Outlier: Rebellion (4 page)

After flicking on the broadcast for half a minute and discovering exactly four boring channels on them, he finally makes way to his tiny room up the narrow stair, pushes the front window open and sits on the tiny porch roof outside, scribbling away his homework assignment in the steadily waning daylight. When he’s on the last page, mom’s come home and pokes her head in his room, face spattered in numerous hues of mud. “Coming down for dinner? Just us tonight.”

With Halves and Aleks off defending the city in the name of Guardian and the Marshal of Whatever, the house is considerably quieter. Two less mouths to feed. And so he clambers down to the half-lit den to share a communal plate of dumplings, bean mash, and salted cabbage with his two brothers and mom until the sun’s been replaced by black and birdsong traded for crickets.

That night, Wick wakes to the razor point of a sword at his lips. “Dead,” says the sword-bearer. 

000
2
 
Forgemon

He holds the sword steady at his son’s face.

Once Wick sees who it is, he rolls his eyes, pushes the blade away with two limp fingers. “Not tonight.”

“Is that what you say when you’re about to die, Anwick?” his dad presses on. “Do you say ‘Not tonight’ to the enemy, Anwick? Do you imagine them obeying?”

“One of these nights,” Wick moans, “I’m gonna bolt up in my sleep, your sword’s gonna go in one side of my head and out the other, and that’ll be the end of it. Except having to explain to mom what happened …”

“It’s time to train,” Forge persists.

“I’ve only been asleep two hours!”

“And when you’re dead, you’ll be asleep for good.” Forge tosses the sword onto his son’s belly. “I’ll be at the shed down the street.”

Wick sits up, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes between staring at the weapon in his lap. “Real sword?”

“Don’t say I never listened to you, son.”

Their hour and twelve minutes of training commences. Wick struggles a bit with the sword, unfamiliar with the weight of it and how it compensates. Forge can see his son miscalculating how much time he needs for swings, the weapon far heavier than the sticks and broom handles they’ve practiced with before. Forge doesn’t let Anwick practice with the long blade because the math tells him his son would lose a finger.
Anwick suffers enough with a terrible Legacy,
he figures.
He’ll need all ten of his fingers.
By the end of the hour, he’d had his son trading sword for spear, testing a new weapon, then spear for scimitar, for short axe, for dagger.

“Know your weapons,” Forge presses on, sparks flying as the various shapes of metal kiss, “and use them! Anything is a weapon when you aim it.” He had to keep pressing Anwick in the training, even if one swing of his son’s sword came too close to shaving off his modest beard. “Was your little dream worth it?” Forge taunts. “Who do you dream of, boy?” Of course, his son’s so focused on getting his swings right—axe, knife, sword—he never answers.

By the end, his son’s sweaty and wheezing. Anwick is not like his other boys; he needs the training to compensate for his …
shortcoming
. Death waits for no one, that’s a fact no amount of swordplay can change, but the training keeps his son cautious.

“Dad, am I an Outlier?”

Forge squints at him, wiping his weapons clean and placing them on the rack one by one. “Not even close, son. You can alter your mind to allow for sleeping. You have a Mentalist Legacy, like mine, nothing more.”

Wick’s piddling with the sword. “Are you sure?”

“Get back to bed before your mom gets the idea to check on you,” Forge tells him, ending the discussion. “Your brothers will be home for breakfast.”

“So? My brothers are always home for breakfast.”

“Your other brothers,” he adds with a wink.

Wick’s eyes brighten. “I thought Halves had gone on to the Guardian dormitories already? And Aleks?”

“They’ve come home for one final morning before Halves begins his first four-week assignment.”

“I doubt I’ll get another hour in before school,” his son realizes, tossing the sword onto a workbench and heading out.

It’s nearly two hours later when Forge finds his wife and most of his sons all met at the kitchen counter. Lionis is cooking with the serious focus of a studied chef while his brothers all laugh at a joke Aleks makes about hazing the new Guardian recruits. Halves just gives a shrug, then admits how excited he is to finally begin his career. “You’ll have a lot of catching up to do, little bro,” Aleks teases, poking Halves in the ribs.

