Fragile Remedy

by Maria Ingrande Mora

  “Walk well,” he whispered, locking the hatch behind them.

  A dream shook Nate out of sleep. He’d been in the car with his parents, speeding across Grand Cosmos Bridge from Gathos City to Winter Heights. The memory struck him often when he talked to Pixel about Bernice. His mother planting kisses on his cheek while he wiped each away, grimacing and confused. His father murmuring her nickname. Ivy, it’s time.

  Except this time, instead of telling him to be very quiet and pushing him into a plastic box between stinking pallets of rotting food, his parents had pulled him back into the car. Instead, the car had crashed and rolled off the edge of the bridge into the dark sludge below.

  The swooping sense of falling took Nate’s breath away as he shook off the fog of the bad dream.

  He scrubbed his hand through his sweaty hair and reminded himself that his parents hadn’t given him away—they’d saved him. Smuggled him from the shadowy people who never let him stay with his parents for long, who always brought him back to the laboratory, to the cold and the hurt. His parents had taken him from Gathos City and given him to a kind, old aunt in the Withers. They couldn’t have known that Bernice would die before he was old enough to know what to do with the rest of his life.

  He wondered—forcing himself not to be hopeful—if they were still alive. All three of them had supposedly died in a car crash, but he certainly wasn’t dead.

  Yet.

  If they still lived, where were they?

  Did they wonder where he was?

  The question raked across his insides. He shook it off. He’d never know one way or another.

  He rolled over and bumped into Pixel, who slept with her mouth open wide and her arms stretched above her head. Nate smiled. He drew his blanket over her legs, smoothing the folds until his hands stopped shaking.

  He crawled out of bed. The skylight above was a dark, gaping mouth.

  Under the glow of a crank-light, he set out the pieces of an old stun gun Reed had found while scavenging the week before. It wasn’t in good shape—the circuit board had rusted over. But Nate’d already managed to rewire half of it. His mind quieted as he worked, hunched over the delicate web of tech.

  Sweat beaded up at his hairline by the time he ran out of the thin wire he needed. He flexed his cramped hand and carefully put his tools away, wiping each clean with the edge of his shirt. It hadn’t taken as long as he’d hoped, and sadness from the dream still clung to him like the grime from the street. Bernice had known everything there was to know about tinkering. And so many things about Nate himself. She hadn’t been a scientist like his parents, but she’d lived in Gathos City long enough to know all about the GEMs kept locked away.

  She would have been able to tell him why he was getting sick so fast between doses of Remedy.

  Remedy kept GEMs alive when their bodies began to falter at an unnaturally early age. It was one more awful way for Gathos City to control their property. Bernice hadn’t understood the mechanics of it. She’d rasped out a low sound and said, “Your mother tinkered with flesh, not me. I stick to guts that don’t bleed.”

  Even Alden didn’t have an explanation that made a smudge of sense. Not that Nate really needed to know anything but how much better he felt when he had Remedy—as if it bathed him in light from the inside out.

  So why isn’t it working the same anymore?

  Nate searched for something else to occupy his mind. Dirty sheets and old rags hung like faded pennants from the scaffolding along the wall. He straightened the bunks, climbing from one to the next, folding blankets and shooing away pests. The others would return home exhausted and ready to sleep—and they’d appreciate not getting bit to pieces in their beds.

  He woke Pixel up before dawn. Holding her small hand, he helped her climb up the scaffolding. They squeezed out the small skylight to the flat roof of the utility building where Reed had discovered the perfect abandoned space for a hideout a few months before.

  As he gently massaged her scalp, she fell asleep again in his lap. Nate listened to her even breathing and stared out at the smudge of a horizon, waiting for the sun to rise over the endless sea and the towers of Gathos City.

  It no longer felt real that he’d grown up in those towers, shuffled back and forth between cold, sterile laboratories and a warm place where his parents held him like he might disappear if they let him go.

