by Daryl Banner
When Kid still remains silent, Fae nods and tells her it’s okay, that she doesn’t need to say anything. Kid hears her parents’ voices again, echoing from some distant, long-forgotten memory she’ll never have back. The longer they stay in this house, the less she feels she’ll ever see them again.
There is noise at the front door. Fae and Kid exchange a look. Is today the day? wonders Kid, her eyes bright and filled with as much glee as there is fear. Kid helps Fae off of the floor. She grabs the bag of supplies too, pulling it into the invisible world. Then, they listen.
Link, Kid suddenly realizes with terror. He’s upstairs. Fae seems to come to the same discovery, gripping Kid tighter with worry.
In that same instant, the front door opens and voices pour in. “Right there, yes, inside,” commands a woman. Soon, a brawny man and a brawnier woman carry either end of a couch through the door. I know that couch. It is set in the middle of the den right in front of an invisible Fae and Kid, who watch with wide eyes. More men and women come in carrying more and more furniture—each piece of which strikes wonder in Kid’s eyes. My furniture. All of it. This is the furniture of my childhood. A fateful table is brought into the dining room, followed by six very familiar chairs, three set at either side of it. A tiny table is brought in and set next to the couch. Then a tall dresser, slowly brought up the stairs, which alarms Kid the worst. There is nowhere to hide up there, she thinks to herself, horrified. Her body trembles while Fae holds her tightly.
At the sight of a man carrying a large broadcast screen toward them, Fae and Kid quickly sidestep into the kitchen, giving him room as he installs the device into the wall. More people enter through the back sliding glass door with kitchen appliances and more items.
“Yes, good,” says the woman from before, coming into the den.
It’s the neighbor. Kid watches her with wonder as she inspects the place, looking to her left, to her right, and then coming to a stop in the kitchen with her hands clasped, a perplexed look on her face.
“Something wrong, Ms. Reeda?” asks one of the deliverymen.
She gives a curt shake of her head. “No, no. I’m just …” She looks up at the ceiling, then back at the man. “You didn’t happen to see a little girl upstairs, did you? About this high?” she adds, putting a hand in the air around Kid’s height. “Really long hair?”
“No one’s here. Why? Got a squatter situation on your hands?”
“Oh, no, nothing of that sort. Just a sweet girl who, um … lives down the street,” the neighbor—Ms. Reeda—sweetly lies. “Sometimes she plays in this house. Nothing to worry on.”
“Got it. Hey, interesting paint job in that upstairs room, by the way,” the man adds. “A bit … exotic for my taste, but interesting.”
The man leaves through the back door while Ms. Reeda stands there for a minute with another perplexed look on her face, unsure of his meaning. She dismisses it with a wave of her hand and heads back to the living room to discuss the placement of a few decorative items on the side tables near the couch. “Yes,” she instructs them. “Good. I don’t want to scare a potential buyer with this décor, of course, but it is neutral enough for a tenth warder, subtle enough for a ninth. Maybe even an eleventh would find it in good taste.”
It’s an hour later when the men and women have vacated the house—which is now fully furnished from top to bottom—and the front door at last closes behind Ms. Reeda. Fae stays put while Kid rushes up the stairs. “Link??” she calls out, worried. She bursts into the colorful room, which now holds a bed, a desk, and a tiny chair by the window. Oddly, the furniture looks so much smaller than she remembers. “Link??”
“Here,” he mumbles.
Kid crouches down, finding him hiding under the bed.
“Close call,” Link says tiredly. “I had to slip into the bathroom until they brought in this bed. Are they gone now?” Kid nods, and so he slips out from under it. He gives an approving look at the new furniture. “Feels like an actual home, now.”
“Come downstairs,” Kid says, fussing and still not quite at ease. “We c-can’t be apart. They might come back. Maybe there’s more … things they want to bring in.”
“Good point.”
Link comes down the stairs with Kid, and the three of them gather in front of the broadcast screen, ready to turn invisible should they have any more unexpected visitors or deliveries. But the rest of the evening finds them free of company, and they are able to enjoy a meal from the bag of supplies that Kid was thankful she’d pulled into her realm of invisibility. Had the delivery people discovered it, they would have lost all of their things.
