Outlier: Rebellion

by Daryl Banner

  “Oh, oh, yes.” He clears his throat. “Yes, I’m sorry. And … And I forgot myself. And … And …”

  “Good words. ‘And’ is a good word, the glue of our language. You’re already improving.” Ruena gives him a tight smile as the great doors of the Cloud Keep yawn, permitting the five of them through. The four girls chirp, giggle, and brag to one another about how privileged they are to be such guests of the lovely, promising, beautiful Ruena Netheris.

  She takes the girls to one of the Archives, doing her electrical trick on the keypad to grant them access. The squatty steel door slides open and the girls pour in, oohing over the strange fabrics and outfits and suits of times long ago when the world was more than a city. Really, when one studies the facts and the histories, there is little difference from the clothing of now and the clothing of then: people still wear suits, still wear jeans and dresses and heels, scarves and hats. Ruena never understood the deep hate that people feel for the past, for the Ancients … Where they hated, Ruena always found fascination. There is something to be learned from the people of Time Ago, and Ruena won’t refuse herself the joy of exploring what it may be.

  One of the King’s Guardian marches into the room, the four girls startled by the sudden, loud intrusion, their giggling brought to a choke. When the man turns his questioning gaze on Ruena, his skin runs pale. “S-Sorry, my princess.”

  Ruena laughs, shocking them all. “I’m no princess.”

  He looks confused. “P-Princess of … of …”

  “Do we live in a castle?” asks Ruena, and maybe the presence of the girls incenses her—maybe her patience is lost on the current, insufferable company. “This isn’t a castle … This is a metal fortress. This is a bunker in the sky, a prison for the wealthy to keep themselves fed without paying mind to who feeds them. It’s a dream wrapped in a big silver box stapled to the sky with promises and kisses from the future. Understand?”

  “Y-Yes, Your H-Highness—”

  “I’m no Highness either.” She makes a smirk. “Not in these shoes.”

  Now, the girls simply regard the intrusion of the guard as a nuisance, like a winged bug buzzing about their face. Ruena considers for one dark, happy moment that she could, in fact, demand all their heads be served to her on a big silver plate. Oh, the joys of Queenship. But why doesn’t that even make her smile?

  Finding the costumes they need, Ruena asks the guard to escort the girls out of the Keep. The four of them are so happy with their choices, bragging to one another, they forget entirely to thank Ruena for the gifts.

  No matter. Ruena has more pressing business.

  With a sweep of her silks and a quaint adjustment of her hat, she takes to the long corridor that connects to Cloud Tower, where an insufferable amount of stairs and control panels lead her up, up, up to the terribly long hall, where finally she finds the big metal doors to the throne.

  “Sorry,” drones the guardsman—a new guard, apparently, a man of sixty or so years, his beard all white, “but King Greymyn Netheris is among his daily trials.”

  Ruena sighs. “How many more does he have left?”

  The guard lifts a brow.

  “Ruena Netheris,” she declares with more irritation than intended. “I know about my grandfather’s trials. I’m made aware of most of his business, whether I like to be or not. I’ll be happy as a Sentenced to wait until he is free. How many more does he have?”

  The guard swallows hard, trembling with a small digital display in his palm. Obviously he did not recognize her. Twice he fumbles with it before finally producing an answer. “Forty-two.”

  She hides her gaping expression not well. “Admit me,” she finally manages to say.

  “I cannot.”

  Her jaw tightens. “Admit Ruena Netheris, heir to the throne of Atlas, or my grandfather will have you added to your little list there. How do you like the number forty-three?”

  The old man clearly makes an effort to mask his own insolence. Chewing on his teeth, he lets open the large, crashing doors of the throne room, and Ruena Netheris slithers in, her heels clacking, clacking, clacking against the white marble tile.

  The way to the throne is longer than she remembers, like the hall itself has stretched itself another hundred feet. Is this what I’ve to look forward to every day of my Queenship? A long walk across half the city to get from one end of the throne room to the other? Seated on the throne is a tired wrinkle of a man, the most of his face swallowed in grey hair and beard, only bloodshot frog eyes and a bump for a nose peering out from his huge white brows. He’s dressed in the laziest fall of linen, grey and drab and lazy. He looks half a slummer. To his left is the rainbow-inspired Marshal of Legacy Impis, colorful and terrifying as ever in his powdered face and pink lips, and to his right, wise Janlord Marshal of Peace in a humble, loose-fitting grey silken suit and a fat pair of boots.

