“Raid!” more screamed, bashing their fists on doors. “Raid!”
And I ran. I ran and collided with bodies, everyone scrambling in the opposite direction, some half dressed, still in housecoats, feet bare. When the sirens blared here, all of Scurry ran for the river.
I ran for the alley, for where I’d last seen Patrick, tearing through the stream of people, but as its mouth reared up, another body met with mine, this one shoving me sideways.
I fell, my head hitting the icy ground.
“Got her, Kicker!” A shout. Something heavy pressing into my back, pinning me down.“She’s here, Kicker!”
All the air squeezed from my lungs. I tried to cry out and couldn’t.
The siren heightened, growing louder, more insistent.
The lane was full of pounding feet, none of them stopping for me. I tried to free myself, my fingernails digging into the dirt.
Then the weight was gone, replaced by a hand on the scruff of my neck, a vise on my hair and collar, pulling me off the ground. I cried out, and it was drowned in the chaos.
Harland stood before me, his face so close I could see the flecks of color in his irises. Smell the fury on him. “Now, where’re you goin’?” he growled, teeth bared. Years of drinking showed in the veins of his cheeks, rivers of them. He looked rabid. “Fuckin’ worthless swank!” He struck me. I didn’t see from which direction it came, only felt the slosh of my brain collide with my skull, saw the light burst in my vision, felt the pain moments later.
“Where’s Colson?” Harland yelled. “Eh? Where thefuckis he?”
My lips sealed themselves shut. I wouldn’t give him another fucking thing. I pulled at his arm uselessly, but he held me too close. I reached outward, visualized dirt rising up and funneling into his eyes and nose and mouth. But he struck me again, and I lost my hold on it.
“Little birdie John Colson told us you sent a little scribble to the House. Bringin’ thefuckin’ armyinto my parish!” he said, spit flying over my mouth, into my eyes. He pulled a blade from his pocket and held it against my neck. “Told us you were plannin’ to cut us out. But I’m thinkin’ the House will make some nice concessions in exchange for their earth Charmer. You ain’t cuttin’ me out, Harrow!”
He turned his head to someone out of sight. “Find John Colson,” he growled. “He’ll have Patrick in hand by now.”
There were hands at my legs picking me up, men on my arms, taking me away. Away from the alley and Patrick.
They dragged me down the middle of the lane one foot at a time as I struggled to remain awake. I fought against the rising black tide threatening to swallow me.
My hair was yanked back wrenching my neck painfully. A blow hit my side. I blinked, panted.
Residents came to their doors to peer at the commotion.
“Please,” I called weakly. “Help me.”
But there had never been any help in Scurry. They locked their jaws and averted their eyes the moment they saw Kicker. The sirens churned on.
And I was ten years old again, knocking at each house and begging for scraps. I was eleven and fishing through their garbage bins. My own uncle dragged me on limp legs as my doped father faded away in the same house my mother had left me in, and there was no help in this world. You didn’t get what you deserved, you got whatever was handed down by those more powerful. You lost what you weren’t willing to take.
They carried me all the way to the church, the only statue in Scurry standing before it, encrusted and blackened with mold and soot. Impossibleto tell who the statue depicted. Desecrated now and left to erode, just like everything else here in Scurry.
But there was enough of it left that they could tie me to it. They could wrap rope around my ankles and stomach and bind my hands at the back of it. I heaved and screamed and felt the blackness encroach, waiting for me to fall into it, my fingers clinging to the ledge of consciousness.
Harland drew monstrous breaths from the air, possessed by something I couldn’t hope to fight. “Those fuckers can try,” he declared, foaming with rage, “but they can’t run us out of our own fuckin’ town!”
Idium was suddenly there in my veins, awakening while the rest of me went under.
“And I’m bettin’ they can’t lose the key to their fuckin’ vault, can they?”
Me. I was the key.
Then something sharp sliced through, something horribly familiar: the feeling that I had been stripped away to raw materials, that I was a tool. A piece of machinery. A weapon.
In another lifetime, hundreds of years ago, a woman not so different from me stood here, tied as I was, when this place was still full of wildflowers. And she let the ground devour the men who came to take her.
The church loomed. The same one my mother dragged me to every week to pray to Idia, to beg her for something more.
