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Forward, but Never Forget/XOXO - Ch: 19 - Graveyards & Gardens

Summary: Zaun is free—and must grow into its unfamiliar new dimensions. So must Silco and Jinx. A what-if that diverges midway through the events of episode 8. Found family and fluff, politics and power, smut and slice-of-life, villainy and vengeance.

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Chapters: 1| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |8 | 9 | 10 |11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54

CH 19: Silco and Jinx in the wilderness.

cw: angst, mentions of mental illness, poverty.

cw: animal cruelty

tw: mentions of war, state-sanctioned genocide, natural and manmade disasters, and indirect mentions of rape.

Won't you clarify clarify our love? ~ "Papi Pacify" – Anna Calvi

"Question?"

"Shoot."

"Why do they call it Bloody Sundae?"

Silco cants his head. "What do you mean?"

"Is it like, some kinda marketing ploy? By a killer ice-cream chef? 'Cause we all get covered in blood sometimes, right? And it gets mixed up with our favorite toppings and sprinkles and—"

"I think your Bloody Sundays are mixed up."

"There's more than one type?"

Jinx's voice is right against his ear. It spreads through Silco like a warm sinewave.

He carries her, piggyback style, like in her childhood. Her arms, deceptively delicate, are looped around his neck. She is the only soul with permission to do so. Likewise, Silco keeps a steady grip under her knees. A tickle-spot only he is privy to.

Above, the sky is a hazy green. No sun is visible beneath the heavy cloud cover. The distant rays angle off remnants of the Oshra Va'Zaun obelisks and cast a fretwork of shadows across the pitted rocks under Silco's boots. They both resemble creatures who've crawled out of a tomb. Silco's face is scoured of make-up, the ruined flesh bare. His hair is stripped of pomade, dust-clotted ropes of hair curling over his eyes. And hanging off him, Jinx is dirty as a dirty sump-urchin, with her smudged cheeks and shorn braids.

Their eyes glow like headlamps in their sockets. Blood gleams in the chinks of their teeth.

After the explosion, they'd taken refuge in a nearby cavern. They were woozy and dehydrated, their stomachs empty. Walking back to Zaun would've been an outlay of outsized will—or stupidity. But soon, Jinx caught the smell of a storm. Together, they did as he and Vander used to do: carved out the shells of dried-up cavernfruit. When rain began pelting outside, they used them as bowls, gathering enough water to drink and slake their thirsts.

Mildly rejuvenated, they'd curled up together. The rest of the night dissolved in a wash of more talking, more tears, but no more explosive disagreements. Jinx was bleary-eyed from crying. But her mood seemed freshly-washed; her smile held its old purity.

Silco felt strangely like they'd not seen each other in years. Now he and Jinx were experiencing a miraculous reunion.

By dawn, they'd bedded down on the hard ground of the cave: Silco with his knife at hand, Jinx with her pistol. They fell asleep, back-to-back; the effortless trust from their early days. In the afternoon, Silco awoke to find Jinx nestled close, still dozing. Her spine bowed in increments with each breath, touching his own.

It was the best sleep he'd had in weeks. Longer.

By late afternoon, they set off. The Deadlands baked with leftover heat. But temperatures were no longer at a dangerous broil. They were hungry, but the fates were kind. Near a rock quarry, they spied a burrow of sump-voles. Silco had never hunted wild game—a Piltie gentleman's diversion, if ever there was one. But necessity walks hand in hand with invention. In their heyday, he and Vander had plenty of practice in plugging critters or snaring them in traps.

It was different with Jinx. By mutual agreement, they split up and came at the sump-voles from both left and right: the scissoring maneuver of pack hunters. Soundlessly flanking their quarry from each side, they cut off their escape—literally, snnnk—with the edge of a blade.

Afterward, Jinx made a fire with rough kindling and his lighter. Silco used Vander's bowie knife to saw away each sump-vole's skin, gutting the dark knot of its innards. Jinx complained about the putrid smell. But once he sheared off strips of meat and crisped them over the fire, the aroma set their mouths watering. They devoured the creatures in steaming chunks, spitting away their bones, backhanding the juice dripping down their chins.

When the sun dipped low over the caverns, they moved on.

Hanging over his shoulder now, Jinx presses her cheek to his scarred one. Her skin is fever-damp. But her mood has gone from last night's thundercloud-black to star-spangled pinks. She's always like this after a blowout; a little smothering, a little invasive. Folding herself around him like a stickysweet taffy.

Despite himself, Silco savors the mutual afterglow.

His child, lost and found.

He says, "It's not Bloody Sundae like the ice cream. It's Sunday like the day of the week."

"Huh."

Silco nods. His boots crunch along the graveled path of a narrow bridge that spans a deep gulley—one of the dozens from the underground river's spillover along the shores. He keeps his ears on the sly infiltrations of sound. The secretive aria of the wind, the susurration of the water, the skitters of late-afternoon insects. The melody is another life; his and Vander's boyhood laughter nearly displacing the moment.

Except Jinx's weight is an anchor. A reminder of the lifetimes traversed.

"So why's everyone so hush-hush about Bloody Sunday?" Jinx asks. "Like it's a bad word or something."

"Vander never told you?"

"Oh, we talked, I guess." The way she says Talked sucks all the meaning from the word. "But it was more—Bad stuff happened, kiddo. We gotta move on, yada, yada. Then it was always back to my room, lights-out, kissy-kiss." She blows a raspberry. "He was always like that. Never really shared his feelings. All the big stuff, the important stuff...that was for Vi and the boys. It was always theirs. Never mine."

Beneath the roguish apathy, he hears the confession laid bare:

I wanted someone to tell me.

I wanted someone to share the pain.

I wanted someone to see mine.

Silco squeezes her thigh. Sometimes, when Jinx tells him about her days with Vander, he feels a piercing ache that's not quite envy. Like he's an interloper, spying on a life that should've been meant for him. A family he and Vander could've salvaged together. A future they could've shared. Instead, he'd been betrayed, defaced and debarred. Always the silhouette on the threshold; the Wolf at the door.

Meanwhile Vander had gotten to relish what Silco now covets—ironically, awfully, insatiably.

Fatherhood.

So profound is the loss—is loss the right word? Theft seems more apt—that some days, Silco isn't sure who was dealt the worse hand: Vander, for losing his sense of fight in bartering for fatherhood, or Silco, in bartering everything for the fight and losing the chance to be a father at all.

