Outlier: Rebellion (21 page)

It is arrogant spotlight-hungry Tide that speaks up, his voice like a roll of thunder. “I’m glad the Park blew up. All those Sanctum scum looking down on us …” He doesn’t acknowledge that the price of it falling was the lives of countless below, but no matter, he goes on to say, “Good riddance to them. I don’t miss no Son or Daughter and I don’t cry for them … that Park was just another thing in the way of my sunlight.”

To his surprise, Wick finds himself agreeing with Tide. Not that he’d dare admit it out loud.

Even later when he’s eating stewed carrots and spicy potato mash, his mother and brothers watch footage from the broadcast of the previous night’s horrors … families of Sanctum-borne being interviewed, their sorrows and agonies expressed, their concerns for their safety, and so on and so on … Wick turns to the broadcast as they let roll the names of three individuals still unaccounted for. He stops chewing the instant he sees the beautiful face appear on the broadcast … the face of the boy he’d saved, and his eyes gloss over, insides warring between thrill and deep dread. “Athan Broadmore,” says the broadcast, “of Broadmore Manor. Any information leading to the prompt recovery of this Son of Sanctum …” and so on.

And so on and so on. Wick just watches, unblinking, unable to swallow his bite …
Athan.

Athan.
The name sits in his chest all night as he tries to sleep, and he can’t tell if the name means to warm his heart or suffocate it.
Athan Broadmore.
No sleep can find him, not in this tortured state.
Please
, he begs Rone in his wishes, Yellow, anyone at headquarters,
Please let me see him. Please let us meet.
It isn’t fair that they should have the pleasure, reap the joy of
his
prize … Then he reminds himself how obsessed he sounds, how crazed, how out of his mind.
He’s a Son of Sanctum,
Wick tells himself, unsure what he’s trying to say.
And you’re the filth of slums to him.

Sleep finally takes hold one agonizing hour later.

And then he finds himself gripping the blade of a sword.

His father stares down at him, shocked. “How’d … How’d you see that coming?”

Wick lets go the blade, sits up and clasps his now-stinging palm. “Like father, like son?” His hand bleeds, he notices. “You haven’t woken me in days, or—”

“One week, exactly,” his dad corrects him. “It’s time to get you back to the shed, son.”

“Dad, please … not tonight.”

“You don’t choose your death. Death chooses you, and tonight you fight for your life, as we fight for it every day, as gardens fall from the sky …”

Spare me.
Wick doesn’t argue further, no matter the ache in his sleep-deprived muscles, the sluggish way his arms lift him from bed—a bloodstain absently smeared across the sheet by his palm—he takes up the dagger from beneath his pillow.

“Where’d you get that?”

Wick smiles tiredly. “A friend. I hold my life in my hands.”

In the spacious shed down the street, sticky and hot even at this time of night, father and son train. “You will outmaneuver your opponent, since you’re weaker. Rely on your ears, son, your eyes. You don’t see weapons, you see
chances …
” When his dad matches a sword against Wick’s little dagger, he finds himself making a grab at anything resting about for weapon or shield. “Don’t hear your opponent’s breath, hear
opportunity …
” Wick stumbles, a sheet of metal he used for a shield dropping to the side. “Be braver than a Legacy, bolder than a King. They can’t know what you truly are.”
What you truly are …
With a rash and angry lunge, Wick’s dagger cuts clean across his father’s cheek—surprising them both—and the fight is at once stopped.

“Dad, I’m sorry,” he blurts.

“No, son.” He touches the wound, looks at the red painting his fingers. “I get cuts at work all the days long, easy to explain.”

“I should’ve worked to disarm you,” Wick goes on, still guilty. “I shouldn’t have made at your face.”

“You’ll have enemies you won’t want to just disarm. You’ll do best going right for the face … trusting their face isn’t one you want to see again.” Then dad puts down his weapon, looks on Wick long and hard. “You need to make up with Lionis. I don’t care what’s got you two at ends, but he’s your brother.”

“I have three others,” quips Wick.

