Outlier: Reign Of Madness

by Daryl Banner

  “When I’m alone … I’m powerless.”

  The words weren’t what Athan was expecting, and he finds his cheery smile flattened a bit. Wick just stares out of the window, his soft brown eyes still sleepy and lost in thoughts.

  “No one to draw from,” Athan finally says with understanding.

  “With no one nearby, I have no Legacy to pull. I’m … powerless. It never really occurred to me until I woke up yesterday and you were outside with the others across the street and … and I felt this absence of … whatever … inside me.” Wick shrugs. “I mean, I’m not too upset about it. I’m used to feeling like I have no real Legacy. I’ve lived my whole life feeling like I’m broken, having the need to sleep as I do. But we both know that isn’t a Legacy,” he finishes with a smirk at Athan.

  “But isn’t it?” counters Athan gently. “I mean, you told me once that some people’s Legacies … radiate more, right?”

  “Yeah,” confirms Wick. “I could make noise with Juston halfway across the room, but I’d have to be pretty close to Victra to see through others’ eyes.” His mouth twitches, a dimple popping out of his cheek. “I can’t believe they’re both gone.”

  Athan slides across the floor of their tiny room, relocating next to Wick and resting his head on his boy’s shoulder. “Me neither.”

  “So … what was your point?” Wick prods him. “About people radiating their powers?”

  “Well, it might be really unlikely, but …” Athan shrugs. “I was wondering if maybe you were pulling from someone whose Legacy radiates far. Like, really, really far.”

  Wick doesn’t say a word for a long while. Then he turns his head slightly and, in disbelief, murmurs, “Are you suggesting—?”

  “That maybe there’s someone out there who can sleep,” finishes Athan.

  Wick chuckles at first, finding it funny. Athan knows how very improbable the whole notion would be, but it was on his mind and he figured he ought to share the thought with Wick.

  “It’d have to be a very, very powerful someone,” Wick finally says.

  “Or someone who just … radiates,” says Athan lazily.

  Wick kisses the top of Athan’s head, then says, “You can radiate all over me if you want. I’m so ready for you to radiate everywhere.” Athan snorts at Wick’s crudeness, and then Wick shifts himself to get their lips together.

  Athan’s eyes open during their kiss and drift to the big window beside him where he notices a strange figure in the street. He ends the kiss and pulls away. “Wick?”

  Wick sees the concern in Athan’s face, then turns toward the window. He sees the person too. “Who’s that?”

  “She’s looking right at us.”

  Wick slowly moves away from the window, rising off the floor. “Stay here.”

  Athan looks up at him, worried. “Wick?”

  “She looks …” Wick blinks, all the peace and calm in his face wrecked in a moment. “She looks …”

  Like a Lifted City person, Athan finishes in his mind. “Wick, you can’t go out there alone. We don’t know who she is or why she’s here. She could even be—”

  “Impis knows where I live,” Wick blurts at once, his eyes flitting everywhere as the thoughts race past them. “I’m one of his recent Nine. And now he’s sent someone here to collect me.”

  Athan’s on his feet in the next instant. “How do you know?”

  “I heard it,” he murmurs, his eyes scrunching up. “I heard it. Like, like, like thoughts. I heard it … in my mind.” He looks up and meets Athan’s eyes. “I don’t think she’s here to harm me.”

  “Wick …”

  “Stay here,” Wick says again, then pushes through the door and is gone in the next instant.

  Athan glances out the window again, still seeing the woman in the middle of the street. She wears a skintight white suit from her neck to her ankles that even covers the whole of her arms, and her hair is drawn back into a long, perfectly straight ponytail that looks oiled and shiny. With her regal demeanor and the unique shimmer of her outfit, she looks so out of place down here in the dirty slums. It’s no wonder that Wick’s first reaction was to freeze with alarm at the sight of her.

  Athan doesn’t trust it in the least. He hurries out of the room to follow Wick, despite being told to stay. My presence protects you, he should have told Wick, and you ought to remember that. He nearly trips rushing down the narrow stair, and the front door slaps against the wall when he opens it to the sight of Wick standing before the woman. Lionis, Prat, Ivy, and Arrow are near the tree, and it seems they were having their own conversation about something a second ago, but are now fully invested in their visitor.

