And so it went/The children lost their minds
Begging for forgiveness/was such a waste of time
~ "So It Went" – The Pretty Reckless
Piltover is a firepit.
Flames bite through everything. Towers crumple and turrets crash. The Bridge splits down the middle. Blue fire ignites like lightning shot down its spine, ripping through its vertebra of bricks and breaking outward from its exoskeleton into a phoenix's wings.
The Enforcers have gone. Hundreds of them. A flock of executioners with crows' heads. Bullets slamming into bodies, throwing up showers of blood and guts. They've plugged every empty space full of lead. They've swooped with the flap-flap-flap of boots and pecked with the thunk-thunk-thunk of guns. When they scattered, they left behind a flood of meat and perforated bones. They turned the Undercity into a landscape of carcasses.
Until Jinx returned the favor.
In the alleyway: a ring of blood.
Jinx's senses are filled with it. Her breaths are a wet gurgle. Her dizzied body won't move. But her left arm holds a terrifying looseness. Wrist liquid; fingers live-wire. PowPow is a satisfying weight down her shoulderblade and the length of her arm. Its silver finish is blood-mottled, but each shot is clean and cutting and perfect.
Perfect like the lines of fire ripping the skyline to screaming shreds.
Perfect like the Enforcers popping one by one into burst blood vessels.
Perfect like the circles cycling across her face as the chamber spins.
Her periphery spins too. Somewhere to the left: Sevika. She is doubled over, braced with a forearm against the dirty brick wall. Her hair is flattened to her skull in a helmet of blood. More blood drips from the blade jutting out of her scorched mechanical arm. To her right: Silco. He stands with difficulty. His suit is dark with blood, too; shirtfront and trousers. The unscarred half of his face is flecked with it. Six inches of razor caught in his fist, fingers wrapped around the bone-handle. Blood on the gleaming metal.
At their feet: heaps of motionless bodies. Dark matter pools beneath them.
Jinx's chamber spins. Her fingers twitch on the trigger in panicky reflex.
(Oh you showed them didn't you took care of 'em like you took care of Vander and Mylo and Claggor oh look at the mess oh look at ALL THAT BLOOD—)
Voices. Voices. She can barely think for their thundering decibels.
Worse is what plays below the thunder. Soft, soft. It wheels through her emptying mind: the old merry-go-round melody.
(Dear friend across the River—)
Gasping, Jinx drops her gun. It falls with a heavy clatter. She barely hears it. The voices are massing in volume. Gathering a suffocating tension, a full-body compression squeezing itself outwards. Her mouth drops open and she lets it loose on a scream.
"I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm so sorry."
"…Jinx…"
Hands grabbing at her shoulders. She flails and screeches.
"No, please, no, no, I'm sorry—"
"Jinx."
Sturdy grip. Calluses on the fingertips; solid bones under pale skin like a bat's wings.
Silco.
Tears have melted her eyes. It's hard to focus on more than fragments of him. A body summed up into sharp angles. Long arms, hard knobs of wrists and shoulders like razorblades, blood darkening a trail up the shark-fin's crease of his trousers to the button-line of his shirt. His face is all angles too: cheekbones hollowing on a ragged inhalation, hair falling in dark slices over his forehead. His gaze is both soft-dark and inexorably bright.
"Jinx," he says. "It's okay."
"Didn't mean to. A mistake. I'm so sorry—"
She isn't talking about the gunned-down bodies. She isn't talking about the Bridge or the buildings. She can't see them. Specks of memory gather in her mind like the points of blowtorched iron nails. Pink and red and pink and Vi. Her sister and Mommy-and-Vander-Mylo-Claggor and Jinx, Jinx, just a stupid fucking jinx. A memory of blood-colored darkness and a giant fist crashing into her jaw, supernovas exploding behind her eyelids. Her whole body collapsing into itself as if hammered by the weight of the entire fucking universe.
She sways, and Silco's arms pass around her. He kneels, cradling her close. Both hands stroking along the sides of her face, thumbs smoothing through the blood-streaks to press against her temples. Jinx's chest hitches; breaths jittering. So much memory. Her body can't contain it. Any minute now, she will burst at the seams.
