It no longer felt real that he’d grown up in those towers, shuffled back and forth between cold, sterile laboratories and a warm place where his parents held him like he might disappear if they let him go.
As the sun drowned the stars out, he caught himself holding his breath, eager for the dazzle of its glow. He couldn’t remember his mother’s voice, but in that moment he recalled her laugh—the way she’d scruffed his messy hair when he beat her at a card game she’d only just taught him. The memory sharpened like the blade of light at the horizon. He fought the urge to wake Pixel and tell her about the illustrated playing cards, each gilded with a depiction of one of the Old Gods. Tidal waves and thunderheads and craggy mountains and rolling fields ripe with wildflowers.
He closed his eyes, reaching for more, but all he could see was his mother putting on a gray coat and a silver name tag, her gaze shuttering as she reached for his hand and told him it was time to go to work and study his special blood. Getting on an elevator that took them so high his ears popped. Never crying, because it made her cry too. And he hated that more than he hated what they did to him.
“Ow.” Pixel winced, twisting to look up at him with sleepy, owlish eyes. He’d clutched her arm.
“Sorry, Pix,” he whispered. “Let’s go downstairs and wait for Reed.”
Later that morning, all that was left of the memory was the feeling of crisp playing cards in his hands. Sharp, waxy edges and heavy card stock. He grabbed a rusty crank that left a ruddy stain on his skin.
Nothing was clean here.
“Why can’t we have a name?” Pixel asked. “We could be the Alley Cats.”
The crank gave a wretched creak as Nate drew the skylight closed against the piercing morning sun. Sunrise became something hot and ugly so quickly.
Reed clung to the exposed rafters like a spider, tugging at one finicky shutter that never closed all the way. “Because we don’t want people to know who we are.”
They didn’t scuffle over turf or fight on the streets. They didn’t take over whole blocks like the Breakers did. The gang was safest with no reputation at all—just a handful of kids in the shadows.
“And cats work alone,” Nate said.
“You sure?”
Nate shot her a warning look. “They eat their kittens too.”
She stuck her tongue out, and Nate grinned, warmed by a rush of fondness. She had a way of getting underfoot, but it wouldn’t be the same without her around. For that, they overlooked the fact that she didn’t pull her weight.
If they were only scavenging abandoned buildings, Reed would probably let her run with him and Sparks and Brick, but the pickings were better—and the work riskier—in workhouses. It was too dangerous. A-Vols might overlook a kid snipping wires from an exposed circuit board, but they wouldn’t turn a blind eye to a gang breaking into a workhouse.
Authority Volunteers—criminals from Gathos City who chose life in the Withers over incarceration—got extra food rations for acting as a police force. But they didn’t keep the peace. They hunted street kids, collecting a small bounty of credits for turning them in to the workhouses. It was a death sentence. Every day, workers collapsed or got mangled by machinery. A-Vols dragged the bodies out of the workhouses to the sludge-channel where families were lucky if they managed to pay their respects before the tide came.
Nate hated A-Vols as much as he hated trappers. Pleasure houses and street chem weren’t legal, but A-Vols did nothing to stop any of that. They were useless.
Reed reached out and banged the gearbox when the shutter got jammed.
“Gentle with that!” Nate cringed. The last time the skylight shutters broke, it took him a week to repair them. Nate turned the crank again cautiously and held his breath. The shutters snapped shut, blocking most of the daylight from the narrow room.
Reed shot Nate a bright smile, and it was like their fight had never happened. Like the morning sun had burned off the soreness between them. “It worked, didn’t it?”
When Reed smiled like that, it tickled Nate’s ribs. He struggled to find his voice. “Next, you’ll be calling yourself a Tinkerer.”
“I’ve already got a Tinkerer.” Reed climbed down the scaffolding and grabbed a plastic bucket hanging from a tack, plunking it down in the middle of the room. “Show and tell!”
Sparks emerged from her bunk, tucking her straight razor into the small leather kit she kept hanging from a nail. Her jaw was freshly shaved, and she’d stained her full lips blood-red. When she ran with Reed at night, climbing through small spaces and poaching tech-guts, she wore her curly black hair in a tight ponytail. Now it fell loose around her face in glossy ringlets.
When Nate had seen Sparks fight off two trappers with nothing but a piece of rebar and one of her shoes, he’d understood exactly how she’d shaken off chem and clawed her way out of the sick. She was tougher than any of them.
“These looked useful.” Sparks shrugged and dropped a set of shiny, numbered buttons into the bucket. “If you can’t sell them, give ’em back.”
When Sparks couldn’t sleep, she sewed clothes from scraps and embellished them with sparkly bits and trinkets from the leftovers no one wanted to buy from Nate at the market. Whenever she managed to finish something, she pressed it under her mattress. Someday, she’d say, she was going to have her own booth, make money, quit stealing.
“They’ll sell.” Nate tested the weight of the buttons. “Quick too.”
“You better keep one if you want it.” Reed tipped the bucket back to Sparks, who took one of the buttons with a nod and climbed back up to her bunk. She tucked it into the metal box that held the shears she kept as sharp as Reed’s knife.
Brick shuffled over with a wide yawn. She dropped a coil of bright-yellow wire on top of the pile of buttons. “I didn’t get much,” she said, giving Nate a look that dared him to complain about it.
