Scraps of Flesh: Chapter 1 (Patreon)

24 Hours Earlier:

My alarm clock woke me up at eight thirty in the morning, half an hour before my mother woke up.

As was my routine, I immediately turned off the alarm and waited with an ear open in case I heard the creaking of mom getting out of bed. Once I was satisfied that I wasn’t going to hear anything, I got outta bed.

As quietly as I could, I went under my bed and removed a shoebox that was hiding a hole in the wall. Reaching inside, I pulled out a small blocky handheld radio, which I turned on.

As per usual, the small popping noise took me by surprise, and I froze as I listened for mom waking up again despite it being far too quiet for that. Despite that, I lowered the volume until it was almost muted.

Remaining under the bed, I checked the numbers written on my arm with a pen before turning the knob to the marked frequency.

“Hello?” I whispered, pressing down the output button.

Joel’s voice came through after a few seconds, saying, “Hey, petiso. Are you working today too?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright. Come down to the house with the iron. Usual signals today.”

“Got it.”

I heard another popping sound as Joel hung up on me, so I turned off the radio and took it with me as I crawled out of bed.

Then I stood up, brushed off all the dust I really should’ve swept earlier, and got back in bed.

Thirty minutes later, which I spent staring up at the ceiling and going over my pending summer homework in my head, I heard my mom’s alarm ring through the wall, and the creaking of her moving in bed.

I closed my eyes and got comfortable, breathing deeply and trying to look asleep. Soon, I heard my door open.

There was a moment of pause, where she just stood at my doorway for a moment. I stayed still while she watched me, listening to her breathe and rub her arms the way she did when she was uncomfortable.

After a while, she walked forward before sitting at the foot of my bed and gently shaking me awake. I pretended to stir and wake at her prodding.

“Mmn,” I eloquently said.

“Morning, pichón,” she said.

She was fairly young, only thirty one years of age. Her long hair was wrapped in blue fabric from which a few black strands escaped. She was wearing her glasses, a big pajama shirt made of soft cotton fabric and sweatpants.

“Did you sleep well?” she asked in Spanish.

“Yes,” I blearily said. “You?”

“Bien, bien,” she brushed some hair off my forehead, smiling at me. She said, “I might need you to take care of yourself for the day. I had some tutoring jobs lined up for today.”

“That’s fine,” I responded. “I was planning to work at Mr. Crane’s today.”

A grimace crossed my mom’s face. “My love, you know you don’t need to work so hard, right? It’s just a summer job.”

A “summer job” I'd been working since March of the previous year. I wasn’t really sure how aware of it mom was, but she’d never asked more than a few surface questions, and she hadn’t fought me on taking the money since the first time I handed her a stack of bills.

Crane had been a big help in hiding stuff from my mom, but I thought there was some willing blindness from her part. As much as a ‘respected’ business owner swore by me, there were only so many jobs available to kids in El Santo.

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m even gonna take a magazine for when it’s slow. And John’s coming with me to keep me company.”

She smiled a bit, brushing my chubby cheek with her thumb before saying in English, “Well, breakfast isn’t going to make itself. Wanna help?”

“Sure.”

After some scrambled eggs, chocolate milk and a hug from mom before she left, I put on an oversized black hoodie, tightened my shoelaces and left to pick up my gun and my best friend.

=]O[=

John Locke had been my best friend since I was six. Our relationship had been born in equal parts due to convenience and my tendency to pick fights with bullies.

Which is to say that John, being himself, he’d attracted a lot of bullies, but conveniently we lived in the same Tower and I’d never been far away while someone tried something.

I headed down two stories and knocked on the door, not too loud but not too quiet. After a few seconds, John opened just enough to look through the crack.

He was a kid, chubby cheeked and skinny like me, but that's about where the similarities ended. He had sunken eyes with dark bags under them, grimy and pale white skin, greasy black hair and I could faintly smell him even standing a few steps away.

At a glance, I guessed that his folks still hadn’t paid the bills, and that it was around time I invited him over for a shower and a bit of laundry.

“Hey, Luke,” he said, putting a hand forward. I slid my own against his, wrists sliding back to palms and pulling back with a snap. “Where to?”

“Pricemond. He said to bring the piece,” I said. I leaned and stood on my tiptoes, trying to look over his head. “Folks still asleep?”

“Yeah. Wanna come in?”

“Sure.”

He stepped aside and walked in, leaving me to quietly close the door behind us.

We walked past the living room, which had a few trash bags set to the side of the dirty red couch.

In front of said couch was a coffee table, which had a few things on it. The bowl of soggy cereal and milk that John had just been eating out of, the spoon he’d been using, a few bags of product, a used syringe, a few bills…

“You gonna finish your breakfast?” I asked.

“Nah, I’m not hungry,” he said, walking towards his room. “You can have it if you wanna.”

“I’m good.”

His bedroom had white walls, a single bare lightbulb hanging off-center from the ceiling and was totally lacking decorations, except for a chair, a mirror on the chair and the few posters that I’d gifted him on the walls.

