Outlier: Rebellion (61 page)

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.

00
66
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 sword 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.

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.