by Daryl Banner
The King nods. “Yeah, you did.” He appears thoughtful for a second. “There was also, as you might have gathered, a speculation among the people that you might have been … with her. Like, maybe you two were working together to end my life.”
“No, I wasn’t,” Tide lies at once.
“I want you to know that I’m not like those Kings and Queens that like to flatten their asses on a throne in the sky. I’m not waiting for you to say the wrong thing that’ll convict you of some crime. I’m not trying to squeeze any confession out of you or manipulate your emotions or … whatever it is you might fear. I swear it. My one and only interest is to learn who you are.”
“I’m Tide. I didn’t try to kill you.”
Tide can’t help himself. He still doesn’t trust the man and he’s pretty sure he never will. He’s ready to escape and race back to the Queen the first moment he gets.
The King nods. “Tide. Nice to meet you. My name’s Chole.” He gives a short chuckle, popping another berry into his mouth before continuing. “I won’t bother with my mom’s reasoning for the name, as they weren’t fanatics of King Chole or the last rebellion. I’m not even sure I know the exact reasoning. But when I started to build the Coalition after the Fall of Sanctum—and yeah, some teasingly spell it C-H-O-L-E-alition—people seemed tickled by my name, since it was the same as the Slum Queen’s lover of long ago. Aye, I guess it tickled me a bit too. So people took to calling me the Slum King. I never liked the name, truthfully. I never styled myself a King. I don’t really like to call myself a King either. I’m just Chole, a boy from the fifth with a dream.”
Tide pulls another slice from the plate, reminded suddenly of Dog. He wonders where he is. He wasn’t involved directly. He’s safe. The thought leads him to ask a lateral question. “Where is Gin?”
The Slum King—Chole, if he prefers to be called—sighs lightly. “I put her in a room for her protection, too. I’ve tried to speak with her, really, I have. A number of times, in fact, but she won’t have any of it. She yells at me. She hisses like an alley cat. She’s much too angry. I have no idea what I’ve done to offend her.”
“It’s her mission,” Tide blurts, then stops chewing, astonished at himself for revealing that so carelessly.
Chole tilts his head. “Mission? She was sent here to kill me?”
Tide swallows the rest of his words along with the apple slice he hadn’t completely finished chewing, coughing and sputtering as he forces the half-eaten bite down. He stares at Chole without daring to say another stupid word.
“You don’t trust me. I get it. I can see it in your eyes, Tide. Yet I feel like you want to trust me … maybe?” Chole tilts his head. “Or is that just my dumb wishful thinking?”
“I didn’t say you’re dumb,” blurts Tide, his hands in his lap at once as he stares dead-eyed across the table.
Chole shakes his head calmly, studying Tide. “What’s been done to you, man? Someone has a tight grip on your balls. Is it the Mad one upstairs? Did he send you and Gin down to put an end to me? To be honest, I’m kinda flattered if that’s the case. I sometimes wonder if he even knows of my existence.”
Tide thinks of the one who does hold his balls in a grip. He sees a flash of Scorp’s panicked eyes as he suffocated before him. He sees Wick reaching out before the warehouse toppled. He sees that blond boy’s face in the Abandon who was looking for Wick. He sees his dad staring at him from across the space of their apartment, and the way it made Tide feel so small … so incompetent … so worthless.
Suddenly, Tide chokes. A tear pinches his left eye. He chokes again, half a gag, half a cough, and then the tears begin to fall. Tide Wellport, big and puffy and full of bark, bites down his own teeth, thinking of the Queen, thinking of Scorp’s face, thinking of the piss that ran down his leg that day, and the tears won’t stop flowing. He sputters and he chokes and the wetness rains down his cheeks.
Chole comes around the length of the table so quickly, Tide doesn’t even notice until the Slum King is seated right next to him and putting an arm around his back. “It’s okay. Buddy. Tide. Really, it’s okay. You’re safe. We can protect you. Please, Tide. Let me help you. Whatever it is. Just tell me.”
“I can’t.” Tide can’t tell him a damned thing and he can’t stop crying these stupid tears and he can’t stop seeing the look of horror and desperation on Scorp’s face during the last seconds of his life. “I can’t. I c-c-c-can’t.”
