by Daryl Banner
He lands with another splash—colder now, freezing, these waters—and his feet are still kicking helplessly, his arms thrashing. When he pushes forth, his head breaking the surface of water for the first time since his bayou plunge, he coughs with the might of a thunderclap, water pulling and pushing at him like a million murderers hanging on his every inch of body, not giving up. His hands and feet still kick, determined despite the agony in his lungs to keep his head above water.
It’s a generous amount of long seconds later before his hand grabs a stone—a concrete ledge. He clings to it, grapples with it, throws a leg over and rolling his back upon it. Then, spinning to his stomach, he begins the attractive process of heaving out the water that’s raided his body in unrelenting waves.
He’s never heaved so much in all his fifteen years of life.
He cries and he retches and he gags.
And then it’s over. He’s coughed it all out, and now collapses on the stone walkway, strewn out and breathing heavily in, out, in, out, in. His eyes dance around, and soon the panic begins to subside. I’m safe, he tells himself. I’m alive. I can breathe … I’m alive. Balance slowly squeezes its way down into his belly, calming him.
I’m alive.
Dizzily, he notices the bank bag still in his fist, partly turned a rosy hue. It’s simply unbelievable that he kept ahold of it all this time, his prize. He lets himself smile, gives a pained chuckle, proud of his brilliant feat. He even forgives himself for turning half the bag pink; he doesn’t care. Such a price he paid for it, falling from a train and landing in the …
Where is he? Link sits up, coughing several times more, water still working out of his lungs. It’s a large, echoing tunnel of stone that goes on and on, breaking periodically at four-way intersections and curving off. There’s a very wide manmade stream of water flowing through the middle, cement walkways lining either side.
He gets to his feet, cramps riddling his gut, but he doesn’t listen to them and carries on, hoping to find a way out. He makes a left turn at the intersection, a right turn at the next. The ceilings, regularly checked for a ladder, an upward access, anything. He’s always known about the undercity waterways, but never actually been in them. Part of him doubted they actually exist.
Then he turns a corner and freezes.
A little girl is standing a few strides ahead, her eyes locked on him like a cat’s. She neither moves nor speaks nor even appears to breathe, frozen just as well as he. Her eyes flash … Is it fear? Is it recognition? Does this girl know me? He certainly doesn’t know her. She’s obviously a street rat, skinny as a plant with eyes huge and wild. Her hair is twisted into a mess of dirty braids bound flat to her tiny head, only a few tufts of hair poking out defiantly.
“Lost?” she offers finally.
Link finds the sound of her voice comforting and kind. After hearing only loud rushing water for twenty minutes, a voice is a welcome disturbance to the monotony. “Yeah.”
“The way you gon’ get out is, um, back where you comed from,” she says, pointing. “Back, back, up.”
She can’t be older than eight, maybe nine. Her speech seems clumsy, like she has trouble finding words, but he understands. “Back the way I came?”
“Yeah … Back, back, and up. Can I show ya?” She smiles sweetly. Link returns the smile automatically, feeding off her kindness. He can really use a bit of friendly help right now, though he wonders why a girl so young is down here at this time of night. Of course just as well, why’s he?
“You’re gonna show me the way out?”
“That way, ya.” She smiles again.
Link starts heading back the way he came. The water is so loud, so swallowing of all else, he thinks she’s said something. “What was that?” There’s no answer, so he turns his face halfway and asks, “Hey, so what’s your name? My name’s—”
Then he turns all the way. She’s gone.
And then, to his horror, he finds he isn’t holding the bank bag anymore. How’d that happen? He grabs at his pockets, clutches his jacket, his sides … It’s gone. “What the fuck?” Panic worms its way up his body, wrapping his neck like a snake, strangling him. He can’t return to The Wrath without the bag, without his mission. No fucking way. He sprints forward, certain the girl couldn’t have gone far. “Give it back!” he cries out. “That was mine! GIVE IT BACK!” His eyes blind with rage, the water deafening, his lungs still cramped as though he’d taken twenty hits in the chest, he screams, “THIEF!!”
