by Daryl Banner
Kid screams, manages a solid kick to the man’s head who carries her, but neither the man nor the mask budge. It is as though the mask were part of him, like antlers on a beast, like horns on a demon. She realizes, of all the people she’d seen die around her, she never expected ever to be one of them. And it was so soon. It was coming. It was here.
Somewhere down the road, most of the masked men have vanished, and the only ones that remain are three: a man that carries Aryl, a second that carries Kid, and a third who asks, “Which one’s the girl with the dangerous powers again?”
Kid yells out, Aryl yells out, but the man was not asking the question of the girls. “This one,” says the one with Aryl, lifting her by the foot again dangled upside-down.
“Take her to Facility.”
Aryl wails mournfully, stretching a hand ineffectively at Kid, hanging from the man’s palm like dirty laundry as she rounds a corner and vanishes from Kid’s life forever. Kid has stopped screaming by now. No one is on the streets tonight to witness this and save her. No one is there at all. It’s the rest of the world that’s gone invisible now, invisible when I need them.
“What about this one?” asks the man carrying Kid.
Hide, said daddy. Why didn’t she hide? Why didn’t she?
“We made enough of a mess on this street. Taylon will blame it on the rebels.” He gives a nod. “Besides, the ones with the killing gifts have gone on and you’ve already taken the Head Lady’s … well, head.” He moves up close to wire-bound Kid, studying her face. “Headless Lady Maram. Has a better sound. I went to that orphanage at your age, little one. She was awful then, too. She deserved it. All monsters deserve to lose their heads. Hey, why don’t you tell us what death’s like on the other side, Ghost Girl?”
“I’m not a ghost,” she spits back.
“Ghost Girl.” He doesn’t smile. Even his japing seems too dry for laughs; he doesn’t seem to say them even for his own amusement. “You know where Ghost Girls come from? You know where Ghosts Girls go?”
“I’m not a ghost!” she shouts.
“So,” says the man with the wires pouring out his palms, keeping Kid in a perfect bundle of cord and tangle, “bind her to the abandoned route, then?”
“To the abandoned route, yes. Let the monster finish the job.”
The masked man carries her away at that, the night air thick with sweat and terror and lonesomeness. She thinks on the story her mom told her once, the imaginary beasts and the long fiery tails. Monsters aren’t innocent, she thinks, fuming, giving up even the effort of kicking anymore. The monster’s on its way to take a lost ghost to you, she tells her mom, tells her dad, somewhere, everywhere. The monster’s coming to take me home.
0065 Forgemon
It has been a very, very long time since he’s stepped foot into his own house. The blunt thicket of lawn where one of Lionis’s reading trees grows smells different, and the sun burns everything orange. There is a dampness in the air he does not recognize. A shoe is in the yard, not one and a half strides from the door, just where it ought to be. There’s a book left up in the tree, its reader’s place saved by being hung over a branch.
Somehow, he knows Anwick is home. He knew he’d come back. But Link has not come back. Link is still gone.
Forge was smarter than his rage. He did not cause any injury at the metalshop, but he abandoned them. Without a job, how can he face his wife and children? He’s supposed to be their pillar. He’s supposed to be the pylon that lifts them up … and he’s failed them. He can’t even find the anger in his heart for Anwick’s rebellion. How can he blame him? You got that from me, he thinks ruefully.
No amount of time spent staring at his house will ease his worry. He could stand here forever and feel not an ounce lighter. His own feet would take root … and if there’s anything his house doesn’t need, it’s another damn reading tree.
He pushes through the door to find his wife at the counter, alone. Their eyes meet. Just the look in them … those shocked, hurt, vacuous eyes, it crushes his bones. A streak of mud plays down her soft cheek, and even it looks pretty in the pale kitchen light. Forge pushes the door closed behind him and stands at the counter, still wordlessly studying his wife. Only when Ellena finally says, “He’s gone, isn’t he?” does Forge begin to cry.
