by Daryl Banner
Recognition dawns on them both.
In the next instant, Halves leaps from his bed and tackles her to the floor with all the feeble strength of half a man, his legs tangled in the sheets and ripping from his bed as they go plummeting to the floor—Halves atop her. She protests with a chorus of, “Wait, wait, wait!” but soon her words are muffled by the sleeve of her own grey robe as Halves pulls the length of it over her neck and mouth, pressing it with all the strength he can manage. Murder is in his eyes as he bares his teeth. Drool and spittle lazily dangle from his snarled lips as the woman beneath his clutch hisses and splutters for breath, unable to get out from under his unmovable body.
Her desperate eyes lock onto his pleadingly.
He bares down on her, keeping his weight in place, keeping the length of fabric firmly over her mouth and throat, slowly strangling the life out of her.
And then her hand draws up from somewhere near his waist. Something sharp tickles his abdomen, but his Legacy won’t let the weapon in her clutch pierce him. The sharp thing comes up to his stomach, then his chest, and finally the point of her knife is at his neck, threats in the woman’s eyes.
If only I knew that I could choose to end my life today at the sharp point of Mercy’s knife—or Ennebal. Two Deadly Answers.
Halvesand Lesser pushes his neck against her blade, daring her. He opens his mouth, and through a hiss that escapes his burning, anguished throat, he hisses the words, “Do … It …”
Mercy’s eyes flicker with uncertainty, the knife still held firmly at his throat, ready despite Halves’ stubbornly loyal Legacy.
The two tiny words are agony, but he repeats them. “Do … It …”
Mercy’s eyes no longer reflect the threat of death. They now fill with something else entirely. Something sad. Something faraway.
Halves doesn’t even realize it when he loosens his grip. Mercy breathes deeply as her airway is revived, but her eyes searchingly remain on his. The emotion in them seems to twist into something more curious as she continues to study him.
The acid of tears finds his eyes for the second time today as he stares down at Mercy, the woman responsible for what’s happened to him. She’s right here. She’s beneath his body, trapped, unable to go anywhere. Against all odds, the woman has unknowingly come straight to him and landed in a trap at the foot of his hospital bed.
And they only stare at one another. Why can’t I kill her? He is now staring upon her in much the same way that she stares back.
“I thought I killed you,” Mercy whispers. “H-How …?”
Of course, Halvesand can’t answer. Not truly. He feels his lips growing wet from their hanging open in shock. When the first drop of blood lands on Mercy’s cheek, he realizes the wetness on his lips is blood, his price for uttering those two tiny words twice.
Mercy doesn’t flinch when the drop hits her cheek, nor does she flinch when the second one does. She just stares up at him with her beautiful, searching eyes.
Beautiful …?
“You want to die?” she questions quietly, gently. “Is that it? You survive my poison … impossibly … and you … you still want to die?”
Halves feels sick suddenly. He feels his bottom lip quivering, the tears desperate to fall out of his eyes. He’s staring down at his worst nightmare and he can’t even bring himself to quash it out.
“If it is your wish to die,” she goes on, her words slow, “all you need to do is kiss me.”
An acid tear drips from his eye and lands on her cheek right by the gifts of his blood. She squints, her only indication of pain, but she still doesn’t look away.
“Kiss me,” she repeats, “or live.”
Two Answers.
Halves thinks of his son or daughter. He thinks of his nephew or niece. He thinks of all the races he won against Aleksand, and the ones he lost.
He brings his lips to hers.
His eyes shut and he feels the tender flesh of her lips as they join. He tastes nothing, yet feels a surge of desire. He remembers the armor she wore—the armor she’d taken from his dead partner Pace’s lifeless body. He remembers how she looked when she stripped that armor off in that room in the Lifted City, just before binding him to the wall. He remembers the look in her eye then, a look he will never forget as he passes to the other side, his life having come to an end.
He pulls away from the kiss, then falls onto his side next to her, waiting for the poison on Mercy’s lips to make quick work of him.