She’s nowhere. Gone in an instant. Not in the water. With nowhere to hide down here, it’s like she never existed. A ghost in the waterway, taking from him his prize of the night. That bag, it meant the black band from Dran. It meant acceptance into The Wrath. It meant …
“THIEF!!” he screams again, again and again and again until his voice breaks, but no one’s there to hear it.
His voice rings bloody with his howls, echoing and dying in the endlessly branching tunnels of the waterway. He yells and he cries until tears are squeezed out of his face. He swings a fist only twice into the wall before his knuckles draw their own blood.
0005 Kid
No matter where she looks, there’s a family. She can’t walk the streets without tripping over one. She turns a corner and finds another sweet mommy and daddy … brothers, sisters, cuddling and loving and all that.
She had a family once.
When she was six, her mommy told her, “I’ll be right back,” and wasn’t. Same night, daddy told her to go hide. Kid hid alright, just like she was told, no hard thing. But perhaps daddy didn’t count on her hiding under the table in perfect view of him answering the door.
Right where he was killed.
When the masked men finished the deed, daddy hit the ground and his eyes couldn’t find her. His eyes couldn’t find her because she went invisible, hiding like she was told. Even in his final moment, she stayed hidden, couldn’t let him see his girl this one last time.
No hand can stop death … Not even an invisible one.
After her parents were gone, it wasn’t too hard for a while. She stayed in that same house while it remained unoccupied, even after the strange men came in and removed her dad’s body. All alone, she ate the things in the kitchen, whatever her little six-year-old hands could find. Then the food ran out. Next logical thing to do was steal from the neighbors. Shielding herself with invisibility, she hunted for the most precious of foods in the slums: sweets, candies, colorful treats. Not so great an idea, she discovered, curled up in the kitchen that night clutching her belly in agony, the aches and the cramps and the way it felt like a beast’s talons had wrapped about her whole body and wouldn’t let go.
That night lasted forever.
She cried for mom and dad, even called out for them, certain they were just in the other room. Mom would come back at any point now, ask her what she needed, why she was crying. Surely daddy’s in the other room reading the paper in his favorite chair. She just had to call out louder, get his attention …
Didn’t matter how loud she cried, no one came anymore. Obviously. Who would.
Days went by. Weeks. But to a girl of that age, time becomes strangely unimportant. The first thing she learned was to be observant. Every little change in the sounds of the house, she noticed. The way the walls breathed and bent with the change of weather outside. How the windows creaked and the doors squeaked and the floorboards settled just hours after midnight. She learned the heartbeat of the house.
Then one day she did something rather dumb, just for fun. She went over to a neighbor’s and found a boy named Landy sitting in the yard, a boy she used to play with. She turned visible. He saw her and screamed. She didn’t understand his reaction until he started calling her a ghost, his face losing color, and then he passed out—dropped to the lawn like a stone.
Apparently word in the neighborhood was, the whole family was murdered, herself included. An hour later, she crept into the house, invisible, and listened quietly as the boy was cal
med down and fussed over by the parents. “It wasn’t real,” they said. “It wasn’t real, it wasn’t a ghost. Just your imagination,” they said, convincing this boy she’d played with since they were babies that his friend next door was dead. They were all dead.
Kid felt so strange, listening to this. Neither sad nor angry nor hurt. She just felt … nothing. Maybe this is what ghosts feel.
After the incident with Landy, life became harder for her. Guardian were sent to her house and they swept it clean, turned over everything, taking anything of value. Seeing all this, she’d had enough. Turning visible, she screamed at them, “Go away!!—This is my house!”
Of course that didn’t go well, for it then became a game of evading capture. Worming invisibly under tables and through crevices and in and out of doors, she escaped the men and tore off down the street.