  Athan pushes past them and approaches Wick and the woman in the street. Already tall, the woman is made taller by a set of white heels, which are opened at the tip to show her dark toes punctuated by bright white-painted nails. Her eyes turn upon Athan curiously, and it is then that she smiles. “Athan?” she murmurs.

  He stops, alarmed. “D-Do I know you?”

  “You will now,” she answers. “I’m Arcana. It’s nice to meet you. And you,” she says, turning her face back to Wick. “I know I have caught you both off-guard. Really, I’m a bit surprised to have found you here at your home.”

  Wick squints suspiciously at her. “Why?”

  She smiles at him. “Well, as I have come to learn from my many sources, you were staying at the Windstone Academy, yet were nowhere to be found after Ruena Netheris’s coronation. Or, rather, her almost-coronation. It might’ve been easy to presume that you did not survive the aftermath.”

  The woman’s cool demeanor when she utters the name “Ruena Netheris” sends chills down Athan’s spine. That was the Queen who was going to save us. She was going to unite slum and sky.

  “Of course, now,” she goes on, “I know you fled beforehand.”

  Wick studies her guardedly, but his voice is calm and curious when he asks, “So what do you want?”

  Arcana gives a curt nod at the boys. “I will make it plain. Impis Lockfyre has an incredible affinity toward you, Anwick Lesser. It was your Legacy Exam that impressed him. I have never known anyone with such a … simple Legacy to catch so much of his attention. Of course, when my sister and I came here with Impis to collect you, what I saw in your mother’s mind … took us by surprise. Your ‘simple’ Legacy was actually a lie. Your true Legacy is to sleep and dream, just as the Ancients did. And …” She shuts up, her eyes turning on him with bafflement.

  Wick presses his lips together tightly, still studying her without a response.

  “Oh.” Arcana tilts her head, the whole length of her ponytail dancing. “That’s not it at all, is it? We … We’ve been deceived twice. My, my.” She reflects true surprise upon her face. “How remarkable. You can read my mind … just as I can read yours?”

  Wick folds his arms and continues to stare at her.

  Arcana’s eyebrows lift, as if in reaction to something Athan can’t see or hear. Then she tilts her head the other way, as if waiting for an answer.

  Wick gives a curt nod, then shrugs and resumes staring at her.

  It’s at this point that Athan realizes they’re still having a chat—with their minds. The mounting silence begins to frustrate him as he watches their facial expressions give tiny hints to the thoughts that clearly pass between them.

  Athan can’t stand it any longer. “What are you two saying?” he blurts, hating feeling excluded. “What do you want?” he asks her.

  Wick faces him, bewildered. “She wants me to come with her to the Lifted City. She wants me to … help manage the Madness. She wants me to join them.”

  Athan blinks. “That’s … That’s f-f-fucking crazy,” he gets out.

  “It’s incredible,” murmurs Wick, turning his gaze back to the woman. “Communicating back and forth through our minds. It’s so fast. It’s so efficient. It’s so … intuitive.”

  Even Arcana’s face seems to have softened, as if she shares the same a
stonishment. “I have never met someone else to do this with.”

  “I have never been inside someone else’s mind,” mumbles Wick, his words slurred as if he’s forgetting he’s even speaking.

  Athan sighs. Why is Anwick so quick to trust her? There is no way he’s going back up there. Impis is a madman who will kill him. Impis—

  “Yeah,” Wick says, turning to Athan. “I know. I said all those same things to her.”

  Athan takes a step back. “Y-You’re looking into my mind too?”

  “Yeah. I …” Wick winces. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to just jump in. I’m still a bit shaky with Arcana’s power. It just came to me so naturally and now I’m kinda …”

  Then he spins around suddenly, his eyes moving between the four others at the tree—Arrow, Prat, Ivy, and then Lionis. He stares at them intently, his face reflecting concern.

  When Athan touches Wick’s arm, his eyes snap to him. “Sorry,” Wick says at once. “I’m overwhelmed a bit. I can hear everything.”

