Fragile Remedy

by Maria Ingrande Mora

  But Reed didn’t have faith in him.

  Why should he?

  Nate was a liar, and he was unreliable. Inconsistent. He’d done so much and tried so hard, and it didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter that they’d shared a real kiss—that maybe Reed really wanted him.

  That maybe Reed had trusted him.

  Everything would be easier if he’d never met Reed.

  But not really. No matter how bad it hurt, Reed was in his blood.

  Nate loved him.

  And Reed would never know.

  Nate hunched over in front of Alden’s shop, taking deep breaths to quell the shudder of swallowed-back tears. The windows glowed weakly from the crank-lights and candles inside.

  “Nine!”

  Straightening, Nate tried to place the familiar voice and name. It wasn’t until a skinny girl ducked into his line of sight that he recognized the name—and Val. She carried a messenger bag crafted out of black rubber and plastic ties.

  How did I miss that before?

  Val was a Courier. By street standards, she really was an old lady—an old lady Nate didn’t want to talk to tonight.

  “I’m busy.” He tried to step around her.

  “I can tell you’re busy. Look at you sweating. I didn’t figure you for a fiend.” Val dodged from side to side, effortlessly blocking his way.

  Nate lost his balance. He flailed his arms to keep from toppling over with the momentum of his heavy load. “I’m not a fiend! And if I was, I’d be somewhere better than this—or in oblivion.” He rubbed his eyes. “I wouldn’t have to think about anything.”

  “Having a bad day, kid?” She rested her hands on her hips.

  “How can you tell?” Nate asked, wiping his eyes with angry scrubs.

  “You don’t look much better than you did the last time I saw you. You’re poorly. What is it?”

  “I told you. What I have isn’t catching.”

  Val studied him as others passed, conversations a lively hum all around them. “Is that so?”

  Rattled, Nate edged toward Alden’s door. His body hurt, and his lungs ached, and he wanted badly to rest. Val let him pass this time. Watching him.

  A prickle of worry made his hands go cold.

  “How sick are you?” Val asked.

  He stared at Alden’s door, her gaze burning at his back. Someone had followed him from Alden’s back to the old hideout. And that’s why Reed had gotten hurt. He wasn’t going to get someone else hurt. “I’m not sick.” He cleared his throat and stepped away from the door, forcing his gaze to track farther down the street. “I’m tired.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  Nate whirled to face her. “I’m just trying to get . . .” It wasn’t really home, but it was all he had. “I need to sleep, that’s all.”

  “You smiled the last time I saw you,” Val said. She rubbed her hip absently, wincing. “Something’s chased your smile away.”

  “You are really nosey.”

  Val grinned. “And quick. I’ve got deliveries to make. I’ll leave you to your frowns and wherever you’re trying to get. But, Nine?”

  Nate gave up on trying to correct her. “Yes?”

  “If you want to get better, you should . . .” She hesitated and flashed him a stilted smile. “Gods watch you!”

  Before Nate could ask her what the sludge that meant, Val jogged away, limping like a fleeing child. He didn’t remember her limping before. She disappeared into the shadow of a tall building, and Nate shivered.

  Alden’s shop was still open for business and would be well into the night. Nate didn’t bother knocking. He stumbled inside to the sound of the door chimes and went straight to the side room. Alden sat at a small folding table, teaching a young girl how to inject chem.

  Nate dropped his backpack in the corner. “I need to talk to you.”

  He didn’t wait for Alden to respond before he went to the washroom in the hall and wet his face. He’d lost his tie, and his hair hung in his face like knotted rope. Too thin, too tired, and wearing livid circles under his eyes, he looked like the chem fiend Reed had always suspected him to be. He’d fit in here, wasting away with Alden.

  “My dear, my darling.” Alden slipped into the tiny washroom and squeezed behind Nate to look at him in the mirror. His arms snaked around Nate and held him close. “When you come into my shop, stomping around so fussily, it makes people nervous. If they’re nervous, they leave, and if they leave, I can’t sell anything, and if I can’t sell anything, I can’t afford to keep freeloaders sleeping on my spare bed and eating my food and using up the last of my stash of Remedy. It vexes me.”