Maybe in the end, they're both equal: the creeping fear of possibility confronted by the smash-cut horror of consequence.

From the silhouette on the threshold, Silco had morphed into the monster of reckoning. He'd stolen back everything he was owed, piece by bloody piece, and more besides. The Drop. The Lanes. The Undercity. He'd burned down Vander's legacy, and made his lair among the bones.

And the child? He'd stolen her too.

A girl with a new name, and no one to belong to but him.

He'd cut his teeth on fatherhood with Jinx. And in loving her, he'd left her bereft. He'd been the root of her trauma; forger, formentor, tormentor. And, like Vander, he'd failed. Vander had cherished the girl, blind to the live-wire beneath the fragile shell. And he, Silco, had cherished the live-wire, blind to the fragility at its core.

Last night, he'd reckoned with the cost.

Jinx's trauma still clings at the heart of their intimacy. It's left the atmosphere between them a deep ache. Most of the ache is hers; the downside to healing, Silco is learning, is the resurgence of old hurts. So he does what a father should. What he should have done from the beginning.

He lays a foundation of trust, minute by minute, for her to feel stable upon.

"Bloody Sunday," Silco says, "isn't talked about because it's too ugly a story to pass around. But Fissurefolk remember. Especially the older generation. For us, it was a wake-up call. A reminder of what we had to lose."

"So what happened?"

"Enforcers." He smiles a bleak little smile. "What else?"

"They blew up Janna's Temple. I remember that."

"Remember?"

"Bit and pieces." Jinx sets her chin on his shoulder. "Me and Vi used to go to the Temple with Mommy. We'd light candles and chant. Then we'd get these little cakes. They were round and brown and had powdered sugar on top." She sighs. "I loved those things. Everytime we'd pass by the Temple, I'd beg for one. And Mommy would say no, 'cause they were Jubilee cakes. Only baked once a year." The longing fades. "Then one night, we were near the Temple. And—boom. There were flames everywhere. I remember the colors. The smoke. All the sparks falling from the sky. Then... nothing." She makes a dissolving motion with her fingers. "Like a bad dream."

"You were only little," Silco says. "I'm surprised you remember at all."

"You don't forget a night like that." She doesn't shiver. But he feels her muscles clench, a visceral pull against memories she can't quite touch. "Sometimes I think my folks died the night. But that's not possible. The Day of Ash wasn't until months later."

"It was a blur for many of us. The weeks were so packed with violence. Bloody Sunday was the tipping point."

"Because Topside trespassed on holy ground."

"It was more than that." The air is unburdened by the gas fumes that permeate the city. Silco takes in a deep breath. "It happened during a night vigil. A boy had been shot by Enforcers a few days earlier. There was a memorial being held in his honor. A small crowd had gathered. Mostly women and children. I remember it was a blisteringly hot April with rolling blackouts. Not so different from this year. The Temple was lit with lanterns. In the shadows, it glowed like a little sun. And out of the shadows, six Enforcers came."

Jinx is quiet. Her two hands, clasped across his torso, tighten in fistfuls of fabric.

"The Enforcers had been tipped off that there was a cache of weapons hidden in the Temple's tombs. Tipped off wrongly. But that's beside the point. Topsiders are good at making excuses to terrorize those they deem weaker." For a moment, the familiar crazed rage boils behind his ribcage. He hitches Jinx in closer, grits his teeth, and keeps on a steady tread. "The Enforcers didn't announce themselves. They didn't flash badges or proffer warrants. They crept in like death creeps in. Uninvited. The Priestess tried to turn them away. But you know the Temple's maxim: Janna Omnia Amat."

"'Janna Loves All.'"

"Janna can afford to. She's a damned goddess. The Priestess was less lucky." He drags the graveled words past the tightness in his throat. "She let them inside, wary but never imagining..." He stops. "That's why I always warn you to beware who crosses the threshold, Jinx. If you aren't careful, the consequences can be fatal."

Jinx says, "So they killed everyone."

"They didn't start with killing. Not right off. First came the interrogations on the hidden weapons. Then the threats. Then the beatings. Then worse." His mouth flattens. "They started with the children. Then they moved on to the women. They left the men for last, so they could see what was being done to their families. So they understood the depth of their own helplessness."

Jinx is quiet. He listens to the shaky rhythm of her breathing. Unfair to burden her with this. Were the subject matter anything else, Silco would condense it to bite-sized palatability. But Jinx owns a small bite of this history too, because it is Zaun's history. A respectful disclosure is required.

After all, there is protection. And then there is the value of the lesson.

Jinx whispers, "Were you…?"

"Hm?"

"Were you there when it happened?"

Silco shakes his head. He wasn't there, and that is indictment in itself. He wasn't there, and he failed. He wasn't there, and there is no mercy in surviving what he could not witness.

Only the what-if's of a man's unmerciful imagination.

"There is no record of what happened within the Temple's walls. Nothing beyond the eyewitness account of a sole survivor. And the autopsies done on the bodies. At least—the ones left intact after the grenades were set off. In total, fifty-five people perished in the destruction. Some during the explosions. Some from the atrocities before."

"And the Enforcers?"

"They had already slipped away. They were never named. Never punished for what they'd done."

"Just like always," Jinx says.

Cool currents sweep over the bridge. The air is infused with the scent of stagnant water and decaying things. Closer, Silco inhales the faded whiff of candied cherry, gunsmoke and salt. Jinx clings to him like a second-skin. She seems to be parsing out his words, turning them over like screws in her mind, pieces to fit into something bigger. The sum of the story's parts.

She says, "So who died at the Temple?"

"I already told you."

"Not the statistics. The people."

"Too many to list." He doesn't mean it as an evasion. "Most were long-time natives of the Fissures. Others were refugees. They'd came to the Lanes because they were running away from the very thing that eventually found them." Memory's valves creak open; the sensations sluicing in are a hot indelible ache. But it's the least of what is owed. "Many were neighbors and friends. I'd known them for years. The old blacksmith from the lower Promenade. A Vastayan named Lysander who sold the best almond biscuits. His wife, Dian, a schoolteacher. A young Shuriman couple who ran the tavern near the cannery. The Ionian widow who knitted sweaters for the Temple's mendicants. The chemist who ran the black-market apothecary." Silco stops. "It goes on. All good people. All corpses by the end."

"But you remember the name."

"Someone has to."

