by Daryl Banner
With Halves and Aleks off defending the city in the name of Guardian and the Marshal of Whatever, the house is considerably quieter. Two less mouths to feed. And so he clambers down to the half-lit den to share a communal plate of dumplings, bean mash, and salted cabbage with his two brothers and mom until the sun’s been replaced by black and birdsong traded for crickets.
That night, Wick wakes to the razor point of a sword at his lips. “Dead,” says the sword-bearer.
0002 Forgemon
He holds the sword steady at his son’s face.
Once Wick sees who it is, he rolls his eyes, pushes the blade away with two limp fingers. “Not tonight.”
“Is that what you say when you’re about to die, Anwick?” his dad presses on. “Do you say ‘Not tonight’ to the enemy, Anwick? Do you imagine them obeying?”
“One of these nights,” Wick moans, “I’m gonna bolt up in my sleep, your sword’s gonna go in one side of my head and out the other, and that’ll be the end of it. Except having to explain to mom what happened …”
“It’s time to train,” Forge persists.
“I’ve only been asleep two hours!”
“And when you’re dead, you’ll be asleep for good.” Forge tosses the sword onto his son’s belly. “I’ll be at the shed down the street.”
Wick sits up, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes between staring at the weapon in his lap. “Real sword?”
“Don’t say I never listened to you, son.”
Their hour and twelve minutes of training commences. Wick struggles a bit with the sword, unfamiliar with the weight of it and how it compensates. Forge can see his son miscalculating how much time he needs for swings, the weapon far heavier than the sticks and broom handles they’ve practiced with before. Forge doesn’t let Anwick practice with the long blade because the math tells him his son would lose a finger. Anwick suffers enough with a terrible Legacy, he figures. He’ll need all ten of his fingers. By the end of the hour, he’d had his son trading sword for spear, testing a new weapon, then spear for scimitar, for short axe, for dagger.
“Know your weapons,” Forge presses on, sparks flying as the various shapes of metal kiss, “and use them! Anything is a weapon when you aim it.” He had to keep pressing Anwick in the training, even if one swing of his son’s sword came too close to shaving off his modest beard. “Was your little dream worth it?” Forge taunts. “Who do you dream of, boy?” Of course, his son’s so focused on getting his swings right—axe, knife, sword—he never answers.
By the end, his son’s sweaty and wheezing. Anwick is not like his other boys; he needs the training to compensate for his … shortcoming. Death waits for no one, that’s a fact no amount of swordplay can change, but the training keeps his son cautious.
“Dad, am I an Outlier?”
Forge squints at him, wiping his weapons clean and placing them on the rack one by one. “Not even close, son. You can alter your mind to allow for sleeping. You have a Mentalist Legacy, like mine, nothing more.”
Wick’s piddling with the sword. “Are you sure?”
“Get back to bed before your mom gets the idea to check on you,” Forge tells him, ending the discussion. “Your brothers will be home for breakfast.”
“So? My brothers are always home for breakfast.”
“Your other brothers,” he adds with a wink.
Wick’s eyes brighten. “I thought Halves had gone on to the Guardian dormitories already? And Aleks?”
“They’ve come home for one final morning before Halves begins his first four-week assignment.”
“I doubt I’ll get another hour in before school,” his son realizes, tossing the sword onto a workbench and heading out.
It’s nearly two hours later when Forge finds his wife and most of his sons all met at the kitchen counter. Lionis is cooking with the serious focus of a studied chef while his brothers all laugh at a joke Aleks makes about hazing the new Guardian recruits. Halves just gives a shrug, then admits how excited he is to finally begin his career. “You’ll have a lot of catching up to do, little bro,” Aleks teases, poking Halves in the ribs.