“You can. Tell me. Please. I want to help you, but I can’t unless I know what’s going on. I won’t even tell my Marshals. This is just you and me. No one’s in this room. No guards. No spies. Just Chole and Tide. Tide and Chole. Just us. Two idiots in a room with a plate of bad apples and a bowl of tasteless berries. Shit, I’m a terrible host.”
Tide sniffles loudly, then evens out his breathing, struggling to end his humiliating sobs. He presses his lips together, glaring at an unlit candle in the center of the table like it’s his mortal enemy. Stop crying, he orders himself, just like his father would say twenty times a week. Stop crying. Stop it. Shut up. Shut your stupid mouth.
“There, there,” Chole encourages him, giving Tide a backrub. “Yeah. Good. Calmer. Good, good.” He keeps rubbing in big circles to cover all of Tide’s broad backside.
“I lost my m-m-memory,” says Tide suddenly.
Chole keeps rubbing his back. “You mean you … forgot? Or you hit your head and, like … can’t remember something?”
He recalls a thing Wick was trying to tell him at that warehouse in the eleventh. “S-Someone took it.”
“Took your memory? Like … with a Legacy of theirs?”
“I was running away from a Weapon Show. And then I just … woke up at home. There was a man leaving my apartment, a man I didn’t know. Then I was alone.” Tide blinks away some of his tears, annoyed that they still hang on his eyelashes. “I wandered out into the streets and didn’t know I had glow all over me. A guy named Scorp found me and took me to the … to the …”
He realizes he can’t say the name. Abandon. He feels like saying the name is revealing too much. It’s the final card in his deck, and if he keeps it close to his chest, he’ll be safe. The Queen watches. The Queen knows. The Queen will sense my betrayal and she will send an assassin to kill me. No one abandons the Abandon.
“To here?” Chole asks, trying to help him finish the sentence. “To the first ward?”
Tide shoves a palm into his eyes, angrily wiping away all the gathered tears and wetness. He takes a deep breath, then lets it all out on the table. “It doesn’t matter.”
Chole nods, his hand stopping in its circular motions and just remaining in place at Tide’s shoulder. The two share a moment of silent, pensive thought. Then Chole says, “I wonder … This Scorp guy who found you. He was part of a group, I suspect?”
Tide doesn’t answer. But then he finds his head nodding ever so subtly, betraying his silence.
“A group that you joined,” confirms Chole. “I wonder … Has it ever occurred to you that it may have been Scorp—or the group he works for—that took your memory? Do you think they intended to take your memory … in order to make you trust and join them?”
Tide had never considered that possibility. How else could it be explained that Scorp just happened to be in the streets near Tide’s residence, there to shield him from Guardian eyes and slip him into the shadows to protect him from the pink glows? What if Scorp gave me these pink glows? What if it was his fault all along?
Or maybe Tide is just trying to find a way to justify what he did to Scorp, suffocating him in front of the Queen. Maybe Tide is just desperate for a reason to relieve himself of the guilt he carries. He is so much more comfortable thinking of Scorp as a villain with a plan that he vanquished to save himself.
“Do you think that’s it?” prompts Chole, leaning in to get a look at Tide’s face.
But none of that explains how Wick knew that his memory was taken. Wick knew a lot more than he was telling
, and it frustrated Tide more than anything else. Was all of this really Wick’s fault, or in the end, was Wick actually trying to help him? The only reason Wick sees Tide as an antagonist is because of … because of me.
“The Abandon,” whispers Tide, his voice just short of a whisper.
Chole hears him perfectly. His posture straightens and his hand slips off of Tide’s back, falling into his own lap. “Oh, shit. The Queen is trying to kill me?”
Tide lifts his stony gaze up to Chole’s. “You know of her?”
“Not directly. I’ve heard things about a Queen trying to build an army of ghosts in the Abandon. See, I’m told a lot of crazy things by a lot of overexcited people, but most of what I hear are rumors and whispers and folly. But if the look in your eyes is any indication, there is obviously no damned folly in thinking that there is, in fact, a Queen who’s trying to awaken that Abandon … and its ghosts.”
“What else are you told?” asks Tide.
