I see the world through eyes covered in ink and bleach
Cross out the ones who heard my cries and watched me weep.

~ "Cradles" – Sub Urban

By midnight, Silco rises homeward in the elevator.

His suite is in the same building as his new headquarters. The tower was once a lodging-house for middle-class families. Its construction began with a fanfare of Piltovan philanthropy fifteen years ago. Midway, it stopped due to stymied funds. Typical. Topside was happy to demolish a faulty factory or a teeming tenement. But a replacement was seldom put up in its place.

Amputation was cheaper than cure.

It was an old song and dance. The Undercity's anatomy would flare up with infection. Septic sewage; fire hazards; overcrowding. The Council would shrug—Screw it. The poors will tough it out. Then crisis erupted. Cholera, conflagration, collapse. When the story hit Piltover's press, finger pointing commenced. Lazy muckrakers. Do they enjoy living in squalor? The pedigrees, exempted from such vulgarities as suffering, would toss loose change with a snobby noblesse oblige. At Bridgeside, they would speechify for the charitable optics. A memorial would be erected: bearing the name of its patron, never the victims.

Then Piltover would wash its hands of the mess, and move on.

Silco's headquarters are different. Everything has been renovated on his own dime. The interior is burnished to a cold sheen: floor, walls, hallways. In the absence of the electrical grid, they'd been running on generators. He'd ordered the unoccupied floors powered off—except for the basement with Singed's lab, the offices on the twentieth floor, and the rooftop atrium.

His and Jinx's suite.

Silco crosses a claustrophobically clean corridor. At the door, he lets himself in with his key. No blackguards here. The entire floor is already patrolled by them. Their presence at the threshold of his most private space strikes Silco as… unnatural. Something civically stuffy that he doesn't fully adhere to.

Here, he's not the First Chancellor of Zaun.

He's a fucking exhausted father.

The suite was dubbed the Bridgewater View by the architect. Its décor doesn't dwell in the neutral zone of creams and beiges common to Topside—but in shades of azure blue and seafoam green. The rooms are large and decently furnished: two bedrooms with their own palatial bathrooms, one guest room, a parlor, and a kitchen overlooking a wide balcony with a sunken-in pool. Everything is flooded with the nightscape ambience that pours in through the triangular atrium. It lends the suite a disorienting underwater glow.

Silco wonders if this is how sharks feel inside aquariums. A gut-level sense of exposure.

Doubtful.

Sharks are predators, not prey.

Dropping his coat on a chair by the foyer, Silco says, "Jinx?"

One word. Yet it passes from his throat on a bolus of pain. What follows is worse.

Silence.

Still, he says it: the reflex of a routine greeting when he and Jinx lived together above the Drop. Back then, Silco could predict the exact moment he'd get cannonballed by a cheerful blur—five-foot-two with hair of blue. She'd been at that age when he'd gently catch her shoulders and murmur that she was getting a little too old to fling herself at him this way. Seventeen and newly out of girlhood. Bright as a star, with a mind to match.

Silco wishes she'd fly at him like before. Not with a hug, but a hand-grenade.

Everything in the suite is tidy, with the cold efficiency of place cleaned by invisible staff. A surfeit of chemical scent lingers in the air. Letting his keys fall with a clatter in their bowl, Silco goes to the window. He jerks the latch and wrenches the shutter open, so the smoky night air shoots up his nostrils.

Gods, the whole blasted place smells like it's been doused with bleach. So different from the olio of odors he was accustomed to at the Last Drop: spilled alcohol, burning coal and factory smoke.

Breathing deep, Silco stares out into the cityscape. With the Old Hungry in ruins, his clock is the phosphorescent foulness of the sky. But he keeps time perfectly by the moon's orbit as it crests over the rooftops. The souls awake at this hour are no different. Streetwalkers and scavengers and sentinels. The eyes and ears of his network. In the fog-laced street below, they are unseen. The only sound is the humid susurrus in the air. There might as well be ghosts waltzing across the cobblestones.

Silco's ear buzzes. He turns to stare at a green-sheened insect—a dragonfly?—fluttering off the window-sill. It lets off a sweet stinging hum. Silco bats at it. It snaps its wings and flickers into the darkness.

Curious, Silco stares after it. At the rooftop opposite, a movement catches his eye. A boy—the same age as Jinx—smoking a cigarette. One of his look-outs. He waves at Silco. Not a greeting, but the coded signage used by all of his network.

All clear.

Silco signs back. Then he tugs the cord on the blinds, and shuts everything out.

At the foyer mirror, he consults his reflection. His skin is pale as a marauding vampire's, the left eye a sickly reddish hue. Tonight, it feels hot as a blowtorch. Silco thumbs the scarred ridge around his eye socket. A flake is peeling at the corner; when he plucks it off, pinpricks of red bloom.

Blood.

Blood on Jinx's body at the Bridge, gluing her hair to her skull and darkly limning her teeth. Next he sees Jinx's pink-shimmering specter in the same spot, Fishbones slung over her small shoulders and her braids helixing blue through the burning night. He sees Piltover aflame, its stone monuments glowing and its towers lighting up like candles, while the bodies of Enforcers thrashed into effigies at her feet.

(A child to do a man's job.)