  As the sun drowned the stars out, he caught himself holding his breath, eager for the dazzle of its glow. He couldn’t remember his mother’s voice, but in that moment he recalled her laugh—the way she’d scruffed his messy hair when he beat her at a card game she’d only just taught him. The memory sharpened like the blade of light at the horizon. He fought the urge to wake Pixel and tell her about the illustrated playing cards, each gilded with a depiction of one of the Old Gods. Tidal waves and thunderheads and craggy mountains and rolling fields ripe with wildflowers.

  He closed his eyes, reaching for more, but all he could see was his mother putting on a gray coat and a silver name tag, her gaze shuttering as she reached for his hand and told him it was time to go to work and study his special blood. Getting on an elevator that took them so high his ears popped. Never crying, because it made her cry too. And he hated that more than he hated what they did to him.

  “Ow.” Pixel winced, twisting to look up at him with sleepy, owlish eyes. He’d clutched her arm.

  “Sorry, Pix,” he whispered. “Let’s go downstairs and wait for Reed.”

  Later that morning, all that was left of the memory was the feeling of crisp playing cards in his hands. Sharp, waxy edges and heavy card stock. He grabbed a rusty crank that left a ruddy stain on his skin.

  Nothing was clean here.

  “Why can’t we have a name?” Pixel asked. “We could be the Alley Cats.”

  The crank gave a wretched creak as Nate drew the skylight closed against the piercing morning sun. Sunrise became something hot and ugly so quickly.

  Reed clung to the exposed rafters like a spider, tugging at one finicky shutter that never closed all the way. “Because we don’t want people to know who we are.”

  They didn’t scuffle over turf or fight on the streets. They didn’t take over whole blocks like the Breakers did. The gang was safest with no reputation at all—just a handful of kids in the shadows.

  “And cats work alone,” Nate said.

  “You sure?”

  Nate shot her a warning look. “They eat their kittens too.”

  She stuck her tongue out, and Nate grinned, warmed by a rush of fondness. She had a way of getting underfoot, but it wouldn’t be the same without her around. For that, they overlooked the fact that she didn’t pull her weight.

  If they were only scavenging abandoned buildings, Reed would probably let her run with him and Sparks and Brick, but the pickings were better—and the work riskier—in workhouses. It was too dangerous. A-Vols might overlook a kid snipping wires from an exposed circuit board, but they wouldn’t turn a blind eye to a gang breaking into a workhouse.

  Authority Volunteers—criminals from Gathos City who chose life in the Withers over incarceration—got extra food rations for acting as a police force. But they didn’t keep the peace. They hunted street kids, collecting a small bounty of credits for turning them in to the workhouses. It was a death sentence. Every day, workers collapsed or got mangled by machinery. A-Vols dragged the bodies out of the workhouses to the sludge-channel where families were lucky if they managed to pay their respects before the tide came.

  Nate hated A-Vols as much as he hated trappers. Pleasure houses and street chem weren’t legal, but A-Vols did nothing to stop any of that. They were useless.

  Reed reached out and banged the gearbox when the shutter got jammed.

  “Gentle with that!” Nate cringed. The last time the skylight shutters broke, it took him a week to repair them. Nate turned the cran
k again cautiously and held his breath. The shutters snapped shut, blocking most of the daylight from the narrow room.

  Reed shot Nate a bright smile, and it was like their fight had never happened. Like the morning sun had burned off the soreness between them. “It worked, didn’t it?”

  When Reed smiled like that, it tickled Nate’s ribs. He struggled to find his voice. “Next, you’ll be calling yourself a Tinkerer.”

  “I’ve already got a Tinkerer.” Reed climbed down the scaffolding and grabbed a plastic bucket hanging from a tack, plunking it down in the middle of the room. “Show and tell!”

  Sparks emerged from her bunk, tucking her straight razor into the small leather kit she kept hanging from a nail. Her jaw was freshly shaved, and she’d stained her full lips blood-red. When she ran with Reed at night, climbing through small spaces and poaching tech-guts, she wore her curly black hair in a tight ponytail. Now it fell loose around her face in glossy ringlets.

  When Nate had seen Sparks fight off two trappers with nothing but a piece of rebar and one of her shoes, he’d understood exactly how she’d shaken off chem and clawed her way out of the sick. She was tougher than any of them.

