Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Up the spine I climbed.
T his corner of Vitale was foreign to me, which was saying something because I was born in this walled city, and I’d die here too.
Stag unlocked the rusted entrance to a rundown apartment, then tucked the key into the breast pocket of his shirt. My mother would speak, in lucid moments, of how the world changed one day long ago. She knew the truth of what happened from her mother, and her mother knew it from hers. These truths had been meticulously passed between our ancestral mothers to reach me, the fiftieth daughter. That was how I knew The End happened exactly twelve hundred years ago and that the way we lived now was similar in some ways to how people had lived before.
The End froze progress, and our tiny population, inhospitable world, and crushing lack of resources had ensured progress never defrosted again. Mother would speak of the differences in the way we lived now too. She’d told me once of how finger pads and clicking buttons used to open some doors.
When I’d asked her what would happen if the pads and buttons broke, she’d laughed.
That is why we use keys now, my Patch.
And that was also why we walked in Vitale, why we mended, why we preserved, why the health of the soil was the most important thing in the world—important enough to earn a person their death if they sought to tamper with it. Without the soil, we were finally dead, not just mostly dead, and twelve hundred years of gathering survivors, building walled cities, and figuring out how to squeeze what we could from this hostile globe would’ve been for naught.
“You can go up,” Sand Cat said to me.
That was the first sentence spoken since we’d left Hotel Vitale.
I climbed the narrow stairs behind Ox and Stag. A glance back told me that Sand Cat didn’t intend to join us. He’d planted himself in the apartment entrance.
After five flights of stairs, Stag stood aside for me to pass.
I looked back at the next corner to find he’d taken up position in the middle of the landing below and was peering downward. Did he expect an attack, or was this to prevent my escape? As I lingered on the landing above him, Stag turned to one side, clearing the path out of the apartment building. He didn’t look at me, but there was that sense I’d had with Ox of a choice being offered. He wanted me to know that I could leave.
My instincts told me to leave. They told me that if I walked up the stairs, my mother might starve to death, unable to move while she wondered what had happened to me. If I didn’t walk up the stairs, she’d likely still starve to death, but we could starve together. That seemed a nicer alternative. The best scenario was that I didn’t get murdered today, the skull employed me, and then no one had to starve. I felt dubious about how employment to a skull might work out long term, and I didn’t have the luxury to think past tomorrow.
I climbed the stairs after Ox. Ten flights.
Twelve.
On the seventeenth flight, Ox stopped before a metal door and sat on a wooden chair beside it. I peered over my shoulder, then studied the landing when it became clear this was the final destination.
My, what a mess.
The shredded walls gave the illusion that a great beast had stalked down this landing while dragging his claws through plaster and wooden frames. A tiny space clear of damage revealed the walls were once painted the deepest red. The carpet… durable and expensive. Scuffed in areas. Unlike the walls, the ceiling was untouched, but I squinted at the strands of hair hanging in a few places. What a bizarre, gross thing.
Even a destroyed landing could only occupy a person for so long. The time and silence extended.
I cleared my throat. “Are we waiting, Ox?”
Goodness! That wasn’t his real name.
I’d stilled, but Ox didn’t open his eyes as he replied, “Through there.”
Perhaps his name was Ox then. That would certainly be a lucky guess. And if it wasn’t, then he didn’t seem to mind the name anyway. “Does he know to expect me?”
The rich and powerful often owned radios, which was the only way to speak over a distance since The End, but I hadn’t seen these guys speak into any radio on the walk here.
Ox chuckled.
Then nothing.
That was that, then. My gaze slid to the metal door. I’d already decided this must happen. Inhaling deeply, I strode to the door, twisted the handle, and pulled. Oof. My breath rushed out. Not a smooth opener.
I yanked harder, and the door relented in a scream that whipped through the landing and echoed down the stairs. Someone had jammed that back on its hinges one too many times.
I left the door ajar and entered the room, certain that my pounding heart was as audible as the screaming of the metal door.
A large man sat on a wooden chair in the middle of the room. He was faced away. Aside from his chair, the only other furniture in here was the low stool beside him that held a glass of water. The carpet was almost pristine aside from the slight wear at the door where I hovered. The walls were unblemished, and if it wasn’t for the man and the glass of water that appeared crystal clear and free of any stagnant films and fungi, then I might’ve believed this room had remained unopened for centuries, a time capsule.
Instead, the near emptiness of the space felt purposeful and cold. Uninviting.
I shouldn’t be here.
But I was.
One thing was clear. This skull would win the fight against his skeleton crew any day. He had eaten an ox, a stag, and a sand cat, because along with his obvious size, his posture sang his grace, and the coiled tension radiating from the skull shouted his power. My knees wanted to knock together, and I widened my stance. My voice wanted to tremble, and I could only do my best with that.
