I woke up feeling the best I had in what felt like years. My stomach, shrunken as it was, was filled, and the relative comfort provided by the pile of straw atop which I slept allowed me to wake without my joints locked and my back little more than a hunch.
I didn't even mind that I had woken up to a less than kind kick to my side.
Granted, there was the obvious, that sudden jolt of fear, the failure to comprehend where I was, or, perhaps it was the realization of where I was that frightened me all the more. I scrambled to my feet, not yet having realized the call of "wake up" belonged to Danev, heart already racing before a hand shoved gruffly fell on my shoulder, shoving me back a few paces. "Relax."
The words, me knowing they came from him, were at least sufficient to get me to calm down for the moment, albeit a still racing heart wondering what was happening, a question I asked as, "What's going on?"
"If you're going to stay here for now, you're going to pull your weight."
It was simple then to remember where I was, in the Hive, and somehow still breathing at that.
If you're going to stay, he had said. So…I'm not going back? I imagine the expression my face had spoken that same question louder than my words ever could have, Danev's addendum of "for now" serving as just the answer I had.
Danev turned to the dank room's exit, nothing about the way he set off implied he was waiting for me. I scrambled to my feet, not at all intent on keeping the man, who my life depending on the patience of, waiting.
The sun now out, the Hive looked different, touched by the rising sun's glare. I could now make out the true breadth of the complex, of the far walls held together by desperate patchwork and scrap reinforcements, the graffiti that lined the building exteriors, the scattered decorations and trophies of bygone days, and the wear and tear this place had faced over the years. Even with the sun up, the Hive still sat silent, its occupants either still asleep, or having done what I was said to be doing now, and 'pulling their weight.' I wondered what this place would have been decades ago, when there was no distinction between inner city and outer city, or at the very least, not one so stark as this. I wondered if bodies had flooded the Hive's plaza, living rather than dead as I knew bodies had during the plague.
Perhaps elsewhere, settling into what had been a hub of plagued corpses would have been considered an ill omen, but when all of Taisho had been flooded with the bodies of the dead, cutting its population from sixty thousand to ten in just under a year, no place was considered untouched of the curse
"Where is everyone?" I asked Danev as we walked, realizing the folly in having been expecting a straight answer, only met with the simplest of responses.
"Working."
"And…what am I going to be doing?"
"Working." I clicked my tongue, figuring I should have expected such an answer.
Hold your tongue, dumbass, I heard the voice inside my head again, realizing I had allowed a semi-full stomach, relatively unparched throat, and proportionately awake pair of eyes to give me a grave misconception of the situation I was in. I was a prisoner, pulled off the streets for knowing too much, on death row until I proved I could be trusted.
Could I?
I didn't leave, didn't I?
I hadn't. I'd stayed, and I had helped take a life. That was likely the only reason I was here right now, and being seated at a long table in a large sandcrete room alongside Bee and Saku, each of which sat with a bowl of what looked to be…almost…porridge?
"Is that-?" I started.
"Sit," Danev interrupted. "You're going to be working today. Gonna need an empty stomach."
I am…am being fed, and I hadn't done anything yet for it. The hell is this? Am I supposed to decline? Am I supposed to take it? Could I even eat if I wanted-
"Hey, dumbass," Bee interrupted between a mouthful of what could only be described as breakfast. "He said, 'sit.'"
It didn't take me being told more than twice already for me to realize I was just standing in the center of a room like an idiot as the others sat at the table, a spot wide open for me. I didn't waste any time and took the available spot on the bench beside Danev as he looked across the room towards an individual of darker skin near the back where the sound of clattering cookery could be heard, and called, "Ladle! Two more!"
The silent individual who went by the tools at his disposal raised his head towards the man who'd given the order, and following a curt nod, lowered a spoon into the pot, scraping what he could out of it while, behind him, more seemed to already be boiling.
Where the hell did they get the water for this? I found myself wondering as the bowl of thick porridge was set down in front of me, eyeing it over before turning my head to scan the faces of the three present: Danev, Bee, and Saku, trying to understand what it was placed in front of me–a last meal? No, he has work for me, I tried to assure myself. I'm not dead. Not dead yet, at least.
