by Daryl Banner
“Rather be a slave to those Lifters?” Aleks spits on the floor. “Slave’s all you’ll ever amount to up there. They swim in heavy gold, dead eyes. We’re slummers and proud of, bro … Live it up! Come out with us!”
Halves bends away from his brother and turns a page, pretending to read. The sentences slip from his mind, the words blurring into more words, letters and syllables twisting about, he just stubbornly pushes through.
His brother makes some remark, Pace grunting, and the two of them leave. The room is quiet once again, darkness eating him, eating the book and the shelves of tombs and volumes and histories and Legacies … If only I had a speck of Lionis’s smarts, I’d finish these books like short-cooked pies.
“My sister Jenevin had a Legacy for clay.”
Halves looks up, finds the strong and curvy shape of Ennebal looming in the shadow, only a stray curtain of moonlight giving hint of her.
“Ennebal, I didn’t see you. How long’ve you—”
“She was excellent in claymaking, clayform, pottery and art and all that. She was an artist in every right.”
She steps out of the shadow. For possibly the first time since he’s known her, she is not swallowed by the heavy Guardian gear that so robs her of a woman’s figure. In fact, she’s wearing hardly a thing at all. A slip of linen, a silken belt cinching her curvy, slender waist … His eyes get lost somewhere around there as she speaks.
“Her art was purchased by a family upstairs. Some Estate or House or some other. Her work was admired by all, and they all took note. You listening?” She’s drawn up close to his side, towering over the book—long forgotten—and pressing her thigh into his. Halves’s heart dances in his chest, his thoughts a muddle, but his hands stay right where they are. “From then on, she was given a pouch of gold for every bit of work. She was even offered a room up in the Lifted City. Imagine that, Halves. My own sister Jenevin, a room up in the heavens.”
“Ennebal … We shouldn’t … You shouldn’t …”
But she’s already made a seat of the table before him, putting one foot on the arm of his chair and the other in his lap. Oh, please, please, oh … A single toe traces his thigh, drawing circles, up and down. She does not smile as she speaks softly, no matter how wildly Halves’s heart thrashes, or how tight his pants grow.
“Are you listening?” she asks, her wicked toe tracing an outline of his cock. “I’m saying something quite important.”
“I’m listening, but, but Ennebal, I … I …”
“Good.” She makes a pull at his pants. Two quick tugs and they’re at his knees. He glances nervously at the door—the two doors that lead out of the dark commons. What is she thinking?? And why am I letting her? Oh—Oh—Her cool hand has found his swollen cock, and his eyes twist around to meet hers.
She still makes no smile, inches from his face, she casually continues her story. “But my sister grew too proud, too greedy … and for her final project, they asked her to make a clay casket.” Ennebal’s eyes shift, her hand still slowly working him. “They put her in that casket and sent her right back to the slums where, perhaps, she belonged all along. In fact, Jenevin’s still in that casket, which is appropriate as she no longer breathes.”
Halves stops breathing himself, mouth parted. Her hand’s still on him, but suddenly he’s forgotten, hit sideways by her story. She doesn’t cry, her eyes dry as bones, the candlelight playing across them like a friend, and her hand won’t stop moving.
How sick, he thinks, that she expects me to hear this horrible story while—while—while—“Ennebal …”
“A sad story, but it’s worth its lesson. See, because I’m not here to protect the streets from criminals. I’m here to protect the streets from them.” Her head nods at the window, at the big black thing in the sky, and Halves, breathing heavy, heavier, growing closer and closer, his mouth stretched half-open in a soundless moan, can’t put words together. Please, please stop … Anyone could burst through those doors. Please …
“Perhaps providing the box we’d later bury her in should be seen as a kindness,” she murmurs thoughtfully, “but I only saw it for the message it truly was to us underlings: Don’t raise your head too high, lest it be lopped right off.”
“How’d …” Halves grabs her hand, stopping her. Their eyes meet, his breath jagged and desperate, hers calm. He feels his cock pulsing, but he collects his breath enough to finish the question. “How did she … die?”
