the floor with a despondent look on his face. “Yeah. What of it?”

  “Named after nature.” The boy smiles, his eyes drifting to Tide’s legs as he speaks thoughtfully. “I find it curious, how your Legacy is in wind … yet you’re named after water.”

  Tide immediately wants to take that comment as an insult. The very next moment, he feels a different sort of mood take him over. “Hey, Dog.” The boy looks up at him. “Thanks for looking out for me over these past few days.”

  “I’d do it as long as you wanted,” he responds.

  And that’s the last thing that’s uttered between the boys before Tide eventually finds his place on the couch and Dog finds his place in front of his instrument where he weaves and sews and constructs.

  It’s several hours later when the boy rises from his chair and presents Tide with a new outfit. “This is it?” Tide grunts in response, taking the shirt and pants from the boy. He inspects it. The sleeves, long and soft, are green. The body of the shirt is a greyish white with a subtle dark pattern sewn throughout it. The pants are made in a deep grey color, the fabric as rough as jeans, but appearing more like
cloth. He rubs the clothes with his fingers, observing the texture.

  “D-Do you want to … try it on?”

  He wants to see you in them. Give your dog a show. Tide gives a shrug, tosses the new clothes at the couch, then pulls off his own shirt. When he gets it over his head, he finds Dog looking the other way, his arms folded over his chest and his face red. He’s not looking. Maybe he thinks he isn’t allowed to. Tide’s glow fills the room even more, painting everything in a subtle pink hue.

  Tide ignores him and the glow, then proceeds to drop his pants. Since he just bathed in the afternoon—more out of boredom than of necessity—he feels fresh when he steps his big legs into the grey pants. As he pulls them up, he discovers them to be tight on his thighs. With a bit of struggle, he gets them on and buttons the waist with no issue. Dog is still looking away, his gaze averted as if to respectfully lend Tide some privacy. Tide isn’t sure if he should find it noble or just sad that the boy isn’t enjoying the view. Tide tries on the shirt next, flipping it over his head and pulling it down. He hears a thread or two snap, but he pushes through it carelessly, slipping in his left arm, then his right, and then he starts to wriggle and dance to get the damn thing on.

  “A little fucking help,” Tide grunts through a veil of the shirt he’s trying to squeeze himself into.

  He feels Dog in front of him, even though he can only see a blurred shape through the fabric that covers his face. Dog’s fingers graze Tide’s abdomen, inspiring Tide to issue a short spasm, tickled for an instant, before the boy’s hands clasp the base of the shirt and pull it all the way down Tide’s broad shoulders and meaty torso. When the shirt falls the way it should, Tide stands before the boy with his off-white chest and long green sleeves. The shirt feels like a second skin, every inch of Tide’s muscular body hugged in firm yet comfortable fabric.