  “These looked useful.” Sparks shrugged and dropped a set of shiny, numbered buttons into the bucket. “If you can’t sell them, give ’em back.”

  When Sparks couldn’t sleep, she sewed clothes from scraps and embellished them with sparkly bits and trinkets from the leftovers no one wanted to buy from Nate at the market. Whenever she managed to finish something, she pressed it under her mattress. Someday, she’d say, she was going to have her own booth, make money, quit stealing.

  “They’ll sell.” Nate tested the weight of the buttons. “Quick too.”

  “You better keep one if you want it.” Reed tipped the bucket back to Sparks, who took one of the buttons with a nod and climbed back up to her bunk. She tucked it into the metal box that held the shears she kept as sharp as Reed’s knife.

  Brick shuffled over with a wide yawn. She dropped a coil of bright-yellow wire on top of the pile of buttons. “I didn’t get much,” she said, giving Nate a look that dared him to complain about it.

  Reed slapped her back. “That’s because you carried a stovepipe clear across the Withers.”

  “Think it’ll work?” Brick pointed at the dented pipe in the corner.

  “I hope so. Looks like it, anyway,” Nate said. The rusted-out stovepipe in their hideout leaked, and every time they tried to cook, it made everyone cough for an hour. They’d been in this place longer than any of the others Nate had known in the year since he’d joined up with Reed’s gang. It was finally feeling worth it to make serious repairs.

  “Good.” Brick tugged one of Pixel’s ponytails as she crawled into her bunk. Pixel glanced up from fussing with her rag doll’s hair and gave Brick a crooked grin.

  “Brick’s been rescuing Reed from fights since they were knee-high,” Sparks had told him the first month Nate had run with Reed’s gang. She’d stayed up late, helping him organize a box of sewing needles the gang had found in a rotting attic the night before. “They grew up under their mamas’ beds in a pleasure house. No place for little ones.”

  Brick wasn’t tall, but she was big—with arms the size of Reed’s thighs. A bruise or scratch always mottled the pale skin at her stubborn, boxy jaw. According to Reed, she’d never been bested in a fight.

  “Don’t ever kill somebody ’cause you’re mad,” Brick had told Nate once after showing up at the hideout with her knuckles split and bloody. “The stillness is forever. You gotta mean it.”

  Nate wasn’t sure if he could kill someone, even if he meant it.

  Reed emptied his haul into the bucket, his backpack like a dirty animal vomiting up wires and scrap metal. “Ah, wait,” he said, mumbling to himself. Nate suppressed a laugh as he dug through the bucket, wincing at the sharp wires. “Almost forgot.”

  Nate squinted at the flash of polished metal in Reed’s hand. “What is it?”

  A hesitant smile dimpled Reed’s cheeks. He wrinkled his nose like it itched and shrugged. “Found it wedged between some pipes in a wall. Must have gone down a sink ages ago.”

  Reed unfurled his fingers one at a time, his grin softening to something proud and secretive. A silver pendant rested in his palm. He turned it over to reveal a polished stone or shell—pearlescent gray, tinged with blues and pinks and vivid greens. “I thought she’d like it.”

  A woozy heat crept through Nate. He smiled so wide his dry lips stung. “It’s perfect.”

  Pixel strung necklaces of greasy bolts and buttons. She’d treasure a real piece of jewelry. Nate forced himself to stop grinning like a flying fiend before Reed thought he’d gone addled, but the warmth lingered. Reed was kind when it didn’t make sense to be.

  Reed tucked the necklace into his pocket and dragged the bucket across the floor to Nate’s workstation. The handle sagged with the weight of all they’d scavenged in the night. “So how’d we do, Tinkerer?” he asked, voice deeper—as if putting the little treasure away had snapped him back to practicality.

  Pretty things wouldn’t feed them.

  “Not bad.” Nate reached in to fidget with the yellow wires from Brick’s haul. He held them to the bright crank-light attached to the pallet he used for a table. Colored wire would fetch the highest price. The fishermen who lined the dangerous, unstable shoreline used it for lures to angle for sludge-fish.