"Name—singular." Jinx's fey contralto softens. "Lock talked about her one time. He said she was the reason you hate Bloody Sunday. You and Sevika both."

Silco's upper lip bridles; the impulse to a deny. But the territorial itch is fleeting. Jinx nudges her skull against his own, a familiar nuzzling, a nuanced marking of kinship.

You are safe here, the touch says. You are with your own.

This is part of the pact between them, too. They let each other talk. They listen to each other's stories. It's why they're such a pair: misfits, secret sufferers, twisters of logic, the years of carnage and cruelty wrapping them in an intimacy as familiar as blood.

Silco says: "Nandi."

The name is as disfigured as a corpse dug out through the rubble.

"She was a friend of yours?"

"Mine, yes. Sevika's sister."

"The Ogre had a sister?"

The shock in Jinx's tone nearly makes him smile. "She did."

"Was she like, double Sevika's size? With mallets for fists and pitchforks for teeth?"

"Not at all. She..."

He doesn't know what to tell her. It isn't that he's forgotten Nandi. It is simply that she has ceased to be tied to his present reality. She'd been part of a different timeline; she'd known a different man. Compared to Silco's current life, everything about her was as transparent as freshwater. It made her easy to sanctify. Easy to suspend in memory.

Someone he'd known once. Someone he'd felt intensely and foolishly for, but also someone… apart.

Nowadays, he carries her presence like a half-remembered dream. Sometimes in bed, emptied of thought, he'll summon her for a heartbeat. His hair will fall into his eyes, and he'll remember the way Nandi used to smooth it back while they were conversing. He'll scratch the crooked jut of his nose, and remember the way she'd trace it with her fingertips after lovemaking. He'll tuck his unmarked cheek into the pillows and remember the way it would nestle so perfectly into the soft hollow between her neck and shoulder.

A dim reflection of his old life. His old self.

Whereas Vander…

Silco carries his brother everywhere. His body and mind are at once testament and trapping of their miserable history. Betrayal entombed within and beyond. His eye, his secrets, his scars.

Zaun.

"I knew her as a girl," Silco says. "She worked in the mines."

"Was she pretty?"

"In hindsight."

Jinx jabs an elbow none-too-tenderly in his ribs. "And in non-hindsight?"

"Stop that," Silco says perfunctorily. Then: "Back then, I took no notice of her. I took little notice of girls in general." His world had revolved around Vander: the sun of his lovelorn orbit. "I remember her as a skinny, strange, quiet thing. But she had a canny way with herbs. She'd carry a satchel full of concoctions she'd made herself, and trade them for spare change. We were half-ravaged, most of us. Young. Dirty. Hungry. Our lives were spent down in the belly of the mines. It was the only home we had, and it was a hard place to belong. A harder place to survive."

"But it was life, right? Real life. Builds character."

Silco shakes his head. "Choice builds character. When you're poor, your only choices are how to make the best of the worst." He stares out into the middle distance. "Nandi was different. She had a gift for finding beauty in the ugliest places. She was the only person I knew who could nurture a sprig of clovers in the ash-fields. Who could coax the canaries to nest near the shantytown. She'd once brought back a nestling fallen from its perch, and nursed it back to health on gruel and water."

"Aww," Jinx says.

"Don't," Silco warns.

"Baby Silly was smitten."

"I wasn't smitten." The hair-trigger irritation is mostly surface. "I was twelve. She was ten. Not exactly a ripe age for romance."

"What about after?"

"After, Vander and I began our smuggling ring. We left the mines behind, and began trading in black-market goods. By sixteen, I'd had my run-in with the Patrolman, and been packed off to Hölle Correctional Facility. By nineteen, I'd left for the Academy. My path didn't cross Nandi's until six years later. By then..." He subsides. "By then, Nandi was a grown woman. And, yes. Beautiful. She was still quiet. Still strange. But she didn't care what other people thought. She had a dignity in herself. Not pomposity or puffery. Just self-worth. That's rare in the Lanes. Tragically rare. Especially given the childhood she had."

"What kinda childhood?"

"Their father—hers and Sevika's—was a drunken brute. Went by the moniker The Wharfside Devil."

"No shit?"

"Language."

"I mean—for real?" Jinx's head slides into his orbit, a little blue moon powered by pure curiosity. "The fella they sing about in the taverns?"

"The very same. He was a terror at home, too. Used to knock his children from wall to wall. Eventually he was sentenced to Stillwater for armed robbery. The Warden took the girls into custody. They kicked around at orphanages. Then they were conscripted to serve in the mines."

"Like you and Vander."

He nods.

"Was Sevika the older one?"

"Younger by six years."

Jinx cozies her head into her favorite spot, temple-to-temple. Her eyes are half-lidded in contemplation. "I reaaaaally can't picture the Ogre with a sister."

"They were close. Because of the horrific stuff in their home... Nandi took it upon herself to watch over Sevika. No easy feat. Sevika had her father's fighting streak. She was always getting into spats. But Nandi had a way of soothing her. I'd glimpse them from time to time in the streets. A more contrary pair, you'd never see. Sevika was much the same as now. Tough. Plainspoken. Short-fused."

"A real peach," Jinx mutters.

"Nandi was different. She was no shrinking violet, but she had an effortless serenity. By her twenties, she'd lost all her hearing. But she could read lips, and listen like no one I'd ever known. She'd watch you, not with her eyes, but her senses. You'd spill the most personal details. And she'd sit there and absorb it. All of it. Then she'd offer something in return. Sometimes advice. Sometimes a potion. Sometimes just a smile."

Jinx's voice grows subdued. "She sounds special."

"She was a rarity. People were always crowding around her. Seeking counsel, or just a shoulder to cry on. And she always obliged." Silco feels a brief, biting twist of fondness. "That's how she became an apprenta to the Priestess. Six years of tutelage. A lifetime of service. Weekends, she'd cook in the public kitchens at Janna's Temple. The rest of the time, she'd lead the prayers, make poultices, tend the sick. She had the touch."

"What did she look like?"

"You'd have liked her hair." He can still feel it, sometimes. Dark, fine, silken strands slipping through his fingers. "It was uncommonly long. Nearly to her thighs. Black as Sevika's, and just as thick. But when the lights caught it, it shone like a mirror. She had Sevika's height, too. We met eye-to-eye. But where Sevika was all sinew, Nandi was supple. Curves. Softness." His tone catches, a momentary fumble. "They were sisters, through and through. But you could tell, at a glance, where the blood was split. Sevika had inherited her clan's strength. And Nandi—inherited the soul."