Buzzter Rabbit and Captain Bastion looked down at us as we went in.

His mattress was on the floor, and there was a small stack of pulp novels and comic books next to it. Careful not to make too much noise, he crouched down next to the mattress and lifted it up. I kneeled down next to him and leaned in to lift a loose floorboard. Reaching inside, I pulled out a small stack of bills and a pistol.

I put the money in my pocket, the gun by my foot, and the floorboard back in its place, letting John put the mattress back down.

I picked the gun back up as I stood and pulled back the slide with a bit of effort to double-check the round. With a grunt of approval, I re-holstered it back in the waistband of my pants, hidden under my baggy hoodie.

“Just the corner today, right?” John asked.

I shrugged, “Maybe. Will’s been doing more stuff lately.”

“Like what?”

“I dunno, he’s reading these books on economy and shit, I don’t get it.”

John snorted, started walking out of the room and towards the door. I followed after him, pausing in the middle of the living room to listen.

Snoring came from his parents’ room.

I looked at him and tilted my head towards them, “No note today?”

He turned around, hand on the doorknob, and looked in that direction. Then shook his head and opened the door.

I shrugged and followed after.

=]O[=

We got to 2204 Pricemond Avenue walking, as it was only ten blocks from our building.

On the way, we stopped by a street kiosk. I stepped up to the window while John looked through the offered pulp novels, books, newspapers and magazines on a worn wooden table in front of it.

“Mornin’, Kevin,” I said.

‘Kevin el Kioskero’ was a portly old bald man with a bushy mustache, no chin and a cheerful disposition. He’d often snuck me candy when I passed with my mom, so he was pretty much one of my favorite people in the world.

“Hola, Luquitas,” he said, smiling. “Heading off to play?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Can we have two bottles of Zest?”

“Yeah, gimme a sec,” he said, opening a fridge and pulling out two glass bottles. “Anything else?”

I looked over my shoulder and asked John, “Anything good?”

“New Captain Bastion issue,” he reported. “And… yeah, this month’s WARP.”

I turned back to Kevin, “We’ll take both.”

He smiled, asked for the money, and we parted ways.

By the time we got to Pricemond, the bottles were almost empty and we both had a different stack of pulp magazine folded and shoved into a back pocket.

2204 was the address of a vacant house in the middle of lower Sieg. Barred door, planks covering the windows from the inside, wire fence separating a modest yard that was overgrown and full of weeds, and four teenagers on its stoop.

The tallest of them, a broad-shouldered black kid named Willard Kent, frowned when he saw me and stood up. He met me on the edge of the sidewalk, not letting us step forward.

“The fuck’d you bring him for?” he asked, tilting his chin in John’s direction.

“He’s my friend,” I said. “And he helps me keep watch.”

“Yeah, right,” he scoffed, turning towards John and leaning in, “Little bitch’s gonna run as soon as a copper shows up and not say a goddamn thing.”

John stepped a bit behind me, and I covered the rest of the way, getting back in front of Will.

He looked me in the eye, and I tried to stare him back down. But as per usual, I struggled to maintain eye contact and found my eyes wandering away from his.

Eventually, he scoffed and spat through his teeth to the side. “Watch the stash, hand out. Usual signal today.”

“Got it,” I said, stepping by him and walking around the corner, nodding at my coworkers on the way. The three of them nodded back, despite giving John disdainful looks.

We stepped through a hole in the fence, then walked around to the back garden. At the corner there were three green milk crates, and leaning against the middle of the vacant’s back wall there was a rusting computer case. I walked up to it while I heard John sitting down behind me, and removed the case to find a few bags and vials of white and white-ish powders waiting inside.

I put the case back in place and walked back towards John, taking out the issue of WARP from my pocket on the way.

I sat down opposite of John and put up my feet on the third milk crate, opening the magazine. I was positioned in order to have a clear line of sight around the corner.

“He took the manhole cover again.”

“Hm?” I asked, looking over the edge of the magazine. John was looking out towards the street.

“The Captain. He must’ve taken the manhole cover again,” he explained, gesturing at the open sewer entrance in the middle of the street.

“Hah. Of course,” I chuckled. “How do you think the fiending fuck does it?”

He shrugged, “He’s got a crowbar, right?”

“You ever tried lifting one of those things? They’re heavy as fuck. No way he’s lifting these as often as he does with those skinny arms.”

John frowned, “How much does he get for those, anyways?”

My eyes drifted up as I thought, “Well, he sells to the union boys down on Chatman, right? They sell at about two seventy-five per gram, and those covers weigh about… hundred and ten kilos? Hundred fifteen?”

He shrugged.

“Well, at the lowest, that’d be… three-hundred-and-two thousand five hundred dollars,” I determined. “Rounding down for all variables.”

John snorted, “Shit, maybe I should start stealing the covers.”

“Sure, if you wanna get shanked by a dope fiend,” I deadpanned, turning my attention back to the magazine.

