Outlier: Rebellion (25 page)

“Thank you, Marshal.” Unsure of the protocol, Wick gives a brief shy bow of his neck, then asks, “Am I free to go?”

Impis tilts his head too far to respond, as though the next words must pour out of his right ear. “Of course, hmm, yes,” he agrees. “Take leave, my sweet Sensor.”

Wick makes no delay. Turning, he hurries toward the door.

“Ah, but one more,” sings the voice of Impis.

Wick stops. Seconds ago relief had flooded in, only now to be frozen over with terror. He turns slowly, lifts a brow to the Marshal and, ever quietly, says, “Sorry?”

Impis has risen from his chair, standing at the brim of the stage, the curled tips of his boots hanging over. “Just one more demonstration, my sweet Sensor. That’s all, hmm, hah, all I ask!”

Wick can feel his heart beating in every limb, to the tips of his eyelashes and in the drums of his ears.
No, no, no … please, no.

“Can you smell anything? Can you smell, for instance …” Impis places a heavily decorated hand on the breast of his doublet, twinkling with a million colors. “… what is in my pocket?”

The whole of the room waits, curious as curious can be. Not even a foot shifts, nor a hand to scratch a nose, nor a stomach to growl. Time itself has frozen, and Wick is the only one free: Free to make an utter fool of himself, free to expose his own lie.

“I can smell …” Wick has only his wit for a weapon. “I can smell your fear.”

Impis is completely reactionless. He simply stares at Wick like some curious animal he’s happened upon, waiting. He clutches a brooch of a thousand colored gems that hangs from his neck, and only for a small moment does he appear offended.

Then he laughs.

Wick is struck with worry, no choice but to simply take in the cloying laughter that billows out from this colorful person. He can’t tell if he’s being mocked or being regarded as a cute thing.

Then Impis stops laughing at once, straightens up and, with chin forward and a smile crooking his face to the left, he asks, “Fear of what?”

“Fear,” Wick goes on, speaking to Impis’s glittering hand, “that I know what it is. I smell that the contents of your pocket are very … important … to you.”

Wick’s eyes gently draw up, meeting the Marshal’s.

“Alas,” sings Impis. He flips open his doublet with one swift hand. “You are wrong, sweet boy … as there is nothing at all in my pocket.”

“Yes,” Wick agrees smoothly. “Because nothing at all is important to you.”

Impis’s left eye twitches. The room is stunned silent. He simply stares at Wick, and for a long moment it’s like the answer has gone unheard.

Then a smile invades his powdered face, Wick’s answer acting like electricity that has touched on the tips of Impis’s eyelashes, playing in his eyes, tickling out of every spike and poke and spray of hair on his head.

“Nothing at all,” Impis sings, playing at the glittering brooch with his long white nails tapping, toying, tapping, tapping, toying.

Then he laughs, one short yelp of laughter, turns to his men and women. “And
that
is a Legacy Exam, my sweet friends!” he declares, his teeth tasting every word. He barks out with another startling bout of laughter, seeming to lose his head for a fistful of mad, mad seconds.

Wick holds strong, his every muscle gripped so tight he can’t even turn his neck.

“Ooh, hmm, yes, Anwick Lesser of Nothing,” sings the Marshal, facing him in half a pirouette. “I … I will remember you. Yes, yes, I will. Hmm, hah.” His eyes watery with joy, with craze, with merry, with terror, he leans forward and whispers, “Go, my sweet Sensor.”

Wick goes.

He goes.

And goes.

Down the hall he goes. Out the school he keeps going. Bolting home …
I just managed the most brilliant deception in all of Atlas. The cleverest. The boldest …

Or the most foolish.

00
27
Halvesand

The darkness eats him, but for the candle by his book. He eats the book on the desk. His friends in the room eat his patience. His own fears eat what laughable amount remains of his courage … and yet that biscuit on the table remains entirely uneaten.

“You’ve already passed your entries,” Aleks reminds him, seated on the tabletop with their mutual buddy Pace. “Put the book away, bro. Come into the night with us. We’re going to the Floyd, just six blocks over.”