Mercy rises from the floor. When Halves opens his eyes, he finds her staring down at him wearing that same curious expression, the grey hood drawn up again to cover her hair and cast a shadow down half her face.
“I can’t kill you,” she says softly to him. “I won’t.”
Halves licks his lips, searching for the poison. A sting of deceit cuts him deeply. Twice, she’s deceived me with her poisons and her tricks. He stares up at her, incredulous.
He makes a grab at her ankle, but she parries, taking one step away. She shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I learned the hard way that there is no antidote to my poison. My brother’s life was the cost of learning that lesson.”
Halves doesn’t care if his throat bursts. He doesn’t care if he must live with the agony for days just to utter these words, but he does it anyway: “K … K-Kill … me …”
“No,” she says simply.
“K-Kill …”
“There’s a reason you’re alive,” she states, her voice losing the touch of sympathy it had a second ago. “There’s a reason you’re the only fucking person who survived my poison. The Sisters—who can all kiss my ass for as much as I care for or believe in them—gave you that pretty little Legacy of yours. A Legacy that saved you. And you want to lie there and beg for me to still take your life? After all that?” Mercy snorts at that contemptuously. “Fuck you. If Dran could still be alive, even with just a scrap of life left in him, even without legs, even without a fucking voice, he’d fucking appreciate it and make everything out of it. He’d fight to live. He wouldn’t grovel at the feet of a woman like me—a woman who’s so despicable that even Sisters abandon her. Fuck you for trying to waste your life. You already had a chance at my mercy, and your Legacy saved you from it.”
Halves’ eyes blur even worse as the acid tears fill them again. A drop spills from the side of his face, burning a path as it races away.
Mercy brings the blade to her lips, giving it a kiss. “If it’s been your dream to kill me ever since you woke up and realized you’re still alive … then rest assured, I’m already fucking dead. I died the day my Dran did.” She pockets the knife with a huff. “You’re not some weak, sickly thing. You’re the only asshole in all of Atlas who survived my poison. Now go do something with that. Win a throne. Save a life. Write a poem. I don’t fucking care. Just live.”
With that, the woman in the grey robe sweeps out of the room, the breeze from her robe wafting over the hairs on Halvesand’s arm, inspiring a chill deep within him. Lying on his back on the cold tile floor, Halves stares blankly at the ceiling with wonder in his eyes. Did all of that just happen? Did all of that truly happen … or is the poison in his mind as deceptive and cruel as the poison in his neck?
0212 Rone
Rone strolls down the streets of Atlas, alone.
He doesn’t see a damn thing. He isn’t being wary or cautious or aware of his surroundings. He might as well be strolling down the hallway of a friend’s house, for all the care he gives the dangerous part of the seventh he’s in. Is it the seventh that he’s in?
He decides it is, and he feels warm. Hey, I’ve been here before, he reasons loosely. There’s a reason they call it the Skinny. Rone pulls his shirt off in one careless go and pitches it to the side, forgotten. He won’t need it anymore. Who cares?
Rone doesn’t give two slummers’ shits about the state of the world, about the Madness, about the anarchy in the streets. He’ll be happy to kick the ass of the next person he sees, or else grab them by the ears and pull them
in for a wet, stupid-faced kiss. “It’s the Reign Of Madness,” he calls out to no one in particular. “Who gives a shit? My name’s Rone. Nice to meet you.”
There is no one on the street. Rone wonders if that last swig of chemical is working his system nine times as hard as it usually does. He hadn’t had any chemical at all for months, he realizes. Perhaps he became sensitized to its effects.
That’s about as little or as much thought as he gives it. From now until his last day alive, he’ll be a chemical mess.
The invisible voice had followed him for quite some time, guiding him from one end of the Lifted City to the other, it seemed. There was a tunnel, a lift, a backstreet or two, then another lift, and … well, he stopped paying attention to where he was going at that point. He remembers little of what happened before he was suddenly ambling down the streets of the slums, ignoring the voice that kept offering to help him, that kept urging him to protect the item, that even resorted to threatening him.