Her answer is gentle. “An oven accident.” Ennebal makes one soft huff of a snicker, though her lips never smile. “Something about getting too close to the clay, they said. Yes, I’m sure that’s the truth of it … getting too close. I can only imagine what she was thinking when she made that clay casket, what she felt. I wonder if it was still pride.”
Halves rises from the chair, the candlelight spilling over them, the smoke slithering around them. With her gaze locked on his lips—as it always is—he pulls up his pants, reluctantly tucking away his hard-on.
“I-I’m sorry,” whispers Halves.
“I’m not.” Her eyes still stubbornly watch his mouth. “My sister should’ve kept her head down. You think I should patrol like this? Out of my gear? Without my weapons?”
“It’s quite distracting,” he admits.
“Distraction’s just as sharp a weapon.” She runs a toe up his inner thigh. “You didn’t want me to finish?”
“It’s against—This is against Guardian policy.” I haven’t been with a girl in eight months, nine months, ten months. “We’d be kicked out. I’d—I’d be ruined. My dreams. Yours too.”
“I only ever had one dream.”
One of the commons doors flips open behind them with a crash. They turn to the callous spill of hallway light. Casting two unwanted shadows over the room, Aleks and Pace, returned.
“Obert made a speech,” Pace tells them, oblivious to Halves’ breathing and the bulge in his pants, “about some rebel slogan ‘Let It Rain’—or maybe it’s their name?—Anyway, it’s graffiti they found at the square. Oh, and he released new partnering. We’re to patrol eighteen hours a day, sunset to the rise and back, every dark and light ‘until Taylon himself smiles’ he says.”
“Bro,” adds Aleks with a wince, “your new partner’s Grute. Sorry about that. Oh, and looks like you’re mine, Ennebal.”
Halves’s heart still racing, Ennebal gives a shrug at the news and saunters out of the room. The candlelight paints a sickly jaundice on them all as he stares stupidly at his brother as though he didn’t hear any of the words.
In the shadows of his dorm twenty minutes later, Halves anxiously shoves the desk in front of the lockless door, then lays on the ground and lets his hungry eyes burn a hole in the ceiling. Clumsily, he undoes his pants and lets free his sore, eager cock, and strokes it madly. He never learned what Ennebal’s dream was, but he knows certain as a heartbeat his own. Focusing on it, imagining it in precious detail, he breathes in the scent from Ennebal’s half-naked body that still lingers on his skin. Her hand felt best, but his own will have to do. Ennebal’s eyes in his mind, her sharp black hair, her curves … Breathing and breathing, faster and faster, closer and closer, he keeps moving his hand.
0028 Ellena
When her son stirs, she makes to quickly flee the room, but it’s too late; his eyes are open. Confused for only half a second, he finally lifts his head and mumbles something. She gently moves a strand of hair off his sweaty forehead. “Sorry, babe. Go back to sleep. Didn’t mean to bug you, I just—”
“What?”
“I was just watching you sleep. Sorry, it was dumb.”
“Okay.” He collapses back into the pillow and starts breathing heavy again.
She keeps her eye on him, crouched by his messy mattress on the floor. He itches his face, just like a baby, scrunches his nose up and turns away. Her heart folds, her little sleeping Anwick, not so little anymore, sleeping as babies sleep … even if no one else does. I should really leave him alone for th
is final hour. But she watches him and she thinks, Is sleeping really your Legacy? Sometimes, I think …
“What’s it like?” she whispers to her boy, her eyes full of whimsy. “To escape to other worlds … fantasies … places and memories and heavens I can only wish for? To be able to escape from this, be free …” Maybe his Legacy is freedom. She smiles wistfully, presses a hand to her cheek. “I wonder what it’s like …”
A stretch of silence goes before, to her surprise, Wick answers: “Like a nightmare every time I wake.”
Her heart hangs heavily for her baby. You don’t have to feel alone, Wick. You’re never alone. You’ll always have us. She closes her eyes, lays down beside the mattress and pretends to sleep, struggling to imagine a world … It’d be a world without mud.
When the family’s making a fuss over breakfast, she’s in the kitchen giving Link a hard and knowing look before he leaves for school. Wick, his eyes heavy and his feet dragging, slings a backpack over his shoulder and pushes out the door, Lionis following. The Legacy Exam is behind them all now, she realizes. No more little ones to push, no more children.