WARP Magazine was a monthly rag dedicated to following the exploits and discoveries of famous Cogs.

Most of the latter type followed a typical beat of ‘incredible scientific discoveries have been carried out in service of creating the perfect toaster, non-cog scientists are trying to reverse engineer it to apply the discoveries to other stuff’, but there was the occasional pondering of certain experiments’ implications in there too.

Those were my favorites. I always loved the weird way cogs built, always taking direct routes to solve problems that regular inventors had taken circuitous routes to figure out. I’d heard that cogs never went to school, because why be taught what you can figure out if you just sit down and think about it for five minutes?

I’d read that by two days after the Ferris-Malt Neurological Mutation kicked in—which could happen any time between birth and the start of puberty—a hypercognizant individual could mentally recreate human technology from the wheel to the rocket, and figure out the universe from ‘fire is hot’ to relativistic time dilation.

The articles about cog adventures were pretty great too. Expeditions outside the walls of Third York, members of House Valiant foiling plots from people that were definitely not at all connected to House Sanguine, experiments gone rogue and eventually banished or put down… it was like reading a pulp novel, but short and terrifyingly real.

And speaking of pulp-fiction, every couple of issues there were a dozen or so pages dedicated to cog-related short stories sent in by readers. That month’s WARP was one such issue, and I decided to save the best for later and start with the short stories.

I groaned when I saw the name of the first author up to bat.

“Ada Bastión again?” John asked, not looking up from his comic.

“Yeah.”

“Did she already call eyes ‘orbs’?”

“It’s the third word of the story,” I reported, sighing even as I started reading.

To call the prose purple would be an understatement that bordered on the ludicrous. No, this wasn't just purple prose, it was prose of some sort of ultra-violet shade so rare it can only be seen by pistol shrimp.

There were roughly seventeen adjectives for every noun.

And despite all that, I couldn’t put it down. The story was fascinating, and not just in how poorly it was written. It was a small story about what goes on in a madcog’s mind as they get ready for a day full of horrible Dark Science. How he’d trapped himself in the ‘role’ of a villain, like he was aware that he was a character in a story.

Despite the lackluster vocabulary, grammatical horrors and abuse of punctuation, I read it twice and was halfway through a third read when I heard a whistle from around the corner.

I looked over the magazine and found one of my coworkers, a teenager named Michael, looking at me through the fence.

He extended his pinky, ring, and middle finger out of his fist, held down to his hip, and called out, “Blue hat!”

I nodded and headed for the stash, from where I pulled two vials of dope out from under the computer case. I put the case back, then headed for another hole in the fence, this one facing the alleyway.

I stepped through, avoiding scratching my hoodie on the fence again, and started walking around and between the buildings, stuffing the vials in my hoodie’s front pocket.

The code was uncomplicated by necessity. It had to be something subtle enough that a cop with camera and wire wouldn’t be able to prove shit, while still simple enough that even the most dimwitted jackass  to ever grace the criminal underworld of Third York would get it.

So, it was gestures and a spoken description of what the buyer looked like:

The amount of fingers indicated how much product. If it started from the thumb, it was cocaine. If it started from the pinky, it was heroin. Held over his head meant I had to hand it to the buyer after a quarter of a walk around the block, held under his waist meant a half walk around the block.

As for the description, it was just opposites. Which is to say that when I got to the other side of the block, I looked around for the man with red shoes.

He was a skinny white dude, shivery and twitchy, his face covered in sores and scabs. He was trailed by two other fiends, both having all the same telltale signs of their addiction. They hung back while he took the lead and looked around, searching for me.

Red Shoes blinked when he spotted me, and I tilted my chin up to greet him, so he started walking towards me. I led him deeper into the alley, out of view.

“Hey man,” he said, sniffing and looking around nervously as he walked closer. “You, uh…”

“Did you buy it?” I asked, imitating what I’d seen Will do when he had to handle buyers. Playing coy, frowning a lot.

“Y-Yeah,” he nodded, stretching out a calloused hand.

I reached into my pocket and placed the vials there, then turned around and started walking away.

“Hey, wait!” the fiend called out, and I turned around with a flat face. “I bought f-seven!”

I frowned, then sighed and walked closer. “The message I got was three. There are three of you. I grabbed three, you get three. Period.”

I looked up, forcing me to look him in the eye, and saw the twitch and the flicker of his eyes down and to the side. Considering.

Then back to me, frowning. Decision made.

I turned my eyeline back down to his chin and sighed, getting ready as he moved.

“Listen here, you little–!” he started, putting the vials in one fist and reaching out with the other hand.

Fast as a whip thanks to daily multi-hour practice sessions, I pulled out my pistol from under my hoodie, pulling back the hammer as I raised it to aim it directly at his head..

It took him a second to react, still moving to cross the distance before his fried brain recognized the object in my grip.

He stopped, eyes centering on the gun, then he looked up at me, expression incredulous. Which makes sense, kids my age are rare in the game, and we usually didn’t get put in anything besides looking out for cops.