  “Try to focus,” Athan encourages him.

  “I’m trying.”

  Athan holds Wick by his shoulders and brings their foreheads together, forgetting everything and everyone around them. If Wick isn’t worried about the woman after swimming around in her mind, Athan won’t worry either. “I’m here, baby. It’s just you and me. No one else. Try to focus on one thing.”

  Wick’s breathing evens out as he clings to Athan. After some time, Wick gives a subtle nod, then brings his eyes up to meet Athan’s, his smile returned. “That … was a rush.”

  Athan returns a tightened smile of his own. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I am. Thank you.”

  “Wick, you’re not really considering going with her, are you?”

  Wick’s eyebrows pull together. “Hell no. I’d be fucking crazy.”

  “If I may?” cuts in Arcana.

  The boys let go to face her. But before she talks, Lionis appears at their side, and his tone is nothing friendly. “Whatever you say to them, you can say to me, too. And use your mouth, not your mind. We’re all in this together or we’re not in it at all.”

  Wick’s gaze remains on Arcana, regarding his brother not at all. Arrow, Prat, and Ivy keep a bit of distance, their faces wary as they stand on the lawn a few paces behind. Lionis, ever self-assured, folds his arms and waits for the woman to speak.

  She only looks at Wick. “It is quite fortunate that I have found you first … and not my sister. If you come back to Cloud Keep with me, I want it to be of your own volition. Not because anyone forced your hand.”

  “No one forces our hands,” says Lionis with a lift of his chin.

  “And no one will,” Arcana promises, her eyes still on Wick. “I do understand it may seem illogical, my proposal for you to join us, but perhaps I can offer you a different way of seeing it.”

  Lionis starts to say something else, but Wick cuts him off by muttering, “Go on,” to the woman.

  And she goes on. “You were once members of something called Rain, as I have read from your mind,” she says, then turns her eyes to Lionis, “and yours,” then to Athan, “and yours,” then to Arrow and Prat, “and yours and yours. Your main objective, if I’m not mistaken, was to kill the Banshee King, was it not?” She smiles knowingly, her eyes flicking back to Wick. “Impis Lockfyre did it for you. He fulfilled the very purpose for which your group was banded together. He is the rain, too.”

  “I can’t believe you’d have the audacity to say that our motives were at all the same,” Lionis says, his voice seething with indignance. “Our values were in freeing the slums from oppression. We aimed our weapons at the Banshee King in the name of freedom. Impis only stabbed him because he wanted power and glory. While we fought for justice, he fought for vanity.”

  Completely unfazed, the woman responds, “And this opinion is coming from the one who, not long ago, believed that King Greymyn and Sanctum were good and necessary powers to govern the Last City of Atlas. Do I have the right of it?”

  Lionis swallows, seeming unable to form a response. Wick’s eyes cast downward, and for a moment, Athan wonders if he means to defend his brother, despite the bad blood currently between them.

  Then Lionis turns his pompous face to Wick. “If you are going with this woman, then I will go to.”

  Wick sneers. “The hell you are.”

  “Anwick.” Lionis’s face softens at once, and then he takes a deep breath. “I … I know that—without reading your mind—you cannot stand me sometimes. But I am your older brother. I think of things that you don’t. I want to protect you. Anwick, I’m …” He sighs. “I’m sorry, alright? You’re my brother, and if you go, I’m going too.”

  Wick looks at Arcana with surprise. “You actually accept that?”

  Arcana nods. “And him,” she says, directing her next words to Athan. “I know from the fire burning in your mind that you won’t let your Anwick go without you, either. That is fine. I need all the help I can get if I plan to form a team who can properly ‘manage the madness’, as I so put it before Anwick here stole the words out of my brain,” she adds teasingly, giving him a wink, then returning her gaze to Athan. “I’m not here to sell you Impis Lockfyre as the answer to your ails, or the means to a better future, or even sell him to you as a good man. He is not. He’s a damaged man. But I’ve worked alongside him for many years now, and I know him better than any of you. And if you have any doubts in your mind, ask your friend-brother-ally-lover Anwick here to peer into mine, and he’ll see the truths just as plainly. I cannot hide them even if I tried.”

