by Daryl Banner
Before he knows it, he’s poured into the streets with dozens of others all around him. Tearing off, he doesn’t look back and, in many senses, he doesn’t even look ahead as he runs, runs, runs. A woman running at his side screams as something long and sharp hits her face, and she’s gone. A boy ahead of him trips, dropped to the ground, and Link runs over him like the poor guy were just a bump in the road. Don’t fall, he begs himself, taking note. Don’t trip and don’t fall and—
He rounds a corner to hide, pressed against the brick, and his left foot taps into the side of a man on the ground. He looks down, realizes the man is dead, bled out all over the pavement. The jacket he wears looks thick as a wall. Think quick, think smart … Feeling anything but quick or smart, Link unceremoniously peels the jacket off the man, wraps it around his own leg three times, ties it over and over, sleeves wrapped—an invisible, bodiless torso hugging his left leg like a best friend … yet still he sees the purple glow, even through the thick jacket.
The people are still scattering down the street, and now Guardian have emerged, on the pursuit, each of them with guns aimed and purple lights flying.
Make it fly, Dran would have said.
Link bolts from the wall, racing like a mad man toward the train. They can’t stop the train, can they? The trains never stop. He flies up the stairs not caring that his leg could very well light a mineshaft. What a convenience his leg would be then, navigating a cave, but he is not in a cave; he’d sooner trade his leg for a broomstick than get captured by Guardian, who have now permanently marked him. His only comfort is how brightly lit the trains are kept. If only they’re bright enough …
He squeezes into the back of the—He doesn’t even know which train this is. He presses his left leg against the wall, praying it to be smothered well enough. Please, Three Goddess, please, Sisters, please, please. He swallows and feels sweat drooling down his face in sticky beads. He can’t catch his breath … in, out, in, in, in, out, in, in, in … His eyes still find the world fuzzy and discolored. He blinks and he blinks, harder and harder, willing the stubborn world back to rights. Please, Three Sister … anything, please, please … His leg throbs distractingly, crying for his attention. Please help me.
The glow burning in his calf, his mind is given just enough time to catch up. This is when the deepest dread settles into his heart, the worst and darkest of realizations. He’s been marked. He glows. Even if he makes it home safe, he cannot go to school. Even when he’s safe in his house, the school will note his absence and pursue him still. Whether his mom and dad both poured excuses to the school officials, Link would be turned up. And when Link is found, his leg is found too … the mark, the criminal, the runaway, the glow. His life is over.
Link feels the choke. A sob squeezes out his nose, a whiny sort of moan from his chest. His life is over. All of this, all of what he’s done and not done … over.
He looks up. Guardian have boarded the train, two of them. Both as menacing as the hounds from the mansion. They might be snarling like them too, hungry for a scrap of red meat, but they don’t yet catch the scent of Link lingering here in the corner.
The train begins to move. The two Guardian are poking down the aisles like fathers in a grocery store, deciding on tonight’s supper. Neither of these men are his brothers. Oh, Halves, Aleks, you two could save me, couldn’t you? When I’m brought before the King and sentenced to die, you’d put in a word and save my life, wouldn’t you?
The one nearest, his eyes meet Link’s. There is a moment of doubt, a moment of curiosity.
And then Link bolts through the back door. Hollering out, Guardian chases Link as he bursts from the back of one car into the front of the next, on and on down the throat of the ugly metal snake. He hears the men yelling. He hears the scandalized gasps and hushes and hollers from people aboard, boys and girls and men and women who still have their lives, whose calves aren’t bursting with alien purple light, who have a dinner to go home to, who have the security of tomorrow.
When Link hits the back of the train, no more cars to leap into, he really knows it’s over. Staring at the city below him pass by … rooftops and empty streets and houses … It’s over. There is no one here to help him. No invisible girl to take his hand and make unseeable magic. No Shye am I … No Sisters to hear my pleas … He will be imprisoned for life or experimented on, he knows all the stories. Publically executed on the broadcast. Won’t that be a lovely birthday gift for mom. Or worse, a dull and meaningless private killing at the top of Cloud Tower by the King. The last cry he will hear is not his own, but the Banshee’s. “I don’t want Guardian scum witnessing my end,” he realizes sadly.
