She ignored him, kept walking, grunting at the effort of bearing most of his weight.
“Stop. Please.” Shivers wracked through him. Hot and cold in quick succession.
Time had no hold on this grey place, but it took many agonizing steps to get them beyond the edges of the slum surrounding Obsidian Square.
Through clenched teeth, Zee doggedly insisted that they’d make it, but the shift in her frame told him just how often she sneaked a glance backwards, the exhaustion playing through her muscles.
They found a ditch and fell into it.
Kai lay on his side, sweating and shivering, too far gone to do anything about the root digging into his spine.
Zee hugged her knees, head down, breathing hard just beyond his feet. It was not much of a ditch, just a shallow scoop on the other side of a small mound, but it was better than collapsing in open view of the slum.
Thoughts crashed through his head like an army of derailed trains, flying wildly, colliding, never making it through to a conclusion. He would never make it to the river alive, but he still held to a golden hope that ran at odds with common sense. “Zee, try something for me?”
She grunted and her head sank closer to her knees.
Kai stretched, meaning to poke her with his foot. He misjudged.
Zee toppled sideways like an over-stacked laundry pile.
“Boy! What was that for?”
He ignored the indignation bristling out of her like a porcupine, “I’ve been thinking…come close.” Another convulsion wracked his body. He gritted his teeth against the rattling, riding the wave of shivers. One of these would break his bones for sure. The gaps between them were getting shorter. LightSucker poison raced through his body, increasing its grip with every passing moment. Suddenly Zee’s hand was on his forehead, burning hot and cold in turn. The seizure had drawn her close faster than any begging could. Now to convince her. He twisted his shoulder towards her. “Touch…my shoulder, the wound…”
She kept her hand on his forehead. “That’s not a good idea. Try to relax, don’t fight it.”
The episode lasted about a minute, a slow count to sixty. The shuddering stopped, leaving him feeling broken. He took a moment to breathe. “Touch it. Please.” He knew what he was asking—it didn’t take First Aid training to know that putting her skin in direct contact with an open wound—much less one weeping black goo—was not the best idea. “I won’t make it to the river—you know it.”
Zee started to protest, but he cut her off.
“I know what I saw. The river is in you. I watched you absorb it. Let it flow out of you. Maybe…” He let the words trail off, hope too fragile to be shaped into words.
She pulled away from him.
His head felt naked without her hand.
“It doesn’t work like that. Only the river can help you.”
It took all his energy to push himself upright. “Try.”
Zee bit her lip, undecided. “If it’s contagious…”
“I know. But I know what I saw–your light, the life in you. You are way more contagious than these bites could ever be.” He held out his arm, the wound weeping black, spreading cold.
She shut her eyes and breathed—deep in, deep out. When she opened her eyes, her hand stretched towards his damaged arm, a moment’s hesitation, a hairsbreadth from touching. With a shake of her head, her hand closed around his arm, palm pressed firmly on the wound.
Nothing.
“I’m sorry.” Disappointment and relief took turns on her face, dirt-streaked from the dust in the air and the sweat of carrying him. She sank back, resting on the mound close to him, her fingers still pressing into his flesh. Not in the hope of healing, but as a comfort. Her eyes were closed.
Kai studied her face, fast becoming the only constant in this bizarre place. Her lashes fluttered and he quickly dropped his gaze, focusing his attention on covering her hand with his. “Something doesn’t add up, Zee.”
A vague grunt told him she was listening.
“Since the first time I saw you, you’ve brought daylight with you that floods everything in full colour, as far as the eye can see.” He could swear a blush crept into her smooth cheeks.
“I dunno about that.”
“Trust me, you do. I’ve stumbled in the darkness that’s left when you go. You carry light.”
She brushed his comment away as if she were swatting a half-dead LightSucker. “What’s your question?”
He squirmed, running his fingers through a struggling tuft of grey grass as if to check his facts before risking offending her. “Where are your colours now? Your light?”
