Fragile Remedy

by Maria Ingrande Mora

  “No one else has Remedy.”

  “Is that so?”

  Frustration rose in Nate like a curling wisp of smoke. “You know that. Tell me what I need to do. I’ll find credits.”

  “You’ll find credits.” Alden rolled his eyes. He swept his hair to the side and began to braid it. This was familiar—a sign that he was doing figures in his head. “Are they finding spare credits in the street these days, then? Along with gilded shit and sugared gull bones?”

  A pang of emptiness made itself known in Nate’s chest. He’d missed the musical sound of Alden’s voice, the way his words filled the space between them.

  He ducked his chin and studied Alden’s long toes where they peeked out from colorful sandals made with braided plastic. “Tell me what I need to do.”

  “I thought you were done being told what to do.” Alden spoke softly now. The shop was growing dark.

  “You stopped giving me a choice.” Nate forced himself to look up. Something shifted in Alden’s eyes. “I deserved a choice.”

  “And you made one. You chose to leave, to live with people who can’t keep you alive. People who would grind your bones to dust and sell them by the ounce if they knew what you were.”

  It was Nate’s turn to roll his eyes. “My bones are worthless, and if you knew Reed and the girls, you’d like them. They’re just trying to survive together. And they appreciate me.”

  “I appreciated you.” Each syllable cut like a blade.

  The weight of Alden’s arm across his chest and his breath too slow at his ear. The Diffuser, still bloodied, cast carelessly into the cushions beside them.

  A shiver of revulsion ran through Nate’s body, sudden and strong enough for Alden to plainly see. Nate took a sharp step back, tripped over his own feet, and slammed his hip against the sharp corner of a display case.

  Alden had gone utterly still, his fingers frozen at odd angles. He’d lost weight, and his robes hung on his thin shoulders like silk on bone. “Tell me what you’re really asking. Tell me you want Remedy for free and want to give me nothing in return. Tell me you’re willing to put my shop, my life, and my grandmother’s life at risk just by being here. Just by being what you are.”

  “Alden.”

  “Tell me you’re lying to the people who shelter you. That your life is worth more than the rest of us.”

  All of it was true. But Nate was a coward, and the words bubbled out of him softly, a wretched admission. “I don’t want to die.” He’d never admitted it before, never let himself name the chasm of the stillness that loomed before him. Closer with every ache.

  “We’re all going to die, Nate!” Alden shouted.

  Nate braced himself against the glass counter, rattling a display of plastic beads. They clacked together like mocking laughter, and his voice tripped on the choking promise of tears. “If you don’t care, turn me in.”

  Alden turned and closed the blinds, driving away the last light. He opened a small box of matches and began lighting candles. “Don’t you think I would have already?”

  Nate watched Alden’s hand tremble above the flickering light of a weak flame.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Nate whispered.

  His head ached with the stuffy pressure of a building headache, and walking over here had exhausted him. Without Remedy, he’d soon grow too ill to hide it from Reed. And Alden was right: he was putting them all at risk.

  Alden opened the curtain to the next room, where the lights Nate had wired cast a warm, familiar light. “Learn to negotiate better, for one.”

  “What?” Nate asked, scraping tears from his lashes with his dirty hands.

  “You’re more than a GEM. As it much as it pains me to admit, your tinkering isn’t worthless.” Alden gestured tightly. “I have things to do. Come get your dose so I can go on with my evening. And next time you come, bring tech and propose a plan to make yourself useful every time you come here.”

  Nate took an unsteady, disbelieving step. “You’re not going to try to feed?”

  “Force you?”

  “No—I— ”

  “You try my patience. Get your fix and get back to your Reed,” Alden said, so acidic that Nate hurried like he’d been pushed. He held the curtain aside, back rigid, as Nate passed through into a room he no longer felt welcome in . . .

  A muffled knock at the bedroom door startled Nate from his memory. Legs momentarily weak with a rush of unreasonable fear, he scrambled off the floor and knocked back softly, careful not to wake Fran, who snored in her bed. “Alden?”