Topside had treated Zaun's rebuff to their treaty as a tantrum. By the month's end, they'd reevaluated. Silco's chem-soldiers had struck in the dead of the night, while Piltovans slept peacefully in their beds. Nobody saw the war coming. Eyewitnesses described the contrails of Jinx's missiles like firebolts spiraling out of nothingness.

Piltover had a bigger army. In a war of attrition, they'd flatten Zaun.

But Zaun had better aim. In a game of strategy, they'd turned the tables.

First, they'd burned down the battlements that bordered Piltover's gates. The sky around the city hung with a haze of flying embers. Next they'd torched down the fire stations and the police outposts. Half the law enforcement thrown into disarray while Piltover's finest still dozed in their cups. The highways followed. Topside couldn't deploy armored vehicles if their destinations were unreachable. A thousand roadblocks popped up—not jurisdictional but literal, the tarmac folded-up by grenade blasts like pleats of a broken accordion.

Enforcers were deployed along the length of the Pilt, their headquarters bivouacked at the riverhead. But what good are Enforcers in the Fissures without their masks? At midnight, their supplies were blown sky high. The brave men and women leapt into the Pilt to escape the blaze. Some choked on the quagmire of toxic runoff. Others couldn't breathe in the ambient gases. They'd suffocated to death.

For decades, Topside had treated the Undercity as its pisspot. They'd fancied themselves safe in their tower; above the rest.

For their hammerlock on hubris, they'd paid the price.

Silco loosens his cravat, tugging free the silk knotted at his neck. His reflection in the mirror shows the blotched ring of fingerprints. Not Vander's; they are too small. Too fresh. Yet the remembered agony is nothing like drowning. The opposite. It is the irradiated ache of being dragged back to life.

His own price.

Paid in secrecy, but paid all the same.

(Are you prepared to lose her?)

Rage explodes around the edges of Silco's control. A flashback from last night shreds the fabric of the present. Jinx rocketing down on top of him, her blue hair cascading everywhere, the sharpness of her cheekbones glistening with pink-tinged tears. Hands so small, yet seizing his throat with a mindless strength.

"Fuck!"

Silco kicks the table at the foyer with his boot. It topples violently, the cultivair lilies in their antique vase crashing in a glittering spilth. He stomps at the wood and glass and disintegrated blooms. Yet the crunch under his heel is the opposite of satisfying. He wants something harder.

Skulls and bones. Blood.

Vi.

Gritting his teeth, Silco forces himself to stop. His body vibrates like a deepsea quake. Since the war, he finds himself in this state without provocation: the familiar root of darkness in his chest blossoming out into every part of him, like ink bursting into water. It scalds and it freezes and it shows no signs of diminishing—a primal violence at once unnerving and unnervingly natural.

Silco grinds his teeth until it subsides. Calm. He must be calm. This isn't something he wants near Jinx.

She is the more fragile one. The Shimmer may have magnified her physical strength. But it has also deliquesced her mind. Her inner monster is now entirely unmoored from control, whereas Silco's own revels in the dark tortures of its delineations. It leaves his instincts always at war—the sharp edges saying, Cut down the threat—while the secret softness begs, Not my child, never my child.

Last night, the softness won.

Tonight?

Silco takes a composing breath. Then he smooths his hair back, and goes straight to Jinx's room.

The door is shut. He doesn't knock; there is little need. He turns the knob with a muted click and goes inside. The chamber is closed-curtained and impeccable. In the Drop, Jinx's room was always a mess. But it was like a fantastical fever dream; beneath the chaos lurked the purest imprints of her psyche. Unlike other teenagers whose walls were covered in posters, Jinx decorated hers in riotous graffiti—every square inch branded with tiny, incomprehensible letters in multicolored ink that garbled into geometric schematics and then shattered into violently-hued caricatures. All the things only Jinx's bespelled eyes could see.

There was always a spark of sorcery in her. It reminded Silco of the legendary patronesses like Janna. His own little witchling. His wonder.

Who else could conjure such magic with the Hex gem?

Here, Jinx's room is an antiseptic tomb. None of her gadgetry or adornments are in sight. No toolboxes, no stuffed toys, no drawings. Her pastimes are a thing of the past. Anything that might hamper Singed's ministrations or hinder Silco's aftercare has been removed. The atmosphere runs thick with sickness—the narcotics that Singed nightly injects into Jinx's arm, the beef tea Silco daily spoons past her cracked lips—and with the fog of Jinx's exhaled breaths.

Suffocating on her own loneliness.

Silco switches on the lamp. In its muted glow, Jinx lays sprawled across her bed as if washed ashore. A sheen of sweat glitters on her skin. She is always sweating lately: drugs, dry heaves, day terrors. Still lovely. She'll always be that for Silco. When he'd first met her, she'd been a gangle of childish imperfections—all knees and elbows and fingers and thumbs. Yet the fierce lunacy in her eyes was the loveliest thing he'd ever seen.

Her face was his own face; her sufferings echoed his to the last syllable.

Silco takes a chair, deposits it near the bed, and sinks onto the seat. Jinx sleeps on, insensible to him as to everything else—the blackouts, the riots, the jubilations. She's kicked off the blanket. Her plain black chemise rides high along her thigh and low across her chest. Another girl's body, so purely young, eyed by a man as dissolute as himself—the outcome would be a lechery synonymous with cannibalism.

