by JT Lawrence
Sticky Fingers Box Set
Books 4 - 6
JT Lawrence
Copyright © 2019 by JT Lawrence
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Dedication
This book is dedicated, with love and thanks,
to my Patreon supporters:
Joni Mielke
Elize van Heerden
Nigel Perels
Claire Wickham
Wendy Durison
Sian Kitsune Steen
Megan Guzman
Thank you also to my dedicated proofreaders,
Keith & Gill Thiele, and to all my loyal readers.
I wouldn’t be able to do this without you!
Also by JT Lawrence
FICTION
FUTURISTIC KIDNAPPING THRILLER
WHEN TOMORROW CALLS
• SERIES •
The Stepford Florist: A Novelette
The Sigma Surrogate
1. Why You Were Taken
2. How We Found You
3. What Have We Done
When Tomorrow Calls Box Set: Books 1 - 3
URBAN FANTASY
BLOOD MAGIC SERIES
1. The HighFire Crown
2. The Dream Drinker
3. The Witch Hunter
4. The Ember Isles
5. The Chaos Jar
6. The New Dawn Throne
STANDALONE NOVELS
The Memory of Water
Grey Magic
EverDark
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Sticky Fingers
Sticky Fingers 2
Sticky Fingers 3
Sticky Fingers 4
Sticky Fingers 5
Sticky Fingers 6
Sticky Fingers: 36 Deliciously Twisted Short Stories: The Complete Box Set Collection (Books 1 - 3)
NON-FICTION
The Underachieving Ovary
Grab a Free Copy of ‘ASTRID’
A mother becomes suspicious of her daughter’s pre-school teacher.
Is Teacher Dalton who she appears to be, or is something more sinister afoot?
Fans of Roald Dahl and Gillian Flynn will love these unsettling stories with a twist in the tale.
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About the Author
JT Lawrence is an Amazon bestselling author and
playwright. She lives in Parkview, Johannesburg, in a house with a red front door.
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Sticky Fingers
Volume 4
Contents
1. BrightSide
2. Cold Breath
3. The Curse of Stone
4. The Green Silk Scarf
5. Not Waving
6. SkyRest
7. Stay the Night
8. Comet
9. Witches Get Stitches
10. The Secret Under My Skin
11. A Tree in a Forest
12. Nachthexen
1
BrightSide
The oat porridge that morning had been made without milk or sugar. The Wizard of BrightSide had warned us this day would come. It would be something to celebrate. It would mean it was time to leave the Orphan House for somewhere better; somewhere far away from the acid clouds and city smog of Akeratu that made us cough in the sooty playgrounds. There would be meadows, he said—I didn’t know what meadows were—and clear skies and trees with green leaves and shade. He said there would be flowers in the fields like colourful buttons on a carpet.
We love buttons here. They are much-prized possessions. I couldn't imagine them just strewn carelessly on a carpet, no matter how green. You can use buttons for lots of different games; you can do magic tricks for the small children; you can trade them for sweets. I tried to picture flowers in a meadow. We were surrounded by cold grey concrete, hard metal chairs, and thin, dirty mattresses. The building stole the warmth from your blood and made your bones ache, so the idea of lying on soft grass in the sunshine made me long for it deep inside my body as I longed for my parents and Milla Mouse, my little sister.
Mouse had cheeks like those crisp pink apples we used to get before the bitter rain ate the blossoms. Before the silver drones and the explosions and the smoke.
I pushed the acrid-scented memories from my mind and forced my thoughts back to Milla; her apples for cheeks and naughty smile. Her belly laugh. Her small teeth were perfect, despite her habit of climbing on the kitchen counter and eating sugar out the dented silver bowl. She would have been three years old now.
Even the weeds there are pretty, the wizard had said once, his cheeks flushed and his eyes sparkling. And you can blow their seeds—they look like feathers—you can blow them into the breeze and make a wish.
But the Wizard of BrightSide wasn’t always so cheerful.
The future is no place for children, he had said the week before. We were in his sparsely furnished office, looking out of the window at the ash falling from the sky like snow. Absentmindedly, he put his hand on the back of my neck, where my barcode was.
The past was better. The sky used to be blue, the most beautiful colour you’ve ever seen. And the grass was soft and green. 2054 is not a good year for children.
I didn't know what to think about that. I didn't know what the future was. All I knew was that I once had a home and a family I loved, and now they were gone. Because of this, I had a black emptiness in my stomach which never went away, even on good days. Even when there was plenty of milk and sugar, and the nurses would sneak us extra biscuits at tea time.