They come together, Ellena’s slender arms wrapping him in a quiet embrace, and nothing more can be said for a long while.
A few hours later when the sun is putting itself to rest for another day, he’s curled up with his wife in a tight embrace on the couch. The broadcast is on, showing the latest coverage of two promotions within Sanctum’s Court of Elders and a statue being erected to honor the memory of Lady Kael Mirand-Thrin. The light from the screen dances up and down his wife’s slender arms.
He whispers softly into her ear. “I am sorry that I’ve so let this family fall apart.”
“No, Forge …”
“Please, let me say it. If I were stronger. If I were smarter. If I could … if I could see more …”
“You see more than anyone can.” She stirs in his arms, her legs sliding against his. “Don’t be silly. You see everything and everyone. You calculate and you figure and you know.”
“Not anymore. The math is abandoned. I can’t see Link. I can’t figure … I can’t see the numbers … I can’t see the numbers.” He grips his head, wondering for a crazed moment if heads can indeed, from too much thought, explode. He finds it very likely.
“Forge. When I had Link, you knew exactly when he’d be born and you prepared. You took the day off from the metalshop and had me at the hospital thirty minutes before my water broke. And you got me there early because you knew the train would break down if we went any later.” She lifts herself to kiss him, and he tastes his wife, running a hand through her velvety hair. “Your math did all that. You have a Legacy the greats of Sanctum would covet, which is a dear good reason they ought not know. A Legacy that would make the Marshals weep. A Legacy fit for a King.”
“A Legacy that’s abandoned me,” he despairs. “A Legacy of the mind, with a mind of its own.”
She nuzzles into him, puts a finger to his lips and says, “Your son is home. And he’s brought a friend. And I want you to be okay with it because I’ve never seen him—”
“Happier,” finishes Forge, and he’s lifted himself off the couch, his eyes wide. A shot of terror is ringing through his bones, his eyes flitting about the room as though reading a book the size of their house. He sees equations in the corner where Link usually sits to watch the broadcast. He sees a pattern along the window, a pattern of behaviors and probabilities and could-have-been’s.
He spins, facing Ellena, and he even reads the numbers down her alarmed face, and suddenly he can’t breathe, clutching at his own throat.
“Forge?” She’s risen from the couch, coming up to his face. “Forge, calm down. Forge. Forge.”
And then he sees Anwick at the foot of the narrow stair. Anwick, my son, my son. He sees the end, which is really just a hundred beginnings, and before he can even explain the direness of everything to himself, it’s already upon them.
There’s a loud knock on the door.
“Forge?”
His feet second-guess where to move him—toward the door, to Anwick, to the backyard—and his hands clutch at things that aren’t there, as though he were able to pluck the numbers and the possibilities from the air.
He looks at his wife for stability, finds her staring him hard in the eyes, waiting for an explanation he can’t give, waiting for him to say more, to explain—
“I see it, Ellena.” He isn’t sure what he sees, but he knows the one possible outcome this will have. The only outcome. “It’s Athan, the boy on the broadcast, isn’t it?”
Ellena’s jaw drops.
Forge takes that for an answer, turns to his son at the narrow stair. There’s another loud, urgent knock at the door, this time accompanied by a voice demanding them to open up for Sanctum. “Da
d?” says his son, and Forge has rushed up to embrace him.
“I love you, son.” He looks up over his son’s shoulder and the boy with the blue-and-gold hair stands at its top, peering down curiously at them. Athan is his name, I know. This will not end well for any of them.
“I’ll hide him,” Anwick says at once. “Out Link’s window—”
But Forge shakes his head. “No, son. There is no hiding. We are surrounded on all sides. They will come in through the back if we do not answer this door upon the next knock, which is right—”
Knock, knock.
“Now.” Forge kisses his son on the forehead. “What I do, I do for your best and your all. You are the key, son. You always were. Ready your many weapons. The battle of your life begins.” He grabs the front door and throws it open.
