“Nate.” He shook his head, eyes big and startled. “No.”
Nate shrugged out of Reed’s grip and wiped his mouth—wiped away what he’d done. Shame seared through him, hot as a fever. What was he thinking?
“Nate,” Reed said, softer this time.
The gentleness was worse.
“It’s fine.” He took a choppy breath. “Sorry. It’s my head.” Maybe Reed would forgive him if he blamed it on getting his brain rattled.
Sparks made a big show of turning back to look at them now that the kissing had stopped. She started to say something and stopped short when a young boy and girl ran by, their shoes slapping hard against the pavement. They ran like they’d stolen something or were trying not to get stolen themselves.
Nate recalled the children playing outside—how they’d played at Breakers and GEMs.
Something shuttered inside of him. Nothing was ever going to change what he was. Now that the Breakers were bold enough to walk around in the day, it would be easier than ever for Reed to turn him in and take whatever reward the Breakers had to offer. Reed had a perfect way to keep Brick and Sparks and Pixel fed and sheltered.
And Nate was keeping that from him. From all of them.
“We need to go,” he said, gripping the wall to stand. His head went sludge-filled, and he tried not to retch.
Reed steadied him. “You need help.”
Nate fought the urge to shove him away. Embarrassment stung like a torn blister. But Reed wasn’t the one who deserved getting shoved and snapped at. “I’m fine.”
“I know a sick-den nearby.” Sparks fidgeted with her sleeve where it covered the silvery scars that mottled the inside of her arms. “Bunch of Servant weirdos, but the lady in charge let me stay as long as I needed to. I saw her helping out at the wreck. Maybe she’s got room for one more. And you’re small.”
“I’ll use the salve I got for Pix. It’s fine.” Nate sucked a breath in, teeth clenched. He’d forgotten the most important thing. “My coat! It’s in a fire bin up the street. It has all the buttons and wires in it still.”
“Don’t worry.” Reed’s hand brushed against Nate’s, and he gave him a quick, strange glance before taking him by the elbow. “We’ll find it.”
Walking amplified the sharp pulse of Nate’s headache, but it wasn’t half as bad as thinking about how stupid he’d been to kiss Reed.
“The explosion woke you up?” he asked, hoping that talking would make them look more like friends on a stroll than tired scavengers looking for stolen tech in a bin.
“It knocked me on the ground. I thought my bones were cracking open.”
“Everyone in the Withers must have heard it,” Sparks said.
“Any closer, and I would have got burned up. Hold on—it’s this one.” Nate retrieved his coat from the fire bin. A cloud of ashes rose from the wrinkled fabric. He sneezed. “How do you think the Breakers did it?”
“You ought to know, Tinkerer,” Sparks said. She walked in front of them, waving her arms and elbowing people to clear the way for Nate’s uncoordinated steps. “Isn’t that what you do?”
“That’s a different kind of tinkering.” Nate pulled his coat on and patted as much of the dirt and ash off as he could. It stuck to his palms and crusted around his fingernails. “I’ve never worked with explosives.”
“Think they’ll send more A-Vols to break up the crowd?” Sparks watched the distant Gathos City skyline like she wasn’t listening to a thing he said.
Nate stumbled with a wave of nausea. The smell of burning flesh clung to his hair. People had died, roasting in the twisted metal. He didn’t want anyone else to die today. “I hope not.”
“Wish I could have got some fancy things from that train,” she said, wistful.
“We don’t scavenge by day,” Reed said. “It’s reckless. And this was reckless enough.” When he made his voice like that—sharp and sure—he didn’t sound like another kid at all.
Sparks gave a shrug, but she lowered her chin. Even in a small gang, the order of things mattered. And Reed was in charge.
It had been reckless for Reed and Sparks to come out looking for him. Both of them had had narrow misses with trappers. Reed’s green eyes and Sparks’s silvery scars made them easy to spot. Especially in the clear light of day.
Trappers didn’t take well to being outrun.
Guilt gnawed at Nate. They’d always worked so hard to stay in the shadows.
