DIRT - short story

 Author's Note: This story takes place in the world of Tinon, which currently has book one out, book two currently being written. 

By this time in her life—she thought about roughly twenty years, though she couldn’t be sure—Lex was used to the dirt. She was used to only seeing out of one eye, because she’d lost the use of the left one as a child (this was not uncommon in the lower streets of Bemignon, there was an overly large population of witches and everyone knew that the ash witches secreted could make eyes quit working), and she was used to being hungry. She was used to having acquaintances, quick meetings, people she could spend some time with and forget. She liked to forget these people because they were bad news, because they’d likely die, or she’d likely die, and everyone was happier if they could just forget people who’d died.

            She stayed solely, religiously, to the outskirts of Bemignon. At the center of the city were great reaching towers and well-built shops, but out here there was nothing but dirt and one-eyed children and gangs and those witches. Lex didn’t know when witches had decided that Bemignon would be a good secondary place to live, they were all from up north, not even from Tinon, but across the sea where it never got warm, but she didn’t like them. She didn’t even want to pretend to like them.

            That didn’t mean that she didn’t have a bit of a stupid soft spot.

            Her soft spot had started to grow in the last year or so. She’d been out, minding her own business, debating going in a little farther to maybe pick the pocket of someone who’d have something worth picking from their pocket, when she’d seen someone, a young man she thought, staggering around half-dead. He’d called out to her, and she’d made the mistake and turned around. It was a mistake because she knew that nobody else he tried to talk to would even think about helping him; not only was he wrapped up like a leper, but from what she could see, he had the short stature and slanted eyes of a Malt and the dark skin of a Sudume. Not only was he an other, but he was two others—and because Lex knew that if he tried anyone else, he’d get nothing better than a spit in the face, she’d given him directions.

            But she had nothing against the Maltagnese and the Sudumese. She’d played with both as a child, and she was acquaintances with both as an adult. She did have a problem with witches.

            That was why it was so stupid that she was helping this one now.

            She’d seen a group of Reds, one of the many gangs that prowled in the lower streets of Bemignon, one that had really grown in the last few years, the beginning members in their early twenties and leaving most of the pillaging and burning and fighting to younger members, kids in their early teens and late childhoods, surrounding something on the ground. She’d figured it was a cat or something, and was going to let it happen (there were too many stray cats on the streets of Bemignon, they did nothing but carry disease and produce irritating yowls when they fought at night), but then she heard a whimper. A decidedly child-like whimper. And since most of the kids surrounding it were fourteen, fifteen, and because of that soft spot that had started growing with directions given to one lost soul, Lex had stepped in.

            She was regretting this.

            “Oh? Are you gonna make us?” the smallest of the Reds said, a young man with a ratty face and a scar on his cheekbone. “Move along, old lady.”

            Soft spot or no, Lex did not like being called an old lady.

            “Oh no,” Lex said. She grinned, and that was enough to send a couple of them back a few steps, because Lex grinning, with broken-out, chipped, and blackened teeth, was enough to scare even the most hardened of gang members. “Now I’ve got to chase you off. Kid, you get out of here before I decide you’ve had enough time being able to see out of both eyes.”

            She pulled a knife free from her boot. It wasn’t the only knife on her.

            “Kell, let’s go,” one of the others murmured to the boy that had spoken. Kell shook his head. He wasn’t one of the ones who’d stepped back when she grinned. “C’mon, it’s not worth it, the thing’ll die anyway, there’s no way it’ll live with that cut.”

            “Your little friend’s right,” Lex said. “It’s not worth it.”

            Kell scowled and took a step forward, his own hand going to his belt, where he had, quite intelligently, hung several knives of his own, but a hand on his shoulder from one of the older boys kept him still. “I’m telling Chief about her,” Kell said, and the older boy shrugged. Kell directed the next words to her. “Watch your step. Chief don’t like people who mess with the Reds.”