Three Guardian step inside, not bothering to wait upon an invitation. “Sir,” says the one in front as the other two move in like a mist, past him and out of sight. “Lesser residence, is this?”
“I am Forgemon Less—”
A Guardian calls out from the stair. “Here!”
Ellena yells for Forge, panic in her voice, begging for answers, and Anwick’s struggling with the Guardian, who’s gotten him by the wrist. Athan’s gently brought forth, but even Athan protests, yelling out that he is no captive, that he is unharmed.
“Anwick Lesser, are you?” The Guardian makes a throw of his son, sending Anwick to his knees despite his hollering, and the cold clicking of handcuffs ring through the house. “You’re under arrest by order of Taylon, Marshal of Order, for the kidnapping and harboring of a Son of Sanctum.”
But only half the words can be heard over Ellena’s shrieking protests and Athan’s maddened cries and the constant efforts of struggle by Anwick and the Guardian who’s apprehended him. Forgemon stands facing front, calm as a dead man, the world whirring around him like blurred, buzzing insects. His eyes are focused on a shiny thing that rests at the tip of the windowsill, right where he’d left it … the last gold coin that rained from the sky that one fateful day. That coin, the math now tells him, belonged to the boy in his home, Athan Broadmore, who let it fly from the balcony of Lord’s Garden.
Forge listens to the math of that gold coin, and then he understands what he must do.
“Unhand my son.”
The Guardian at the door simply laughs; a dry, choked one. The Guardian bringing the handcuffed Anwick to his feet makes a grimace and says, “Your son is a criminal.”
“He is no criminal.” Forge is saying this as he watches the gold coin, listening to the futures ahead, the futures unrolling. “When the Lord’s Garden fell, I saw an opportunity. I took the unconscious Athan Broadmore from the wreckage and I claimed him as my prisoner. My family should not be held responsible for my criminalities. The boy has been kept here under my roof at my command. It is I, Forgemon Lesser, who will pay for the crimes of abducting and harboring this Son of Sanctum.”
“Dad!” Anwick’s face is white as death. His eyes flashing and crazed. “Dad! Don’t! Don’t you fucking dare!”
“I will pay for the crimes,” repeats Forge, his final words to the gold coin before facing the Guardian. “Unhand my son.”
The Guardian nearest turns to the boy. “Is this true, Lord Broadmore? Is this man your true abductor?”
“No, no, no.” Athan’s face is a visible mess of emotions. “Neither of them took me against my will. I am here on my own account. I ran away from home. I came to the slums on my own. This family took me in, please, they’re innocent. I’m just a—”
“There’s no need to protect me, Athan,” Forge interrupts. “You are free now. Go with them.” He offers up his hands.
The Guardian asks again: “Is it true, Lord Broadmore?”
“I’m no Lord, never was, I’m—Please!” Athan’s eyes meet Anwick’s, tears flooding them in an instant. “No, no, please!”
“Is it true? Is this the man who abducted you?”
Athan’s eyes flick from the Guardian to Forge, back and forth, agonizing. He can’t say it. He won’t say it. He has too good a heart to know the right way out of this.
“It was me,” Forge tells Athan directly. “You can say it.”
“Silence,” the Guardian barks at him. Facing Athan again, he says, “You should not protect your captors.” The other Guardian puts an arm around Athan, guiding him. “You’re safe now, Lord Broadmore. We are here to bring you home.”
The handcuffs leave his son’s wrists, as he knew they would. He calmly accepts the kiss of metal on his own, and by the screaming protests of his son and wife, the Guardian take him down the walkway he’s strolled across a million times in his life, past one of Lionis’s reading trees he’s strolled by a million times, only this time it will be his last. The house at his back, the very last time he catches sight of it.
Ellena makes a crazed dash from the house, but she’s caught by a Guardian who shields her, pushing her back to the front door. Anwick too, his son, his screams, his hysterical pleas that break his voice into midair pieces.