For days after, she was too afraid to return home. Getting food was a touch more difficult when she could not manage her way into a house, especially after learning that sweets aren’t the best way to keep appetites away. Then one brave and ugly morning, she crept back to her neighborhood unseen and watched her house from across the street. It had been occupied by another family. A new family. She could swear she saw a mommy tucking her child into bed upstairs, shadows dancing along the window curtains. There’s no telling how many weeks have passed since her own mommy tucked her in, how many months, how many years.
She was six when it all was taken from her. She might be seven now, maybe eight or nine or ten. She was never good at counting, never needed to be.
And she has no idea how much shiny is in this pink bag she took from the kid in the waterways, but she’s sure it’s enough to secure several days’ food.
I’m sorry, she says to the liar-boy from the waterways.
She’s so tired of stealing. It’s about time she got herself a real and true dinner … Food she’s truly paid for. The bakery smells so good and she’s walked by it so many times, but was never able to manage getting close enough to the bread. Don’t squeeze into tight places, she taught herself. Even unseen, she can still be caught like a rabbit in a net; she’d just be an invisible rabbit.
The moment she speaks up, trying to buy a loaf, the baker brushes her off, irritated, telling her to bother another store. “We don’t serve your kind,” he grunts, bending over to continue arranging loaves in the store window. Kid doesn’t give up. “But I’m hungry.” The baker scoffs at her, so she drops a coin on the counter. “Isn’t this enough for bread?”
The baker needles one eye at it, wrinkles his face and says, “We don’t accept Sanctum scum for money, kid. Get out of my store with that gold scum before I bake you into a cake.”
“Hey, hey,” interjects a scruffy-faced man behind the counter, one of the baker’s men. “She’s just a little kid. Why not a blueberry muffin or so, boss?”
“Out!” screams the baker.
To the street Kid goes, taking back her Sanctum scum, or whatever he called it. So much for an honest pay. What good is the shiny things, she wonders sadly, if the shiny things get me nothing? She kicks the ground, vanishes, and plops onto the curb to sulk.
A hand of minutes later, the voice of hunger outcries the voice of properness, and a bag of dough bites goes missing and unmissed from another shop down the road.
She follows the scruffy-faced man home. He was so nice at the bakery and it’s hard not to be drawn to such people. The man enters his house, kissing a girl’s cheek on the way in. Must be his daughter, the girl dangling her legs over the ledge of the porch.
Kid grips the bag of gold tightly, regrets the way she came into possession of this thing. She knows it didn’t really belong to the kid in the waterway—the one called Link is a liar, she knew that for fact—so in truth, she’s simply stolen a stolen thing.
But stealing this bag of gold from him still doesn’t sit well on her conscience, the bittersweet tang of vengeance. Link wasn’t like the others, she reminds herself, feeling guilty. He was … different. He was … But he’s a liar the same, isn’t he?
She’s going to make right of it. She’s going to pay him back. Yes, even a liar, Link. Somehow. Someday … she must.
Kid takes a single coin out, pockets it with a kiss. Souvenir, call it. Then, still unseeable, she tiptoes as close to the girl as she dares and pitches the bag into the lawn.
The girl looks up, her twirling legs stopped, and listens. After a moment of curiosity, the girl investigates the sound and happens upon the spilled bag of shiny. Once peeked into, her eyes grow double. “Dad!” she cries out, racing up the steps. “Dad! Dad!” And she’s vanished into the house.
Kid beams happily. The world’s never fair quite the way it ought to be.
0006 Wick
This time Wick’s not going to hold back. It’s lunch hour again, and Tide’s pushed into his brother on the way to his table, knocking Link into a spread of mud. A few daring words are exchanged, hissing and yelling, a derisive laugh wiggles out of Tide’s puffy chest, and Wick can’t stand for it anymore.
“You leave my bro alone,” he hears himself saying, reacting faster than logic or reason can keep up.