  Alden let out a muted sigh. “We appear to be under siege.”

  Nate unlocked the door and peered out, more concerned with his alarm system failing than he was about Alden’s veiled warnings the evening before. Shadows flickered at the front window, outside the range of the trip wires and alarm circuits.

  Alden handed him a stun gun.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” Nate asked, squinting in the dark. Through the blinds and flimsy curtains, torchlight danced. The streets were full of people.

  “If someone breaks the door in, shoot them with the stun gun.” Alden leaned against the front counter, his nightgown clinging like a shroud. He held a polished wooden stick the length of his arm. Nate had never seen anything like it, and Alden didn’t look like he knew what to do with it.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Who knows. An overabundance of speed-chem. A stampede toward the nearest rain barrel. The Breakers. A parade. I don’t pretend to understand the whims of our neighbors.”

  But he did. Alden had an uncanny way of knowing exactly what people needed when they came to him with wordless hunger. He watched the window warily, his fingers clenched tight around the wood.

  “Why won’t the A-Vols stop them?” Nate asked.

  Alden made a low, displeased sound. “The A-Vols have no reason to stop a riot. It appears others have been incentivizing their loyalty.”

  “The Breakers?”

  “I didn’t wake you up for a midnight chat.” Tension clipped Alden’s words.

  If the crowd outside decided to raid Alden’s shop, the alarm system and the stun gun and Alden’s stick weren’t going to save them. But the late hour dulled Nate’s senses. It had to be close to dawn, and finally, his body was ready to sleep.

  Little by little, the crowd outside thinned. Here and there, Nate made out the shapes of baskets and bags in people’s arms. “It’s food they’re after,” he realized, fear and concern mingling in the dark. “They’re hungry.”

  Hunger was nothing new in the Withers, but this was different. A chaotic, desperate need.

  Alden didn’t move. “Of course they are.”

  Nate thought of Pixel and knew that Brick, Sparks, and Reed would sooner starve than let her hunger like that. That they would starve for her. A pang of grief hollowed him out. He should have been with them, doing something to help. But there was no sense in wishing now. Tomorrow, he’d figure out how to get tech over to them. It was more than nothing.

  The night stretched on, the streets slowly quieting, until Nate could only hear the steady tick of a clock on the wall and not the rustle of hurried footsteps outside. In the absence of immediate danger, he swayed with sleepiness, nearly dropping the stun gun he was reasonably certain didn’t work.

  “Sit down,” Alden said.

  Nate wobbled across the room and sat at his feet, resting his head against Alden’s legs.

  He couldn’t recall falling asleep, but woke in his bed and wondered if it had all been a dream—until he saw the hollow pinch of exhaustion around Alden’s eyes.

  Nate stood. “I’m going to go to the market.” He pulled his coat off the hook on the wall. The pockets were deep enough to hold the battery packs from the back room. “I’ll see if anyone’s talking about what happened last night.”
>
  Alden caught his wrist. “Not today.”

  “What?” Nate glared at him. “Why not?”

  He let go of Nate’s hand, but unfolded to stand in front of the door with his thin arms braced against the jamb. His robe hung like a curtain, and the sun shone through, illuminating the pale swirls in the embroidery. “You don’t need to be flitting in and out of here all day long.”

  “But I haven’t left at all. You told me to do things. I’m bored!” he lied, desperate to get the battery packs to Reed and to know exactly what was happening—and how it might affect the gang.

  “There are worse things to be.”

  Nate waited for Alden to fall asleep so he could sneak out, but Alden stayed more alert than usual. Instead of smiling at the sound of the door chime—the herald of a fiend in need—he tensed, like he expected an attack. When Nate fussed around the shop, trying to keep his hands busy, Alden herded him back into Fran’s room.

