Outlier: Rebellion (13 page)

His eyes find Wick, his glare as scathing as his palms, blaming him instantly.

“You’re welcome,” says Wick unkindly, abandons the den in silence and, with a foot-stamping trip up the narrow stair and into his tiny room, he slams shut the door, drops to his bed of blankets on the floor and pushes face into pillow. Even the hum of wind from his cracked-open window can’t reach him.

Ever since a certain age, the two brothers never got along. He couldn’t say with confidence what kindled the animosity. Lionis has always acted so superior, the self-declared intellect of the family, and his Legacy isn’t even Mentalist; it’s Morph, hot palms. Wick can recall each and every burn his brother gave him when they played, accidental or otherwise, but doesn’t know which fight set them so against one another. He doubts either of them remember what it was even about.

Later that eve in the bathroom when Wick’s peeled off his shirt to shower, dad appears at the door. Wick can already predict the lecture he’s about to get. Of course he’ll be in the wrong; it’s never Lionis’s fault, not ever.

But his father’s attention is stolen elsewise. “What’s that on your back, son?”

A bruise from training at the Noodle Shop. Wick cringes, forgetting he even had it. He didn’t think Rone’s staff hit hard enough to leave anything—or maybe it was the boxing. “Doesn’t hurt.”

“That isn’t from our night sessions.” Wick can tell his dad is already working gears, math flittering through his glassy stare. “Has your mom seen that?”

“I still have it, don’t I? Obviously she hasn’t seen it.”

“Where’d you get it from, Anwick? Don’t lie to me.”

Clenching his eyes, Wick makes a rash decision. He can’t say it with his eyes open; he might give himself away, his dad’s Legacy having such a cunning way of outsmarting his secrets. “I don’t want to train anymore.”

“Not an option,” his dad says too quickly, as though already sensing his son’s withdrawal. “You have to train. You’re not your brothers, you know it, I know it.”

“Yes, we’ve made that very clear.” Wick’s nerves are already so frayed, body shivering not due to cold. “But I
need
to sleep … whether you accept it or not.”

“Do you
know
what I have sacrificed for you?” Oh, that tone, the one that stings of the times when dad actually did put a beat on him, to the face or otherwise.

“Go ahead,” Wick spits, venom through chattering teeth. “Hit me, see what happens. Knock me out and you better hope it puts me to sleep for good, otherwise my knuckles will find
your
face soon as I wake.”

“Don’t you threaten me, son. I put you before
everyone
since you wore diapers and cried ‘mommy’ in the night. I risked the lives of everyone in this household for you … Every tantrum thrown before bedtime! Every Sanctum inquiry dodged, every friend and neighbor and uncle estranged or put off!—all to keep your secret.”

“Why’d you bother? Protecting my
secret
has made you hate me so much, clearly.”

“I do not hate you, Anwick!—You do not see—”

“Could’ve turned me in at three years old when you realized what I was, been finished with it. Hand me over, score some Sanctum gold—the freak I am, the Outlier.”

“You’re no Outlier and you know it.”

“I don’t know what I am.”

“You’re a Lesser. A vulnerable one who must train.”

“I must
sleep
—Training can
wait
…”

“Death will not wait. Weapons find your hand, Anwick—”

“NO WEAPON CAN SAVE ME!” Wick shouts at last, snapping, then slams the door in his dad’s face and screws on the shower. The noise of the drizzling water drowns his last scream, and the weakly-dribbling nozzle sprinkles hot as the tears that will soon burn his cheeks.

His father doesn’t wake him that night.

00
13
 
Ellena

After Anwick’s made it off to school with Link, looking more and more tired with every passing day, she puts herself in the kitchen with Lionis, determined to make her own breakfast. She succeeds in burning her toast and undercooking an otherwise perfect pair of eggs. Lionis offers to make more, but she insists not to waste them, as it’s one of the few proteins they can afford to buy, and eats the runny things and the charred things.

