Fragile Remedy

by Maria Ingrande Mora

  He became aware of someone banging on the shop door, and Fran, wrapped in heavy blankets, using a walking stick to poke Alden’s still form. He’d thought, for a lurching moment, that Alden was dead. But it was worse. He was flying, too gone to see that Fran was gaunt with hunger and thirst, that Nate looked like a skeleton, that the shop was in disarray. The last thing Nate remembered was summertime, and now the shop was cold. The furnace lay bare.

  When his legs would carry him, he’d left without saying goodbye.

  Something heavy pounced on Nate’s chest, ripping him away from delightful numbness. His hands stirred and found skinny arms.

  “You’ve been asleep for three days,” Pixel said. “You toad! I thought you were killed.”

  Nate didn’t want to open his eyes, but even in the fuzzy tilt of waking up, he knew something was wrong about Pixel being close. The smells around him and the softness beneath him were too familiar to be anywhere but his old pile of cushions on Alden’s floor.

  “You shouldn’t be here.” Nate strained against sticky dryness in his throat.

  “Why is that?” Alden asked, close by. “Are you insinuating that I’d do something untoward to our very young friend?”

  “Alden’s nice,” Pixel said. Her small hands gripped Nate’s bare ankle. “He has pretty things.”

  “Water,” Nate croaked. He opened his eyes to slits, but the candlelight pierced him like sunbeams.

  Alden wound his arm under Nate’s head. He tipped a narrow cup to Nate’s lips and filled his mouth with small sips until he could swallow. The water burned at first, but the more Nate drank, the more his head cleared.

  Alden helped him finish the water the same way he did every time Nate woke up blurry and sick. “What do you think you were doing letting that boy feed on you for so long? Have you lost your mind, or were you actively trying to kill yourself?” His voice went thin in a way Nate had never heard before. “I told you not to do that.”

  “Alden.” Nate stared at the bluish circles under Alden’s eyes.

  Alden met his searching look with an icy glare, his mouth pinched with hunger.

  He wasn’t really concerned. He was only worried about losing his fix.

  Then Alden’s questions sunk in. “Reed! Did it work? Did it fix him?”

  Alden’s expression tightened. He said nothing as Pixel crowded Nate’s vision, fluttering like a moth.

  “He woke up!” Pixel said. “Sparks came to tell us yesterday. After you were done, he was so much better. I told Brick you got tired from running, like when you get sick sometimes. Brick said maybe Alden would take you in ’cause you used to live with him, and Alden didn’t mind because he wanted the medicine box back anyway. And I wanted to stay, and Brick said it was okay ’cause Miss Fran’s real nice to me. Alden gave Sparks medicine and needles to sew Reed up. You were sleeping for a long time. And you wouldn’t drink neither. Oh, Nate, I thought you were killed for sure.”

  Nate smiled, his lips stinging with dryness. “Reed’s okay.” That was all he really needed to know.

  “Aren’t you concerned that Reed and his young associates will question how you managed to restore a dying man?” Alden sat at the edge of the pile of cushions, his hair pulled back in a severe bun.

  Pixel rested her cheek on Nate’s chest and hugged him gently. “Nate told them it was fancy chem. Like city medicine. It’ll be okay, right, Nate?”

  “I’ll worry on it later.” Nate put his arm around Pixel’s back and watched Alden. “You’ll be safe, Pix.”

  Alden rolled his eyes. “It’s a wonder any of you sentimental fools have lived this long. You must realize Reed will try to find out how you managed to buy medicine. You’re not exactly wealthy.”

  “Pixel, go on and rest now,” Nate said. “I know you’ve been staying awake, looking after me.” There was no sense in scaring her.

  “You can sleep at the foot of Miss Fran’s bed.” A brief, fond smile softened Alden’s features. “She thinks I’ve brought her a granddaughter to dote on.”

  Pixel burrowed closer but didn’t resist when Alden helped her up and guided her through the curtained door to his grandmother’s room.

  Left alone, Nate drifted, dozing lightly, and woke to find Alden beside him again.

