Outlier: Rebellion (53 page)

But maybe just a peek. Just a little peek.

Wick cautiously peers through the crack he’d just made in the door, as if the sight within could end his life in an instant. Through the crack he sees nothing but a brick wall.
Further. Further in. Just a little peek.
He pushes the door one more inch, dares his eyes. He sees the edge of a cage.
Further.
He pushes it once more, his lips parting, a shiver working its way up his back, tickling the hairs on his neck, and he sees him.

He sees the Weapon of Atlas.
That’s him?
The boy’s locked in the thickest chains he’s ever seen, his hands bound to his chest just as Gandra described. His hair is black and wavy, thrusting down his forehead in a crazed mess. His skin is pale as death and his sunken eyes show deep black pupils that look endless. Something about him doesn’t even seem human, though he plainly is.
Don’t be a fool, Wick. It’s just your fear twisting your mind.
The boy has a long, slender shape. He’s dressed in threadbare jeans, the knees jutting out of holes, and his shirt is two sizes too big, hanging half off his left shoulder and torn a bit at the neck. He looks a mess … a dark, ragged, brooding mess …

The boy doesn’t turn his head, doesn’t so much as twitch a finger, but his eyes move at once, finding Wick’s. The moment eye contact is made, Wick shivers and regrets opening the door. Even the handle he’s holding is becoming colder—as if frosting over. The breath in front of Wick’s face turns to mist, his eyes burning from the frigid atmosphere.
This was a mistake.

He pulls the heavy door shut. It bangs horribly, its ugly sound assaulting the cellar and rattling his skull.
There … I’ve had my peek.
When he leaves the cellar and comes out of the kitchen, Cintha’s tiny voice finds him, still seated at the booth. “Did you meet him?”

Wick wrinkles his brow innocently. “Meet who?” She gives a meek smile, and Wick realizes he knows better than to play coy with Cintha; she seems to know most things before anyone else does. “Well … I didn’t mean to. The door was unlocked. A fine job we’re doing in keeping him hidden if we can’t even manage to keep the door locked.” He makes a dry, joyless chuckle.

“He’s about to be fed,” she explains. “I unlocked the door. The kitchen’s making lunch for us, a bowl’s set aside for him.” She peers down at her fingers, studying them. “I told Kendil I’d leave the door unlocked so he could feel less …” She can’t find the word, shrugs instead. “Anyway. He’s not gonna hurt us.”

Wick takes a seat at the booth with her, his hand finding a spoon and playing with it nervously. “What do you mean he’s not gonna—Wait. Kendil? That’s his—?”

“Yeah. Kendil.” Her eyes don’t meet Wick’s, as though she’s ashamed. “They don’t know I’ve been talking to him. I refuse to call him what everyone else does. He has a name.”

“The Weapon, you mean? Oh, sorry …” Wick wipes an eye, then leans forward, curiosity driving him. “So how do you know?”

“That he isn’t gonna hurt us? Well. I think he wanted to be captured. I think … I think we treat him better than his last owners did. Owners.” She sighs, pressing hands to her face. “Owners. Like he’s a pet.
Owners
. I can’t believe I said that.”

The door to the shop clatters at the sound of a pair of customers coming in. The floor seems more lively than it’s ever been, at least while Wick’s here. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that he hasn’t ever known the Noodle Shop during the day, only visiting it at night in the past.

He thinks on Athan suddenly. “We treat our captives well.”

“We don’t trust them well.” She gnaws on her lip, looking up at Wick with apologies in her eyes. She speaks as if shyly choosing each word. “If only things were … easier. I know that you and the sky-boy are close. And I know you’ve grown closer, I can sense it. Sexual energy is my Legacy, after all.”

“I wonder what’d happen if you used your Legacy on a guy like me,” says Wick, trying to get a smile out of her.

She just shrugs. “I wouldn’t try. Maybe I’m wrong about my ability. Maybe all I do is quicken pulses. Maybe I just push at men’s hearts. Maybe I’ve had it wrong all along.”

