Consciousness is a tide for Rivin — it comes and it goes, parting sometimes with a gentle lap and other times ripped from the shores completely.

  “Hold still.” The voice is young, too young to belong to the set of hands that retether the flesh of his side, and yet they are interchangeable.

  The air smells thickly of copper and petrichor and maybe antiseptic beneath the mud.

  He flinches, straining to hold his head up. He’s splayed across something cold, but the air is warm; unbearably so against the beads of sweat dripping down his skin.

  “This will pinch, okay? But then it’s going to make the pain flutter away.”

  He feels his jaw twitch, his shoulders tense with apprehension. He might fight back—most likely because the voice is scolding him again. “Don’t be silly.” Don’t resist.

  Cool fingers on his forehead and then parting at his eyelids, a blinding light flashing into the pits of pinprick pupils. “I’m going to fix you up. Take you home right after, ok?” It’s soothing, or trying to be.

  The fingers feel familiar in the haze and grief of it all, like mothers in moments of scraped knees and tears and kisses over bruised knuckles with lips that tell stories that don’t always frighten but sometimes make life seem beautiful, beautiful beyond this tiny room and its terrible shadows and the eyes that peer through the cracks in the door and the hands that— Don’t stop, Rivin.

  His own mother is weeping into his skull again. He can see her dead in the sheets.

  Don’t stop running; her voice is but an echo of ghosts he can’t lay to rest. He seeks to listen to her, even now, if only to escape the ache in his soul at the pit where unshed tears have come to gather and drown him.

  His body is a betrayer.

  “Yeah, that’s right. Just relax,” the voice coos, stroking the hair from his eyes. “You’re lucky you’ve stumbled into my kingdom.” It’s all a blur like smoke and snakes and a bite of iciness at the site of an injection. Cold. Cold. Cold.

  The heat starts first in his chest, petals unfolding like a shy night orchid in bloom, and Rivin feels himself relax for the first time in hours. The pain that was once radiant and sharp begins to flicker and ebb into something hazy. “Dance with the darkness. Don’t let it lead.” The dreamy figure muses. “Focus on my voice, huh?”

  He tries too. Tries to let it fall like rope into a well where he’s stuck squirming at the bottom.

  “Tell me about home…” Rivin thinks then of dripping puddles and buckets and kiosks in a world forgotten. He thinks of Ricket’s clear hazel eyes and the wrinkles in the blankets of the cots. He thinks of the neon green and the cobalt and the laughter and the soup and the crumbs on the floor and the sound of the pots—the sound—oh god, all the ridiculous, baffling SOUND of family.

  His family.

  “Poor thing,” the voice laughs, pitying.

  Rivin’s ribs hurt. Yes. They are so loud.

  In the low light the figure removes several soiled rags thick with dark clotted blood from his chest and begins to deftly replace the gauze. He can hear the pride in the click of their tongue, “Good. Good. We’ve stopped the bleeding.”

  He feels himself being pushed to one side, his back inspected, but he only really feels the burning. He’s not sure if it’s respite or torture, but the heat embraces him fully now, the pain a dull throb beneath ardent waves that only float him skyward. Time seems to stretch on and on, warped by the delirium he’s being tucked away within. “Good, right? I’m such a gracious leader. Charitable, too.”

  The blur thickens, and with it come the dreams unprompted, shawls wrapped in the echoes of things he’d rather leave to the fold. He wants to forget the bite of uncertainty and the familiar churn of losing things and the terrible scream of watching Mouse die in the dirt because he wasn’t quick enough. God, he wasn’t smart enough.

  Why couldn’t he be?

  Idiot, Rivin. You’re an idiot. Now she’s dead. How many times are you going to fuck up like this?

  “Rest now. You won’t die.”

  Rivin feels his lashes flutter. The world still doesn’t make enough sense for him to ascribe form to colour, but it is warbled and beautiful and hot and cold and silver and gold, and everything smells so fresh and wet and soft. He might feel his fingers twitch against blankets, his knuckles curling into fists.

  Inevitable. Inevitable.

  He remembers the moment he first saw the colour of the sky printed into pages and clouds—and clouds weren’t at all what he expected them to be, and he wondered if they were soft, wondered if they were as soft as the fingers that brushed his jaw and smoothed away his hair and pulled up the blankets and wiped away the blood and the sweat and the fear and the remnants of a night that changed everything.

  Death is inevitable—

  “Just sleep.” Soft and dabbing away at the sweat that gathers at his brow.

  Okay.

  “Sleep.”

  Okay.

  Rivin wakes with a tight and wheezing breath. It feels like his side and his front and his other side and maybe his leg or perhaps his back, but it could also be his head, have been cracked wide open. His ankle feels fat and angry. Completely swollen. His skull is throbbing — a vibration that rattles his bones.

