by Daryl Banner
A hand touches his arm, startling him so deeply he yelps out like a dog before finding Ennebal’s face inches from his own.
“You ought to reconsider working in the offices instead of the field,” she tells his lips. “Papers and books are too scary for you.”
“You think? Yelping doesn’t suit a Guardian?” He tries to smile, feels it falling flat.
“Halves, you don’t look well.” She runs a hand through his hair and he pulls back as if she’d attacked him. “Halves?”
“Sorry.” He hadn’t meant to reject her so rashly. It’s just that whenever he’s startled lately, he gets a flash of Grute’s calm, unassuming backside, seconds before a knife meets it. “You know they have … Guardian, they have … There’s rules, you know, and if either of us were caught breaking them, then—”
“It’s Grute, isn’t it?” She studies his mouth as she always does, her too-close eyes burning black in the dimness of the study. “I’m sorry. I should’ve … I didn’t realize you’d grown so attached. To be blunt, I kinda thought you hated him.”
They were all fed a lie, by Lead Officer Obert’s command. The whole of their unit of Guardian was told that Grute fell victim to some quick-handed thief in the seventh. He basically died a hero. A quick ceremony of honor was given to him, and Halves had to stand there with Obert’s heavy stare on him all the while. Two hours later, Halves lost his lunch in the ninth-floor bathroom. You know my honor, he can hear Grute saying, denying the accusations brought to him that day. I feel pity for any who come to question it. Were those his exact words?
Pity. Question. Honor. He brought it all on himself. It’s his fault that he no longer lives. So why does Halves still feel guilty?
Obert said he would be reassigned a partner, but he still has yet to meet one. What if he never gets another partner? Just the idea of facing Obert again terrifies him beyond anything else. He’d rather spend thirty hours in the Dark Abandon than thirty seconds more in Obert’s cold, damp office. How does one perform their duties in Guardian when they can’t even look their Lead Officer in the eye without wanting to retch?
I could just run away. He’d given it an honest consideration, just the same as he’d considered it in the office that fateful night. He’s still considering it. Ridding himself of Grute only seemed to make things worse.
But Obert trusted Halves enough to reveal his Legacy. He can tell when people lie. Surely that spells good for Halves, doesn’t it? Surely that means he has nothing to worry about; Obert is on his side. Obert believes in him. Obert knows his truths with a certainty.
“Come here,” she says.
“I can’t.”
Ennebal suddenly moves to the door, shuts it and thrusts a chair beneath its handle. With another careless kick, the other door to the study is slammed shut, and she blocks it just the same. The two of them are trapped now in the study, safely, securely, secretly locked from the world. Then she’s right back where she’d begun, her huge mouth inches from Halves’, backing him up against the table. Her impossibly smooth hands slide up under his clothes, tickling up his flat stomach like cool icicles, then rushing over his head, the shirt slipped off and dropped to the table. The coolness of the room hits him and he shivers.
“Ennebal …”
“You’re no longer allowed to say a thing.” She grips him by the hips and looses his pants, shucking them to his feet in one effortless tug. “Oh, I see you’re awake.” She takes it in her hand.
“Ah.” His eyes flash and he claws the edge of the table.
Her wide mouth opens, showing the pink of her tongue. “I’m pretty sure I know what you need.”
“Cold.” He chuckles, because that’s what you do when an icy set of fingers are wrapped around your cock and you’re exposed to the world of a long, dim room. “It’s—It’s cold.”
“Ought to find a way to warm it, then?” Her eyes leave his face, and down her head goes.
Warmth finds him where cold was a second ago. Halves almost loses his balance, having mistakenly gripped a book for purchase instead of the table, then thrusting it off the edge. The study so dark and wide and still, almost naked and vulnerable to the chilly air of the room, he feels weightless. By the slippery warmth and teasing of a tongue down below, he gasps into the emptiness, and he’s floating, floating, floating.
Too soon, she’s come back up, eyes finding his. “Still cold?”
“No.”
She squints at him.
“Yes,” he says, changing his mind. “Still very cold.”
She goes back down.