  To sell it, he’d have to try his aborted trip to the port again. He still needed to sell the fishing line, so it would be a rewarding trip. But this time, the strange girl called Val wouldn’t be there to save him if he passed out in front of a train. He told himself he’d wait until he felt well enough to walk that far. What was one more lie?

  Reed crowded close, pale-green eyes narrowed in a careful squint that made him look like he actually knew a rotting thing about tech—which he didn’t. Reed had grown up mending his mother’s lacy things. He was nimble-fingered, but didn’t know a switchpad from a sandwich. Until Nate had come along, Reed’s gang had barely gotten by scavenging tech.

  It was Nate’s one source of pride. He’d helped them. They were better fed now, and they scavenged faster now that they knew what to look for.

  “Is it enough to stock the pantry?” Reed asked, tweaking the springy end of the wire in Nate’s fingers.

  “I said it’s not bad.” Nate’s breath stuttered as Reed bumped against him. Reed was strong and lean, muscles filling out his clothes.

  Nate’s clothes hung off his angular body. And he wasn’t pretty like Reed. He hated the way his gray eyes bugged out a little too much and how often people asked him if he was ill—especially when the sun stayed behind the smog-clouds for too many days. Those were the weeks he avoided the mirrors in the marketplace, dreading a glimpse of his bronze skin gone sickly gray.

  He couldn’t imagine Reed wanting to be with someone who looked half dead, someone troublesome and secretive.

  But sometimes, Nate woke up disoriented and hot, skin prickling with half-remembered dreams. He’d never touched anyone the way he touched Reed in those dreams—darting his tongue out to taste the soft skin at Reed’s throat, Reed rumbling deep in his chest and clutching him closer, hot and sweet at Nate’s mouth.

  Nate knocked over a stack of gutted switchpads and crouched to pick them up, focusing on the task until the warm buzz of Reed’s touch passed. He fumbled the haul out across the pallet table and glanced aside to see Reed watching him with a silent question furrowing his brow.

  “I can sell most of this.” Nate cleared his throat to cover the strain. “Some I can melt down. We can eat off this for a week.”

  “What about the headaches? Will you be able to get something for that?”

  All the warmth slipped away.

  “I’ll take care of it.” Nate shrugged, forcing his voice to remain even. “Al
den will have something, and he owes me credits.”

  Reed’s fingers tightened around a shiny metal pin on Nate’s worktable. “You don’t need to go to him. He’s mixed up with the Breakers.”

  Frustration spiked through Nate. Reed wouldn’t understand. “He’s not—”

  “Even if he’s not, he’s still pushing the worst kind of chem.” Reed’s breath hitched, the sound sharp and irritated. “You know that.”

  Not the very worst.

  Alden liked to call his chem “artisanal,” which was a rot-filled way of saying he was too stubborn and proud to work with the Breakers. He worked with cooks who had been in business since before Alden was born. He didn’t rely on chem runners working the street. He let the fiends come to him.

  “I did a lot of tinkering for him,” Nate said. “Might as well cash in on that for a few tinctures.” It wasn’t that much of a stretch. Nate often bartered his tinkering when scavenging got slow. He was young for a Tinkerer, but his work spoke for itself once he was given a chance.

  “They say Alden owes half the Withers credits for one thing or another,” Reed said.

  The opposite was true. Alden detested being in debt and loved cashing in on owed favors. “He’s not as bad as you think,” Nate said.

  Alden was probably ten times worse than Reed thought.

  Reed let go of the pin, and it rolled in a semicircle, rustling a whisper-soft sound like music. “Right,” he said, tapping his fingertips against the table. “And I’m the king of Winter Heights.”

  “It’ll be fine.” Nate reached for Reed’s fidgeting hand, realizing too late that the comforting gesture might be mistaken for something else. His calloused fingertips dragged over the back of Reed’s hand in an awkward, slow caress.

  He knew better than to touch a live wire with his fingertips. It was the first thing Bernice had taught him: check with your knuckles, so that the current doesn’t close your fingers into a fist and burn you to bits from the inside out.

  “You don’t . . .” Reed sighed and studied their hands.

  They never talked about what they were. Reed needed a Tinkerer, and Nate needed shelter. But Reed didn’t pull away.