by Daryl Banner
But he is being chased, by his own hauntings, by his father, by his brothers. It’s so difficult to keep his head up with all of it going around, he can’t possibly face his fellow Guardian. Especially not Ennebal—who knows what she’s thinking. He has no idea how Aleks is doing it. Obviously more nerve in that one. For tonight, I have no nerve. I haven’t my brother’s Legacy of strength. I haven’t even my own. I can’t stop the tortured thoughts. I can’t stop the words from spreading. I can’t stop my dad as he’s processed through the system I’ve sworn to protect, the system that is certain to end his life by the rise of another day’s sun.
He’s come full circle around the block. The dumpster and his Guardian tag and his sword await him to his right. He looks the other way. The mouth of the Dark Abandon yawns in the black of this contemptible night.
The mouth screams.
He squints his eyes, wrinkling his face in concentration. Did he just hear that, or imagine it? So many times he was warned … The Dark Abandon has a way of infiltrating minds … and fears.
Halvesand is not afraid tonight. He’s nothing. Nothing cannot fear. He continues his nightly jog toward the wide-open mouth of the Dark Abandon, the Forsaken Ward, Sector Zero.
My blood is thick enough. My blood is thick enough.
The crumbled buildings welcome him not. There is no wind here, not even a breeze to carry up a stray sheet of newspaper from the wrinkled ground. No streetlamps light the way. Halvesand moves in, uncaring. He arrives at a crossroads, looking left, looking right. There is no soul in sight. There are no bands of thieves, no creatures with fourteen eyes, no beasts with foul breath and screeches that shatter the night sky. The only enemy he has is the darkness, swallowing up every crevice and corner and alley of this wicked, cruel place.
There is nothing here that could’ve given a scream. There is no person in a window. There is no hiding shadow. There is no ghost, no Ancient King’s spirit. It was the creak of a building settling in the night’s abandon. It was the howling of wind between a half-opened door, nothing more.
He moves further down the street, ascends a service ladder leading up to the roof of a short building so that he can get a better view. Once at the top, he squints into the night, listens with all his body, just as he was trained. Nothing even stirs. Up here where the last dying rays of sun still lick the tops of every filthy, twisted-of-brick and warped building, he sees no life. This is truly the Dark Abandon. Knowing emotionally the fear, but logically dismissing it, as there’s nothing here to fear. It’s a phantom, he decides, his face lightening at the realization. All along, a phantom. Your partner’s a phantom. He peers to the south, pushing his face into whatever wind it can find. He wonders if he can see the dormitories from here, if he can be the view of his own dormitory window, looking back at him. I’ll remember this, he promises. The Abandon’s a lie.
When his eyes drop, he spots a figure on the train track.
I am not alone. With a sickness punching his gut, he realizes he stubbornly left his sword by the dumpster at the dormitories. I’m an idiot. Halvesand. Why? Why?? He slowly moves across the roof, ducking so as to hide behind the small lip about the edge, and finds the opposite corner of the building, studying the figure closer. It’s lying down on the track. He squints, trying for a better view. Why would someone be lying there?
They’re not lying by choice. He swings foot over the lip, catches his balance on a plank of wood that leads to the neighboring roof. Balanced, unafraid, he moves from building to building until the elevated rail is within reach. With a brave and final hop, he lands on the rickety track. His nerves are frayed in every inch of his body and his pulse throbs in his ears, but he moves with a desperate quickness.
When he arrives at the figure, he cannot believe what he sees. It’s a little girl bound to the track, fragile little limbs, tiny … eight or nine years on her, about. The girl’s hair is a dirty web of braids and her tattered clothes have seen twenty-hundred nights without a proper washing, at least. She’s so small, and someone felt it necessary to bind her to a track that’s not even used. He wonders for a moment if she’s even alive, the poor thing. Then her eyes move to him. Her little brown eyes.
“Hi,” he says. “I’m … I’m a Guardian. Are you—”
She vanishes. Halves blinks, confused. He looks left, looks right. He’s about to dare crouching down to peer under the track when suddenly she appears again, her eyes still on him.
