Outlier: Rebellion (62 page)

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.”

00
67
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 ahead 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.

And then the world learns why. For the first time in his life, Link watches King Greymyn rise to the stage, his creepy fish-egg eyes fixed on the boy. The act of the King opening his mouth is, in itself, a disturbing thing. It seems almost like his jaw detaches, the whole of the bones seeming to snap and lengthen and let go. Then, the world is greeted with no sound, because Janlord has contained it using his Legacy of sound manipulation. Instead, the world watches the King perform his Legacy in a perfect mute. His jowls shake and flecks of blood fly from his furious hole, catching in his beard and on the white-crystal tiles of the stage. Within Janlord’s force field of sound, Dran’s little brother receives the full impact of the Banshee King’s death-cry. His hands chained to the floor, he can’t even bring them up to shield his ears.

When the deed is done and the boy’s fallen limp to the ground, sound is revived, and the stomach-wrenching screams of his brother Dran rip across the Crystal Court. The word he screams over and over cuts Link straight into the heart, and it is then that he’s reminded of the name. “FYLAN!! FYLAAAAN!!” Collapsing to his knees, Dran heaves and cries out in desperation. The black of his eyes has melted down his face in gooey waves of ink, teasing into the creases by his mouth, some of it to his lips, the rest dribbling down his chin and neck.

Link drops the knife. It lands with a loud, unnoticed clangor. With an odd limp, he cuts through the crowd of sanctuary folk who are watching this, pushing himself up close to the broadcast.
I have to see this. With my own eyes, I have to watch Dran die.

On the stage of the Crystal Court, the Marshals shift their feet and wait for the next execution to commence. The King has returned to his perch, where a woman with long silver-white hair stands next to him, dressed in black and red. She watches the proceedings with a tense scorn in her eyes, the broadcast showing them clear, focusing on the King as two men are grooming him, ridding his beard of blood and discolor.

Then the cameras shift back to Dran, who has seemed to empty himself of his grief in those several throat-splitting screams. Now slouched, on his knees and with a face nearly covered in the mess of grease from his eyes, Janlord announces that it is now Dran’s turn to face his end and pay the final price. “Any last words?” the Marshal asks, managing a tone that’s almost kind.

Dran cannot seem to move for a while, his eyes still resting on the lifeless body of his brother, who’d just had the life screamed out of him. Just when Link thinks all hope’s lost, Dran recovers. He lifts his face to the camera. The whites of his eyes are made so severe by all the black on his face. Link feels his chest thicken, as if Dran is looking right at him, as if his last words are to him.

Dran parts his mouth, says, “Make it fly, Shye.”

Link inhales sharply, his eyes wide, his lips parted.

Dran’s execution will be by a method different than his brother’s. From across the stage, the Marshal of Legacy Impis presents his man: Metal Hand. Stomping gracelessly to the front, the faceless block of armor removes one long gauntlet and steadily approaches Dran, who still smartly, stubbornly, proudly stares into the camera. His eyes shine with pain for his brother. His lips play with secrets that will die with him. His black …

Metal Hand presses a finger to Dran’s forehead, and then there is no more Dran.

Clothes that once held a boy fall to the floor. The Crystal Court applauds, and Link just stares and stares and stares. The broadcast going on, Marshals and speeches and words … Link finds something stinging his eyes. The tears hang at the corners of his eyelashes, hang at his nostrils, and he realizes even his mouth is hanging. He’s staring at the broadcast as if Dran will, at any moment, reappear.
Make it fly, Shye.

Link turns away finally, takes notice of the people in the room. Where once they were all ignoring him outright, now they are all, each and every one of them, watching him. He stammers, tries to say something, but it comes out in a sickly grumble. He realizes he’s crying, the tears dripping down his face, and all the people of The Brae now find him a suitable form of entertainment.

Then, as if summoned, he sees the priest Baron at the back of the hall, right next to the cell he’d been kept in. The Baron stands there as if daring him, his figure blurred by Link’s tears.
Come,
the bald priest seems to be saying.
Make a show for all of us
, his quiet demeanor says.
Give us a reason to execute you just the same.

Link moans again, unintelligible, his every word a pain to his side, a cramp in his gut, and he fights the crippling tears that insist on being shed—but for why? For who? Dran? Fylan? Himself?