As one makes progress down the long winding road to the Greens, weeds begin to creep out of cracks in the pavement. Tiny white and ochre wildflowers tickling out of concrete, lilac spouts pushing their way through the slab, vines crawling up the walls of otherwise drab buildings … These are the friends that greet her for yet another arduous day’s work in the Greens.

The mud fields are vast and measureless. It is the only place in all of Atlas that feels unbound. Rows upon rows of to-be crops sit baking in the warm sunlight, misted in intervals by titanium pipes that run just over surface. Ellena swings around and pulls the wide metal spade, jabbing into earth and yanking, jabbing, yanking, pulling, raking. The soil yields to water yields to mud, and when sweat makes out on her brow, she absently wipes it away with the back of a muddy hand, oblivious to what’s left in its place.

From the distance, she sees a vehicle. Instantly she stops, watches across the field with eyes wide open. It is so rare to see a vehicle even on the streets of Atlas, but out here in the Greens?—Unheard of. She covers half the distance, bringing herself to the side of the dirt road as the large mirror-polished vehicle—which turns out to be a chrome caravan—glides by calm as a bird. It has to be someone from Sanctum, Ellena realizes, awestruck. From nowhere else do chrome caravans come but the Lifted City, the Sanctum, the people in the sky. The spade slack in her hand, she watches the caravan roll to a stop at the squatty main office of the Greens—the only building in all the fields—where her tall, ugly boss sits in an air-conditioned room all the workday long counting seeds and arranging numbers in a computer.

Too overcome with her awe for the people from above, she hurries toward the building, rests her spade against a tree and spies through the nearest window. The occupant of the large chrome caravan was one single lady—certainly a Privileged, from the looks of it. So regal and flowing in silks, Ellena watches the lady being tended to by a trained florist who, after a short discussion, takes her through the tall sliding doors that lead to the greenhouse, a big glass dome attached to the east end of the office. Unable to catch any further glimpses, Ellena fetches back her tool and makes for the fields, but is sure to keep to the edge of the road in hopes of catching one final view of the caravan when it goes.

“You’re from the ninth?” asks a stubby-nosed florist who later comes out to the field to collect a soil sample.

“Yes,” Ellena answers, startled the florist is even speaking to her. In truth, Ellena had always hoped to someday befriend one of them; she’d wanted so badly to work with the flowers. This particular florist is from the sixth ward, some say the wealthiest ward of the eleven in the slums.

“So desperate this place’s gotten,” the florist spits back, jabbing a knife into the earth, “seeking help from the ninth. Nothing good comin’ from that ward. Filthy. Ain’t nothing got its merits no more, not even petunias.”

Ellena takes no offense. She just murmurs back, “I like petunias. I like sunflowers too, and four-tip roses.”

Then she sees the caravan on the road again, her heart giving a lift. She rushes to the curb, watches as the chrome thing glides by, and is just in time to be slapped in the face by a puddle of mud by the caravan, a sheet of it sprayed across Ellena’s whole, head to foot, but she only wipes it out of her eyes eagerly to continue watching as the caravan goes, goes, smaller and smaller as it goes, then gone.
Who was that Privileged lady?
Ellena wonders.
If only I could handle flowers … If only I could make beauty from sodden earth and pottery, then I’d be noticed by a lady like that.

Destroying her moment utterly, the florist says, “Oh yeah, forgot. Boss called for you, ninth. Better go, and don’t go trackin’ mud through the office.”

Ellena abandons her spade at once and hurries down the road past the large dome greenhouse and into the office, careful to deposit the andragora seeds she’d collected into one of eleven giant bins that hoard them outside the door. “You called for me?”

“What?” barks the boss. “Oh, you, yeah. I need you to stay an extra three hours. Sanctum’s got too many demands, we need another fourteen rows secured and at least thirty-hundred more seed by week’s end.”

Ellena’s stomach drops through the ground, her mouth hanging open for some time before she’s able to respond. “I’m … but sir, I’m—”

“I have a meeting with Mr. Itinus, he should be here by now. See if he’s outside and bring him in.”