“Wow,” he breathes. “That’s quite a Legacy. What’re you—What’re you doing out here?” He’s at a total loss for words, crouching down to examine the cords and wires that have so bound her to the track.
“I can’t have survived,” she says with a lisp, her voice hoarse. “All I survived, to be died here. I can’t be died here.”
“No,” says Halves, pulling on some of the cords, discovering many of them to be dangerously razor-sharp. How the girl isn’t chopped up into hundreds of bits by now, he has no idea. “No, you’re not going to die. This is an abandoned cargo route. There is no train.” He works his fingers under the bindings, searching for the end of the wires. There is a knot made somewhere in this mess, surely. “Why don’t you tell me your name, little girl? Tell me your name while I—uh—untangle this.”
She doesn’t respond. Something about her silence suddenly gives Halves cause to hesitate. Sympathy will kill you. Hesitation will kill you. The words of Obert flood his mind, greatly slowing the effort of his fingers in loosening the cords. You show your heart on those streets, you die.
The simulation he spared in one of his first training sessions, it was a sweet woman. It was a sweet woman that, seconds later, took up a knife that would’ve spilled the blood from his throat, or from his back, or from his bowels.
Halves glances over his shoulder, ensuring himself that no one is watching, that there is not some hidden criminal-partner to this girl, that this isn’t some peculiar robbery-setup. Nothing seems to move in the dark.
He returns his gaze to her, his every suspicion roused at once. “You a little thief, girl?” He studies her eyes, willing the power of Obert’s Legacy into him, praying to see some sort of truth in the girl’s deadpan stare. “Are you a runaway, girl? A criminal, living in the dark of the Abandon, are you?”
The girl closes her eyes, shaking her head with such surrender that it disturbs Halves. Sympathy will kill you … Don’t feel sorry for the little thief girl. “Give up,” she tells him.
His hands stop. He watches her, wary.
“Gived up trying to help me. I haved no more family. No mommy. No daddy. No sister. Even boys don’t fight Wrath, they’re just mad, mad, mad. Pink things and black things and other things that just maked me mad, mad, mad. I can’t escape this one, invisible or not.” She closes her eyes, and Halves can’t tell if she’s crying or angry, for the way her face tightens up. “Yes,” she finally says. “I’m a thief. I stealed things all my life. They taked my mommy and daddy away and so I stealed to live.”
Halves is listening. “Who? Who took your parents?”
“Mask men. Daddy said hide, so I did. Mommy said—”
“Masked men?” Halves checks over his shoulder again, peers off into the distance, then leans over the girl, making more of a commitment in freeing her from the tracks. Maybe it isn’t sympathy I should be employing. Maybe it’s something else entirely. “Tell me about these masked men, little girl. I’m going to free you.” This would be so much easier if I’d brought my damn sword. To hell with you, Halves.
“I stealed and I killed.” Halves stops, stares at her again. Killed? “Whoever I meeted, they killed. But it doesn’t matter. I’m a thief. I’m the kind Guardian taked away forever.” She says it plainly, with no bite to her words. “Do the duty, Guardian man. Taking me away. Putted me in the Keep. Even the orphan place didn’t want me.”
Halvesand stares at the girl, his eyes boring into her. He feels her words shaking him apart. Everything, from her demeanor, to the impossible cords that have bound her to the
rail, to the way she speaks of justice and criminals and right and wrong. It’s like she’s the voice of his inner torment. Is she even real? Is she a … Is she some creation of the Dark Abandon, come to claim my every bit of remaining strength?
“Do you feel that?” asks the girl.
Halves looks up. The world trembles. A quaking takes the Abandon. “I feel it, yes.” His eyes, so wide in the deepening dark of the falling night. “What is it?” The rail stirs, vibrating, rattling.
And then he sees the train.
“No,” he breathes. “This track. It’s abandoned. It’s—”
He hasn’t time for thought. Panicked now, he throws himself into the painful act of prying and pulling the razor-sharp cables. Twice the wire slices at his finger, drawing dark blood. The train comes, the world beneath them shaking, shaking, shaking.