  She has clearly interrupted the current trial: an old man with nothing on his head but a sheen of nervous sweat, knelt and bound by chain at the hands and feet. What he’s to be tried for, who knows; she only cared to take note of two or three of today’s trials that piqued her interest. “Good day,” she announces carelessly to the Council.

  “Come,” replies Janlord professionally. “The King wished you to attend these trials and take mind.”

  The King can’t seem to speak for himself, simply sitting there watching. Or is he even watching? He wishes me to have a taste of the burden of Queenship to persuade me away from it. “Of course,” Ruena says instead. She ascends the steps, taking a seat at the chair normally occupied by the Marshal of Order, who is as yet absent.

  The old man is pardoned for mistakenly assaulting a Guardian. He is going senile and lost his mind in the dark of some night when he was travelling home, having mistook the Guardian to be a robber. “On your way,” says Janlord kindly, and it is unclear whether the old man is relieved or not as he makes the long trek out of the hall. The next trial is a plump woman and her twelve-year-old son who were captured after having been on the run for two weeks. The son was marked truant and the mother couldn’t care less, spitting at the foot of the throne and calling the King a piece of soiled meat. “You can’t care any longer for the child,” Janlord states, “and you have no respect for your Kingship. I fear the end’s for you, but not by death. To the Keep until you’ve remembered your loyalties.” The son is ushered off, to be placed in a sixth ward orphanage called the Kindred Abbey, and the sight of the mother screaming and reaching for her boy as she’s dragged off by the King’s men is one Ruena does not enjoy. She was a stupid woman, Ruena reasons, justifying Janlord’s judgment the best she can. She was a stupid woman whose own pride got her by the throat.

  The next four trials might as well be the same thing over and over, the monotony threatening to bore Ruena to death. All of them about starving and stealing, starving and stealing, and Ruena has to bite her tongue so as not to shout: If you’re so hungry, why not work to make a speck of gold and purchase yourself a meal like any other dignified person? Most slummers are so lazy, they’d rather steal the city for all its worth. Mouths fed with lies and crimes and ruined integrity cannot a stomach fill.

  Three quarters of an hour later, kneeling before the king and bound in chain are two boys with very dark hair, similar in size and build. One of them seems to have recently cried black tears, two long streaks of the dark color having run down his cheek and dried. There are no words exchanged for quite some time, and Ruena suddenly finds her patience lost. “Is that evidence of your Legacy?” she asks carelessly. “The crying of black tears?”

  The boy looks at her not unkindly, something soft about his eyes, as if smiling without lips. He answers, “I wear grease in them, of course. I’m afraid I didn’t have time to properly wash them out. Had this unfortunate trial of mine been better scheduled, I suppose, I would’ve had the chance to don my dress clothes. I wear a real mean suit.”

  “Oh. How discourteous of us.” Ruena sighs airily. “If only we’d gi
ven you enough time to clean up those blots of grease, they wouldn’t be running halfway down your face.”

  He winces plainly. “My eyes ran when I shed a tear, of course, for the family I’ll never see again.”

  Ruena studies him long. “Why do you grease your eyes like that anyway, with the black in them?”

  “Oh, but for all the bad I’ve seen.” Now he smiles slyly. “The bad any slum boy or girl must see, he or she can never unsee.”

  Okay. Ruena turns finally to her grandfather, still tiredly sitting his ugly chair. For the hazy glass things he has for eyes, Ruena isn’t even so sure the man’s alive. “King Greymyn. May I request to handle this one?”

  “Swee … Swee … Sweet Ruena,” he finally croaks. His voice is a most horrible sound, like gravel running through a machine, gears of a rusted wheel struggling to turn. “Are you ready?”

  “Always.” She isn’t certain what he means, but can’t stand to show a speck of reluctance in front of him and the Marshals and these dirty slum boys.