“Oh, you know. Stuff. Forces down in the Keep. Guardian in the eleventh. Guardian in the Core. Bunch of greedy vegetable hoarders in the Greens. Nothing all that surprising.” Chole inclines his head towards Tide. “Except you. You’re quite surprising.”
Tide’s brow wrinkles. He doesn’t respond, but he keeps his eyes on the Slum King.
“You are,” Chole insists, his voice light. “There’s a lot more in you than I think you’re admitting. Maybe more in you than you even know. That Legacy of yours? That’s fucking powerful. I saw what you did. A wind elemental, you are. Never seen anything like that.” Chole chuckles suddenly, then gives Tide’s shoulder a squeeze. “Stay with me, Tide. At least consider it. I have a hundred ways to protect you, and that Queen has ghosts and wishes and empty threats. Trust me. You’re safer here than you’ll ever be there, and I’ll value your worth because you have worth. And damn it, you’re worth fighting for. I’ll fight that damned Queen myself if I have to.” Then Chole seems to reconsider. “Uh, well, unless she’s got big tits and big pouty lips. Can I make work of her in a bedroom, you think?”
Tide is almost offended, unable to disrespect the Queen even from a distance, even with his own loyalty to her in question. “Don’t speak of h-h-her like that,” Tide manages to say.
Chole’s face lightens. “So what you’re saying is, she’s got a tight pussy-with-teeth and I ought to sweeten her before asking her out to dinner? My, she sounds like a tough one. Maybe I should get her a bouquet of flowers from the sixth-side Greens before I entertain the idea. Foolish me. You know the flowers on the sixth-side, don’t you?” he asks suddenly. “What they can do to a woman? Their beauty? I happen to have a … certain finesse with plants.”
Tide wipes his nose, then almost glares at Chole when he answers, “I don’t know nothing. I’m not that bright.”
“Aye, but you are,” says Chole. “Like, literally. Literally, you are bright. Seen yourself in the dark? You light up a whole room pink.”
The next instant, Chole has risen from his chair, rounding about the table once more. Tide watches him, his eyes wide with surprise at the brazen way in which this so-called Slum King speaks. He can’t decide whether to be amused, terrified, or perfectly at ease in front of this guy who can’t be more than a handful of years older than him.
Chole pops a few berries into his mouth, then nods at Tide. “I’ll be walking about the grounds, my friend. Help yourself around. Make some friends. I’m going to see if Gin will chat with me yet without trying to claw off my nuts.” With a wiggle of his eyebrows, the boy King giggles and heads off down the hall, disappearing through an archway.
Tide feels a strange sense of relief, sitting in the silent dining hall with nothing around him but his own thoughts. He looks down at the plate of apples, then helps himself to one. The sound of crunching fills his ears as he ponders his circumstances, staring at the unlit candle … and its wick.
0228 Link
Playing dead is a lot easier than Link thought it would be. He even gets to leave his eyes open so that he can see everything, as long as he makes sure to keep them languid and unfocused on anything. The worst part is the pain he must endure when they drag him halfway down a street to load him into the back of a vehicle. He mourns the hole that must exist now in his chest. It does not feel comfortable in the least.
“No sign of her at all,” grunts a man near him.
“Greymyn won’t be pleased,” returns a woman, deep and raspy.
“Fuck Greymyn. Do we even know she had a baby girl?”
“That’s what the tests showed.”
“The tests have been wrong before. I don’t trust those doctors. They’re all lazy and look at me funny.”
“Maybe it’s ‘cause of your stupid mask.”
Someone else guffaws at the jape, but the man only growls and says, “I’ll carve yours from your face if you give me lip again.”
“Yeah? Then I’ll have Mr. Wires wrap you up in his razor-sharp wires and watch you bleed to death trying to break free.” Now it’s her turn to bellow out with a throaty laugh.
“You know he hates it when you call him that.”
“Only to his face,” she grunts in return.
The vehicle starts moving, which gives Link a stroke of worry. Is Kid with me? Did she make it out of the house in time? But he has no way to confirm it, so he is left acting the part of a corpse as he is ungently driven away in the company of countless men and women in creepy masks, which show no expression.