I looked to Danev above my meal, wondering if I had leave to take a bite, but rather, he stood, nodding towards Bee and Saku to say, "Give Fluke the rundown. Got things to take care of."
Saku nodded, whatever it was needing explaining clearly having been divulged to him first and foremost, something that did not surprise me. Not after last night.
Danev retrieved his bowl from the table and delivered me a look somewhere between an assurance and a threat before abandoning the cafeteria to the three of us, my gaze now on the two individuals sat in front of me, stomach still rumbling, caught in a limbo of not knowing whether it was okay for me to eat or not.
"Well what the fuck, Fluke?" Bee asked. "Ladle shit in your bowl or something? Eat, for fuck's sake."
There was a clear enough answer if there ever was one. I didn't need to be told twice, and immediately set my eyes and hands to the wooden bowl in front of me, and the grain chowder that sat within, runny, tasteless, and the best thing I had eaten in almost a month. I wished I had saved the bread for this morning. The way they two would have gone together, allowing me to sop up what clung to the side of the bowl, it would have been perfect.
"Spirits," Bee commented. "He's really digging in. You'd think he hasn't eaten a decent meal in weeks."
I wonder why?
I had raised my head from my bowl with a questioning look of that exact variety, not thinking to moderate my response before my fears were alleviated by the last thing I would have expected out of her–a hearty laugh, the momentary smile on her face painting her as almost somebody who wasn't hideous in that moment. How she was laughing in the wake of yesterday, however, I was less prone to understand, but still, the relief of seeing something from her directed towards me that wasn't an insatiable desire to kill–it was enough to get a small smile out of me.
"So come on, Saku, don't leave him hanging."
Saku cleared his throat over a penultimate bite of porridge, saying, "We're making collections."
As in, we're going on the streets? After last night?
"That safe?" I asked, the concern enough to stop me in my tracks, wiping the porridge from around my mouth with my tongue. "Especially for the three of us after last night?"
"If anything it's them who should be worried about their safety around us," Bee scoffed.
Saku, however, seemed less inclined to give into her confidence, concern plastering his face as well, but clearly having already come to terms with the way things were–a decision that wasn't his, but came from above.
How above?
"Danev and Riu are handling things," Saku said. "Besides, we're gonna be running collections far enough away from Rat territory, we should be fine."
As though territory mattered when you didn't have manpower to guard it. A rat by the Jiāyuán Route was just as dangerous as a rat on the Liángshí Street. Theoretical lines of boundary made little difference on one's ability to kill, which led Saku to his next point, saying, "We're going to be sticking close, anyway, so we should manage. Just all of you, stay by me, and by day's end, we'll be back home."
So he would be running the show. I had to admit it instilled more confidence in me than Bee doing so, but still, something about it felt off, putting us back on the streets so soon. I'd have figured Danev would want us inside here until things cooled down. Then again, there was the chance that the decision wasn't his own, but Riu's, and I could make no claim to know the man as I had never met him before.
Perhaps if I found a way to not get myself killed in this period of 'for now', the chance would arise.
All the more reason to keep my head low and do as I was told.
I nodded, taking the last bite of the porridge I was able, the bowl still half-filled, but my stomach refusing to allow any more in.
"Gonna finish that?" Bee asked, met with a shake of my head and a push of the bowl across the table. "See, Ladle?" she called across the room. "Some people are generous enough to share!"
"You ate your fill the moment I gave it to you, Bee!" he called back. "You don't get to bitch! Least I know my food's going to you and not that shit."
A shared chuckle, the way in which she managed to do so with the blood on her hands still having not yet dried, it scared me, but so long as it wasn't mine, who was I to complain, even if I was the object of the shared amusement, 'that shit' being me.
Who else knows I'm here? I wondered, feeling all the more inclination to get going now. The last thing I wanted was to find a crowd already on the move in the Hive's courtyard, just ready to catch the newbie stumbling out. No, not 'newbie'. Captive.
Don't forget it.
Just keep your head down, I reminded myself. And do as you're told.
We didn't stay eating for long. Both Bee and Saku seemed just as aware of the clamor my presence would cause should I be seen. I couldn't help but wonder what the others thought was happening. Did they think me dead, killed two weeks ago once I'd stopped rearing my ugly head at the Hive? And the Rats, they must've thought the same thing, though I doubted that would hold. Match had seen my face, heard my voice, both of which I knew he would recognize from a mile after these years of selling and stealing information to and from them.