“Wishes?” he asked. During the coldest days and nights of the last winter, Pixel had made up a game of wishes. She’d known exactly how to bring them comfort. Nate needed it now. If he didn’t stop gnawing on his own guilt, he was going to collapse in a useless heap.
“It’s not a good day for wishes,” Reed said shortly.
Nate kept up as best he could, clumsy with pain and lingering sickness from the acrid smoke. He had plenty of wishes—but right now all he wanted was a way to go back and fix the rift deepening between him and Reed.
Maybe it was already too late.
Talking had always sealed up the cracks that let fear and doubt in. He and Reed had volleyed quiet conversations through the frigid winter, through all the times when someone didn’t show up when they were supposed to and life had to carry on with a great big hole full of wondering what had happened.
They passed the dentist’s shop. She sat on the porch, waiting for someone to come by needing a tooth yanked out of their gums. A tool older than she was gleamed in her broad hands.
“We’re near Alden’s,” Nate said, realizing Reed had wisely led them on a wide, wandering path back to the hideout. “He can stitch up my head if it needs it.” Better Alden than asking the dentist to give it a go. She had kind eyes, but no one ever walked away from her store smiling.
Sparks made a face and snatched her bloody scarf out of Nate’s hand. She examined it with a frown. “What’s that sludge-puddle know about mending?”
“I’ve seen him do it.” Which wasn’t exactly the truth. But at least Alden had clean, sharp tools.
Alden had gotten chem-spooked and tried to pick up a broken glass with his bare hand. He’d stared at it, watching the blood run down his forearm. Nate had shouted at him for being foolish and sewn up his bloody flesh in thin rows. Once Alden had passed out and quit flinching, it hadn’t been much different than working with a delicate circuit board.
Reed took Nate by the chin to squint at his hairline. He sighed, his breath warm on Nate’s face. “You can’t do it with what you have?” he asked Sparks.
“Not unless you want him to look like a patchwork quilt.” She leaned in close and grimaced at Nate’s wound. “Might be an improvement.”
Nate shrugged Reed off and scowled at Sparks. “It’s up to me, you know.” He didn’t need a festering head wound further complicating his life.
“Yeah, I know.” Pain crossed Reed’s face. “I can’t stop you.”
“Can’t stop me from fixing my head up?” Frustration made Nate’s words ugly and sarcastic. Not everything was a secret. Not everything needed to be picked apart and unraveled. For once, he just needed help. Not Remedy. Not anything but a clean needle and strong thread. “Thanks.”
He stomped ahead of them, his coat spitting puffs of ash with every angry footstep. He didn’t have to turn back to know that he’d hurt Reed. Reed followed silently, close enough to catch him if he stumbled. Close enough to make Nate feel like a worm.
Near the shop, a column of black smoke from the wreck loomed over the skyline. People hovered in windows and doorways, watching it curl into dense clouds of smog.
“Is the city attacking us?” a child asked.
“They’re gonna burn us all away,” a creaking voice said.
It was Fran standing at the curb a block away from Alden’s. She wore a fine embroidered shawl and a string of black beads, like she was going
to a party.
“Fran, you should come inside.” Nate reached for her hand, anxious to get her away from Reed and Sparks. There was no telling what she’d say.
Her eyes went wide. “Oh, you’re a scrappy bird. You don’t smell like death today.”
“Alden’s mom?” Reed asked in a whisper.
“Grandmother.” Nate gave her weathered hand a gentle tug.
Sparks went to her other side and offered her arm, and Fran took it with a happy, dry laugh. She put her head on Sparks’s shoulder.
As they reached the door, Nate let go of Fran’s hand. Sparks led her inside to the sound of tinkling bells. He leaned into Reed, suddenly very tired of worrying.
The truth tickled in his throat. It would be so easy to tell Reed what he was and let Reed decide his fate. Throw him out for hiding what he was. Sell him to the Breakers. Either way, he wouldn’t have to lie anymore.