Even now, he’s not completely convinced that the woman who bore the voice has gone away. “Are you there?” he calls out, deciding to test it. “Is this your Legacy? To cast your voice halfway across the city? Or is it invisibility? Are you a voice or a person? Never mind, I don’t really care.”
Rone sits cross-legged in an alleyway with the syringe in his palm. He tosses it to his other hand, then tosses it back. The clear fluid wiggles within its glass confines.
“You,” he says accusingly to the liquid, though his voice is light and his tone, playful. “You are what my sister died for. You. Well, you and a friend of hers. I suppose that’s noble, at least,” Rone decides with a hiccup and a sigh. Really, is he still truly influenced by the chemical, or hasn’t it worn off ages ago?
Rone aims the syringe at his own chest, curious. Should I try to taste you through my heart? Will you be nine times stronger than that splash of chemical I had to honor my dead sister? He holds the point of the needle there, its tip nearly tickling him. He lets it graze over his nipple, which slowly hardens. What are you? he asks the syringe.
It’s medicine for a treasure beneath the floor. Was that really his sister’s words, or has he warped them in his mind? A weapon in your arsenal. What the hell does that even mean?
And why didn’t she just say directly what she wanted him to do with it? Why the riddles?
“Please don’t stab yourself with that.”
Rone’s eyes flick up. He stares ahead where the voice came from, but sees nothing. It’s the woman’s voice, the same one who led him to his sister.
“Why can’t I see you?” he asks the air.
“It doesn’t matter. Please don’t waste the serum.”
“Serum?” He pulls the syringe from his chest and gives it a light wiggle, the clear liquid dancing inside. “Why don’t you tell me what the hell this is and what I’m supposed to do with it?”
“I already told you what your sister said to do with it.”
“But I don’t know what it means.”
The voice seems to move toward his right. “A treasure beneath the floor?” she questions. “Was it a floor at your house? Or is she talking about the Waterways? The sewers?”
“I’ve never been. We have nothing beneath our floors at home.”
“The Noodle Shop?”
Rone grows still at those words. How does she know …? “Who are you?” he asks, his tone turning hard.
“It doesn’t matter. Think, Rone. The fate of Atlas depends on it. Think on what it means. A treasure beneath—”
He reaches out suddenly and his hand grabs hold of an ankle. In an instant, he looks up to find the shape of a naked woman his age. She wears nothing but a silk piece over her breasts and another at her hips. Her hair is cut at the neck, a mess of light brown tangles that dance in the night breeze. He is stunned by her beauty.
“Are you … Are you a Goddess?” he asks.
The woman looks alarmed at first. Then, her face lightens and she offers him a small smile. “Not really,” she answers.
Not really? Rone won’t let go of her ankle. He slowly brings himself to standing as his hand slowly runs up her body, careful not to let go of a single part of her. For some reason, the woman lets him, though her eyes grow more wary by the second. When he is finally on his clumsy feet, the two stand eye-to-eye, and his hand is gripping her arm. He feels like if he lets go, she’ll vanish again.
“I much rather like talking to you when I can see you,” he says.
“I can’t stay for long,” she warns him. “I must go soon.”
“Tell me what this serum is.”
“I don’t know.”
“Guess. Tell me what you do know. What was my sister doing there? What was that place?”
The woman has soft eyes that search his for the longest while. He can’t tell if she’s admiring his pretty eyes or sifting through a memory. At this point, he welcomes either possibility. A lifetime of endless sex and chemical-guzzling would please him greatly and take him far enough away from the grief of his sister that he might never feel a thing again.
Then she says, “Cintha was part of a great experiment involving a lot of … patients. They were trying to remove her Legacy.”
The words gut Rone. He knows them to be true in an instant. If there was ever a thing Cintha would wish for, it would be to be rid of her sexual Legacy.
“When Sanctum broke apart,” the woman goes on, “they were destroying all evidence that the place existed. That involved killing all of the patients, too, and every last drop of that serum that’s in your hand.”
