Outlier: Rebellion (45 page)

“I was meditating,” Wick retorts, the lie coming to him fast as an ill-timed fart. “I get into a deep state. It’s how I … It’s how I control my Legacy. I meditate.”

Rone finally speaks. “I know what sleeping babies look like. I’ve seen plenty by my baby-happy neighbors.”

“Me too.” The new voice is Athan’s, which pains Wick the worst, to hear him join them in their curiosities. “It was … It was unmistakable.”

Instantly, Wick goes berserk, throwing up his hands and shouting an unintelligible obscenity. They all take a step back and warily watch him, as though his Legacy were deadly. He can’t stand for the looks, prodding at him like children poking a dead thing in the schoolyard. His face is flushed red.

Rone tries to soothe him, reaching out. “Wick …”

“Stop staring!” he yells, groggy and mad. “All of you can fuck off!” He’s on his feet, stirring them all from their curiosities, and marches out of the room. He moves down a flight of cement stairs and brashly seats himself at the brink of the same gaping hole, one floor below.
Fuck them.
He wipes the sleep out of his eyes and stares at the giant mouth with wooden teeth, finding it to look eerily different in daylight. With a sick strike to his belly, he spots the akimbo shape of the Guardian still lying at the bottom. Even a floor closer, he still looks so far away … so tiny and sad. A starved cat has found him too, apparently, gnawing on his fingers.
Oh, look, the cat brought friends.
He doesn’t look away.

“Wick.”

He doesn’t turn around, still preferring the sight of a dead Guardian over any members of his party right now. And what is he feeling, exactly? Embarrassment? Anger?
I’m exposed,
he realizes. For the first time in his life, his secret is exposed to people outside his family.
They all know. No lie can make them unsee what they’ve seen. They know.

Tide knows. Victra knows. Rone knows.

Athan …

“Nice view. Getting hungry?” Rone takes a seat next to him, dangling his feet over the splintered ledge. “Listen. We need to band together now, more so than ever. We can’t fall apart. It was a mistake for me to take Athan off like that, but you weren’t within my reach, and Tide—”

“I know.” Wick’s picking at the splinters in the floorboards, wondering idly what the hell caused a hole to punch through five stories of a building. A piece pulls off. He flicks it over the edge and says nothing. He does not hear it land.

“We need to get back to headquarters. Yellow will know what to do to protect you. We’ve … well, I’ve never known an Outlier. I didn’t realize I’d known one all along. I just—”

“Outlier?” Now Wick has turned, and their eyes meet. Wariness glows in Rone’s, and Wick can’t stand for it. “No. That’s not what this is. I’m not an
Outlier
, Rone.” The word comes out half a growl, tasting foul on his tongue.

“Wick …
no one
in the city sleeps. It’s unheard of.” When he sees the look in Wick’s eye, he seems to change his tact. “I know what you’re going through. Kinda. I mean, we all have our secrets and our … our personal struggles. No one wants to be an Outlier. But—” His eyes flash and he swallows guiltily. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. What I meant was—”

“I’m
not
an Outlier. My Legacy is a simple
Mentalist
one,” Wick declares in a tone that suggests Rone is the biggest idiot for jumping to such a dramatic conclusion. “My mind lets me sleep, Rone. That’s it.”

Rone seems confused. “Wait a minute. You think your Legacy is … is the ability to sleep?”

Now it’s Wick’s turn to be confused. “Uh, yeah. Obviously. What the hell else would it be?”

Rone’s expression softens, and he stares at him curiously for a moment. “Hmm. Wick, I think you’re seeing it all wrong.”

“How do you mean?”

“Maybe … Maybe sleeping
isn’t
your Legacy. Maybe it’s … it’s a side effect of it. Whatever your Legacy actually is, it
causes
you to sleep. It makes you immune to the thing that keeps us all awake. I think … I think your Legacy is something else entirely.”

Wick can’t make any sense of that. Something else? No, his Legacy has been the same since he was a boy of three. Sleeping. A boy of four. Dreaming. A boy of five, six, seven. Sleeping, sleeping, sleeping.