The room spins and spins, and a happy sickness is swimming up and down his spine, tickling him and playing games with his nerves. His left leg starts twitching and giving to tremors. He realizes his weight is balanced on it awkwardly, frozen, afraid to move and prematurely bring the blissful moment to an end. Oh, how he doesn’t want this moment to ever end.
Hand me that flask, Obert had said.
Certainly, sir, Grute’s snaky voice responded.
An innocent back turned. Grute’s innocent back, and a sharp thing flew across the room. It was a bird with one metal wing.
“Cold?”
Halves looks at her, confused. “What?”
She frowns. “You still cold?”
“No.” He takes hold of her cheeks, pulling her mouth into his. And instead of his lower part, she’s attached now to his upper, their mouths slowly, softly, experimentally kissing. They’re as soft as I thought they’d be.
Then he’s on his back on the table, and the designs of a graffiti bomb are thrashed to one side. Images from Lord’s garden tossed to the other. A book thrown here, a folder there, and the table’s only contents are now the bodies of Ennebal and Halvesand. He wrestles off her pants, then attempts to lift her by the hips—finds she’s too heavy, or he, too weak. She’s got more muscle than I do. Ennebal makes it no matter, lifting herself and putting him just where she needs him. He doesn’t even have to aim.
“Ah!” His eyes flash again, and he performs half a sit-up to kiss her, but she’s too high. She ignores him, tousling her own hair and throwing back her head, eyes to the ceiling as she rides him.
For as much activity that’s happening on this table, it’s remarkable how little noise they make. Just the thrusting of flesh against flesh. Just the subtle creak of the table complaining of their weight as it shifts and shifts and shifts. And if he listens through all the movement, he hears her breath … shallow, light, almost meek. Even through all the stoniness he’s come to expect of her, through her dark demeanor, even past her stoicism and her plainness, she makes sex like a gentle lady. Has anyone else seen this softness? Does anyone else in all of Atlas know how beautiful she is?
They come together, and even that is quiet as a drawing of breath and a shiver and a shuddering of excess energy down the legs, down to the fingertips, to the tips of little hairs Halves didn’t know he had until this moment. Somewhere in all that, he’d reached up and grabbed her breasts, and she never objected.
Keeping him in her, leaning forward she asks, “Still cold?”
And Halves just laughs, at last breaking the room’s peace. He laughs until his ribs ache and until, to both their surprise, even Ennebal lets out a hearty cackle. Both of them laughing, sweaty, half-naked, images of blue graffiti and water droplets and slummer conspiracies strewn across the floor, forgotten.
Among those conspiracies and designs, there is a half-written one that Halves takes notice of three hours later after he’s had a shower and eaten his middle night meal. It’s a mentioning about certain elements that were used in the graffiti bombs, specifically in the cerulean blue ink … chemicals that only could’ve come from a certain end of ninth ward.
0054 Kid
The window was left wide open from yesterday’s playtime, so Kid slips right in and perches in the corner of the main room until the children spill in and her friend Aryl spots her, laughing at the discovery. “Hey, Red!”
While the
other children are occupied with their dumb, less important activities, Aryl plays chase with her invisible friend. Bounding around the room, the orphan girl dodges tall stacks of blocks and ugly boys while Kid bounds after her, likely appearing as a frightful blob of red. She still hasn’t shown Aryl her true form, thinking it better to lend herself to more mystery.
They come to a stop by the door and Kid has a brilliant idea. “Wait here,” she tells her friend. With the cautious prowl of a cat, she scurries across the playroom to one of the Kindred Abbey ladies who, dressed in a flat woven boring slip, lets her keys dangle stupidly from her hip. And in the next instant, those keys are no longer there. Aryl is watching from the other end of the room jaw-dropped, which shamelessly makes Kid feel quite proud.
“What are you doing?” asks Aryl in a hush, half scandalized, half amazed, half thrilled … all three halves wiggling through her tiny juts of black hair.
“I stealed your freedom back,” she answers, “and now our real fun begins. Take my hand.”
Aryl does, and then there are two invisible girls.