Some dumb hangout with dumb girls and dumb boys who play hormones all over each other. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Come on,” his brother stubbornly pushes. “You’ve been a slug since the square.”

“Little wimp you’re being,” Pace chimes in.

Pace’s real name is Regory, and no, he still hasn’t gotten the story of why the hell they all call him Pace.

“You know, the only people in Guardian who amount to anything,” quips Halves, “are those who are learned.
They
advance and get the promotions. Not you.”

“Rather be a slave to those Lifters?” Aleks spits on the floor. “Slave’s all you’ll ever amount to up there. They swim in heavy gold, dead eyes. We’re slummers and proud of, bro … Live it up! Come out with us!”

Halves bends away from his brother and turns a page, pretending to read. The sentences slip from his mind, the words blurring into more words, letters and syllables twisting about, he just stubbornly pushes through.

His brother makes some remark, Pace grunting, and the two of them leave. The room is quiet once again, darkness eating him, eating the book and the shelves of tombs and volumes and histories and Legacies …
If only I had a speck of Lionis’s smarts, I’d finish these books like short-cooked pies.

“My sister Jenevin had a Legacy for clay.”

Halves looks up, finds the strong and curvy shape of Ennebal looming in the shadow, only a stray curtain of moonlight giving hint of her.

“Ennebal, I didn’t see you. How long’ve you—”

“She was excellent in claymaking, clayform, pottery and art and all that. She was an artist in every right.”

She steps out of the shadow. For possibly the first time since he’s known her, she is not swallowed by the heavy Guardian gear that so robs her of a woman’s figure. In fact, she’s wearing hardly a thing at all. A slip of linen, a silken belt cinching her curvy, slender waist … His eyes get lost somewhere around there as she speaks.

“Her art was purchased by a family upstairs. Some Estate or House or some other. Her work was admired by all, and they all took note. You listening?” She’s drawn up close to his side, towering over the book—long forgotten—and pressing her thigh into his. Halves’s heart dances in his chest, his thoughts a muddle, but his hands stay right where they are. “From then on, she was given a pouch of gold for every bit of work. She was even offered a room up in the Lifted City. Imagine that, Halves. My own sister Jenevin, a room up in the heavens.”

“Ennebal … We shouldn’t … You shouldn’t …”

But she’s already made a seat of the table before him, putting one foot on the arm of his chair and the other in his lap.
Oh, please, please, oh …
A single toe traces his thigh, drawing circles, up and down. She does not smile as she speaks softly, no matter how wildly Halves’s heart thrashes, or how tight his pants grow.

“Are you listening?” she asks, her wicked toe tracing an outline of his cock. “I’m saying something quite important.”

“I’m listening, but, but Ennebal, I … I …”

“Good.” She makes a pull at his pants. Two quick tugs and they’re at his knees. He glances nervously at the door—the
two
doors that lead out of the dark commons.
What is she thinking??
And why am I letting her? Oh—Oh—
Her cool hand has found his swollen cock, and his eyes twist around to meet hers.

She still makes no smile, inches from his face, she casually continues her story. “But my sister grew too proud, too greedy … and for her final project, they asked her to make a clay casket.” Ennebal’s eyes shift, her hand still slowly working him. “They put her in that casket and sent her right back to the slums where, perhaps, she belonged all along. In fact, Jenevin’s still in that casket, which is appropriate as she no longer breathes.”

Halves stops breathing himself, mouth parted. Her hand’s still on him, but suddenly he’s forgotten, hit sideways by her story. She doesn’t cry, her eyes dry as bones, the candlelight playing across them like a friend, and her hand won’t stop moving.

How sick,
he thinks,
that she expects me to hear this horrible story while—while—while—
“Ennebal …”

“A sad story, but it’s worth its lesson. See, because I’m not here to protect the streets from criminals. I’m here to protect the streets from
them.
” Her head nods at the window, at the big black thing in the sky, and Halves, breathing heavy, heavier, growing closer and closer, his mouth stretched half-open in a soundless moan, can’t put words together.
Please, please stop … Anyone could burst through those doors. Please …

“Perhaps providing the box we’d later bury her in should be seen as a kindness,” she murmurs thoughtfully, “but I only saw it for the message it truly was to us underlings: Don’t raise your head too high, lest it be lopped right off.”