"Sisters, huh?"

He hears the ache in Jinx's voice. She swallows, once, and makes a small movement. For a moment, Silco wonders if she is going to slough herself off. But she only encircles him tighter, arms and legs and warmth, as if to stem a deep internal ache.

Hers—or his.

"So?" she prods gently. "How'd you run Nandi down?"

"Run her down? She wasn't quarry, child."

"No, she was a Priestess. No way she'd give your shady ass the time of day."

"Language."

"What? I'm right! You had game, but no game's good enough to—"

"It wasn't a pursuit," Silco cuts in. "It was a progression."

"What's that mean?"

"It took its own pace." Silco navigates a steep slope with careful footfalls. His arms adjust their hold on Jinx's knees. She's no thistledown, but his muscle-memory molds to her shape. An intimacy so innate that he forgets the passage of time. "You're not wrong. Vander and I—we were like wolves in those days. Wild, uncouth, uncivilized. We'd clawed our way out of the orphanages. We'd clawed our way out of the mines. We'd clawed our way into the Lanes and made something out of nothing. Nandi was different. She had her own world: one where there was suffering, but also salve. Even back then, I respected that. So I took pains to make an acquaintance."

"Did it work?"

"Not right off. She wasn't averse to a friendly dance. But she had the good sense to see me as trouble. She'd take her leave as soon as the Sumpside Waltz was done. But I was patient. Or better put: relentless. I bided my time. I made advances by increments, but never crossed lines. There's a rhythm to winning someone over, Jinx. The right tempo, the right measure, until the song goes from a solo to a duet."

Playfully, Jinx tweaks his ear. "Listen to you, Mr. Pickup Artist!" Her intonation drops to sly gravel. "They don't come easy, these womenfolk. One has to play the long con."

He uncurls a grudging smile. "I'd never put it in such mercenary terms. But yes: the sentiment stands. We had a dance, Nandi and I. I'd offer. She'd accept. I'd read her cues and communicate my wishes. She'd give me a nod, and then I'd lead."

"You make it sound like she was calling the shots."

"Because she was." The smile lingers. "Nandi was always her own person. She had boundaries, and she'd never be persuaded beyond them. I had to take the long view... until her tune changed."

"Did it?"

"Eventually. A half-dozen dances, and she finally let me into her world. Her neighborhood in Oldtown. Her little flat at Drop Street. Soon, she'd invited me to the prayers in Janna's Temple." He allows himself a beat of savoring silence. "It was a rainy evening, and the place was full. Everyone was soaked from the downpour. But no one minded. In fact, no one noticed. Everyone was too caught up in the ceremony. It was extraordinary. The Priestess and her acolytes were so graceful. They weren't trying to prove anything. Only honoring the divine. And when they'd finished, the congregation began a rhythmic clapping, and it was a prayer itself. I had never seen anything like it. I was awed."

There is delicacy in Jinx's silence. Like she's picked a locked door, expecting to find a skeleton, only to discover a sprig of posies.

"So—what?" she says. "You got religion?"

Silco shakes his head. "I've never believed in gods. You know that. But there is a power in belief, no matter how unfounded. Ritual is its own magic, and pulls its own strings. That was the first night I'd witnessed ritual as a means to unite people." His voice dips to a low scoff. "In fact, I remember thinking it was a damned shame. Why not use this power for something practical? Something to rally the masses together against Topside."

"Sounds like something you'd say." Jinx's chin dips, a little nudge. "I can hear you sometimes, y'know. In my head. Even when you're not there. Like a song that goes on and on and ooooooon." Then: a shutter-snap segue. "So what happened after the Temple prayers?"

"They doled out food from the open kitchens. It was a feast, really. Just cheap bread and soup, but it tasted as fine as anything I've ever supped on. The old Priestess sat with me and explained the process. How the chaff-bread was kneaded. How the soup was made in massive cauldrons. How everyone contributed something, and thus everyone was enriched. At the time, community-owned enterprise was still a novelty. We'd only just begun to unionize in the mines. So the concept struck me as strangely noble."

"Noble?" Jinx snorts. "Like a fancy-pantsy charity?"

"Not a charity. More like a haven. Somewhere people from different walks of life could find their place." He shrugs. "It's an idea I've kept close."

"With your network."

"With Zaun."

Jinx is quiet. He can see the gleam in her eye: the one that burns with equal parts doubt and desire. It's a look she'd worn in childhood, when the knot of her emotions went too deep, and what loosened it was the promise that she wasn't alone. That someday, she'd have her own place. Her own legacy.

That's the beauty of Zaun. It is a city of castaways. A place where those who don't belong can always find their own way.

"So what happened next?" she says. "Did you and Nandi... y'know."

"What?"

"Did you do the bouncy-bouncy?"

Exasperation edges Silco's words. "I'll give you a moment to rephrase that."

"Ugh. You know what I mean!" A little finger prods his scarred cheek. "Did the inevitable come to pass?"

He flicks off the offending digit. "No."

"Seriously?"

"It wasn't for lack of trying." The terrain grows treacherous; the bridge is in disrepair. He hoists Jinx in tighter. His feet know the path. And his back has carried heavier loads. "The problem wasn't attraction. It was logistics. Those were hard times. Vander and I were running the Black Lanes. The Wardens were breathing down our necks. From time to time, they'd send Enforcers. They'd raid the Drop, and haul the regulars off. Beatings. Interrogations. Imprisonment. Many of us were in and out of the brig on a weekly basis. And every time we got sprung, we'd hit back. Harder and harder. Rallies. Strikes. Protests. Anything to stir disorder."

"Did it work?"

"Not really. The Wardens kept their hold. They knew the best way to disarm us was to break our spirit. That's what the Enforcers are good for." His good eye slits. "Every other week, they'd break into my flat at the Pump Station. Throw me on the ground and put their knees in my back. Cuff my hands and get their batons. They'd call me names. 'Freak,' 'filth,' 'Rat-bastard.'" His tongue rolls around the words. "Some days, I was so bloody-minded I'd tell them to try harder. Then they'd really lay it on me."

Jinx's grip tightens over his chest. Silco strokes her knuckles with his thumb, a silent soothing. She's heard this story before. From his mouth, and from the mouths of other Trenchers. But each retelling, with its attendant violence, still affects her.

After all, Enforcers were once an omnipresent evil. A daily reminder of how expendable the Fissurefolk were.