Forge’s two oldest have always been competitive, nearly conjoined for as many things as they’ve done together. They even look so alike, though they are not twins. Both lean, long-limbed, and a head taller than the rest. When they lived here, they shared the upstairs room that now belongs to Link, while Link and Lionis kept their things in the den, not really having a proper room to call their own. Lionis used to throw tantrums about Anwick being younger and getting his own room, which is really just a converted closet. Until Lionis was old enough to understand why Wick needed privacy, there was nothing but tension between the boys. Most of that tension still lives, Forge is afraid to admit. He gave Anwick’s closet a window and mattress to make it feel more like a bedroom … the only actually-functioning bedroom in all of Atlas.
Anwick finally comes down the narrow stair, tackling Halves from behind. Even Link smiles, sipping a glass of artificial orange. The sight of his whole family together again, even if just for this dark and early morning, makes him beam.
“Take a picture,” Forge decides suddenly, nudging his wife.
She makes an awful face, still somehow looking pretty when doing so. “We sold the camera, love. Don’t you remember?”
This will be the very last time they see all their sons under this roof … according to the math. Their sons will, after this meal, be on their very separate ways. But he cannot tell them this; they will panic, think the worst, and ask questions his math cannot answer. Maybe I am wrong, he hopes. My futures have been wrong before.
His wife seems to see the tightness in his face, as she brings both her hands around his arm. “Forge?”
“Yes,” he mumbles, watching Halvesand collapse into a fit of laughter with his brothers. “Yes, I remember. Sold it years ago, when you were out of a job. Sold the phone too.”
She lays her head on his shoulder. He smells her hair, slipping an arm around her waist and listening to another of Aleksand’s bad jokes. The boys laugh, Anwick slamming a fist on the counter and Halves spitting half his orange out his nose. I’ll do with my eyes just as well, he decides. My eyes are my camera.
Too soon, Anwick is off to school with Link, and Halves and Aleks make their goodbyes, seen off to the trains by Lionis who bears a hundred unanswered questions for them about Guardian. Forge knows Lionis will only get four of his questions answered, and the rest will be abandoned forever as the train doors close on his face too soon and force him to wave goodbye, tears in his eyes and unasked questions left dead on his tongue.
Now it’s just his wife and her slender, soft, supple body and long tangles of hair … and she’s poised at the sink, slowly washing the last of the plates … oh, the way her hands work. Forge spins her around and attacks her with his lips, unable to stop himself. She laughs into the kiss, then gives in, her body slackening. Suddenly he surprises her, carrying her up to the kitchen counter like a hammer to the anvil—she shrieks giddily—and with his big hands at her hips, he slips one under her dress to pull off her panties in one deft yank. He buries his face in her breasts, making his wife squirm and moan … He’s so good at this, he knows it.
“You’re gonna be late,” she whispers while he’s working her long neck, kissing his way down the happiest of paths leading somewhere pleasantly lower, lower, lower. “You don’t want to—Ah, lower—You don’t want to piss off your—Ah, ah …”
“Don’t spoil it,” he says from somewhere between her thighs.
“Forge,” she manages to say, gripping the side of the oven for balance—then for the next long while, can’t say a thing at all.
When he meets her face again, he says, “You, my Ellena, make it all worth the sweat and steam of a hundred metalshops.”
She kisses behind his ear, right where it sends electricity through him and his beard, then responds, “Those same words convinced me to have my first baby with you …”
&nbs
p; “And the second,” he confesses, “and third and fourth …” And then he opens his pants with one wild yank, pulls her legs about his waist and enters her to finish the job he’d started.
When he pulls away at last, still breathing heavily in her ear, his wife says, “Looks like you’ve already made your sweat and steam for the day.”
They met young, had so many kids, so many times Forgemon thought they’d overdone their family, not thinking they had the means to support that many children … but she is beautiful, even so many years and kids later she can set his eyes on fire and stir the animal in him. She has such youth in her skin, not even forty. Her laughing brown eyes, her feathery lips …
On the train to the factories, worries eat up the joy of the morning. He can’t escape the math, not anywhere, for it’s his Legacy and therefore a permanent part of him. His mind calculates how scattered the Lesser family will soon be, and it draws circles in his stomach.