He'd eat her alive and spit out the bones.

Except this is Jinx.

All Silco sees is a little girl with gooseflesh rashing her arms and legs. His little girl. He reaches out and folds the blanket over her body, then smooths a clump of untied blue hair out from between her parted lips. She's been chewing on it lately—something she hasn't done since she was eleven years old.

Singed had advised buzzing it off to expedite her caretaking. Silco had glowered as if he'd proposed to mutilate her. Hadn't the butcher done enough damage?

(Haven't I?)

Silco swallows, and resists the gut-deep urge to gather Jinx close. Then he thinks—fuck it.

His arms slide under Jinx, encircling her against him, blankets and all. In sleep, she lets off a muted hum. Her scent, stale with drugs, sharpens all the subtle flavors of his own misery. She'd always had such a sweet aroma—dust and gun-oil and candied cherry overlaying a bloom of good health. He'd never allowed her more than a sip of whiskey or the barest drag of a cigarette. The chemicals bunged up the circulation, starving the body of oxygen. The Undercity already had so little to go around.

Let Silco drink like a fish and smoke like a chimney. Jinx deserved sweeter sustenance.

(Like being pumped full of Shimmer?)

Shimmer.

An unpredictable devil. Its effects on the brain are doubly so.

Singed had helpfully described it in mining terms that Silco could grok. External factors like flashfloods of stress versus the natural stability of a brain's slope. Shimmer heavily altered the mind's chemical landscape, yet the output was also massively reliant on physical factors: age, weight, health, past drug use. For instance, a high dosage pumped into a rough-living young man like Deckard, late teens and approximately 160 pounds, would result in a premature heart-attack within a week—if Vander hadn't pulverized him first. Silco, in his mid-forties at 157-pounds, medicinally microdosing since his early thirties, might survive that same dosage physically, but find his brain turning feral. Jinx, late teens, 110-pounds, no history of drugs and already on the cusp of death, ought to have keeled over on Singed's table.

She didn't.

Under the stress, her brain hadn't become tissuey, or torn itself apart. It had just …stalled, like an old motorcar in the scrapyard. Once in a while, if you twisted the key, it would sputter to life. But mostly it was like a junker that had to be hauled from spot to spot.

During the war against Piltover, she'd shot and spied and scavenged as Silco ordered: a dutiful death-machine. Afterward, she'd eat if Silco fed her, drink if Silco tipped a glass to her lips, use the bathroom if he guided her to the toilet. But other than that, she'd lay in bed with her legs curled up, her eyes staring at something Silco couldn't see.

If this was Jinx forever-after, Silco would've done the merciful thing.

Put a pistol to her temple. Then to his own.

Except without warning, Jinx could burst to life. Sometimes, the chemical fizz of Shimmer subsided. Old hatchdoors of memory swung open. She'd be the girl Silco remembered—not at her happiest, but her most hateful. A spitfire flinging rage into his face: the night he'd stabbed Vander and stolen her away, the night he'd upended the Undercity and remade it his own, the night he'd kept her in the dark about Vi's return to keep her under his thumb.

She'd pace the room, wrecking furniture and punching walls, her eyes exuding a ferocious hatred that she must've kept stymied for—how long?

Years.

There was no reasoning with her in those moments. She'd ignore his quiet reassurances, sobbing and raving. Last night's episode culminated in her lashing out at his fingertips on her arm. Silco had found himself, in the next blink, slammed to the ground with her tiny hands around his throat.

(Your fault ALL YOUR FAULT.)

Silco resists the urge to rub the bruises purpling his skin.

It is easy to forget that Jinx's ballerina figure now conceals a demon's strength. Yet her outbursts don't disturb him. They sadden him.

Silco isn't a man to default to physical violence. There are simpler psychological shortcuts to getting his way. Yet sharing the same roof as Jinx for six years, conflict was unavoidable. It seldom escalated to blows. With a boy, he'd have no qualms doling out a backhand; he'd gotten beltings from his own father, and worse from his mother.

Jinx was different.

We don't hit each other, he'd told her at the start, after she'd flown at him in a flailing temper because he'd refused to take her along on a stakeout. We don't do what they did.

They.

Vi and Vander. Two brutes fluent with fisticuffs and nothing else.

Jinx took the words to heart. With enemies, she was a hellcat. But as a daughter, she was pure devotion. Her spats with Silco were like a busted speedometer: running from hot exchanges to hugs in fifteen seconds flat. Well-aimed insults on tap. But never blows. After the argument reached its apex, she'd storm to her workshop to sulk, and Silco to his office to smoke. Later, they'd always make up over a shared plateful of eel pie.

No amount of eel pie can repair their relationship now.

The only mercy? Jinx's episodes never last long. One moment the rage pins her body to the spot. The next, she crumbles into a ball of tears, and remembers nothing. Just an aftertaste: a lingering throb in her knuckles and a pulsebeat's phantom under her palms.

Shimmer can salvage the body, or mutilate the mind. Jinx's own, Silco has been given to understand, is healing slowly. There may, according to Singed, be lasting damage, so she periodically veers between Jekyll and Hyde. Or else her system may acclimate to the drugs, her mind and body stabilizing. He may yet have her back: his perfect girl.