The Rats would know.
Reek would know.
It wasn't the first time I've thought of him in these last few weeks. First, it'd been a concealed hope that maybe he would manage to save my ass, pull me out of all of this, rally the Rats to get me out. Then, of course, after an entire week of captivity, I'd come enough to my senses to realize that the reason I still was where I was, in a damp stone freezer, was because either the Rats didn't know, or didn't care, and if they did come to know, I doubted they would care. I thought often enough of Danev or Reek to have managed to trick myself into believing I was mutually liked by this street's contenders for territory, subtle reminders such as Mu or more explicit ones such as Bee reminding me that the truth was far from ideal. In reality, I was wanted dead by more than those who would rather keep me alive. I was only fortunate that one of the few people in these streets who saw more use of me with a still-beating heart happened to have a voice that meant something.
We were working away from the hive–something that didn't come as a surprise to me given the way that the streets had been shaken last night. Away from the Rats, and away from where the Hornets were concentrated. There were others out here, by the spice road to be sure, but not enough that we'd be easily noticed.
The streets were emptier out here, as none had gone to miss over these last few years. As far as I was aware, it'd always been like this, spices from the south, and the desert that supposedly lay there, not having been particularly forthcoming for decades, before as well as after the change in management. Perhaps over a century ago, it'd been different, but now, that road sat empty, the streets that connected, not too different. Those that stuck around were start-up gangs, drugged-up squatters, desperate whores, and apparently, among them, people who owed us money.
I remembered upon going quickly enough why it was I didn't make it a habit of sticking around Taisho's west side. I felt naked wherever I stepped, as though I was being watched, which was an odd sensation given that there was hardly anybody here wandering these streets.
"Feels like the plague's still around, don't it?" Bee commented as we walked.
I did not disagree. Between the decrepit buildings that surrounded us, I felt as though I could open the door to a single one and have 50/50 odds of coming across a heap of diseased bodies, some still half alive, just waiting for cleansers to wheelbarrow them out of the city into a mass grave, finding buried alive to somehow be a better fate than living any longer.
"Probably still is," Saku said with a shrug. "Watch for rats." I was unsure if it was a joke or an actual advisory, but I watched my feet in either case.
"So who are we making collections from here anyway?" I asked as my eyes wandered, searching for any sign of value in this neck of the woods. I raked my brain, trying to figure just what it was. Back when they'd still been a force to be reckoned with, even the Lawmakers had avoided the West, the place remaining relatively free of their influence, considered something of a haven even in light of the plague that lingered in its dark corners. "People out here cooking crank and shit?"
"Mhm," affirmed Bee over-enthusiastically, as though proud of the conclusion I had come to. It wasn't much of a leap. Banned in lawmaker territory, some traditions stood, chief among them being that such substances were banned. "Because we all remember the punishment for that."
"He who poisons shall die by his own supply," we all spoke in unison as one, eliciting a small chuckle from Bee. Old memories died hard.
"Pay us to protect them," Saku said.
"What from?" I asked.
"Nothing, most of the time. But paranoia goes a long way."
"And if they start to realize they're paying for protection against nothing?"
"Then we pay off a few slumdogs to remind them, we come in and save the day."
"It's quite the performance," Bee added. "And you thought the Ember Island players were good."
"Like you've ever seen them perform," Saku mumbled.
"Any of that today?" I asked. "Reminders, I mean?"
"Nah," Saku answered. "Danev'd let us know beforehand. Make sure there's no surprises so we don't accidentally kill one of 'em or something. Would need to pay them off more then."
"So what if there's a reminder that we didn't plan? That ever hap-"
"Spirits, what's with all the damned questions?"
"Ah, come on," Bee intervened on, surprisingly enough, my behalf. "He's just curious."
"Oh so he can slip away and sell everything he hears to the Rats?"
"Oh, please. Odds are Rats want him dead just as much as us now." She spoke as though it was comedic. Perhaps, in a cosmic sense, it was, though I certainly didn't find it to be so at that moment. "Never claimed Fluke here was smart, but he seems intelligent 'nuff to know they'd kill him if he ever shows his face without our pretty bodies to back 'im up."
