Chapter 2
2
Toorin
The inside of the Singing Bull smelled much like the outside—like stale urine and rotting garbage. The wind whipped the stench of the fringe through the open back door and out the front, but a change in wind direction wouldn’t have helped.
No one seemed to care.
A few ramshackle buildings on the fringe had stolen electricity from the hydroelectric plant supplying the most important parts of Toonu. But not the Bull. It used camel-fat lanterns like the rest of us did.
But in a place like the Bull, it’s best not to shed too much light on the inside.
At least I didn’t have to feel too badly that I’d had no time to get to the bathhouse and wash the sticky sweat off my skin before we hit the Bull. At least I’d jumped in the bay the day before, but you couldn’t call it a proper bath.
A barmaid, a girl I hadn’t seen before, came through the back door, looking over her shoulder as Rocco, who owned the Bull, ran after a group of men who hadn’t paid.
“Another?” She held up the bottle of moonshine. The bottle’s lip had a missing chunk, but at least she could put a cork in it to keep the flies from falling in and drowning.
Or maybe life was as bad on the fringe for the flies as it was for the people, and they would willingly jump to their deaths at the bottom of a bottle of moonshine.
I sat alone at the end of the darkened bar. Bodie had left me as soon as he spotted two men who looked as if they’d put on tattered clothes so they could go slumming in the fringe. No way they lived here—their eyes still held a spark.
And their clothes didn’t hang off their bodies.
Snap. Snap. Snap. “I’m not holding this bottle for my health, sunshine. You want more or not?”
“What’s your name?”
Her jaw sawed from side to side. “Juniper.”
She didn’t ask for mine. I tapped the tin cup with a finger and held it out for her to fill. “How old are you?”
“Old enough.” She had dark skin and black hair braided and pulled back from her face. She filled the cup. “That’ll be one chip. Blowjobs be extra.”
She wasn’t the first to offer. You couldn’t walk up a street on the fringe without a man, a woman, a boy, or a girl doing whatever they must to stay fed. We all did.
I reached into my pocket and tossed a salvaged chip onto the bar top that had once been a door. The chip should afford me drinks all night. “I don’t want you to blow me.”
My attention flicked to the two men Bodie had pushed into a dark corner, and her gaze followed. “Suit yourself.”
She held the chip under the flickering light of the camel-fat lantern. I didn’t think I’d ever get the stench of burning camel fat out of my nostrils. It was the kind of smell that seeped into your pores until you smelled like you’d slept with the beasts all winter to keep warm.
She squinted and turned the chip over in her hand. Her focus shifted back to me. “Still work?”
While the Primos in the settlements had credits to spend on technology, the Lowers and everyone else on the fringe had to scavenge for electronic parts from before the war. Some chips were good. Many were not. But the good ones were worth enough to take chances on the bad ones.
“Dunno.”
She dropped the chip into a camel hide pouch tied at her waist and reached for her blade. She stabbed it into the bar, catching the cuff of a man reaching for the bottle of moonshine.
The brute had to be three times her size, yet she held tight to the blade’s grip and leaned across the bar. “I’ll have your balls in me jar if you don’t get your dirty paws off me bottle.”
The man’s eyes flicked to the jar on the shelf behind her. Testicles filled the jar to the brim, marinating in some sort of yellowed brine. They’d been there as long as I could remember. Maybe human. Maybe not. No one was brave enough to ask, though.
“Honest mistake,” the man said.
Juniper grabbed the bottle by the neck and stuffed it behind the bar before yanking the blade out. “Bugger off.”
The man grumbled but left.
She poured moonshine for two men who walked up to the bar and accepted a coil of weathered copper wire as payment.
Juniper returned to me after serving the two men, wiping out tin cups with a dirty rag. She scanned the bar. I had no clue who she was looking for.
“You never answered my question,” I said. “How old are you?”
“Don’t know for sure. Seventeen. Eighteen, maybe.”
I laughed. If she’d reached fifteen years, I’d eat my boots.
Another man stepped up to the bar. He’d been in the Bull since before we’d arrived. He tossed three bolts on the bar, and she filled his tin cup two fingers deep with what looked like watered-down mead. He scowled. She put her hand on the hilt of her blade. He tossed another handful of bolts on the bar, and she filled it halfway.
The man eyed her but walked away with his drink.
“ Oi ,” Rocco called out from the doorway. Juniper jumped. And if the lighting had been any better, even with her darker skin, I might have seen the color drain from her face. “Get out from behind me bar.”
“Gotta go,” she said, but not before swiping the bolts and wire off the bar and sprinting out the back with the bottle of moonshine.