Rone glances down at the syringe in his free hand. His eyes go in and out of focus, but he blinks away the effects of the chemical that must still be swimming in his body, even from that little splash of it he had.
“I don’t know what it does. But if I had to guess, it has a deadly effect … or else a neutralizing one. When I found Cintha, she was already bleeding her last, and she was looking for a friend … a friend who I was also looking for.”
“Bleeding her last …” whispers Rone, trying to picture it, trying to be there with his sister, even if he wasn’t.
“I stayed with her until the end. She wasn’t alone.”
Rone feels his insides hollow out. No, it’s too soon. Don’t cry. Don’t let it out or else you’ll never stop. Rone lets go of the woman, and in an instant, she’s gone, just as quickly as she’d come. He steps away from her, the syringe clutched tightly in his fist.
“Rone,” calls the woman’s voice. “She wasn’t alone.”
And now I am, Rone decides, still backing away. His heel kicks into the side of a dumpster. He circumvents it, then turns and starts to walk away.
“Rone … Please …”
He starts running. He can’t hear another word of it. Ruena is gone. Erana is gone. Cintha is gone. Wick and the others, they are lost to me. Rain has no more place for me. My family is dead. Everything …
Everything …
When he still hears the voice cry out, Rone plunges through a wall, reckless. He pushes through a house, his solidified feet kicking into glasses on a coffee table, knocking over a lamp, and kicking up a rug from the floor. Two men at a table shout out at his arrival.
But Rone is out of the back wall as quickly as he came in through the front. He’s in the den of another house, three kids on the couch in front of a blank broadcast. The three kids look up, fear in their eyes.
Rone charges through them, phasing through wall after wall after wall, bursting into home after home after home, until he’s back on the street and still running, running, running.
Running.
Running.
He isn’t sure when it happens, but something catches his foot and—thankfully—he manages to turn solid just before crashing face-first into the ground. He doesn’t bother getting up, letting himself enjoy the sting of whatever scraped-up mess now lives on his face. He peeks open an eye just to observe the syringe still in his grip, and has a second or two to marve
l at the fact that it’s not broken.
“Let the Madness stay mad,” he mumbles to the syringe, his lips half-kissing the pavement. “Let the world get what it deserves. Let the Lifted City fall. I just want to bleed in peace for a while.”
And bleed in peace he does, staring at the syringe and basking in a pool of his own stinging pain, his filth of not having bathed in weeks, and his longing regret of things that could have been and never will be.
A shadow pours over him coupled by soft footsteps that come to a stop.
“I thought it was you I heard,” comes the familiar voice, a young man, someone of the streets, judging by the tone.
Rone doesn’t care who it is. Hopefully they have a really long sword and can sheathe it right through my back, he thinks. I would let them do it. It might even be comfortable.
“How’s that pavement taste?”
Rone pushes air out of his lips, staring at the tip of the syringe, the needle, the thing that’s supposed to save Atlas. Rone starts to laugh. All these big swords … All these pointed daggers … All these fired arrows and long blades and Weapons Of Sanctum … and his sister says this tiny syringe is the answer. Rone laughs and laughs, his aching body jostled by the laughter.
“You’re fucking crazy, aren’t you?” asks the man standing over him. “Lost your damned mind, huh?”
Rone laughs until tears spill from his one eye that isn’t buried in pavement. The tears run down the bridge of his nose. He can’t stop laughing. His belly aches and his lungs are sucking in air for each and every little laugh.
“Get up, fool. Come with me. Oh, you’re such a mess. Got you all drunk on chemical and sky-dreams, huh? Is that it?”
The shadow shifts, pushing Rone onto his back. Rone is still laughing hysterically. He hardly even sees or recognizes the young man standing over him through his blurry, tear-filled eyes.
“Up, up,” says the man, pulling Rone off the ground.
The syringe slips from Rone’s fingers and lands with a soft tap on the pavement as he’s carried away.