But it's difficult to predict.

(You can't leave me, Jinx.)

(I won't let you.)

The snarling pressure returns to his chest. Silco swallows it down. His sigh encompasses every iota of exhaustion from the past three months. Suffocating days of checking on Jinx every four bells, and sleepless nights of keeping vigil at her bedside.

In Jinx's childhood, it was different. He'd cared for her steadfastly whenever she'd caught a flu or a pox. But in the manner of a man who'd fallen out of touch with human tenderness: always a step removed. A cool word of comfort; never a head-pat. A spoonful of medicine; never a hug. Then somewhere along the line, his measured distance shrank. First the size of prison bars, then thin as crepe paper, then dissolving like sugar on the tongue.

Once, when Jinx was fifteen, she'd caught a hellish case of pneumonia. Silco had enlisted an orderly to tend to her. In the evening, he'd come home early to find Jinx dehydrated and half-delirious, and the idiot playing backgammon with the guard.

He'd had the guard shot on the spot. The orderly, he'd kicked down a flight of stairs.

Ten times.

Afterwards, deaf to Sevika's grumblings, Silco had camped on a chair by Jinx's bedside, among the litter of smeary tissues, and stayed there for two weeks. He'd tended to spills and tendered steam baths. Read her books and rubbed her shoulders. Plied her with obscure herbal remedies from his apothecary and viler medicinal philters from Singed.

Once Jinx was well again, she'd been cuddlesome as a kitten. Following him everywhere, rubbing her cheek against his arm at the least sign that it was tolerated. Staring down into her adoring face, Silco had felt a blistering ache in his chest. Never such a sensation for his old comrades. It even eclipsed the boyhood ache when he'd first stared up at Vander.

He should've understood, then, how much she meant to him.

(Are you prepared to lose her?)

It grates like a rusty knife between his ribs. This is his doing, isn't it? He'd put her in this bed. He was the reason she'd blown the Enforcers on the Bridge sky-high. For the Hex gem: his key to Piltover. The thing he'd desired with all the rage in his marrow, a rage he'd never wanted to lose, because that would mean losing the game. Trading his dreams for death, and Zaun's freedom in the bargain.

Because what was he otherwise? A scarred pariah with a bloody past.

And gods—the past had been hard. Things breaking. Family dying. Food disappearing. Synapses in his mind snapping and rewiring, over and over. Since boyhood, he'd always clutched at straws of control, and yet remained at the mercy of chaos. Always craved a moment's cessation—a sanctuary. Then he was told, You're a man now, and with came the death of such cravings, of growing calluses on his skin and his soul, of taking responsibility for himself and for others, even as Piltover relinquished responsibility over any of them.

The sea-levels of risk were always rising; he outswam them. The wolves of penury always snapped at his heels; he outraced them. The tongues of strangers twisted like snakes at the kill: he outsmarted them.

In all ways, he survived. Yet he'd never stopped carrying inside himself that craving.

Until Vander's betrayal cleaved him apart. Until the Pilt's baptism liquified the rest. The man who rose up out of the water was a different creature altogether—an incarnation of control.

Yet his core was chaos, so chaos crept from the corners of his every choice.

Jinx is chaos. Its purest embodiment—at his beck-and-call. The thing he's craved for as long as memory stretches, when he was fatherless and motherless and engulfed by the dark of the mines, their rough walls weeping the tears that he didn't dare shed. She is everything he'd worked angles and pulled strings for decades to achieve—a hundred disjointed elements that never cohered into the right shape.

Until the night he killed Vander—and a crying girl cannonballed into his arms.

Take me, her essence sang, Use me.

Love me.

So Silco did.

He'd taken her under his wing, and shaped her to his own deadly uses. Molded her and marked her with life-bitten lessons in strategy and warfare, with potent muscles and eye-popping tattoos, with a proficiency for mind-games and a prowess for massacres. Hers was a ferocity that lacked any conception of fear. A pure perfection that ate all the pain. Her pain, and his own.

In Jinx, Silco found his sanctuary.

And loved her.

A love he'd trapped within the same transactive dimensions of control. I care for you—now obey me. I need you—now kill for me. I love you—now build the weapon for me. To the last, he'd dangled love like a lure, when she'd every right to reach into his heart and pluck it out.

It already belonged to her. Like the entirety of his existence.

(Am I too late, Jinx?)

It was why she'd pulled the pin on her grenade, hadn't she? She must've decided, in her bones, that Silco's love was false-bottomed. It was why she'd chased after her cowardly sister. Despite Vi choosing a damn Piltie over her flesh and blood. Despite Silco not sharing a drop of blood with Jinx, and choosing her always.

Choosing—and squandering it.

Silco's head sinks heavily into his hands. His face spasms, but it's not an impulse to tears. His features contort into a rictus of hatred—the expression of a creature tricked out of its rightful taste of blood. Vi's blood, and her suffering at his hands. Payment for destroying his lovely child more thoroughly in a single night than Silco could in six years.

(I'll kill her.)

(Slowly, so she feels every second.)