I wasn't sure whether to feel flattered, or terrified.
We arrived at our first pick-up soon enough–a boarded up hovel that stank of a fume the others advised I best not breathe. We thus stayed outside while a man whose eyes housed pupils smaller than a needle's head emerged, a shawl over his head as though he feared the sun more than he feared whatever it was we 'protected' him from. What that protection was worth–1 silver piece.
"So what's that for?" I asked en route to our second stop, the drug den's thick wooden door having already been shut and barred behind us. "Week? Month?"
"Month," Saku answered, at the very least now keen on giving me straight answers.
"He need any 'reminding' this month?"
"Nah, Ramur doesn't ask questions, doesn't need setting his mind right."
"You mean because he's fucking out of it." The look in his eyes, glazed over, horrified of the sun, I didn't suspect I was wrong.
Bee shrugged in place of Saku delivering an answer. "So long as we get paid, doesn't matter to us."
"So what was he? Dealer, manufacturer?"
"He look like his understanding of social interactions goes beyond handing something to another, money or dope?" Bee laughed. "Nah. Slinging requires somebody with a bit more charisma, and a bit more sunshine."
"So just makes it? And gives it to who?"
It was Saku who spoke now, educating me on the world of the slums that I never before had even thought to look into. It was out of my territory, not my league. I'd been focused on the gangs, what they hit from one week to the next, where they got their shit, but never before had I set my eyes West.
"Drug pushing 'round here isn't exactly organized. Somebody makes, somebody sells. Some people do both, some stick to one."
"So Ramur specializes in just making?"
Bee guffawed, turning two pairs of eyes to her. "Sorry," she wiped an amused tear from her eye. "Never thought I'd hear 'Ramur' and 'special' in the same sentence in this context."
"That'd be a 'yes'," Saku gave as a more straightforward answer.
"So who's he selling to?"
Then he only shrugged. "Whoever. Not our business. He cooks good enough, so he has no shortage of people who want to move his stuff around."
"And if people decide they don't want to buy, just take?"
Saku turned his head to be, looking me up and down, as though the answer was right in front of-
"Oh," I realized. That'd be us.
"Our name goes far, hell if I know why. So, keep on acting professional, and don't give 'em reason to not line our pockets."
The next stop was a dealer by the looks of him, huddled beside a rain gutter that too obviously was a stash location. It seemed the idea of 'protection' also bred negligence, or was it just sloth? The rate at which things moved around here, the latter wouldn't have surprised me. Maybe I should have stayed in the business of stealing from others, I considered. Lawmakers had never made it out this far; could have made off with both my hands, and, from the look of it, a decent amount of silver.
Then again, seeing what seems to have come of those residing here, I was unsure if it was necessarily a bad thing that I had kept my distance. Rumors alone of the west had been enough to stay my feet by the Liángshí street where I knew how the world worked. When it came to the West, there was a difference between understanding and living, which is what I'm sure divided the Hornets and those whose money they took.
"I mean, even before the plague, the West had been pretty much abandoned."
"Well," started Bee. "That's what happens when the spice doesn't flow. No trade caravans to leech off of or steal from, no need for people to hang around. Been like that long before the Fire Nation showed up."
"Not that you would know, of course," interrupted Saku.
"She's not wrong," I intervened, my mind suddenly choosing now as the moment, while we made our way to our third target, to remember Mishi's answer when I'd asked of why things in his shop were priced as they were, grain low, spices high, and textiles somewhere in the middle. Supply and demand was a concept that was not lost to me, and where there was no supply, there tended to be high demand, and from what I'd gathered from Mishi, the fall of spice imports didn't affect us, whose dreams didn't go far beyond a loaf of bread to fill our stomachs, as much as it did those past the interior walls, whose concept of the distinction between luxury and necessity couldn't have been any further from our own.
"Why thank you."
"You're even younger, Fluke," Saku objected. "Like you'd know any better."