No more children.
She sits in front of the broadcast for an hour, more and more coverage of the square and wreckage turning up by the day. She squints at the images that flick by, sure she sees Halvesand, sure she sees Aleksand, so sure … but when the person turns about, she’s proven wrong. My sons are out there making right of it, making us proud. My big strong boys. She still can’t see either of them in the masses.
Before leaving the house, she reaches into the top drawer for a clean pair of socks, and her hand happens on the tip of something sharp. Gasping, she pulls out the object—a dagger—and turns it over in her hand, gaping. Is this some orphaned project of Forge’s? What’s it doing in the sock drawer? I’ll return it on the way to work, she decides, admiring its shape. I’ll return it to his shed, he’s likely to expect it there.
After a quiet midmorning, it’s in a dead train that Ellena eats her lunch, some car that hasn’t ridden a rail in centuries, pulled off its route for maintenance once and forgotten. It squats on a plot of gravel at the outskirts of the Greens, only minutes from her zone. She has a nice view of a street to her left through the grimy train window. She likes watching people stroll by. To the right, the wide sliding door reveals the green infinity, the muds.
Though she always eats here alone, today a fellow coworker spots her from across the field: the woman who works in the flowers—the snob. Ellena muses whether to finish her lettuce-and-something sandwich, or hide.
Too late. The woman’s big nose pushes into the train, sniffing. “What’s this here, what is this?”
Ellena swallows her bite, crumbs sticking to her lips, she says, “My little getaway.”
“It’ll do.” The woman, uninvited, pushes into the train and takes a creaky seat opposite Ellena. From a bag, she plucks a fruit and begins to peel its skin. The only other sound is the persistent breeze finding every fissure in the train to whistle through.
“I always wanted to work in the flowers. How’d—?”
“Don’t wanna talk,” grunts the woman, chewing. “Life’s got too much talk as it is. I came here for quiet.”
“Alright,” agrees Ellena, turns her attention back to the view. Two young lovers race by, hand-in-hand, and the boy tickles the girl and she screams, smacking him up his arm. Ellena smiles.
“My stupid boy-son,” the woman blurts, drawing Ellena’s attention. “He’s all sick over this girl from the inner circuit. Spends all his time with her and won’t come home for dinner. All the happiness I give, all this work, and the damn boy sells himself to some girl with big eyelashes. Who knows what the idiot’s Legacy is or what she’ll do with her life, no matter, all our money’s run.”
“I’m sorry.” Ellena takes another bite, crunching.
“Sorry, yeah, ‘sorry’ … aren’t we all. My dumb boy-son, all sold and sick and gone and going, but hey, all sons and daughters do that to you one day.”
Ellena smiles. “I only have sons.” Between bites, she says, “Two of them in Guardian, hardly see them at all.”
“Two boys from the ninth are in Guardian?” The woman squints at her, pops a wedge of fruit and chews, juice dribbling down her wormy fingers. “Unusual.”
“Yeah.” Ellena straightens her back, suddenly proud of her boys. “Both of them. Taylon himself took a liking to my oldest, last I heard. That’s the Marshal of Order.”
“I know who the Marshal of Order is,” says the woman flatly.
“Of course.” Ellena peers down thoughtfully at the last crescent of sandwich in her hand. “Halvesand only left a few weeks ago, moved to the dorms and all.”
“Halva-what?” The woman chortles. “What the hell kinda name is that?”
“Halvesand and Aleksand, they’re my two oldest. Named after gods of the Ancients, in fact. Or I think they are. I’m not very up with my histories. Both were named after gods of protection, only spelled different.”
The woman shakes her head, interest lost. “Never liked Ancient studies. Only thing them greedy bastards gave us is felling the world, thanks. Could you imagine if it weren’t for these great walls of Atlas, keeping all that oblivion out? We’re lucky, all of us, lucky our kind isn’t extinct because of those Ancients …”
Ellena offers a tiny smile, then finishes her sandwich in silence. When the break is over, she bids the woman farewell, but not before asking, “What’s your name? I only just realized I don’t know what to call you.”
