“All right,” Nate said.
“All right?” Judy snorted. “You’ve never taken my first price before. You in a hurry?”
Nate tried to offer her a reassuring smile. “It’s been a long day.”
“No trouble, I hope.” She passed him a crust of bread.
He took it and ate with quick bites, his stomach twisting gladly, despite the mold that stuck to his tongue. “I’d never bring trouble to you, Miss Judy.”
How bad do I look that Judy’s feeding me?
“I’m not worried about trouble,” Judy said. “Go on home to your mice and get some rest.”
Nate shook her strong hand over the table covered in tech-guts and broken toys and dodged around tables to the center of the market. Food stalls carried fruits and vegetables ripe with an oversweet, half-rotten smell and street meat simmering in enough spice to blast away the taste of decay. Gathos City sent food onto the island through the tunnel gates twice a week for registered workers with vouchers. Most of it ended up in the market, trading hands a dozen times.
With the credits he’d made selling tech, Nate filled a bag with stale bread, mottled red apples, and a musty rope of dried meat. A small table covered with fragrant fruit caught his eye as he left the market.
“How much are these?” he asked the produce seller as he skimmed his fingers over the fuzzy pale-orange skin of a fruit he dimly recognized. He couldn’t recall what it tasted like or the name of it.
“Peaches? Half-price. They ain’t wormy.” The man spat a dark stream of gunk into a chipped bowl of frothy liquid at his feet.
Nate wrinkled his nose. “What will one credit get me?”
“Three.”
“How about four?” Nate asked, regretting not haggling with Judy.
The man snorted and palmed four of the peaches with his fat hands. “Fair enough.”
Nate dropped his last credit into the shopkeeper’s change bowl. The fruit smelled like wet sugar. Reed would love it.
By the time Nate left the herbalist’s shop, the sky had thickened with dusk. He jogged along the cracked sidewalk, wary of the thinning crowds and creeping shadows. He’d lingered too long tinkering in exchange for healing salves.
A hollow-cheeked girl stumbled out of an alley, tugging a scrawny child who fought her clawed grip on his hand. The boy’s gaze flew to Nate, wide—beseeching. “I don’t wanna,” he said, and it was little more than a rasp. As if he’d screamed his voice away long ago.
Nate froze, and the girl turned wild eyes on him. Her lips curled to reveal gray teeth and bleeding gums. A chem fiend, deep in hunger. Furrows of raw skin striped her bare arms. She looked him up and down, no doubt sizing up the heavy bag at his back. He sank his hands into his pockets automatically, covering the clanging tins of valuable salve.
He knew he should run. In a fight, he wouldn’t stand a chance against a fiend gone mad with want. Instead, he asked, “Where are you taking him?”
Her laughter was the sound of rusted hinges. “The trappers. What’s it to you? Got a better offer?”
The boy began to croak, eyes dry and sunken. Too thirsty for tears. “Mama. . .”
Nate shuffled back, sick. She couldn’t be more than seventeen. And at best, selling her son to the trappers would offer her a few days of solace. At worst, she’d gorge herself on chem and her heart would stop before she had a chance to mourn him.
“Wait!” She reached with a clawed hand, dried blood beneath her nails. “What will you give me for him?”
Even if Nate had chem to offer, they couldn’t take another child. Pixel was already one little one too many.
He ran from the boy’s fevered cries and her scraped-bone shouting. His bag thumped against his back, an echo to his thundering heartbeat, and he only slowed when he reached a crowded intersection and his frantic pace would draw too much attention.
Gasping to catch his breath, he scrubbed his eyes, his face hot with shame. By morning, the boy would be in the trappers’ hands.
There’s nothing I could have done.
But that was a hollow comfort.
He knew what it meant to be a commodity. Traded and shifted from hand to hand.