Curling into herself, she wails. The noise cuts bone-deep.
"Jinx, it's all right." Silco cradles her into the crook of his arm. "You did it."
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
"Shh."
He dips his head to meet her eyes. His pupils are dilated with adrenaline. Blood on both their faces; hellish emptiness between them. Then his forehead touches hers, a widening circle of warmth.
He says, "You freed us."
"F-Freed?"
"We showed them." His voice husks as the smile twists across his face. "We won."
NEWS – SUN & TOWER
OPINION COLUMN
"Birth of Zaun: A Tryst with Liberty or Tyranny" – By B. Goode
"AMIDST unprecedented scenes of chaos, Zaun drags itself from Piltover's sheltering embrace and into self-proclaimed independence within 48 hours hence. In thus achieving separation through a bloody revolution, it has made democratic governments and imperial regimes alike squirm in their spectator's seats."
"Within the walls of this new dominion, the hastily-assembled Cabinet announced the maiden framework for governance. In Zaun's streets, the mood held a breath-held sobriety, a mark of mourning for the countless fallen to their revolution. Prayer was the keynote of the hour. Members from all communities visited the Temples of Janna to offer thanksgiving for the triumphs of the past hours, and to pray for the success of the Nation in the difficult times which lie ahead."
"On the eve of 10th October, a green-and-red standard – Zaun's colors in the symbol of a dagger-winged chem-shield – was run up a flagpole at the former Piltovan government-office at Entresol. There, the First Chancellor, Silco, delivered his address to the crowds of newborn Zaunites."
"A sharp-dressed man with a scabrous temperament and a disquieting appearance – rumor abounds that he traded his left eye for a sorcerer's omniscience – the First Chancellor's true métier lies in rhetoric. He spoke to the crowds in a rasping baritone that swelled into a thunderous bellow. His speech blended acuity with hyperbole, yet what shone through was his passion for Zaun. He painted a portrait of a city savaged by Piltovan indifference; with a keen eye to the exotic, the eccentric, the earthy, his anecdotes grounded in raw realities of Zaun's streets: miners and misfits, prostitutes and paragons."
"In Piltover, he stands accused of stoking a nationalist fervor into unrepentant terrorism. Yet here the sentiment is balanced with a keen intellectualism. Zaun for Zaunites; self-determination for self-sacrifice. Zaunites, in his words, finally have a shot at both, through the boons of a modern nation-state."
"'Forward, but never forget,' he declared, to the roaring throngs."
"Time alone will tell whether these lofty goals ripen on the vine of rampant instability. Large swathes of the city remain under curfew, without electricity or gaslight. Other regions are in disorganization and disrepair. Zaun's new leadership must pull together the fraying fabric of their creation—or perish."
"For the present, denied the clasp of Piltover's guiding hand, the Underground's fate hangs in the balance, and on the thinnest of threads."
Revolution is like love.
Sometimes it brews in secret, a dark stain seeping in slow-motion beneath the surface. Other times it hits like a sidewinder, powered by a lunatic savagery within which self-doubt holds no bearing. At long last, Zaun has dealt Piltover the sidewinding kiss-off, kept secret through years of subjugation. Now the city is unfettered, free-floating.
Unstoppable.
We showed them.
We showed them all.
Silco's salvaged headquarters is a cast-iron tower between Entresol and Sumpside. The shelling has stripped away its classical clothing of masonry. Left behind is a bony physique stretching into the fog of architectural eccentricity. Yet it stands strong, a testament to inward resilience despite outward deterioration. Its angular cupola crests to the surface like a shark's fin.
The fogged-over moon, angling off the ruined skyscrapers, sets its rooftop atrium ablaze in the colors of victory.
Green, red and blue.
From the floor-to-ceiling window, Silco stares at the downtown vista. With the lights low in his office, he can see across the jewelbox of his broken cityscape. Across the river, Piltover's mirrored skyline glows—an ember softly doused.