“Isn’t there somewhere else you can get mended?” Reed asked, a gentle rumble at Nate’s ear.
Nate pressed his forehead to Reed’s chest. The space between them was a snarl of wire—the kind he could usually untangle without snapping a single strand. But he couldn’t tinker his way through this knot.
“Why does it matter?”
“He’s a chem pusher, Nate.” Reed cupped the back of Nate’s neck, grip light, like he thought the touch would hurt him. “That’s what matters. I don’t care if he gives his credits away to addled old women.”
Nate sighed. “It’s safe enough here. I like Fran. Alden’s not going to hurt me.”
“Not this time around?”
Nate couldn’t look up. He’d been a starving, sick mess when he’d gone to Reed, begging for a place to stay with nothing but a handful of tools to offer in return. Alden had fed on him for so long he hadn’t been sure of the day or even the month. He couldn’t let himself think about it, not now.
Even then, Reed must have suspected him a fiend.
“Nate.” It was a soft, wistful sound. “There has to be another way.”
Alden came out, barefoot and hot as a live wire, his eyes wild and his limbs shaky. “What is this? House calls?” He stumbled into Nate and Reed and blinked like they were the ones who were at fault.
“A train crashed,” Nate said.
“Did it land on your face?” Alden pulled his robe tighter around him. “You look a fright.”
Reed scowled and drew Nate close. “He needs help.”
Alden squinted for a long, silent moment and then laughed. “Of course he does. Come inside, Natey.”
Reed’s grip tightened.
“I just got a hundred people out of a flaming train car,” Nate snapped, shrugging Reed off and pushing Alden away as he passed. He ignored the pained sound of Reed calling his name. “I can manage on my own!”
Nate slammed the door shut behind him, leaving Reed and Alden out on the sidewalk and the smoke and horror out of sight. He stumbled into the washroom and splashed cold water on his face until the water ran red, pink, clear.
The crank-light over the wash basin sputtered. His hands shook as he filled them with dingy water from the rain barrel on the roof. Charred flesh and strangled screams lingered in his throat, and it wasn’t until he sank to the floor and began to cry that he tasted anything else.
CHAPTER FIVE
Three hours later, Nate’s head still pounded. He sat on the floor in Alden’s room and massaged the bone around his ears, willing away the throbbing pain.
Alden hunched over his cluttered desk, scrawling out figures in shorthand code so complex that Nate had never figured it out. He frowned at his work, his forehead resting in one hand and lips pressed together in a tense line. His writing took up all the space in the margin of one of Fran’s dusty old storybooks.
“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” he asked without looking at Nate. “You shouldn’t stay here long.”
“I can’t go yet.” Nate frowned, unsettled by what sounded like a warning. And even stranger, like sincerity. “I don’t think I’d make it. I feel like I spent the night in a waste trench.”
Alden’s gaze snapped up. “Already?”
“No. I mean from this.” Nate ran his fingers over the tight, even stitches Alden had given him with surprising expertise after catching Nate trying to manage it himself. The pokey ends of the plasticky thread itched.
“Good.” Alden turned his attention back to the paper under his fingers.
“Everyone thinks the Breakers blew up the railway. It had to be them, right?”
“I’m working, Nate.” Alden sounded different. Tired in a way Nate couldn’t place.
It was probably from being clear-eyed after a chem-fueled morning.
Nate tried to stay quiet, but his thoughts rattled around in his head, dancing to the beat of the throbbing ache there. “Reed and Sparks saw them too. At the wreck.”
“Saw who?”
“The Breakers.”
Alden’s pen stopped moving. “Now that sounds like a tall tale.”
“Sparks said they wore fine clothes.”
“I’m told people from Gathos City wear fine clothes too.”
“No, she was sure. They had food with them. And medicine.”
“Medicine.” Alden hummed. He set his pen down and loosened his braid. “Did anyone follow you here?”
“You mean trappers?”
“I don’t.” Alden’s jaw tightened. “I mean Couriers. Breakers. But while we’re having this lovely conversation, is there anyone else you may have led to my doorstep?”