Refusing to think any longer on it, Link takes to the back railing and jumps. The tracks are nothing and he slips through, falling and grappling. This would be the second time he’s fallen off the back of a train, except he’s nothing to grab, nothing to save his plummet. He falls and lets the stone or brick or death below catch him. His leg flashing, he must look like a falling star. Look, mom …
Then it stops horribly.
Something behind him snaps. His back, his neck, his leg. What’s broken? He can’t feel it, whatever it is. His head? Oh, he hasn’t stopped, he’s still falling … falling …
Another terrible crash and he’s spread like shattered glass. A window broke to bits, that’s what he is. Weakly, the little thing with limbs now that have spread themselves like parts of a doll. He cries out and there’s no sound. He moves, yet cannot move.
He opens his eyes to a grey haze. Has he exploded on the pavement? Is it ghastly? There are mad clouds everywhere.
Sound comes back … his own moaning. Then there are voices. Hushes. A whisper and a cry. Link tries to lift his head and can’t. Smoke and cloud and crap all over. His eyes blink, blink, blink … and there’s a roof way, way above him. Far above him, this place has a high ceiling. And in that ceiling, a hole he made.
A hole he made where he fell.
“Help.” Is that his voice? Did he just say that? He tries to work it again. “Help,” he begs over and over until his voice is nothing but rasps and mumbles.
A man’s face looms over him, eclipsing the sight of the hole in the roof. The man is bald. His face is warm and round, but his eyes are cold, serpentine. I know you, Link realizes with a lift.
“I know you,” says the man.
Link squeezes his eyes, looks again.
The man. He is a priest. This place, it is a church … a sanctuary … a sanctuary Link’s been in before. Is it his mother’s? Three Goddess, have you found me after all? Or is it another sanctuary? Is it … is it …
The man crouches down, his face close. “You took our gold, took our peace, and now have taken our roof.” He squints. “I’m afraid we’ve little else to take. Welcome back to The Brae, child.”
Link bursts into tears, his voice squeaking. He raises a hand, but sees no skin—only red, his entire hand, red from the two-foot-long gash that runs from halfway up his forearm, away to his shoulder somewhere. “Blood,” Link hisses, faint as death. “Blood. Blood.”
And the world twists away.
0037 Forgemon
First thing he does when he gets home is shut the door, drop to the hard concrete floor and stare emptily at the base of the kitchen counter. One of the stools is leaning, he’ll have to fix that. There’s webs forming under the oven. Lionis has to clean it … has to clean …
What just happened?
He closes his eyes and tries to blot out the screaming and the screaming and the screaming. Calm now, Forge, you’re home. But why does his mind keep working? The figures insist and the numbers persist, drawing further dimensions and vertices and planes of probability on an already unfathomably complex design of countless maybe’s and if’s. Forge clutches his head like a ball of steel, weight as heavy, he’d reckon. He lowers it to his knees. I’m losing my mind, he realizes. I must be losing my mind. Certain Legacies are known to have side effects; his has to be insanity.
“Forge?”
He looks up to find his wife standing there in all her beauty, buttoning up a lilac blouse. She must’ve just changed out of her work clothes, cleaned up from her day’s work. “Nope,” he grunts, climbing to his feet.
She stops, frowning. “No?” She looks so sexy, even when she frowns. Lush lips … I’m going to bite those lips.
“No.” He places a hand over hers. It’s twice the size, it covers it whole. The way one unlaces a gown, loosens silk, he draws her hand away and undoes all her tedious work, button by button, opening the blouse.
He notices a scar running up her arm from wrist to elbow. He traces it with his middle finger, curious. She took this wound from a young man, not from one of our sons, he already knows, the math lending him half the answer, but the young man had not asked her to take it; she took it by impulse. “Whose is this?” he asks gently.
Ellena presses her lips together, peering down at the wound as if recalling something fondly. Her kind eyes meet his hungry ones and she answers, “Someone’s who didn’t need it anymore.”