"What'd they do to you?" Jinx whispers.

"The usual. Bash my head into the walls. Kick me and pummel me. A cracked rib here. A broken finger there. I learned to sleep with a knife under the pillow." He squeezes her hand. "Vander defended me when he could. But the Enforcers weren't above knocking him down, too. He and I would get hauled into the lockup at the garrison. Usually, he'd be in as bad a state as I was. Other times, we'd each take the fall for the other. That way, the Lanes wouldn't lose both leaders at once. And whoever was still standing could keep the fight going." A crooked little smile. "That's loyalty for you."

Jinx nods.

Loyalty is a sacred word between them. Silco has taught her to revere it—and to hold it ransom. The first rule of the underworld is knowing where someone's allegiance lies. Loyalty is the foundation for everything: power, politics, play. You must know where to invest it. When to wield it.

And, above all else, how to exploit it.

"Did you ever fight back?" Jinx asks.

"If I could. Mostly, I chose my battles. I slipped into the shadows whenever the Enforcers came knocking. I carried a switchblade, and I wasn't shy in its use. I'd even hide weapons in places I could reach: the gutters, the rafters, the crawlspaces. And if all else failed, I'd take refuge where the Enforcers were least likely to find me."

"Janna's Temple."

"Yes. Nandi always welcomed me in. No questions asked. She was well aware of the brutality outside her walls. But her creed was to remain neutral. To offer shelter, and keep her peace. Sometimes, though, she couldn't help herself. She'd have harsh words with the Enforcers at the Temple gates. They'd threaten her. She'd stand her ground. Then she'd come in and patch me up." His smile loses its bite. "I was no easy case. But she always managed to quiet me down."

Jinx loosens a cackle. "You? Quiet? Puh-lease."

The sound tickles a tender space inside Silco. His face remains straight, his eyes on the path ahead.

"She had her ways. She'd brew me tea. Or tell me stories about the Temple's history. About the old mystics of Vekaura. Sometimes she'd just sit with me in silence." He lapses into musing. "She had the patience of a saint, that woman."

"So you two got together at the Temple?"

"In a sense. We'd been dancing around each other for weeks. I was still a little reckless. A little wild. But Nandi was good for me. A safe port in the storm. One evening, I stopped by the Temple. Not to seek refuge, but to roll in a barrel of salted fish I'd lifted off a Topside merchant. A gift for her. When I boasted about the score, she scolded me. I said it was just a lark. She said I had a lot to learn. I said I was learning. After the prayers, I helped her dole out the fish to the worshipers. By the night's end, she walked me to the gates. And she kissed me."

He falls silent. The night is so hazy now; even in memory. What comes to him are tactile snatches. The black cornsilk of Nandi's hair. The pale notch of her sewn harelip. The warm russet of her bare skin. The cut of her hipbones and the softness of her breasts under his palms, and the way she'd sighed when he kissed his way down her body, her fingers tangling in his hair and her thighs parting for him. The taste of her: a sweet sharp tang. Like a mouthful of candied ginger. The sounds she'd made when he'd first gone inside her, her arms and legs folding around him, her cries breathless and aching with want.

The way she'd said his name afterward: Sil. A whisper-sigh of pleasure: Sil. Her hand, trembling, on his face. Her fingertips, tracing his mouth, memorizing the shape of his smile.

Sil.

He'd been twenty-five, and that syllable held the purity of a prayer.

Jinx says: "So was she...?"

"What?"

"Y'know." Her voice grows small. "The Big Boom."

"What in the hexing hell is a Big Boom?"

"It's when the primer pops!"

"The what?"

"You know! When the fuze sparks and burns down the detonator, and the main charge ignites!" Her eyes are alight. Silco is certain that if she possessed a tail, it'd be perked. "That second where everything falls into place and the world goes quiet, and then—" She spreads her hands. "Boom!"

"Is this another absurd euphemism?"

"No."

Jinx's hand slips between the space of his coat and shirt. Her palm starfishes over his heart.

"I mean," she says, "did Nandi make the anger go quiet?"

Silco considers his answer. A simple yes. A complicated no.

"She made a difference," he says. "It's not the same thing."

"Meaning—what?"

"Meaning—" He stops, then sighs. "Two people can fit together. In mind and body. But they can't fit together into one whole. Nobody can. Everyone comes with their own histories. Their own limitations. Nandi was lovely. The best kind of person. But we had our own rhythms, our own lives. And I wasn't always good for her. I could be selfish. Cagey. I wanted what I wanted, and damn the consequences." A headshake. "It's just as well commitment was the furthest thing from our minds."

"You never made it official?"

"What we had was official enough. Nandi liked to say people have no ownership of each other. They're like rivers. Nobody can own a river. Not really. All you can do is choose to flow alongside it."

"So she was a free spirit."

"She was. I liked that about her. Her ways suited mine." His lightness fades. "People aren't rivers, though. They can be twisted by forces beyond their control. They can split up and lose their way. Vander and I did. We'd spent years in the thick of revolution. Fighting the good fight. Now, we kept fighting each other. I was young. I had my sights set on toppling Topside. Vander—he was a born custodian. He couldn't see the point in burning the bridge when the enemy would always be next door. We'd butt heads over everything. The means; the ends. It was as if all our childhood fights had just been practice for the real thing." He lets a slow exhalation drain. "Us against ourselves."

"Just the way Topside wanted," Jinx says.

"Hm." The bitterness wells like blood. "By the end, closeness became claustrophobia. The only thing we had in common was Zaun. But the way we loved her was different. I loved her because she was mine. He loved her because he was hers. And there was no compromise. Each time we were together, it devolved into a showdown. Later, we'd go off to our corners. He'd tend the bar at the Drop. I'd go to Nandi's. She'd make me dinner. We'd talk. We'd fu—make love. Afterward, we'd discuss the future. And I'd feel, for a little while, that life was not falling apart." He darkens. "Until it did."

"Bloody Sunday."

Silco nods. "By April, things came to a boil. The Wardens upped their pressure. Enforcers were everywhere. There were mass crackdowns. Raids. Shootouts. Imprisonments. We couldn't get our heads above water. I was at a rally that night to boost morale. Vander was too. We'd been on the same side for so long. Now, we couldn't stand to be in the same room. By the time we finished our speeches, we were both steaming. I decided to cut out early. Sevika was with me. We were headed to our next stop."