Zee shot up and for an instant blazed techni-colour in a flash that transformed their dull surroundings. It jolted through his arm, slamming him backwards hard enough to drive the air from his lungs and crush the struggling grass tuft. Just as quickly, it was gone.
“What was that?” There was a calm in Zee’s voice that he would have believed, if not for her wide eyes.
“That was you, darling.” He ran a hand over the arm where the sore had been and found no trace of the wound. Just smooth, clear skin. He held it under her nose. “And so was this.”
Zee stared at his arm, uncomprehending, mouth dropping open in slow motion. “The others?”
Kai wiggled his back, testing for the pain accompanying every movement. No pain. He ran his hand over his ankle, that one was gone too. Zee’s hands were shaking as she dragged herself through the dirt to examine him. At every missing wound, her head shook too. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it.” Her hand finally came to rest on his forehead. Every trace of fever was gone.
With another blinding flash, Zee vanished.
Pounding footsteps.
He heard them a breath after Zee’s disappearance. They were coming for him. In a flash, it made sense. Somehow her instincts must have been a dimmer switch on the brightness. She’d come into the OS undercover, like one of those covert ops shows he loved to watch on the TV at St. Greg’s.
With his wounds healed, Kai felt strength trickling back into his body. Too slow. He would need every scrap of it to get away from the Pack.
Should he find the river?
But Runt. Runt needed him
9
Kai’s feet poked out the ends of his jean-clad legs, mocking him with their sheer bareness. He half-ran, half-crawled across the open ground to the cover of the forest. Once hidden, he slipped from tree to tree, hardly daring to breathe. Beneath his feet, the floor of the forest was a tangled mess of thorny bark and sticky vines—a combination dead set on removing all the skin from his soles.
Face aching in concentration, Kai tried again. Willing shoes to appear. Ordering boots to materialize. Begging. Anything. Even flip-flops. He’d seen Zee shift clothes like those quick-change acts on talent shows. Surely he could make some shoes appear?
Apart from easing pain, something on his feet gave him hope of getting to Runt. If he could think shoes, surely he could think himself into some hideous brown leather that the Pack from the OS wore.
Then again, faking clothes was one thing, faking those black eyes…he’d have to figure that out.
Shoes first.
But no.
He could still see each hairy toe as it wiggled deeper into the sand. Running footfalls came closer. Sweat slicked his palms. He had to move or be discovered. Creeping low, he felt his way on hands and knees, biting back yelps at each thorn that snagged his skin.
He sat up to check his progress, sucking at his punctured hand. Tiny beads of blood covered his palm. Any moment the soldiers would be close enough to spot him. Kai ducked behind a tree.
Slowly, tree by tree, he made his way back to the slum. Sometimes holding still, barely breathing as wolfmen crashed past, close enough for him to reach out and pat one on the head for the good job they were doing hunting him. You go, wolfboy, you go.
“Oy, you! Clear off!” A scrap of a girl hissed at him, armed with a spoon, bristling. Her fee
t were bare and stained green from the forest floor, her hair hung to her waist, a tangled mass of wild grey, and her arms were fragile and thin.
She was the closest thing he’d ever seen to a pixie. At first Kai put her at around ten years of age, but delicate curves beneath her tattered shirt hinted at closer to mid-teens. He frowned at her, dismissing her as he would a mosquito. Kai turned back to listening, strained his ears for any of his hunters. A thick quiet had settled. It was time to move.
The stench crawled up his nostrils, a living thing intent on choking him. He didn’t need his eyes to know he’d made it to the slum. Kai wrinkled his nose and tried to place the odour; it was unlike anything he’d ever come across. Not garbage, rottenness, or the moist greenness of stagnant pools. It gnawed at him, this not-knowing.
A branch cracked like a gunshot as the girl shifted her stance, planting her feet and thrusting the spoon at him as if it were a spear. Her eyes wore the telltale black of a slum dweller, but there was a spark to her that he hadn’t seen in the others. Instantly, he knew what he was smelling.
