4. Chapter four
Chapter four
Kieran
I have a plan.
It might be a stupid one, a reckless one. But it’s a plan.
Actually, if we’re getting technical, I’ve got two.
Turns out, the brothel—like Max called it back on the docks—really isn’t that bad. At least not at the part where I’m stationed, where Joyeus dropped me after hauling me off to her domain once I got registered.
It’s old and rundown and moldy. Sure, there are things happening here that I don’t want to know about, screams that keep me up at night, but there’s also food.
Water. I’ve got my own room. Four walls.
A door with a lock, in a building with security, in a city with actual walls.
This is the safest I’ve been since my mother was taken from me.
She didn’t get infected. She didn’t turn. She didn’t even perish because of her addiction.
No, she went out the old way, by a fucking disease from the old world. They called it the flu .
It still was and always will be, the worst time of my life.
My worst memory. It didn’t matter what came after, the trek through half a continent, settlement to settlement, bartering scraps and coin just to keep moving, keep running, keep going, until I reached Ibitha. The safe place, according to Mom.
A place far away from here, she whispered on her deathbed, her fingers rubbing the curved scar on my wrist from a wound I can no longer remember.
All she wanted for me was a place where I could live. Survive.
And she was right about Ibitha.
It’s at least better than where I came from, the big city I left behind.
Rotting, broken, crawling with crime. A place where fish didn’t come steady from the ocean, where food was always scarce, where war between factions and settlements never stopped.
Always fighting for scraps, for the best quarters, for clean water, for control.
And then there were the cults. The Walker-worshippers, lunatics who thought infection was salvation.
Or the scientists that still claimed power, funded by whatever crumbling excuse of a government we had over there.
They were worse. Always prowling for test subjects, always making people disappear.
Blood drawn, bodies never seen again. All under the pretense of finding a cure that will never come.
Not that my mother ever let me near much of it. Not safe, she said. Never safe.
If I wasn’t at the excuse for a school they had there, she kept me inside our three room apartment, in a rotting giant of a building that held an entire community within its bones.
Floors stacked on floors: trade floors, medic floors, black-market floors.
You could find anything in there if you had coin, or blood, or flesh to spare.
But she never let me see much of it. Too protective. Too desperate to keep me untouched by the filth outside our door. It’s not safe, she’d whisper every time I so much as glanced toward the stairwell at the end of our floor. It’s not safe, it’s not safe, it’s not safe. Stay safe, Kieran.
Live, Kieran. Live.
I still knew what she did besides her day job to keep me fed, keep me safe. And the irony isn’t lost on me I’ve ended up staring down the same fate.
Because in a way, that place isn’t so different from here. Trade flesh for safety, virtue for coin. Where there are people willing to pay, prostitution will always exist.
But not yet. Not me. Not now.
Like I said, I’ve got two plans I have to work out before I’m eighteen… as far as they know, at least. The first is simple: Become indispensable. If I make myself irreplaceable, Joyeus won’t shove me into a room to get fucked for coin like the rest of my colleagues.
Maybe some would call it selfish, but I see it as survival.
A way to protect the piece of me that still hopes.
Still dreams. Because if I had to go there, really go there, sell myself like that every night, for five years?
I might keep breathing, but the last part of me that makes me me would wither and die.
It’s not like anyone would mourn me if I couldn’t live without it and decided enough was enough. Maybe that would even be a blessing. One less fight. One less burden. Maybe I’d even see my mom again, if I believed in that kind of thing.
But I do believe in something. Or maybe I just need to. Some tiny, stubborn part of me still sees a future. Still refuses to let go… even if I have no one, am no one, and have nothing.
I shake it off. No. Not going there. Not again.
I finger the silver chain around my neck as I head back to my room over the faded red carpet, fresh from patching up one of the girls.
Some creep tried to choke her while fucking her.
Thank the Gods she managed to fight him off, but they called me early in the morning to help her, treat the bruises on her neck and the scratches on her skin.
They trust my hands because I know what I’m doing.
