Nate rolled toward Alden when he came to sit beside him. Alden’s fingers carded into Nate’s hair absently. If anything, they still had their old habits—the comfort of routine.
“How do you know Val?” Nate asked, murmuring. In the dark, they could tell secrets.
“As you clearly noticed, she’s a Courier. As you may also have noticed, my business receives quite a few deliveries.”
Nate rubbed the spot where his ribs ached with a sinking feeling. Val delivered chem. He had no reason to feel disappointed—it wasn’t like he actually knew her. But after what she’d done to help him on the rails, he’d felt an odd sort of kinship. Turns out, she wasn’t doing anything any better than Alden was.
“Why are you worried about it?” Nate asked. Alden had always kept Nate away when deliveries came in. He’d always figured the caution was a product of Alden’s abiding paranoia.
Alden coughed out a toneless laugh. “I didn’t say I wasworried, little bird. Let me be more explicit. I dislike her. I don’t like people I dislike talking to people I do like.”
“You don’t like me.”
Alden let out a deep sigh. “You tire me.” Without another word, he folded himself over Nate’s middle like a heavy blanket and passed out.
Only Alden could make falling asleep a dramatic exit.
Outside, the street rustled, silence peppered by shouts and laughter and scraps of music. Nate played with Alden’s long hair, weaving it between his fingers as he waited for sleep to catch on to the exhaustion he felt. But his mind wouldn’t quiet down.
He stared at the boxy shadows on the walls—shelves full of jars and dusty old books from the time when the area around the shop had boomed as a colony of artists and makers. Fran told stories about it on her clear days, holding a scarf and waving it around like an actress on stage. Nate didn’t enjoy reading the few books he’d gotten his hands on, preferring to keep his fingers busy instead. But he’d known his letters by the time his parents had sent him away to live with Bernice.
Closing his eyes, Nate stretched his memory back as far as it would go. A trembling kiss from his mother. His father’s dark hair and dark eyes and silence. A woman his mother’s age with hair shorn close like a pelt. Strong hands on his shoulders, squeezing too hard.
Before that, it was only scraps. Feelings. Never feeling safe for long. Cold metal against his skin and words he didn’t understand. Rushing down a dark hallway in his mother’s arms. Adults yelling in another room, scaring him.
He’d only cried to Bernice once, asking why his parents had sent him away. She’d taken him to the roof of her building, where the wind whipped her white hair around and cleared the yellow smog away.
“See the towers?” she’d asked.
They shone on the horizon, lights twinkling.Home. He’d nodded and scrubbed the snot off his face with his sleeve.
“To the folk in those towers, you are not a person.” She’d spoken slowly, raising her voice over the whistle of the wind in their ears. “To them, you’re not a boy. You’re no one’s son. They made you to carve you up or bleed you dry.”
“But Mom—”
“Your mother made a mistake! Your father knew that. I knew that. But she wouldn’t listen to reason.”
Nate’s breath had sucked out of his chest, as if the wind had stolen it away. And Bernice had taken him by the chin and forced him to look at her wrinkled, spotty face and her milky eyes.
“She wanted you so badly that she went against the rules, took advantage of her position and made you with her own genes and your father’s. But the city was never going to let her keep you, so she got you away. And now you’re here. And I won’t have you crying about it. Do you understand?” she’d asked, the hard lines around her mouth softening.
Not trusting himself to speak, he’d nodded tightly. And she’d taken him to her tiny, dusty apartment to teach him how to fix things.
Nate slept fitfully, dreaming of falling in a motorcar, trapped in the metal as it twisted to scrap and burned. He woke pinned by Alden’s thin body. A familiar chemical smell tickled at his nose, and he squinted at the plastic blinds heated by the morning sun. The rogue spring in Alden’s bed that always seemed to find its way to Nate’s kidneys poked him reliably.
Alden lifted his head and frowned, his face framed by wispy tangles. “Why are you here?”
The warm morning light did nothing to mask the sickly cast to Alden’s skin or the reddish patches that would eventually become sores if he kept up without a break.
Chem wasn’t treating him well.
Nate arched a brow. “I find you irresistible?”
Amusement danced across Alden’s face for a moment before his eyes went sharp. “No. Wait. You told me.” He paused a moment, squinting at Nate’s face. “Reed bounced you from the gang. Why?”
“For being a chem fiend.”
Alden laughed, the sound close to Fran’s dry cackle. He wasn’t much older than Nate, but too much of him was so old, wasted. “I’m surprised it took this long. You didn’t tell him the truth?”