"At Janna's Temple."

"Yes. The Priestess was leading the prayers. The dead boy's memorial. I'd have been there myself, had the rally not ran long. I was late. For once in my life, I was late. Sevika suggested we stop by Jericho's. We could grab a quick meal, then catch the second half of the ceremony. It would only be a few minutes. I said no. We were bickering beneath the awning when we heard that Enforcers had stormed the Temple. Inside, there were reports of gunshots. Screams. Worse."

Jinx is silent. She knows the story's conclusion. But she still bears it with him. She bears him up.

"Sevika and I ran. We ran like hell. That's when the blast happened. I didn't see the flash. But the sound was like a sledgehammer to the skull. The concussive force threw us backward. I cracked my head on the cobblestones. It took a few moments to collect my wits. Sevika and I picked ourselves up. We kept going. When we got to the Temple, the place was ablaze. Sevika's first instinct was to dash in. Find her sister. I grabbed her. Held her back. The building was already collapsing. The only thing we could do was get clear." His jaw sets. "She fought me like a wildcat. Screamed her sister's name. But the roof was crumbling, and the whole block was on fire. The only way forward was back. At the Drop, a crowd had gathered. Some of them were crying. Others were shellshocked. Then death-toll began. Rescuers pulling out body after body. The runners relaying the names. Names I recognized. Men and women I knew. Alive yesterday; corpses today. Then I heard the name. Nandi. I couldn't believe it. I told the runner he was wrong. Then he said the name again. Nandi. And I knew. I just... knew."

Jinx shivers, and Silco stops.

His expression is solid as steel from years of dissembling. But the memory comes in irresistible pulls. The heat, the crush of bodies, the whispers rising and falling. The shock of loss like a fist to his gut. His vision dimming at the edges. A single question rising in the dark: Why?

And the scream.

A scream that went on and on and on.

It comes back now in an awful ambivalence of rage and retrospect. All of it tugged loose, renewed and resurrected in every dimension. The more he unspools the thread of his history, the more it tangles with Jinx's.

And with Sevika's.

Almost is the nature of his relationship with Sevika. Almost-kin. Almost-partners. Almost-lovers. It's as close as he can tolerate, when the functional and familial come with their own attendant complexities. And when you have shared custody of a dead woman, the lines blur further. The double-helix of guilt and grief braids itself tighter when a dead baby is twisted into the equation.

It is a muddled mass, a clot of disembodied memory.

A story with a stillborn ending.

"I was in shock. Barely coherent. But Sevika was in denial. She couldn't grasp it. She wouldn't. Together, we went to the clinic. That's where they'd taken the survivors. There weren't many. Most slipped away in the hours afterward. And Nandi..." The barest swallow. "She was unrecognizable. A jigsaw of broken bones. It was so bad, they wouldn't let Sevika see the body. I had to bribe the orderlies just to get past the doors. Sometimes I wish I hadn't. It's a sight you never forget."

Jinx says nothing. Just nestles closer.

"Nandi was a solace to me. Same way the Temple was to the community. Now, both were gone. Only ashes left behind." The speech is mere scaffold now; his gritty voice, a born orator's, becomes the foundation. "That was the turning point. The Lanes were never the same. Fissurefolk grew angrier. More ruthless. It's hard to see the light when the only thing left is darkness. The same went for the rest of us. Vander and I had nothing but blowouts afterward. He'd accuse me of bringing the Lanes down. I'd say the Lanes were already in hell. Meanwhile, Sevika and I grew closer. Our grief wasn't the same. But our rage was. She'd lost her sister. I'd lost my solace. We both vowed to destroy those responsible. We began rallying more fighters. We planned a large-scale retaliation. Vander warned me that it was foolish to escalate. But he couldn't fight the tide. It was already rising."

"The Day of Ash," Jinx whispers.

"It was the only way. We'd been pushed to limits beyond reckoning. They'd taken our lives, and we were ready to take theirs. So Vander and I made our preparations. We gathered our forces. Then we marched to the Bridge. The rest—"

He lapses on a single, guttural breath.

"The rest you know."

Jinx stays silent, listening, hand resting on his chest.

"So that's why, huh?"

"Hm?"

"That's why nobody talks about Bloody Sunday. It's not a sore spot. It's a psychotic break."

Silco nods.

"That's why Topside did it. To push us over the edge. Break our spirits—or our bodies. Either way, they'd win."

Silco nods again.

"That's fucked." Her hand curls into a fist over his heart. "That's so fucked."

This time, Silco offers no remonstrance. Jinx's voice holds little grief. Only a killing hardness. Like Silco, she isn't built for anything else. Her world has never been delineated by softer contours. Her innocence is already tainted by inerasable trauma; her trauma twisted by inescapable innocence.

Zaun steeps with the paradox—past and present.

(But not future.)

(I promise, Jinx.)

Silco's gait has slowed: partially because the cobblestones are cracked, and the incline steep. Mostly because the last quarter-mile on this bridge is the most perilous. He ought to slough Jinx off. She's not eleven anymore, and he isn't in his thirties. At his height, he'd hauled her through alleyways and up rooftops without breaking a sweat—before heading off to break real bones with the crew.

Except he's missed carrying her like this, practically wearing her like a blanket. The wind blows off the warm motes caught in her skin, flirting through the lopped-off fringe of her hair. He mourns the loss of her beautiful braids. But the green-tinted sky reflects off the convexity of her eyes and darkens the starspray of freckles on her cheeks. Her proximity holds a perfection that is nearly hallucinatory.

His backache. His heartache. His sole joy in this godsforsaken world.

"Aren't you tired?" Jinx whispers.

"Tired?"

"Tired of carrying it all. Me. Zaun. All of it." Her skull nestles against his jowl. "Haven't you ever wanted to walk away?"

(Once.)

(When I thought you were lost.)

(Because that meant it was all for nothing.)

"No," he says, and means it. "Never."

"I'm heavy," Jinx says sullenly. "You'd think I'd be lighter. I'm nothing but bones."

Silco's hand enfolds Jinx's fist. It's a possessive, almost primal clasp. The same one that kept a crying child close, his footsteps carrying her away from the flames, and Vander's broken carcass on the concrete. The same one that vowed, with every cell in his body, never to let go.

Her small body, then and now, is no burden. And her soul, heavy as it is, has become a counterweight. Two halves of a whole, perfectly balanced. He can bear anything with her weight upon him.

Because with her in his arms, the world is a lighter place.