Three months, and Jinx's magician's hat of weaponry has left Topside stupefied by the performance. Buildings sawed in half, Enforcers fallen to dismemberment, roads folded into origami wreckage, armored vehicles finger-snapped into nothingness. Topside is recovering—but not with triumph. Rather, they stagger to their feet like godlings who've stumbled on a crack in mortal pavement: stunned by their own fallibility.
Silco's lip curls.
Secrecy is tattooed into his matrix. He shares neither his setbacks nor his sorrows. But his triumph? He wants to share it with someone. No—not someone. He wants to share it with Vander. He imagines himself and Vander staring out into the cityscape, shoulder-to-shoulder, passing a cigarette between them.
Just like we used to.
Since boyhood, they'd shared personalities at opposite polarities—Silco, a sly-tongued schemer, wielding as his weapon the slow and steady grind; Vander, a blunt-forced brawler, bulldozing through obstacles with his big fists and ballistic temper. Yet their crazy dream held them fast and true. A dream built in sufferings survived, in secrets shared. A dream they'd both notched into matching scars across their knuckles, knocking them together in solemn promise—Forward, but never forgetting.
Now their crazy dream is real.
(See, old friend?)
(This is what it takes to win.)
Ordinarily, Silco is a pragmatic daredevil. Every risk taken is a calculated blueprint of cause and effect. But for the barest heartbeat, he lets himself bask in Piltover's indignity without a care for past or future—a bastion with its nose bloodied.
Small pleasures are a rarity. Yet they cannot outweigh the casualties. On Piltover's side. And on Zaun's.
Before Jinx used Fishbones to blow the Bridge to cinder, the Enforcers blazed a war-path through the Undercity. Uglier than the Day of Ash: belching gunblasts and bulldozing grenades. Rubble flew through the Promenade like a storm of frightened moths. Entresol was pocked full of holes like a galleon under cannonfire. The Lanes were left a blackened smudge, like a dog doused in kerosene and set alight. The needle on the Old Hungry clocktower ran in herky-jerky circles as its body went up in smoke.
The inferno ate the Last Drop. Flames licked up its superstructure and bit off its neon eye. Jinx knocked Piltover's pride down a peg when she pulverized the Ecliptic Vaults as payback. Hours later, the Enforcers tore through Factorywood, corpses littering the cobblestones in their wake. They lost loyal men and women. The snitch—Cath. The twin bodyguards—Zoked and Szaza. The bartender—Thieram. Martyrs who bore the mantle of Zaun to their graves.
If revolution is love, then war is business. Fiendishly complex arithmetic is applied to cost and benefit. Lose a bet, win an ally. Lose a soldier, win a nation.
Yet Silco is not immune to a rare death-spasm of sentiment. One at a time, he sees them—the gunslingers, the runners, the mechanists, the dancers, the hustlers, the clerks, the barmaids, the fast talkers, the floozies, the freaks. The purest efflux of Zaun, all of whom lived hard and loved wildly and died horribly.
They deserve more than vague epithets of remembrance. They deserve loyalty.
He takes a moment to commit their faces to memory. A grim necessity. Some barely had faces left after the blitz. Others had even less remaining to cremate or bury.
The survivors were likewise stripped down to the bones: a steep psychic toll of broken limbs, bullet-wounds, and other internal damage from the Enforcer's razings and rapes. Ran has been jittery as a coked-up hummingbird. Dustin is no longer licking walls, but pounding his head against them. Lock, though he stays moving despite his Stillwater stay, is bloodlessly pale beneath his tattoos. Sevika is subdued, her mechanical arm twisted to an exoskeleton by an Enforcers' blowback.
And Jinx?
She doesn't have any wounds, except the dark vacancy in her eyes.
A dead girl's eyes.
That's what they'd whispered on the streets, when the smoke-clouds dissipated, and the survivors came stumbling out to gauge what was gone, and what remained. They'd given Piltover a bloody nose. In reprisal, Piltover left the Undercity wrecked as a whore with a mouthful of broken teeth: empty gaps in streets once throbbing with life.
Except it cannot rob them of their base elements. Their resilience and ruthlessness. They will recover. Rebuild. Resurrect.