“Maybe.” Rone had planted such a notion deep into Wick’s worries. Until now, he hadn’t given it much thought. It’s too scary, too overwhelming, the idea that Wick’s Legacy might’ve been something entirely different than what he’s thought it’s been his whole, seventeen years of life … and to think, how he’d been covering up his Legacy with the lie of “acute smelling” …

“And yours,” she says, studying his face.

“Mine,” he agrees despairingly.

Suddenly she reaches out, takes his hand and squeezes. When their eyes find each other, he finds he appreciates Cintha so much. Like brother, like sister … the two really know how to comfort a friend in need.

“I think lunch is ready,” says Wick, seconds before the doors to the kitchen swing open and a man emerges, carrying a large tray across the floor and through the side door that leads up to the loft.

Cintha lifts a brow. “How’d you know?”

“Smelled it,” he says.

They laugh hysterically.

00
56
Forgemon

His beard’s grown so thick and ugly. He wishes his reflection would quit staring at him in the metal body of the humming machine next to him as he beats hammer to anvil. He pretends the anvil is the face of a Sanctum official … the face of a Marshal … the face of a King. Any of them will do.
Bang, bang, bang.
It is a sweet motivation, but does little to lift the storm in his mind.

The metalshop has been under the greatest scrutiny after that Weapon Show. Half his crew has been called away, sent to other factories, or even arrested as suspects. But not Forge, no, never him. The math of a life in the cells never worked its way to him. And just as helpfully, neither has the math of finding his sons.
Damn you, Anwick.
How has the math failed him so grievously?

Bang.
That one’s for Sanctum.
Bang.
That one’s for Anwick.
Bang.
Another for Link. Two more for his sons in Guardian, may they not discover the peace in death too young.
Bang, bang.
And
bang.
That last one’s for the son with his nose in the ancient paper books of Atlas.
Lionis, you fool.
And a final bang for the lady at home whose grey-blue eyes he has not peered in for over a week.

The loudest of bangs he reserves for himself. For failing his family. For failing his children. All that training for Anwick, all that anger and he still can’t see.

He still can’t see the math.

His life is becoming this place, an angry hammer and a hot anvil. Every corner of the ninth ward he’s seemed to search. No one knows a thing. No figure leads him. Even in such a desperate time as this, the numbers are nowhere to be found. The numbers give him such useless information.
Avoid the market,
they tell him,
as the probability of two angry men and a crate of chickens breaking loose is high.
The math has abandoned him, offering only a confusing, cramped, claustrophobic sort of agony.
Yes,
he agrees.
That’s exactly what my brain is: confused, cramped, and claustrophobic.
Maybe one of these mighty axes he’s spent hours sharpening can free his mind from his skull.
Maybe only then will I know peace.

He wants to be home. He wants to lay his wife across the kitchen floor every single day, but cannot be a proper husband when his sons are missing. If he were not bound to this ugly metalshop … If he were home instead, his sons might still be home too. Every moment spent under his roof is more like a little rest break until, upon the sun’s rise, he returns right back to this death vault of steam and white-hot metals.
Why can’t it be the other way around?
“Give,” he slams the hammer, “me,”
bang,
“my,”
bang,
“life,”
bang,
“back!”

Bang, bang, bang.

“Deege Eppero is outperforming you, Lesser, and he’s got a bad eye and half a brain in his skull. Dropped on his head as a kid, I’m sure about that one.” The boss Holden stands over him, his mighty beard lifting with his words. “That hammer getting too heavy for you, is it? Prefer working with a spoon?”

Bang, bang, bang.

“I need more, Lesser. Sanctum’s ordered six hundred chrome candlesticks. That’s after their order of a fourteen-case of wrought iron posts. An order of chandelier coverings—the silver spec, not the gold. Are you listening? Two hundred crests, two hundred caps, two hundred bolts, and they’re expecting them
assembled
.”

Finally Forge manages a few words. “We’ve plenty enough to manage,” he says quietly, “when I can’t even manage to keep my own sons.”

“You want to find me a man with a smith’s Legacy?”