“No,” grunts the woman. “No, no. This isn’t a friend thing happening. I ain’t got room for another, let alone one from the ninth.”
“Fair enough,” responds Ellena simply, then pushes her way out of the train and back into the fierce yellow sunlight that paints the world. As she crosses the field, the long arm of the Lifted City stretches like a finger’s shadow across the sky, reaching for her—the fingernail still smoking from the other night’s tragic event. Just you remember, she thinks of the sky and the snob from sixth, like any of us, sixth ward or ninth, even things great and golden can fall.
Every time she’s called into her boss’s main office, she feels so delicate and careful, scared to touch a thing, scared to stain an important document or form or piece of machinery with her browned fingers. Today, a trace of defiance burns in her. She stands in front of his desk and waits for eight full minutes before he finally looks up.
“Ah,” he mumbles, slapping down a leaf of paper. “Here’s the shop address. Five stacks a’ paper I need, two ink cartridges, black, and an apple mash for my lunch. Here’s eleven tens, that ought to cover it.” He slides the money to the edge of the desk nearest her, then buries his fingers and nose back in the computer.
“Why am I being asked to do this, sir? Where are all your assistants?”
“They’re out assisting,” he grunts. “To be frank, you’ve raked the field enough for two days’ seed-sowing, I’m like to tell you to stay home a few, for the love of the Sisters, I’m just sick a’ seein’ your face out my window.”
She spots an opportunity. “Oh, you worship the Sisters too? Three Goddess? I pray to them when—”
“Only since my mother’s shoved it down my neck my whole life. And ‘worship’ is hardly the word I’d use.” He taps the money on the desk. “Go, ninth. Day’s not getting any longer.”
“Yes, sir.” She takes the cash and leaves.
The train ride to the shop is tormenting and long. No wonder I was sent on this tedious errand … Crowded and smelly, the occupants of the train are traded three times fold with new and smellier occupants the further into the tenth ward it goes. Pushed to the back by the onslaught of men and women, Ellena just clasps her eyes shut and counts away the minutes as the train lurches to stops, springs ahead, lurches, springs, lurches. The smell of sweat and soiled feet never ease up, a permanent and unwanted traveling companion.
Disembarking somewhere at the south end of the tenth,
she walks along a wide, foggy street in a part of town she’s never before visited. Even in daylight, every alleyway and sewer grate and rooftop seems to have eyes. Her hairs stand on end and she feels deep relief when the shop’s name is spotted ahead on a half-rotted sign.
Inside, she tediously pokes through the aisles, gathering in her arms the stacks of paper and the ink cartridges, which were particularly annoying to collect, as there were so many different varieties to choose between. Waiting in line to make her purchases, two men behind her complain to one another of a smell. “Like sewage,” one of them says. “Like fettered rats and mealworms,” the other agrees. Ellena rolls her eyes and begs for the line to move faster, knowing the scent the whiners behind her are catching is hers. Let me at your faces, she muses, and you won’t smell a thing, for all the blood coming out your nose.
Hardly a second after the dark thought, the shop doors burst open, and a dozen or so boys charge in yelling commands, slinging chains and blades, hollering. There’s a scream, cursing, and a loud crack of a whip. Ellena holds the items tight to her chest, eyes wide as the invading robbers—all boys, all dressed head to toe in black, in chains, in grease—take control of the store and its customers, ordering all money be handed over else a hurt be put on anyone opposing.
“YOU!” cries one of the boys, thrusting the butt of his sword into a woman’s face. “Down! Don’t you look at me, I saw that! Down, down!”
Ellena keeps her eyes glued to the floor, her breath gone heavy, throat tight and dry. Don’t look at them, she begs. Don’t look. Let them have their play and don’t look.
But there’s one that catches her eye, despite all her restraint. “Money, gold, and that fine choker you got,” he tells an old lady ahead in the line, his voice slippery as silk. Eighteen years old maybe, messy hair black as pitch, greasy gunk smeared around two hungry eyes. His smile is sweet as a wolf’s on the prowl.
“This man’s being smart,” a boy calls from the back.