So will Jinx.
(If Zaun can, you can, child.)
The alternative is intolerable. It builds a lung-splintering pressure in Silco's chest. Sometimes he wonders if it is Vander's revenge from beyond the grave. Their shared dream of Zaun bursting open like an air-lock; his daughter sucked out into the vacuum, and taking all of Silco's oxygen with her.
Exhaling, Silco moves away from the window.
His bullet-pocked desk is strewn: piles of books, sheaves of folders, heaped papers with his signature. Since the Undercity has broken free of Piltover, he has set a brutal pace that has continued unabated from the dim daylight hours to the cusp of nightfall. Edicts are churned at a prodigious rate, pen uncapped by breakfast, the draft polished by dinner.
A new nation is like a heart; it must be mainlined with liquidity. Money, trade, water, gas, electricity, infrastructure. The fledgling government so far consists of nothing more than twenty post offices, a modest coterie of clerks and attorneys, a heavily-damaged army with a depleted armory, and a newly-dubbed domestic bank on two wobbling legs. There are no federal courts, no naval fleets, no aerial support.
Worse, there are thousands suffering wounds and Shimmer-withdrawals at squalid camps that are festering into disease-pits. Power blackouts have plunged large city sectors into weeks of darkness. Violent clashes periodically erupt against the enforced curfew. They have few foreign powers in their corner: Ionia, a reliable business partner that pays ready cash for the munitions from Silco's steel-mills. Bilgewater, whose top smugglers have long held a close but choleric relationship with Zaun's criminal underbelly. Noxus, who has its sights set on Piltover, and isn't above employing Zaunite mercenaries to do their dirty work.
It's the makings of a grand guignol: the colors and lights, the heady music, the spinning wheels. But they aren't quite ready yet. The tents have yet to be pitched. The performers haven't yet donned their costumes.
Until Silco cracks the whip and the show begins.
Six years, he's worked behind the scenes. He's pulled strings and twisted arms. He's dragged the Undercity, kicking and screaming, into an era of cutthroat modernity. Under Vander, it was a fractured waystation. Piltovan officials pitted the Fissurefolk against each other, using cracks of dysfunction to divide and rule. Daily life was threaded with a blanket of false bonhomie. Beneath, it was every man for himself. Trade was at a standstill. Cartels ran amok. A heavy Enforcer presence strangled economic growth.
Vander was a popular leader, but gutlessly shortsighted. He'd struck a ceasefire with the status quo, and yet fast-tracked the Undercity's decline. He'd treated the Lanes as family, and yet failed to safeguard their dreams. He'd fought for freedom, and yet traded it for illusory peace.
Silco had changed that.
Overnight, he'd staged a coup and swung the Undercity upside-down. First, he'd driven out the Enforcers (bribes, blackmail, brutality). Next, he'd united the warring gangs (chicanery, coercion, collaboration). Last, he'd culled the dead weights (disappearance, double-crossing, disaster).
The success wasn't without its cost. The Undercity existed in a moral gray-zone. Everyone was on the make and on the take. Silco was no exception. A Janus-faced subversive, his dual nature was always split between devious means and incorruptible will. He'd left the Lanes overflowing with Shimmer. Yet the profits had bullied out the gangs and paved the way for a united front. He'd cut out the middle-class middlemen. Yet the removal had struck bloodless bargains between business rivals. He'd built a fearsome reputation as Zaun's all-seeing eye. Yet he gave a sizeable slice of his profits to a citywide network—street urchins, conmen, prostitutes.
The secret of his success lay in its dichotomy. While he'd embraced the Undercity's ruthless zeitgeist, he'd also reveled in subverting it. Double-dealing, some called it. To Silco, it was simply the cost of survival in a rigged system. As the Undercity saying goes: There are fifty ways to lose a game—and fifty more to fix it.
His methods were myriad. His bottom-line was singular.
Zaun.
Too long, roadblocks had impeded his nation's growth. They'd turned Fissurefolk into a tribe of halvsies—half-dying, half-surviving, half-mediocre, half-mad. They'd become the losers of history, impotently nursing their grievances like a shot at the bar, instead of vowing: I'll fight for what's mine.