  “Reed threw me out.” A shudder ran through him. Saying it out loud made it final.

  Nate bit his lip and squeezed his stinging eyes shut. He’d lost his family.

  “Oh my,” Alden said. “How sad.” He pulled Nate’s hair aside with one hand and kissed his ear. His lips were as cold as rain.

  Nate elbowed him away with a raw, quiet sob. “You’re flying.”

  “Very much.”

  Some chem made Alden focused and quiet, and some made him sleepy. The worst kind made him pushy and hungry like a street cat, his hands unsteady and too busy.

  When he opened his eyes, Alden stood behind him, watching him in the mirror. They made a strange pair—Alden’s pale skin and Nate’s bronze complexion, both marred with bruises and exhaustion.

  Nate scrubbed at his tears, hating the pressure in his chest, the rage and grief aching to be released. “I saw a girl I know outside.” His voice wavered. If he didn’t act like everything was fine, he was going to shatter apart. “The one I told you about from the railway. I think she’s a Courier.”

  “Was she small?” Alden clawed his fingers into Nate’s arm and met his gaze in their reflection. “Unusually nosy?”

  “You know her?”

  “Valerie,” Alden said, spitting the name out like a seed.

  “Val, yeah.”

  “Did you talk to her?” Alden grew sharp, loud. “Did she see you come here?”

  Chem often made Alden paranoid. Once, he’d screamed at Nate, accusing him of changing all the codes on the security system when he’d been too high to remember them.

  Nate searched for that same wild suspicion in Alden’s dark eyes now, and when he saw none, a chill came over him. “I don’t think so.”

  Alden released his painful grip. He glanced away and shook his head, his shoulders sharp and tense. His gaze was clear in the reflection, as if something had chased off the haze of chem.

  “Go lie down,” he said hollowly. “And stay out of the front room. Don’t let anyone else see you.”

  Nate followed him out of the washroom and sank onto the mattress on the floor. As soon as his head reached one of the tufted cushions, exhaustion weighed at his eyes.

  Alden locked up the shop early, his skeleton keys clicking and tingling. He snapped the latches shut at each window. The room grew darker with every candle Alden blew out.

  Nate rolled toward Alden when he came to sit beside him. Alden’s fingers carded into Nate’s hair absently. If anything, they still had their old habits—the comfort of routine.

  “How do you know Val?” Nate asked, murmuring. In the dark, they could tell secrets.

  “As you clearly noticed, she’s a Courier. As you may also have noticed, my business receives quite a few deliveries.”

  Nate rubbed the spot where his ribs ached with a sinking feeling. Val delivered chem. He had no reason to feel disappointed—it wasn’t like he actually knew her. But after what she’d done to help him on the rails, he’d felt an odd sort of kinship. Turns out, she wasn’t doing anything any better than Alden was.

  “Why are you worried about it?” Nate asked. Alden had always kept Nate away when deliveries came in. He’d always fi
gured the caution was a product of Alden’s abiding paranoia.

  Alden coughed out a toneless laugh. “I didn’t say I was worried, little bird. Let me be more explicit. I dislike her. I don’t like people I dislike talking to people I do like.”

  “You don’t like me.”

  Alden let out a deep sigh. “You tire me.” Without another word, he folded himself over Nate’s middle like a heavy blanket and passed out.

  Only Alden could make falling asleep a dramatic exit.

  Outside, the street rustled, silence peppered by shouts and laughter and scraps of music. Nate played with Alden’s long hair, weaving it between his fingers as he waited for sleep to catch on to the exhaustion he felt. But his mind wouldn’t quiet down.

  He stared at the boxy shadows on the walls—shelves full of jars and dusty old books from the time when the area around the shop had boomed as a colony of artists and makers. Fran told stories about it on her clear days, holding a scarf and waving it around like an actress on stage. Nate didn’t enjoy reading the few books he’d gotten his hands on, preferring to keep his fingers busy instead. But he’d known his letters by the time his parents had sent him away to live with Bernice.