Anwick to graduate school this year, Link to follow in two years’ time. Halves and Aleks in Guardian, their commitments growing longer still, provided they keep their lives—that math scares him the worst. It’s likely neither will marry women and start families of their own. Sure, they’ve had their fair share of girls along the way, Aleks perhaps more than Halves, but nothing stuck. Link’s grown too fast, always angry, too angry for love. Then there’s Lionis, so full of his books with little room for anything else. Anwick is the real wildcard, troubling him the worst, which is why he must train him. The math is all there, but so frayed, so multidirectional that the figures unsettle him. Each member of his family stands at the threshold of something new.
Nothing is scarier than certainty.
At the metalshops, Forge has a figuring it would benefit him to enter through the back. Sure enough, he finds his boss heaving over a stubborn machine that isn’t performing proper. “The damn thing won’t calculate iron alloys versus bronze, or percentage marks or—what the dumb-hell is that number doing over there? I put it over here!!” Forge has to laugh, that the issue he’s walked in on is perfectly suited to his skills. In a matter of four and a half minutes, the machine is doing all it should again, and his boss Holden clenches his teeth into something one might carefully call a smile. “The damned Sanctum won’t upgrade any of our machinery, yet we’re expected to produce-produce-produce. What dumb-hell is this for? An order for twenty-hundred silver gloves!”
Forge shrugs. “Maybe all two thousand are for the man with the metal arms, the Legacist’s kill-touch-guy.”
“Not right.” The boss turns up his chin, half his mouth lost in his orange, curly beard-thing. “We ought to be compensated. Already lost three men this last month, including Jardon, Larne … Who was the other? The one who went shit-crazy half a week ago and broke the X40? Bard, wasn’t that his name?”
Bard … Rychis Bard, I remember him. So short a temper on that one. “Rychis Bard, yes. Didn’t know any of them that well on a personal level,” Forge admits, “but every man helps. Even a hothead like Rychis.”
“I need someone to bang hammers today, Lesser.” Mr. Holden’s mouth still crushed in a grimace, he says, “Production’s low, we’re so many men down I can’t count them on my toes. I need an arm like yours.”
Forge already knew he’d be asked to do this. He saw the math long before he even woke up Anwick, while he was pulling on his boots. Still desperately exhausted from yesterday’s workload, he just twists his lips and says, “Count on me.”
Seven hours and twenty minutes later, Forge seats himself on a small mound of dirt and grass that’s settled in the dumpster-lined alley behind the factory. He felt it important to take his lunch here instead of inside at the computers where his coworkers will be chatting themselves stupid. He takes a bite of his sandwich, tasting the sweet memory of Ellena this morning, warmed by the thought of his sons making good of themselves in the city, and waiting patiently for the thing that’s about to happen.
And then the tiny, shimmering gift falls from the sky. With a loud metallic snap that nearly scares the sandwich out of his hands—even as expected as it was—the tiny thing leaves a crack in the pavement where it landed, bounces, then titters along and finds rest at the base of a dumpster. It shines in the midday light, winking at him. Forge scampers over, picks it off the ground, and flips it into his smoky, rough palm. It’s a shiny gold coin with the Sanctum’s royal mark etched into both sides—the currency of the Lifted City.
He looks up with a grin, but in staring at the dark underside of the city above, his thoughts turn sour and the grin withers. He imagines the coin slipping from the purse of some old man drunk off his riches, spilling gold for a woman he’s fucking at the brim of the Lifted City. His calculations are always black with bitterness for the rich and wasteful in the sky. No matter what the math says, he won’t take this gold coin as a symbol for his own family’s fortune, no … Nothing good ever falls from the sky.
Of that math, he’s quite certain.
0003 Rychis
I am Rychis Bard. I have a wife and one baby boy. I lost my temper, I broke a machine at my job, it won’t happen again.
This is what Rychis recites over and over as he’s ushered down the endless chrome corridor. All he hears are the soles of his boots, clacking, clacking. That and the heavy song of chains. Are they really necessary? He’d happily face the King without restraints. The Kingship is kind, the Kingship is good.
