(A/N: I'm trying to put these in chronological order now, so it isn't as difficult to follow. The only problem seems to be I have a scene gestating in my brain that happens between this scene and the previous one. As for the editing on this; I overhauled the dialogue to make it less sophisticated since the two characters here are both barely teens. )

to be left

"The blood hasn't looked like this before," Shadash commented as he held a fresh hand towel out before the tired girl. She took the offering and placed the blackish-red one in his other hand. He didn't mind blood on his skin; it was a natural by-product of their livelihood.

"The blood is thick," Aisha mumbled listlessly. She wiped her stained hands on the new cloth and pressed it up between her equally stained thighs. "I think this is the woman's curse."

"You're just saying that because you took weight," the boy smirked, but secretly he was relieved the last man had not seriously injured her. It meant he could soon cheer her up with good news he had eavesdropped that morning while applying gold enamel to the owner's nails. She believed the fumes would affect his mind, but he'd only acted the part as she fanned them into his face.

"Please," Aisha scoffed, "the last one couldn't put a dimple in a newborn's cheek. No, I think this is the other thing. I should laugh or cry?"

The slender boy shrugged his angular shoulders and plunged the used towel into the tub of soapy water between his knees. He had been doing laundry when another so-called dancer had relayed Aisha's condition. It was simple enough to take the basin with him as well as good sense.

"You get time off your back, Aisha," he mused helpfully as he scrubbed away again. "You don't like what they do to you, so this is good. You'll have to do more chores, but you won't have customers all the time, either. It is a good thing."

Cheap glass earrings tinkling softly, the girl with curves beyond her scant thirteen years shook her head. "No. I think this means I can make a baby."

Her eyes were pools of stifled hysteria slicked with sadness. Clamping her thighs on the towel, she sat up enough to reach out to him. Shadash continued to wash the stained hand towel; he pretended he did not see her hand reaching out to him. Shadash didn't know how many times had he seen this scene: a woman with bloody hands and thighs reaching out for him. For anyone. Prostitution was hard on both genders, but the presence of a womb inclined the boy to suppose the scales tipped against women. It was a sentiment he hadn't enough sympathy to voice aloud, not even to his friend.

"Run away with me...!" she whispered harshly to the more experienced boy. Her voice was rough with tears she didn't want to shed. "We can leave the Avenue, the city, the country. Come, Shadash, it would be better to die out there than live in here! I don't want a baby before I'm married!"

Running was a thought that appealed to Shadash only in fancy; he knew it was never so simple. Aisha had only been in the lower rung teahouse for a year and before that she'd been the daughter of a widowed carpet weaver. Even though she was poor before, she didn't know how wicked and depraved Calimport could be. Shadash knew, in detail, every bad thing that could happen on the streets. If his body had not experienced the worst of it, he had stood a numb witness to the rest.

The hand towel was losing pieces of fabric under the hard strokes from his hands as he thought over her desperate plea. Dying on the street was a much worse fate than prostitution or the scorpion pits. And who was she to think of marriage?

He had to squeeze his eyes tight against the encroaching scorn that often poisoned his young heart. When he replied, he tried to keep the unwanted anger from his voice. "There's no need to put yourself in danger. You have an offer from Answal's tea house in one of the outer wards. He was looking for young girls with pretty eyes, nimble hands, and clumsy feet. You were perfect."

"Answal..?" The girl looked at the dark skinned boy in confusion. She was too new to understand the extensive network her forced servitude was only a small part of. "Clumsy feet? What kind of place is it? They don't want me to dance?"

Horror played slowly across her face, for if she was not wanted for the farce that dancing was on Avenue Paradise, then it sounded as if she would go somewhere even worse. Dancing was only lip service to Calimshan's harsh laws; most of the action in low rung tea houses had more to do with backs on the floor and feet in the air rather than the other way around.

He wasn't so kind that he couldn't take pleasure at her mistake; he smiled at the look of dread. "Stupid. You are leaving the Avenue for a better place that only uses girls. Answal is a well-known wizard that sells magic supplies; his tea house is a sideline. That probably means his girls don't get diseases or full of babies. If you're going to look sad it better be because I'm still stuck here and I'm going to have that nasty rash longer than those ugly sores you keep getting."

Aisha's eyes were struck with the sunlight that filtered into her stall from the ripped canvas above. Forgetting herself completely, she rose shakily to her feet and tried to grab the boy. Grimacing at the blood that would surely stain his clothes, Shadash took a step back, but this did not dissuade the girl.

She lunged for him, overturning his wash basin in the process, and fell over him, taking them both to the hay-strewn floor. The water flooded the floor and rendered Shadash's thin clothes transparent. Neither cared, for nudity was not the same as nakedness to their way of thinking. Their hair hung in wet tendrils about their shoulders, but still they shared laughter between them.

"Aisha," he groaned, slapping the top of her head, "do you know how hard I'll be caned for the loss of so much water?"

"Shadash, you ass!" She giggled and grabbed at his thin wrists, "I'll tell old Answal you're a young girl and with that willow-like figure he'll come to his senses and take you, too!"

The boy only shook his head, sea kelp hair plastered to his dark skin. "No, I'd never pass inspection; he's humans only."

And deep in his heart he was glad for Aisha, for she was his first and only friend. But he resented her, too, for she was beautiful and new to the Avenue and would escape their prison to a better cage before him. It was hard to celebrate, to return her relieved grin, when he knew his hard work had only brought him out of the gutter and scorpion pits, and into the most deplorable of Avenues.

"Besides," he continued, running a hand over her back and the young swell of her backside, "it takes longer for a boy to move up in the world. I don't have these fun curves like you do. If there really is balance, it is that when you're beautiful, you don't have to work as hard to reach the top, but when you do it is easier for you to fall."

Sadness filtered back into Aisha's eyes as she lay atop the exotic young boy. She stroked his cheek with more honesty than any of the men or women that paid to do the same. "Shadash, that's not balance, that's what my mother called a paradox."

He first closed his red eye and then his green, enjoying the feeling of her hand on his face and for the first time, the weight and warmth of a body on top of his. "If you get away from Answal's place, if you ascend higher heights, if you become free, come back for me, Aisha."

"I will," she whispered solemnly, but though she was sincere, Shadash's ears only fed him ashes.

Shadash did not cry that night nor did he see her off days later when she was taken away. Instead, he did everything he could to forget and he worked hard, very hard, to please visitors. It was not her fault, he told himself, that she was elevated before him. Life was harder for her, he mumbled as he was degraded a hundred different ways. It was wrong to be jealous of a friend, he mused. She had nothing to do with the injustice of the world, the unfairness of life, he sang in Shadashite as he danced in one of the teahouse's many smoky rooms.

But before long, he hated her anyway.