Silco had replaced the roadblocks with a runway. No handouts—but sky-high opportunity. No rules—but dreams run rampant. A thriving marketplace needs wildcards; a laissez faire economy is powered by live-wires. Under his aegis, the Undercity was transformed from a jetlagged wasteland into a jetsetters' playground.
Zaunites are not losers. They are survivors. If dealt a bad hand, they take matters into their own.
And so we have.
Today, Zaun stands as its own blood-soaked testament. Its scars run deep, but its self-dominion is indisputable. Its businessmen, bureaucrats, politicians and privateers are one and the same. The water-barons control the flow of the river reservoirs. The shipping magnates haul in trawlers of legitimate trade and smuggled goods. The gas tycoons keep a lid on the mines. The steel moguls erect the buildings. They have privatized the Undercity's most critical sectors; they, not Piltover, are the wielders of its wealth.
And they are all in Silco's pocket.
He reaches for his smoking case. A cigar is withdrawn, clipped, cupped, lit. Behind a plume of smoke, Silco broods.
Freedom, once snatched, is never surefire. Zaun is at an unsteady juncture. Its reserves are low; its vulnerabilities are high. The subsequent year will decide whether it climbs to its feet or collapses in the bilge. The air is thick with expectation—a suffocating heat-wave. The cobblestones and bricks radiate it like a furnace. His office pours fumes like an oven.
Silco endures it with iced whiskey and gritted teeth. The only true relief he wrings is in the shower. At night, he sits by the window of Jinx's room—bulletproofed—and plans, not covertly as a good little third-class citizen of Piltover, but as the First Chancellor of a nation dragged from the depths, his decrees pumping air into an enormous pair of lungs, the future constricting and expanding around him, over and over, with possibilities.
Silco's own lungs burn. His chest is strangled by too much he refuses to name.
Pressure.
It mutates the mind. Like drowning. It cracks men into monsters. Like Silco.
So be it.
Monsters spare no thought except for survival. Zaun is survival, and Silco is that monster. He refuses to let the city collapse. Everyone—from the blackguards patrolling the streets to the clerks camped out in the bomb-shelters to the scientists locked in the Shimmer labs—must play their part. He will tolerate no excuses, and forgive no failures. Victory and victimhood are separated by a razor's line. Either you get suckered, or you throw the sucker-punch.
Zaun has plenty of sucker-punches up its sleeve.
At his door, three sharp knocks. A familiar combination-code.
"Come in."
Sevika shoulders through the door. Her hair, chopped three inches shorter after getting scorched in the battle, sticks out in hedgehog spikes. A blotching of old bone bruises overlays the Shimmer veins along her jawline. From beneath the flap of her poncho, sharp metal calipers poke out. The latticework is intact; she can use her mechanized hand for daily tasks of soup-sipping and throat-slitting. But the armored surface still needs adjustment.
These aren't the obvious signs of the battle's aftershocks. Sevika is a workhorse: she shrugs off most calamities that leave lesser men dead. But lately her expression looks like she's ingested a bad batch of magic mushrooms—palely nauseated, with red-rimmed eyes.
It's insomnia, not weepiness. Sevika isn't the weepy sort. Silco can count on one hand how often he's seen her in tears—with fingers leftover.
Once was after her sister's death at the hands of Enforcers, her blood-oiled hands cradling Nandi's broken body in the morgue as it grew colder and colder. The second was at the funeral, her eyes glistening red as the Temple's rotating lanterns strobed across the tar-toned mausoleum. The next was in the aftermath of Zaun's liberation, the spotlight silvering the dampness on her cheeks as Silco took the podium, the crowd breaking into a massacre of screams.
They've had much to mourn in the past. But more still to achieve in the future.
"The chem-barons agreed to the meeting," she says.
"Where?"
"The Cathedral. Just like you predicted."
"Typical."
Smoke twirls through the semi-dark. Silco bites the cigar between scathing teeth, and strokes all ten fingers through his hair. Bloody chem-barons. In Zaun's excruciating birth, they bear witness as ugly stalwarts of the old older: flesh peddlers, black marketeers and business tycoons.