"Hollow bones," he says. "Like a bird."

"A crow, maybe." Her voice is a raw splinter. "They're always following me around. 'Cause they know. Same as everybody else."

"Know what?"

"I'm bad luck. The Jinx to end all jinxes."

With her balled fist, she thumps his ribcage. The blow is no harder than a child's, but his heart still throbs to its impact. Taking her quivering hand, he lifts it to his lips, and kisses her knuckles. Then he folds his long fingers through hers.

"You're no crow, Jinx."

"What then?"

"A phoenix." It comes on an abraded whisper. "I'm not a man of faith. Before you, I put no stock in gods. There's no such thing as divine balance. Only the equation of cold equity."

"Cost and reward," Jinx murmurs.

"Our lives for Topside's wealth. Our deaths for their gains. No god had ever changed that." A breath. "Only you."

"Me...?"

"You showed them. The night you burned down the Bridge. You took everything it cost us, and you paid it back tenfold." He turns his head. His lips touch her cheek: an inch of bare, freckled skin. "When faith flags, only force survives. It's a balance gods will never understand. Because gods aren't real. You are. And Zaun is real because of you." He smiles. "You're the only prayer I need. And I'll never let them forget it."

Them.

The Topsiders. Her naysayers. Her ghosts.

Jinx's breath comes on bone-deep shiver. Then her arms enfold his neck. She burrows her head into the crook of his shoulder. Heat and heartbeat. Silco's world is reduced to these twin sensations. His world is nothing else.

She holds him as much as he holds her.

They've reached the bridge's zenith. Below them, the river's murky tributaries split into a dozen streams, coursing in a webwork that disappears into the darkness. The wind stirs the water, ripples scuttling across its surface. The isolation is almost absolute. Only the occasional glow of a firelight punctures the gloom.

As if the world is holding its breath.

"Tell me the rest," Jinx whispers.

"The rest?"

"The happy times." Her palm cups his scarred cheek. "You never talk about happy times. Just what had to be done. The means and ends."

"The means got us to the end."

"Yeah. But—" Her fingers tremble. "There's got to be more, right?"

Silco stares out into the barren landscape. Seeing nothing; remembering all. The memories, long buried, begin to disinter themselves. Their glow is an old one, dull like a cog dug up from the soil.

But the currency still holds value.

"There were moments," he says. "Small ones. But they were ours to keep."

"Like what?"

"Little things. Sometimes Nandi and I would visit the Equinox Bazaar, and she'd hold my hand while she led me from stall to stall. For a deaf girl, she had an unerring gift for knowing which hawker was crowing about shoddy merchandise. Then she'd smile and sic me on them. I'd haggle till my jaw was sore, but it was worth it. Some evenings, we'd walk away with an entire basket of chitterlings. Or a sack of spices. Or a whole barrel of fruit."

Jinx grins into his collar. "There's that silver tongue in action."

"The trick is in the framing. Never open with, 'But it's old,' 'But it's cracked,' or 'But it's cheap.' Play to their pride instead. Let them think they're doing you a favor. Talk up the goods, but downplay your interest. When they finally come to their price, look disappointed. Let the silence linger. Don't blink. Don't break. Before you know it, they'll drop the price by half." His smile turns a little wolfish. "It works outside the bazaar, too."

Jinx's laugh is a tiny flutter, like a moth's wings. But it's real, and Silco savors it. A girl's tickled fancy.

"Always knew you were a con man," she says. "A regular slickster."

"Even slickers have to eat. And Nandi liked to cook. Her kitchen was the size of a cupboard. But she was a master of making do. I'd bring home a few modest fixings, and she'd whip them up into a meal to make your belly sing. Fishbone curry. Lentil stew. Pickled mango. Sometimes Sevika would be there too. It made for tight quarters, but a full belly." A wry aside: "Neither of them let me near the stove."

"Gee, I wonder why."

"Other nights, we'd go dancing. Just Nandi and I. She couldn't hear music. But there's more to rhythm than sound. It's the way a crowd moves. The beat of their feet. The percussion of drums. She could feel it in her bones. And once we'd found our rhythm, she flowed like a stream." He grins despite himself. It takes a moment to even realize that he is. "Once, we won the dance-hop at Rotten Row."

"Wait?" Jinx hooks her chin onto his shoulder. "You used to cruise Rotten Row?"

"Years before. It wasn't a cesspit. But it was no Promenade, either. There were only a handful of establishments at the time. The Sprout—that's where the miners flocked for good ale on tap. Men and women polishing their elbows side by side at the bar, hot jazz playing on the jukebox and the whiff of rye in the air. If you were the gambling sort—with a taste for blood-sport—you'd sojourn south to The Rumbler's Den. Betting was illegal in those days. Most of it occurred off-the-books, in the back-rooms of low sort of establishments. The kind where hard drinking and fast living were the order of the day. For a handshake with a hex, the publican would show you to a trapdoor and lead you downstairs to the cellar, where Jack the Rat-Catcher plied his trade. Vermin as fat as kittens ripping each other to shreds inside a pit, and the punters howling their heads off. Afterward, if you were in a festive mood, you might take your winnings to The Belle—a humble precursor of Babette's—to watch the girls perform."

Jinx snorts. "In their underpants."

"Nonsense. They were all respectably dressed in garters and top hats."

And little else—but that's beside the point.

"No way you took Nandi to The Belle," Jinx says. "Priestesses don't dance in their garters."

"More's the pity."

"Where then?"

"A dance-hall called The Nymph. It fancied itself an upscale place. Rather like a grand dame fallen on hard times. It was one of the few establishments with a legitimate Topside permit. No tobacco or fistfights indoors. No hanky-panky in the back-alleys. You were allowed in, if at all, because you cleaned up nicely, and were serious about dancing. Vander and I were neither. But we were on good terms with the proprietress, so we were always welcome. The Nymph had the liveliest bands and the best music."

"Did they play rock-and-roll?"

He shakes his head. "Jazz was all the rage then. Dancing was different too. There were steps."

"I'm still stuck on you actually hanging in Rotten Row."

"So you do listen." He squeezes her knee. "It seems like yesterday. But it was so long ago. A different era."

"D'you miss it?"

His hesitation runs parallel to honesty. "No."

"No?"

"Retrospect is a slippery slope. Especially if you survive the fall unbruised. You start imagining things were better than they truly were. Except they weren't. They were just different." The muscle in his jaw twitches. "I was different too. No two eras are ever the same. Just as no two people are the same."