  He groans, blinking away the soft light swimming in and out of his field of vision. There’s gauze around his wrist, strapped across his bare chest, his ankle and every other part cut open by scythes and blades and edges so sharp they shouldn’t belong to a forearm.

  Grey eyes can’t see clearly just yet, but he might spy a patchwork blanket on the floor in the corner, lumped into a net-turned-hammock strung to the ceiling. Chaotic scribbles of coloured trash and etchings carved messily into walls and furniture like unified murals unbothered by fractured canvas. He can’t hear much aside from the rattle of something tinkling outside, beyond tin and poorly reinforced walls.

  Rivin tries to sit up, but pain returns to splinter through every vein. He tries not to call out, tries not to curl in on himself and whimper like the fourteen-year-old boy that he is. Instead, Rivin blinks again. Thrice more and harder each time to clear away the fog of his vision. He glances at the room he’s in with clearer eyes.

  It’s a junkyard. Really. It smells of vinegar and rust, something sticky and sweet. There’s still his blood on the tiles — poorly wiped up and dotted with fingerprints and toes that scurry towards a corner stacked with toiletries, rags and cluttered tins overflowing with pins and tubes and buttons. There’s a ghastly orange carpet bolted into one wall, pinned methodically with antique spoons and forks that appear to be arranged by tier.

  Drones in various states of repair are stacked up in another corner of the room, flung about in a fashion that reminds Rivin all too much of the Pit back home and Slink’s terrible messes. One drone appears to have been repurposed into a heater, a graveyard of dead insects now nestled at the base of an amber glow.

  There’s a single mirror bolted to the ceiling with two narrowed red eyes taped to the glass. Manically drawn portraits are scrawled onto the backs of labels and boxes, tucked into the creases of the walls like a scrapbook. One wall is covered in pinned-up maps sketched in chalk, crayon, ink, and sharpie—he hopes not blood—some he recognises, others he doesn’t.

  There are other strange markers and warnings, all lost to him without context:

  BIG BOY SPOTTED

  WHAT WAS MARY DOING?

  HASTILY!!!

  OWES ME MONEY (or spoons—tbd).

  It feels as though Rivin has stumbled into the cavern of a madman — potentially a hermit but definitely someone deranged. He tries to sit up once more, reinvigorated, but the pain is a whip around his spine, and he falls back into blankets with a huff against every aching muscle that pleads with him to both rest and run.

  He manages only to hoist himself upon his elbows when suddenly, the door to the cabin bursts open, kicked in by a bare foot.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  The person who waltzes in does so with all the subtlety of a can rattling down the road, one arm clutching a basket overflowing with trinkets and brass and valves that may have once belonged to a trumpet. She’s maybe twelve years old, clad in a bomber jacket two sizes too big, sleeves patched with wires and pins. Trinkets hang from her hair — pencils, rings, feathers, gears, and half a spoon.

  Oh god, he hopes that’s not a bone.

  She’s covered in grime, but her eyes gleam in the dreary light, sharp and amber-bright, and as they regard him, her little round nose crinkles up before she shucks the door closed with her hip and unfolds a coy smile.

  “You’re awake.” She sounds pleased, but not with him.

  Rivin furrows his brow. Tries to understand the sight that she is, and then glances down at his fragile-packaged body — the bruises that still peek beneath cotton and the bloom of blood mottling the white in places it still oozes through — and trusts in that moment that if she had meant him harm, surely he would be dead by now.

  He manages to pull himself to sit, folding his sorest arm over his gut and swallowing back the pitiful whine building within his throat.

  He shoots the girl a weary look and asks, “Did you…” He hesitates. “… Save me?”

  “More or less.” She grins, wide and toothy, and then pops up like a spring — like a toy all the way wound — to spin on the heel of one bare foot and bounce up the back of a dented chair to balance with eerie ease.

  She begins to deposit some items from her basket onto the topmost shelf, over a sink stacked with unwashed mugs. From there, she grabs a can wedged into a web of string and scrap on the ceiling.

  “Your insides were about to become outsides. I merely said…” She pauses, appears to think with one finger poised up, and beams again, “nuh-uh!” Swiftly, and without looking, she tosses him the can.

  Rivin catches it against his chest, flinching. “For the brave and broken. Only the best of the best for the best—” It's a tin of fish. “Also,” she adds, before descending to the floor again. “I hate fish.”

  Rivin doesn't open the can but instead places it aside and onto an upright pink velvet stool stapled with feathers. “How long have I been out?”

  “About this much—” She doesn’t drop the basket to size out the length of time with her hands, grinning wider as the boy scowls in response. Rivin recalls the Halidom watch and swiftly glances at his wrist, although the band is gone. His gaze quickly turns accusatory.