Rocco didn’t run after her. He hadn’t caught his breath from the last group he’d chased. “Bloody urchins. You chase one off, and another takes their place. Outnumber the rats and roaches if you ask me.”
He clapped me on my shoulder. “Stop laughing. How much did she get?”
I snorted and finally quit laughing long enough to catch my breath. “A chip from me. A coil of wire and a bunch of bolts. And the rest of the bottle that was in her hand.”
“ Fuck. ”
I chuckled. “Maybe you should hire her. Best service this place has ever had.”
“Fuck you,” Rocco said, but not in such a way that I thought I’d get a smack upside my head from the plank of splintered wood he wielded like a bat. You never knew with Rocco.
Another customer walked in. The man looked… rough. Which said a lot when you lived on the fringe. He looked bad for even an outlier. He limped in, using a short length of steel pipe with a jagged, pointy end that looked sharp enough to run anyone through. Which was probably the only thing that kept the thieves from yanking it from the man’s hands, beating him with it, and selling it for scrap.
The man approached the bar. The journey from the door took him so long that I’d grown tired of his struggle and turned away. But I couldn’t ignore his smell.
I’d have taken him for a dead man by the stench alone if he hadn't ordered a drink.
Rocco eyed the man up and down and leaned his considerable weight on the bar. It bowed slightly. “You got chips?” his tone alone said he’d believe it when he saw it.
The man swayed on his feet, and I reached out a hand to steady him. “Water?” The single word came out scratchy, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it had cut his windpipe as it rolled up.
The water on the Fringe had as good a chance of killing you as it did quenching your thirst.
“Give him a mead. On me,” I told Rocco. I should buy the man a drink. Likely would be his last.
Rocco didn’t argue. He poured a tin of the mead and slid it toward the man who fell more than sat on the stool beside me. He balanced the steel rod against the bar, and Rocco left to fill another order, leaving me to stare at the man.
The more I looked, the more I saw.
The more I breathed, the more I smelled.
My nose crinkled at the metallic scent. That wasn’t any old stain on his trousers. It was blood.
“You all right?”
The man turned his head, his sunken eyes taking me in for the first time. “I’m breathing, ain’t I?” He coughed and coughed until he coughed something up, only to swallow it.
Once he caught his breath, the man didn’t elaborate or complain. Complaining never got you nothing out here.
He raised the arm closest to me to drink, winced, and then used the other arm. My eyes snagged on the rip in his shirt beneath his arm. It went all the way down to the hem. Blood had soaked both halves, with enough caked-on dirt and dust to disguise all the red.
Bodie called my name from across the bar. One of the guys had his hand up Bodie’s shirt, and the other man hung on his arm. Bodie jerked his head toward the door, trying to get me to leave, but I wasn’t leaving with anyone, no matter how cute they were, until I’d finished my moonshine.
Besides, Bodie was the only one with shittier taste in men than me. Chances were, the two men were assholes.
I shook my head at him and took another swallow. I had enough of a buzz brewing that my curiosity got the best of me.
With tin cup in hand, I pointed at the torso of the man beside me. “What happened?”
Maybe the man had enough mead in him, or maybe it was because I had bought it for him, but he didn’t flip me off. “Reapers.”
Reapers.
The swallow of moonshine caught in my throat, and I sputtered and spewed it over the bar top. I smudged it away with my hand before it could eat through the remaining varnish on the bar. My eyes watered, and my nose burned.
“ Here? ” The word came out on a wheeze as I mopped my eyes with my shirt. “In Toonu?”
He waved a hand in the general direction I took to mean out there. “Badlands.”
I snorted. They weren’t called the badlands for nothing. Nothing good came from crossing them. If you came out alive on the other side, the badlands always took its exit tax, even if it were only a stripe out of your hide and a few miserable years off your life. Or, in this man’s case, a kidney, by the looks of it.
At least they’d let the man live. I’d heard stories where the reapers harvested every usable organ on a body, including the eyes. Every part had a price, and Primo’s willingly drained all their credits to get body parts when needed.
And while a Primo’s life in the settlement was infinitely better than the Lowers or anyone on the fringe, no one escaped the brutality of a post-war world.
As if to prove it, the man raised his arm with a grimace and parted the crusty flaps of his shirt, revealing the horseshoe-shaped wound on his side. It looked like he’d been sewn back together with camelgut, the wound’s edges swollen, red, and dropping maggots on the floor.
The man was lucky he wasn’t dead.
Or maybe not.
The man dropped his arm and rested his forehead on the bar as if raising it had drained him of his final drops of energy.
