by Daryl Banner
“Ah, yeah … I forget, I’m so vexing. My little secret.” Wick bitterly looks away, hands shoved in his pockets and the hood of his sleeveless jacket drawn tight over his head.
“You’re welcome,” says Lionis coolly, then departs for the train that will take him home the quickest, nothing more to discuss. And just as quick, Link scurries off to school so as not to have his spying known.
That must be the family secret: Wick’s Legacy is a lie. What’s his real Legacy, then? Link considers what it could be, stewing over the possibilities while he waits in the courtyard for the morning bell to ring. Only moments later, Wick passes by like a stranger, disappears into the school. And really, how well does Link know his own brothers? They all share secrets behind his back … Even his own mother must know the truth in which Link, for one reason or another, has yet to be included.
So distracted by his own brooding, he doesn’t even hear Tide come up behind him. The tackle is so quick, from a tabletop to the hard, dusty ground, that the papers in Link’s grasp turn pink and yellow. Finding that hilarious, Tide explodes into laughter, his thick body doubling and tripling over. His cackling echoes off the trees, off the sides of the building, off the air itself.
“Keep laughing,” Link warns him, picturing how Dran might look doubled over too, laughing at the danger The Wrath left him in the night at the mansion … Tide, in this moment, is Dran. If Link squints, they even look the same, plus or minus a hundred pounds of solid muscle and black around the eyes.
And then Link snaps, charging at Tide. He doesn’t care that it’s an ant charging a brick wall. Tide’s eyes flash with surprise, but only until Link crashes into his side, gripping him by the hips and attempting to turn him to the ground. The struggle is rather sad, as Tide merely braces himself with one planted foot, hardly budged.
With one sweep of a leg and two giant hands bringing Link plummeting to the dirt, Tide stoops over his face, nose to nose. He snickers hollowly, his eyes still wet with laughter. “Give it up, Pink. You’re my personal joke and punch line until I stop laughing.”
Guardian intervenes soon after, and it’s over.
An hour later, Link is in the room just outside the Headmaster’s office. Tide’s seated on the opposite end, grinning something awful. Yes, go ahead, make your grins and your laughs. I’m still going to pull a knife across your throat. Link’s anger confuses him; is it Tide or Dran whose blood he wants? Does he even have it in him for death? He’s so queasy with rage, he can’t even bring himself to think on it any longer. All he wants to do is heave his breakfast on a wall.
A giant man with a face as beaten up as a weathered mountainside tramps into the room, and Tide’s grin is gone like a thought. Link needs no hints who the ogre is. The man stands over his son for one long minute, casting Tide in his capacious shadow, then takes a seat next to him without a single word uttered. Oddly enough, the ogre of a man puts an arm around his son, possibly like a hug, and that’s how the pair of them remain.
Not long after, Link’s mom comes around the corner reeking of mud and soot from her job, smears of dirt across her face and hands. Deep down, Link was hoping neither of his parents would come, dad trapped in the metals, mom trapped in the muds … but his luck is all but favorable lately. She crosses the room and takes a seat next to him, shrugging carelessly. “Muds,” she drones. “Really don’t care much for them, pretty as they make me look.” She squints across the room and—much to Link’s annoyance—nudges him. “Is that the guy?” Link says nothing, only working to keep his breathing even, his face blank. “Not a smart choice for a fight, Link. That guy could sit on you.”
“Whatever.”
“Well, I’m speaking true,” she says coolly, lifting her brows. “The boy’s ten times your weight, I’d reckon. Didn’t I raise a smarter boy?”
The assistant rises from her desk, announces that the Headmaster is ready to see the parents, her voice like a tinny horn. Just before they go, Link leans into his mom. “Please, later when we’re home … don’t take my bruises.”
His mother stares into his eyes, considering the odd request for a good bit. Then she nods once, and adds, “But only because the sight of it will likely soften any punishment the Headmaster deals out. Though it’s gonna bother the hell out of me to see that for a few days. Wouldn’t you reconsider?” She shrugs, pats her son on the shoulder and disappears into the Headmaster’s office, Tide’s giant father following.