  The girl is already sweeping it off a bench and brandishing it within the light. Cracked. Broken. “I was only going to fix it.” She drops it into his outstretched palm before scrambling off again and up a bunk of rope blankets as he examines the shattered clockface.

  “Lav’s boys are haunting the tunnels,” she adds conversationally.

  Rivin folds his arms over his chest, gritting through the ache. Defensive. Curious. “What do you know, brat?”

  “Brat? Saviour is a better fit.”

  “Who says I needed savin’?”

  The girl only barks out a laugh, bare feet slapping against tile again as she scurries towards a desk stacked with a heap of paper chaos. “Needin’, wantin’, expectin’ — regardless, you’re now owin’… of me.” She points to herself but pauses to think. “To me? Yes. Quite.”

  She then moves like a bullet let loose in an impenetrable cube, bouncing from one side of the room to the other, freeing gathered trinkets from her overflowing pockets to place about the room. A rusty cog by the kettle. A horse statuette missing its head on the desk.

  Rivin can only stare. It hurts his head as much as the dull thud, but he doesn’t argue, instead choosing to rub his hands between themselves. “Did you see… it?” He can’t bring himself to elaborate, but he can still see it printed on the back of his eyelids. The waxy face beneath the white visor, the rippling flesh that absorbed shrapnel like jelly, and the blood on its forearm as it extracted itself from Mouse’s torso. Rivin pinches his eyes closed.

  “Mhm. What was left of it.”

  When he opens his eyes again, he keeps them downward; his hands are fists now, knuckles pale white against the blankets. “My… friends?” He's not sure why he expects her to know. Hopes she doesn’t.

  The girl only spins like a planet in orbit, stopping short to flash turned palms and ten extended fingers. “Mass casualties!!” She pulls a horrified face before laughing again and swatting a hand at the air, killing the distasteful joke before it even lands.

  Rivin can only scowl at the way she holds her belly and cackles like death is hilarious.

  “Nah. Just the girl.” Blunt. Not meant to be cruel. But it twists like a blade.

  He sits straighter, pushed over the edge by this terrible, rude little gremlin, spitting venom as he asks, “How would you even know, twerp? Were you following us?”

  “You destroyed my best drone!”

  He thinks hard, features twisted with frustration. He recalls the useless drone stalking the ruins of the cathedral, the boot and the feathers. “Th-That damn birds nest?!” It hurts to raise his voice. He shouts anyway.

  “My original intent! But, frightful lack of birds. So, now it's a wind chime—AND…” She stands straighter. “It was my best set of eyes, rookie!”

  “There’s no wind down here either—” He pauses, quirks a brow, “rookie?”

  “Trench monkey!”

  "What are you—you’re nuts!” He says it like it’s a curse.

  She smiles like it isn't and then holds her hands on her hips and is still for a moment in the silence like she's posing for a portrait. She looks minutely familiar in this beat of insane and oozing confidence. One in a dozen faces he’s probably seen begging on the streets of the Spine. She tilts up her chin — no, not begging.

  She turns away again before he can remember anything more, shuffling through a pack of tagged cards. “Sorry about your friend,” softer now. She sounds young. Less like a creature and more like a girl.

  Rivin only shrugs. Glares at his palms. Tries not to cry.

  “Everyone dies,” she follows up with, and Rivin knows that but wants to slap her anyway. He wants to shake the apathy out of her skin suit and shove her mouth full of quiet and silence, and if not that, then at least some fucking decorum, but from his purgatory on the floor he can only glare at her, not because he's in pain but because it hurts.

  Because she says it like it doesn’t.

  “Except me.”

  Rivin scoffs, “Is that because you’re too annoying to die?”

  “Probably,” she snickers, perching herself atop a bench and swinging her legs until the heels of her feet tap a messy rhythm against the cupboard. Annoying is right. Still, somehow familiar. Rivin strains to figure it out. Squinting hard at the ratty child before him.

  “Have we met before?”

  “You don’t remember? I’m usually so hard to forget…” The girl bounces off the counter and to her feet again, spreading out her arms like it’s obvious.

  “I remember…” Rivin lies.

  He spies a dimple surfacing in her cheek.

  Remember. Remember.

  He can recall the sound of a can being kicked down the road — a girl dressed in rags. Months ago. He’d seen her opposite a Squalor Preacher in the depths of the Spine, voice overlapping scripture with unwelcome debate.

  He lingers on a separate time, slightly clearer than the last:

  The dust she’d kicked up with bare feet, the way she’d skipped in the dark, whistling.

