Fragile Remedy

by Maria Ingrande Mora

  The door fell inward, slamming down with a sound that vibrated through Nate’s bones. He drew his knees up to shield himself and watched—stretched out and helpless—as a crowd poured into the room like ants erupting from a stirred mound. They surged over the mangled bodies of the guards Nate had seen at the door before. Juniper slithered across the floor and crawled into his bunk, shaking so hard it rattled his bones.

  A box of chem broke open and spilled across the floor. Snarling, stumbling people fell to their knees, palming the little white pills. Shoving them into their mouths and pockets.

  Fiends.

  Nate’s blood went cold. They were all chem fiends.

  And they’d found Agatha’s stash.

  A burly man grabbed Juniper and wrenched her out of the bed like she weighed nothing. She screamed, reaching for Nate, but there was nothing he could do but kick his legs out at the man. Unable to move, Nate watched the man bury his teeth in the soft skin at Juniper’s bare arm. Juniper screamed and sagged in his grip, her eyes going blank, as if someone had snipped a wire inside of her.

  “Nothing’s happening,” the man snarled, spitting her blood down his chin. He dropped her, and she crashed against the floor, her head snapping onto the hard concrete. She didn’t move.

  The fiend turned to him.

  Terror washed over Nate like icy rain. He coiled his legs up, prepared to kick and fight, but he already knew it was hopeless. The man was huge, and Nate couldn’t use his hands—let alone a weapon that might make it a fair fight.

  The man staggered at Nate and pitched forward as another fiend tackled him from behind. They rolled around on the floor, trading punches, blind to the others ransacking the room.

  No one noticed the grating on the ceiling, high above.

  The wild-eyed fiends tore open cabinets and pulled down shelves, grabbing every box and jar of chem in Agatha’s distillation room. They jostled and dented the cylinders on the still, but even crazed with want, they seemed to realize it wasn’t going to dispense what they needed, no matter how much they shook it.

  “I heard if you eat a GEM’s heart, you’ll live forever,” a woman with no teeth said.

  The man beside her turned red-rimmed eyes on Nate. “And never get sick.”

  “Think he’s one of them?”

  “Only one way to find out,” he said.

  Nate stared at the man’s nose hair. It stuck out like a thorny bush from each nostril. The last thing he was ever going to see was an ugly nose.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and tucked his chin to his chest. Now he understood the blank look in Juniper’s eyes. His mind could only hold so much fear and pain. He was starting to float, detached from the chaos in the room, as if he’d taken one of Alden’s sweet tinctures.

  A grunt sounded, and nothing else happened. No one touched him.

  He opened one eye and then the next. And then he stared. Red hair. A mess of glaring orange freckles. Strong, bloody arms.

  “Brick!”

  “Sorry we took so long.” Brick stepped on one fiend’s throat while she fought the other off.

  “We?” Nate scanned the crowd. The fiends were fighting each other. They’d ripped down one of the stacks of bunks and were tearing apart the thick mattresses, as if expecting to find more chem in the scraps of rubber inside. Most of the crowd had already left, gone back into the front room where the sounds of shattering glass and metal against concrete made ugly music.

  A few more bodies were scattered around the room, one with its head smashed in, purple-gray mush mingling with white bone and glistening blood. The poker from the furnace rested alongside the ruined flesh, iron stained with flecks of their insides.

  Nate wondered if any of this was real, if he’d died in his sleep. Maybe the stillness was a nightmare—vivid and rank with the smell of sweat and hurt.

  “Is Pixel . . .?” He couldn’t finish the question. Couldn’t bear to think that she hadn’t made it to the surface, away from this ruin.

  Brick shook the fiend off and threw her to the floor beside the man she’d choked until he’d stopped moving. The woman rolled away and curled up, groaning and clutching her head.

  “Pixel climbed right out of a drain on the street. You shoulda seen Reed’s face. He looked like he saw one of the Old Gods naked and singing about springtime.”

  Nate blinked. “But she’s okay?”

