by Emma Hamm
When she felt as though the school marm had given up, she skidded into an alleyway to catch her breath. Running had felt good. She hadn’t run free since they had arrived here.
Her heart was beating against her chest, her breath sawed out of her chest and her lungs felt raw. She felt alive again.
One hand pressed against her sternum as she leaned back against the metal wall. Laughter slipped out of her mouth like a hidden secret. She had done it. She had gotten away from everything that she hated so much. Luther would be so angry with her but this was the first time she had actually enjoyed being in the City.
It was so much easier to disappear here than it was anywhere else.
With a sigh, she rotated her shoulders and looked around to her bearings. She was going to have to find Luther.
The school would send word to him that she had disappeared. Again. At first, she had refused to even go to the school. She didn’t want to sit in chairs with other students and stare at boards that flashed pictures in front of her eyes. She wanted to go outside! Wasn’t that what children were supposed to do?
At least she knew where Luther was working. He was apprenticing at the hospital. Exactly where he had always wanted to be. He wanted to save lives. To make a difference in this world.
He said it was because that was where the brightest minds went. But Willow knew differently. He had wanted to go into it because he thought that someday he could go back to the mines and cure the thing that had killed their mother. He remembered her heaving cough and slow death.
Willow didn’t.
She wished he were smart enough to realize that they were never going to let him do that. The people in the City didn’t want anything to do with the miners. Once you were in the City, you were here for good. They weren’t going to be wasting any resources on people they thought were less than dirt.
Even when she mentioned it to him, he told her she didn’t know what she was talking about. A little girl couldn’t understand the politics of a City such as this.
Willow knew that if their children were treating her like this, that they were learning it from someone else. Their parents thought the same of her. That meant that the older these kids got, the more the hatred of her people would grow.
She just didn’t understand how they could look down on people they didn’t even know.
Her feet made no sound on the stairs of the hospital and she opened the door quietly so that the man at the front desk wouldn’t notice her. She had gotten into the habit of being quiet since moving here. Quiet meant that people didn’t realize she was around. Quiet meant they didn’t ask questions.
Unfortunately, she needed questions to be asked now.
“Ahem.” She cleared her throat. “Excuse me?”
The man looked up and seemed to stare at her for a moment.
“Yes?”
“I’m here to see my brother.” She said quietly.
The pen in his hand tapped against the table loudly.
“And your brother is?”
“Luther.”
“Luther who?”
“Luther Penderghast.” She responded with a sassy tone. He knew who her brother was. Willow had been here before.
His nose wrinkled slightly as his eyes traced the wild tangle of her hair. “He’s busy.”
“He’s not too busy to see me.”
“He most certainly is. I’m afraid, little girl, you’re going to have to go back to school.”
“No school today.”
The man’s head tilted to the side. “Funny. I dropped my son off at school just this morning. Sure looked like there was school. Go back before you get in more trouble.”
And then he looked back down at the desk as though nothing had happened at all.
Willow wanted to hit him. She wanted to smack her hands down on his desk like she had done to that boy at school. Maybe then he would look at her. Maybe then he would realize that she wasn’t just some little girl that didn’t understand what was going on around her. She was a person! And she was smart.
She reminded herself of that and took a deep breath. She was a smart girl. Which meant she knew that she didn’t have to go into the hospital this way. The front door was only one of the many ways for a person to get into this place.
“Thanks so much.” She gritted between teeth and turned on her heel to leave.
“To school!” The man said as though he needed to remind her where she was supposed to go.
The door closed behind her with a clang and she shook her head.
“School. Right.” She glared at the distorted reflection of herself in the metal door. “As if.”
She took off down the stairs and around the back of the hospital. Her eyes narrowed as she scanned the alleyway. There it was, the exact thing she was looking for.
A vent.
Now Willow didn’t like to lower herself to such tactics. Luther had yelled at her more than once when she had come home with grease smeared all over her. The vents were sometimes clean as a whistle. Other times they were being repaired which meant she was going to get a little dirty.
She looked down at the pristine white school uniform she was wearing and shrugged. Dirty was better in this case.
The vent was fifteen feet off the ground and was covered by a grate. That wouldn’t stop Willow in the slightest though. She clambered up onto a trash can and hoisted herself onto a fire escape. From there, it was relatively easy to balance her way across the edge of the building until she could sit on top of the vent itself.
Her hands busied themselves in her pockets until she yanked out a screwdriver. Luther didn’t know she carried it around with her, but she liked to think it was handy.
Wasn’t it coming in handy right now? Besides. She liked to have some sort of weapon on her and no one would blink twice at a screwdriver.