Nate ducked his chin. Something twisted in his chest, tight and sore, stung by the bite of Alden’s sharp tongue. “No.”
“Then it’s no bother.” Alden waved his hand dismissively. He closed the book and opened the lockbox beside it with a key pulled from a hidden space beneath the desk. “Let’s take care of your achy head so I can work in peace.”
He held up a small vial.
Nate shrank back. “Alden. No.”
Alden rolled his eyes. “I’m not looking to make a customer out of you. You’re not good for the money, and you smell like wet ash.”
Nate caught the vial Alden tossed with a flick of his wrist. Dark, purplish liquid swirled against the glass. “What is it, then?”
“Gathos City meds. Not the latest concoction from the Breakers, but it will make you sleep and stop your head from hurting.” He made a beckoning motion with his pale fingers. “It’s also expensive. If you’re not drinking it, I will.”
That wasn’t an idle threat. Nate recalled the jittery, bright-eyed high that Alden had been on earlier and gulped the spicy tincture down. He coughed and gasped at the tingling burn trickling from his throat to his belly.
“I thought Remedy tasted bad.” Stinging tears welled up as Nate wiped his mouth. “This tastes like gasolex.”
Alden laughed. “That’s the spirit.” He crossed the room like a dancer and sank down onto the cushions beside Nate to pry the vial out of his hand.
“You promise it wasn’t chem?” Nate asked, a thread of guilt running through him. What if he’d done exactly what Reed suspected?
“It really matters to you, doesn’t it?” Alden twirled the vial in his fingers. A crease formed between his thin eyebrows. Nate couldn’t tell if it was sadness or wonder.
“Yes.”
“I promise it isn’t chem. Real doctors in Gathos City give this to people with real headaches. I can’t say I obtained it legally, but it’s perfectly proper.” He touched Nate’s nose. “Your reputation remains spotless.”
Sheepish relief washed over Nate. Alden had done many things, had whittled Nate’s trust down to a bruised remnant, but he’d never tried to push chem on him. He’d even locked it up at night, especially early on, when Nate’s grief had made him itch to feel anything else.
Nate wiped his nose where Alden had touched and missed, poking his cheek instead. The pain dampened. And his head started floating away.
He gave Alden an accusing squint.
“I said it was medicine. I didn’t say it wasn’t strong.” Alden watched him, the corner of his mouth twitching. “Did you really do what you said? Save those people from the train?”
“I climbed up and opened doors. It’s easy for a Tinkerer.”
A soft, odd smile graced Alden’s face. He stood without a word, and as the fabric of his robe swirled beside Nate, the tincture kicked in. Nate tilted down into the bed and closed his eyes.
At thirteen, Nate had been fresh on the streets, still soft from his childhood in the city and four years of sheltered life with Bernice. He was smaller than other kids his age—and unprepared. Spooked by the sound of someone picking the lock at Bernice’s door, he’d scooped up what he could and climbed out the window and down the fire escape.
When a trapper with a belt full of leashes had chased him down a narrow alley, he’d hidden on the back stoop of a shop, cramming himself under a rain barrel platform.
Alden had opened the back door, tossed the trapper a credit, and thanked her for finding his “cousin.” Still shaking, Nate had let Alden push him over to a rusted fuse box connected to a snarl of taped-up wires running up the brick wall.
“I’ve heard of you. The little Tinkerer. You set up the alarm system at the herbalist’s on 9th.”
“How do you know that?” Nate asked, wondering for the first time if the Old Gods were real and this boy was one of them. He only looked a little older, but he spoke in the tired way adults did.
“The streets talk. I listen.”
Alden stayed very close to the door and picked at his fingernails while Nate worked. He didn’t look like anyone Nate had ever seen. He wore his hair long and his body swathed in an embroidered robe like one of the mothy old nightgowns in Bernice’s closet.
“They say you were with an old woman.”
“She’s dead now.” Nate winced as a frayed wire pricked his palm. “I fixed the stove at the herbalist’s too.”
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