He must’ve expected me to be an easy target.

I pulled back the hammer and in a very calm tone of voice, I told him, “You should go while you can, before I take the vials and some more.”

Red Shoes swallowed nervously, stepped back, then quickly turned around and left.

I kept the gun trained on him until he was away, before putting the hammer back forward and breathing out a sigh of relief.

I took a moment to breathe, despite the rotting stench of the garbage around me.

I’d stopped being scared of fiends around the same time that Crane showed me what he did to the last one that tried to punk me, but it was still an uncomfortable experience to have an adult lumbering towards you with intent to do harm.

I put the gun back down the back of my pants and started walking back.

I’d never killed anyone with that gun. In fact, I’d only ever fired it for practice against glass bottles, down by the shitty part of Hamilton Park.

Usually kids that wanted to join the Blackfish had to kill someone for the Fish. Gangs affiliated with them, even loosely, tended to adopt the same approach.

(And as for the ones that asked to join but couldn’t kill… well, it’s not like loose ends could be allowed.)

I’d gotten past all that business because of Mr. Crane. After I asked for a job and proved myself, he swore by me and said that he’d taken care of the initiation. People didn’t question him, since apparently he’d been important at some point, and I got handed out to a gang of social climbers that regularly and faithfully bought from the Blackfish.

I was in deep debt to Crane for it.

He said I could pay him back by letting him date my mom.

I would continue to be in deep debt to Crane for it.

I got back to the yard and barely had time to sit back down when Michael showed up again, two fingers starting from the pinky raised over his head, and he called out, “Black shorts!”

Groaning, I went to grab two vials and look for a tall white guy.

That was most of my morning. Life didn’t start getting weird until the midday sun started bearing down on us from above.

=]O[=

An argument had been brewing from the front of the vacant. One that John and I had studiously been ignoring for a while.

The gang consisted of four people, not counting me and John, who wasn’t really a part of the gang but he was definitely around enough that he could be counted as gang-adjacent.

There was Will, who was the one that actually contacted the Blackfish. He became something like a leader at sixteen through being the one actually willing to interact with the adult gangsters.

And he… Well, I was pretty sure he hated me.

Upon looking back on it, it wasn’t hard to realize he probably held some resentment.

He adored the Blackfish, he longed for the respect and fear gained through membership. So he put in the work. He scrapped and scraped until he could buy from them, and then he did so over and over, looking to make them money, looking to do favors for them.

And then there was me. Random kid, didn’t do more than the job given, but I was given a spot on his gang—a gang made up of lifelong friends—because I asked someone important?

Of course he hated me, I got there through nepotism while he held up five stores to get enough money for the first package from the Blackfish.

Still, my relationship with the other three wasn’t so bad.

Michael was the youngest beside me, at only thirteen. While his brain was mostly focused on girls, having been hit hard by the semi truck of puberty, he was always nice to me.

This kindness mostly came in the form of advice about what ‘bitches’ liked. I was fairly confident that if I repeated any of the advice he gave me in front of my mom, she’d kick my ass until next week, but I’d been taught not to contradict people unless I wanted to make them mad.

Then there were the twins, Marcos and Joel (pronounced Hoh-el under pain of being kicked in the privates). Apparently they’d immigrated with my mom’s group from South America, though they came from the city-state of Puente Alto.

They mostly just treated me as a gofer, but they helped me practice my aim and bought me ice cream after the first time a fiend punked me, so I was cool with them. At fifteen, they were close to Will, and they tended to follow his orders without hesitation.

As any good sons of Santo Ataúd, we all argued as a hobby. I myself had participated in a few. But there was a cadence to the argument currently leaking in from the front that indicated that I should stay out of it.

And then I heard my name, muffled by distance.

I looked up from the magazine, just in time to hear how the conversation slowed down.

Then, still muffled, I heard my name repeated with a questioning tilt.

Then my name again.

Some more silence.

Footsteps, and then Will turned the corner, snapping his fingers at me as he walked over. “Luke! Get up, I got a job for you.”

I blinked, but I stood up, folded the issue and stuck it in my back pocket. I walked over, nodding upwards. “‘Sup?”

“Need you to do a delivery,” he said, ducking through the hole in the fence and walking over to the stash.

“A delivery?” I repeated. “We a pizza place now?”

“It’s a new idea, smartass,” he said, going for the stash. As he kneeled down and moved the case out of the way, he explained, “Joel’s seeing this bitch from uptown Sieg, and she wants to buy, but…”

“She’d get mugged the second she stepped lower than five-oh-eight?” I joked. It was a recurring joke that Joel only ever seemed to date uptown girls, inexplicably.

Will snorted, looking up to smirk at me before turning his attention back to the stash, grabbing three eight balls of cocaine and handing them to me.

I stuffed it in my pocket as he hid the stash again and looked at me, saying, “None of us wanna go, but we figure you’re still short enough to keep cops off your ass.”

