Corin didn’t know. No, not that—she didn’t want to remember.
She slowed down to an open area in the middle of the jungle, where clusters of trees wrapped around them like a bowl. In the center, Elly knelt in front of a limp figure, hunched over in grief. Her back looked so small. What she held, even smaller.
Corin approached them from the side, even though she already knew what was in Elly’s hands. The fox had shrunk since Corin last saw him in Winterland. His tail drooped lifelessly over Elly’s arm, his head buried in her lap. Tangled clumps of dirt matted his coat. Elly picked through his fur, as if to inspect for wounds. She only found cracks in his skin, lengthening around his face and torso, his flesh split so far open it bled in clay. Her tears stained his porcelain coat as she kept piecing him together. Each shard sliced Elly’s skin while phantom pain coursed through Corin’s hands, her fists clenching to ignore it.
Fixing him was useless. Every time she fiddled with the pieces, they left cracks, evidence of it breaking apart.
“Don’t you understand?” Corin said. “We can’t put him back together again.”
Elly placed him gently to the ground, where he separated into pieces. She turned to Corin, tears slicking the dark pools of her eyes.
“Then why did you break him?”
Elly’s tears flashed in Corin’s memory. She gasped on Gyldan’s thick air, nearly choked on it. She didn’t want the anger and desolation to return—their year in that house, walls cracked and peeling, floorboards groaning under each step, as if the building had resigned itself to ruin. Elly had hated this home. She despised its protective isolation, craving instead to return to the commune’s shared tents, a place that rang with laughter and not secrets whispered through broken beams.
It didn’t matter that Corin had told her sister that their friends were gone. Elly was too naïve to believe in the permanence of death. “Harlow wouldn’t have been caught so easily,” her sister had argued that night, fueling Corin’s irritation.
Corin paced around the muddy ground of the jungle, but the dreamscape morphed to the memory as if it were happening in real time. Tall trees melted into gray walls. Tangled vines transformed to leaking pipes. Bark turned to burlap, fruit and foliage to tattered sheets and dust and mold. The familiar flare of anger coursed through her veins, where any sound her sister made would set Corin off like a bomb.
She was cold and tired and hungry. The lease was meant to be a new beginning, yet the decrepit house was far from the home she’d thought it would be. She’d sworn to herself that stealing from the commune would be the last time, and a steady job would be enough, as if playing by the rules would make life fair. But she grew tired of tightening her wallet, rationing bites, screaming in the middle of the night from nightmares of raining bullets and dead friends. Sleep came to her only in fragments, for Corin refused to close her eyes and dream, terrified that she would see Harlow and the others bleeding before her every night.
Her sanity felt like a frail thread, one that would snap under any more weight. Still, Elly continued rambling. “Maybe their plan worked. Maybe they escaped Gyldan—”
Corin slammed a hand on the table inside their home. The ceramic fox Harlow once gave her rolled to the edge and shattered on the ground.
“They’re dead, El.” Her patience had worn thin, and she no longer cared about delivering the news so bluntly. “They used the tunnels to plant a bomb under a military post. The soldiers knew and wasted no time killing them. You should be grateful we never got involved.”
Elly rushed to the broken fox, her knees pressed to loose floor boards, fingers pricking against the jagged edges of clay. The attempt was so useless it made Corin want to scream.
“But they planned this for so long,” Elly argued. “How would they have gotten caught—”
“Because I told him, El!”
Her words spewed out in an angry rush, a dam burst open to reveal nothing but regret and self-loathing. She didn’t realize the snarl at the end of her sentence until it lingered in the air, silencing them both. The leaking pipe made a small, dripping sound that matched her heartbeat, though Corin could have sworn she heard the cracks in her sister’s.
“Who?” Elly whispered.
For the first time, her voice was quiet and frail, a flimsy hope that Corin would be better than this. They both knew that would be a lie. Elly believed in fairy tales, but even she couldn’t believe in something as impossible as Corin being good.
Corin could not bear to say his name without wanting to vomit.
“The man who put this roof over our heads.”
She had kept away from Woodbine shop whenever she patrolled the marketplace for easy pickpockets. He’d often conversed with soldiers, a business suit among steel uniforms, laughing in camaraderie as if they weren’t responsible for others’ suffering. The man was indistinguishable from any other landlord rubbing elbows and licking boots for approval.
Corin had caught his eye without stealing anything, as if her very existence had incriminated her. He’d approached her like she was a disposable body he recognized across the street, claiming she had a friend who took something of his. Even when she’d acted oblivious, he’d cornered her, a group of soldiers behind him in tow, ready to beat her into submission if she’d tried to run.
He’d claimed he’d seen Harlow and other vagrants skulking around the shops, collecting wood pulp and sawdust and gunpowder. He knew they were the same group of people spreading protest flyers around districts. What he’d wanted to know was what they were planning.
“You’d get in a lot of trouble for stealing from me. Fortunately, I’m a generous man,” he’d said. “I can tell you value the same things as I do. When there’s a lucrative opportunity, we take it. That’s the only way we survive in this world.”
The deal had been renting one of his vacant properties for five years and only paying for one year in monthly installments. Corin had been stunned by the proposition. She hadn’t allowed herself to believe it until he’d prepared the contract. A roof and four walls guaranteed by signature, even if the ink would be stained with blood.
He’d promised to send soldiers to kill her in their place if she warned the group about their conversation. On her last night at the commune, she’d told Harlow not to go to the tunnels, thatthey would die if they tried to execute their plan, but she could not reveal why. Did the reason matter? Her warning would have been the same even if she had not met Woodbine. They would have died regardless, with or without her.
She thought she’d made the logical choice for survival. And yet, with each night she’d screamed herself awake from nightmares, she only remembered herself as a desperate, pathetic animal that had been backed into a corner and chose to save only herself.
Elly must have thought the same, for she was still staring at Corin with disgust.