“Sir,” tries Ellena once more, “I have my kids at home. They need me, and—”

“I recommend you find new kids that need you less.” He pushes a pile of papers aside, turns to focus on his computer screen and squinting. “Three hours, it’s all I ask. I’m being generous, you should realize. I could keep you overnight, and still may if we aren’t making goals.”

“Sir, perhaps there’s another—”

“Mr. Itinus, welcome,” interrupts the boss, and a large woman moves into the office with a mustached man whose chin wiggles as he greets the boss. Ellena finds herself pushed behind them, their words swallowing the room with important business and pressing matters and numbers and money, and Ellena’s existence and needs and worries lay utterly forgotten.

Outside the office, she catches her reflection in the window, the setting, burning sun flashing in the glass and illuminating the horrid stains of one day’s work that play across her tired face. Really, she should be angry with the sixth warder who so talked down her nose, scoffing at her. They’re sometimes called the Hightowers because those of the sixth ward regard themselves with such esteem, they’re like a miniature Lifted City. Even their buildings they boast are tallest, though hardly lifted more off the ground than a house on fatter foundation. Filthy gold, they’re called. Smudge money. The richest of the starving and poor, they’re called … The greasy queens and kings of shiny slums … Many of them are the result of a son or daughter who’d scored big with the Marshal of Legacy, whose prized talents earned them a lofty place or a high job or some other reverent duty.

But instead, Ellena scorns herself.
No wonder
, she thinks, still staring at her reflection. Her worn fingers clutch at the stains on her face, rubbing them, rubbing and rubbing and rubbing, the caked-on blemishes of dirt tattoos that have nothing nice to say at all, she rubs and rubs and they won’t come off.

00
14
 
Wick

In the daytimes, school comes and goes and dinners are had and suns rise and fall. But in the night, another tune plays; a song that makes Anwick Lesser of the ninth feel more alive than ever.

“Up!” shouts Rone, and Wick scores a hit on the dummy target. “Over left, quicker!” Wick hits that one too, though less impressively. “Under, quick, quicker! Nope, you’re dead.”

Wick drops the heavy weapon he can’t name and falls flat to the floor, exhausted, breathing heavily. His dad stopped coming to wake him in his room ever since their quarrel, which is lucky for him as it lends ample opportunity to sneak here to the Noodle Shop at night. The trick in training with these people is having to unlearn so much of what his father taught him; their methods are nothing similar and it’s confusing. Where his father taught him caution and distrust, they teach him boldness, confrontation … taking a lead.

Rone perches on the floor next to him like a bird on a tree limb, smiles playfully. “Giving up?”

Of this elite group’s members, he’s met only a few. There’s Juston, the young blonde with an egg-shaped head whose Legacy is noise; on first meeting, Wick mistakenly thought it was raining outside. Once when Juston was startled, a near-deafening bullet of sound cut through the room. No one startles him anymore.

There’s a pair of guys—Pratganth, pale and full of acne, and Arrow, quite dark-skinned and reclusive—who are the self-named intellects of the group, reminding Wick of Lionis. Pratganth has some dream of mapping the whole city, though Wick has not yet learned what his Legacy is; he always assumed it had something to do with mapping because Prat is always found at the tables downstairs drawing out plans and maps and schemas of known parts of the Lifted City. Arrow’s Legacy has something to do with manipulating computers and microchips to server a purpose, even when he isn’t present—which makes him the first Charmer Wick’s ever met … which is really just a fancy type of Elementalist.

He’s even had the pleasure of meeting the group hothead, a big-eared tall fellow with long, slanted eyes named Adamant. He looks like he’s scowling all the time. “He’s had to stuff his anger quite a bit since he joined,” Cintha explained to Wick once over a plate of dumplings, “and he’s never much gotten used to it. When we find broken things, we blame him.”

But with all its members considered, why hasn’t he met the most important one yet? “Why doesn’t the leader show herself?” asks Wick from the floor, still regaining his breath. “What if she doesn’t exist and you guys are all following the word of a ghost? Until you said otherwise, I thought the leader was Yellow.”