  Closing his eyes, Nate stretched his memory back as far as it would go. A trembling kiss from his mother. His father’s dark hair and dark eyes and silence. A woman his mother’s age with hair shorn close like a pelt. Strong hands on his shoulders, squeezing too hard.

  Before that, it was only scraps. Feelings. Never feeling safe for long. Cold metal against his skin and words he didn’t understand. Rushing down a dark hallway in his mother’s arms. Adults yelling in another room, scaring him.

  He’d only cried to Bernice once, asking why his parents had sent him away. She’d taken him to the roof of her building, where the wind whipped her white hair around and cleared the yellow smog away.

  “See the towers?” she’d asked.

  They shone on the horizon, lights twinkling. Home. He’d nodded and scrubbed the snot off his face with his sleeve.

  “To the folk in those towers, you are not a person.” She’d spoken slowly, raising her voice over the whistle of the wind in their ears. “To them, you’re not a boy. You’re no one’s son. They made you to carve you up or bleed you dry.”

  “But Mom—”

  “Your mother made a mistake! Your father knew that. I knew that. But she wouldn’t listen to reason.”

  Nate’s breath had sucked out of his chest, as if the wind had stolen it away. And Bernice had taken him by the chin and forced him to look at her wrinkled, spotty face and her milky eyes.

  “She wanted you so badly that she went against the rules, took advantage of her position and made you with her own genes and your father’s. But the city was never going to let her keep you, so she got you away. And now you’re here. And I won’t have you crying about it. Do you understand?” she’d asked, the hard lines around her mouth softening.

  Not trusting himself to speak, he’d nodded tightly. And she’d taken him to her tiny, dusty apartment to teach him how to fix things.

  Nate slept fitfully, dreaming of falling in a motorcar, trapped in the metal as it twisted to scrap and burned. He woke pinned by Alden’s thin body. A familiar chemical smell tickled at his nose, and he squinted at the plastic blinds heated by the morning sun. The rogue spring in Alden’s bed that always seemed to find its way to Nate’s kidneys poked him reliably.

  Alden lifted his head and frowned, his face framed by wispy tangles. “Why are you here?”

  The warm morning light did nothing to mask the sickly cast to Alden’s skin or the reddish patches that would eventually become sores if he kept up without a break.

  Chem wasn’t treating him well.

  Nate arched a brow. “I find you irresistible?”

  Amusement danced across Alden’s face for a moment before his eyes went sharp. “No. Wait. You told me.” He paused a moment, squinting at Nate’s face. “Reed bounced you from the gang. Why?”

  “For being a chem fiend.”

  Alden laughed, the sound close to Fran’s dry cackle. He wasn’t much older than Nate, but too much of him was so old, wasted. “I’m surprised it took this long. You didn’t tell him the truth?”

  “How could I?”

  “Well, I certainly wouldn’t, but I’m not a tender little flower like you,” Alden said, drawing away. The robe he’d worn to bed stuck to his body in sweaty folds. He wrinkled his nose. “I must make myself respectable before the business day begins.”

  “It’s too early.” Nate squirmed toward the warmth of the slotted sunbeams from the window. He closed his eyes as Alden fussed through his morning routine.

  Nate had spent months waking like this, listening to Alden gossip about people he didn’t know or hum bits of songs he didn’t like. Watching Alden comb his hair and fasten on glittery bits of jewelry before opening a bottle and shaking out whatever cocktail of capsules and powders would get him through the day.

  This morning was different, though. Alden dressed and played with his hair and shook a few capsules out of bottles as if playing with a rattle, but he said nothing.

  “Why don’t you keep someone else around here?” Nate hated where his thoughts took him. Has Alden been alone since I left?