Useful for squeezing out cash and connections. Useless for virtually anything else.
They'd holed up in their strongholds during the conflict. In the aftermath, they're still spooked. Silco hasn't heard a peep from them in weeks. Now, he's cracked the whip. The summons must be obeyed. He'll lure them out, one by one. He'll put them in their place, and put them to use.
For Zaun, and its future.
"Power's still out in Entresol," Sevika says.
"Tonight's meeting will remedy that."
"Probably a blessing in the meantime. Hides the corpses."
"They're still there?"
"In heaps. I wrangled together the blackguards at Northside. They put the fresher bodies in wagons and took 'em to the cemetery. Others were dumped in communal graves. The rest were too badly decayed. We had to make a mass pyre."
"We can't have a pyre in the town square."
"What choice is there?" She shudders despite the overheated air. "We need to get rid of the smell."
Silco tips a shadowy half-smile that deepens the grooves of his mutilated cheekbone. "You've always hated rot."
She scowls. "It kills the mood."
"Or inspires a killing mood."
Her nod holds a slow-simmering anger. The chem-barons were responsible for cleaning up the Undercity after the ceasefire. They're the ones who've prolonged this mess. Silco has pantomimed indifference; giving them a long leash and letting them run amok. Except a leash can easily tighten into a noose. Now he'll see them dangle from it.
"What about southside?' Silco says. "How many Firelights eradicated?"
"The blackguards are proceeding as per your charted strategy. We've cracked open one of their strongholds. Complete takeover is scheduled for next month. But we need manpower. More boots on the ground. Right now, the troops are barely at thirty percent."
"Another matter to remedy at the meeting."
"What about Uppside?"
"What of it?"
"You said there were talks on the table."
"Tentative."
"What's that mean?"
"Means what it means."
Stymied frustration pours off Sevika. He's on a short fuse lately; by proxy, so is she. In the spirit of charity, Silco throws her a boneful of detail. "Piltover's ploy is sophistry. Ours is stubbornness."
"They still want that damn Hex crystal?"
"Hmm."
"What did you tell 'em?"
Silco exhales a murky smoke ring. "I told them to piss off."
"Bunch of bastards," Sevika agrees. The rage vibrates through her ribcage and out of her darkly-twisted lips, a mobile microcosm of Zaun's own rage. Memory of bullets striking the chests of thousands, their bodies dropping like puppets with cut strings. "They left us for dead, soon as their Enforcers stormed belowground."
"We didn't die."
"Yeah. But—"
"What?"
"We might not have had a second chance."
Silco knows Sevika's triggers like a marksman with a well-worn shotgun. He doesn't miss the tightly-screwed strain in her voice. Mortality's shadow dogging their heels.
Rather than replying, he fills out a clipboard of forms with a methodical hand. Smoke spindles from the cigar between his manicured fingers. He's had them redone a week ago, the cuticles buffed to a cold sheen. But he still remembers them cracked and peeling, with flecks of Topside gore under their rims. Running down his knuckles, glinting off the bone-handled knife in his palm.
He'd always been a dab hand with a blade. You didn't need to be the strongest to slide a knife between someone's ribs. You only needed skill and stealth. He'd gutted plenty of men. Vander was simply the most memorable. But violence has different modes; dirt was better off delegated. At the apex of the underworld, Silco seldom sullied his hands, except with the blood-money that crossed them.
That night, he was in the thick of it. No manpower; no choice.
He remembers the hot piss of dark blood each time his blade found its mark. Remembers the redlining adrenaline, and his breaths half-laughing through gritted teeth afterward. The ache in his body was indescribable. Not pain. The wrung-out relief that came from squaring overdue debts.
Too long, he'd kept to the saboteur's sidelines. He'd spun webs and woven schemes. That was his talent since boyhood: his calculating brains equalized by Vander's charismatic brawn.
Not that night.
That night, he was in the eye of madness. Another cog in his own war machine. And he belonged as much as Jinx did.
(Always a pair, weren't we, Jinx?)