  But Alden couldn’t stay awake forever. When Nate found him with his head in his arms at his work desk, fingers still gripping a pencil, he made quick work of packing up the battery packs and collecting a few odds and ends from the shop that he could trade for softer bread and some stew meat for Fran.

  He disabled the chime on the alarm system long enough to slip out the back door and into the alley where he’d first met Alden. It reminded him so much of leaving to sell tech for the gang that his chest tightened. He’d forced himself to stop thinking about Reed all the time, but now, everything he’d tried so hard to forget flooded back.

  How were they? Were they hungry? Safe? Finding a new hideout? Did Reed miss him?

  If he brought the battery packs to Reed himself, Reed would see that he was still useful. And he could check up on everyone, even if he couldn’t stay.

  He could say goodbye.

  Surely Alden wouldn’t fault him for that.

  Nate made his way toward the tall buildings in the distance, the bank nestled in the cluster of them. He walked slowly, wary of the unnaturally empty streets. Three people fighting poured out of a doorway, falling down the stairs and carrying on without missing a beat. He dodged them hurriedly, trying to ignore the way they snarled and clawed like animals.

  At his slow pace, it took him an hour to reach the market square. When he got there, he checked the street signs, wondering if he’d gone thoroughly addled from lack of Remedy and gotten himself lost.

  The market was empty. A single torn awning fluttered from bent metal where a table lay in crooked shambles. It was as if the shopkeepers had carefully collected every sign that they’d existed and disappeared. A gull perched on a crumbled stone bench, cocking its head and cawing.

  Nate could still feel the grit of ash in his mouth from the bread he’d shared with Alden. People were going to starve without the market. Hardly anyone had food vouchers. There wasn’t enough work.

  Even the bird sounded hungry.

  Tightening the straps of his backpack, Nate hurried onto a narrow side street. Two families stood at the entrance to an alley full of tents, forming a loose circle around three toddlers who played in nothing but stained rag diapers. The adults weren’t talking or laughing. They were simply watching, standing guard. Nate approached slowly, making sure his footsteps were loud.

  “What happened to the market?” he asked.

  A woman with sores on her hands spun around and softened once she sized him up. “Where have you been? In a pit?”

  “More or less.”

  She huffed. “Room for more in there?”

  A shorter woman put her arm around her and pulled her close, affectionate and protective at once. “Nothing’s coming in from Gathos City. No need for a market. There’s nothing to buy, nothing to sell.”

  “Nothing to eat,” the first woman said.

  “If you missed the riots, you better share that good chem you’re on. We could all use it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nate said senselessly, backing away. Hunger etched lines on their faces, on the toddlers with skinny arms and distended bellies.

  “He’s flying too high to know his own name. Sounds nice.” They laughed and turned their backs to Nate, blocking the babies from his view. He was glad for it.

  With the streets empty and too many small fires to count in the distance, he’d never get to the bank and back in one piece. His backpack felt like it was full of stones. He’d been stupid to think he could do this. Even flagging a Courier would be too risky—with every mouth desperate, nothing he could pay would guarantee the safe delivery of tech.

  Nate headed back the way he came, too rattled to walk slowly. He jogged as best he could, getting winded every few blocks and pausing to wheeze until he could move again. He was so busy watching for someone following him that he nearly stumbled onto a person sprawled out on the ground. He sucked in a breath. It was one of the people who’d been fighting viciously.

  They were dead.

  And not just dead, but carved up in places, as if someone had tried to butcher them and had quit in a hurry. Fresh, bloody footprints and slimy trails of gore surrounded the body. Retching, Nate began to run and didn’t stop until he was back in the alley behind Alden’s. Doubling over, he vomited again and again, clinging to a scrap of chain-link fence to keep from collapsing in his own sick.

  Alden opened the back door and dragged him inside, silently depositing him in the washroom and leaving him there. All Nate caught was a flash of lips pressed tight with rage before the door slammed shut on him.

  Nate pulled his backpack off and clutched it like one of Pixel’s rag dolls, sobbing into the dusty canvas until he felt like there was nothing left inside of him.