“Why can’t Joel go? It’s his girlfriend.”

“‘Cause I don’t fuckin’ wanna!” Joel shouted over.

I grimaced a bit, then tried another approach. “Who’s gonna hand out when I’m gone?”

Will worked his jaw a moment, then turned towards John. “Yo! White shadow!”

John looked up, as if he hadn’t been looking at us out of the corner of his eye.

“You know the code?” Will asked.

John nodded.

“You’re on handouts,” he decided. “I’ll give you Luke’s cut for every sale he’s not there for.”

John blinked, before nodding and smiling a bit.

I grimaced. I wasn’t loving the idea of missing out on money, or of John getting more involved with the gang. Mom had said that any responsible person would keep others away from the gangs, and she also said that I should look out for my friends.

Still, she’d also said not to preach what I don’t practice, so what could I say?

Will turned back to me, and I realized my fate was sealed.

“What’s the address?” I sighed.

Will smirked.

=]O[=

“Ugh,” I muttered, looking out of the train to see the quality and shape of the buildings change. Residential towers, cheap apartment buildings and other such sights traded for skyscrapers, office buildings, and a cornucopia of overpriced coffee shops and restaurants.

A lot of used book exchanges, though…

Maybe I would swing by one on the way out. My collection could use some padding.

I got off at one of the latest stations, then hailed a cab.

The driver gave me a weird look when I told him to take me to the suburbs, but a flash of the money that I’d grabbed that morning was enough to get him to drive on without further comment.

After a little while, we got out of the city and closer to the Wall, until we reached the security booth, and the iron gates that covered from concrete column to column.

Atop said concrete were security measures. I swallowed nervously upon seeing them.

The devices had three parts. The tank, the gun, and the camera.

The tank was a thick brass cylinder containing the bare essentials of maintained life: Lungs, a heart, a digestive system and what could just barely be called a brain. All grown in vats and carefully connected in an assembly line.

The tank had a small hatch through which some maintenance schmuck could throw in kibble-fuel, discrete vents through which it breathed, and no way to toss out waste because it had been designed to use every bit of what it ate, and kibble-fuel was nothing but nutrients.

Atop it was the camera. Nothing much to say there, it was just a typical camera connected through wires made of nerves and copper to the half brain inside the tank.  Its scope extended a bit, looking inside the car after we parked.

And finally, there was the gun. A small turret of some kind, loaded with was supposed to be and hopefully really was non-lethal ammunition. There were a lot of rumors about people dying trying to get inside, though.

This all added up to a bit of cogtech called an autoturret. It was designed to shoot anyone that didn’t belong, and it automatically would if the taxi driver got any closer.

The only reason it wouldn’t would be that the private cop getting out of the security booth pressed a button on his clicker and the autoturret would get a small zap indicating that we should be an exception to the omnicidal policy.

I watched the nearest turret with tension while the driver casually lowered the window and nodded at the private cop.

“Reason for coming in?”

“Bringing in the kid,” the driver said. I turned to look at the guard, who was giving me a skeptical look.

“... I’m here to meet a friend,” I said, having prepared a lie for this on the way over. “My mom works for her dad.”

The private cop looked at the driver with skepticism.

I could only see the back of the driver’s head, but I saw him look to the side as his arm bent and raised, until I saw a small fold of cash being offered.

The cop worked his jaw for a moment, before rolling his eyes and pulling out the clicker with one hand as he grabbed the bribe with the other.

“Whatever,” he muttered, pressing two buttons. The autoturret lost interest in us, and the gate rolled open.

As he drove forward, the driver said, “I’m adding that to your pay.”

“Fair enough,” I muttered, transfixed by the inside of the gated community.

Despite my earlier joke with Will, the truth was that I’d never crossed five-oh-eighth either.

My home neighborhood of El Santo José, nicknamed by the locals as El Santo Ataúd, covered over half of downtown Siegfried, next to Villa Tres-Doce-Once, which covered the rest. Both neighborhoods were populated in large part by one mass migration from many parts of South America, after the nuclear winter had started expanding.

Mine was the kind of neighborhood where the kids played on the street, though not because it was particularly safe. Because of this and my job, I’d been able to explore a lot of it. I could safely say that I had no problem moving in my little corner of Third York.

But I’d never been outside of it. And now I was so far North that I could see the city wall.

Seeing the enormous space and the oversized houses, with verdant gardens and two cars each… My eyes were wide and my head was on a swivel as I looked around, trying to process this strange glimmering facet of my city.

“... it’s something, huh?” the driver asked.

“Yeah…” I agreed. “I… I knew we weren’t doing great, but…”

The driver did something between a scoff and a chuckle. “Yeah, you don’t really get it until you see how good it can be, right?”

“Yeah.”

I pressed my nose up against the glass, watching the cars and the houses and the gardens and how much wider the sky felt without tall buildings around.

“... I’m guessing you’re from El Santo, right?” the driver asked.

“... yeah,” I said, turning to look at him through the rearview mirror. “How’d you know?”