They pass down a short hall that gives to a set of long stairs. They giggle as the steps creak beneath their every footfall. Downstairs, they pick another hall at random and make a race down it. Aryl cackles, then hushes herself, glancing about a while before realizing no one can see her, not while she holds Kid’s hand. Then suddenly Aryl is leading the way, tugging Kid through another creaky corridor and shoving through a pair of swinging doors and into the kitchen.
It’s minutes later that the two girls find themselves on the floor sitting opposite one another—Aryl leaned against a workplace counter, Kid against a tall metal fridge—their feet touching so as to maintain the invisibility. Between the pair of them, half a dozen torn-open packages of sweetbreads, pastries, and other colorful goodies lie used and abused.
“Head Lady hates me.”
“Who?” Kid’s got her mouth full of a sweet, her word muffled and crumbs snowing down to her lap.
“Head Lady Maram. I drew a field of flowers one day during playtime, because it reminds me of my old house … before my parents so tragically died. And Head Lady Maram said my roses looked like spiders.”
Kid frowns, swallowing. “That’s not nice.”
“Where are your parents?”
Hide, said the dads. I’ll be back, said the moms.
“They’ve goned on a journey,” Kid answers, not bringing another invisible sweet to her face. “It’s a very important journey.”
“Can I be your sister?”
Kid frowns. “I’ve never haved a sister.”
“Neither have I. We can be sisters. It doesn’t matter that we don’t share blood. What’s a family anyway?” Aryl lets her foot slip a moment, drawing herself into the world of visible things for a second, then coming back. “You can be mine. I can be yours.”
“Okay, ya.” Hiding didn’t help my daddy. Screaming doesn’t feed a stomach. Glaring doesn’t change a world. “But what’ll we do about all our brothers? The boys in the Kindred Abbey?” Kid gives a smirk.
Aryl laughs. “I don’t know,” she admits.
“I know what we can do about Lady Mama.”
“Maram,” Aryl tries to correct her, but Kid’s already gripped her by the hand, abandoning their food, and together they tear out of the kitchen in quieted giggles.
Down the hall, a key slips into a creaky metal hole. A key turns, and then the Head Lady Maram’s office lay open and ready for their wicked bidding. There is an immaculate stack of paper on the Head Lady’s desk, and it is directly toward this paper that Kid runs. Crumpling and crushing and mashing each sheet like dough, she begins to make shapes.
“What’re you doing??” Aryl asks, fascinated.
Kid shows her a finished product. “Paper spiders.”
Aryl and all her black spikes of untamable hair freeze on the spot, electrified by Kid’s brilliant idea. And for a good while, the two of them are busy making paper spiders and dangling, hanging, setting, and hiding them everywhere in the office. Aryl needs a little practice, but soon is making them twice as frightening as Kid’s, and several times they abandon their task, giving to tossing spiders at one another and cackling. It is the most free Kid has ever felt, even being an unbound, unseeable child of the streets.
Aryl decides they’ve littered the office with enough spiders, and Kid can only agree. Clasping hands, they make a hasty leave back to the playroom down the hall to rejoin the other children. They’re out of breath by the time they get back, the excitement daring to choke them.
“You having fun, Red?”
Kid makes a poke of her foot at a skinny boy’s tower of blocks nearby, watches the boy’s shocked expression as it falls. “Ya,” she decides finally. “We haved a lot of fun today.”
It’s only four and a half minutes later when Kid and Aryl are deciding which boy to torment next that they hear the scream.
A lady bursts into the playroom, a lady Kid had seen many times before. Her long stringy silver hair ends in ugly, jagged tufts at her elbows and her face seems to have too much skin, drooping at the neck. Her eyes are furious grey needles, eyeing the children with a monster’s appetite.
“Who did it?” she demands, her lilting, pretty voice betraying her ugly face. Kid had expected a nastier sound to come from those thin, bluish lips. “At once, I must know.”
Her eyes search and search, and the children have all gone silent as death. Not one of them confesses, as none of them ought to, seeing as the culprits are Kid and the girl whose hand she anxiously clings to, keeping her unseen.