Quite some time later, the vehicle comes to a stop, and Link experiences a lifting sensation, as if the very vehicle itself is rising. Even with Link’s eyes unfocused and staring blankly at the ceiling, he can still get a sense of the space within this vehicle, and he feels a very strong surge of vulnerability and doubt. There is no way Kid could be in this vehicle. She’s been left behind. I’m all on my own.
To Link’s great annoyance, one of the masked men closest to him runs a hand down Link’s face, shutting his eyes for him. When a woman near him asks, “The fuck you do that for?” The man replies, “It was creeping me out. Felt like he was staring at me.”
And so it is in the darkness behind his eyelids that he is soon pulled from the vehicle and unceremoniously thrown over the shoulder of one of the men. Link experiences an unfortunate journey of hanging partly upside-down with the man’s shoulder digging into his crotch and his own face bobbing against the man’s ass with every step as he moves. Playing dead was a lot easier in the vehicle.
Just when he wonders if he should dare to open his eyes, the man comes to a stop, Link’s face bouncing against his ass as he hears a grunt of annoyance from somewhere nearby. “Stupid routines. Send us in. I have my authorization here.”
“Two, two, five, two, two, five, two, five, six, six. Authorized.”
“No shit.” The man guffaws, jostling Link’s weight a bit, and then the pair of them are moving again.
After two annoyingly bouncy staircases downward and a trip down a long hall, a door is opened and a cold room’s air breathes on Link’s limp body. Then, he’s pulled from off the man’s shoulder and slapped on his back against the cold unkind surface of an exam table.
He lets the landing jostle his eyes a crack open, but it does not help him much. Now, all he sees is the plain white tiled ceiling of the room, dimly lit by small buzzing lights. A majority of the men and women seem to leave the room, a pair of them arguing loudly to one another about what to eat for lunch. When the door softly shuts, however, he still feels the presence of someone in the room. It is agonizing, to not be able to lift his head off the table to check. He can’t give himself away until he’s absolutely sure that he’s alone.
The presence grows closer, and the face of a red-eyed woman appears—a doctor. She presses two fingers gently to Link’s neck, likely to check for a pulse. Then she pulls on the skin under his eyes and flashes a light into them, to which Link struggles not to flinch or blink. The woman wrinkles her face in response. “That’s odd,” she mumbles to hers
elf, then moves out of view. He hears some gentle rummaging of metal tools and things, and then a soft sigh. “Must I always be the one to restock?” the woman mumbles tiredly, and then he hears the door open and close again.
Now there is only true silence.
Link lifts his head from the table. He is in an exam room of some sort. It looks like a hospital room, but there are no windows, nor is there a sense of comfort whatsoever. This is where they cut up dead bodies to examine them, Link decides, not knowing for sure. Why would they need to examine me? Why didn’t they just dump my body off at a receptacle in the tenth?
“Link …” comes a whisper.
He turns his head, searching for the voice. No one is there. Link feels a rush of relief. “Kid?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Oh, thank the Sisters. Why are you whispering?”
“So they don’t hear me. You should whisper too.”
Link only lowers his voice slightly. “Where are we?”
“Some warehouse in the Lifted City. Or right beneath the Lifted City, more like. We need a plan.”
“Don’t let them cut me open.”
“Lie back down. I see them coming back.”
Link glances around. “See them? Where are—??”
But his question goes unanswered as he hears the doorknob turn. He slams himself back down on the table and returns his face to the precise position it was in when the woman had left. He hears the door shut and footsteps approach. The red-eyed doctor has returned, but she is not alone; a long-nosed man with squinty, wet eyes who wears a long tan cloak is beside her.
“He’s dead. He hasn’t a pulse, nor draws breath,” the woman explains. “Yet observe.”
She pulls out her light again and flashes it in Link’s eyes. The man bends over Link, watching. “Hmm,” the man grunts. “What a curious thing. What’s the man’s Legacy?”
“We don’t know. It doesn’t matter. He was just—”
“It does matter. If his Legacy is of the eyes, then he is an auto-borne and that is why his pupils are still reactive to the light, even in his death. Perhaps he could see through things, or see thoughts, or turn water into piss by looking at it. We’ll never know.” The man snorts and pulls back, walking out of view. “Is that all you’ve called me in here for, Emery? I’m late for my middle-night meal.”