Hopelessness. It hung think in the air.
This girl smelled different.
“I’m warning you. Push off!”
“I don’t want trouble. Just trying to help a friend.”
She circled him, spoon ready, eyes taking in minute details, scanning him for tricks, lies. Trust was in short supply in the neighbourhood. She frowned at his bare feet.
Kai tucked one behind the other, as if he could somehow hide their nakedness. Stupid shoes. This was nothing short of ridiculous, her spoon and his bare feet. Then again, her feet were bare too. What a pair. He tried to suppress it, the snort that started in his belly. But it sneaked up and out.
Her nose twitched in fury.
He shook his head. “A spoon. Seriously? Are you planning to disembowel me? Pop my eyeballs out?”
Her nostrils flared, a warning sign only a fool would ignore.
He held up empty hands, forcing the corners of his mouth down. I’m not laughing. I’m not. Really. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have laughed.”
“What do you want?”
“For one, I’d prefer not to be hacked up by your ever-so-vicious spoon and secondly, it would be really great not to be caught by the guys from the big black box in the middle of town. So why don’t you just let me pass? My issue is not with you.”
“You’re being hunted?” She squinted at his slow nod. Instantly, she appeared to change her mind. She grabbed his arm, dirty fingernails dug deep furrows in his skin, and dragged him toward the stench.
They broke through to a clearing on a rise at the edge of the town. She scrambled to the top of the mound and bowed with an elaborate flourish of her hand.
“Welcome to the City of the Dispossessed.”
~*~
Kai’s spine crawled at the black eyes staring back at him from the reflection of his face in the broken shard of mirror. The shack they hid in was crude, nothing more than a carefully balanced arrangement of metal sheets lashed together with bits of tattered fabric. The roof tilted at a crazy angle. Kai stayed in the only corner high enough for him to stand upright. It all looked as if it might come down if he sneezed too hard. Yet every open surface was covered in paintings, full-colour images that he would have sworn were photographs but for the rough surface beneath the paint.
“Did you paint all these?”
Bree nodded absently. “Mm.” Her mind was far off her pretty walls.
Even the sand at their feet was traced into patterns.
Another good reason for Kai to stay in his corner. He turned back to the mirror, trying hard not to shudder. “How long does this last?”
Bree flicked her grey hair back from her shoulders and her eyes started to lighten from the pools of shadow that they’d been. She shrugged. “A few hours. Never the same.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. They were still stinging from the drops Bree had put in. Other than the pain, they felt normal. Unless he was looking in the mirror. That was enough to twist his stomach.
Bree bent double over a small chest, the only object in the rough room besides the bed—a pile of leaves and twigs held together with a dirty rag, all of it pale grey, devoid of colour. Bree appeared coated in a dusting of greyness, as if she’d fled a volcanic eruption, carrying in her pores the thick ash that defined the horror she’d escaped from.
Yet, underneath the greyness, Bree sparked hints of a life he hadn’t seen in anyone else from here.
“Aha! This is what we need.” She lifted out a glowing jar. Kai backed into the metal behind him with such force, the shack nearly toppled.
Two fat LightSuckers buzzed inside the jar, zigzagging as if they could head butt through the glass.
“Get away.”
Bree laughed. “What? I take it you’ve been bitten?”
Kai didn’t feel so bad about laughing at her spoon anymore. He ignored her question. “What are you doing?” Somewhere deep beneath the blind panic racing through him, it occurred to him that he hadn’t seen any of the fat bugs anywhere near the slum.
“Chill. I have a plan.”
Right. So that was meant to make him feel better.
She uncapped the jar, caught a flying fatty tightly in her palm, and closed it again in one smooth movement. Using her thumb and middle finger, she flicked the bug on its head, stunning it, causing the glow to dim. Gently rubbing its belly in circles with her thumb, a thick bottle-green slime came off the creature’s skin. She scraped the ooze into a bowl and did it again.
