The Slum Queen (an Outlier prequel novella) Read online

  Books by Daryl Banner

  The Beautiful Dead Trilogy:

  The Beautiful Dead (Book 1)

  Dead Of Winter (Book 2)

  Almost Alive (Book 3)

  The OUTLIER Series:

  Outlier: Rebellion (Book 1)

  Outlier: Legacy (Book 2)

  Outlier: Reign Of Madness (Book 3)

  Outlier: Beyond Oblivion (Book 4)

  Outlier: Five Kings (Book 5)

  The Brazen Boys:

  A series of standalone M/M romance novellas.

  Dorm Game (Book 1)

  On The Edge (Book 2)

  Owned By The Freshman (Book 3)

  Dog Tags (Book 4)

  Other Books by Daryl Banner:

  super psycho future killers

  Psychology Of Want

  Love And Other Bad Ideas

  (a collection of seven short plays)

  The Slum Queen : an Outlier prequel novella

  Copyright © 2015 by Daryl Banner

  Published by Frozenfyre Publishing

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be used or reproduced

  in any manner whatsoever, including but not limited to being stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, groups,

  businesses, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual

  places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover & Interior Design: Daryl Banner

  Urban Photography By: Jan Behrens

  ISBN-13: 978-1508593867

  ISBN-10: 1508593868

  Kings & Queens of Atlas

  Year: Name & Title:

  0000-0300 Birth Of Atlas / The Age Of Three Goddess

  0300-0410 Aardgar, The Immortal King

  0410-0445 Winley, The Everywhere King

  0445-0483 Emelda, Queen Of Stones

  0465-0465 Marshals Of Peace, Order, & Legacy Instituted

  0483-0505 Gourde, King Of Shadows

  0505-0521 Nylesandra, The Storm Queen

  0521-0572 Unther Dreadland, The Smiling King

  0572-0600 Ashe Lionbane, Queen Of Promises

  0600-0636 Illiam Breeds, The Fell King

  0636-0637 Ghesta Goldmore, Queen Of Faces

  0637-0640 Council Of Elders ruled in the absence of an heir

  0640-0690 Prymise Eastly, The Obsidian King

  0690-0716 Borbar, King Of Wrath

  0716-0716 The Decimation Of Twelfth Ward

  0716-0804 Anarchy / The Age Of No Rule

  0804-0804 The Prohibition Of Bombs / Balance Restored

  0804-0852 Xen Lunaran, The Queen Of Pieces

  0852-0872 Quilis Armlong, The Berserker

  0872-0880 Penelo Armlong, The Unborn Queen

  0880-0916 Everest Lastly, The Gold King

  0898-0898 First Legacy Tour, by Royal Legacist Jennos

  0916-0924 Phade, The War Bringer

  0924-0930 Jennos, King Of Opportunities

  Year: Name & Title:

  0930-0995 Vivilan Rubylight, Queen Of Skies

  0995-1022 The Undercity Rebellion / The Ghost Age

  0999-1022 Aardgar, The Risen Again King

  1022-1076 Reign Of Windstone – Marshals Reinstated

  1022-1058 Feldon Windstone, King Of Twelve

  1058-1070 Whila Windstone, Queen Of Keeping

  1070-1076 Ciliandra Windstone, Queen Of Might

  1076-1110 Reign Of Storms

  1076-1086 Timult Storms, The Crying King

  1086-1099 Timinia Storms, The Marble Queen

  1099-1110 Emelda Storms, Queen Of Blood

  1110-1110 End Of The Storm / Dawn Of Sanctum

  1110-1121 Yule, Queen Of Stars

  1121-1131 Tide Mindhammer, King Of Tunnels

  1131-1141 Hamaron Kingsword, King Of Arms

  1141-1149 Zarcke, The King Of Time Ago

  1149-1154 Vorne Wayward, The Goddess King

  1154-1167 Dedimon, Dedimon The Heavy

  1167-1177 Saura Mordan-Icros, Queen Of Duty

  1177-1180 Traglia Mordan, Traglia The Green

  1180-1200 Yan Mordan, The Unseeing King

  1200-present Atricia Sunsong, The Slum Queen

  The

  Slum

  Queen

  The Slum Queen

  Atricia Sunsong became Queen with one little lie.