“Lady Maram asks who did it,” says the plainly-garbed woman at the other end of the room, the one whose keys Kid had stolen. “I suggest the guilty one come forth. Honor, isn’t it? Honor is our first principle here at the Kindred Abbey.”
“Honor.” The Head Lady Maram repeats the word, tasting it the way one tastes a lemon. “Yeah, and the second is discipline. Both for doing the right thing and for doing the wrong.” The Head Lady holds up one of the paper spiders—one Kid is pretty sure she made—and then says, “I will punish every child in this room unless the guilty one comes forth to confess.”
Kid can’t help herself, overcome with the pleasurable fright their little act has cast upon the nasty woman, and she chuckles.
Too late, she covers her mouth, having forgotten that it’s only her visual aspect that’s hidden from the world, not her auditory one. Hunting the noise like an eagle now, Maram crosses half the room, but does not make a figuring of who it is. Regardless, she picks up a boy by his hair—he gives a feeble yap—and she swats him once on the butt. “Out with you,” she says sharply to the rest of them. “Out with you and this will be over with.” She gives the boy another swat, twice as forceful. “Out with you and this ends!”
Aryl wrestles against Kid’s iron grip. No, no, no! Kid tries to protest, but Aryl’s broken free, returning in an instant to the world, and she rises. “I’d only wandered down the hall,” she confesses boldly, her voice unwavering and calm. Even her fierce green eyes don’t show a flick of fear. “I thought I’d seen a bird and I followed it through the windows.”
“Bird,” echoes the Head Lady, still clutching the poor boy by his hair. “There’s no bird in these parts, girl.”
“I saw a bird. I … I thought I saw a bird.” She shrugs, playing herself casual and guiltless. Kid gives a hopeful lift of her brow, even if no one can see it; she’s even impressed by Aryl’s show.
“And in your pursuit of this … bird … you found your way into my office?” The Head Lady narrows her eyes, growing all the more terrifying even with the sweetness of her tone—or perhaps because of it.
“No.” There’s no way Aryl can make herself out of this lie, unless the Head Lady is somehow ready to reveal an unexpected show of forgiveness. “No. No one can get into your office. Isn’t it locked at all hours?”
The Head Lady unceremoniously drops the boy, then crosses the remaining ha
lf of the room and takes Aryl up by her arm in an unrelenting grip. “Let’s investigate ourselves a door, then.” And the silver-haired woman then proceeds to drag her new friend across the room. The other children give yelps of shock and part to make room for the Head Lady.
Kid has already clambered to her feet in quick pursuit. The Head Lady moves fast for an old lady being resisted by a spritely youth, but soon she’s flung open her office door and vanishes within, swinging the creaky wooden thing shut behind her.
But not before Kid’s pitched a desperate shoe down the hall. It turns visible midair, then rolls and flips along the floor, coming to rest in just the right spot to block the door from closing all the way.
Hurrying, Kid snatches the shoe and slips into the office, only to find her friend Aryl bent over the desk in the midst of a spanking. Kid gapes, instantly feeling responsible for this. If I’d just left her alone … Their spiders still surround them, as if an audience of curiously observing paper insects.
The Head Lady stops for a minute, confused as to why the door is suddenly open. She makes a quick movement, slamming it shut. In this moment, Aryl’s eyes find Kid, appearing as a reddish blur most likely, and Kid’s afraid to admit her wit has abandoned her. What do we do? She knows even invisibility can’t hold up to a woman thrice their size and bearing keys.
But it is Aryl who has the idea. “I’m warning you, Lady Maram.” She balls her fists, plants her feet into the office floor as if preparing for a great and impressive maneuver. “You don’t want me to get upset. You don’t want to … to see my powers.” Her eyes flick at Kid, giving a knowing stare.
Kid squints, uncomprehending. What is she doing?
“Powers?” The Head Lady doesn’t laugh, not exactly, but her eyes swell with cold amusement and her ears seem to twitch. “You’re as powerless as you think you are powerful.”
Aryl gives Kid another keen flick of her eye, then declares, “You’ve never seen me angry.”