One of the wires snaps free. One, out of the seventy or so that remain.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” he tells himself, his jagged breaths turned audible, half a scream with his every inhale and exhale. He pulls on a wire, bends it, then flies back, nearly throwing himself off the already-trembling rail. His finger is sliced worse, deep red trickling to his palm. Cut to the bone, feels like, for all the searing pain he’s willing himself not to feel.
The train comes, comes, comes.
He leaps back into the work of it, thrusting and maneuvering the wires, willing them to let go. He screams out, startling the girl. Yes, even the panic is set in her eyes now. Her little eyes wide as the world. He works the wires, but he’s looking into her little face. They both see the end.
They both see the end.
These things that you use to soften lovers and make dads smile, said Obert in training, circling Halves something deadly, they will end your life—sure as a stab in the lung, Lesser.
Sure as an oncoming train. The light from its head now illuminates their activity. Not even a second cord comes loose. Not even a second one, of the sixty or seventy or eighty. He will not get this girl free. Her fate is sealed. There is no hope.
How thick’s your blood, Lesser?
He gets to his feet, the ground beneath them moving. He steps in front of the girl. The rail shakes with the relentless fury of the train, with the impending doom, with the imminence. I want my life to mean something. Even if for sparing the life of a simulated woman who’d come to later stab him dead. Even if for taking the plunge and daring his tongue into the mouth of Ennebal. Even if turning in his old partner for a new one, casting a life to the underworld in doing so. Get out there and stop the thing, she told him.
He lifts his hand.
The light from the train is blinding now. The rail beneath him shakes with such power, it threatens to toss him off the side, but Halves will not be tossed. The girl behind him screams for her life and Halves only keeps to his hand, pushed out. How thick’s your blood? The world’s about to find out just that, when this train crashes into him and spills his every ounce of so-called thick blood along the rail.
They are, both of them, at the end. They know it. This little thief girl, this broken Guardian man, they are meeting it together. “I’m ready,” he says, calm, braced, his every breath measured like the ticking of a clock. Five, he’s ready. Four, he’s ready. Three, he’s ready. Two.
Two answers. His palm faces the train.
One.
The light blasts him as a catastrophe of noise envelopes the world. Bombs the whole of Atlas thought were gone, have found a new existence here; they explode with such concussive impact that Halves feels his spirit shatter. The brightness, for this one infinitely-long second of time, bringing a day to his abandoned night.
When the light is gone, Halves peers up, and finds the train bent from the track. Pressed into his hand, the whole nose of the train has collapsed into itself, the first three cars lifted up in a perfect arc. A hideous scream of metal against metal still cuts through the world of light, threatening to make a shatter of every window in the ninth ward. The train hovers in that perfect arc, its force rippling back through its body in undulating shockwaves.
Then at once, the train collapses back onto the track. Stopped.
Halvesand’s palm still kisses the now-crumpled nose of the mighty train. He cannot move, for fear that his every bone has been broken. He only stands there and stares.
The train hisses terribly, the rail shuddering from its unaware commitment to bearing the force of what just occurred.
What just occurred?
A man has swung to the top of the long metal monster, stepping forward with a bloody gash running down his forehead. He comes to the front, as close as he dares. The man sees Halves and stops, staring, unable to produce even an expletive of shock.
“There’s a girl,” Halves hollers, out of breath, quite certain the man cannot hear him, “a girl, a girl …” He swallows, his palm still pressed against the front of the train. “There’s a girl trapped on this track, bound to it, a girl …”
“What the fuck?” screams the man from the top of the train, bleeding, gaping. “What the fucking fuck??” he cries out again.
“Mind the child,” Halves tries saying, his every nerve shaking with a fear from which, he’s quite sure, he’ll take years to recover.
The next moment, the man is standing aside Halves on the rail. Blood’s made it halfway down his face and he’s staring down at the girl, confounded.
“Is anyone hurt? I’m sorry about the—There’s a girl—”
“I see the girl,” says the man. “I’m riding alone. Only me’s hurt, fucking hell. I’m just taking ore from the Mechanoid.” He reaches down to give the wires a tug—regrets it immediately, bringing a finger to his mouth. “Fucking hell. I’ll get my tools.”
