Chapter 4
4
Toorin
“Oi,” Bodie nudged me with the toe of his boot. “This ain’t no time for sleeping, mate.”
A rock jabbed into my cheek, and drool pooled in the dirt beneath my mouth. As soon as I moved, it all came back to me. The pain, the waking up with a dodgy mechanical heart, finding Juniper in an alley fighting for her life.
I turned my head and found the man who’d attacked Juniper dead. At least, I assumed he was dead. There wasn’t much left of his head. Bodie tossed the bloody rebar away, and it clattered against the rocks and tin sheeting of one of the shacks lining the alley.
I wanted to stay right where I was, but I knew I’d die if I did, and then people would be riffling through my pockets the way Juniper was doing to the man Bodie had killed. I grunted and worked my way to my hands and knees and unsteady feet. I leaned against the shack to keep my balance. At least my head was clear. Mostly.
“You ready?” I asked Bodie.
He held an arm across his middle and took a step toward Juniper. “What you got there, girl?”
Juniper pulled a leather pouch from one of the man’s pockets and stuffed it in one of hers. “He’s a pill man. I’m taking his pills. What’s it look like I’m doing?” Her tone suggested that she wondered if Bodie had more damage to his head than her attacker had.
“Give us some of that.” He made a give-it-here motion with his hand.
She lifted another leather pouch from another one of the man’s pockets and stuffed it down her shirt. She must have run out of pockets. “You’re scrappers. What do you need with—”
Bodie lifted his shirt to reveal his infected incision. Her nose wrinkled, and she swiped a finger under it as if she could smell the stench from ten feet away. Though, to be fair, she probably could.
“Oi.” She held a hand over her shirt over where the leather pouch had settled. “You even know what you need?”
“Something for the pain. Antibiotics.”
She rolled her eyes and dug out one of the pouches from her pocket. She untied the camel leather cord and held the open pouch out for Bodie to see. I was too far away to see much of anything and too weak to move closer.
Bodie fingered through the pouch. “What are these?”
“Some are water pills, some for pain, some for infection. Some will kill you if you take too many.”
“I don’t much care right now. Give me the whole pouch.”
Juniper snatched it away and re-stuffed it into her pocket. “Take me with you.”
“No.” I intended for the word to come out firm and definitive. Instead, it came out on a wheeze.
“We can’t do that,” Bodie said. Though there was no reason why we couldn’t. But the last thing we needed was to have to watch out for someone barely older than a kid. “We’ll take our chances with the pills. Give me the pouch and leave.”
She squared her body. This wasn’t going to end well for us. I could already tell. “Make me.”
I watched Bodie doing the mental math, and I noticed the slump in his shoulders when he realized we were in no shape to argue or fight.
“Come on,” Bodie pleaded. “The scrapper life is no place for a kid.”
“You scrapped as a kid.” She knew nothing for sure, but it wasn’t a hard guess.
“That’s why I say it’s bloody well not a place for a kid.”
She held her arms out to her sides. “And this place is?”
My knees shook with the effort to stay upright, and I sunk to the ground. “She has a point.”
Bodie grumbled. “Not you, too.”
He stepped over to me as I braced myself on my hands and knees. He patted my back and squatted beside me. I didn’t have the energy to turn my head and look at him. “We can do this. We’ve been through worse and made it through. You and me.”
You had to love his optimism.
“No. This is … the worst.” My arms gave way, and my face hit the ground. I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
Bodie tried to haul me up but only managed to grind my face into the ground.
“Well?” Juniper asked. “What will it be?”
Marcelis
I left Solomon’s lab in a furious daze.
My sire knew.
He knew my wishes.
He knew I didn’t want a donor heart.
He knew I’d rather die than have one.
And he’d completely disregarded what I wanted for what he wanted.
I no longer felt drained. The rage fueled me, my cane tap, tap, tapping down the hall.
I had a sire to confront.
Thyle was sitting on the curb where I’d left him. Normally, I would have felt bad keeping him waiting so long, but the rage easily overwhelmed any guilt.
“The residence,” I said as soon as Thyle had strapped into the yoke. He must have sensed the urgency in my voice because I’d never traveled through the streets of the Toonu so quickly.
Thyle’s lungs drew in great gasps of air as he pulled up to the side entrance of the residence. I eased myself down, reached into my pocket, and tossed him one of the chips I usually carried. He caught it with one hand and smiled, too out of breath to speak. Then the smile dropped as the realization of what I had given him hit.
He held it out to me. “Too much.”
I didn’t have time to explain. I knew what I’d given him could likely feed his family for half a year. “Keep it.”
Tears welled in his eyes, and I turned away before I could let them affect me. I should have given him more. All these days that he’d pulled my cart. Sure, he lived on chancellor property without charge, but my sire hadn’t done it to be kind. He’d done it because it is easier to find someone to run his cart in the middle of the night if he didn’t have to send someone through the settlement to find them first.
The inequity and injustice in the provinces sometimes sickened me more than my old heart had. I wanted to raze it all down to the ground and start again, but first, I needed answers.