  “We have trouble.” Alden tucked Nate’s hair behind his ear. “Bigger trouble than the mess you got yourself into at the railway.”

  “Is that a bedtime story to scare me or the truth?” Nate asked.

  “What would I accomplish by scaring you? You don’t listen to reason.” Alden’s hands fluttered like distressed birds. “You don’t listen to me at all.”

  “I—”

  “Your diminutive friend was correct, Nate. You were half dead when they brought you here. I couldn’t help you. All I could do was wait to see if you’d wake up or drift into the stillness.”

  “I’ll try not to damage what belongs to you again.” Nate worked his way onto his elbows.

  “Is that what . . . is that really what you think of me?” Alden asked, gripping Nate by the arms and forcing him back into the bedding with a stilted, trembling gentleness.

  “I know what I am to you,” Nate said.

  “Do you?”

  Nate was being manipulated, but his skin went rough with goose bumps. Even in his wildest hungers, Alden hadn’t looked at him the way he watched Nate now, with longing and impossible sadness.

  “What do you want?” He tugged Alden’s sleeve, wanting to replace Alden’s expression with the indifferent smirks he wore so well.

  “That’s no matter, is it?”

  “Stop making no sense. You told me I don’t listen, but you don’t say anything that’s not some game.”

  “Maybe I’m not sure I can trust you anymore, Natey.” Alden pulled his sleeve out of Nate’s grip restlessly. He sat cross-legged on the floor beside Nate’s bedding and pressed his fingers against his forehead.

  “I’m not in a position to sell you out,” Nate said.

  “But you might say too much, confide in the wrong person. I’ve told you time and again that I don’t come by Remedy cheaply. I’m told they were looking for you, for the Tinkerer.” He exhaled noisily. “If you get caught, guess who they’ll be looking for next?”

  Nate frowned. Alden never let anyone push him around. He fed A-Vols credits and chem and sent them on their way. Something—someone—else worried him.

  “Exactly,” Alden said, studying Nate’s face. “It will be my lovely neck on the line.”

  “So you’re only looking out for yourself.”

  Alden stared a moment and then laughed once, sharply. “You’re starting to learn, sweetness. That’s good.”

  “You can trust me,” Nate said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Other than my dearest friend feeding his very life to a street thief?”

  Nate checked a flinch and waited, refusing to respond to the bait. They’d never called each other friends. They’d never called each other anything.

  Alden, for once, turned away. “There’s a problem with Remedy,” he said.

  Everything went gray. “What?”

  “My supplier hasn’t shown up, and I can’t track her down. The last batch I’ve got . . . I don’t know.” Alden never sounded this unsure—scattered. “I’m trying to stretch it, but it’s not lasting long.”

  “You weren’t worried few days ago.”

  “You weren’t dying a few days ago. I thought we had more time. I didn’t think you’d be at the shop this much. I didn’t know you’d throw your life away for your gang—despite being clearly warned not to feed for too long. “

  “I’m not dying,” Nate said, hollowed out by Alden’s words.

  “How would you know one way or another?” Alden asked, clipped and too loud. “You’ve been sleeping the days away. And I told you you can�
��t be here so often.”

  Alden had told him all along, from the very first time Nate had shown back up at the shop, that he needed to be careful. That Alden wasn’t made of Remedy. It had always seemed like Alden’s way of making him suffer for leaving. For the past year, every one of their interactions had been too thick with shame and anger and fear to untangle the real meaning of a threat.

  “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I couldn’t watch Reed die when there was a way to help him.”

  Alden’s black eyes pierced him. “Do you love him?”

  “Reed?” Nate blinked, thrown off. “I told you, we’re not—”

  “Fucking. Yes, you did mention that. Call me a romantic, but I didn’t know that was a prerequisite for loving somebody.”

  “What do you know about love, Alden?”

  A huff of breath shook Alden’s narrow shoulders. He shot Nate a rueful, ugly smile. “It’s a simple question.”

  The room had darkened as the candles began to sputter and die out around them. “Why do you care?”

