Here, the wall itself is crumbling away, so that there are tiny concave pockets of loose brick hidden behind the second-story stalls’ cloth drapes. It’s just enough space for a person to curl up without being seen.
Daniel crouches here for a moment, his eyes distant. His entire body is tense, and his hands fiddle restlessly. He swallows hard. It looks like it’s taking everything in him to be back here.
“When I first started roaming the streets,” he says, “I’d end up looking for these crumbling pockets in the markets. They were highand dry, for the most part, and the street police wouldn’t bother you if they did a sweep through the neighborhood. You could get a decent night’s sleep and no one would ever know you were in there.”
I stare in disbelief at the tiny pocket of space. It’s filthy and dark, littered with brick and dirt. “You’d sleep here?” I whisper.
He nods. “For years. It wasn’t so bad. I liked that it was right in the markets. Made it easier to steal food.”
His lips have tightened now. I look at him, wondering what kind of effort it takes for him to dredge these memories up. He has never talked about the details of his street life with me before. I knew nothing about how he survived, what he had to do, where he had to live. Now I try to picture my brother—the legend of the Republic, the star of Ross City—curled into a tight ball in this pitiful place, scrounging for a meal.
And I’d never understood. I’d neverbotheredto understand his abhorrence of this kind of surrounding.
He shakes his head at me, then starts climbing back down the side of the stalls. I follow him.
He leads me to the back alleys behind the markets, pointing out the trash bins. They are overflowing, with heaps of garbage piled around them. “This hasn’t changed much since I lived here,” he tells me as we walk. “Another place you could get food, albeit during more desperate nights. Sometimes Tess and I would camp in alleys like this one. The street police only did their sweeps through here every other night, you know. Lack of funding and manpower.”
He pauses at the end of the alley, then points out to the water. “See that?” he says.
I look closely. Rising out of the water some fifty yards from theshoreline is an old, abandoned skyscraper, hollowed out and long gutted for parts, its skeleton towering dark and foreboding against the night. These structures litter the entire lake.
Daniel hops onto the end of a dilapidated, abandoned pier leading out into the water. He nods for me to follow. I do. Together, we make our way along the pier’s rotting floorboards, hopping over parts where it’s all caved into the lake. As we reach the end of it, Daniel jumps onto the lowest floor of the skyscraper rising out of the water.
I take a running start, then collapse to my knees beside him. He gives me a grim smile as we settle against the edge of the building.
“John always told us to stay away from the lake when we were kids,” I finally say through my gasps of breath. “He said these skyscrapers were full of dangerous folk.”
Daniel nods. “He wasn’t wrong. You had to be careful which towers you chose to stay in, which floors you ventured on. Gangs would rotate in and out on these structures. I had to make sure I stayed out of their way and remembered what the schedules were. But it’s the nicest place that me and Tess were able to find. Whenever we had a chance to stay on these towers on the lake, we considered that a lucky day.”
A stone sinks to the bottom of my chest. I’ve always known, to some extent, why he’s never told me his stories—why he doesn’t seem like he wants to remember our home, or seems so eager to stay in the Sky Floors of Ross City. I knew, and yet I didn’t know at all. I’ve never walked these streets like he has, never understood what he faced out here every day, a child with a family he could never contact.
I was always drawn to the humble streets of Lake, always despised the luxurious ignorance of our current home.
But I never had to fend for myself in Lake, either.
The screaming, the blur of soldiers in our home. The sound of a shot to our mother’s head. The past crowds into my head, loud and relentless.
Daniel watches me quietly. What he sees in my expression, he doesn’t say, but after a while, he looks away and leans back on one arm. “How much do you remember of John?” he asks.
An old, rusty memory appears of Daniel and me waiting around our dining table, impatient for John to come home from his work shift so that we could eat. My oldest brother’s weary smile, his cheeks still red from heat and exhaustion, his arms outstretched as I’d dash from the table to greet him.
Enough nights pass now when I forget that we had another brother. The realization makes me flush with shame. “Not as much as I wish I did,” I reply.
Daniel smiles. “John was the one who taught me how to change your diapers, you know.”
Now it’s my turn to smile. “That’s not where I thought this conversation would go.”
“Who do you think was in charge of you as a baby when Mom had to work late shifts?” Daniel raises an eyebrow at me. “John would drag me over to the table where he’d change you, and the two of us would hover over you, arguing about the best way to pin a fresh cloth diaper on you while you screamed your head off. It was the worst goddy chore in the world. He taught me how to put you to sleep and how to tell if you were sick. I almost burned down our house once when I was trying to boil you some mashed carrots. John almost killed me for that one.”
I try to picture two young boys bickering with each other while an infant version of me looked on. I try to imagine Daniel franticallyputting out a kitchen fire while John watched in horror. The thought is so ridiculous that I can’t help a laugh from escaping my throat.
Daniel laughs once, too, and shakes his head. “I used to fight with him even more than I do with you. Everything was a battle. He hated how impulsive I was, how sometimes I’d stand in the street and complain about the police loud enough for everyone to hear. How many questions I’d ask about why Republic soldiers had roughed up our father or where he’d gone. I lost count of the number of times he had to drag me home after I’d gotten in some argument about Republic history with the kids at school. He was convinced I’d get myself killed someday with my carelessness, or that you’d pick up my bad habits.” He sighs. “I guess he wasn’t wrong.”
A breeze sweeps past us, bringing with it the scent of a Lake night—fried street food, smoke, briny water. I cross my legs and try to ignore the sudden lump that rises in my throat. “I should have listened to you,” I finally say, my voice so quiet that I can barely hear myself.
“I couldn’t protect you any more than John could protect me. You’ve seen the wrong in this world, powerful forces that no brother could ever hope to hide from you. And no matter what John did—or what I do—those things stay with us forever.”
I start shaking my head. “John shouldn’t have had that burden.Youshouldn’t have.”