Instead, they now have countless other things. A couch. Tables. Chairs. A broadcast. A bed. Decorations. Lamps. Kid can’t believe her eyes as she walks about the house, recognizing once again how all of the furniture in the house is—
“—mine,” she finishes when she explains her discovery to Link.
Link chuckles. “Is that so? All of it, you say? Maybe your mom and dad will buy this house as is, and all this furniture will become theirs.” At the mixed look of wonder and worry in Kid’s eyes, Link gives her shoulder a reassuring rub. “Don’t worry, Kid. I’ll be here and Fae will be here when your parents arrive. Hey, you liking Fae’s hair? Soon, it’ll be as long as yours, maybe.” He chuckles. “Together always, remember?”
Kid glances at the dining room table, visible from the front door, and her heart sinks with fear. Later, as Link and Fae cuddle on the couch and murmur words of comfort to each other, Kid stares and stares at that table, picturing a little six-year-old version of herself hiding underneath it, just as her dad told her to do, then watching him die before her eyes at the hands of the masked men.
I won’t be afraid, she tries to tell herself, despite all the fear that rushes into her. I am a ghost and ghosts cannot die.
0215 Mercy
The streets are as silent as death at this time of night.
Mercy catches a hint of smoke in the air. Maybe something beautiful burned down. Maybe a family was torn apart, their screams unheard through the ripping, toiling flames. Maybe the Laughing Finger just spent some time laughing in this neighborhood.
When she comes around the corner, she sees a group of people in rags and tattered clothing around a fire pit. A man rubs his hands over it while a woman holds a stick with bits of food at the end of it over the dancing flames.
Mercy stops and watches the scene. It isn’t quite the picture of doom she was imagining. She hates to admit that the scene warms her heart, but it does.
“I thought I killed you,” she says to herself, hugging her body and leaning against the grimy brick of a building. The smoke from their fire pit intoxicates her. It’s a far better taste in her mouth than the constant bitterness of venom. “I don’t know anymore which is the greater mercy. Letting him live? Or letting him die?”
“Letting who die?”
Mercy turns to find the soft-eyed Sister man named Scot in his grey robe. Clutched in his hand is Mercy’s robe, which she had torn off her body and discarded on her way out of the Eleven Wings.
She narrows her eyes challengingly. “Why did you follow me?”
“I care about you. I was … w-w-worried.” He swallows hard and hugs her robe to his body protectively. “You dropped your robe.”
“I don’t want it anymore.”
“Please don’t say that.”
“I’m done with the Sisters.”
“Which Sisters? Us? Or the Three?”
Mercy hisses at him like a cat. “Both,” she spits at him, then turns back around to watch the people at the fire pit across the street.
“I wish you wouldn’t abandon us. The Sisters can be a home for you.”
“They don’t want me any more than I want them.”
“That’s not true.”
“Oh?” Mercy turns her head again, eyeing the stupid, weak-looking man with the annoyingly perfect hair and the soft eyes and the softer body through which she coul
d skewer him on her knife like a marshmallow. “Then allow me to enlighten you. One or more of our fellow Sisters is a thief. They have stolen a precious item from me. Lady Agdanagon is a wimp who can’t even approach her own blood sister with the accusation. Promises. Promises. Lies. Lies. I’m finished with the whole dirty, scheming lot of—”
Her words are cut off when he lifts his hand. Upon the middle finger, there lies the dull shimmer of a ring.
Mercy pierces his eyes with her own, but finds herself far less angry than she is astonished. “You …?”
“I …” He swallows hard and starts to pull the ring off his finger. “I was just … My feelings were … When I first …” He grunts, trying to pull the ring off. It appears to be stuck. “Really, I didn’t mean to … um … Listen, I …”
Mercy takes his hand. At first Scot flinches away, like he fears that she’s meaning to hurt him. Instead, she only takes his hand and brings the finger to her mouth, her eyes resting on his.
Scot parts his lips, watching with a racing heart and quickened breath.