  In the Last City of Atlas, that’s how a King or Queen is made. She learned that fact even before she learned how to lace her boots, or where boys go when they die, or why women bleed. All of the Kings and Queens are made so with the unkind stuff of deceit, a smiling murder, a promise made one night—then savagely broken the next morning. When she was young and sweetened and her favorite thing in the sky was the sun, she swore she’d grow up to be a kind and honest woman, but was never sure to whom she was swearing.

  There’s a light knock at her chamber door. “In,” says Queen Atricia, and a man is ushered inside. A man with muscles of a god, or so is indicated by the tight suit he wears. Not that he’ll be wearing it for long. His pants hug a hard-worked form down to the shin where, bunched up, they reveal two thick boots.

  They get better and better with the men they offer, Atricia thinks hollowly.

  “Hello, your royal … uh …”

  “Atricia,” she corrects him, not moving from the balcony at which she stands. “Just Atricia.”

  For a second, he doesn’t seem to know whether to smile, cry, or wet himself. “They told me you didn’t prefer the formalities or, uh … titles. I wasn’t sure if they were kidding or not.”

  “Even a Queen gets sick of such words like ‘Queen’ …”

  Now her favorite thing in the sky is nothing at all. Until it is vacant but the sickly moon and a pox of demon-white stars, she knows no comfort. The sun that used to smile and smile, now only draws sickness from her belly, sickness and memories of childhood and times when she preferred her morning juice sweet. Now she can’t even bare the sweetness of flowers.

  She envies the people in the ancient histories she read about, people from a time long before the world was ruined. Now, there exists only the Last City of Atlas, surrounded by a Wall so tall it tickles the bellies of clouds, outside of which nothing but oblivion remains.

  In this bleak and long-progressed time, people no longer require sleep after the age of two; dreams are for babes who know nothing of how harsh the real world will greet them. However did the Ancients, as grown and able adults, manage wasting eight hours a day on silence and stillness?—Don’t we get enough of it when we die? Atricia wonders.

  But it is not only the sleeping that confounds her of the Ancients … It is the lack of Legacies. For in this world, every person is born with a unique and special ability, and this ability is called a Legacy. Most abilities are lowborn, ineffectual, weak … Only the rare gifts that are potent enough can rise a soul from the deepest of trenches all the way to Queenship …

  Says the man: “Should I undress, or …”

  His age would be a total guess, really; he could be the likes of thirty, or he could be a well-groomed child. His youthful face and bright eyes, they don’t seduce the way a man’s might, but they will have to do. What does it matter who or what you are, thinks Atricia. I’m Queen and Queens take what they want. “No,” she says simply. “But you can make a seat of my bed.”

  The wind feels cold against her face, standing here in the balcony of Cloud Tower, overlooki
ng all the best and worst of the crystal spires and domes and twisted chrome parapets of the grand and privileged Lifted City—the city held up by two-hundred-and-two massive pylons, a city squatting over the slums below … the waste and ruin of criminals and commoners and other lesser things Atricia pretends not to know so intimately.

  The man has taken his seat, and she hears him say, “I haven’t seen many beds. They don’t make them so commonly where I’m from … Can’t afford them down below, I guess. No need, anyway, seeing as babies aren’t really big enough to fill them.”

  The wind feels cold and yet she lets slip her silken robe to the marble tiles at her feet. “There are other uses for a bed,” says the Queen. The icy steel of grey midmorning light can’t cut deeper than the loneliness that strangles her heart. She can’t even bring herself to shiver. Queen Of Ice, that’d be a more appropriate title for her, if only she had such a Legacy. Queen Of Cold.