“There is no man with a
smith’s
Legacy,” Forge retorts acidly, disregarding the fact that his boss was being sarcastic, “and if there is, he’s either dead or lives at the other end of Atlas for all I care.”

“Care,” orders his boss. “If you don’t, I’ll hire a Charmer who can make hammers move on their own. Then fuck your arm. Who cares about an arm that whines as often as it bangs.”

It happens in an instant. Forge is on his feet, hammer raised over his head, and Holden’s pressed against the hot anvil, his eyes wide and his orange beard glowing like molten fire in the hot, gleaming red of the shop.

“Care,” repeats the boss, though marginally less assertively. “Care where you put that hammer, Forgemon. The last person who raised a hammer here—the Bard fellow—no one’s heard from him since.”

Rychis Bard.
The arm bearing the hammer slowly, slowly, slowly lowers, dropping gently to his side, though his body does not move, still pressed against Holden with shaking rage.
Rychis Bard, the short-tempered.
Tempering metals all the days long, and Forge somehow never learned to temper himself.

“Sanctum,” mutters Forge, the numbers flitting past his eyelids. He sees it. He sees how very unnecessary this is. His son. Anwick.
Anwick …
“Sanctum will have to make do without six hundred chrome candlesticks. Light their own fire, I say.” Forge sets the hammer gently on the anvil, opting not to break any machinery today and incite the anger of the Guardian. He’s soon to incite someone else’s. “I quit,” he whispers, defeated, victorious.

His boss calls after him thirteen times, for the thirteen more
bangs
that Forge will not be making this day.

00
57
Halvesand

The briefing is long, and during the whole of it, Halvesand can’t meet Lead Officer Obert’s eyes.

Thankfully, the entire ninth ward unit is present, including the tenth ward Guardian that live in another dormitory. From their united intel—including Halvesand’s own contribution of certain details leading them to a few key locations in the ninth ward—they will be setting out on a final mission to scope out the last two areas that may house the remaining rebels, because if there’s anything unanimously agreed upon, it’s that the two boys now in Sanctum custody, Dran and Fylan, did not act alone. Two teams are selected comprising of ten Guardian apiece. One team will go to the abandoned warehouse that used to be a textile factory in the tenth ward, and the other team will investigate a block of cafés and restaurants at the very edge of the ninth ward on first block.

After the briefing, Halves walks to the barracks to change and arm himself and finds his brother by the door wearing a grin.
He turns into a wicked Lionis before my eyes when he grins like that.
“What do you want?” Halves asks his brother.

“Raw about your new partner, are you?”

Halvesand did not realize he’d be cleared back to the field so soon. It’s only been days since his last partner kissed the floor of Obert’s office, dead, and now Halves is partnered with the nerdy, curly-haired Pace who is loudest to laugh at his own jokes. On the bright side, there is absolutely nothing about his new partner Pace that reminds Halves of … his last one.

“No,” says Halves. “I like him. He’s kind.”

“So’s Ennebal,” Aleks responds, giving a shrug. “She has a way about her when she approaches situations. She’s so …
clever
. We’ve bonded a lot on the streets. It’s like we read each other’s minds out there. She goes ahead when I’ve the instinct to cover, and whenever I make a go, she’s got my back.”

Halves makes no reaction. He just lets his brother have his words, listening, but sweat is gathering under his arms … as if any twitch of his face will give away the secrets that Ennebal and he share.
I am honest.
Maybe this is the real reason he fears Obert. Does breaking the fraternization rule warrant a knife to
his
back?

“She’s a rare one,” agrees Halves. “Aleksand, listen … I want you to be really careful out there. The others are saying—”

“Yeah, yeah. They think the warehouse is it, I know. You’re worried tenth ward’s gonna eat your bro alive? Nah, not a chance. Though I do think searching the pot’n’broth block is a
hilarious
idea.” Aleks gives a big, dramatic show of laughter to express just how hilarious he finds it. “Dad used to take us there when we were kids, you remember? There’s that one place with the big chimneys that serves the upside-down ice cream.”