            The kids scattered, disappearing into alleyways and storefronts and nooks and crannies. Kell went straight down the middle of the street, sending a poisonous glare back to her, and Lex was faced with a bleeding witchling.

            Like all witchlings, it was impossible to know the gender of this one. They were lying curled on their side, holding their stomach, face screwed up in pain. There was a large bruise forming on the side of their face that faced the sky, and Lex swore for a solid thirty seconds before the witchling opened their eyes and, seeing that there was still some of the dirt of Bemignon hanging around, closed them right back up again.

            “Calm down kid, I ain’t gonna hurt you,” Lex said. She sighed. She wasn’t going to hurt the witchling, that was something true that she could accept to herself, but what she didn’t like was the fact that she felt the urge, almost uncontrollable, to help the kid. She had a friend who was decent at stitching up people, made a pretty penny off of it, too.

            But Mal had a little girl, a little girl who’d already lost sight in one eye to the stink that the witches put off. Lex couldn’t dump a witch on them, even if it was a baby one, one that looked like they were barely seven or eight, one with a bruise that looked like it was from a boot on their face, one bleeding out from a gut stab.

            Lex would have to take care of this one by herself.

            And that’s what irritated her so much.

            “All right, kid,” Lex said. She crouched and shook the witchling’s shoulder. “What’s your name?”

            The kid let out a mess of syllables that Lex couldn’t dream of remembering, let alone pronouncing.

            “Okay,” Lex said. “How about we just call you Jack, okay? Let’s see your gut, Jack.”

            Jack didn’t move, and Lex sighed, stuck her knife back in her boot, and picked up the kid. She staggered a little; it wasn’t like the kid was heavy or anything, but Lex was wiry muscle that could let her pull herself up and around things, not muscle that could carry anything that was all that heavy. When she picked up the kid, she couldn’t help but gasp a little, a stupid girly wimpy sound that she hated as soon as she’d let it out—but the gut-stab must have been worse than she’d figured, because the pool of blood that sat where Jack had been lying was a big one. A big one that looked deep.

            She’d get Jack back to her place, a one-room crap apartment on the bottom floor of a building full of one-room crap apartments, the only luxury being a large stone fireplace that really did come in handy during the winters, and she’d stitch him up as best as she could, and when he woke up, she’d send him on his way and hope that he found his witch friends before the Reds found him again. If he didn’t wake up, she’d have to be satisfied that she’d done all that she could do and just throw him out back and forget about him.

            She half-expected to be attacked by some Reds, probably led by Kell, but maybe by some older higher-ups, on her way home, which was a few blocks away, but she wasn’t. She made it home safe, with Jack shaking and letting out dangerously whistling breaths against her chest. Lex wasn’t a mother and didn’t plan to be—didn’t get close enough to any men to let them do that to her, and didn’t want to be responsible for anything like a child, but in that moment she almost fancied herself one.

            Then she remembered that she was carrying a half-dead baby witch, not a child she’d birthed herself, and the fantasy dropped from her mind.

#

            She stitched up Jack as best as she could, which was nothing near what Mal could have done, but enough to make it stop bleeding. Jack didn’t wake up with the needle pushing through his skin, which was probably a bad sign, but he didn’t die, either, which was definitely a good sign. She found herself sitting up and watching him sleep, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest, how his long hair fluttered from the draft that blew through the crap one-room apartment walls.

            It was the middle of the night before there were consequences for what she’d done.

            She’d fallen asleep sometime earlier, but woke up to the smell of smoke. She jerked to her feet—arson, possibly, but also possibly just a kid who’d knocked over a candle, either way, the place was going up. Since it was Bemignon, since it was low Bemignon and since Lex was a realist, she was pretty sure that it was arson.

            She went for the door when she heard a cry, and her heart dropped and she looked back and saw Jack propped up on his elbows, tears running down his face. He said something in his witch language, and she cursed and went back for him. She could do more than smell smoke now, she could feel it sting her eyes, even the one that didn’t work, and she could taste it at the back of her throat. She coughed a few times, bringing up phlegm and a little blood, and scooped up Jack again. This time he didn’t curl and shake and breathe terrifying whistling breaths, this time he wrapped his arms around her neck and nearly choked her to death.