Forge’s two oldest have always been competitive, nearly conjoined for as many things as they’ve done together. They even look so alike, though they are not twins. Both lean, long-limbed, and a head taller than the rest. When they lived here, they shared the upstairs room that now belongs to Link, while Link and Lionis kept their things in the den, not really having a proper room to call their own. Lionis used to throw tantrums about Anwick being younger and getting his own room, which is really just a converted closet. Until Lionis was old enough to understand
why
Wick needed privacy, there was nothing but tension between the boys. Most of that tension still lives, Forge is afraid to admit. He gave Anwick’s closet a window and mattress to make it feel more like a bedroom … the only actually-functioning bedroom in all of Atlas.

Anwick finally comes down the narrow stair, tackling Halves from behind. Even Link smiles, sipping a glass of artificial orange. The sight of his whole family together again, even if just for this dark and early morning, makes him beam.

“Take a picture,” Forge decides suddenly, nudging his wife.

She makes an awful face, still somehow looking pretty when doing so. “We sold the camera, love. Don’t you remember?”

This will be the very last time they see all their sons under this roof … according to the math. Their sons will, after this meal, be on their very separate ways. But he cannot tell them this; they will panic, think the worst, and ask questions his math cannot answer.
Maybe I am wrong,
he hopes.
My futures have been wrong before.

His wife seems to see the tightness in his face, as she brings both her hands around his arm. “Forge?”

“Yes,” he mumbles, watching Halvesand collapse into a fit of laughter with his brothers. “Yes, I remember. Sold it years ago, when you were out of a job. Sold the phone too.”

She lays her head on his shoulder. He smells her hair, slipping an arm around her waist and listening to another of Aleksand’s bad jokes. The boys laugh, Anwick slamming a fist on the counter and Halves spitting half his orange out his nose.
I’ll do with my eyes just as well,
he decides.
My eyes are my camera.

Too soon, Anwick is off to school with Link, and Halves and Aleks make their goodbyes, seen off to the trains by Lionis who bears a hundred unanswered questions for them about Guardian. Forge knows Lionis will only get four of his questions answered, and the rest will be abandoned forever as the train doors close on his face too soon and force him to wave goodbye, tears in his eyes and unasked questions left dead on his tongue.

Now it’s just his wife and her slender, soft, supple body and long tangles of hair … and she’s poised at the sink, slowly washing the last of the plates …
oh, the way her hands work.
Forge spins her around and attacks her with his lips, unable to stop himself. She laughs into the kiss, then gives in, her body slackening. Suddenly he surprises her, carrying her up to the kitchen counter like a hammer to the anvil—she shrieks giddily—and with his big hands at her hips, he slips one under her dress to pull off her panties in one deft yank. He buries his face in her breasts, making his wife squirm and moan … He’s so good at this, he knows it.

“You’re gonna be late,” she whispers while he’s working her long neck, kissing his way down the happiest of paths leading somewhere pleasantly lower, lower, lower. “You don’t want to—
Ah, lower
—You don’t want to piss off your—
Ah, ah …
”

“Don’t spoil it,” he says from somewhere between her thighs.

“Forge,” she manages to say, gripping the side of the oven for balance—then for the next long while, can’t say a thing at all.

When he meets her face again, he says, “You, my Ellena, make it all worth the sweat and steam of a hundred metalshops.”

She kisses behind his ear, right where it sends electricity through him
and
his beard, then responds, “Those same words convinced me to have my first baby with you …”

“And the second,” he confesses, “and third and fourth …” And then he opens his pants with one wild yank, pulls her legs about his waist and enters her to finish the job he’d started.

When he pulls away at last, still breathing heavily in her ear, his wife says, “Looks like you’ve already made your sweat and steam for the day.”