I didn’t ask any more questions. Not that I’d have the chance if I’d wanted to because Bodie showed up with those men. One on each arm. “Let’s get out of here.”
The moonshine must have kicked in enough to settle that unease in my belly and beat back any good sense I’d been born with because I said, “Sure. Why not?”
Toorin
I struggled to sit, fighting the burning pain in my chest. I wanted to vomit. “W-where are we?”
The sun beat down on me and my sweat-drenched clothes. I needed shade, but whatever building had once been here had long ago been razed, reducing it to nothing more than warped steel beams reaching skyward. We couldn’t be anywhere near Toonu because if we had been, scrappers like me would have reduced those beams into scrap in a matter of weeks.
Bodie grunted beside me. He coughed up stuff from somewhere down near the bottom of his soul from the sounds of it and spat it out. “No fire, so it can’t be hell.”
I would have laughed if I didn’t hurt so bloody bad. Besides, hell had ceased to be anything anyone feared when you lived in the wreckage of the post-war era.
With each excruciating breath, my sternum shifted. A mechanical whirring had replaced the thud of my heart. I glanced down at what remained of my blood-stained shirt. Someone had sliced it down the front, revealing a line of Tricor sutures holding my chest together.
At least when they took my heart, they’d had the decency not to sew me up with camelgut.
“Check yourself,” I said, “I think we’ve been chumped and dumped.”
I should have known those two men at the bar were too good to be true.
At least that twist in my gut had vanished.
Bodie’s face blanched. Considering how pale he already looked, it hadn’t seemed possible. He lifted his shirt and inspected his sides, exposing suture lines over where his kidneys should be. “Fucking reapers. They probably used those cut-rate kidneys from the central province. I’ll be pissing hydraulic fluid for months. What did they steal from you?”
“My heart.”
Bodie barked out a laugh, followed by a series of coughs. “Here I thought Aksel had stolen it already. I told you you can’t trust a pirate.”
To be fair, the pirate in question had been charming and fucking gorgeous.
And he hadn’t stolen my heart. He’d left it in ruins.
Lesson learned. Don’t marry for love. Marry for the alliance.
After a lot of cussing and struggling, we rolled over and stood on shaky legs. Bodie pointed to a spec of green in all the gray. “What’s that?”
I shuffled over to inspect it. I nudged it with the toe of my boot. “Five-leaf clover.”
Which only grew in the radioactive exclusion zone deep in the badlands.
As tan as we were from a life on the IP, the brutal sun out here would surely bake us.
My rueful laugh rolled out, but the pain of my shifting sternum cut my laugh short.
It would have been an upgrade if we’d woken up in hell.
Bodie muttered a string of curses that wouldn’t change a damn thing. If the reapers had wanted us dead, they could have taken our organs and left the skin and meat behind. They didn’t have to dump us so far out we’d die before we made it back to what civilization remained.
I picked up a rusty hunk of old rebar for a walking stick. “We gotta get out of here before my nads get fried from the radiation. How can I repopulate the world if my boys don’t swim?”
“You’re gay and live on the fringe. You were never going to repopulate the world.”
“Yeah, but I like to know they could call on me in a pinch. I could close my eyes and—”
Bodie bumped my shoulder with his as he walked by. The pain radiated through my chest and cut off whatever I’d been about to say. I couldn’t remember what it was now. My brain focused solely on blocking out the pain and keeping myself from throwing up.
I patted my pockets, remembering the chips I’d left the Lark with. They were gone. Naturally. But I found something in the lint-filled corner. I pulled it out.
I stared at the three yellowed pills in my hand and held them out to Bodie. “What do you think these are?”
He took one and licked it. I bopped him upside the head. “What are you doing?”
“How else are we supposed to know what it is?”
“What if it’s poison?”
“They could have killed us. Why dump us only to try to poison us with pills?”
“Fair point.”
He checked his pockets and found three pills stuffed in them for him. Shrugging, he popped one in his mouth and swallowed.
The deep furrow between his brows immediately thinned, and he looked around him as if seeing the world for the first time. “I don’t know what these are, but the pain is nearly gone, and the world has never been prettier. If it’s poison, this is the way to go.”
I downed the pill that he licked and took a step and then another. The world swirled, making it hard to stay on my feet, but the pain was gone. I gripped the rebar and followed in Bodie’s staggering footsteps. I had no idea where we were going, but Bodie could navigate the Lark on starless nights better than any compass I’d salvaged off sunken ships, so I followed him.
Here’s hoping the pills wouldn’t throw him off course.