Wick has taken up a long, firm stick into his hand as he approaches, and he’s gripping it the right way, bending at the knees like his dad taught him. All the training is about to pay off.
“You look like an idiot,” says Tide, observing him.
“I’m about to rearrange your face.”
“Please, don’t embarrass yourself. Not with all these people watching.”
Wick lunges without warning, the stick scoring one solid hit on Tide’s side, but it has so little effect, bouncing off his bicep and sending tremors up Wick’s own arm. Then suddenly a gust of sharp wind picks up from nowhere, stealing the weapon quite deliberately from Wick’s hand and knocking him over in the same effortless motion.
Tide claims the stick and shouts, “You’ve been a bad, bad boy, Wick!” Tide wallops him over the ass with it, spanking him several times as he squirms, scrambling to his feet and trying to get away. “Bad boy, bad boy!” Tide keeps shouting with each swat, then cackling hysterically. Everyone is laughing, Wick can hear them, his rage growing the worse by it. “You’re such a bad boy!”
Then the stick snaps in half on the final swing, and Tide tosses Wick aside with another brush of wind, walking off in a cloud of laughter with his cronies.
Wick spends no time rubbing his sore spots or taking notice of the blood drawn from his cheek, and he doesn’t pursue it further. He just gets up and turns his face from the crowd, none of whom bothered to step in, preferring to be entertained instead. He spots Link a few strides away, but being roughed up from his own fall, he’s marching off without a word. Why is he being so cold? Wick was only trying to help. Link had come home so late the day before, nearly by dawn. He looked a mess too and smelled like the sewers, but there’s really no taming the anger-ball that is Link. A part of Wick fumes that his mom is often so oblivious, hardly concerned when Link came through the door, filthy and brooding.
His thighs sing red tunes, and when most of the yard is clear, Wick notices Rone and his sister watching. The look in their eyes is unreadable … Wick dares wonder if that look is one of proudness, curiosity, or pity.
His ass stings too much to care.
Professor Frey is pacing the front of the classroom, speaking on the structures of government and the current regime of King and three Marshals and their guard and the Guardian and—Who cares. Wick had winced when he sat at his desk, inspiring a breathy chuckle from Tide in the corner of the room, but he ignored it. Wick took the seat next to Rone, since it was empty, and now he listens halfheartedly to the lesson, taking notes and struggling to ignore the pain he’s in.
Professor Frey poses a rhetorical question about the King and his Marshals, asking what kind of world we would have without Sanctum. Rone, ever so quietly, whispers, “A world without a screaming King.” No one heard but Anwick Lesser. Those words, he feels
like they were meant for his ears only.
When school is out for the day, Link has obviously hurried ahead, not bothering to wait up. Wick makes a rash decision, doesn’t board his own train, but instead follows Rone and his sister onto the nine-four and sits near the back, trying his best to be discrete. He’s still intrigued by what he overheard Rone say in class … It felt like a secret was shared with him, but what was it? He isn’t even certain why he found it so intriguing, other than the fact that such statements are dangerous to make aloud … illegal, punishable. And coming from Rone, the straight, note-taking, rule-abiding class smarty.
It just doesn’t make sense.
The train lurches to a stop, and it seems like the whole world gets up to debark. In the mess of people, Wick loses track of Rone. He jumps to his feet, pushes through families, shoves between couples, stumbling over his own legs to catch up … but he’s lost him. He’s not even sure what he was hoping to find, and now it’s too late … He was slow and clumsy.
When he turns, Rone’s right there, eyes narrow, mouth tight. “What’re you following me for, bro?”
Wick stammers, completely caught by surprise, shakes his head for an answer.
“What do you want?” Rone presses on.
“A … a world without a screaming King.”
Rone stares at Wick’s face, almost as if he hadn’t said a thing. Wick is about to apologize when Rone at once recites: “Edge of ninth ward, 1200 and first block. Tomorrow night, be there.”