“Mm, I had a hunch. See a lotta people when you drive a cab,” he said, a smile in his tone. “Want some advice, kid? This whole place? This is what it’s all about.”

I blinked, looking around again. “Everything?”

“Every single thing is about this,” he confirmed, nodding. “What you do, how you do, everything. This is the prize at the end of the road, you feel me? This is what you put the hours in for.”

I saw a family having a barbecue on their front lawn, and I imagined how happy mom would be if she were in their position.

I had a vague idea of my own future; I knew that mom wanted me to grow up and be happy. I figured that’d be easier with a huge house, green lawn and a couple cars.

“That’s what you keep in mind,” he told me. “When life’s hard, when the job is shit… think about this.”

“Is that what you do?”

“Yup. Right now, I just drive a cab. But a friend and I are collaborating. As soon as we figure out the right business, we’ll go at it together and get stupid fu–fudging rich.”

“You should sell drugs,” I suggested. “There’s a lot of money in that.”

I saw him blink through the mirror. He half-turned to look at me, then focused back on the road.

After a moment of silence, he started chuckling, before outright laughing. “Yeah! Yeah, maybe I should.”

I was a bit confused at his reaction, since I hadn’t meant that as a joke, but whatever.

Soon enough, he stopped in front of the correct house, so I paid him his dues plus a bit more (for the bribe and the service) and left his cab.

It was a short walk up a cobblestone path to get to the front door. I stood on my tiptoes to reach the bell, then pressed it for a couple seconds before letting go, mostly for the novelty. It was the first time I saw a bell that wasn’t jury-rigged from loose wires and miscellaneous bits of technology.

Grandpa Walt’s own bell sparked when it rained.

There was enough of a wait that I contemplated ringing the bell again, but then I heard footsteps approaching.

I stepped back as the door opened and I came face-to-face with a blonde teenage girl. Her hair was long, curly and tied back in a ponytail. She was wearing a loose white shirt with a short bottom that didn’t cover her pierced belly button and long sleeves that reached up to her knuckles.

“Um,” she said, upon seeing an expressionless latino kid appear on her doorstep. “Hi?”

“Hey, um… are you Joel’s girlfriend?” I asked.

“Oh. Oh! You’re here with the stuff?”

I had a sudden feeling that I was talking to someone wearing a wire. But I dismissed the notion on account that I could see her belly, so I just assumed people from uptown were like this.

“Yes. The stuff,” I said. “Do you have the money?”

“Yeah, I…” she drifted off as she patted her pockets, before hissing out, “Shit!”

She patted herself down a bit more then gave me an apologetic smile, “Sorry, I left my money upstairs. Can you wait five seconds while I go get it?”

“I mean…” I said, looking around skeptically. “I don’ mind, but if I hang out here much longer, your neighbors might talk.”

She bit her lower lip and looked around, before nodding. “Okay, come inside.”

“... ¿Perdón?”

“Come in!” she repeated, a bit more urgently as she actually put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me closer.

I squirmed out of her grip, heading in by my own volition. When I stopped frowning at her long enough to look around, I was awestruck.

It was like someone had taken the abstract concept of wealth and turned it into a location. The walls were tall and mostly white, decorated with large paintings, pictures and shelves full of books that had clearly not been moved in a long time, if the dust crammed in the spots hard to brush were any indication.

Ahead of me was an area that was a bit lower than the rest of the floor. It had two couches and a pair of armchairs all arranged in a circle, with a pretty large flatscreen television hung on the wall. Until that day, I’d only seen flatscreens in publicity.

To my right was an actual goddamn fireplace, made of brick and everything, though it’d been painted white to match the wallpaper.

Also to the right but next to the social pit was a set of stairs, made up of thick wooden steps coming from the wall with a glass handrail leading up to the second floor.

To my left was a kitchen, which interrupted the pattern of the floor tiles on the rest of the house to a chess pattern. There was an island in the middle of the kitchen with a marble counter, which had on it a bowl of fruit and a few bottles of wine.

Everything was practically shining from cleanliness, and the amounts of white almost gave a headache with how the light bounced around.

It was an incredibly gaudy place.

The wallpaper, the furniture and the floor tiles all had chintz patterns covering them, which clashed terribly with the stairs. Using books purely as decoration also rankles, and I haven’t even mentioned how distant everything was from everything else. The house’s own size only served to show how incredibly empty it was when filled by just one family. Plus they had the lights on in the middle of the day, the lunatics.

But I was nine, so I just thought something dumb like ‘jinkies, this is the biggest, cleanest house I’ve ever been in!’.

Because when you’re nine, you’re stupid.

“Heh, Joel was like that the first time he came over,” she chuckled. “My crib’s fuckin’ tight, right?”

I grimaced a little at the affected ‘urban’ tone, but didn’t say anything except, “Where should I wait?”

“Oh, just… sit down on a couch. You want a snack, lil’ homie?”

“Um… sure?”

“Okay, I think we have something around here, go chill.”