When it is only them in the waiting room once more, Tide mumbles, “And on the day of my Legacy Exam, too.” He shakes his head, scowling. “You better be glad we’re in here and not outside, Pink, or I’d break your back with one little gust of wind. Been honing my skills all week for the Marshal. Just one twist of my finger and you’re broken … like the twig I snapped over your big brother’s ass, broken …”
Link, despite all his doubts, feels the rage inside lending him unnatural strength, and he finds himself grinning. “Be glad this room separates us, Tidy-Tidy, or I’d be over there changing the color of your face without use of my Legacy.”
From his firm belly, Tide erupts once more into wet and ceaseless laughter, bending and throwing his cackling to the floor. Link watches him emptily … Somehow, the bassy resonance of Tide’s hysterical laughter calms him, second by second. Link realizes too late that his words are wasted on the wrong person, this Tide character, this joke of a boy that laughs and laughs.
No … Link must find Dran, the eye-blackened Wrath boy, and he must find him very soon. Really, it’s that fucker Dran’s face I want to recolor …
0026 Wick
Wick stands before the hall where he’ll wait with roughly twenty others whose Legacy Exam is scheduled today. His stomach is in his feet and his mind is trapped in a Noodle Shop with a boy named Athan and maybe his heart found a way to his ears, because pulse, pulse, pulse is all he hears.
“I’d go in with you,” Rone tells him quietly, “but I took mine years ago. It wasn’t really a big deal.”
“Except it can determine the rest of your life,” Wick points out. “I’m surprised your Legacy didn’t alarm them. Figured they’d ask why you haven’t yet walked through every security checkpoint from here to Cloud Keep itself.”
“I underplayed my power, just let my fingers phase through a sheet of paper for demo.” He grinned smartly. “It’s what you gotta do, y’know … Keep your head away from the axe. Just be a nobody, Wicky. Go in, smell Impis’s bad makeup job and be on your way.”
“Don’t you start calling me Wicky too.”
“Sorry, slipped.” He punches Wick in the shoulder, shoves him toward the door. “Get on with it. Day’s long enough as is without you dragging this out.”
“Alright. Thanks, Rone. For … you know.”
“I know.”
Wick pushes into the hall where the others are seated. Paying them no mind, he sits in an empty chair and leans forward, elbows on knees. The others around him, he wonders who will really make do with their true Legacy, showing and impressing the Marshal and his men. Someone in this room may actually score gold—it is possible with any fool—and catch some incredible opportunity in the Lifted City, showering riches on their family for generations hence.
A part of Wick—maybe a small part, but a part nonetheless—wishes he could be one of them. Oh, if only his incredible and unique power could be flaunted, a great statement for his family. Quiver, people of the sky, he’d declare, as you watch me … sleep. No. In truth, he’d rather a different Legacy entirely. He could borrow from his younger brother and paint the world with dry fingers. He could borrow from another brother and make hot anything he touches … or instantly stop any fist that were to swing at his face.
But Wick cannot be grand and powerful. He must fade into crowds, melt into the shadows of slums and nobodies. Gold in his palm, yet he cannot have it. Wick spots a dead fly on the floor by his feet. I am that bug … winged and unable to fly.
Tall creaky doors at the end of the hall sw
ing open, and a kind-faced girl calls out: “Nortord Ginseng please, to the chamber.” And the boy of fourteen or so years rises from his chair, crosses the hall and disappears through the doorway. Swinging closed, the room is silent again.
This is when Wick takes closer notice of the others in the hall. So many of them are young, years and years younger. There’s even someone that couldn’t possibly be more than eight or nine years old, a boy with fat lips and freckles. Wick is the only seventeen-and-a-half here, it seems. Though he already knew this would be the case, making himself aware of it again unsettles him further. Why didn’t I get this over with years ago when my other brothers did? Why’d my parents insist I wait and wait and wait …?
Another person pushes into the hall, as late as Wick was, and he takes a careless seat directly across. When Wick raises his head, he’s staring at the face of Tide. The hulking lump of beef doesn’t smile when their eyes meet. He just burns Wick with his baleful stare, seething and brooding in silent fury. Wick can’t imagine what’s inspired this mood of his, unless he’s just as tense about his own Legacy Exam. Tide’s his same age; he must’ve waited as long to demonstrate his talent.