She made quick work of the screws holding the grate in place and then let it drop onto the alleyway. They’d fix it eventually. Until then, she was going to squeeze her little body into the vent and find her way to the place she wanted to go.
Willow had always thought she would be claustrophobic in a place like this. She was so small, and she just barely fit into it. But on her hands and knees she could travel much farther here than walking. And she had seen all sorts of adventures.
Couples fighting, babies crying, teacher’s dressing themselves in the opposite sex’s clothing. It was a wonder of secrets in here. Secrets she knew she wasn’t supposed to know, but Willow liked to know them anyways.
She scooted along until she paused at an opening in the vent. There was a hallway beneath her, full of people in white lab coats. They all carried clipboards and they all looked exactly the same to her.
She rolled her eyes and kept moving.
Everyone here always wanted to look exactly the same as the others. It was like they were afraid to stand out. No one wanted to be the person that someone looked at.
Except Willow.
She wanted to be the one that was wearing the bright colors with her tangled hair a mess around her. She insisted that Luther let her wear the jewelry she had brought from home. And when she thought he wasn’t looking, she slid beads into her hair so that they clacked when she moved.
Willow was meant to be a creature of the wild. They had locked her up in here, but they couldn’t tame her.
She paused again at another opening and stared down through the vent at the lab beneath her. Creatures she had never seen before struggled in cages. There was a bird with feathers of every color that squawked loudly. A sand cat snarled as it beat itself against the edges of the bars around it.
“What?” She whispered as she stared down at the bald spot on the man below her. He was staring at one of those damned clipboards too before he started moving in another direction. Willow turned left to follow him.
She made sure to stay quiet, but stared down again through the vent as the man knocked on a door.
“Ma’am, the delivery is here.”
“Excuse me? The delivery is supposed to be here tomorrow.”
“Well it’s here today.” He shrugged and handed her the clipboard. “Sign here please.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m supposed to be supervising the handling of these creatures.” She said. Willow wondered if she thought that tone of voice would intimidate the man. Her voice had a hint of strength, but her eyes kept flicking away from his.
Predictably, he didn’t even flinch.
“I just deliver the animals. I do what people tell me to.”
“I think it would be best if I spoke to your supervisor. This is unacceptable. I cannot take care of these creatures right now, I have other matters to attend to.”
Again the man shrugged. “We can leave ‘em out here I guess.”
Willow watched as the woman’s chest expanded slowly and then let go.
“No. No we can’t leave them out here. Fine I’ll go with you.”
What caught Willow’s attention was the way the woman stared back at the door. There was something important in there. Or at least, important to the woman.
Then she tucked the clipboard under her arm and followed the man back towards the room where the animals were still screeching loudly. Willow could hear their cries echoing through the vent.
She was supposed to go find Luther. That was her only reason for being in this vent in the first place. But the expression on the woman’s face was so intriguing. What was behind that door? Willow knew that if she jumped down from the vent, she would likely find it locked.
She loved locked doors.
Instead of finding her brother, Willow travelled along the length of the vent once more until she could peer down into the room the woman had been so interested in.
She hadn’t expected to see a man strapped down to a table there. That was boring. Men were always strapped to tables here. Women too. The hospital was not the place of healing that most people thought it was.
Willow had seen too much in her adventures to believe that.
Then she started to notice little details about the man strapped to the table that she would never have thought to see.
Yellow skin. Claws on his hands. Finely tipped ears. He was bigger than any other man she had seen before.
This was not a man. The thought popped into her head as she stared down. Her eyes grew wider as she realized she may be looking at something entirely different. Was that what the Doctor was doing here? Was he creating some sort of humanoid creature?
She had to find out. Her curiosity would never rest if she didn’t.
Against all reason, she curled her body into the small space of the vent and kicked out at the grated opening. One, two, three, she struck the flimsy metal hard until it fell with a loud clatter onto the floor.
She held her breath, certain that someone would come running.
But no one did.
After she counted to thirty, Willow poked her head from the ceiling and then leveraged herself out of the vent. She dangled by her hands for a little while before letting herself drop onto the floor.
She made far less noise than the grate did. That she was proud of.
When she turned towards the table, she realized that the creature had its face turned towards her.
“So you’re awake then.” She whispered.
Willow took a good long look at the creature. She started at his toes, noticing the long nails and the blood smeared across them. Long legs and strong muscle lines curved up and over his thighs and chest. His torso looked longer than human’s, that she could at least tell. Those deadly claws were locked down onto the table.
Finally she looked at his face, the sight of which immediately made her shake her head.
“Weird eyes.” Milky white, they tracked her movements even though they shouldn’t have been able to.
“So you’re blind huh?” She asked it. Then she snapped her fingers so that those eyes could lock onto her position a little better. “There was an old man in the mining camp who was blind. His eyes looked like yours.”