  Brick huffed a sound that must have been a laugh. Nate couldn’t tell. Her hands were bloody, but she didn’t favor anything or limp, so he doubted the blood was hers. “Sparks has her. They went up high on a roof to get away from these sludge-eating fiends.”

  Shaking and numb, Nate nodded. Every time he blinked, it was harder to keep his eyes open. “Can you get me free?”

  Warm hands touched Nate’s face. His throat. His hair.

  Nate’s ears rang.

  He forced himself to focus when his mind wanted so badly to switch off for a while.

  Kind green eyes studied him from beneath a furrowed brow.

  “Reed.” It wasn’t until that moment that Nate let himself consider how badly he’d wanted Reed to come back and how much it had hurt to walk away from him. From all of them. From what they were.

  His family.

  He choked on a low sob. “My hands hurt.”

  “Gods, what did she do to you? Hold on.”

  “Nate, I wish you’d seen it. Reed made like a fiend and got these fools to listen to him. He knows the way they talk.” Brick pulled her knife out of the sheath she wore under her shirt and started scraping at the thick plastic binding Nate to the bed. “He told them the Breakers were hiding enough chem to fly to the moon and back with. Mountains of it for the taking. Crowd got bigger than we wanted, though.”

  “Don’t worry him,” Reed said, working on Nate’s other wrist. Sweat dripped into his eyes as he glanced up at Nate as if he expected him to disappear at any moment. Brick nudged him to the side to use her knife. Reed’s breath caught, and he cupped Nate’s face. “Hang on.”

  Nate watched them, dazed. “My shoulder,” he said, his tongue thick in his mouth.

  “The trick’s getting it back in quick as you can, before you get swelled up,” Brick said. She paused, close. “Reed, he looks bad.”

  Nate couldn’t get his arms to move at all once they were free. Reed and Brick eased him onto the floor, and he watched the ceiling spin slowly. Brick lifted his arm, Reed shoved something soft into his mouth, and the world exploded. He waited for darkness to take him away from the pain, but for once, his awareness lingered. Wave after wave of hurt crashed into him. Someone rolled him over. He vomited up water and soft bread.

  “You look as bad as you did before,” Brick said. “I thought they were going to help you down here.”

  “I’m not sick.” Nate grimaced at the mess on the floor that indicated otherwise. “You about pulled my arm off my body.”

  “I didn’t pull it off; I put it back where it goes.”

  Reed eased him up, and he moved his arm gingerly, surprised to find that while it throbbed, he could move it without blacking out. Or throwing up again.

  Nate started to tell them, decisively, that this day could die in whirlpool of sludge, when he smelled smoke.

  Reed stiffened beside him. “Let’s go.”

  Flames caught the pant leg and boots of the body by the furnace, licking along the filthy fabric. Smoke curled, thick and smelly where flesh began to char and bubble.

  Nate shrugged away from Reed. He pushed up with his good arm and approached the burning body.

  “Nate!” Reed’s voice was raw. “What are you doing?”

  The heat from the flames warmed Nate’s clammy skin. He held his sore arm against his belly so it wouldn’t dangle and make the relentless throb worse.

  “Think he’s gone addled?” Brick asked.

 
; Nate ignored them. The whole room narrowed down to one thing: the poker. Long and heavy. Strong. He plucked it off the body, gaze momentarily snagging on the wreck of the man’s skull. Someone had done this—torn this man apart. For chem. For a few days—maybe a few hours—of flying.

  He lifted the poker, dodging the growing flames, and approached the still. The metal flickered with firelight. He caught his warped reflection.

  “Nate.” Reed was behind him, skirting the heat of the flames. “Nate, come on. We need to get out of here.”

  Nate opened the delicate latch and exposed the fine glass inside. His arm protested, the pain lancing down his side. He stroked the smooth surface with trembling, bloody fingers. So many intricate pieces. Priceless Gathos City tech. Tinkering beyond his comprehension.

  He thought of the young mother dragging her terrified child down the alley.

  And the body in the street, butchered.

  He thought of Reed huddled under a bed.

  And Alden crying out in his sleep.