Birds against wind, raindrops in a storm, his son’s words die as Forge is thrust into the chrome vehicle that will take him to the Lifted City for the first and last time in his life. He turns to the window, knowing they cannot see him, and he watches the hysteric faces of his wife and child as they scream for him, as they scream for Athan … It’s over. It’s all over. This will be the last time I see you. Let me one last look. Take away the tears and the screaming, please, and just show me your beautiful faces I’ve fallen in love with.
But the vehicle is already moving, and in the space of four seconds, his house is already out of view and gone forever. He sits forward, calm, his insides wound tight to control the tremors that have started in his feet, that have started at the tips of his fingers.
Athan, sitting in the seat ahead of him, turns around, the Son of Sanctum’s eyes meeting his own. You love my son too, Forge knows—maybe it was Athan’s eyes, the tears in them, the way he screamed as Guardian pried him off their property—but the driver tells Athan to face forward and, dutiful as he is, he obeys.
Just by the color of the boy’s hair, Forgemon is flooded with the information that had been so long kept from him. The late nights, the scurrying away, Anwick’s secrets and his vanishing. He realizes he has more to thank Athan for than he ever realized upon first glance. The gold coin was yours, he thinks, allowing himself a smile. My son was yours. You gave my son hope. You taught him to see with smarts, to think of the world and not of the city.
When the vehicle so quickly reaches a part of the city Forge already cannot identify, the darkness begins to swallow him. Beyond the brightness of the deed he’d just done, beyond the light that so shined in his wife’s eyes, his son’s eyes … all he has now ahead of him is darkness. Lots, and lots, and lots of darkness. He has known all his life what the darkness means; where the math ends, he ends. I am ready, he tries telling himself. I have put myself in the enemy’s hands and I am ready.
To where the math ends, that’s where he goes. That’s where he’s all his life been going.
0066 Halvesand
He’s sitting on the dumpster studying the break of light across the sky. It’s so curious, how the oranges play into red, play into white, play into pink … and then black, black, black. Pink, like his little brother. Black, like The Wrath. Black, like the Dark Abandon that sits on his shoulder every night. Just a turn down the street and he’d be there, lost in its haunted roads and its groaning buildings and its decay.
He buries his face in his hands, not caring for how dirty his hands have become. They’ve been dirty the second he joined Guardian. When that first angry man in the market, the one who fought that salesman, found the fist of his own wicked justice, that’s when his hand was dirtied. By blood. By deaths. By lives he’s condemned. Guardian, he thinks bitterly. Guardian of what?
The Guardian tag pulls off easily, and he sets it down gently on the lid of the dumpster. The sw
ord at his hip, he removes it and puts the long thing down in a crevice, unseen. And he runs.
He needs this. He needs this run tonight.
The sun’s burned away and the neon blue burns across the sky, the last tendrils of day giving to the inky arms of night. Halves breaks from the dumpster and runs about the block.
My own dad. He runs and he runs, forcing the sweat from his body. Thoughts of his father’s crime squeezed out of his body, literally becoming lighter by it. Skies burn and muscles burn and his father is a man guilty of one of the worst crimes in the book, worse even than common murder. A Son of Sanctum, hidden in their own home. His own dad.
He has no way to contact home other than physically going there, but it’s so far away, and he’s been advised against drawing himself into the scandal of his own family. If only he could simply ask his brother Wick what the hell went on. If only Link could tell him, or his mother, or Lionis. If only someone could put his mind at ease, reassure him that the whole of his family wasn’t involved in this ridiculous crime. But dad confessed. He confessed he acted alone and he would pay for the crimes. If he had not confessed, the whole family would’ve been brought in, all of them facing possible death before King Greymyn.
He knows there is a truth of word, and the real truth beneath. Two truths exist, and he knows the one and wants so desperately a taste of the other. If only I had Obert’s Legacy for a day. Halves keeps running, his legs burning. He runs as if chased down the streets by creatures of the night.