“There’s a girl …” Halves stares into the blinding light at the front of the train, staring until the whole of his sight is nothing but aching, agonizing light. The fear he just knew … not even Obert cutting down Grute can compare. I feel invincible.
The man returns with a heavy clipping tool. Positioning it carefully about the girl, he clips through the cables. Several times, the wire proves even strong against the thick rusted metal of the claw on the man’s tool, but enough of the binds are undone for the girl to, at long last, wriggle herself free.
For one instant, she seems ready to tear off without even a proper thanks. Then she seems to reconsider, her little eyes lifting to the two of them. Halves watches her, still trapped in his own stupor, everything feeling so unreal, so beyond the realm of things that can be feared. I’m invincible, he keeps thinking.
“I owe you,” the girl says, her little body looking so starved, so breakable. “Please. Your name.”
“Halvesand. My name’s Halvesand Lesser.”
Her eyes flash, a bizarre expression crossing her face. She looks ready to laugh, ready to cry, ready to explode into stars. Then, with a smartness playing in her eyes, she simply responds, “Lesser. Of course you are. Just like your brother.”
Then she vanishes. And it is now Halves with the bizarre expression on his face. “My brother?” For a moment, he thinks he can hear her leaving, her footfalls against the tracks. “My brother? Wait, wait!” But the girl is gone, and he will never know which brother she meant.
The man from the train guffaws, blood smeared along his chin. “Look at that! Hah! Disappearing girl! Hey, Halve-whatever. You believe in ghosts?”
Staring into the light, he says, “I believe I can stop trains.”
0067 Link
And then one nightfall, the door to his room swings open, and no one is there to greet him.
Link slowly, carefully, cautiously rises from the floor and watches the door warily. “Who’s there?” No one answers. He pulls the knife out from under the pillow—the knife the priest had left him many days ago—and he moves to the doorway, warily peering out of his room for the first time. There are priests and people in street clothes scattered about the sanctuary, the broadcast glimmering down on them from a great height ah
ead of the benches. Is this a trick? Is someone tricking me? Link staggers from his room, daring several steps beyond the threshold, aches and tenderness still playing up his sides and back, and he tries making eye contact with anyone in his proximity. No one seems the least bit concerned that he’s making way from his room, regarding him not at all. Through the hole in the ceiling, he sees the dark sky and nothing. The people of the sanctuary are focused intently ahead of them on the broadcast. For a crazy second, he wonders … Have I died? Has my spirit risen, freed from the cell, freed from my broken body? Doesn’t well explain the pain still riddling up his body, unless perhaps pain is carried with you to the after-whatever. Why isn’t anyone fucking looking at me?
He glances up at the broadcast, as if caring to see it for the first time. The sight brings a deep coldness into his heart. They are witnessing, on the broadcast for all of Atlas to see, a viewing from the Crystal Court of the Lifted City. The occasion is an execution.
And Link knows very well the ones to be executed.
“No,” he breathes—or rather, he would breathe, had he any breath left in him. Just the sight on the broadcast pushes all the air from his lungs, spilling it before him in silent horror.
Dran and his younger brother are facing the world. Janlord, Marshal of Peace, is explaining to all the citizenry that the horrors of The Wrath have come to an end at last. Atlas, the last city on the planet, will regain its peace by tearing out all its blight—or something like that. Link can’t even hear the words properly, still taken by the sight of Dran and his younger brother. He raided this very sanctuary at their side, his first mission. For all the dark fun they’d had, for all the misery and terror and humiliation, he can’t even remember the younger brother’s name.
“Any last words?” asks the Marshal of Peace.
He asks it of the younger brother. The boy lifts his face at the broadcast, then starts to scream, “Get mad! Get mad! Get fucking mad, all of you! Rise up! The Wrath’s—!” But his tirade doesn’t go on for very long, as Janlord robs him instantly of sound. Or perhaps it’s that the whole of the world’s been suddenly spared the nuisance of noise.
