Outlier: Rebellion (29 page)

“He’s going to die,” she says simply. “I know. The world knows. Some claim he’s already dead, the words going left and right by my ears. Such an old man, soon to pass the crown.”

“Yes, and Kael Mirand-Thrin is missing.” Janlord sighs, his gaze looking so much like pity. If there’s anything she hates, it’s pity. “Ru … Ruena, you
do
realize what it means if—”

“She’ll return.” Ruena carelessly throws the silk over her hair, hooding herself. “She’ll return and the King will live another ten years and we’ll all be happy. Anything else, Marshal, or may I make my way home?” Janlord nods at the thing in her hand. “Something necessary,” she answers. “You can tell the King I took something necessary.”

Somehow, the answer appeases Janlord. Ruena makes her leave of the ever-chrome Cloud Keep through malfunctioning keypads and beeps, and manages to get home quickly. In the basement, she installs the final piece to her project. Only twice does it shock her. She licks her finger and studies all the work, curious if it’s ready to go.

“Don’t do it.”

Ruena looks up. “How’d you get in?”

The ball of a boy Sedge is posted at the doorway to the basement, doesn’t let himself any further in, so scared even his cheeks shiver. “Please, please don’t do it. I know what that is. Please.”

Ruena rolls her eyes and fusses with the wiring of her beautiful thing. Sedge yelps, squeaks, then says, “Please, please, I know you’ve been building a bomb. I know what a bomb is, I’ve seen pictures. You’ll destroy the whole Lifted City with that thing, please!”

“It’s not a
bomb
,” she snaps, annoyed to her every hair follicle. “Calm down or I’ll zap your ears, silly boy. I’ve never been interested in things that go boom.” She reconnects the circuit and the whole thing hums with anticipation. “It’s ready. Now listen, I’m going to turn it on. If you want to be a part of this—” He eagerly nods, nods, nods. “—then you need to keep secret what you see here. This cannot leave the room, cannot leave your mouth, can’t even leave your
mind
. You promise?”

“I vow on my life,” he says, then obviously not thinking it enough, adds, “and my mother’s life. And my mother’s cakes and pastries, even the berry ones. And my brother’s. And my brother’s girlfriend and all her family. And my cat Lucy.”

She frowns. “You’ve a cat? Aren’t they dirty?”

“Not mine. No thing I take care of is dirty … I’m the greatest caretaker of Atlas. I’m vowed to be Guardian for a King someday. I’m brave and clean and smart.”

“And annoying,” she adds without humor. “Good, you’ll need to be plenty annoying if you’re to guard a King. But for now, just start with guarding our secret.” She winks—which seems to inspire all of a blush and a giggle and a squeal from the boy—and turns back to her contraption. “Now let’s make this beauty sing.”

She doesn’t wait for him to deliver another annoying speech of readiness and excitement. With no ceremony, Ruena pokes the button with a long white finger.

And then music.

Sedge gasps sharply, then says and does nothing else, frozen by the sound. Ruena smiles, enjoying his reaction, and takes a step back. A soft music, soft and blended as an old portrait. Suddenly the world is no longer there.

She closes her eyes. The instruments begin to swell.

Music from the Ancients, music from thousands of years ago when the world hadn’t fallen apart, when humanity still clutched the whole of the Planet, the oceans, the lands, the hills and beyond. Music that has lost its name, its history only existing now in sound.

Ruena pulls the diamond pin from her hair, flings it at the wall like it’s nothing. Her white hair unravels and falls, a curtain of snow, except for the small patch her scar steals away. She moves with the music, spreading her hands. The music swells …

Sedge laughs joyously, the happiness too much, he can’t keep it in. Ruena lets it all go: her Aunt who fell from Lord’s Garden, who is still missing and may be dead—and what that means for Ruena—and the King’s violent cry, and the stirring of noises beneath her feet in a place of slums and cats and dirt, and the big empty Mirand-Thrin Palace that may now belong completely to her …
Farewell to it all, to it all, to it all …

She opens her eyes. Sedge is wiggling and spinning around and around. She pulls off her long milky-white scarf, swings it around Sedge’s neck, surprising him, and they both laugh and spin around and around. The music swells. How can music keep swelling and never burst?