“Hey, got a gift for you,” mumbles Tide unsmilingly. He shifts his body to the left, scrunches up his nose, and rips a proud and voluminous fart. “Legacy practice. Tell us what you smell.”
Just then, the tall creaky doors flip open and the sweet girl peeks out: “Anwick Lesser please, to the chamber.”
Wick regards Tide not at all. He rises, crosses the room on shaky legs and passes into today’s Exam chamber—which is really just the small gymnasium in which they practice sport and athletic activity. On a raised platform at one end, he sees a slew of people he does not know. Men and women of the Sanctum, surely … the Marshal of Legacy’s cronies and protectors, of which it is rumored he has countless. Wick proceeds across the gym floor, the sound of his footsteps dancing along the walls and the high ceiling. When he’s made it center, he truly sees for the first time in his life the Marshal of Legacy in the flesh, seated upon the Headmaster’s chair as though it were a pretty throne made just for him.
Wick cannot bring himself to speak at first, stunned by the sight and the grandeur and the fear.
Impis Lockfyre, Marshal of Legacy, wears a sort of doublet embroidered with colors the burning rainbow of a setting sun’s sky would covet. His pants flare the green of neon and force field and power, and his boots shine a lustrous red-purple. The flamboyance of his attire alone could power the city for a day, should his garb ever decide randomly to conduct electricity. Wick believes it could do just that.
And if one weren’t already seized enough by the splendor of the Marshal’s vibrant threads, there is the Marshal’s vibrant face: powdered white and pink, his eyes flare with a force one can’t easily pin as happy or angry or crazed or perplexed or empty or excited or patient or dead. Glassy, doll-like, when he looks at anything, he looks through it and at it and in it all at once.
And for all the intensity of his face, it’s only amplified a millionfold with the fury of his hair—knots and ties and bolts of it pinned back, pinned up, wrapped and curled and spiked and drawn in, out, up, down.
Impis Lockfyre is not beheld without great unease. The nickname Marshal of Madness is not unearned.
“Greets,” chirps Impis, his eyes wide and curious.
“Hi. My name is Anwick Lesser.”
“Of course it is,” Impis agrees.
The Marshal’s voice is strange, curling, intonated in such a way to suggest everything he says is truth and jest and threat all at once, the snap and flirt of dancing whips.
“I …” Wick fights a sudden impulse to giggle, another urge to laugh—What are my nerves doing to me??—and then he finds himself gathered again. “My Legacy is … is a heightened sense of smell.”
“Ooh, hmm, hah,” says Impis precisely, and Wick swears the Marshal’s yet to flinch a single eyelash since he’s entered the room. Does the man ever blink?
Wick squints, takes a long and undramatic whiff, then announces, “There’s a … a cherry blossom root in this room. In fact, I believe it’s quite close to you.”
As the occupants of the room—Impis’s countless men and women—shuffle about and turn their heads, Wick experiences a sudden and unwelcome stab of doubt. What if Lionis was wrong? What if the root is not there? What if someone had found it beforehand and removed it entirely? What if—What if—
An armored woman rises, the ugly red root dangling from her fingers. “Alas,” she calls, smiling flaccidly.
“There, yes,” stammers Wick. “That, right there. The root.”
Impis—his gaze never having left Wick—begins to smile, bigger and bigger and bigger. The grin curls his powdery face, bends his pointy cheeks, pulls his nose and his ears, yet never touches his glassy, unblinking eyes.
“I’m pleased!” decides the Marshal, and he begins to clap. Applause, as though Wick had given him a show. Oh, but if only you knew how much a show it was, indeed.
“Thank you, Marshal.” Unsure of the protocol, Wick gives a brief shy bow of his neck, then asks, “Am I free to go?”
Impis tilts his head too far to respond, as though the next words must pour out of his right ear. “Of course, hmm, yes,” he agrees. “Take leave, my sweet Sensor.”
Wick makes no delay. Turning, he hurries toward the door.
“Ah, but one more,” sings the voice of Impis.