“Family is the only thing in the end, son. When Sanctum falls and Kings fall and gold from the sky … even then, family will be your only remain.” He ignores the wound on his cheek, letting it run in little red tears to his chin as he talks. “Lovers betray you. Authorities and bosses and peers, they listen to the man or woman with money, or who’s the scariest Legacy—neither of which you will have. They are loyal to their eyes, to the growls of their stomachs … not their hearts. For all his smarts, Lionis is fool to never tell you how much he loves you. He needs you just as you need him. The world’s small, son, smaller than it’s ever been …”

“Dad, you’re bleeding.”

“I know.”

The training ends early tonight, and in only twenty minutes, his dad is bandaged up and Wick’s head is back on the pillow staring at the bloodstain his own palm left him. The mark of his wound, his instinct, the little red gift is the last thing he sees when he finally lets himself go. He sleeps easy the rest of the night.

Before they enter school the next morning, Rone meets him by a tree. “Come tonight,” he tells him over the stirring of leaves and grass by a stray breeze. “You can be there, yeah?”

“Yes.” Wick’s heart goes to his throat, excitement choking him. “What’s—What’s changed?”

“The Sanctum boy,” says Rone. “He won’t talk to us. The only person he trusts enough to speak to is …” Rone grins, white teeth bared, “well … you.”

00
22
 
Halvesand

The scene at the square is unlike anything Halves ever dreamed he would pay witness to … worse than any cruel imagining he’d had. He keeps his posture up despite it all, chin lifted like the rest of the crew. Wouldn’t want to look weak in front of any of them, let alone his own stone-nosed brother Aleks.

They’ve not been called to order yet, so everyone’s roaming about. They’ll be briefed by Marshal of Order Taylon himself, and it will be Halves’ first time to see him in person. Ennebal stands nearby as if already called to order, poised and choosing not to meander. Instead, her face is fixed up at the sky where ash still populates the air, greying out the bleak morning sun.

“Is this …” Halves starts to say, then quiets his voice and whispers, “is this the doing of Sanctum?” Ennebal makes no answer, so he puts a hand on her shoulder. She gives him eyes. “There you are,” he says with a smile. She only stares at his lips like she always does. Halves never feels so self-conscious about the movement of his lips than when he speaks to Ennebal. “Do you think this was caused by Sanctum? By their … Weapon?”

“Don’t know,” she mutters, “and don’t want to.”

“If a little flick of the Weapon’s power can bring down a piece of the Lifted City,” Halves goes on quietly, “who’s to say what it could do to the whole city? I mean, I thought bombs were outlawed centuries ago, during the time of the tenth King?”

“Twelfth,” Ennebal corrects him, “and it was a Queen.” Then her eyes screw up. “Or thirteenth, maybe. I don’t know, was never good with my histories.”

He is excited by the way she talks, but maybe more the way she smells … like home, clean and fresh as a flower no matter their setting. Ruins and rubble and he’s just happy to be this close to her shoulder; even bulked by armor and Guardian gear, the dream of what’s beneath is a delight that fills him up, hot and distracting.

“We can study histories together,” he whispers into her ear. She hardly flinches. “I’ve always found it boring, all the Kings and Queens, all the laws …” She turns a corner of her eye to him and squints. “But I’m pretty sure anything read by your voice would keep my interest.”

“You’re cute,” she says dryly, then turns away.

She calls me cute …
Her hard mouth moves in such a way, like behind every sentence is a sexy secret lined in sheer panties and lipstick.
She calls me cute and I don’t know if she’s mocking me. Everything she says gives me a hard-on. Maybe it’s best she doesn’t know that. Maybe she already knows that.

What are you doing, Halves?
“I’ll ask Lionis about the Kings and Queens,” he decides. Ennebal is looking elsewhere now and doesn’t respond. He guesses the middle of a field of ash and rubble that used to be a Lunar Festival isn’t the ideal place for flirts.
Nowhere is.

Then, all too suddenly, the chrome caravan arrives, vehicle of Sanctum, and Guardian is called to stand at attention. They form rows, Ennebal to one side and his greasy hallmate Grute to the other. The Marshal of Order Taylon steps off the caravan like a bird and, after a greet with the Lead Officer, faces Guardian.

Instantly, Halvesand finds his opinions of Taylon surging up from his chest like bile …
Taylon looks like a small, spoiled Sanctum boy.
How can some kid—thirteen, is he?—fourteen?—rule and make decisions for Guardian? Halves lets show none of these thoughts, caring instead to show the respect he swore he’d give no matter.
I don’t feel like having my bones bent today.