“Yes,” he agrees quietly, ripping off her blouse and casting it somewhere forgotten. “Another thing unneeded.” He shoves his face into her breasts, and she moans and gasps. Then he clamps his teeth to her nipple, giving her a greater reason to moan and gasp. “Yeah. That’s how it sounds.”
Suddenly he’s lifted her up, carrying her like nothing around the room. His mouth and his nose buried deep in the happy place, he can’t seem to decide where he wants to set his woman. “There,” she suggests, and he throws her onto the couch. She laughs loud, almost a scream, and that brings him to smile for the first time all night.
Not even weapons can bring him a smile like she can.
Then she puts hands against his firm abdomen, pushes him off. “You’ve had your fun.” She grins wickedly. “Let me mine.” And where his pants once gripped his hips tight, they now let go ever slightly to release his man. And his man is plenty ready to go.
Ellena puts her warm mouth on it, and Forge throws his head back, gripping the couch as though winds of joy could knock him off and throw him to the heavens. The happy agony of their bodies connected fills the room without a care for who’s home, for what’s happened only minutes ago, for what’s ever to come. She makes me forget the math. When she climbs up, she tells him she’s aching. Her hand finds a place, he squirms, and she tells him again how bad it aches. “Let me take your aching for once,” he says, then does.
For hours, the world’s forgotten. They go between fucking like mad and lying as the merrily dead lie … a sweet, glassy look of bliss and harmony flowing across their face like a cool stream.
The morning’s light cuts in. Forge shudders, squinting into the sun. How’d they end up on the kitchen floor? He staggers naked to the window, pulls the shutter and studies the backyard. After a night of forgetting the math, sudden numbers begin to click. An absence of certain actions. An equation left without two key variables. A fraction, divided by zero, yielding …
“Where’s Anwick?” he whispers, so quietly no one hears.
He turns abruptly, scurrying up the narrow stair and thrusting into his son’s bedroom. The mattress is empty. He runs into the bathroom just beside it; the window yawns, an empty morning breeze snaking in.
He’s gone. He already knows. Anwick’s …
“What is it?” Ellena’s come up to the foot of the stair.
“Link.” That’s the other missing number. “Both of them.” He covers the length of the hall in two long strides, opens his other son’s room. Only a clutter of discolored clothes meets his eyes. I should’ve known. I was a fool and I should’ve known. I should’ve seen.
“Forge?”
He whips past his wife, barges into their little room under the narrow stair and pulls out the drawer, throwing underwear to the wind, tossing socks and bras. “Dagger!” he cries. “Where is it!”
Ellena stands naked at the door but for the lilac blouse she holds to her chest. A small sound escapes her lips, then the weight of it all dawns on her too: “They didn’t come home … Oh, Forge, they never even—”
“They came home from school,” Forge cuts in, his eyes mad. He already knows. The dagger is missing and he knows. “They came home but they went out again, the both of them. But not together. They’re in the city. They’re in trouble. Our boys.”
“Forge.” Her eyes search his desperately. She knows his Legacy is working white-hot, burning with answers that don’t make sense, working numbers and figures with a speed even Forge’s own mind cannot keep up with; like a psychic friend within his core speaking at the rate of a thousand probable futures a second. “Forge, talk to me. What do I do? Where are they?”
He already knows and doesn’t have time to catch her up. There’s no time. They’ve been out of time for many hours already. “Anwick took the dagger. Anwick went to the Weapon Show last night and he took the dagger. Link followed him. Link, our Link. And they’ve both—”
And then he’s thrusting clothes on his body so fast he can’t manage a sleeve of his shirt, tears it and cries out, furious. Ellena keeps her distance, still as a stone. Forge wrestles a pair of pants into submission, strikes a leg each into two industrial boots. He hears Ellena’s voice as she moves into the backyard: “Lionis! Lionis, down from the tree! It’s an emergency! Your brothers …”
Forge’s grabbed a coat, he’s gone before she can reach the end of her sentence.