The bloodlust sparks a mad craving for a cigarette. He withdraws the silver cigar case from his waistcoat. He doesn't light up; he clicks a switch on the side. A hidden compartment unrolls as if oiled. The twilit glow refracts off the blue sphere nestled inside, fractals shimmering off the walls.

The Hex gem.

Silco lifts it out between a thumb and forefinger. It has remained in his possession since the Bridge fell. He doesn't trust a soul with it. Not Sevika; not Singed. Turning it in his fingers, he is spellbound by the changing colors: pure blue liquefying into pinkness. As if the magic is of a piece with Jinx, sensing her proximity.

Just as Jinx senses the magic.

A charge fills the room like electricity before a thunderstorm. It stimulates Jinx; she stirs under the sheets. One moment insensate. The next awake. Her eyes flip open with the eerie prettiness of a doll's. Except the irises are no longer china blue, but pink as faded blood. Her whisper is a tiny rasp in the dark.

"…S-Silco."

The Hex gem is stashed away. He is up like a shot. "Jinx!"

Her lashes flutter in the paleness of her face. But her pupils aren't dilated into dreamland. She gazes back at him, bleary but shockingly alert. Her small hand reaches out. Instinctually, he catches it in both his own. One thumb finds a vein of pulse and checks its melody. It strums strong and steady.

Silco sucks in a breath. Steady. He must be steady in turn. Nothing will be gained in losing his grip now.

"Silco," Jinx says again.

"I'm here, child."

She swallows. "Are you—?"

"What?"

"Are you… real?"

Silco lets off one of those low rasping laughs that never quite leaves his throat. Then, he says, "Thirsty?"

She nods, waveringly.

"I'll get you some water."

He goes to the pitcher at the nightstand. Jinx stays where she is. Her face is half-hidden in the unkempt hair strewn across the sheets, a blue mermaid washed up on the shores of her own bed. Except her pink eyes, always so crazed and cored-out, follow him thoughtfully.

Silco dares not consider what it means. Her lucid states never last long; they either spike into hysterics or flatline into slumber. Yet each one squeezes the rotten ventricles of his heart. Silco hates hope; it's the opiate of those without a scrap of control. But with Jinx, every random act holds within itself the unpredictability of hope.

(Stay with me, Jinx.)

(Please.)

He props her up with one arm to tip the glass to her lips. She drinks from it like a child, cradled in both hands. Passes it back to him, empty, and wipes her mouth on the edge of his loosened cravat. It's an offhand intimacy that Silco never tolerates from anyone else. With Jinx, it is the opposite. A tenderness burgeons blackly in his chest.

Gods, he's missed this. Missed watching her drink. Watching her talk. Watching her breathe.

His arms encircle her close. Against his fritzing inner-thermostat—cold hands, overheated body—she's always felt pleasantly coolish. But now, dosed in Shimmer, her skin is almost fizzy. It powers itself off when she's asleep. But when she's awake, it's like catching at a cut power cord with a thousand volts crackling at the ends.

Silco doesn't care.

In the prime of deadliness; in the peach of health. He'll take whatever he can get. Just as long as she's better again.

"Hurts," Jinx mumbles.

"What?"

"My stomach." She winces, almost fretfully. "I think—"

"Hm?"

"I need the bathroom."

Drugged, she's never in full possession of her bladder. At clockwork intervals, Singed uses the awful catheter. Otherwise, Silco carries her to the toilet. Better not to waste time. Yesterday, he'd delayed, and within a minute the sheets had been drenched in piss. Afterwards, he'd had to strip the bedding, then help Singed haul Jinx into the tub. He tries not to think of it overmuch: the clammy sheets, the choking steam and Jinx under the pelting water, like a corpse being prepped for burial.

Scooping Jinx into his arms, he bears her to the bathroom. It is a green marble monstrosity: a glassed-in shower along one wall and, directly opposite, an old-fashioned clawfoot tub. The air here doesn't stink of bleach, but of lavender soap and smoky night air: the window is prised open a crack.

Gently, Silco sets Jinx to her feet by the toilet. Her arms are slung around his neck. She loosens them slowly, and finds her balance. It takes a while, but once she does, she rarely needs toting around afterward. Like always, Silco waits until she's steady before he exits and shuts the door to give her privacy.

Tonight, his hand is on the doorknob when Jinx says, "Um…"

Silco keeps his back to her; she's probably sitting down, "What's wrong?"

"I need a change of clothes."

"All right."

"And something for the blood."

Blood?

Silco's insides shrivel up. The memory that crashes is sudden and sickening. The Bridge. The burnt corpses. The blood on Jinx's cold skin. Dying people bleed. Sick people bleed. Yet when he'd carried Jinx here, he saw no wounds her wasted body.

Effortfully, he says, "Are—are you hurt?"

"I've got uninvited guests."

"Guests—?"

His gorge shoots up. Comprehension, then chagrin.

After a three-month dry-spell, she's resumed menstruating.

"Oh," he says.

"Oh," Jinx echoes tartly.

There is a silence. Then, in the spirit at pragmatism, Silco says, "I'll get what you need."

"What I need?"

"From your closet."

Jinx emits a faraway hum. Then she says, "I'll need your help."

"My help?"

"Getting the bloodstains outta my undies."

Silco chokes so sharply he needs to thump his chest.

"I'm screwing with you, Silly."