The third was another dealer, evidently having a better time of his day than the prior, in what seemed to be a moderately populated area, at least by Western standards, enough so to the point that he had direct company, doing business it seemed by the look of it, and enough self-instilled confidence so as to make the statement, "Think I'll be going without your protection actually." Somebody clearly had gone without reminding, and by the look on Saku's face, it wasn't the first time.
"We'll ask you to reconsider, Rahi. Things are quiet out here, but unpredictable. Never know what can go wrong."
"I know exactly what does and what doesn't go wrong around here. I know it's people you pay off who come in here to start shit to 'remind' us of what your protection is worth."
"Well, then," Bee interjected, taking a step forward that, already, seemed to be enough to shatter the minimal confidence in himself that the man still held in this moment. Where it had come from, too long a period of negligence or the bottom of a bottle, who could say, but his sobering came quick. "You should be more than aware then of what should come to pass without our protection." And the final straw to break the man's back was laid.
I asked, after we had left and received our money, what it was that would happen, the answer not far off from what I'd have expected from Bee. "We go in, take what we want, beat the shit out of him. Either he wises up, or somebody finishes the job and replaces him. Somebody more…"
"Amiable?"
"That's it."
I noticed, as we walked, the familiar terrain we passed. We weren't looping around to double back on those we'd missed, no. "We're headed back?" I asked.
"That's right," Saku answered. "Taking what we've got so far back to one of our safehouses nearby."
"Then double back and continue?"
"That's correct."
"Seems a waste of time."
"It's safer. Bad idea to travel with too much on us, in contested territory, or even out here. Never know how desperate some of these dope fiends might get, or how far a damn Rat may be willing to go to get a hit on us."
"So you double back based on what? Amount held, number of places collected from?"
"Take your guess?"
It was an easy feat to both think and move at the same time–an ability I couldn't ascribe to others, especially when 'moving' also entailed watching one's surroundings to ensure they wouldn't find themselves victim of an untimely ambush. "I'd say," I started, "amount held on you, but then whenever you'd be seen doubling back, anybody willing to mark you as a target would know how much you have on you and that it's the most they're gonna get. You go by number of collections made, that number can vary, be it higher or lower, and people might be less willing to rob you if they don't know what you're carrying."
From the corner of my eye, I could see it–an exchange in glances between Saku and Bee, a silence between them.
"Yeah," Saku said, in a way that felt almost hasty, quick to make some form of recovery. "Of course that's what we do."
The topic was pursued by neither party, conversation as a whole kept to a minimum until it was we were greeted by what could only have been the nearest stash house's staff, two individuals whom I knew I recognized the faces out without having ascribed names to them before. I kept my ears perked, hoping to be able to mend such gaps in my knowledge.
Information would not be forthcoming, however, be it by design, or mere happenstance.
"3 silver," Saku spoke, removing the tiny pieces from his pocket and handing them to the burly slumdog who accepted them with a grateful nod before, as though just to make it clear to the world he was an honest man, recovered their stash box and added the tribute to the whole in a fashion so overtly exaggerated I could not help but assume there's been problems in the past in the way of honesty.
And yet the dishonest live while the ones who make a mistake get executed. Even after over two weeks, I still couldn't get Mahin out of my mind, how he'd died for nothing, for what I had seen. And there it was again, the entire routine, the guilt, the self-assurance, the reminder to not complain, to not speak up, but do as I was told. It seemed even after doing that, however, there was no such thing as a guarantee.
"Bee," the stash house guard called out, needing to do so twice before capturing her attention away from the two-yard distance ahead of her. "You're wanted back at the Hive."
"What for?" she asked, now finally attentive.
"Danev didn't say, just that he and Riu wanted you back."
It was now not only Bee's attention that was on the man, but the rest of us as well. The hell? Seemed to be the question passing through our minds judging by the glances we exchanged with one another. It was one thing for Danev to have a request, but for it to go higher that he…I couldn't make any claim as to the strangeness of it all, at least not until a glance at Saku was all it took for me to be able to identify that this was nothing in the norm.
"What for?" Saku asked, jumping to the beat first, myself not yet sure what it was that dominated his question first: confusion, or fear. I supposed it was a healthy mix of the two, the line of inquiry towards the stash house guard yielding nothing in the way of answers as a disconcerting silence reigned until Bee simply shrugged, breaking her look on the rest of us before shoving past the guard to be on her way. "Shouldn't keep them waiting then, huh?"