  She crosses the room, brings her body up to the man at her bed. He looks up, his eyes like a boy’s, and she wonders, Are you him? She pulls back his suit jacket, feels the firmness in his shoulders, his hard neck, the muscles that dance down a back. Are you him? She lets fall his suit and marvels, and the comforting stab of lust finds seat in her chest. She pushes him down, straddles his rippled stomach, and a single gasp issues from somewhere within him, a gasp of surprise.

  “There are other uses for a bed,” he agrees.

  They call her The Slum Queen instead. Only when they think she can’t hear, of course. They whisper it like ghosts in a long echoing hall. Queen Of Rags … Dirty-Gold Queen. Atricia is living proof that anyone, anyone at all, can become King or Queen of Atlas.

  Even a girl from the slums.

  Life below the Lifted City, down in the slums that holds up the Lifted City like a precious baby, held up and out of the vile cesspool of mud and crime and starvation below … that life taught Atricia all she needed to know about the human being. The Tattered Queen … Queen Of Grime And Crime … No matter the amount of coin in one’s pocket, a poor hand can betray and murder a friend as slickly as a hand wetted with riches. A penniless mouth speaks as many lies as a full one.

  Her hands trace his flawless body, fingers jumping at his every hillside of muscle, down the peaks of his nipples at Mount Pec left, Mount Pec right … Are you him? She doesn’t smile as her hands cross the symmetrical hills of Abs, through the valleys of Hips to a Ridge of Intimate Lands.

  His anxious boy eyes watch hers like he sees stars, and his lips part.

  There was a boy in the slums, a boy who lived very close to her dwelling in the fourth ward. His name was Chole, and they both attended the same school, lectured to by the same professor who taught that all Queens and Kings were good, borne of pure hearts and souls. Chole’s hair was a messy pitch of night, his nose a button on a doll’s face. Big-lipped and with wide ears, he wasn’t the most attractive boy, but he was the nicest and he was Atricia’s best friend, and whenever they talked about their days, he’d always look at only her eyes and melt her from the inside out. Though their hands never touched for longer than seven seconds and their lips never officially met—even after their voices changed and hair sprouted from sensitive places—Atricia felt such adoration, and it lived in the strangest of places … her love for him festered in her lungs, hung on her shoulders, quaked in her knees.

  Slum boy Chole had a common Legacy, a lowborn Legacy, some simple talent that involved being able to manipulate dust particles into little shapes. With a stirring of his fingers, he could encourage bits of dust or ash to come together, lift up off a surface and unite to form a thing. Tiny hairs could be included, bits of sawdust too … Atricia would smile excitedly as he made his silly designs. “Trouble is,” young Atricia told him once at the lunch table, “only one touch of a breeze can tumble down your beautiful creations.” Just then, as if comically summoned, a small wind that couldn’t even unrest a paper napkin danced across their table, and his little dust-made creation—a figure of a beautiful queen—crumbled to nothing, twisted in an instant back to the pile of dust from which it was made, beautiful no more.

  She never expected one day to find herself a Queen … made of dust or otherwise. Those little creations of dust queens he would make her, she thinks fondly and sickly of them. The tiny little dust queens.

  See the dust queen I made you? That’s what he’d say, proud as a boy trying to impress a girl. See how she dances?

  Chole always talked and talked of someday being King and making the great change. “I’d bring the Lifted City to the wards below, to the hardworking people and the trenches and the factories.” He smiled grandly as he encouraged his little dust sculptures together, painting his dream before their eyes. “I’d be a good King. I wouldn’t live in that stuffy cold thing in the sky, no way. I’d be one with the people … Isn’t that how it should be?” He forms another figure, a little king standing tall as a hand before them, proud and commanding, limbs of dust, hair of breadcrumbs, a face of pollen. “The Slum King.”

  Another breeze passed by and the two watched, wide-eyed. As if by reflex, their hands clasped together … one, two, three seconds … their breath held … four, five, six …

  Seven, and the little king fell.

  Their fingers let go.