The mockery in Jinx's voice floats across the space to him. Ordinarily, he'd rebuke her. He's never taken to Jinx's sense of humor—largely because it's too similar to his own. The older she's grown, the more it's veered toward the transgressive and downright nasty.

Except he's bribed to bittersweetness by its evocation of better times

(How long will it last?)

He doesn't glance around. But he knows the relief is audible in his voice. "We'll not discuss this ghoulishness further."

"Ghoulish." She huffs. "You kept calling it a 'normal bodily function' during our Serious Talk."

"It scarcely warrants a running commentary."

She lets off a small Heh-heh that reminds him of those comic book cretins from his youth, the quintessential Undercity teenagers, Mavis and Mutthead. A sound he's not heard in months.

"You're embaaaarrassed."

Swallowing, wishing he could safekeep this moment despite its grotesquerie, Silco says, "I'll be outside."

From her closet, he retrieves a change of clothes and a sanitary serviette. Most Undercity women wear cheap menstrual belts; the rest use rags. Jinx's frippery is custom-made, the edges patterned with adhesive lace.

Eying them, Silco's discomfiture blends with bitter memory. Jinx-at-twelve. She'd gotten her first bleeds and howled like a dying thing. That's what blood was to her. The manifestation of death or its aftermath. Silco had to explain menstruation to her: a word she'd never heard of, nor seen in print. Vi hadn't bothered to enlighten her; perhaps the byproduct of an all-male household. Sevika loudly proclaiming Congrats on the curse hadn't helped matters.

Silco kept his own explanation succinct. It wasn't a curse; just a cycle. She wouldn't die.

Jinx's wretchedness left him reconsidering. He'd known women who fell prone to petulance; none who fell literally prone. Jinx did. Shivered and vomited besides. Sevika declared it wasn't standard. A physician was called. Silco remembers the old man looming over Jinx. His knob-like fingers prodding her groin. He couldn't see Jinx with the bastard in his sightline. But her wails ripped into Silco like knives: Stop! That hurts!

Silco had lunged to kill him. A purely animalistic response. You don't torment his child and expect to live.

Sevika had stopped Silco's attempted throat-slitting. Undercity charlatans, she'd said, were no substitute for a midwife. Silco had summoned one the same evening. She'd diagnosed Jinx with endometriosis. Likely, it ran in her family. Might explain the older sister's reticence in sharing details. No cure unless Silco wanted to cut Jinx open and tamper with her innards.

His response: No and Get out.

The first year, he'd coaxed cupfuls of poppy tea past Jinx's lips. By the second year, he'd gotten her the Demacian Pill. She'd fared much better.

We'll begin production on our own brand, first thing.

In the kitchen, Silco boils tea black as witches brew. Pours it into a cup, the rest of his concentration on Jinx's not-sounds in the bathroom. His instincts are always at war—the paternal concern of What if she's hurt? crosswired with the masculine reticence of She needs space—as do you. After a reasonable handspan of minutes, he paces back to the bathroom.

"Jinx?"

The door opens a crack. Jinx's neon-pink eye peeps out in a gloomy vignette.

"Hn?"

Silco proffers the cup and the folded-up toiletries. "Here. Do you need anything else?"

"Nuh-uh."

"You're sure?"

"Uh-huh."

Her hand reaches past the door. Instead of taking the things, her fingertips slide, gingerly, from his jawbone down to his Adam's apple. The splotching bruises show beneath his loosened cravat. Jinx's expression doesn't alter. But her eyes do: the pinkness has a way of diffusing to darker hues, a subtle sign Silco is starting to recognize. A backsliding from saneness to savagery, zero to sixty.

Then Jinx drops her eyes, and her hand.

"I'm sorry."

He'd braced for a blow-up. The apology knocks him off-balance.

"What?"

"I didn't—didn't mean to."

A silence. Hoarsely, Silco says, "You remember? Jinx, do you—"

"It's coming to me. Bits and pieces."

For a moment, her features resemble those of a creature so very ancient: an undying force trapped in the flesh of a child. Then she blinks, and they regain a distressing innocence. Tears pool at the cups of her eyelids.

"I was bad," she whispers.

"What? Jinx—no—"

"'We don't hit each other'," she says, their old maxim echoed in a little-girl voice. "'We don't do what they did.'"

"I'm all right. Honestly."

"Please don't—"

"Don't what?"

"Please don't hate me."

"What? Jinx—"

Snatching up his offerings, she's already stumbled back into the bathroom. The door closes with a not-quite-slam. Behind it, there are sobs. As Silco listens, they garble into something else, Jinx's rasping breaths interspersed with words, a disembodied soliloquy that makes the hair on the back of his neck prickle.

Her damned ghosts. Always creeping up on her.

Silco's own muscles are wired, his breath taut. It takes everything inside him not to kick the door open and snatch her into his arms. Instead, he exhales—and withdraws. It will do Jinx no good if he succumbs to his own irrational blasts of emotion; he needs to harbor his reserves, keep steady and keep ready. In the backroom of his mind, he negotiates with himself. Threats, barter, bribes.

Five minutes.