"Sure, Bee?"
"What's there to be sure about?" she asked, turning back to us as she was already on her way, shoving past the selfsame man that had delivered the news of her summons. "Just a little talk with the bossman is all."
"And what about-?" Saku started, turning back to the guard.
"Keep the collections going," the guard answered prematurely, seeming to have already known what it was being asked.
"Just the two of us?
"What?" Bee asked, pausing for the moment in her steps away, seeing the opportunity for a snide remark and not missing it. "Worried you can't manage without me?"
"Ceasefire with the Rats for today, relax," the guard affirmed. "Just don't get jumped by some junkie and you'll be fine."
A ceasefire? When was the last time that'd happened?
The decision wasn't ours, and it'd been made. The last we heard of Bee was a chuckle echoing down the empty streets on the thin line between East and West, calling as she went, "Oh you'll be fine. See you all for supper assuming I don't stuff myself the second I get back!"
"It about last night?" I asked Saku as we made our way back West, now down a man, feeling that much more exposed with Bee gone for reasons neither of us could place our fingers on for the lives of us.
"Most likely," he answered with a shrug. "Probably just want to bring her in for a few more questions, clear things up, y'know?" Was he asking me?
"So why just her?"
"Keep us separate, yeah?" He didn't know. "Get the stories from us individually, bring us in at different times, then have us all together, get it all at once one last time. His argument. The more he talked, the more and more I could see him forcing it. He didn't believe it, did he? "They'll probably call one of us in on the next go around. Then it'll be us there, and we'll be done with this."
Already, noon had passed behind us. When would that 'then' be, and what would have changed by then? Saku was talking from a place of one who knew nothing but tried to cling onto that which he did, the effort admirable, but in vain. We were in the dark, equally so which I could tell did not fail to infuriate him, but still, he continued forward, unable to do anything else.
The latter half of the day passed as the first had, without much incident, our collections scattered between one another, the threat of a growing rumble in our stomachs all the more incentive to push us along, both of us having the vague sensation that it wasn't so much hunger that kept us going, wanting to finish as quickly as possible, so much as it was the knot in our stomach, that vague sense that something wasn't right.
"A ceasefire?" I had asked at some point.
"Weird, right?" Saku agreed, clearly having abandoned any notion that he was in the know more than I was. It no longer angered him so much as it did worry him.
It worried both of us, and yet neither of us knew what it was we were worrying about. Was it Bee? Was it that we were likely next? We were worrying over something about which we had no idea, something that, for all intents and purposes, was no fault of our own. We'd been attacked, we'd defended ourselves, and a Rat had died. Bee was right; it hadn't been our fault. Such was the consensus Saku and I had reached as we walked, not choosing to dwell on the unspoken rule of blood having been spilled, of what would be demanded in turn.
"They wouldn't do that," Saku had said at some point in the evening after we'd made our drop off, and there'd been no explicit demand that we'd been requested, but had been told notwithstanding to head back. "I know Riu. He'd sooner go to war than sell one of us out."
"So you think that's what it was?" I asked.
"War picking up? Bee for extra muscle? Ceasefire before it all begins?"
There was no answer, not for a moment until he said, "Yeah. Gotta be."
I don't know if either of us had believed it. It was the same thing that had been on my mind, all of our minds except possibly Bee's last night, when Shaalin's lifeless body, and what it meant for me was all that I could see. It meant two things. On one hand, it meant that blood would be met with blood, and that would be the end of it. Or, it would mean that there would not be an exchange, but that justice would be left to fate, and there would be war.
Yet there was no war when we returned. The Hive was quiet, already asleep, not a wardrum to be blared, not a mass mobilization that which would prelude a storm of swords, but only quiet, and I wasn't sure whether to be relieved, or worried, because of those not present, neither was that whom we'd come to see, that whom I thought may just be the only person whose opinion on me I'd managed to change, who, for some reason unknown to all but the spirits, had decided I wasn't worth the bloodlust. Instead, it was only Danev awaiting our return, and the news we had already pieced together the moment we entered–the reality we had suspected, but ignored for fear it would be true, until now, when there could be no more hiding from it.