  “I told you, Natey. I’m a romantic.”

  Nate rolled onto his side with a groan, his body aching from being still too long. “You’re a lunatic, is what you are.”

  “The little girl says you love him,” Alden said.

  “Pixel.” She wasn’t as good at keeping secrets as Nate thought.

  “We had a lot of time to chat while you were off in dreamland.”

  What kinds of things could Alden possibly talk about with Pixel? He never left the shop. He spent his clear-eyed time working endless figures and counting his inventory. When he was soft and sleepy with chem, he sat in Fran’s bed and listened to her stories, never flinching when she called him the wrong name. He didn’t know anything about children.

  Nate couldn’t imagine Alden ever having been a child at all. “She’s a little kid. She believes in magic and—”

  “Hope?” Alden lips quirked.

  Nate nodded, unsettled by the look in Alden’s eyes.

  “Hope’s a fragile thing in this world,” Alden said. “Her happy ending is still out there, somewhere. The rest of us, well . . .”

  “Very poetic, Alden.”

  Alden watched him, letting the silence drag. Another candle sputtered out, rattling with its last breath. “You could have said that you don’t love him, but you didn’t.”

  “Then I guess you have your answer,” Nate said, tired. His stomach rumbled, but his limbs were heavy, and eating sounded like too much work. “It isn’t important.”

  “Who’s to say what’s really important?”

  “Running out of Remedy is important.” He didn’t want to fight with Alden anymore. He didn’t want to fight with anyone. “To both of us.”

  Alden rolled his eyes, but his fingers were gentle as they combed through Nate’s hair. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say. I’ll keep my ear to the ground, so to speak, and you . . . well, be careful.”

  “That’s our plan? Be careful?”

  “Our plan?” Alden gave a cold smile. “You’ll have to come up with your own plan. My plan is to keep the Breakers off my doorstep. They don’t take to competition.”

  Nate’s bones ached. He couldn’t shake the sense that he was missing something. Why won’t he tell me the truth?

  Alden collected the burned-out candles, tossing them one at a time into the basket where he kept misshaped stumps to melt them down. With his back to Nate, he murmured, “There’s nothing I can do for you.”

  Brick arrived at Alden’s shop the next day. She lingered in the front room, peering into containers full of stinky incense. When Nate walked through the curtain door, he startled her, and she nearly toppled a glass jar off the shelf. Nate squinted in the glaring light. Alden had kept him in a windowless room far in the back, where guests weren’t allowed.

  “Reed thought maybe you would need help walking,” she said. “I told him there was no way I was carting your skinny ass across the Withers again, and he said to come check on you anyway.”

  Nate could never tell when she was joking and when she wasn’t. She had a naturally pleasant face, creased with laugh lines and sunspots, but she always managed to twist it up into a frown.

  Brick shot Alden a caustic look. Alden hadn’t killed Brick’s little brother with his own hands, but he’d been part of the strung-out days and nights that ended with July’s body in an alley.

  Alden didn’t look away.

  “I don’t need carrying.” Nate hurt, but he could walk fine. Alden was worse off, hungering fiercely behind the counter and glaring at Brick.

  Nate was far too weak to let Alden feed, even after a small dose of Remedy. Alden’s hunger lingered in every darting look, every sharp breath and unsettled step around the shop.

  Fran came through the curtain from her room in the back. “My first lover was a ginger,” she said. “Fiery thing like you. Orange and pink in his intimate areas, oh, like a sunset.”

  Brick’s skin went about as red as her hair.

  Pixel had spent the morning playing with Fran’s jewelry box. She darted through the curtain with several strings of glass beads around her neck. “Brick! Alden has the best things.”

  Brick crossed her arms. “I bet he does.”

  Nate scurried to get the necklaces off of her. “Let’s get moving, Pix. Aren’t you excited to see our new hideout?”

  “Should you be saying that in front of him?” Brick gestured at Alden.

  “Don’t trust me? I’m terribly wounded,” Alden murmured, ushering his grandmother out of the room.

