The Faerie were two of those few.
“So refreshing,” Ev murmured to Keller, practically squirming with excitement.
■
Muscles were tense all throughout my body. My teeth were grit so hard I was getting a headache.
I intentionally walked through the open pool of water, disrupting the image and sounds. Nobody else had caught them. The scenes were just for me.
What the fuck are you doing, Rose?
Me being a pawn was bad enough. My friends being used as pawns?
Holy fuck, if this place wanted to screw with my head, it was succeeding by leaps and bounds. Fuck me. I’d already been trying to deal with the frustration and rage that had followed from talking to Ms. Lewis, but now this? Watching my friends get led to their doom while I was utterly unable to do a thing about it?
I raised a fist, ready to punch a wall, and stopped. My wrist was still a wreck, badly bandaged with my other spare sock.
My other hand- bandaged with the first sock, divided in half.
A kick then? My right leg was a wreck, barely able to sustain my weight when I walked.
I would have screamed, but I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t wake up something I didn’t want to wake up.
There wasn’t anything to do but swallow my frustration. To let it gnaw at me from the inside out. The environment was doing its fair share of damage from the outside in. At some point, I’d hit my limit.
This wasn’t that point. Like I’d told Ms. Lewis, I wasn’t about to lie down and die.
I hiked up my pants leg to double-check my leg’s condition. Veins and capillaries had burst, causing horrific bruising, complete with what looked like black tracks along the skin where the veins or arteries or whatever had been closer to the skin. All from a brief touch from the cold tentacled thing in the water.
I let the pants leg drop. At least it wasn’t an open wound, like the cuts and abrasions on the sides of my right wrist were. Open wounds meant inviting diseases. Or, worse, they meant inviting something special to this place. Fungi, molds, parasites, infections of the sort that weren’t in any medical journal.
I needed a weapon. There were people selling them here, further into the settlement.
I needed information.
Progress through the settlement revealed more shacks. In places, shacks had been arranged around resources. Eight or so shacks were arranged in a ring at one point opposite a chasm, and water periodically emptied from some pipe high above, along with collected debris and garbage. Where the water passed under, I observed, there was very little garbage. A grill or grate to catch the leavings, shared communally?
Light, it seemed, was another convenience, many shacks built to covet and borrow the light of a given lightbulb, their windows and shoddy construction allowing only slices of light through for others to use. Safety was yet another, and the only apparent safety here was the safety of being in the middle of the herd. As I drew closer to the heart of things, the houses were crammed in closer together. It was like a very young child’s experiment with building blocks, sloppy, haphazard, and it didn’t make fundamental sense. Everyone knew that when one laid down bricks, they staggered it, so each brick was supported by the two below. Kindergarten level architecture.
Yet over and over, I saw sloppy construction where people had somehow, for some reason, decided to build their shack as an extension of the place below, increasing the pressure, making it all just a touch more wobbly and unsteady.
The people, too, didn’t feel like a society. The crowd didn’t function as any crowd should. Individuals stopped in the middle of the footpath, walked against the unsteady flow of people, and ranged from the openly hostile to the hyper-passive avoidant types.
I wasn’t seeing any indication of signs or general means of finding anything I needed. I had to ask.
I stopped a man who was walking by, looking furtively around, like he might be jumped from any direction. He startled at my reaching hand, as if he’d barely noticed I was there. Skin had been ripped away from his face, neck and hands in long, perfectly straight, pencil-thin strips.
“The witch?” I asked.
He started moving again, but he extended a hand, pointing as he walked, eyes averted from mine.
Moving in the direction indicated, I found an alley. It was the only way to describe it – a bridge with constructions on either side. Shacks were piled haphazardly beside and on top of on one another, very few any larger than a single room. They rose like individual walls with only a narrow path between them.
I picked out the Witch’s as one of the biggest, with walls of found stone – clusters of brick and mortar or stone and mortar that had broken away from various walls of the drains, fit together imperfectly. Something had been stuffed in cracks, sufficient to keep light from shining through gaps where individual elements weren’t flush.
There was even a plant in the window, which was quite literally a hole in the wall, lacking glass or any covering. The plant was a weedy, shitty looking plant of indeterminate nature, but there was a decoration. That said something.
Anyone here who isn’t a victim is a predator, I thought.
I knocked on the door of driftwood. There were cracks between the door and the wall, and candlelight shone through.
“Come in.”
I had to work for a second to figure out how to open the door. The ceiling was low enough I had to duck a bit.
The witch was surprisingly normal looking. Back in what Ms. Lewis had called the material world, the witch would have passed for a homeless woman. Her hair was matted in places, and her skin had stretches of rash where it didn’t seem to have grit embedded in the flesh. Forty or so, Greek if I had to attach an ethnicity to her.
But she would have passed for normal, and the extensive collection of knick-knacks and decorations, as well as genuine conveniences suggested she had been here for some time. She’d spliced wiring leading up to a lightbulb and extended it to what seemed to be a hot plate. A radio buzzed in the background, a man’s voice reading what might have been baseball stats, alternating between English and a guttural foreign language. Swells of static periodically drowned out the voice. Candles sat on three different surfaces, fat and crude looking. Driftwood was stacked by what might have been a fireplace, though it was no larger than a toaster.
“You practiced,” the witch said. “Before.”
I nodded.
“That was you with the visitor, on the poles?”
The poles? Now that I thought about it, the bits of architecture between the bridges of scrap metal had resembled pillars, reaching up from the abyss to go nowhere.
“Yes, it was.”