My footfalls echoed in the maze of halls of the residence, my cane tapping along beside me. “Sire!” I hollered as I approached the door to the great chamber where my sire spent most of his days.
The guard posted by the double doors didn’t stop me. He wasn’t there to keep me out. I shouldered the door open, biting back the gasp of pain that ricocheted through my body and threatened to steal my breath. The heavy door flung back and hit the wall with a crack that reverberated around the room.
That sound, not the sound of me calling him from the hall, made my sire glance up. He had no concern on his face, even though I’d never had the guts to storm through the chamber doors before.
I refused to wait for him to acknowledge me and for Keon to call me forward. “What were you thinking?”
I strode up the center cobbles. My sire scanned me up and down, looking more bored than alarmed as he continued to talk with Keon and some other man I’d never seen before.
“You—” I hesitated, catching my breath and hating that my voice shook when I spoke. “You had no right.”
I came to an abrupt halt in front of the short stack of steps leading up to the raised dais where my sire sat. My incandescent rage may have propelled me this far, but my thighs quivered with the effort to keep me on my feet. Despite the cane, I didn’t like my chances with the steps. Steps or no steps, I could say what I came to say from where I stood. Discretion meant nothing. I didn’t care if anyone else knew or heard or spewed the news to everyone in the settlement.
My sire raised a bushy brow at me. That infuriating indignation settled in his voice when he said, “I am the chancellor of the Tranquility Province. I have every right.”
“Not with this.”
Keon’s hand flew to his mouth, unable to stop the gasp as if expecting my sire to raise the long blade at his side. The other man shrank into the shadows as if he wanted no part of what may transpire next.
The other bushy brow rose to meet its mate as my sire’s lip raised in a sneer. His hand went to the hilt of his blade, but I no longer feared swift retribution. He wouldn’t have gone through the lengths he had to get me a donor heart only to run it through.
I think.
Something shifted in my sire’s eyes, and it was then that I knew he needed me more than I needed him. I just had no clue why.
My sire waved a dismissing hand at Keon, and Keon quickly and quietly gathered the other man and led him out the door at the back of the chamber.
My sire didn’t waste words pretending he had no idea why I’d come. “You should be thanking me. Without the donor heart, you would be dead.”
“What about the man you stole it from?”
My sire used the same dismissive wave he’d used on Keon many times before, the same dismissive wave I’ve seen him use his entire life like he was flicking a fly off the scraps on his plate. “A man should be so lucky as to be chosen to make it possible for a Toft to live.”
I scoffed. My sire had lost his mind. Or maybe he’d never been in control of it to begin with. “I doubt anyone stopped long enough to ask him first.”
My sire stared at me. I stared back, the eye contact making my nerves buzz, and my lungs catch, but I refused to look away. My sire sighed and shifted his gaze away. Before I passed out, I quietly sucked in a lungful of air.
“How long? How long have you been looking for a donor?”
“A while now,” my sire allowed.
“Weeks? Months?”
My sire didn’t respond.
I tasted the slickness at the back of my throat, my voice weak when I said, “Years?”
“Finding a donor heart isn’t easy. Many factors might make one unsuitable.”
A thought occurred to me that I’d never questioned in the past. The number of times my sire had sent me to the hospital for ‘tests’ only to return to the residence a few days later, though my condition hadn’t significantly worsened to warrant the tests. How many times? Four? Five?
A half dozen?
“The tests,” I said, “They were to confirm compatibility of the organ.”
I got a reluctant nod. “At least to ensure we had the parameters we needed to find the best match.”
I swallowed, not wanting to hear the answer to my next question. “How many died?”
Instead of supplying a number, my sire sighed as if completely bored with the conversation. “Any man would be lucky to sacrifice his life for the province.”
My bark of bitter laughter reverberated around the stone walls of the otherwise empty room. The room wasn’t opulent, the way I had read about the castles of kings from long ago, but an enclosed space the size of the great chamber post-war was enough to impress.
“Is he alive?”
“I am told when they left him, he was very much alive.”
“Where did they dump him?”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew them to be true. My sire wouldn’t reward my donor with chips and credits and an easy life. He’d hide what he’d done. Because he could.
My sire shifted in his seat, not because the questioning made him uncomfortable but because he’d grown tired of the conversation. I knew the signs well enough. If he seemed the least bit surprised I’d heard about reapers dumping donors in the badlands, he didn’t let it show. I wasn’t as sheltered as he’d tried to make me my entire life.
“The usual spot, I would imagine.”
I didn’t know how this donor had been lucky enough to get a mechanical heart. From what I’d heard, most hospitals didn’t waste them on the donors.
But in this case, the man might live long enough to see old age if he survived the badlands. Which, really, who was I kidding? Most people didn’t survive the badlands without the whole being dumped in the middle of nowhere after having the heart ripped out of their chest part.
I’d heard enough.
I had to find this man. I turned on my heel before my sire dismissed me. My intentions must have shown on my face because before I’d taken a step, he said, “You’ll never find him.”
I turned a quarter turn, too exhausted to face him fully. “Watch me.”