Wick stops. Seconds ago relief had flooded in, only now to be frozen over with terror. He turns slowly, lifts a brow to the Marshal and, ever quietly, says, “Sorry?”
Impis has risen from his chair, standing at the brim of the stage, the curled tips of his boots hanging over. “Just one more demonstration, my sweet Sensor. That’s all, hmm, hah, all I ask!”
Wick can feel his heart beating in every limb, to the tips of his eyelashes and in the drums of his ears. No, no, no … please, no.
“Can you smell anything? Can you smell, for instance …” Impis places a heavily decorated hand on the breast of his doublet, twinkling with a million colors. “… what is in my pocket?”
The whole of the room waits, curious as curious can be. Not even a foot shifts, nor a hand to scratch a nose, nor a stomach to growl. Time itself has frozen, and Wick is the only one free: Free to make an utter fool of himself, free to expose his own lie.
“I can smell …” Wick has only his wit for a weapon. “I can smell your fear.”
Impis is completely reactionless. He simply stares at Wick like some curious animal he’s happened upon, waiting. He clutches a brooch of a thousand colored gems that hangs from his neck, and only for a small moment does he appear offended.
Then he laughs.
Wick is struck with worry, no choice but to simply take in the cloying laughter that billows out from this colorful person. He can’t tell if he’s being mocked or being regarded as a cute thing.
Then Impis stops laughing at once, straightens up and, with chin forward and a smile crooking his face to the left, he asks, “Fear of what?”
“Fear,” Wick goes on, speaking to Impis’s glittering hand, “that I know what it is. I smell that the contents of your pocket are very … important … to you.”
Wick’s eyes gently draw up, meeting the Marshal’s.
“Alas,” sings Impis. He flips open his doublet with one swift hand. “You are wrong, sweet boy … as there is nothing at all in my pocket.”
“Yes,” Wick agrees smoothly. “Because nothing at all is important to you.”
Impis’s left eye twitches. The room is stunned silent. He simply stares at Wick, and for a long moment it’s like the answer has gone unheard.
Then a smile invades his powdered face, Wick’s answer acting like electricity that has touched on the tips of Impis’s eyelashes, playing in his eyes, tickling out of every spike and poke and spray of hair on his head.
“Nothing at all,” Impis sings, playing at the glittering brooch with his long whi
te nails tapping, toying, tapping, tapping, toying.
Then he laughs, one short yelp of laughter, turns to his men and women. “And that is a Legacy Exam, my sweet friends!” he declares, his teeth tasting every word. He barks out with another startling bout of laughter, seeming to lose his head for a fistful of mad, mad seconds.
Wick holds strong, his every muscle gripped so tight he can’t even turn his neck.
“Ooh, hmm, yes, Anwick Lesser of Nothing,” sings the Marshal, facing him in half a pirouette. “I … I will remember you. Yes, yes, I will. Hmm, hah.” His eyes watery with joy, with craze, with merry, with terror, he leans forward and whispers, “Go, my sweet Sensor.”
Wick goes.
He goes.
And goes.
Down the hall he goes. Out the school he keeps going. Bolting home … I just managed the most brilliant deception in all of Atlas. The cleverest. The boldest …
Or the most foolish.
0027 Halvesand
The darkness eats him, but for the candle by his book. He eats the book on the desk. His friends in the room eat his patience. His own fears eat what laughable amount remains of his courage … and yet that biscuit on the table remains entirely uneaten.
“You’ve already passed your entries,” Aleks reminds him, seated on the tabletop with their mutual buddy Pace. “Put the book away, bro. Come into the night with us. We’re going to the Floyd, just six blocks over.”
Some dumb hangout with dumb girls and dumb boys who play hormones all over each other. “I’m not in the mood.”
“Come on,” his brother stubbornly pushes. “You’ve been a slug since the square.”
“Little wimp you’re being,” Pace chimes in.
Pace’s real name is Regory, and no, he still hasn’t gotten the story of why the hell they all call him Pace.
“You know, the only people in Guardian who amount to anything,” quips Halves, “are those who are learned. They advance and get the promotions. Not you.”