“That isn’t true.” These are the only words Wick can make, his mind overwhelmed with possibilities he does not have the will to consider. “That’s … That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever …” He covers his mouth and stares down the hole, silent.

“I … could be wrong,” Rone admits quietly.

He had always slept, always dreamed. Just like the people of the past, the Ancients, he sleeps and dreams every night. But it has always struck him as strange that he has no control over it. Sleep is not an act he can simply make happen; it is a thing of necessity, like air, like food. And what is a Legacy, if not something that acts? Some spend their lives ignoring their Legacy. Link might spend his days never turning another thing pink. Lionis could choose not to burn another meal with his palms. Ellena could refuse to absorb another paper cut and yet … and yet …

I can’t not sleep.
The realization stirs in his belly like an unwelcome friend. Something he’d thought all along, now turned over and spun around and kicked in the ribs.
I can’t not sleep.
Surely there are others whose Legacies have a mind, unable to be switched off, forever haunting and plaguing and torturing.
I can’t be the only one.
No, he can’t. The thought makes his stomach twist worse than calling himself an Outlier.
There have to be others like me. Because if there aren’t …

And if sleeping is not his Legacy … then what is?

“Are we going or not?”

The voice is Victra’s, waiting at the stair and glaring down at the pair of them on the ledge. Something has changed in her face. It doesn’t wrinkle with its usual bitter contempt, but seems somehow strained, curious … wary. Is it Wick she’s wary of? Does he inspire fear in others now?

Rone puts a calming hand on his shoulder, gives it a little rub. Suddenly Wick finds himself appreciating that very much. “You got yourself back together, Wick?”

“Sure.” He wipes a bit of sleep out his left eye. “Not getting us any closer to home sitting here.”

Victra steps further into the room, sighing heavily. “We need to think on a solution to that fat kid-boy of yours. He’s been hit thrice in the back, in the neck, in his shoulders, in his ass. He’s glowing like the fucking sun.”

Wick peers at the Guardian down below, the cats making a lunch of the dead man’s ears. “Let him glow.”

When they’ve all regrouped at the base of the empty building, the cats have scattered from the corpse and Victra is using her sight to figure the safest, quickest way to the subterranean rail that will take them closest to home. Rone confers with her on buildings he could phase them through, provided he flexes his Legacy enough. Tide lights up the corner of the room like a chandelier and he’s staring at a dead bird his own body’s glow illuminates in the bleak ruin of the concrete floor.

Athan comes from behind, gently hugging him at the waist. Wick doesn’t object, letting in the Sanctum boy’s aroma.
He smells so clean even when he’s dirty.

“No way. Not through the ground,” Rone is telling Victra, raising his voice.

She huffs. “That’s where our destination is. The subterranean rail is—surprise—
below the ground.
Not far off, I might add. If you’d just phase us through the floor—”

“And risk getting us all trapped a hundred feet in the earth? I’ve never phased downward and I never will. Scares the fuck out of me, to be honest.”

“You need your chemical.” She grabs his crotch for one quick instant to shove him at the wall, then rolls her huge blue-lidded eyes. “You’re limp as a worm without it, see? You turn into a boy, running away from glow guns, hiding from challenges, trembling and worrying … Look at you.”

“Sorry you find me less exciting when I actually
think
things through—
sober
—and when I refrain from reckless use of my Legacy. Real ironic advice, coming from you.” He gives a wave at the dead Guardian in the adjoining room. “How about you give us a show, Miss Brave, and have a go through a dead man’s eyes. Tell us all what you see.”

She slaps him harshly right there. The blow is strong enough to pop blood onto Rone’s chin, and too unexpected for him to phase the hand harmlessly through his face. After a cold silence, she raises one finger at him and, in a voice so low it’s animal, says, “If you
ever
disrespect the memory of my sister again—” He tries to apologize, the speck of blood playing on his chin, but it comes out in a gurgling cough followed by more blood.

Victra doesn’t finish her sentence, leaving the room in a frosty haste. A thickness of emotion settles in the room, and Wick has to turn away, embarrassed to continue looking at Rone. He wonders if they’ll even survive the trip home, with all the drama.