Marcelis
The settlement lay quiet by the time I’d packed my gear into my bag and hoisted it onto my back. I wouldn’t want to be Keon in the morning when my sire discovered I’d left.
If my sire had truly thought I’d leave, he would have posted a guard at my door. Maybe all those years of him underestimating me would pay off. All I had to do was find a place to hide on the fringe until the chancellor guard stopped looking for me. Then, I’d be free to find my donor.
I’d stuffed my pockets full of chips. They’d buy me whatever I might need on the fringe. With my physical limitations, I’d packed light, yet it felt as heavy as a camel on my back. I leaned heavier on my cane and popped one of my pain pills into my mouth.
At the door, I turned back for one last look. I had no intention of returning. I didn’t look at my room fondly, but more as a cage that I’d escaped. The day of exertion caught up with me. Since discovering the truth at the hospital, my emotions had sustained me, but now I felt drained. A bone-deep exhaustion I hadn’t felt since before my surgery.
I would rest. Later.
As I worked my way down the tower steps one by one, my shoulder already complained from supporting me on my cane all day. At the bottom, I shuffled out the side door and headed straight for Thyle’s quarters. The long ride down to the wall would give me time to gather my strength.
I found Thyle, not in his quarters, but in the cart shack, polishing the chancellor’s seat by lantern light. He startled when my shadow brushed across him. Thyle’s hand went to the blade at his hip that the chancellor forbade him to carry while working.
“It’s me,” I said.
He removed his hand from his blade and bowed his head. “I’m sorry, Your Grace.”
“Stop with the ‘your graces.’”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
I cut my eyes at him.
“Sorry.”
“I need you to take me to the wall.”
Thyle stepped back and scanned the area behind me as if he’d expected Keon or my sire to emerge from the darkness. I’d never gone to the wall before—or rather, the single opening where the Lowers and people on the fringe could come and go.
“They won’t let you out.”
Guards manned the gate, limiting who could come and go. “I will order them to open it. I am the chancellor’s spawn.” I said it as if Thyle could have forgotten my lineage in the short time since he’d called me Your Grace.
“Exactly.”
My knee buckled, and Thyle hurried over and carefully wrestled the pack off my shoulders. I got my legs underneath me again. “What does that mean?”
“You can’t go like that. Looking like—”
“Looking like what?”
“Like you .”
He must have thought I was about to collapse because he helped me to a crate against the wall near the entrance of the cart house, the one I’d often seen him sitting on when I’d look out my window at night.
I slumped against the wall, my breath coming faster than I wanted. I had to keep in mind that I was recovering. I don’t think my doctor meant I should be on my feet all day when she said I needed to get out of bed.
He leaned against the cart’s wheel across from me. “You don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?” Sitting down allowed the exhaustion to creep in and settle in my bones, and I barely had the strength to form the words. My head fell back. Why was it so heavy?
“That you aren’t allowed outside the walls.”
My head popped up. “I never went outside the walls because of my condition, not—”
Thyle’s slow shake of his head cut me off. “The chancellor has standing orders. You are not to leave the settlement.”
“Since when?”
“Since… ever? I was told this from the time I was old enough to pull a cart.”
How had I not known? How could this secret have been kept for so very long?
“If you must go, you can’t go like that. You’ll need a disguise. Your red hair will give you away. But more than a disguise, you need to heal first.”
I knew Thyle was right. “I don’t have that kind of time.”
He didn’t understand my urgency. How could he? Since I was very young, my sire taught me not to trust the ones around me. Not fully. But for some reason, Thyle had earned that trust.
Or just maybe I needed someone else to know the full story.
So I told him. I told him the whole dirty, disgusting, despicable story.
The entire time I talked, he fixed his gaze on the ground and kept shaking his head in disbelief, though if he knew my sire, he wouldn’t be that surprised. I wasn’t.
When I finished, he looked at me, and I saw pity in his eyes. It hit me in my solar plexus, and I nearly grunted at the impact. Imagine that. The cart boy pitied the chancellor’s spawn.
“That’s messed up,” he said. “But if your donor survived, he will be alive after you’ve healed and gained the strength to defend yourself. It will do neither of you any good for you to get killed within minutes of stepping beyond those walls.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
Thyle rolled his eyes, which no one had ever done to me before. It was disrespectful, but it made me smile.
“I guess that means I have much to learn about the fringe.”
“So, so much. I will help you if that is your wish. But to my eyes, you don’t have it so bad here.”
“It’s killing me. Slower than my bad heart was, but it is still killing me.”
“It’s killing us all.”
A few minutes later, we finished our conversation with a promise. I promised I would wait until I healed to go on my quest, and—when ready—Thyle promised to help me escape.
I stood and nearly crumpled to the ground. Thyle steadied me on my feet and helped me up to the tower.
“If you find your donor,” he said, his hand on the doorknob. “What do you hope to accomplish?”
Without a clear answer, I said, “I want to apologize.”
“Is that meant to make him feel better or you?”
I’d never had this deep of a conversation before. Not even with Solomon.
He helped me into my room, and I sat on the corner of my bed. “I don’t know. I just know I need to try.”