  So many lives had already been ravaged by Agatha’s chem, by the horrors she could create with his blood, with Juniper’s, with her own. With the blood of nameless GEMs he’d never know.

  He had to fix this.

  It was his calling.

  I’m sorry, Pixel.

  He raised the heavy iron as high as he could, his shoulder screaming, blood pounding. He drove it down, shattering the glass and scattering the miniscule gears. They pinged against the metal still, cascaded across the floor, rolled into the drains. The still hulked above him, shiny and powerful. Useless now—gutted without the Diffuser at its heart.

  Nate laughed until his throat ached, kept laughing when Brick caught him around the waist and dragged him away from the machine.

  Nate fought Brick’s tight hold. “Wait!”

  Brick ignored him.

  Reed marched behind them, eyes dark as a stormy sky. “We can talk outside,” he said.

  Nate tried to elbow Brick, but his arm wouldn’t work. And his good arm still held the heavy iron poker. It dangled from his grip, the tip making an awful screech as it dragged against the concrete.

  “Brick!” Nate dropped the heavy poker so he could wave his hand at where Juniper was lying, smoke thickening in the air around her body. “Reed! You can’t leave her.”

  They both stopped in the doorway, turning to survey the hazy room where toppled bunks and crumpled bodies littered the floor. The dangling tube swung faintly, as if pushed by a gentle breeze.

  “The girl who tried to kill Pixel?” Reed asked.

  “She’s horrid, but Agatha was pretty bad to her. And Gathos City was worse. We can’t leave her down here to get burned up,” Nate said. He wasn’t sure if he really wanted to save her or ever see her again. In fact, he was certain he never wanted to hear her shattered voice again. But he couldn’t walk away knowing she’d burn alive either. “She’s still breathing, Reed. What if she wakes up and she can’t get out?”

  “Okay.” Reed sighed sharply. “No more talking about burning up.” He jogged back to Juniper and hauled her up with a wince.

  Reed’s belly wasn’t healed all the way. Nate avoided his gaze, guilt like grime on his skin.

  The body by the furnace burned. With nothing but metal and concrete around it, the fire stayed contained. The smell of cooking meat chased them through the open door.

  In the front room, every light but one was broken. Glass covered the floor, and the table Nate had rested on was turned over, one leg broken. The plants were gone. Two more bodies were in the corner, one stabbed and the other with her neck broken. They wore A-Vol patches on their sleeves.

  Brick followed his gaze. “She was buying them off. Hiring them as her muscle.”

  Grunting under Juniper’s weight, Reed started sifting through the cabinets, tearing one after another open and feeling around inside.

  “What are you doing?” Nate asked.

  “That stuff. The stuff she had to keep you alive.” Reed’s chest heaved with harsh panting. “The fiends didn’t need it. Why would they take it?”

  The realization tightened Nate’s chest. “They didn’t take it.”

  Broken jars littered the shadowed floor.

  Remedy.

  It pooled at their feet, swirling around shards and grime. “Brick, put me down.”

  “Sure about that?” she asked, easing him to his feet.

  His legs wobbled, but he managed to sink into an unsteady crouch. Grimacing, he swiped his palm through the liquid on the floor and darted his tongue at it. The taste was unmistakable, even cut with filth. Humiliation curdled in his belly as he dropped to his knees and scooped more up as best he could, cupping the liquid to his mouth and sucking it off his fingers.

  “Nate,” Reed said softly.

  Nate didn’t know how much time he was buying. Days? Weeks? The units of measurement in Alden’s manual hadn’t covered drinking spilled Remedy off of polished concrete. He choked on a quiet sob and used his sleeve to soak more up and wring it out onto his tongue.

  “Will you quit watching me?” he snarled out, hating Brick and Reed seeing him like this, scrabbling for a little more time. He’d known what he was doing when he shattered the Diffuser, but he wasn’t in a hurry to go to the stillness.

  Reed handed Juniper to Brick and crouched beside Nate. He picked up pieces of glass and set them aside, clearing another pool of spilled Remedy. “There’s a lot here.”