“The hotel you s-shut down today, I worked there. Your c-crew say you have no plans to open the hotel again and no other plans for the space yet, but why let it sit vacant when you could profit otherwise? I can?—”
“You looked into his eyes.” The skull didn’t move as he spoke. His voice floated as though from the depths of a daydream, and the musing tone was at utter odds with his size and coiled tension. How could he exist in a daydream and also on the edge of bursting forth to strike me down?
I sensed my answer was vitally important to my survival and to keeping his interest a while longer. “Into Ox’s eyes? I don’t know. Perhaps for a second.”
“A beat.” The words floated to me. “No more before you peered elsewhere.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. The skeleton crew hadn’t spoken to their skull on the way here. Oh. Unless Sand Cat radioed from the bottom floor as I walked up.
My brow cleared. “I suppose so. Yes.”
“Supposing. I would expect such of a creature like you. And so you are here.” Boredom entered his detached voice.
“I need a job. I’m willing to do a lot for a person who can give me, say, seventy-five dollars a week and provide flexible hours.”
“If you are willing to do a lot, then seek the breeding pens as your employer.”
The breeding pens were an option, yes, and one many women took, including nearly every one of my ancestors. The End drove humanity to the brink of extinction, and a breeding program was developed to ensure diverse genetics. I could agree to become a surrogate and live in the cushy breeding pens, give birth, then get pregnant and give birth again. As many times as I liked until age thirty-five. The testing we all went through at thirteen had shown my genetics were somehow satisfactory. I knew otherwise.
“I won’t pass on my genetics.”
“The females in your line suffer from disease,” he said, detached but not bored. “They wither, as your mother withers now.”
My heart tried to escape my body.
No one knew my mother lived. No one knew of the withering condition of my female ancestors. I certainly hadn’t told his skeleton crew these things. My mind pulsed painfully, squeezing and twisting. I lifted a hand to my temple. Too many impossible things in one day. Too much strange.
“My mother is dead, sir,” I said quietly when I could speak.
“Many possibilities.”
Possibilities. I gritted my teeth, sick to death of the word by now. “I respectfully ask for any employment that you can offer at this time. I am?—”
“Capable and Dependable.”
I stilled at his words and the sudden, swimming intuition that this man was somehow aware of everything his skeleton crew witnessed… without needing to be told a thing. To be a skull was to lead a gang of thugs. To be a skull wasn’t to know everything as this man seemed to. The strangeness of him yelled at me to flee.
“Purposeless,” the skull said in clear disdain. “Grossly unset.”
Did he speak of me? Purposeless. I had a single reason for living and being. How much more set could a person get? His comment jolted me from clawing panic. Fleeing wouldn’t lead to a job. My mother needed me, and I needed my mother more than anyone.
A hand gripped my elbow. Ox’s. Not a loose grip.
I didn’t jump, though I hadn’t heard him approach—if only because the eeriness of this interaction had me in a numb daze.
“Did you move my cleaning cart?” I asked him. “Where’s Frank?”
“And now she loses her mind,” the skull sneered.
“You will leave now.” Ox guided me from the skull’s room, and there was no choice about it.
“B-but we were talking,” I babbled. “He didn’t answer about a job.”
“He did. You’re grossly unset and purposeless, didn’t you hear him? There’s nothing he detests more.” Ox nudged me toward the stairs. “Go.”
If the skull wasn’t convinced of my purpose, I just needed a minute, tops, to fix that. I rested a hand over Ox’s. “I can’t leave empty-handed, Ox. Do you see?”
“I see, yes,” said the man, surprising me. No, he wasn’t just a man. He was a man in a skeleton crew ruled by an all-knowing skull. I shouldn’t forget that. This man was a thug, no matter what he could see.
Never-the-less, I replied, “Then I can return to speak with him?”
He glanced at the skull’s door. “How curious that I hesitate when there is but one thing to do.”
Ox returned his focus to me without warning. He whipped out his hands to hold my face still, and our gazes locked and held.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t blink. I couldn’t look away.
My focus wanted to slide away, but Ox had locked up my body somehow. A scream built inside as his eyes began to occupy more and more of my awareness. His irises held every imaginable color and none at all. They were everything and nothing—beady and blazing.
The skeleton’s eyes were utterly and monstrously empty.
He whispered, “I see some. He sees all.”
His eyes were too much, which should be impossible, I knew. I heard my gasp as if from a great distance. I felt my body and mind give up the battle to stay conscious as Ox’s irises drowned me.
This was my End.