Mercy, ever slowly, sucks his finger into her mouth. With her tongue, she teases and works on him, which causes Scot’s breath to push and pull even harder, his eyes wide and unblinking.
Then his private ecstasy quickly becomes a wince of pain as she pulls her mouth off with the ring upon her tongue. A soft, hissing steam issues from his finger, which he clutches against his body, a moan of pain wriggling out of him as he stares at it, alarmed.
Mercy pulls the ring from her mouth and slips it upon her own hand. She observes it, slick from her poisonous saliva.
“What’d you d-d-do to my finger?” Scot moans in a strangled voice, holding the hand firmly against his chest as he fights an urge to shout in pain. “It’s burning. It’s b-b-burning.”
“The other option to reclaim my ring was cutting that finger straight off,” she says, then quirks an eyebrow. “I call that mercy.”
Scot studies her eyes carefully as he tries his best to swallow his pain and not show any of it. He fails, but at least he tries. “Mercy,” he murmurs. “Who are you? Who are you really?”
“Take off that miserable grey robe of yours and I’ll tell you.”
He falters, the searing pain of his finger forgotten momentarily. Then, as if a match was struck instantly in his head, he drops her robe to the ground and fumbles for the binding of his own, loosening the tie and drawing the huge ugly thing over his head. He wears only a pair of tan linen shorts underneath, the rest of his torso, bare. He runs a hand sideways through his bright blond hair, as if to ensure that his perfect part is still in place. Then he crosses his arms self-consciously and waits for her approval.
Mercy’s eyes scan down his body. He was hiding quite a form beneath that big ugly robe. The man clearly has seen a gym several days a week throughout his lifetime, though he keeps a lean and simple form. He has no ink on his pale, peachy body, and his nipples are small.
“Now tell me straight,” demands Mercy. “Why my ring?”
Scot swallows. “B-Because … you intrigue me. A-And …”
“And?”
“And I like you.”
Mercy tilts her head. “You like me?”
“I think about you. Every day. Ever since I joined the Sisters. I like your eyes. I like the color of your lips. I find them ex-ex-exotic.”
Mercy purses her green lips automatically, not meaning to. The compliment must have sprung them to life. She turns the accidental flinch into an effort of biting the inside of her cheek as she squints and observes the soft man.
Then she says, “So you want to fuck me?”
Scot shakes his head. “N-No. I … I didn’t mean to objectify you like some pleasure girl from the slums. I simply like you.”
Some pleasure girl from the slums. Now the truth is made plain. “How about you tell me who you really are, Scot,” she says, her voice deep and deadly.
“Me? B-But …”
“You aren’t really from the Maiden’s Mercy. That was a lie. You aren’t from the fourth ward at all, are you?”
He sputters several times before he presses his lips together, his eyes cast downward. Then he gives a quick shake of his head, no.
“You’re from the Lifted City,” Mercy goes on.
After a moment of reluctance, Scot nods.
“You ran off after the King was felled,” she states, assuming his story without his uttering a single damn word. To that, Scot meekly nods again. “You abandoned the Lifted City and ran for safety. After some time of fending for yourself in the slums, you happened upon the Sisters, who took you in after your little lie of being a healer from the fourth ward hospital.”
“It … It wasn’t a lie.”
Mercy tilts her head the other way, waiting.
Scot clears his throat. “I was a healer in the Lifted City. I worked for the Westly Wish, a Sanctum clinic. I was a healer.”
Mercy nods. “But the rest I have right?”
“Mostly.”
“Feel free to fill me in, Scot,” she says flippantly. “And if I sense another lie come from those pretty little lips of yours, I’ll take off that finger of yours and cast it in the fire pit at my back.”
“I m-might just ask that, with as b-bad as this burns,” the man says to his chest, still clutching the hand to it. Mercy isn’t sure if he meant for her to hear that, or if it was his odd way of trying to lighten the tension between them. “Is this your Legacy? Pain?”
“Poison,” she corrects him. “Now speak. Everything. Out.”