They met young, had so many kids, so many times Forgemon thought they’d overdone their family, not thinking they had the means to support that many children … but she is beautiful, even so many years and kids later she can set his eyes on fire and stir the animal in him. She has such youth in her skin, not even forty. Her laughing brown eyes, her feathery lips …

On the train to the factories, worries eat up the joy of the morning. He can’t escape the math, not anywhere, for it’s his Legacy and therefore a permanent part of him. His mind calculates how scattered the Lesser family will soon be, and it draws circles in his stomach.

Anwick to graduate school this year, Link to follow in two years’ time. Halves and Aleks in Guardian, their commitments growing longer still, provided they keep their lives—that math scares him the worst. It’s likely neither will marry women and start families of their own. Sure, they’ve had their fair share of girls along the way, Aleks perhaps more than Halves, but nothing stuck. Link’s grown too fast, always angry, too angry for love. Then there’s Lionis, so full of his books with little room for anything else. Anwick is the real wildcard, troubling him the worst, which is why he must train him. The math is all there, but so frayed, so multidirectional that the figures unsettle him. Each member of his family stands at the threshold of something new.

Nothing is scarier than certainty.

At the metalshops, Forge has a figuring it would benefit him to enter through the back. Sure enough, he finds his boss heaving over a stubborn machine that isn’t performing proper. “The damn thing won’t calculate iron alloys versus bronze, or percentage marks or—what the dumb-hell is that number doing over there? I put it over here!!” Forge has to laugh, that the issue he’s walked in on is perfectly suited to his skills. In a matter of four and a half minutes, the machine is doing all it should again, and his boss Holden clenches his teeth into something one might carefully call a smile. “The damned Sanctum won’t upgrade any of our machinery, yet we’re expected to produce-produce-produce. What dumb-hell is this for? An order for twenty-hundred silver gloves!”

Forge shrugs. “Maybe all two thousand are for the man with the metal arms, the Legacist’s kill-touch-guy.”

“Not right.” The boss turns up his chin, half his mouth lost in his orange, curly beard-thing. “We ought to be compensated. Already lost three men this last month, including Jardon, Larne … Who was the other? The one who went shit-crazy half a week ago and broke the X40? Bard, wasn’t that his name?”

Bard … Rychis Bard, I remember him. So short a temper on that one.
“Rychis Bard, yes. Didn’t know any of them that well on a personal level,” Forge admits, “but every man helps. Even a hothead like Rychis.”

“I need someone to bang hammers today, Lesser.” Mr. Holden’s mouth still crushed in a grimace, he says, “Production’s low, we’re so many men down I can’t count them on my toes. I need an arm like yours.”

Forge already knew he’d be asked to do this. He saw the math long before he even woke up Anwick, while he was pulling on his boots. Still desperately exhausted from yesterday’s workload, he just twists his lips and says, “Count on me.”

Seven hours and twenty minutes later, Forge seats himself on a small mound of dirt and grass that’s settled in the dumpster-lined alley behind the factory. He felt it important to take his lunch here instead of inside at the computers where his coworkers will be chatting themselves stupid. He takes a bite of his sandwich, tasting the sweet memory of Ellena this morning, warmed by the thought of his sons making good of themselves in the city, and waiting patiently for the thing that’s about to happen.

And then the tiny, shimmering gift falls from the sky. With a loud metallic snap that nearly scares the sandwich out of his hands—even as expected as it was—the tiny thing leaves a crack in the pavement where it landed, bounces, then titters along and finds rest at the base of a dumpster. It shines in the midday light, winking at him. Forge scampers over, picks it off the ground, and flips it into his smoky, rough palm. It’s a shiny gold coin with the Sanctum’s royal mark etched into both sides—the currency of the Lifted City.

He looks up with a grin, but in staring at the dark underside of the city above, his thoughts turn sour and the grin withers. He imagines the coin slipping from the purse of some old man drunk off his riches, spilling gold for a woman he’s fucking at the brim of the Lifted City. His calculations are always black with bitterness for the rich and wasteful in the sky. No matter what the math says, he won’t take this gold coin as a symbol for his own family’s fortune, no … Nothing good ever falls from the sky.

Of that math, he’s quite certain.

000
3
 
Rychis