            Since she was on the ground floor, she had her own door, but when she tried to kick it open, there was something blocking it. She heard laughter, and though it was stupid, she swore that she recognized Kell’s voice in some of that laughter.

            “Hey! Kids!” she yelled. The force of it got her coughing again, and for a few brief, terrifying moments she squeezed Jack to her chest and hacked out what felt like half of her lung. “Move whatever the hell you’ve got there!”

            The response was less than polite and decidedly unhelpful.

            She turned and rammed her shoulder against the door a couple of times, but then she started coughing again and found that she couldn’t stop. She sunk to the floor, one shoulder still leaned against the door, and her head dipped forward. Her forehead brushed against Jack’s, Jack who clung to her neck and cried into her chest, and she decided that this was likely how she was going to go. Burned to death with a witch clinging to her.

            She wasn’t as angry about it as she thought it would be.

            She still didn’t see the fire; likely the Reds hadn’t known her exact location in the apartment building and had set the front on fire, but the smoke would get her before too long. Jack was coughing now, too, and probably would bust his stitches before too long. He’d bleed out and she’d suffocate and they would die together. She’d die acting as a mother.

            She smirked a little. It was crazy, stupid, but that was how she was going to go.

            She staggered over to the other wall, hoping that the fireplace stones would be cool enough to at least give them that last pleasantness. She had an image of herself resting Jack in the fireplaces, leaning him against cool stones that she hadn’t used for flame in months, Bemignon was southern and hot except in the most extreme times, and then she froze.

            She was an idiot.

            She hugged Jack to her chest. “Hold on, child,” she said. She didn’t know when the witchling had become a child to her, but either way, the child clung to her like she really was his mother, and she squirmed into the fireplace. It was a tight squeeze, with both her and the child, but she was a skinny bitch, all skin and bones, so she thought that they would fit.

            She didn’t have time to prepare herself, she just started climbing. The stones were not cool, they were too close to the fire and they scalded her hands, but she climbed. The building was shoddily made and the stones jutted out in odd places; good for climbing, bad when they banged into her head as she ascended. The building was four stories tall, four stories was four stories of climbing, of her limbs shaking and of the child clinging to her so hard that she thought her collarbone would snap under the pressure, but she climbed.

            She didn’t run into any problems until she saw the night sky above her. That was when the chimney started to narrow.

            She swore, coughed again—Jack had become almost scarily still—and then pressed her back against one side of the chimney, propped up one foot on a piece of stone, let the other one hang, and then slapped Jack lightly on one cheek. “Jack,” she said. “Jack, wake up.”          

            Jack coughed weakly and stirred. Better than nothing.

            “Jack, get on my shoulders. Wake up.”

            She shook Jack, a little, and then nearly lost her balance and caught the wall with one hand, clung her fingers hard to the stone, her heart pounding and everything moving so fast. Jack did wake up fully at this; maybe he felt her heart speed up or maybe a witchling could sense that kind of danger, because he regained consciousness.

            “I need you to finish the climb,” she said. “I can’t fit with you on me like this.”

            Jack blinked at her, and she nudged him toward the wall. He did start to climb, but after a few inches, he stopped. Lex nudged his thigh with her head. “I’m right behind you, keep going.”

            She could feel the building creaking underneath her.

            “Keep going.”

            Jack kept going, and she kept going beneath him, her arms shaking. She didn’t think she would make it, and then he pulled himself up and out and she pulled herself up and out and she grabbed him, grabbed him and picked him up with her shaking, raw, numb arms and ran across the rooftops like she’d done when she was a child and once they were far enough away to no longer have to fear death by fire, she sat down and clutched him to her chest and did something she hadn’t really done in years. She cried.