(Now you sleep the bells away. I barely catch a wink.)
Silco snaps back to the moment. He licks his thumb and forefinger and extinguishes the cigar. His good eye meets Sevika through the wisping smoke.
"Second chances are do-overs," he says. "We've never had the luxury. Yet here we stand. For better or worse."
"For better or worse," Sevika agrees.
Her smile is wan, and in her face Silco sees the rotten years they've spent together. They've never held the solidarity of siblings, as he and Vander did. But they've scavenged side-by-side from the Undercity's nadir to its pinnacle. A symbiosis of eye and fist, though they've occupied no common body, of general and soldier, though they've conferred no medals, of husband and helpmate, though they've shared no vows.
Except one. A birthright of bitter defiance bred from the cradle to the grave.
Now they are Zaunites, battle-scarred and born again. Both of them facing up to reality; their dream isn't percolating in their minds or plotted on their maps anymore. It is real. It is electricity and water supply; it is turmoil and toil. It is nothing like they expected. It is every fantasy fulfilled.
Depending on how they seize it.
By the throat.
Silco unfolds to his feet. Silently cued, Sevika takes his coat from the rack and holds it up so that he can pass his arms into the sleeves. Dark serge and red silk fall over narrow bone and wiry muscle. It feels less like a uniform than a second skin.
A shadow slicing up to the water's surface.
Sevika holds the door open for him. Her usual scent of sandalwood is piqued with brightleaf tobacco. With a ration on cigarettes, she's gone back to dipping. When Silco crooks a brow, she sighs and flips open the puck from her poncho. He takes a pinchful and packs it between his lips. The taste is bittersweet and carries with it a touch of the mines from over three decades ago.
It may soon be possible, he thinks, to savor the present without scalding mouthfuls of the past. But for now, it is everywhere. Their past selves recoalescing out of the stifling air—Vander, Benzo, Lika, Nandi, Silco, Sevika.
He remembers them standing together by the quarry after dark—working their swollen hands under the trickle of tepid water from a calcified spigot. He remembers the haze of chemicals that hung in the air—their lips and eyelashes perpetually blackened with it. He remembers them jostling in line for dinner at the Soup Kitchen—the twelve-hour shift's only hot meal sloshing in their bowls and perking their moods.
And he remembers the Day of Ash.
He remembers their clandestine meetings at the Drop, their group huddled under the suspended beer kegs. He remembers the lines of Vander's face hardened with grim resolution, the sharp paleness of Silco's own finger tracing out the smuggling routes for weapons between the shipyards, Lika tinkering with bitten lip over a makeshift grenade, Sevika huddled in the corner behind a sulky cloud of cigarette smoke, Nandi brewing coffee and Benzo wisecracking to keep their spirits up, everyone else listening intently. He remembers the crowd gathered at the Bridge, a small band in the midst of rewriting the Undercity's history—or so they'd believed.
Then the Enforcers came, in brutal marching rows, more and more, and their weapons weren't enough, and the ferocity of their convictions fled as their bodies scattered like matchsticks, Lika gutted, Nandi long dead, Benzo going down in a storm of blows, Sevika snarling as she was seized by Enforcer's black-gloved hands and ripped away, her clutching fingers breaking from Silco's sleeve as he fell under stomping black boots in a pool of his own blood, Vander the strongest and silhouetted by the flames, his massive fists still swinging before Silco's world crashed into darkness.
The past weeks—full of violence and hope—have conjured those days out of memory.
But the old days are never truly gone, are they? They bleed from the past into the present. They spur you to chase down and reclaim what's rightfully yours.
Forward, but never forget.
Silco savors the grittiness of the tobacco. Then he slips the puck into his coat pocket as if it belongs to him.
Sevika glowers. "That's my last."
"I'll handroll it into a half-dozen."
"When? During the meeting?"
"Better than listening to the chem-barons' sniveling."
"Guess that means we'll be there awhile."
"Guess again."
"Yeah?" Her eyes narrow, intrigued. "Any tricks up the sleeve?"
Silco's lips twist into the terrible approximation of a smile.
"Plenty."