They learned that fast, after the first bar fight I stumbled into, when one of us walked away with a shard of glass buried in his arm.
I can stitch. Clean wounds. Stop bleeding. Basic stuff, nothing fancy, but enough. My mother taught me everything she could, making me practice on dead meat whenever she scavenged it.
She used to be a nurse in our building, stationed on the medical floor—the only reason we even got an apartment that was safer than most. She’d drag herself home after endless shifts, collapse into bed, but still take the time to show me how to wrap a bandage, how to disinfect with whatever scraps we had.
But like so many, she got caught in drugs after using them to keep herself awake and alert. Started doing other work to keep her addiction alive. At first she only left in the dead of night, when she thought I was asleep. Soon it turned into whole days she was gone.
I stayed in that apartment, pretending not to know.
Sometimes an old neighbor peeked in on me, like she did with the other kids on our floor.
Mostly she just hunched over her chair, eyes glazed at the flicker of a scavenged TV, watching old DVDs.
I’d bury myself in whatever book Mom managed to find for me, because she was still a good mother.
Despite everything, I know she loved me.
The building still had electricity, at least. Solar panels rigged across the roof. Same as here. I even have electricity in my room.
When I get back there, the sun already sliding low, I toss the little medic bag into the cabinet in the bathroom and step into the shower.
The tiles are cracked, grout black with age, but it’s clean enough.
And there’s running water. Courtesy of the plumbing system they’ve somehow kept alive in this place.
I scrub a hand down my face, exhaustion dragging at me. Half a day helping the girls and boys with cuts, bruises, stitching what needs stitching—it wears me out faster than I want to admit and my shift has yet to start.
Sometimes I want to kick myself for not mentioning this skill when I first arrived. But I was too panicked, and who would’ve believed me without documentation? And even if they had, my skills wouldn’t have been enough for a medical posting. I can only do the basics. Still… I want to learn more.
For now I just have to be good enough that Joyeus sees the value. Keep the others healthy, keep them a little less broken.
When I step back into my small room, a crusty towel around my waist, I freeze. Someone was in here.
There’s a T-shirt laid out on my double bed that wasn’t there before. Clean. Bright blue. Basic as hell, but when I lift it, I see it’s my size. My brows rise. Underneath it, cargo shorts. Also new, also my size. No stains, no tears, no stretched-out seams.
My brows pull tighter as I scan the room. The sliding door to the little balcony, where I’ve cluttered the sill with scavenged herb pots, is open. Curtains stir with the early evening breeze.
I go out there, staring past the balcony, to the wall rising behind my building, a strip of land between us.
It stretches all the way to the Den. Beyond that, nothing but forests and cliffs.
The resort sits at the city’s edge, close to the beach, but after that it’s just rugged land where the world finally fell apart.
On the wall, the usual Watchers patrol in pairs, rifles slung easily, eyes fixed outward. They scan the other side like clockwork, radios crackling whenever something stirs, but none give me any attention.
There are a lot of Watchers. More than I first realized. And they’re everywhere, keeping the inhabitants safe from the Walkers. It’s effective, since I haven’t seen a Walker since I got here, since the one on the boat.
I learned a few other things, too. Like the fact there are one or two smaller villages here, but running there wouldn’t change anything.
They all play by the same rules, under the same council—the Nine—who rule this island, far away from the mess on the mainland.
Roads connect us, sure, but you don’t travel without permission.
They’d turn me in the second I showed up.
I sigh and pull the shirt over my head. It fits. Better than anything I’ve had in years. I’ll have to thank Joyeus, I guess, for finding something that finally sits right on me.
After pulling on the shorts, I shove my feet into my trusty flip-flops before going down for my shift. They’re the good kind, thick soles, single band. I can’t give them up. My mom found them for me once, proud as hell when she did. And fuck, they’re comfortable.
When I come out of the stairwell into the foyer, I nod at the manager behind the rundown counter, then push through the double doors into the former restaurant, now turned bar. My steps take me straight to the far left corner, the bar I’ve claimed as my little safe place.