  Atricia knows this man that was brought in for her, he did not dream of this moment. It is not desire that catches in his eye when he sees her, but fear. He will be happiest when he’s collecting his payment, ushered back to his life, released like some captured bird. And what does that make her? The cage? The net in which he struggles? The clasping hands of a child to a precious feathered thing?

  “Look in my eyes,” she commands. He obeys. “What do you see?”

  He smiles like a drunken fool. He plays the part well, I’ll give him that. “I see a beautiful woman. I see a strong woman. I see … I see …”

  “Do you know what my Legacy is?”

  His forehead screws up, lips parted. “I … uh … Is this a trick question? Of—Of course I know your Legacy. The whole of Atlas knows it.”

  The whole of Atlas thinks they know it. She took the throne with one little lie, didn’t she?

  “That means you will tell me true?” she says, like a warning.

  This brings him to pause. With him straddled, she can feel his pulse quickening. She sees evidence of his tension in even the subtlest of flinches through his muscled torso. Something about it gives her great glee … and equal disappointment. Why can’t a man simply speak their mind around her? Why must it always be a game?

  The man finally answers: “You can make people see truths. And speak them.”

  With the balcony open, the cool wind prancing through the room tickles her hair, runs like ice across their nearly-naked bodies. The smile she gives to his answer does not touch her eyes. “So I will ask again, without judgment, without recourse or consequence … Tell me true. What do you see?”

  His eyes turn to glass. He is afraid … He is terrified, as all men are terrified. No one can misspeak to a Queen, as it can mean forfeiting their life. For a wrong answer, who knows?—She could toss him to the prisons for the rest of his days, or order an execution, or pitch his body to the flames for all anyone would know. She is the Queen, and the Queen does as she likes. And perhaps that is the cruelest gift the throne ever gave her.

  If Chole had become King, this fear would not exist. A person wouldn’t cower, they would laugh with the King and share tea. But it is not Chole that fortune and circumstance touched, no … He is not the one whose body fills the cold and silent throne.

  The Queen of Truths. This is her official name, because the whole of Atlas believes in the one little lie, that her Legacy is in making people see the truth. Everyone who stood before her saw a truth indeed: They saw that Atlas would fall without her reign, that they would be safe and live happier lives with her seated at the throne, that they would know a better world.

  Every single person was convinced, but not because
they were actually seeing the truth. They were convinced because that is her true Legacy: She could make anyone believe anything, with the simple will of her mind.

  “So is it true that you love your Queen?” she whispers, speaking to him, into him, through him to his very nerve endings, to his body, to the synapses of his brain that judge yeses and noes … love or hate … choose or don’t choose.

  Her Legacy reaches in with an ice-cold grip that no man can refuse.

  This is when his eyes change. All pretense is released instantly, like some mad drug has taken over. With every single man that’s brought to her chambers, Queen Atricia hopes not to have to do this, but it seems no one can enjoy her bed without a little dose of her secret Legacy. Free will is an illusion, anyway … a pretty illusion of power, lust, and greed that, no matter your choices, lands you the same ill fate.

  “Yes,” he breathes, his voice aquiver with the excitement of a schoolboy at last meeting his lifelong crush. “Please, yes. So, so much. Oh, please.”

  Please, what? What is it you beg for, you sad, stupid boy?

  The man’s eyes have already rocked to the back of his head, his lips parting with the sweet agony of a lover. Yes, Atricia agrees heavily, I will make you earn every cent tonight. The Queen puts a hand to her ice-cold body, or maybe it’s her hand that is ice-cold. She wonders if she’s that ash-borne figurine now, just some dust-creation of Chole’s. No innocent winds dare to dance anywhere near her; only tormenting stillness and the muscled man between her thighs that, now, will do quite literally anything she wants. Indeed, nothing seems to dance anymore, not even a robe in the nightly breeze, not even candle flame. It’s just fabric now. Just fire.

  When she rolls off the man, he eagerly props himself up on an elbow and asks, “What else can I do, Your Majesty? May I … Can I do something else for you? Can I …”