“Well of course I didn’t get all of it. But that’s what we did, me and the people who used to live here. Just go out in the morning, come back with what we could find. It’s getting harder these days, but there’s still a lot out there to be harvested.”
“What do you do with it?” Wren asked, running his hand over a dark brown coat.
Jackson chuckled.
“We use it, little one…”
He trailed off for a moment, smile fading, eyes clouded. Wren looked up from the coat, noticed Jackson.
“Are you OK?”
Jackson just stared.
“Jackson?”
His eyes cleared, and he shook his head slightly, forcing a smile again.
“Sorry. I said we, but I guess it’s really just me now. Well, actually… there is ‘us’, at least for now.”
“Where did they go?”
“Who?”
“All your other people?”
Jackson’s eyes dropped to the floor, jaw clenched. He shook his head.
“I don’t… little one. Away,” he replied in a low voice. “Taken.”
“I’m sorry.”
Jackson shrugged, wiped his nose with the palm of his hand.
“Hey, you like that coat? You can have it if you want it.”
Wren looked back down at the coat. It was the neatest looking coat he’d ever seen. It was brown, with a hood, and had tons of zippers and pockets on it, and even secret pockets on the inside.
“You should take it,” Jackson said. “Looks like it might fit you pretty good. If not this year, maybe in a couple anyway.”
“That’s OK,” Wren said, hand sliding back to his side. “I don’t want to take your things.”
Jackson laughed good-naturedly.
“That’s what it’s here for. No way I’m gonna be wearing it anyway. Go on, take it. It’s in a lot better shape than yours is.”
“Well…” Wren paused, thought through it. It really was a great coat. “If it’s OK with you, then, thank you very much.”
“You’re very welcome. Come on,” Jackson said, turning and kneeling at the door. “Hop on. Let’s go see about your mom.”
Wren rolled the coat up as best he could under his arm in a hurry and jumped on Jackson’s back, piggyback style. Jackson stood and set off down a corridor to a staircase. Now, riding on his back, in such close proximity to Jackson, Wren felt a wave of anxiety wash over him. He couldn’t explain it, or find the right word for it; just images of wildness, and jostling crowds, and frustration, and fear. His skin crawled, and at last he couldn’t bear it.
“Can you put me down now?” he said quickly. “Please?”
“We’ve still got a few more flights to go—”
“Put me down! Put me down please!”
Jackson dropped quickly and let Wren slide off his back, then turned to face him. Wren dropped back two steps, and pressed his back against the wall.
“What is it, kid? What’s wrong?”
Wren felt the tears welling up, and he swallowed hard, trying to hold it together.
“What’s going on?”
“Are you sick?”
The question took Jackson back. He shook his head slowly.
“Not that I know of… why?”
“There’s something…” Wren took another step back down, afraid to say the words. “Something’s wrong. With you.”
Jackson gave a curious look at Wren. Studied him. Then, he sat down on the stairs and crossed his arms, resting them on his knees.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Yeah, I know.”
“What is it?”
He didn’t answer for a while. Just dropped his gaze to his feet. Eventually he rubbed his face with both hands, ran them back through his greasy hair.
“The night they came…” he started. “I just needed a few minutes. You know?”
Wren waited, not sure where Jackson was going.
“I thought I was going to die. I knew I was going to die. So I shipped. I just needed a few minutes to do it. I hid in the safe place.”
Wren didn’t understand. People often shipped in the final moments of their lives, sending their consciousness off to a digital warehouse for preservation, effectively ending their own life.
“But… if you shipped, how can you be here now?”
“They didn’t find me. So I came back.”
He paused, sucked his teeth.
“But… I don’t think I came back alone.”
Jackson dropped his head into his hands, clenched his eyes tight. Pulled his hair back, tight.
“Night is a bad time for me.”
The two stayed silent for a time, Wren not sure how to respond, and Jackson seemingly lost in his own thoughts. Finally, Jackson was the first to speak. He stood.
“It’s alright, I’m not going to hurt you. Sometimes I just have trouble remembering which one is me. But I’m OK. Right now, I’m OK.”
Jackson stretched out his hand.
“Come on, little one. Let’s go get your mama.”
Three crouched at the entrance of the Vault, running his fingers along the edge of the gate where it separated from the wall. Eyes closed. Hunting for a mechanism or release that might activate the door. For now, he focused on solving the problem at hand, on reuniting Cass with her son. Once that was taken care of, then and only then would he let his mind consider the gathering storm that RushRuin surely presented for them.
His fingers brushed across a small, angular piece of metal just inside the gate. As he probed it with his fingers, he snuck a glance at Cass, standing nearby, wearing his coat. Chilled, pale; fragile. And somehow in her raw humanity, utterly captivating. Her eyes flicked to his, as if she felt his gaze. He didn’t look away.
“Any luck?” she asked.
Three shook his head, opened his mouth to explain he was unlikely to find any sort of way to open the gate from the outside. Instead, the sudden sound of straining steel. The gate shifted, rose in jerking steps. And suddenly, a gasp from inside, and a cry from without. A blur of motion. Cass on her knees, Wren in her arms, both sobbing. Inside the Vault, Three saw a gaunt young man operating a jury-rigged crank. The two nodded to each other. But for a time, it just didn’t seem right to speak. Even in this collapsed and decaying world, the reunion of mother and child demanded some semblance of reverence.
Three looked at the two of them, the delicate pair that he had brought out into the open. Without question, he was responsible for them now. And in a sudden flash he felt, without question, they were the mistake that would cost him his life.
And he wasn’t sure it was a mistake at all.
Fourteen
Three sat cross-legged on the floor, staring down the empty corridor, letting the hollowness fill him until he could taste it. He wanted to feel rage, wrath, a burning righteous fury to unleash upon the Weir when next they met. But here, now, in this heavy, silent hallway where the air barely dared to stir, he felt nothing. The emotions he had expected to surge and seethe were as dead as the shell of this underground city.
Loss was nothing new. He’d lost more than a few acquaintances out in the open, and even a couple he’d have dared to call friends. But Gev? If there was anything like family left in the world for Three, Gev had been it. And he’d never seen the Weir hit anything on this scale before. Gev, the Weir… Dagon. Too much to process.
And Cass. She’d played him, and he’d let her. He’d killed for her, nearly died for her, even left and come back for her. Even now he didn’t know why. Or wouldn’t admit that he did. He’d seen women and children plenty of times before, in the shelters, in the gutters, never thought of them as anything more than human debris. But these two… he felt something for them, but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, identify it. Pity? Compassion? Was it the boy? Or his mother? He found her intensely frustrating. And even more fascinating. Such a small thing to be so fierce. He cursed himself for getting involved, for taking responsibility for someone else’s mistake. And all the while he felt that he’d never had a choice.