“My girlfriend Amma, she was with me in the Crystal Court the day Impis broke blood on the glass stage. We ran together, hand in hand, but … I ran f-faster. She f-fell behind. I was pushed on by the crowd of others escaping that I … I c-c-could not go back. After I made it out, I thought that I could sneak in, that I could find her, but I was too afraid. And then lightning struck and everything exploded. Glass. It was raining glass. I ran until I was dizzy.”
And then Scot’s face wrinkles, his eyes flooding with tears in one quick instant. He brings his hands to his face to cover the emotion that spills from it—his good hand and his hissing one, the one finger of which is red and welting in three spots from the poison Mercy dowsed it with. For a moment, Mercy feels an untimely sting of sympathy and wishes she hadn’t done that to his finger.
“Your girlfriend Amma is dead,” says Mercy.
Scot drops his hands suddenly, his face a mess of tears and his eyes red. “W-What?”
“She’s dead. Say it.”
Scot stares at her as if she’s gone mad. “B-But I don’t know that. She could b-b-be hiding. She could be up there or down here and—”
“Amma is dead.”
His shoulders collapse as he gazes at the ground, his lips parted and the tears sitting on his cheeks, half-spilled.
The next instant, Mercy takes his hand. “Dran is dead.”
Scot snaps his eyes up to meet hers, confused.
“Dran,” she repeats. “He was my fiancé. You heard me right on the road that day. And he is dead. I must say it every day. I must know it as certain as I know that I have hands, that I have poison on my tongue. Dran is dead. Dran is never coming back. Dran is gone. In one quick instant, he turned to dust at the bare finger of Metal Hand. Dran is dead.”
After quite some time of staring into Mercy’s eyes, something seems to awaken in Scot’s soft ones. “A-Amma …”
“Go on.”
“Amma is dead.” He says the words too quickly at first, as if not really hearing them. Then, he repeats them, slower. “Amma … is … dead.” He swallows. “Amma is dead.”
“Dran is dead,” she recites.
“Amma is dead.”
“Dran is dead.”
“Mercy is alive.”
Her lips are parted with different words on her tongue, words that now go unspoken at Scot’s sudden change. Mercy is alive.
“Mercy,” the soft man states, “is … alive.”
> She stares into his eyes, affected beyond what she would care to admit out loud. “Scot is alive,” she whispers back, her words clipped.
“Mercy is alive.”
“Scot is alive.”
In the smoke-filled street, Mercy chooses to leave the last two words of those sentences unsaid. Maybe part of her wants to cling to hope for once. Maybe she’s ready to do something meaningful with her life. Maybe she’s been made to see something by this soft, weak man that she refused to see before. Scot is alive. Mercy is alive …
For now.
0216 Ellena
Their destination is but two blocks away. Ellena’s new home. The Guardian holding in which she’ll be kept for the rest of eternity. Or at least until the Reign of Madness has ended … which might also be an eternity.
“You may have known my first cousin once removed. His name was Wendor,” Gabel goes on.
Ellena squints, curious. “That name rings a bell, yes.”
“He was your Warden of the ninth before he was murdered. Janlord broadcasted the news that Wendor Wayward fell ill and needed to be replaced, but I was told the truth. He had been poisoned overnight, though no one can say how. His lips were black, as if burnt, but his tongue was grey. His eyes, dry and purple like prunes. Nastiest poison anyone ever saw. Not many mourned him. Even my great-grandfather, once King of Atlas, referred to little Wendor as his other grandson.” Gabel chuckles. “No one respected him much.”
“What an awful way to die,” mutters Ellena, then becomes lost in a whole other train of thought, thinking on poisons and afflictions and pain. She can only imagine what Halvesand experienced when he was attacked, cut at the neck by a poisoned blade.
“They discovered Wendor was auto-borne the day they found his corpse.” Gabel chuckles again, each time he laughs sounding twice as hollow as before. “Late discovery, I suppose.”
“That leads one to wonder a thing or two,” says Ellena, grasping at the slight shift in thought, despite it being a morbid one. “How does one come to discover that they are auto-borne … if one must die in order to discover it?”