If she's still not okay—

The door opens. Jinx pads out unsteadily, changed and cleaned, the cup cradled in both hands. Giving him wide berth, she slumps on the edge of the bed. Her head hangs low, unkempt strands of blue hair slithering off her shoulders. The defeated posture makes Silco likewise ache. Yet this is longest time that's elapsed between her bouts of incurable sleep and unpredictable violence. He ought to summon Singed from the basement laboratory. He'll want to examine her; make notes.

Except Silco will kill Singed if he interrupts. This uneasy stasis with Jinx is better than any restoration to awful solitude.

Watchful, he leans by the window. "How do you feel?"

Jinx swivels her head. Through the bluish veil of hair, her eyes are red-rimmed.

"Hurts. Up and down."

"Shall I fetch something from my medicine cabinet?"

"Like what?"

"Chlorodyne. Laudanum."

"It's shark week," Jinx rebuts with a touch of her old sassiness. "I wasn't bit by an actual shark."

Could have fooled me, Silco thinks. Still, her sass dispels his shadows. He doesn't smile, but the lines of his body relax a degree. "You know what I mean."

Jinx nods, and sips her tea. "I'm just tired."

"Let's get you fed up."

"Not now." Her sigh holds a deeper complexity. "Tired."

"Lie back down."

"Tired of lying down." She swallows. Silco can see her surfacing out of months of drugged-out displacement, and into a fuller awareness. Tears blur her eyes; her voice holds a blistering-hot clarity. "Tired of the dreams. They're making me crazy. They're all there. I hear them when I'm sleeping, and when I'm not. More voices the air lately, have you noticed? Flapping like crows, and that's what they pretend to be, but they're more than that. Always going wsss-wsss-wsss into my ears, down my nose, up my ass—"

"Jinx—"

"They were all on the Bridge. I saw them. Mommy. Vander. Mylo and Claggor and Ekko. Now the bricks have fallen and they're with me all the time, wheelin' and flappin' in my dreams. Like crows. Or ravens. An unkindness of murders, or somethin' like that, right?" Her voice catches in her throat, a shapeless laugh that breaks into a sob. "It's the rot that's calling to 'em. Makes me think of the grave, and wiggly maggots. Better get the chem-barons behind that, Silly. Since Zaun's a big o'l graveyard now, maybe they can build a baseball stadium over it? Or a chocolate pie factory? I like chocolate pies. Or—hey! How about daises? Everyone loves daisies! They could design a hot-house garden. Zaun's memorial to the fallen. Everyone could pay it a visit. Everyone Jinx hasn't jinxed yet."

Silco stares at her. He hadn't known what to expect, but it certainly hadn't been this invective. Stranger is the way she speaks of herself in the third person. A soul divided.

"You didn't jinx Zaun," he says softly. "You saved it."

She laughs, a bright, bestial sound.

"I blasted everything to—to BBQ. Zaun. Piltover. Everyone. Now their stink and their voices won't leave me alone! They—"

"They knew the cost."

Jinx is wrenched off-course.

"What?"

"Zaun knew the cost of war, child. So did its soldiers. As for Piltover," his voice thickens in hatred. "They had it coming. For burying us alive. For leaving us dead."

Jinx twists a bitter smile at him. "Like Vander left you dead."

And like Vi left you, Silco thinks, but doesn't say.

He sidles closer. Then, impelled by a force he can't explain, kneels. Jinx blinks with wary bemusement. He's never knelt before anyone in his life; nor has she. They are Zaunites. Their pride is their armor. Yet the pose doesn't feel unnatural, or like a ploy. Nor does his stare: a rawness of honesty that belies the rage at its core. A rage Jinx has always matched with her own, the mirror of all his old hurts.

The mirror is darkened by cracks now.

A reflection of his worst sins.

"You're entitled to be angry at me," he whispers. "The burdens I placed on you... are unforgiveable. A child should never do a man's job. Yet you did. You fought for us. You built for us. More than that. You freed us. There's power in that, Jinx, and not the dark and bloody kind. Don't lose faith in it. In me, but not yourself. Never that."

"Never that."

Jinx's tone is loaded—hostile, sneering, miserable. An essential part of her seems ready to retreat into the shelter of her subconscious, because he'd run down his capital of trust the moment Vi returned. Without the urgency of a greater crisis—Zaun's survival or their own—it's easier to believe that he's used her heartlessly from the start. To believe they are both strangers to each other, and become a stranger to herself.

Unless Silco summons her back.

Impulsively, his hand covers hers. Jinx's fingers spasm. For a moment he thinks she will wrench away. Then she folds her hand through his own. They twine fingers, knuckles sharpening. A shared ferocity that runs bone-deep.

Jinx whispers, "I don't understand…"

"What?"

"I don't understand why you're still… keeping me. You have Zaun. I played my part. Shouldn't you cut the marionette loose? You've got bigger strings to pull."

"No strings on you." Were there ever? "We've cut all the strings. We've blanked the slate. A nation all our own. No Council breathing down our necks, or Enforcer's boots crushing them." He lets off a twisted exhalation almost like laughter. "And yes. It's a mass graveyard. But just because the present is hell, doesn't mean the future need be. This thing of ours will yet find its feet."

She smiles faintly, before it fades. "This thing…"

"Isn't that what you call it?"

"Ours, huh?"