Sedge wraps the scarf around his face, struts across the room, giggling. Ruena tosses a lavish hat of hers, it lands perfectly on his little head. He cries out in laughter, the both of them lost to the joyously deafening swell.

Then the music stops instantly. A spark.

Ruena and Sedge stare at the silent music machine, confused. It glows, shivers, shudders, sparks again.

Then a light blinds them and a terrible sound—not the music—fills the room. Ruena and Sedge go flying, thrust against the opposite wall with a grunt and a boy’s shriek. The blinding purple light is a lightning bolt outside the window-wall—
Flash!
The next instant, gone.

Ruena opens her eyes, gaping. The machine is in pieces. Ignoring the broken smoking thing, she races to the window, anxiously peers down to find a trail of fog where the lightning bolt tore the air in half. It struck somewhere in the slums, and like spiders of darkness scattering, all the lights in the city below go out. Darkness shivers across a spread of slums all the way to the brim where the Greens begin, all the way to the Wall …

Ruena puts a hand to the scar on her cheek. Her fingers quivering like charged lines, she says, “Oops.”

00
31
Link

Link flinches; the light on their neighbor’s house has flicked out. He squints, screwing up his forehead and glancing through morning haze. Indeed, all light’s gone, even the lit windows of tall buildings in the distance.

He scrambles down the tree, pushes into the house and finds his mother standing in the dark den. “I … was watching the broadcast,” she mumbles, still staring at the blank screen. “What sort of hell is this?”

“Mom.” Link comes up to the counter, squinting in the dark. “If there’s no power—”

“No school, I know.” She smirks, crushing her face in thought. “I think I’ll take advantage of you and your brother, assuming this lasts as long as other outages have. The stores never close, and Lionis has a food list …”

Not what I wanted to hear.
“No, mom. I have a project that’s due. I can’t run errands.” Of course, this is a lie; he just wants to find that fucker Dran and, upon his own knuckles, make beautiful bloody art of his face.

“Who else will stock the pantry?” She spreads her hands, exasperated. “Link, baby,
I
still have to work, seeing as the muds require no power, and I can’t—”

“Stop calling me
baby,”
he retorts, shoving his back against the wall and sulking. Why, when an opportunity so cleverly finds him, it just as cleverly slips away?

“Dad’s at the metalshop. He’s got a very important Weapon Show he’s preparing for, and Lionis is busy around the house. You and your brother must put yours into this house too, don’t leave it all to Lionis.”

His brother Wick appears at the foot of the stair, rubbing his eyes.
He’s always rubbing his eyes.
“The power’s out,” he mumbles, King Of All That Is Obvious. Mom informs him of the errands they’ll run. The sourness that passes across Wick’s face is just the same as Link’s.
Maybe he also had plans for this gift of a day.

“Do I need to send Lionis with you two for escort?” Mom looks between the two brothers, back and forth and back again. “Stop with the faces. It shouldn’t take you two more than an hour. Well, maybe longer, as the trains won’t be operating. Oh, that’ll make my getting to the Greens considerably longer, now that I think of it …”

“We’ll do it,” says Wick at once, snatching the list off the counter.

Outside, the sun has scattered the night’s storm and in its place a furious orange burns. The two brothers move silently down the street, take the turns and stroll six more blocks to the intersection where normally they’d embark the train and head into the thick of the city.

This is when his brother faces him. “To be honest, this list can wait. I have more important things to do.”

Link has never heard more beautiful words in his life. “Me too,” he confesses. “Meet you here at noon?”

“Link … You been alright?”

He looks off as though caught by something over his brother’s shoulder. “Could ask the same about you.”

“Well, if you must know, I think my Legacy Exam went a little strange. The Marshal paid me a lot of mind, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.” His brother smiles wistfully. “Not everyone has such a clear, focused Legacy like you. If I had your power, would’ve been easy.”

“I wish I had yours.” Link smirks, like a lemon’s kissed his tongue. “Did you smell everyone’s fear at your Exam? Smell their weakness?—Sanctum scum?”

