Nate exchanged a quick look with Reed, pained at the thought of Alden’s entire life spent indoors, surrounded by his mother’s things and the sound of his grandmother’s paper-rustle voice.
They stopped to drink acidic water from a broken gutter and made their way to the rails—the shortest path to the spot Reed had picked to meet up with the girls. The rain had stopped, and the evening sun shone through breaks in the thick cloud cover. People came out of their homes, clearing broken concrete out of doorways and sweeping glass off the street.
There was something beautiful about every small effort to return the Withers back to the way it had been before the train wreck and the fires and the mobs of angry people. Wretched or not, this was their home. For most people, the Withers would be the only home they’d ever have. Even if the gates opened, the city wasn’t going to welcome every Witherson to its gleaming towers.
They traveled slowly, silent except for Alden’s coarse breaths. Every few minutes, he swallowed back a sound of pain. He was hurt more than he was letting on. Reed threaded Alden’s arm over his shoulder.
He’s never quiet. Not like this.
The sickly sweet tang of decay hung in the air as they passed a building reduced to rubble. A lumpy pile of bodies rotted in the street below them. No one ever left bodies out in the Withers. They brought them to the shoreline and pushed them into the sludge or burned them in the street. But someone had left those bodies there. Someone had run away from them and never looked back.
The rails were crowded, but no one spared a glance at Alden’s barefoot, hobbling form. He fit in with the other dusty, bleeding travelers. Everyone walked with the clumsy momentum of fear. A family passed, carrying bloodied children who clung tightly, wide-eyed and silent.
Alden’s pale skin gleamed with sweat. He scanned the faces of everyone who passed as if afraid he’d recognize someone. With his shop gone and a surplus of Breaker chem on the streets from the fiends’ raid on Agatha’s basement, Alden had no power. There were no more bargains to be made.
Reed kept silent, his jaw tense and twitching as he matched Alden’s sluggish pace and carried the brunt of his weight. They’d already be at the meeting place if they could run.
And it wouldn’t take skill to track them.
Nate longed for a ticker and his tools, something to keep his hands busy and his mind quiet. Walking wasn’t enough.
Sadness pressed at him, sudden and heavy. “Fran knew she would die.”
“I’m sure it was a lucky guess.” Alden shivered, beyond the help of anything Fran could have knitted to warm him up. “Everyone knows they’re going to die.”
“She told me about the Mainland,” Nate said. “She believed in it.”
“While I appreciate your conviction,” Alden said, measuring his words out like each one taxed him, “I feel the need to remind you that my grandmother also believed that the cockroaches in her bedroom were trying to get a look at her knickers.”
Reed’s tense expression softened to a twitch of a smile.
“How will she get her happy ending now?” Alden asked.
“Your grandmother?” Reed adjusted his grip on Alden and cast Nate a concerned look.
Alden’s voice went icy. “My grandmother is dead.”
“Pixel,” Nate explained, remembering a day that felt like a year ago, though it couldn’t have been much longer than a few weeks. Alden had told him that hope was a fragile thing, but here they were with nothing left but hope.
“I never would have fed from her.” Alden stumbled and caught himself with a low, breathless curse.
Nate wanted to believe him, but the memory of the fiends in Agatha’s basement was too fresh. They’d all been regular people once. People who’d made choices—good and bad. Chem had wrenched those choices out of their hands.
“This is our stop,” Reed said.
Nate went down the stairs first, watching Alden closely as he shuffled down the steps, swaying and nearly stumbling to his knees. Reed caught him and met Nate’s gaze in silent assurance that he wasn’t going to let him fall.
Whether Alden liked it or not, Reed had made him part of the gang when he’d led him out of the shop.
But even with the help, Alden wasn’t going to make it much farther.
They pressed on silently. If Nate gave his fears a name, grief would swallow him up.
Down on the street level, bin-fires cast a warm glow. On this block, every street ran slightly downhill, affording a view of Gathos City in the distance across the channel. It glittered, each tower radiant with more lights than the Withers had altogether.
The gull-catcher was an old man, blind in one eye and hard of hearing. He sold the fresh carcasses from his shop on the street level and spent every morning up on the roof, setting traps and coaxing gulls with gruel made of bug guts and water from the waste trenches. Nate had never been able to bring himself to buy the fresh meat, to shake the thought of the man’s bare hands stirring piss and plucking gulls in the same morning.
But he sold him wire to set his traps every once in a while, and the old man had taken kindly to Nate and listened to stories about his gang. Kindly enough to ignore the girls on his back stoop, tucked behind rows and rows of bones drying on twine.