  Alden didn’t speak to him for three days.

  When the chimes rang out early the next week, Nate snuck back out and peered through a fold in the curtain. An old man with a shock of white hair walked in using a cane.

  Alden met him a few steps in and offered his arm, leading him to a stool at the front counter. “Careful now.”

  The old man swatted at him. “I’m not made of glass, boy.”

  Nate tensed, expecting Alden to lash out—no one addressed him like that. But Alden laughed quietly and began to rummage beneath the counter. “How is it out there?”

  “How do you think?” The old man coughed, thin and wheezy. “They’ve sealed the delivery gates. No food, no supplies.”

  Nate’s worries simmered under his skin, half-formed like the echoes of a bad dream. The battery packs wouldn’t be enough to help the gang. He’d have to try to hack the ticker feeds—learn everything he could. He’d never tried to scavenge for information, but it couldn’t be that hard. The gang needed to know where to take shelter. He’d get what he learned to them somehow.

  A clattering drew Nate’s attention back to the front room. The man had dropped his cane. Alden crouched to retrieve it for him and pressed a small plastic box into his knotted fingers. “This is all I have left. Go slow.”

  “Low supplies at Alba’s? The world really must be ending.”

  Alden ducked his head, lips pressing into a tight smile. He pushed his hair back behind one ear. “No one calls it that anymore.”

  “Ah, well. Let an old-timer have his memories. Take care, son.” He patted Alden’s hand and left the shop with the box clutched to his chest, chimes tinkling in his wake.

  “Spy on me again, and I’ll chain you to Fran’s bed,” Alden murmured, his back rigid. They’d had a few stilted conversations, but Alden was still sore with him for sneaking out of the shop.

  Nate dashed down the short hallway, boots silent against the ragged old carpet that smelled like mold. Alden’s threat was rot, but his heart raced anyway. He ducked into Fran’s room.

  “Who’s chasing you, bird?” Fran asked.

  “No one.” Breathing hard, Nate offered her a small smile. It took awhile for his body to
settle, but even after it did, regret lingered, an ache that ran from his chest to his fingertips. He’d stolen something from Alden—a private moment, when Alden had precious little that belonged only to him.

  But he’d learned something too. It wasn’t getting better out there. He needed to work harder—do anything in his power to give Reed and the girls an edge. A chance to survive.

  Wary of taking apart Fran’s precious ticker, he rummaged around until he found an old, cracked one in a pile of junk in her chest of drawers. He broke it down to a meaningless pile of tech-guts.

  Shadows spread across the room. Fran snored.

  Moving like a ghost, Alden lit candles around him and left a plate of bread without saying a word. Nate worked feverishly, carefully reconstructing the ticker with a modified tuner.

  Rogue broadcasts ran on a different wavelength than the official Gathos City notices. If he tweaked the tuner to pick up frequencies the tickers didn’t use, maybe he’d come across another signal. The Breakers had to communicate somehow. Couriers were too busy running chem and passing threats from one gang to another to carry secret messages about explosions and chaos.

  Late in the night, Alden stumbled into the room and dragged a cushion next to where Nate worked on the floor. He moved like he wasn’t quite awake and threw his arms around Nate’s waist before falling asleep. His breath was sweet with chem.

  Nate tried to keep working, but he hadn’t slept much since sneaking out, and the rhythm of Alden’s breath lulled him. He curled up alongside Alden on the cushion, and Alden’s arms convulsed around him.

  What does he dream?

  Nate held still and feigned sleep as Alden startled awake. His heart raced against Nate’s back. Alden’s breath didn’t settle back to the gentle rhythm of sleep. He pressed his face into Nate’s hair and clenched his fingers in the loose shirt Nate wore to bed.

  “Nate,” Alden said, mournful and soft. He wept quietly as Nate stared into the darkness and didn’t sleep at all.

  Nate’s repaired ticker couldn’t make sense of the jumble of information polluting every channel.