  Ricket giggled as he shyly tried not to wave but did so anyway, if only with the tips of his fingers. Rivin hadn’t looked hard enough. Hadn’t cared enough. There weren’t enough resources to care about every lonely child streaking across the bowels of hell.

  ‘You look like you owe me something,’ she’d said, sniffing into one too-big sleeve. A bloody nose — an eyepatch?

  ‘Keep dreaming’, kid.’ Barely a glance. He hadn’t even slowed his pace.

  Now, her chin is lifted high and noble. She’s pretending to hold a sceptre before she repurposes a pan for effect — amber eyes peering down at him, waiting. Rivin glances at the wall of maps again — the paper, empty envelopes, and code.

  He recognises the handwriting too. Hear Ricket’s voice thrumming over his brain.

  ‘Turns out the source’s way of bartering was… irregular…’

  “You’re…” He begins slowly, reaching, reaching—

  She bursts up at the same moment he puts the pieces together.

  “Ricket’s source.”

  “The Queen of Roaches!”

  Her arms waterfall around her like she’s a spurting fountain, and then the girl twirls and starts a curtsy like she hasn’t heard him. Pauses when she finally comprehends, one hand holding the tip of an imaginary skirt she lets drop.

  Silence. The soft thrum of machinery. A whisperslug smudges along the window, resonating softly in a voice muffled behind the glass, ‘Use your wrong hands.’

  Rivin is making a face, and even he isn’t sure if it’s because he’s charmed by her or horrified. “That’s terrible,” is all he says.

  The girl scrunches up her nose and scuttles into a stack of crates, reaching for something: a jar filled with keeled-over lightflies. She shakes the dome until the tiny corpses rattle like rainfall. “No matter,” she continues to herself. “It’s caught on in other circles. Strikes fear…”

  Rivin looks to the graffiti and the writing and the maps again. Sucks in a sharp gasp that tingles what’s left of his ribs. Another piece slots into place.

  ROACH WAS HERE.

  “Roach? From the tunnels?”

  She smiles once more, apparently appeased. “By royal decree. Ask the rats.” Roach starts rearranging her blankets and tossing them onto the floor.

  Rivin watches with a plain face. The silence stretches too long. “I… should get back.”

  “I’ll say a prayer,” she laughs like he’s stupid and then jumps onto the surface besides him, a broken stove stuffed with knives. She wields one, only to flex it between her fingers, absently juggling the utensil over her knuckles. “Plus you can’t leave. Your life is forfeit. Finders keepers.”

  “You really are mad.”

  “Hey, you’re lucky. I’m looking for new staff.”

  “What are you, like twelve?”

  “Exactly! It’s a lot of pressure.”

  “… You all alone out here?”

  “Define ‘alone.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Then, I’m never alone!” She starts to busy herself with the blankets she’s kicked onto the floor, scooching them until they’re a pile by Rivin’s side. He recoils each time she draws too close at first, but soon enough his edges begin to dull.

  Roach reaches for something up high on the shelf — it’s a braid of someone's hair. Thick. Blonde. Full of thumbtacks. She plucks one free, pinning up a new spoon to join her tier on the rug wall. She pauses, thinking hard, for apparently much thought goes into arranging spoons.

  Rivin chooses not to comment. “Have you seen anything like it before? That thing?”

  “There’s a rogue one in the belly,” she points downwards and stands straight. “It’s very pro-autonomy.”

  Rivin frowns, but he is too tired to complain about her riddles. The pain is peeking through the blur, and when he coughs into one fist, he’s sure that he can taste blood on the back of his teeth.

  She busies herself at a desk exploding with papers and a book thick with entries and then glances over her shoulder, “You’re lucky. Lav has been looking for someone to scrap that thing for weeks. The visor alone is worth your best spoon. I’ve been too busy with…” She pauses, thinks hard, then elaborates. “… Business.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Just saying.”

  “Lav paid us to collect a crate. Called it easy money.” He shakes his head, frustrated with himself. As he’d expected — betrayal. It appears they were never supposed to make it back. “That bastard.”

  “Hm.” When the silence stretches, she glances over her shoulder at him. “Don’t forget.”

  “Forget what?” Clipped. Tired.

  “So much to teach you… Don’t forget when he tries to rip you off, dummy.”

  “He’s lucky if I don’t kill him when I see him!”

  The girl finally comes to settle in the pile of blankets she’d collected at his side, sitting cross-legged on the floor to stare at him like he’s stupid again. “Can’t skin a dead cat twice.”

  There’s a long pause as Rivin quirks his brow. “I… I wasn’t aware it grew back.”

  She grins. “Not with that attitude.”

  Rivin blinks. Leans back and sighs deeply. “Queen of the Roaches, huh?”

  Roach presses forward, grinning wider. “The very same.”