  “It’s fine. He doesn’t know where it is.” Nate dropped one necklace after another on the counter. The beads clicked and rolled against the glass.

  “Keep the purple one, little Pixel princess,” Alden said as he came back. He grabbed a penknife off the counter and tapped it against the glass rapidly. “It suits you.”

  “Really?” Pixel asked, snatching it away from Nate as if expecting him to protest. She pulled it on and smiled, weaving her fingers around the shiny beads.

  “Stick that thing under your shirt, or you won’t make it a block without losing it,” Brick said.

  Nate helped Pixel get it hidden. Alden’s generosity unsettled him. He’d never seen Alden give anything away for free, but there was something oddly genuine about his affection for Pixel. “Thank you, Alden. I’ll pay you back for it.”

  Alden smiled too sweetly. “I’m certain you will.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Nate panted as he followed Brick up the dark stairwell to the room Reed and the gang had taken over in the bank. He squeezed Pixel’s hand—more for his own comfort than hers. “This building is too tall.”

  “Better up here than in another basement.” Brick lit the way with a crank-light. She stepped around a pile of fallen plaster and dodged a sticky pile of sewage. “Mostly.”

  It was impossible to get away from the stink of the Withers. In the summer, waste-trenches in the alleys steamed until the air thickened with rot. In the winter, the smoky-sour scent of burning garbage clung to everything.

  A handful of kids, street-dirty and thin, passed them on the stairwell. They carried bags full of garbage coated with sludge. Pixel’s fingers twitched. That’d be her fate, if she were alone. Dodging trappers every day and twisting trash into makeshift sticks of kindling to sell at the market.

  At the next landing, the kids gathered around two Servants in long robes. The Servants handed them rolls of gray bread and jugs of water. Nate and Brick hung back in the shadows as Pixel darted over with the other children and accepted a roll.

  “Gods watch you,” one of the Servants called to Brick and Nate, her voice as gentle as a lullaby.

  Startled by a wave of sadness, Nate took off up the stairs.

  “What spooked you?” Brick asked as s
he caught up to him with Pixel.

  Nate shrugged. He couldn’t explain the hollowness in his chest. When he reached the bend in the stairs, he looked back, feeling foolish. The Servants were already out of sight.

  “How do you get to be a Servant?” Pixel asked with a mouth full of bread.

  “Who knows?” Brick huffed. “They pick who they want.”

  “People who have magic?” Her eyes darted to Nate, and he shook his head tightly.

  “People who have a strong stomach. There’s no magic here,” Brick said, gesturing at the crumbling walls and the sticky garbage on the stairs. She guided them through the hole in the wall that led from the stairwell to Reed’s new hideout.

  Nate stumbled, surprised by the muggy wind blasting through the room. He caught sight of the dizzying view and sank to an unsteady crouch.

  “Why . . . why is there no wall?” he asked, trying not to look. The hole where a wall should have been was ragged and scorch-marked—the scar of an old fire.

  “Doesn’t matter.” Brick helped him to his feet and nudged him toward the solid interior wall.

  “No wonder nobody claimed this place.” He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes until the dizziness passed.

  “Everyone knows to stay well enough away from the edge, and we’re safer high up,” Brick said. “Trappers aren’t welcome here, and the A-Holes aren’t stupid enough to come up this high.”

  “How high are we?” Nate had lost count as they climbed.

  Brick smirked. “Eighteen flights.”

  He dared a look at the gaping hole. That explained the distant gleam of Gathos City’s silver towers.

  “You scared?” Pixel asked, pressed tight against his leg like she needed to hold him up.

  “A little.” Nate took shuffling steps after Brick. He stayed close to the interior wall. Climbing a pole twenty feet high was one thing. The view sent swooping waves of fear through him. People weren’t supposed to be this high up.

  It wasn’t going to be fun getting a decent alarm system up. But that was the first thing he needed to do. They’d have to construct a door or set up trip wires, and he’d have to get up into the walls to find live wires. Whatever he had to do, it would be worth it to make sure the new hideout was safe.