“Something like that.” His brother suddenly hugs him, catching him completely off. “Bro, if anything ever happens, if suddenly I gotta go somewhere and … and I’m not around for a long time, or like … or like if—”

“What’re you talking about?”

Wick lets him go. “Never mind. I’m being dumb.” He ruffs his hair—annoying Link to no end—then says, “Hey, let’s meet back at the grocery store. We’ll make up some reason we’re late. Grocery store at noon, Link?”

“Grocery store at noon,” he agrees, confused.

They part ways. Link dwells on his brother’s words. What’s he doing in
his
spare time? Where might he go that he won’t for so long return? There is something very strange about his brother, something to do with his Legacy. Even one night when Wick was supposedly closed up in his room, Link managed a peek through his window, but his brother wasn’t there. He goes out at night too; he keeps as many secrets.

Is there such a thing as a Lesser without secrets?

Hurrying down the dark street, Link pursues the last remaining places he could possibly think to find Dran or any of the other fools who call themselves Wrath. Really, any of their faces will do to smash in at this point; they all were in on his cruel abandonment. They’re all to blame.

Shye, the avenger. Shye, of shadows and anger and things once lost, now found. Shye, the pissed-off.

Pushing into a clothing store known for all its supply of
black
and
chains
and other things the Wrath seem likely to bathe in, he casually peruses the racks, pretending to care for a sleeveless black jacket or a spotted woolen hood or gloves. His shoulder brushes against chains, rattling, he cringes and scans the store, as if already afraid of being caught.
They caught me by surprise once,
he thinks bitterly.
They’ll never catch me by surprise again.

“Can I help you?” asks the clerk.

Link scowls. “You can mind your own,” he spits back, then returns to picking through the racks.

“We only take cash today, kid, as there’s no power. No ID’s or loans or Sanctum credit.”

“Do I
look
like some kid with Sanctum credit?” Link squints sharply, of malice and murder and danger.
Kid, he called me. I dare you to call me that again.
The clerk only rolls his eyes and resumes reading a book, a small lopsided candle by his hand.

The word “kid” makes him think of a little girl who once made an enemy of herself in the waterways, only to turn around and save his life in that toolshed. Even still, thinking on her, he wonders how far he can trust her good intentions. Did she benefit somehow from saving him? No one does a thing without a gain, he’s learned this much in fifteen years of slum life. No one at all.

Link gives up, pushes out of the store, and then—

Dran.
He can’t believe what he’s seeing. Across the street, poking through a basket of a seller’s trinkets like some old man, Dran without the black gunk in his eyes, without all the black garb and clattery metal at his waist and feet, without the spraying mess of black hair. Dran almost looks a normal citizen, like some fellow bumbling about the marketplace looking for fruit. Even without all the drama, he recognizes Dran.

The leader of The Wrath gives up on the basket, thanks the seller and continues down the street.
Yes, even his arrogant strut is the same.
Link turns into a shadow. This shadow pursues the Wrath-Man quietly, soft-footed as a cat.
Shye, the shadow, the cat.
This shadow blends with the dead streetlamps, the bending of a building by sunlight, between the fissures of walls.
Shye, the blended.

Dran rounds the corner and passes through the gate of a chain fence. The shadow follows and finds himself in a metal scrapyard. Shadows are more difficult to conceal here, so it keeps its distance. The heaps of metal prove tricky, but at least they aren’t fire-hot by the sunlight just yet, as morning only hours ago broke. The shadow has eyes, and it watches as Dran picks through the metal, lifting a sheet here, pushing aside a sheet there. Dran, the metal-picker. Link, the shadow. But a shadow has no fists; a shadow needs a proper weapon.

Link sees it: a splinter of metal by his foot. It’s so easy, it’s made so easy. The makeshift sword finds way to Link’s eager, hungry hand. He stalks his prey, preparing, oh, the ideas, the many imaginings and ideas of what to do to Dran with this beautiful, sharp tool.
The shadow pays back for what you’ve done
, Link promises with all his fury.
The shadow pays back for what you’ve likely done to countless others, for what you’ll do to so many boys after me.
He grips his splinter tight, opportunity drawing so close to his lips he could lick it.