The creature didn’t respond to her. He simply breathed in and out.
It had to be a he. Willow didn’t have a lot of experience with anatomy, but even she could see that a naked creature strapped to a table had a few parts more than her and a few parts less.
“So did they make you? Or are you something else?”
Again, no response. The longer she talked, the more it seemed like it was reacting to her though. It didn’t understand her. She somehow knew that. But maybe, just maybe, it wanted to understand her.
Willow was just as skittish as the goblin boy. She stalked closer to the table and peered over the edge until just her eyes showed over the lip of the table.
“What are you?” She asked it.
A low rumble came out of the creature’s mouth. But it hadn’t sounded like a growl. It sounded like something else.
“Do you have any idea what I’m saying?”
The creature’s head turned so that it could be pointed more clearly in her direction.
“You’re pretty good at tracking me. Even without your sight.” Her brow furrowed. “Think that means you used to be able to see? You’d be better at knowing where I am if you were used to hearing footsteps.”
She stood a little straighter until her chin rested against the edge of the table. Her throat pressed against the metal, and she wondered for a second if he would be able to feel the vibrations.
“You’re not super scary though.”
It bared its teeth at her. She flinched when she saw the sharp points. “Okay maybe a little.”
One hand raised, and she slid it along the table until just the very tip of her pointer finger touched his bicep. This time it was the creature who flinched.
Willow kept her finger against his skin.
“Willow.” She said quietly. Her other hand reached out to tap against his hand and then thumped her fist hard against her chest. “Willow.”
The goblin seemed to think for a moment, and Willow repeated the movements. Again and again she said her name until the creature’s claws scratched against the table.
She fell silent then, wondering if she had overstepped the line.
But then, so quietly she almost didn’t hear it, the creature whispered, “Juo.”
Willow leaned forward. “What?”
“Juo.”
“Is that your name?” She asked excitedly. “My name is Willow.”
“Juo.”
She grinned then, leaning over the table so that she could see his face more clearly. She was an excitable child, and the idea that she had taught something to another species made her breathless. “Willow.”
Perhaps it could hear the excitement in her voice, but Willow could have sworn that she saw the creature’s mouth quirk slightly at the side.
But then it was gone, replaced with a look so fierce she squeaked and flinched backwards.
“Willow.” It said. This time it almost sounded urgent. “Willow.”
Then she heard what the creature was hearing. The heavy sound of footsteps that were walking towards the door.
Saddened that her new friend was going to be taken away from her so quickly, Willow stared at the door with wide eyes. Just when she had found someone that was as strange as her, that person had to be taken away.
She touched him gently on the cheek, her fingers leaving a warm mark in their wake. “Be safe, Juo. I’ll come back and visit.”
And then she was scrabbling back towards the vent. She toed the edge of a chair and launched herself back up into the vent.
Willow had just managed to squeeze herself far into the vent when the door opened.
“What in the world?”
The words made her freeze.
“Those damned engineers. I keep telling them that the vents are clanking and what do they do? Now they start falling apart. You’d think a
t some point they would actually fix things around here!”
The frustrated words made a smile spread across her lips until Willow thought her face would crack. Next time she would be more careful. Next time she would figure out a way to keep the grate in the vent so that she could replace it.
This time she had managed to do it without getting caught. Willow was going to keep it that way.
8
Jane and the goblins traveled for two more days. This time, they listened to her. The goblins were stricken by grief and shock. The battle had been a reminder that they did not understand the people in this land.
Jane did.
Her life had been significantly different Above. She was reminded of that every second that her feet were sinking into the sands. Though it had been a novelty to come back, she now wished for dark caves and soft blue light.
No longer did she linger in the sun with her face turned towards it. Instead, Jane remained in the tents with the goblins. They needed her presence as much as she needed theirs. Together, they became a source of comfort for each other.
Now, they had something more important to do.
“No.” Ruric’s voice travelled easily over the vast expanse of sand. “We are not doing that.”
“We have to.” She replied. “Ruric, the fastest way to get to the City is on that train. It’s only for a few hours and then we’ll be there. We have taken too long already. Simon has definitely made it to the City before us. We don’t know what they’ll do to Juo.”
“It’s not safe.”
“You didn’t have any trouble with safety when you ran into raiders and killed them all!”
His silence was answer enough to her harshly spoken words.
Jane sighed. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair. But you have to trust me. I will make certain that no one sees you.”
She watched as his face tilted towards her, those dark eyes of his still watering with lingering pain from the sun. “And if you do not return?”
“I will come back.” She said quietly. Her palm touched his cheek. “I will not leave you and your people out here. I’ll bring water.”