He doesn’t have anything to fear.
I am Rychis Bard. He recites his line over and over like a lyric and he hates music. The only music he knows is of hissing steam and banging hammers, his home at the metalshop where he’s worked loyally for seventeen years—until this morning when he lost his temper and found a pair of cold handcuffs kissing his wrists. I am Rychis Bard. I have a wife and one baby boy …
Others have been arrested today too, it seems. Many men, some women, even a boy somewhere ahead of him in the line. Seeing the boy sends a searing pang through his body, making him think on his little son. The wife will understand that he could not be home, but what of his baby boy? His boy won’t know why daddy has gone.
Soon, he promises him. The King will forgive the fuck-up and send me home to you by supper.
A set of monstrous iron doors sliding open sobers him, and he reminds himself stupidly that he is not home … far from it. There is no wife to slip his hands around, only the uniformed men leading them through the doors and down many an endless hall. His chains giggle at him when he gives his thick orange beard a good scratching, and he listens to the beeps of access points, the tapping of keypads and passcodes, and more steely doors sliding open with electric hums and hisses. Marching on and on, up and up the metal contraption that is Cloud Tower, he wonders how much longer it’ll be before reaching the throne room of good King Greymyn, the Banshee King, where his judgment waits. They say the room’s like a huge glass chamber, its only neighbors the stars, with mirror-polished tiles and a ceiling so high it’s gone.
I am Rychis Bard. I have a wife and one baby boy …
His true home is a small one-bedroom in the grimiest of the ninth ward slum where even the acrid fumes of neighboring factories cannot soil his heart, for there is a beautiful woman in that home whom he calls wife … a woman who’s already claimed his heart plenty. Last night’s memory keeps him smiling as he moves down the hall … How she laughed when he pushed her into the couch, the baby asleep at last … Pulling himself over her, running a single finger up her leg to learn what she wore underneath. And she took that finger and put it just where she wanted. “Nothing,” she said. “That’s what’s underneath tonight.”
He needs to get home soon, he realizes. She’s likely waiting for him right now, wondering why he’s so late.
Soon, he promises her too. Once this farce is over with …
He stumbles, and a guard with kind eyes brings him to standing again. Rychis tries a smile, reassured. All the things he and his wife were told in the slums, they’re all wrong. T
he Sanctum is good, the Kingship too. This place is not the nightmare his coworkers at the metalshop hiss and spit about, he’ll be so proud to tell them. The people of this Lifted City are just another people, not the rich monsters and cruel dictators and capitalist evils from which his childhood tales were spun. Even the guards ushering them to their judgment have eyes that smile.
He can’t wait to tell the guys at the metalshop. They were wrong, they were all wrong. What a good laugh they’ll have, repairing the machine he’d broken in such a careless fit. He already misses their jeering. The chains on his wrists already feel so light, they might as well not be there. The Kingship is kind …
At last the marching comes to an end, and now they’re seated on a steel bench the length of the hall. As each person is ushered into the throne room, the rest of them grow more anxious. The chrome hallway echoes monstrously with the crash of the iron throne room door each time it shuts. After the fourth or fifth slam, Rychis thinks of it like the heartbeat of Cloud Tower. Not unlike his own thrashing chest, he can’t seem to breathe evenly. I am Rychis … I have a wife and baby boy. I lost my temper …
No one seems to be returning from the throne room, which comforts him. Each person is being shown mercy. They’re released out another door, put onto a train back to the slums in time for dinner. The Kingship is kind. The Kingship is good. Greymyn the Great.
First thing I’m going to do when I see you, he thinks of his wife, is take you for all the hours in a night.
The next person is called, the crash of doors, and only two left before him. Rychis considers whether his wife is home yet, if she’s preparing supper, which makes him worry suddenly: he’s the only one who can get that boy to eat when he’s having one of his fits! His wife never figured out the trick, but it’s the little monster thing Rychis does … acting like a silly creature, the boy laughs and his mouth opens. It’s so easy, it’s so, so easy …
