Chapter Three
Underworld
Train Steaming out of control. This new venture made many feel exhilarated. There was something about the blood pumping in the veins, a grenade without reason ready to burst. Made gluttons for punishment.
Tante Heleen thought in terms of pimp and prostitute. Ponce's warnings and so on, she'd grown used to at tender ten within a harsher Ketterdam and plied her trade first with her harlot cracks.
She'd only made it this far by utilizing the same vices and whips she'd been broken into. Needs must be met in a world of peddled flesh and propensity resulted.
Zaun, this new bastardized figurehead for the liberated Ketterdam, was just window dressing, disguising the rancid sores that never fully healed. Never would. Topside had it's own wounds but was better at concealing them.
Jinx was the one exception to this rule, taken in by Silco at age eight. Bleeding from a fight, an exploded depot and 600 dead vagabonds inside. She'd been the unwitting arsonist, brilliantly broken. Silco, at the time, was second only to Van Haskel. Both saw the utility in her brokenness to mold into a weapon that'd blossomed into a beatific scourge.
Kaz was a whelp rat of six who'd made it to the polluted shores by his older brother's bloated dead body.
The Queen's Plague had left him upon the reapers' barge, where the dead were piled for incineration—pox-ridden brother atop him. Trypophobia was the outcome, a strange aversion to skin leaving him sick, doubled over with agonizing bile rising like the murky waters of the harbor.
Jesper lost his Da at age five through the hazy gun smoke; those made fools of the moon. Bummed cigarettes, found family was a crude description of the Dregs. But the same drew him to Zaun after his Jurda farm burned to ash. Livelihood gone. Mamma was a pagan of hidden prowess.
They laundered, folded, and pressed clothing, with self-cooking dinner and chopped herbs finished with transparent hands.
Healing neighbors is commonplace in a community without medics. Drawn poisons, not without risking death. Ended Mamma, cold world, hark the heralded Saints, black roses couldn't account for two sleeping parents.
Inej was with her parents, caravan Gypseys, and Jews of color and class. Highwire acts, dancing silk-covered and glamorous women with bells upon their feet. Clowns and tamed animals All families took part and had a role.
Tent assemblage: to break down a day in a field with soap buckets to wash off sweat and grime before moving on to another town, city, or burrow.
Between moves, children would play in the waters of Shu Han, close to the ocean but not too far in fields with wildflowers or outside carriages, for the justifiable reason of abduction from slave traders to Ketterdam.
Inej was one of those children, in the ocean playing and asleep on the beach, when burly men dropped and dragged her away like a potato sack onward to Zaun for an exotic whore house for girls as young as eight and as old as 14 from other countries war-torn or too poor that shaped an alien cage.
And so it went, lives intertwined by washed-up tragedy, of their own devising or misfortune. One thing remained the same, clawing Topside. Worlds old and new struggled for exclusive permanence.