I took a seat in one of the couches, the one facing the stairs, and tried not to startle when I sank far more than I expected on the soft couch.

Joel’s girlfriend smiled at me as she walked over to the kitchen and started rummaging around.

I watched her go, then stared forward, trying not to get anything dirty.

Seeing movement out of the corner of my eye, I whirled around and found what looked to be a younger version of Joel’s girlfriend hurriedly coming down the stairs, going down as fast as she could without making a sound.

She was very similar to Joel’s girlfriend, except she had much shorter hair — only coming down to the top of her neck — and a mole on the right side of her upper lip.

When she got to the bottom, she looked over towards the kitchen before turning to look at me.

She blinked, confused, and I raised an eyebrow, also confused.

She put her finger to her lips then ran around and started wriggling into the space between the couch and the wall.

I stood up a bit to look down at her. She looked up and repeated the shushing gesture.

I blinked a bit, then sat back down, thinking, Rich people are weird.

Soon enough, Joel’s girlfriend came back with a small bowl of Japanese peanuts, gave me another smile and the bowl, then calmly went up the stairs.

Before she had finished stepping on the second floor, the tinier blonde crawled out from behind the couch, leaned over to make sure her sister(?) wouldn’t see her, then she turned to look at me.

“... you don’t look like a drug dealer.”

“If I looked like one I’d get caught,” I pointed out.

“Oh, that makes sense,” she nodded. “‘Cause you do crimes and stuff, right?”

That feeling of being on a wire came back. Since I couldn’t see her belly, I kept my mouth closed tight and frowned.

She ignored me and walked around to sit next to me. A little close, so I shuffled closer to the armrest and away from her.

She shuffled closer, body turned towards me and leaning over. “What is it like?”

“... why do you wanna know?” I asked.

She blushed a little, tossing a look up the stairs, before leaning even closer and whispering, “I… I asked Gwen if I could be at her party tonight, and she said I couldn’t because it’s all criminales and I wouldn’t get it.”

My expression immediately soured. It seemed like ‘Gwen’ was what Mr. Crane had described as ‘a tourist’. People that dropped into our lifestyle to experience the most glamorous aspects and feel bad about the least glamorous without any of the dedication or consequences that we dealt with.

He’d expressed a lot of disdain for them and for the younger generation that indulged them in romanticizing the ‘lifestyle’.

Though the terms he’d employed were more along the lines of ‘fucking hated’, ‘tourist jackasses’ and ‘upstart fuckwit wannabes’.

Crane’s attitude towards the game was simple, effective, and something I could quote verbatim.

Which I did.

“... it’s a job,” I said, trying to imitate Crane’s tone. The girl blinked at the severity of my tone. “Okay,? It’s a f-fuckin’ job.”

I still hesitated to cuss, under fear of chancla from mamá. But I continued.

“You wake up, you go to the place, you sell or you shoot or you do whatever, you go home and do whatever,” I said. “It’s not a lifestyle, it’s not a party, it’s a job. You got bosses, coworkers, clients, everything else.”

“Then… Why does Gwen brag about it?” she questioned.

“Because she thinks fuckin’ up is cool, I dunno!” I said, alarmed to have been taken away from the comfort of quoting someone else. “Look… your sister just tried to talk ‘street’ at me ‘cause she wants to impress a nine-year-old kid. If you think that’s cool, that’s on you. But maybe you should just try to be cool without pretending you’re from my side of Sieg.”

She blinked a bit, before leaning back into the sofa — which I was pretty sure was slowly eating us going by the way we kept sinking into it — and staring forward for a while.

“Huh,” she said.

“... Mm,” I replied, also looking forward.

We sat like that for a while, just staring forward while Gwen could be faintly heard moving stuff around in her room. The mind boggled at how disorderly a room had to be for you to struggle to find enough money for three eight balls of coke.

At the cost we sold it to her, that was like NINE hundred dollars.

Obviously we usually sold it much cheaper, since cocaine is the one drug enjoyed by poor and rich people alike, but apparently she’d agreed to buy it for more, as a way to support her boyfriend.

“... are you really nine?” the girl suddenly asked, looking at me.

“Yeah.”

“Huh,” she said again. “... do you wanna be friends?”

I blinked, then looked at her, “Huh? Why?”

“I dunno, you seem cool.”

“I just said–”

“Not like that!” she said, smiling a bit. “You just… seem nice.”

“Oh,” I said.

It had been a while since I’d heard something nice from someone outside the game. I kinda liked it.

For a while there, I’d been afraid that I’d never be able to meet someone normal. If she wanted to be around me…

“Yeah, okay,” I said, forcing a small smile that mom had assured me wasn’t that creepy. “Um… do you like pulp-fiction? A-And… What's your name?”

“I’ve never read any,” she said, which fired up every neuron in my nerd brain, barely letting me catch it when she said, “And my name’s Annabeth.”