“How’d …” Halves grabs her hand, stopping her. Their eyes meet, his breath jagged and desperate, hers calm. He feels his cock pulsing, but he collects his breath enough to finish the question. “How did she … die?”

Her answer is gentle. “An oven accident.” Ennebal makes one soft huff of a snicker, though her lips never smile. “Something about getting too close to the clay, they said. Yes, I’m sure that’s the truth of it … getting too close. I can only imagine what she was thinking when she made that clay casket, what she felt. I wonder if it was still pride.”

Halves rises from the chair, the candlelight spilling over them, the smoke slithering around them. With her gaze locked on his lips—as it always is—he pulls up his pants, reluctantly tucking away his hard-on.

“I-I’m sorry,” whispers Halves.

“I’m not.” Her eyes still stubbornly watch his mouth. “My sister should’ve kept her head down. You think I should patrol like this? Out of my gear? Without my weapons?”

“It’s quite distracting,” he admits.

“Distraction’s just as sharp a weapon.” She runs a toe up his inner thigh. “You didn’t want me to finish?”

“It’s against—This is against Guardian policy.”
I haven’t been with a girl in eight months, nine months, ten months.
“We’d be kicked out. I’d—I’d be ruined. My dreams. Yours too.”

“I only ever had one dream.”

One of the commons doors flips open behind them with a crash. They turn to the callous spill of hallway light. Casting two unwanted shadows over the room, Aleks and Pace, returned.

“Obert made a speech,” Pace tells them, oblivious to Halves’ breathing and the bulge in his pants, “about some rebel slogan ‘Let It Rain’—or maybe it’s their name?—Anyway, it’s graffiti they found at the square. Oh, and he released new partnering. We’re to patrol eighteen hours a day, sunset to the rise and back, every dark and light ‘until Taylon himself smiles’ he says.”

“Bro,” adds Aleks with a wince, “your new partner’s Grute. Sorry about that. Oh, and looks like you’re mine, Ennebal.”

Halves’s heart still racing, Ennebal gives a shrug at the news and saunters out of the room. The candlelight paints a sickly jaundice on them all as he stares stupidly at his brother as though he didn’t hear any of the words.

In the shadows of his dorm twenty minutes later, Halves anxiously shoves the desk in front of the lockless door, then lays on the ground and lets his hungry eyes burn a hole in the ceiling. Clumsily, he undoes his pants and lets free his sore, eager cock, and strokes it madly. He never learned what Ennebal’s dream was, but he knows certain as a heartbeat his own. Focusing on it, imagining it in precious detail, he breathes in the scent from Ennebal’s half-naked body that still lingers on his skin. Her hand felt best, but his own will have to do. Ennebal’s eyes in his mind, her sharp black hair, her curves … Breathing and breathing, faster and faster, closer and closer, he keeps moving his hand.

00
28
Ellena

When her son stirs, she makes to quickly flee the room, but it’s too late; his eyes are open. Confused for only half a second, he finally lifts his head and mumbles something. She gently moves a strand of hair off his sweaty forehead. “Sorry, babe. Go back to sleep. Didn’t mean to bug you, I just—”

“What?”

“I was just watching you sleep. Sorry, it was dumb.”

“Okay.” He collapses back into the pillow and starts breathing heavy again.

She keeps her eye on him, crouched by his messy mattress on the floor. He itches his face, just like a baby, scrunches his nose up and turns away. Her heart folds, her little sleeping Anwick, not so little anymore, sleeping as babies sleep … even if no one else does.
I should really leave him alone for this final hour.
But she watches him and she thinks,
Is sleeping really your Legacy? Sometimes, I think …

“What’s it like?” she whispers to her boy, her eyes full of whimsy. “To escape to other worlds … fantasies … places and memories and heavens I can only wish for? To be able to escape from this, be free …”
Maybe his Legacy is freedom.
She smiles wistfully, presses a hand to her cheek. “I wonder what it’s like …”