We Leave Together, стр. 14
“No one was smart about it,” she said. These words spilled like snow from her lips, and spilled all around the room. Ice everywhere, so cold. “I’m running out of clothes again. I’m going to need you to get me something I can wear, Djoss. Can you do that?”
Djoss said nothing back.
Rachel reached her mind into the air between them, full of fire and ice and cool winds and throbbing with the energies of the Unity and this ashen snow of unspeaking. The room was just a normal room, like every too-small, stinking room jammed into the corners of the too-big buildings in the huge city, but in here it was snowing.
“You do that without money. Bring me clothes. Make that happen for me. I can’t give you any coin for it right now. We need it all to make rent. Got it? You always got clothes for me, Djoss.”
He nodded. He didn’t look like he meant it.
Disgusted, Rachel left her brother without another word. She walked outside. She felt into the Unity for all the energy hidden in the air, where people live and love and the threads of life swell into one pattern.
In every room—every single room—her breaking heart was not alone.
A thousand upon a thousand snowfalls, and all the city weeps in the dark, alone.
***
In the Docks south of the Pens, crates ascended up and out from the ship’s hold by a crane that placed the crates in leaking heaps on the docks. A dozen stevedores hauled on the crane ropes to muscle the crates off the ship. Once upon the ground, the stevedores unhooked the crane, and cracked open the crates on the spot. They pulled sacks of ore out of the crate, and threw them one by one onto a flat river ship in a messy heap. A merchant sweatier than the stevedores counted the sacks.
The sacks seeped ore across the mud. The yellow-white ore splashed all over the naked chests and backs of the porters. It filled their hair and clumped in the sweat down their leggings. Tonight, the men’d find the ore’s flecks behind them in the chamber pot. They’d dream of ore. They’d taste ore in their lovers’ skins, if they had one to taste. Most did not.
Rachel sat down on a porch stoop across from the stevedores. She waited until she saw one wearing a wedding band around his neck on a chain, where it wouldn’t catch on the hook in his hand, or any of the ropes and pulleys. He had a neck the size of a small tree. His hair was burned-off along one side, and he laughed with a sound like coughing smoke.
She caught the man’s eye. She walked towards him, slowly.
He sneered. “Get back, Senta.”
“I have a warning for you, friend,” said Rachel.
“I ain’t your friend.”
“Your wife knows,” said Rachel. She placed her hands on her hips and shook her head. She tsk-ed at him.
The man looked sideways at Rachel. “My wife?” he said, “What’s she know, then?”
Rachel looked around at the stalled stevedores, waiting for their fellow to get back to work. She winked at the married foreign man. “I’d tell you if we were friends.” Rachel turned to walk away.
One of the other stevedores smacked the dock worker on the back. “Hey! Pay the Senta lest she curse you for it! She done you a favor!” They shouted at him, and they urged him on.
The stevedore with the burned head and the wedding band threw off the hands of his fellow superstitious stevedores. He jogged after Rachel.
The merchant shouted about how he wasn’t paying for foolish trips to the Senta.
The stevedore shoved a hand into his pocket for a few coins, and jammed them into Rachel’s palm.
“Thanks, I guess,” said the stevedore, “Don’t curse me, Senta. I paid you fair.”
Rachel nodded. She walked away.
She needed more money than this, and soon. She asked a shopgirl about an old brewery. She pointed to the edge of the pens, on a three-edged corner between the Warehouse District, the Pens, and the maw of a canal.
When she finally found the decrepit building, she saw Dog pounding away at some lump of malformed metal near the water’s edge. A street boy, with only one good arm and the other twisted and limp like a chicken wing jutting out of his shoulder, dangled his feet in the canal.
Dog lifted the lump of metal in the air. He threw it to the boy.
Rachel saw the shape of the metal: a crown.
The boy couldn’t hang onto the hot metal in just his one hand. He dropped the thing into the canal. Then, he cursed at Dog for throwing the crown into the water.
Dog ignored the boy. He shoved a pipe into his mouth and sat down with his back against the brewery.
Rachel frowned at what she had seen. She turned back into the Pens District and walked away.
She only knew one person near the Pens that cared enough about her to give her money.
The sun was still high. Rachel knew Jona’s mother wouldn’t be at home. She didn’t know if he was off today or not. He wasn’t. The house was empty and dark. Her boots echoed on the old wood and tiles.
(Jona never knew how Rachel managed to get into his house when she did. He never thought to ask. It was a large house where the absence of anything worth stealing protected it from thieves more than a lock, and more than a king’s man living there.)
She walked up to his room through dark halls. She peeled her boots off. She