Kai wanted to throw up. And run. But instead, he stayed in the corner, the only one in which he fit without bending, watching this grey girl squeeze slime off a bug. Somewhere, someone would probably diagnose this as morbid fascination.
“There, that should do.” She popped the bug back into the jar where it lay on the bottom, stunned, ignored by its friend still trying to head-butt through the glass. Reaching for one of the berries she’d picked to blacken their eyes, she crushed it over the bowl, black liquid rolling off the slime and collecting in a pool around the edges. She dug in the chest for a paint brush and used the back end to swirl through the slime and berry juice. Reluctantly, the two liquids mingled with a hiss. Another drop of berry and it was done. Bree cleaned off the back end of the paintbrush on a long piece of grass and turned to Kai, bowl full of shimmery copper in hand. “Hold still, this is tricky.”
The ink flashed hot on his forehead, then cold as if his skin had been seared off and then frozen. He gritted his teeth not to pull away.
Bree had the tip of her tongue out in concentration, frowning over him to make the snakelike curls just right.
“Done. You look like one of them now.”
Kai grimaced at the strangeness of his reflection. “Why are you here, Bree?”
She shrugged and her mouth remained a tight line. “I have my reasons.”
Kai knew better than to push. “What now? Let’s go.”
“We need to…pick up some clothes.” She hesitated for a fraction of a breath. It was enough to make Kai’s neck itchy.
The fact that it was Kai’s second trip through the tunnels didn’t make it any easier. He felt his way forward on hands and knees, blind and barely able to breathe. Riding the tunnels with the wolfmen and their machine had been a blur. Travelling at a speed through suffocating narrowness was one thing, crawling through blind darkness at a snail's pace was another.
“Bree, wait. Can’t breathe.” Kai stopped and sat down, curling his arms around his knees not to bump his head, rocking back and forth.
“Keep moving. Have to be out before diggers come through.”
“This is not an abandoned tunnel?”
“No. This is the quickest route to the OS. Shut up and keep moving.”
Her voice boomed loud in his ears. With his eyes useless, his ears tried to compensate. His nose too, sucking in the stench of damp darkness. “We’re gonna die.”
“If you stay here flapping your
lips, yes. Come on!”
Kai pushed his thoughts into a quivering corner in his mind and concentrated on putting one knee in front of the other. As long as he was moving, this torture had to end.
They broke through the surface about an hour later. Dull light washed over them.
Kai pulled himself out of the hole, flopped on his back, and sucked in great lungfuls of air. He opened his eyes.
Bree stood at his head, hands on her hips, foot tapping.
They were alone in what Kai could only describe as a rubbish dump, surrounded by tall fences which he guessed were there to keep the slum dwellers out. The garbage was heaped according to type.
“Are you going to lie there, or will you help?”
“With what?” He shut his eyes. Maybe she’d be gone when he opened them. And his bedroom ceiling would be above him and Riff’s prickly whiskers would be brushing against his face. Maybe. Something coarse and stiff slapped his belly.
“Put that on. I think it will fit.” Bree had her back to him again, bent double over a pile of filthy brown clothes, muttering under her breath. She was hoping for a smaller one, but they all seemed huge.
Kai’s upper lip curled at the smell of what she’d tossed his way, a deadly combination of sweat, leather and something like earthworms. He held it up and choked. “Where are these from, Bree?”
“You don’t wanna know.” She held a pair of pants against herself, measuring the length. “What do you think?”
He ignored her question. “I do actually want to know.”
“Fine. Every so often they recruit new Pack members. For the Soulless, joining the Pack is a real step up. You’re fed, and you move out of the shacks into the OS. Most don’t care what they have to do for those two things, but it’s not easy to get in. There are certain things you gotta do to run with the Pack.”
“Soulless?”
“The halfway-dead people who live in these slums.”
“But you live in the slums.”
She fell silent, pulling on a top and rolling the sleeves. Only when she’d done up all the buttons did she answer. “Maybe I do, but I don’t belong here.”
Kai pulled on the pants she’d given him, waiting for her to carry on.
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