  Athan and Wick share a look. Wick sucks in his lips, silent.

  “And if you give it time,” she concludes, “I think you’ll find you have more in common with the new regime than you realize.” She gives a short, knowing nod at Wick, then says, “I will be at the train station eight blocks over. It only operates with a key that I have and will connect us to Pylon #208, which will lead us to the Lifted City.”

  Lionis crosses his arms, not caring to hide his clear contempt for the woman and all that she’s said. Wick wears a dubious expression, and Athan can’t tell if he’s listening to her mind and hearing a whole other story—or her words, which they are sadly limited to.

  “If you make up your mind, that is where I will be,” says Arcana. “You have an hour.”

  Then the woman turns and saunters away, her heels stabbing the broken pavement as she disappears. People from their lawns and porches say no words and make no movements as they all watch her go, heads slowly turning in silence.

  After her departure, the neighbors start heading down the road, wanting to know what all of that was about. The man who lives across the street shouts a question, as does a woman several houses down, a child at her hand dragging behind her and hardly able to keep up. Even their kind neighbors Auleen and Iranda are slowly approaching, the baby cradled on Iranda’s chest. Swarms of people angry, concerned, or simply curious are gathering.

  Wick shakes his head and cuts through the noise of chatter with his shout. “Please! We need time to process this. Please, give me a bit of space. I need to—”

  “We haven’t had their like down here until you arrived,” spits out a man with a mustache hanging over his lips.

  “My children,” puts in a tall man with a quivering voice on the verge of tears, “my children, all my children, I came here to be safe, to make sure they grow up, to make sure they have healthy lives. I can’t—I can’t trust to—”

  A woman cuts him off. “I knew it, ever since your father—”

  “QUIET!” shouts Wick, his hands at his head at once. The noise of the crowd dampens. With his eyes closed, Athan watches him say, “I have seen into the woman’s head. She took a huge risk coming here. She is defenseless. I saw things Impis has done and said. I saw things that have happened up there. I saw many things I doubt she even knows I saw. I …” Wick’s eyes open. “I need to discuss this with my team. None of you are in dang
er. Please know that. I will make sure you all remain out of danger. It’s not my wish to invite any of the madness here, where we have plenty of our own to enjoy.”

  Wick releases his head, then turns and heads back for the house. Some in the crowd mutter a word or two, and a few of them whisper to one another, but no more fuss is made, and soon Athan follows his boy, Lionis and the others trailing behind.

  When the door closes with all the boys and Ivy inside, Lionis is first to speak. “Tell us what you saw in her mind.”

  Wick stands by the sliding glass doors, arms folded as he stares blankly ahead. Lionis, Arrow, Prat, and Ivy stand in a cluster by the door while Athan is the man between them all, positioned just behind the couch as he keeps his eyes trained on Wick, awaiting the answer with as much curiosity as the others.

  “I saw a version of the Madness I never thought I’d see.” Wick shakes his head, still staring blankly. “She doesn’t trust Impis any more than we do, but she knows him on this deeper level … this oddly personal level … as if she’s his sister, or a childhood friend … of which she’s neither. She thinks there’s a method to his madness.” He smirks, glancing up at Athan. “Forgive me the pun. But I felt, for the first time, that I might have caught a glimpse into Impis’s grander purpose. I think, on some deep, psychological level, Impis Lockfyre is as anti-Sanctum as we are.”

  “I’m not anti-Sanctum,” Lionis puts in, always having to assert his opinion, “and I never was. I think order is necessary for a city to survive. But the order in power had become corrupt, that much I can admit … even now.” Lionis’s eyes narrow. “But how does one explain Impis’s nihilistic determination to just … destroy the city piece by piece without enduring a scrap of consequence? He lives his days firing red lightning bolts at the slums and laughing about the deaths he causes. There is no logic to that man.”

  Wick lifts his gaze to his brother. “And is there logic when I’m beating your face in because you accuse me of killing our sister?”

  Lionis’s face hardens.