"Always." He squeezes her hand. "All the pieces are in place, Jinx. Everything's laid out—even if getting it right will take time. All it needs is you."

"Me?"

"You. A body is nothing without a soul. A nation is the same. You've done so much for Zaun. But there's still one thing I need you to do."

Jinx freezes. Under his palm, Silco feels the subdermal spike of her pulse. I need you—now build me a bomb. That is his pattern, isn't it? Passing the virulence of his expectations on to her. She'd always met them with a single-minded zeal that matched his own. Never expected him to go any easier on her than he was on himself. Never expected anything from him—period—except his love.

He'll give it now. Lock, stock, and barrel.

"I know you're suffering," he whispers. "You've endured terrible change. Inside and outside. But you must do this one thing. If you've any care for me, please don't forget it."

Jinx tenses. Beneath the layers of mistrust, her eyes glow with the softest ember of hope.

"What?"

Silco kisses her forehead. Rough and sharp as everything about him is, his lips are always soft. His voice is softer still with the strangling ache of love. "Remember. You are my lodestar. My perfect daughter. You always will be."

Jinx's throat works on a ragged sound.

Daughter.

The word has always hung unspoken between them. So different from the epithets Jinx adorned herself with at his behest. Marvel. Maniac. Monster. He'd taught her the power of persona, and the freedom of reinvention. But truth was a dangerous element to deal in. Masks could be locked in cold storage. The truth was harder to conceal.

Once it was out, it was out.

Silco doesn't care. Let his secret hang by truth's noose for the world to see. It doesn't feel like handing his most vital part away. This is his most vital part.

Jinx at her darkest and brightest.

The pinnacle of his pride and joy.

Jinx crosses her arms around herself, trying to lock the tears down. In the next breath, they are falling, and so is she, a sob working its way out of her body. Silco's arms pass around her, enfolding her against him. She doesn't jerk away; she flows into the embrace. His scarred cheek rubs along the curve of her head, a predator marking territory; her sharp little nails sink into his shoulders to mark him in kind.

He's seen Piltover's pride topple in a plume of ash. He's seen the jagged zigzag of his own signature on Zaun's declaration of sovereignty. He's climbed a staircase of his naysayer's skulls and sunk his blade into his backstabbing brother's spine.

Yet there is no greater sweetness than this.

Jinx in his arms.

He lets her cry herself out. The tears subside into slow bubbling hiccups. She sags against him; groggy, disoriented. The poppy tea has done its trick. A heartless trick in other circumstances. In these: a mercy. Stepping past her room's threshold tonight, Silco had made his choice. Singed will not be allowed to sedate Jinx again. In the meantime, let her enjoy an undisturbed rest on her last night as an invalid.

Jinx isn't sick. She is suffering.

The least Silco can do is suffer alongside her.

Gently, he guides her dazed body under the sheets. Jinx's head sinks like a stone into the pillow. Her cheeks are pink-mottled from emotion, a replica from her childhood. Tonight's brew will lull her away from its sad shores—and into a dreamless sleep. The clock on her bedstand shows it is nearly two in the morning. With luck, Silco can catch a few winks himself on the chair, before returning to the daily grind of gameplaying.

Creeping back, Silco encounters Jinx's outreaching hand.

"Don't go," she begs.

"I'm right here, my lovely."

"Stay." Her fingers twist into his sleeve. "Please."

In the old days, Silco often let Jinx sleep in bed with him. He's never once shared her bed. It isn't what the Demacian psychickers—he imbibes their literature time and again—would dub ideal childrearing. Then again, he needs a psychicker's opinion like he needs a hole in the head.

Jinx needs comfort far more.

He lets Jinx tug him closer. The mattress sags under their shared weight. Yet he finds the awkwardness getting lost in the remembered gaps between their bodies. Instinctively, his arm passes around Jinx, steadying her within its crook. She fits herself against the hard bolster of his body. Their sharp bones imprint into each other like a set of teeth-marks.

"Left me," Jinx whispers.

"Hm?"

"I don't understand. Vi left me. You didn't." A slurred sigh. "It's all—"

"All what?"

She clings closer. Shimmer-tears sparkle on her cheeks.

"It's all wrong. You killed Vander. You stole me. You took everything."

Yes, yes, and yes.

Yet the terrifying abyss in Silco's chest isn't guilt. It is something altogether more brutal. Because he knows full-well that the world is a twisted place full of twisted bastards. As the most twisted bastard of all, he'd staked his claim on Jinx before the rest dared, and kept her safe. Kept her—and in doing so transformed his own life from wretchedness into a bliss more profound than many lay claim to in a lifetime.

(Now this is my price.)

"Don't leave me," Jinx says.

"Ssh." He palms her hair. "Go to sleep."

"Please stay."

Silco tugs the blanket up, and under its coolness, lets their foreheads nestle close. His hand settles against Jinx's nape. Cold, then warming.

"Always," he promises.

Soothed, Jinx's lids flutter shut.

In the distance, faintly, the bells of Old Hungry sound off two a.m. Evidently, the repairs were successful. Silco lets himself be lulled by the sound, and by the slow drag of Jinx's fingertips along his chest. They sketch three letters into the weave of his shirt. A childish code from bygone days, imparted like a blessing.

Right into his heart.

XOXO