  Nate hunched over himself, overcome. His shoulders shook from weeping. Reed rubbed careful circles at his spine.

  “You did the right thing.”

  “When Pixel’s older . . .”

  “We’ll figure it out.” Reed took Nate’s hand and guided it back to the Remedy on the floor.

  With Reed beside him, Nate didn’t feel as wretched. The last of his pride eroded, and he pressed his lips to the floor, drawing as much as he could into his mouth.

  It spread through him, cool and soothing. Despite the pain, despite his tears, his body grew stronger. The fog in his mind faded. His legs stopped trembling.

  “We need to go, Nate. She could be back anytime.” Reed helped Nate sop up as much as he could. It was more than he’d ever had at a time—more than Alden had ever given him.

  Nate shivered at a sudden hollow feeling. The thought of Agatha returning frightened him, but there was something else. Something he was missing. He reached for Reed’s hand, and they stood together.

  “I can feel it working,” Nate said, shocked to find that he could stand easily. “I wish Juniper would wake up so she could have some too.”

  Brick tapped Juniper’s pale cheek. “She’s not waking up anytime soon. Shouldn’t I leave her here?”

  “One of the fiends tried to eat her.” Nate struggled to form the words. He wiped his eyes with his good arm. “We can’t leave her. They might come back before Agatha does.”

  He knew he shouldn’t feel protective of Juniper, but the need snagged at him anyway. The way her face had gone blank, as if she’d reached the limit of what she could endure.

  What happened to her in Gathos City?

  Reed sighed. “All right.”

  They made their way up the stairs, stepping over another body. Nate couldn’t tell if the person was dead or knocked out.

  Light rain bled down brick walls and darkened the streets. Low clouds glowed like lamps in the dying yellow light.

  Nate breathed in the scent of wet char and tangy water, clearing away the tickle of smoke in his throat. “They’re opening the gates,” he murmured.

  “For sure?” Brick’s hands twitched. “How do you know?”

  “Agatha knows. She said so. I don’t think she was lying. Everything she’s doing is to get set up here before folks from Gathos City start coming over.”

  “Won’t make a differe
nce,” Brick said. “They’ll come here, but they won’t want us there.”

  Nate nodded, pretending not to hear the hope laced through her words. He walked like he was in a dream, staring down at his wet boots and the pockmarked pavement below them.

  He couldn’t get his head around everything that had happened—the fiends, Juniper bleeding, the bodies, and the Diffuser smashed up. It felt like minutes since he’d been carried away from Alden’s, but years and years too. A lifetime. He wondered if this was what it was like to get old, full to the brim with memories like Fran and Bernice.

  They approached a gnarled fire escape. Reed set Juniper down gently between two plastic bins. She didn’t move. A thick knot bruised her forehead, and blood soaked her clothes from the bite on her arm.

  Nate startled at the sound of creaking and looked up, expecting one of the Breakers to be crawling down at them. Relief chased away the dizzying spike of fear. Sparks picked her way down the fire escape, with Pixel trailing behind her. Pixel’s skin and clothes were covered with a fine layer of plaster dust. She’d wiped her fingers through the chalky residue to draw whiskers on her face.

  “Nate!” She hopped down the last few steps and bounded into Nate, squeezing him tightly. “You got free.”

  “Wasn’t sure you’d come back out of there the way the fiends were running,” Sparks said. She wore a bandana in her hair, her curls wild and tangled, and stubble lined her jaw. Her dark eyes shone with relief as she wrapped her arms around Reed and clasped Nate on the shoulder.

  “Ow.” Nate ducked away, pain reverberating from her touch.

  Reed took her by the arm. “He’s hurt.”

  She shook Reed off and clasped Nate’s hand in a careful grip instead. “I told Reed you didn’t mean that garbage you said to the Breakers. ’Bout hating the rest of us.”

  “I didn’t think he meant it,” Reed mumbled.

  Sparks huffed a breath. “Sure.”

  They’d forgive him more readily than he deserved. Reed, so stubbornly good, would absorb the hurt Nate had caused him with the things he’d said.