  “This isn’t a house of charity, Nate. Despite what you appear to think.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Alden spun in the ancient dressing chair he kept in front of his bureau. “Do you mean to insinuate that you are so very, very special that I couldn’t bear to replace you with some pale substitute?”

  “No, I—”

  “Do you think I have no friends? That I can’t find someone to warm my bed? That I haven’t?”

  “Alden—”

  “Spare me, Nate. I have a headache—and a new houseguest, it seems. Next thing we know, I’ll be running a sick-den.”

  “I’m not that sick.” Nate rose to the bait, despite knowing exactly what it was.

  Alden pointed a hairbrush at him. “You are. And that should be your problem. But you’ve made it my problem too.”

  “Then I’ll leave.”

  “Gods know what you think of me, Nate, but one thing I won’t do is send you out to the streets to die. You can die here,” he said cheerfully, “in the comfort of my home.”

  Nate gasped, the wind knocked out of him. “You’re the one who’s sick.”

  “Honesty is no affliction.” Alden’s hands dropped to his lap. He glanced up at Nate, gaze unsteady for a moment too long before he hardened his expression.

  Anger swelled in Nate, and he latched on to the comforting flash-burn. If they were going to be honest now, he had plenty to say. “I would have died here last year if I hadn’t left.”

  The pain flashing through Alden’s eyes failed to satisfy Nate the way he’d hoped.

  “I realize that,” Alden said dully.

  “How long do I have?” Nate asked, the words sounding like they came from someone else’s throat. His hands went cold, and the room lurched as if the whole building was sliding into a sinkhole.

  “Not as long as you would have had if you’d listened to me. You wasted your time, your life. Saving a thief who threw you out anyway.”

  Nate’s fingers curled into fists. He’d do it again if he had to. “Tell me!”

  Alden gestured vaguely with his hairbrush. “I only know what I’ve heard, and secondhand accounts aren’t exactly—”

  “How long?” Nate asked, hoarse and loud. Alden made it his business to know everything. He had to know.

  “I have one dose left, Nate. I’ve been rationing it.” Alden ignored Nate’s noisy sound of disbelief. “But I’m going to have to cut it more, and I don’t think we’re going to like what happens after that.”

  If Alden was evading this much, the answer couldn’t b
e good.

  “Tell me. Please,” Nate said, forcing the shaky words past the panic in his throat.

  “A month. Maybe two. But you’ll be in bad shape in a few weeks. I can keep you alive awhile, but you won’t want to be.”

  Nate ran trembling hands through his hair. “Can’t we get Remedy somewhere else?”

  “Certainly! Go to the gates of Gathos City and tell them you’re a GEM.” Alden’s jaw tightened, and his nostrils flared. “I’m sure if you ask politely, they’ll send you a batch with the next shipment of wilted lettuce.”

  “This isn’t funny!”

  “No,” Alden said, dark eyes glittering. “It’s not.”

  “Aren’t there other dealers? Anyone? I can’t be the only GEM who needs it.”

  “Do you think I haven’t exhausted every opportunity to get Remedy?” A haunted look shadowed Alden’s face. “Every avenue?”

  “Even the Breakers?”

  Spots of color appeared at Alden’s cheeks. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  Nate scrubbed his face, troubled by the roughness in Alden’s voice—the edge of fear there. It bore no argument. “Your grandmother was right,” he whispered. She’d poked him and told him he was dying.

  “Every so often. They’re tricky, grandmothers.” Alden set the brush down and came back to the bed. He held Nate, his breath warm against his hair. “Do you want to know a terrible thing?”

  “Like having a few months to live?” Nate asked, his ears ringing with muffled hysteria. He didn’t fight the narrow tug of Alden’s embrace. He barely felt it.

  “I hoped you’d stay away, that your gallant Reed would be the one to watch you die.” Alden was cold, but his hands were gentle, and they combed through Nate’s hair, over and over, as if it soothed him as much as it soothed Nate.

  “You really can’t,” Nate realized aloud. The manual had been clear about that much. He’d only last a few days if Alden tried it.

  “Can’t what?”