Outlier: Rebellion Read Online Free PDF

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
     
     
    I am Rychis Bard. I have a wife and one baby boy. I lost my temper, I broke a machine at my job, it won’t happen again.
    This is what Rychis recites over and over as he’s ushered down the endless chrome corridor. All he hears are the soles of his boots, clacking, clacking. That and the heavy song of chains. Are they really necessary? He’d happily face the King without restraints. The Kingship is kind, the Kingship is good.
    He doesn’t have anything to fear.
    I am Rychis Bard. He recites his line over and over like a lyric and he hates music. The only music he knows is of hissing steam and banging hammers, his home at the metalshop where he’s worked loyally for seventeen years—until this morning when he lost his temper and found a pair of cold handcuffs kissing his wrists. I am Rychis Bard. I have a wife and one baby boy …
    Others have been arrested today too, it seems. Many men, some women, even a boy somewhere ahead of him in the line. Seeing the boy sends a searing pang through his body, making him think on his little son. The wife will understand that he could not be home, but what of his baby boy? His boy won’t know why daddy has gone.
    Soon , he promises him. The King will forgive the fuck-up and send me home to you by supper.
    A set of monstrous iron doors sliding open sobers him, and he reminds himself stupidly that he is not home … far from it. There is no wife to slip his hands around, only the uniformed men leading them through the doors and down many an endless hall. His chains giggle at him when he gives his thick orange beard a good scratching, and he listens to the beeps of access points, the tapping of keypads and passcodes, and more steely doors sliding open with electric hums and hisses. Marching on and on, up and up the metal contraption that is Cloud Tower, he wonders how much longer it’ll be before reaching the throne room of good King Greymyn, the Banshee King, where his judgment waits. They say the room’s like a huge glass chamber, its only neighbors the stars, with mirror-polished tiles and a ceiling so high it’s gone.
    I am Rychis Bard. I have a wife and one baby boy …
    His true home is a small one-bedroom in the grimiest of the ninth ward slum where even the acrid fumes of neighboring factories cannot soil his heart, for there is a beautiful woman in that home whom he calls wife … a woman who’s already claimed his heart plenty. Last night’s memory keeps him smiling as he moves down the hall … How she laughed when he pushed her into the couch, the baby asleep at last … Pulling himself over her, running a single finger up her leg to learn what she wore underneath. And she took that finger and put it just where she wanted. “Nothing,” she said. “That’s what’s underneath tonight.”
    He needs to get home soon, he realizes. She’s likely waiting for him right now, wondering why he’s so late.
    Soon, he promises her too. Once this farce is over with …
    He stumbles, and a guard with kind eyes brings him to standing again. Rychis tries a smile, reassured. All the things he and his wife were told in the slums, they’re all wrong. The Sanctum is good, the Kingship too. This place is not the nightmare his coworkers at the metalshop hiss and spit about, he’ll be so proud to tell them. The people of this Lifted City are just another people, not the rich monsters and cruel dictators and capitalist evils from which his childhood