  “Vee … Vee … Very well, my sweet. Tell us the … Tell us the fate. Of these boys.” He lifts a finger—what effort it seems to take for him to make such a simple gesture, he must be a million years old—and he’s pointing at the slum boy.

  “I have read a note on this trial only this morning,” Ruena announces, a detail or two surfacing in her mind. “I read about the boys who call themselves the warriors or the wrestlers … the whatevers.”

  “They call themselves The Wrath,” Janlord offers.

  She rolls her eyes, no idea what in the world anyone could be so angry about that they must name themselves such a thing. “Before I reckon a fate, I suppose I ought to learn more about these two.”

  “A Queen,” agrees Janlord, “must always make use of her ample wisdom. Good, Lady Ruena. Very good.”

  Ruena hides another roll of her eyes. They treat me like the world’s dumbest. A girl to be carefully guided to a chair where someday she can lazily sit and do nothing. “Very well.” She comes partway up to the throne, then takes a seat on the steps just in front of it. She cocks her lavish hat back, pulls the large frames off her face, blinks, and says, “Tell me, boys. What are your crimes?”

  The one with the black tears lifts his chin. “I regret to say, Your Highness, that I must borrow the words most guilty men use: I am innocent.”

  “Innocent.” She pores over his face, his dirty clothes, the nearly identical boy at his side—obviously a brother, if she had to swear. “Care to elaborate?”

  “Yes, I care.” He lifts his chin once more, narrows his eyes defiantly. “I am here, accused of making the Lord’s Garden fall, accused of belonging to a rebellion whose slogan is ‘Let It Rain’ … but I regret to say, if I did belong to such a rebellion, those wouldn’t be my choice words. Where I’m from, it never rains.”

  “Don’t be silly,” replies Ruena, frowning. “It rains everywhere in Atlas.”

  “Except for the part the Lifted City covers.”

  Ruena is caught, finding herself corrected. Corrected by a slum boy with greasy tears and filthy pants.

  “Unless you count the Lifted City sewage pipes that, on occasion, leak,” he adds. “Then, in that case, it does rain. Though the raindrops are less than desirable.”

  Ruena sighs, disgusted, and faces her grandfather once again. “Shouldn’t matters of those accused for mass destruction and violence be in the hands of the Council?”

  “You have two thirds of your Council here,” Janlord reminds her. “The Marshal of Order Taylon is busy dealing with the so-called Doom in the second ward and the band of extremist Sister-lovers in the fourth. As well, a branch of his Guardian is still busy arresting other rebels of the Eastly Weapons Demonstration.”

  “Weapon Show,” the other, younger-looking boy offers, as if for a correction. Janlord shoots him a look, and the boy bares his teeth—two are missing. For all the cuteness of his face, he’s missing teeth. Don’t they ever think to visit dentists, to get such things fixed, or are the slumborn as lazy as they say?

  “Arresting … rebels.” Ruena tastes the word, shakes her head and looks down on the knelt boys. “I don’t like that word. It should not exist. The people have every reason to be happy and compliant, haven’t they?” Her eyes darken, twisting. “Or are we so desperate for a repeat of the last uprising?”

  “I’m desperate for nothing,” says the black-tears boy, “and I am not a rebel.”

  “Then who’s responsible for the blue?” The question comes from Janlord, who moves forward and takes a seat on the steps aside Ruena. She turns a sidelong glance at him, appreciates how modest Janlord is, modest enough to sit on the floor with her like some clever commoner. “The words were plain: The Lifted City will fall, the ink read. We are the real weapon. Let it rain. I have seen this anger before, my boy. Many times before. Lost tempers. Boys who dress in black and chains and call themselves The Wrath.” His eyes look sad, a disappointed father. “Why the words, my boys?”

  “If only they were mine,” black-tears replies.

  Ruena feels heavy, watching the boys on their knees. If we lived in a time of the Ancients … “We could have a trial,” she says, her thoughts suddenly becoming speech. “A trial with a—what do they call it?—a jury. There could be a system in place to bring justice to those who deserve it, and mercy otherwise. Their peers would judge them fair.” She sucks on her tongue, studies the boys with all her curiosity, all her wild notions. “Now, with simply a word, we can end these boys’ lives, or …”

  “The ways of the Ancients brought ill judgment on many an innocent man and woman,” points out Janlord. “Their archaic system of justice proved corrupt.”