Taylon talks a lot about obvious things, observations that were already made, and other various wastes of time. Halves is near to rolling his eyes when the Lead Officer makes one small comment, questioning an insignificant fact that was mentioned, and is suddenly bent in half.

The Lead Officer shrieks once, then can’t make any more noise. His body is bowed backwards, inexplicably past the point of breaking, past anything natural. He hangs there with absolutely no means of relief, gasping sickly.

“Question me again,” dares Taylon arrogantly.

Where once a man bold and nasty of mouth stood, now only a whimpering boy. “In front of … my men??” is all he can say.

Then the Lead Officer’s body drops to the uneven ground, still twisted of bone, and Taylon lifts his chin to the stoic-faced Guardian. “Obert Ranfog, Unit Trainer. I promote you to Lead Officer, seeing as your prior one is now … too bent for the position. Do you accept?”

Obert steps forth, his face impressively unshaken. “Yes, Marshal. My new post is accepted.”

Quick as that, the Marshal Taylon continues his instruction, casually stepping over the man he’d just bent in half who, in muffled moans, still writhes in a private agony. Halves can’t pull his eyes away from the sight of his old Lead Officer attempting to right himself somehow. Even with Taylon’s Legacy having let go of him, he can’t manage to get to rights. It sickens Halves—he feels his eyes wetting with his own alarm—that the man’s pride and dignity won’t even let him the mercy of begging to be taken to a hospital. As Taylon goes on and on with the instruction, Halves wonders if they are all, aware of it or not, witnessing their old Lead Officer dying slowly in front of them. It’s really only a matter of time, if he isn’t helped, that his body will give in, broken, folded … if it hasn’t already.

Ennebal at Halves’ side, she appears completely unmoved, her eyes following Marshal Taylon with total focus, undistracted. So tough, so immovable … just like his Legacy, really. If only he had half her courage.

“As we’ve yet had no leads,” Taylon finishes, “I suspect your team will be adequate and thorough in their scope of this scene. Any speck of evidence, cause, or culprit … Any sign at all, bring it forth. I’m certain you will be luckier than the predecessor, Lead Officer Obert.”

“We will make King Greymyn smile,” says Obert, his voice droning with the bother of a humorless man.

“Never mind the King,” says Taylon, brushing ash off his shoulder. “Make
me
a smile or two, Obie.”

With that, Taylon sweeps across the rubble toward the vehicle, then stumbles once and nearly falls. Every breath in the square is held for one desperate moment until Taylon lifts his chin, righted, and carries on to the chrome vehicle unperturbed, boarding it, and off it goes.

Dust and ash settling in its departure, Obert speaks briefly to the group, then everyone disperses to their tasks of searching. As Halves passes the body of his old Lead Officer, he realizes it no longer stirs. Obert watches the man too, with nothing in his eyes, then looks up to Halves. “Blood thick enough, Lesser?”

“Yes, sir,” says Halves, then pries his eyes away from the stomach-turning sight of the bent man and goes on his way.

After two and a half hours of silence, save the scuffing of shoes against dusty cement, Halves becomes certain that nothing remains here to be found but death and unnamable faces and graves of children.

“Devil’s barbecue,” says Grute as he slumps past Halves, his steel boot knocking into a severed burnt-to-black appendage of some poor fellow as he goes.

Just the two little words bother Halves to the tips of nerves, the tactless plank of a man that is Grute. How some people are accepted into Guardian and not others, it is lost on the mind of Halves. Aleks said it had something to do with Grute’s dad, that the dad had a history with Guardian and therefore his son was accepted without question.
The slums are not known for being fair.
Halves’ own father said that once. Is Sanctum so desperate for recruits that they take anyone nowadays, or was the selection in Grute’s home ward so dismal?

He gets his stomach, steels himself, and pushes on.

Halves happens upon a strange canister. At first it seems like a small blue pot that should carry a plant, yet there is no adequate opening for soil and green. He turns it about in his hands a few times, confused, when at once the thing bursts from the end, bullets of blue ejected from it with such suddenness that Halves drops it, terrified, thinking he’d just detonated some ancient, long-forgotten bomb … but it was just a spray painter, nothing more.