“Okay, whatever, I’m about to change your life,” I said, suddenly very excited. “Pulp-fiction is basically the best thing ever and I’m going to tell you why:

“It basically started in 1896, right? There used to be these things called penny dreadfuls and dime novels that were just like cheap books that a lot of people could buy. When the printing press got all popular and stuff, this guy Frank Munsey started publishing Argosy, which had no images at all — even on the cover — and that got really popular.

“So then all these people started copying, and pulp magazines started having color covers after The Popular Magazine came out, which was the second one.

“The makers of that one also introduced magazines that specialized in certain genres, so you had pulp magazines that always gave horror stories and ones that always had adventures. And since now there was more people that could read, more people were buyin’ it, right? It became a huge industry, and it was really popular from the twenties to the forties, right?

“But during the forties it started getting less popular ‘cause there was a shortage of paper ‘cause world war two or whatever, and since more gay people were writing with it people got mad and it started dying out.

“By the fifties the industry almost died out, but then cogs started appearing, right? So there was a small boom of stories about madcogs, but then things got really crazy when world war three started happening.

“There wasn’t a shortage anymore because everyone figured out how to make stuff in vats, right? But most of the paper was going to newspapers so people knew what was going on. Well, when NYC got bombed and everyone evacuated just for half the state to get walled off, tensions were high. People were stressed, everyone was angry, and life was sh-shit, right?

“So, while a couple local cogs figured out how to make the state independent, this lady Karen Street got some excess paper that wasn’t getting used since all the contact was gone, made a printing press with some loose stuff she scavenged from some parts of NYC that weren’t that toxic.

“She started publishing and handing out for free. It got popular, people started submitting stories. People got pissed she wasn’t publishing the ones she didn’t like, they made another printing press, soon enough it was a huge industry.

“Then the old gov came back and said that we were on our own. Well, we already were, but now we were officially on our own, and this caused a huge mess, no? ‘Cause now there had to be an actual government instead of a couple dudes that knew stuff.

“So these different pulp magazines got political — more political, actually — and started supporting these guys, or those guys. And when the Council of Houses started, the magazines in favor of them started publishing stories with cogs from the houses goin’ on adventures.

“Like Captain Bastion?” she asked, and my excitement quadrupled at seeing her engaged with my increasingly deranged rant about the history of pulp-fiction.

“Exactly! Some people say that the magazines helped the Council to win the civil war.”

“Cool!” Annabeth said, eyes wide and interested. Then she blinked and tilted her head, “Why do you know so much about pulp-magazines?”

“I read a couple books on their history,” I said, shrugging. “I dunno, I just like them.”

A few years later, I would learn that what I had just done was called ‘infodumping’, and was one of the things that marked me as someone with Asperger’s.

At the time, I and everyone in my life just thought that I was very into a limited amount of topics.

I was about to talk some more, my throat slightly and pleasantly aching from having talked a lot and very fast with vocal chords unused to the exercise, when I heard someone clearing their throat.

Turning back around (when had I turned my entire body and one knee towards Annabeth?) I found Gwen looking at us, a faint smile on her lips.

“I got the money,” she said, lifting up a roll of crumpled bills. “I can come back later, if you’re busy rantin’ about magazines?”

I cleared my throat, ears feeling extremely hot as I stood up and walked closer, taking the money. “Um, thanks, I’ll… I’ll just go–”

“Do you have to?” Annabeth asked.

“Um…” I said, because I was pretty sure that explaining that I wanted to leave so her sister couldn’t look at me anymore was a bad answer.

“I can drop you off when I pick up Joel,” Gwen said, making me a bit annoyed that he’d sent me even though he was going to meet up with her anyway. What a dick. “I’ll give him a call and ask if it’s okay, if it makes you feel better?”

“... please?”

She smiled and said, “I’ll get right on that.”

She went back upstairs, and I sat back down, still a bit embarrassed to have been caught ranting by someone uninterested.

“I like medicine,” said Annabeth, unprompted.

I looked at her, confused.

“Medicine,” she repeated. “I just– I think it’s really cool how our bodies are like these machines made of meats and juices and poop, and how we can think and learn how they work, and that when these machines break we can repair ourselves. Like, if we were machines we would be Dark Science!”

I blinked, eyes wide, “I never thought of it that way!”

“I know, right?! I blew my own mind when I figured it out,” she said, grinning proudly. “And like, the ways we can put ourselves together is so cool! After vat-grown organs were figured out…”

We spent a good couple hours like that, talking about all the stuff we liked.

As it turns out, Annabeth wasn’t what you’d call neurotypical either.

=]O[=

A few hours later, with the sun already caught at the edge of the Wall, I found myself standing back in the backyard of the vacant building on Pricemond Ave.

After chewing me out and ordering me to stay behind while John gave me back my gun and went home, Will explained that he was going to give me a second chance. A way to get back into his good graces after spending all day screwing around with ‘some suburban bitches’, ignoring my pointing out that he’d allowed it.

He told me someone had pissed off a high-ranking member of the Blackfish.

He ordered me to kill him.