I knew things could be worse; I had heard the whispers. At least at the Orphan House I had a bed to sleep in and food to eat. And I had the wizard, whose tender palm was still resting on my neck. My eyes travelled down to the windowsill, and I saw the silver envelope there. It had the Sheng insignia on it, and the top of the paper was jagged where the envelope had been slit open.
His hand tensed on my neck, and my muscles stiffened along with it. I was never afraid of him; he was a kind and generous man, and if he had a temper we never had once witnessed it. He forbade the nurses to spank us or hurt us in any way. But I was scared of what he might say about the official-looking silver letter. I wanted to know what was inside, but I was also afraid.
I dragged my eyes from the envelope and gazed up at him. His face looked like one of those charcoal clouds that thundered in and threatened to pelt us with hot shocks and searing rain. He sighed, then forced an affectionate smile.
But things will get better, Kitsune, he said, and I nodded. I liked it when he said my name; it made me feel important. And I knew the line from the book. I knew every line in the book. Things will get better, it said on page 28, the one most smudged by small fingerprints. They always do.
The Wizard of BrightSide was not a real wizard, but we liked to call him that, and I think he liked it, too. He wasn't like a white-bearded man in a fair
ytale, but he was magical in his own way. Before he built the Orphan House, he had worked as a doctor in a children's hospital where he wrote books to cheer his young patients up. The nurses told us that his most popular book—The Wizard of BrightSide, where he got his nickname from—sold thousands of copies and that he was famous, even in some parts of Sheng, where he was born. He received a medal of some kind from the mayor in the Akeratu city hall days before the building was razed by the silver drone bombers. Akeratu is in the East, and Sheng is in the West. We don't have a wall to divide us but a greasy black river called the Fiume. They say it used to be clear water, sweet enough to drink, but now it runs with ash and blood. I don't know where the ash comes from.
The Wizard of BrightSide was a story about a poor boy who discovers he has supernatural powers and has to learn how to believe in himself, and how to control his magic. At the end of the book, he saves the people he loves with a special magic trick. We'd all read the book; of course we had. We had a few copies to share but with almost two hundred of us—greedy for stories that would make us forget the nagging ghosts that spilt cold mist into our limbs—the pages were brittle and dog-eared, and the curved spines had been sewn and taped over and over.
My mom taught me to read when I was three. She was a journalist and author. We had a lot of books at home, so I know a lot of words, more than some grownups do, and I read stories to the tots. We call the one- and two-year-olds the tots and it's our job to look after them. The nurses do, too, but there are only twelve of them and—as they like to remind us—they only have two hands. Not like the silver soldiers. But I don't like to think about that.
Orphan House is no ordinary orphanage. That's what the wizard says. He says we're all extraordinary, and that's why we wear our badges every day, to remind us that we're important. It's a pale blue diamond-shaped piece of fabric the size of a copper crown. We wear them proudly over our hearts. The wizard doesn't wear one, and neither do the nurses. You can only wear a blue diamond if you're born on the East side of the Fiume, in Akeratu. The people born to the west of the black river don't wear badges, and they don't have barcodes on their necks. They speak Sheng—the same language as the silver soldiers—a language we don't understand. I feel bad for them sometimes. Why can't they be special, like us? Especially the wizard, and the nurses. I thought it would be fairer to get a badge if you were a good person, instead of where you happened to be born. If the authorities knew what they were doing, they'd take Jakko's badge away for bullying the tots and give it to the wizard, instead. Jakko pinched the babies and stole their biscuits, which was really mean, because usually we were only allowed one cookie a day, at tea time. Sometimes the idea of that biscuit is what got you through the day.
The day we ran out of milk and sugar the sky was its usual shade—the colour of a dirty old facecloth frayed from too much boiling and wringing out—and it was raining. We weren't allowed to play in the rain. The acid would sting your skin, and the cold echoed in your skeleton for hours afterwards. There were no more antibiotics, and even the little white pills they used to give us for our fevers were running out. There wasn't enough wood to keep the heating stove burning all day. We used to have heaps of firewood; mountains of it. We'd hunt for branches and kindling in the forest, but we aren't allowed to go into the woods anymore.
The black emptiness in my stomach churned the whole day after eating that plain porridge because I knew things were going to change. I was looking forward to the better place; to the blue skies and clean air. But I also had a bad feeling, like the one I had when the Sheng soldiers came into our house and my mom told me to hide in the dog kennel. I hadn't wanted to leave her, hadn't wanted to squeeze into the little house that smelled of old dog breath, air abuzz with mosquitoes. Jumpy with nerves, I had begun to argue, but she hissed and shoved me away, tears in her wide eyes.