  How is ours any less corrupt? Ruena holds her tongue, all too aware that her grandfather is hearing every word of this, whether he looks alive or not. She rises, looks to the King. “If not for the blue words, the boys are still guilty of crimes with The Wrath. Thievery, isn’t it?” She puts one cold eye on the slum boy and his brother. “Murder, I wouldn’t doubt? … Rape?”

  “Never rape.” His eyes turn very dark, his face set as a statue’s. “I respect my woman.”

  “You respect the ones you rob as well?” She is all ice, the humor lost. “The ones whose lives you ruin? The ones whose husbands you kill?”

  “No one is innocent,” he responds, his every word a hammer to the marble tiles. “No man, no woman, no King, no To-Be-Queen.”

  Half a second of chirping laughter fills the hall. The Marshal of Legacy Impis becomes quiet again, looking off somewhere high, high above where nothing regards him but the voices that are likely in his strange mind.

  ‘No To-Be-Queen’ … I heard that last jab, slum boy. You’re dangerously audacious. This sort of thing cannot be corrected or forgiven. “Janlord here has taught me that no person should be sentenced unless you know his name and have seen the color of his eyes.” She looks on him. “Yours are black, the both of yours. Black as your hair. Now tell me your names.”

  “Dran,” he says, making his name sound half a bite. “This is my younger brother, Fylan. My fiancée is named Mercy and you will ruin her life. And I agree, it’s quite important you know the names of the innocent slumborn you charge with the outrageous crime of rebellion.”

  “Ah, but you said it yourself, didn’t you?” Ruena leans forward. “We are, none of us, innocent.”

  The hat tips too far, topples off her head. Her white hair swings about, unrested by the loss of it, and her great and ugly scar is visible to the world of these two boys for a long, generous time. With patient grace, she reclaims the hat, sets it delicately back upon her head, then lifts her nose high as a sky. “Dran and Fylan, of no apparent last name …”

  With one word, she ends their lives. Another, she condemns them. Yet another, she hands them freedom.

  “To the Keep with you two,” she finishes.

  “The Combs,” mutters Dran. “Every boy in the slums know what your prisons truly are: catacombs. A
place to store the dead, as it goes. Nothing dignified in it at all. You might as well sentence us to die.”

  “The Kingship is kind,” she recites. “The Kingship is good.” Ruena nods to the guards, finished.

  The armored emerge from the walls and claim the bound arms of Dran and his younger brother Fylan, walking them down the long hall and out of sight. It is a surprising sensation, to so easily have a request honored without resistance. The only resistance she feels is her own; a battle within her belly, writhing with the guilt and the self-righteousness and the ultimate nature of power. Even her grandfather the King didn’t lift a hand in question. Any word she uttered would have been taken at its worth. I could’ve saved them, she realizes. I had their lives in my hand, their two little lowborn lives. I could’ve freed them.

  “You did well,” murmurs Janlord.

  Ruena nods emptily, looks up at the King, her grandfather, the true judge. His bubble eyes gleam, two murky moons.

  He parts his chapped, ugly lips. “Youuuuu …” He clears his throat, which does nothing whatsoever to actually clear it. “You are … too soft … to be Queen.”

  Ruena frowns, insulted. Janlord had offered pardons and kindness to half the trials she’d just witnessed. How was her sentencing any different? “But I—”

  “Not ready,” he grumbles, his whole beard twitching and flinching with his words. “The world is coming undone. Undone. Ruuuena.” He inhales, a horrible rasp like metal splinters grinding. The throat of the Banshee forever bleeds and bleeds and bleeds. “It has been ages since an Outlier has been found. They hiiiide them, Ruena, hide them, they hiiiide them.” He clenches a fist, teeth, legs, every part of him squeezed the way one strangles some invisible enemy. “Uproot them. Every one of them … them … Outliers. They threaten. Threaten the King, the Queen. They will take it all away.” Phlegm is caught in his voice, or blood, or something else awful, the last words gargling out through mucus and horrors: “Ruena forgives. Ruena kisses her killers and—and—and grants them undeserved homes … the Cooombs. But what does Queen Ruena do?”