As if to address a load of unasked questions, Rone just lifts a hand at Wick and the others, finally managing to say, “Nothing … It’s nothing. Never mind it. We’re okay.”

Rone sits down, taking a moment to nurse his chin. Tide still lurks sulking in the corner, offering nothing but the slow yet inevitable conversion of oxygen to carbon dioxide.

Wick feels Athan’s arms strengthen around his waist, feels the boy’s breath on his neck. And then Athan whispers into his ear: “I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but I wish I remembered what it’s like to dream. It’s wasted on two-year-olds who won’t ever remember the joy of it … I miss it, I think.”

“You wouldn’t if you did it every day.”

Athan snuggles into Wick’s neck, like he’s making a nest of it. “I could kiss you every day. Every single day, and still know how badly I’d miss it.”

“You mean when you’re back home?” Wick can’t keep the cold from his voice. All that sits in his chest is the all-sobering, all-knowing, stubborn-as-death coldness. “When you’re returned home to a big palace in the sky, you’ll miss my kiss?”

“I … No, what I meant was …” But he doesn’t seem able to find an explanation for what he meant.

So Wick supplies it for him. “That I’m just a dream to you. A dream that you’ll someday wake up from. And my kisses will just be another pretty flower to think on in your Lord’s Garden. Oh, look at how it blooms, withers, and dies.” Wick wills himself to shut up before he says anything worse. He closes his eyes because even the sight of Rone nursing a broken lip or tooth or whatever is too much.
We’re all falling apart. We’ll never make it home.

But Athan doesn’t move away. Athan seems never hurt, never offended. Always bright, hopeful … and there. He gives a squeeze, in fact. His arms flex with affection and understanding. Like he knows every one of Wick’s pains without words needing to explain them. Wick feels instantly sorry for lashing out, but really, he knows all about the nature of how dreams end.

Maybe Athan is the dream.

His lips still intimately close to Wick’s ear, Athan whispers, “For what it’s worth, your secret’s only been revealed to us. Just your friends. Not yet to the world.”

Maybe he’s right. Wick knows Athan means well, giving him such well-needed reassurance at a time like this … but his ears can’t help but obsess on those two deadly words.
Not. Yet.

00
46
Ellena

She’s the only one home. Lonely, it is.

A son here and there. A husband somewhere else. And where is she? She’s lying on the couch in the warm, thick silence of an empty house. Not even the bugs stir, not even the air. She moves a wicked hand down her breasts, down her belly, puts it somewhere warmer than the room. She closes her eyes and wonders.

A breath here and there. A finger somewhere else.

What the hell is wrong with me?

She isn’t thinking about her missing sons. She isn’t doing the math of days they’ve all been gone … Wick, Link, Forge. Math is
his
Legacy, not hers. She isn’t counting the days Halves and Aleks have been gone, nor the amount of days it’s been since she heard from them or seen their faces on the broadcast, doing their duty.

Her finger is gone and something else takes its place. Another guilty finger?
What the hell is wrong with me?
And really, what’s a dirty ninth doing dreaming of flowers and wanting to be like that lofty woman of the sky? She puts a finger in her mouth, brings it down to join the party.
He’s gone, they’re all gone.
She bites her lip so hard she tastes blood. A breath here. A breath there.

She stops.
Enough.
She lifts herself off the couch.

In the kitchen, she tries to cook herself breakfast. She does this alone because Lionis is at the library and
a person ought to be able to make their own fucking breakfast.
She slams a pot onto the stove—then immediately feels ashamed for it.
Why aren’t you here, Forge?
Is he even going to work? Have they marked him missing, too? Fired him? Where in all the Last City of Atlas does he hope to find their boys? If Forge loses his job, they will have no way to pay for their lives. This box in the ninth ward they call home will be forfeit. Ellena imagines them on the streets, fending day to day for scraps the rats haven’t yet touched.
Where are you?
Reaching for a plate in the high cupboard, she shudders at the thought.

Ellena cuts her hand. No, not even on a knife. She cuts it on the edge of that plate … that stupid, simple, nothing plate.
Who’s gonna take my aches away?