Remember the plan, her pale lips whispered. So I ran to the kennel and scraped my skin getting inside so that it was raw and bleeding.
Sometimes I wished that I’d stayed with Mom there at the kitchen table, then I wouldn’t miss her so much, because I’d be dead, too.
Things will get better, said the Wizard of BrightSide. Today we begin our adventure.
He instructed us to dress in our finest clothes, our most comfortable shoes, and to take extra care with our morning routine of tooth-brushing, face-washing and hair-combing.
Even though I'm a boy, I'm good at doing the tots' ponytails and braids because I used to do Milla Mouse's hair. Jakko makes fun of me for this and for wearing my mom's locket around my neck.
Kitsune, Kitsune, he says. Kitsune’s a girl.
I don't care. I don't see anything wrong with being a girl. My mom was a girl, and she was the best person I ever knew.
Get lost, I tell him. What I really want to say is Go and get lost in the forest, but that would be a terrible thing to say because everyone knows what happens to children who stray into the woods.
When we were all smartly dressed and had gargled with mint tea (mint grew like weeds all around the house, despite the snow ash and sour rain), we were told to pack a knapsack.
Only one change of clothes, the nurses said, and your favourite toy. And don’t forget your lucky buttons.
That cheered me up. If we were only taking one outfit and one toy it surely meant that we would be getting new clothes and books and things to play with. Even my smartest outfit was faded and scruffy, and I was forever trimming loose threads from the seams with the rusty little pocketknife I found under the cracked floorboard in the dayroom. The navy blue blazer I was wearing was the smartest thing I owned, but it was a size too small. At fourteen years old I was one of the oldest orphans, so there were very few hand-me-downs. The idea of new, comfortable clothes lit a flame of hope inside me. The sound of the rain beating against the roof faded to a hiss and then to silence. Maybe the wizard was right, I thought, as I straightened my jacket. Maybe things would get better.
Knapsacks packed, faces shining, we were ready for our departure. The tots grasped their cuddle toys to their chests, their pale faces stamped with confusion. They wanted to know where we were going, but no one knew the answer. "The meadows" meant nothing to them, or us.
“Our new home,” said Nurse 3, her expression stern. Nurse 3 was usually stern, so that didn’t worry me too much.
We stood on the warped timber of the front verandah, spilling out down the broad steps that used to be grand but were now peeled back to splintering dry wood. The wizard had his backpack, as did the nurses. The nurse's bags were grey, matching their tunics, but they had left their aprons behind. The wizard took a breath and looked around at us, patting Salome's shoulder and mussing Frederic's hair. It was as if he was breathing in the energy he required for our adventure, even though the air burned your lungs if you drew it in too deeply. I guessed it was difficult to leave the house he had built, the memories he had helped create. Even when you know you're going to a better place, it can still feel sad to leave. The nurses looked upset, too, and wore gashes for lips instead of smiles as they herded us down into the front yard of wet sand and soot. At least it had stopped raining.
We heard the rumbling of heavy vehicles far in the distance. I had assumed we would have to walk to our new home in the meadows, but it looked like the wizard had arranged transport. It couldn't have been easy; any fuel was challenging to come by. I was relieved. My shoes were too tight for me, and I could already feel a blister beginning to swell on the back of my heel. I had imagined a trek through the evil forest, tripping over roots, fighting off monsters and carrying the tots when they were tired, so I was happy to hear the engines coming our way.
But when I saw the two trucks approach, splattering black slime and mud, my relief twisted into dread. They weren't school buses; they were cattle trucks armed with silver soldiers. The drivers wore no blue diamonds over their hearts. The robotic Sheng soldiers jumped out, their built-in radial rifles hidden by the shimmering uniform they wore that looked like s
ilver water.
My immediate instinct was to run. I remembered my mother’s protestations, and then her screams until the rat-a-tat-tat of the robot's weapons silenced her. I remembered the feeling that it could not be real, could not possibly be real, but the needle-bites of the mosquitoes—like pinching yourself in a dream— made me understand it was. I hadn't wanted to hide. I had wanted to save my mother, but the glint of the silver through the kitchen window paralysed me.
In a way, I was trapped in that moment forever, because in my mind there was no moving past such a heart-shattering thing. I would be squeezed in that musty kennel forever, skin scratched, bleeding and bitten, fright freezing me in place. I suppose a part of me did die with her that day.