0038 Ruena
She hears the knock, even from the top of the book tower where she loves to hide, reading the fictions and the sciences of the Ancients. She hears the knock and she ignores it. It’s Sedge, she already knows. She returns to the book she’s reading, the one she’s already read six times, her favorite.
He’s knocking because he’s likely heard the same news she has: they’ve officially given up the search party for Kael Mirand-Thrin, proclaiming her to be dead.
And Ruena is well aware of what this means.
Hours after the knocking has stopped, Ruena finally lets herself down the book tower and into the wardrobes. Pulling open a door, any door, she picks a color and wraps her neck. Another color drapes down her body and a wide lavish hat sits atop her head, angled perfectly to cover the ugly hairless scar. She dresses her neck with big beads and covers her eyes with large turtle frames that decorate the scar-streak that trickles down her temple.
She will have to face her grandfather whether she wants to or not. Better on her time than his.
Sweeping out of the Palace, she crosses the garden and spills into the streets. It’s an impossibly bright and sunny midmorning, and she minds the breeze that pokes and tickles her silks. She curses herself for not choking her outfit with a belt of some kind. All clothes must be strangled into obedience; that’s a lesson Aunt Kael taught her, a rigid woman herself. Aunt Kael always made sharp remarks about Ruena, saying, “You’re so like your mother.” And it wasn’t meant to be a compliment.
Ruena’s parents died very young, so the only mother she knew growing up was Aunt Kael, who never married. Without brother or sister, and now without Aunt Kael, who does she truly have? The whole Palace is hers now, but to what end? Even the Palace she will have to give up, when she’s … Don’t think of that. Head up, chin up, and don’t think again about that. Aunt Kael Mirand-Thrin will return and this will all be for nothing.
Halfway across the Eastly, she encounters a peck of girls. Four tall sticks-for-legs with plastic hair; that’s what Ruena thinks of them. “Ooh, I love, love, love that color on you,” one of them says, poking at Ruena’s sleeve. Another steps in, running a finger along her hat. “Ooh, the details, the details. Very deserving on a lady as you.” The third and fourth come in for their own peck, peck, peck. “Ooh, your eyes catch the sun and simply glow!”
Ruena smirks. “That might be the electricity. Maybe I’m overdue to let loose a charge, do you think?”
The four titter nervously. Then, perhaps wonderi
ng if Ruena meant it to be funnier, they pour into hilarious laughter. “Ooh, you’re so funny! Lady Ruena!” And the one with the orange hair cackles, her voice chirping like a tall, bony bird. “Ooh, my ribs ache, the laughter! Ooh!”
For the next humble while, Ruena truly considers whether some deadly pent-up static can do them good.
“We were wondering,” one of the girls says, her voice nine octaves high and thin as wind, “if you might help us?” Another one swoops in, her smile as plastic as her hair. “Please, Lady Ruena. We are throwing a Ball, a Ball Of Pasts Pretty, and we require costumes of the Time Ago?” Orange hair sighs wistfully, whispers, “Ooh, you can come if you like, sweet Lady Ruena! It is a costumed affair … if you’d so aid us with the costumes. You do have such an … eye!”
It’s my colors they want, she thinks, screwing her eyes to them. These girls who used to criticize my clothes and make japes at me—even before the scar. But what does she have to lose? Soon, the whole of Atlas might be bowing to her, asking her advice on a lot more than just colors and costumes of the Ancients … of the “Time Ago” …
“I will be happy to help,” Ruena sings back, just as fake, playing just as plastic a role as they, and the four girls are beside themselves with glee, giggling, jiggling. Ruena leads them, her destination unchanged.
The doors of Cloud Keep are guarded by unfamiliar men today, and when Ruena approaches with the girls, one of the men says, “I’m sorry, but the King allows no audience today.”
“Oh, a tough fix for you,” replies Ruena, “denying the King a visit from his only living granddaughter.”
The other guard makes a face, and the one who spoke sputters and chokes, his face flushing deep as a raspberry. “Sorry, oh, oh, sorry. My … My, I’ve—”
“That’s a lot of words,” observes Ruena, putting on a look of concern. “Will you choose one and commit?”