"Or two loves?"

Silco's brow gives a dry tweak. "Someone's romanticizing a tad."

"You didn't love Nandi?"

"It was so long ago."

Jinx's eyes hold his sidelong. A strangely calm and piercing stare.

"You loved who you were with her," she says, "except your Big Boom was somewhere else."

"Zaun."

Jinx's palm aligns over his heart again. "Vander."

There is a moment of dead shock. It lodges itself like a bloodless bullet between Silco's eyes. For a beat, it feels as if his skin might split open at the scalp to give Jinx a glimpse of the glistening red runnels of his brain. His secrets. His scars.

This is what she does. In small ways or big, she always catches him off-guard.

"Everything you've said," Jinx says. "It's about a life you could've had with Nandi. A family and home and all the rest. Except it never happened. Maybe you wanted it, but you wouldn't let yourself need it. Because what you really needed was Vander. Him and Zaun. Everything else came second." Her palm flattens. "You chose, and Vander didn't. He gave it all up, and took the life you'd let go. The family. The home.�� He took everything, and left you with nothing. And now you've got Zaun, but you've still got nothing. Nothing but—" Her lip quivers, "—me."

Her palm transmits a pulse straight into the chambers of Silco's black heart.

He thinks of Nandi; of Vander. If she had lived, Silco would have had what he wanted. If Vander had lived, Silco would have had what he needed. And yet he'd be bereft, because there would be no Zaun, and the idea of no Zaun is untenable. And Jinx, in their mutual absence, has always stood as the sum total of all three. The only truth left standing once the binary of cost and reward is trumped by divine reckoning.

"I'd trade it all," Silco rasps, "in a heartbeat."

"You'd go back?"

"Forward."

Her hand is a fist now. "Say it again."

"Forward." He covers her knuckles. "Everything I've lost. All the blood I've shed. It's all led to you." He squeezes. "I don't regret one red drop."

The light is receding in the sky. But Jinx's eyes glow with a triple-shocked intensity. Her smile is a tiny, lip-trembly thing. Heartbreakingly sweet. It makes Silco wish he'd said it sooner. Told her every day, instead of whittling their moments down to the bare bones of sentiment. He should've wasted less time. Wasted less love.

The two most unpardonable wastes of all.

Jinx kisses the point of his ruined cheekbone.

"To the moon and back," she whispers.

"To a thousand hells beyond."

She shifts the orientation of her body, squeezing him tight with her arms and legs—a stranglehold of affection. Then she uncoils and slithers off. Released, Silco almost misses the weight. But her warmth lingers with him, like the remnants of the sunlight before the darkness.

He straightens. Snap-crackle-pop goes his spine. A guffaw cracks from Jinx's lips.

"Hope you didn't slip a disc, old man."

"My own fault."

"For getting sloppy?"

"For offering the free pony ride."

Jinx cups a hand over her eyes, taking in the distance they've traversed. "I'd say this pony's earned his oats."

"And his rest."

Silco rolls his neck, working out the kinks. The vista stretches out, unbroken; the horizon a hazy line. Railway tracks cut through the terrain in a submerged zigzag. The rest of the landscape is a patchwork of canals and culverts, all flowing north.

They're at the midway point. From here, it's a straight shot to their destination.

And yet he senses the static resistance in Jinx's bones. He can see it in her face: eyes dipped and shoulders taut. Her entire being conveys a low-key reticence. She's like a child who, forbidden to cross the street, has done so anyway, and is now afraid to turn around. As if to acknowledge the mistake is to invite retribution. And when she does pivot, her eyes pose a single question: Now what?

"We're almost there," Silco says, daring to hope. "Just a few miles to go."

Jinx bites her lip. "Can we stop for a bit?"

"Stop?"

"I'm hungry."

It's four-fifths lie. But her look is one of naked pleading. Silco feels himself relent, though it's an inch he can't afford.

"I've whiskey in my flask."

"Breakfast of champions, huh?"

"There's worse things." He pauses, considering. "Unless you are in a daring mood."

"Daring, how? We gonna hunt a sump-boar?"

"Not quite." He points. Beneath a dark ridge of rocks jutting from the riverbanks, there is stretch of prickling black scrubland. Low-flying bats dart overhead. "The undergrowth is a prime spot for foraging. Wild onions. Pigweed. Tubers." A half-smile. "Then there's the matter of cave-wasps."

"Cave-wasps?"

"They're vicious bastards. Venomous as rattlesnakes, and twice as temperamental. They build their hives right in the heart of the underbrush. The bats are a decent gauge. If the colony's active, we'll find a nest nearby."

Jinx looks dubious. "We're gonna steal a wasp-nest?"

"Not steal." Silco pulls out his lighter. "Smoke."

That ignites a smile—the one he remembers from Jinx's girlhood. A dimpling, double-barreled bang-bang of delight.

"Now we're talkin'!" she cheers. "Giddy up, Seabiscuit!"

Her blue hair flies, and so does her laugh. Then she's gone, and Silco is hastening to keep pace. Crossing the bridge, they veer together into the scrubland. The soil is soft. Their footfalls sink like silent stones through water. Branches prickle at their bodies; little barbs biting through their clothes. The earthy scent is overpowering: lichen, fungus, scat, spoor.

In the distance, a bat gives off a high-pitched chirp.

Moving stealthily, Silco and Jinx circle the terrain. The land slopes into a dip. At its nadir, a squat copse of trees huddles together. The insectile drone of wasps rises and falls. Their black nest hangs from the upper branches. Hundreds of insects swarm its surface. The sweetness of nectar wafts through the air.

Silco and Jinx retreat a short distance away. They huddle behind a wall of brush. Silco scrounges together a handful of dead branches. Then he strikes his lighter. Jinx crouches, her hand cupped around the tiny spark.

Her eyes, dancing neon, meet his. Silco's own heart leaps at the thrill of collusion.

He's not done this in an age, but his body remembers. And Jinx's reflexes, her quicksilver focus, are a seamless fit. They work as almost a single organism, not synchronicity but fusion.

The flame licks the desiccated twigs. With a crackle, the fire catches. Silco fans it with his coat. Within moments, the kindling has become a torch. Silco lifts it high. He creeps out of the thicket, Jinx trailing his footsteps. The wasp-nest is a black knot hanging in the canopy. The insects have not yet detected them. Silco's pulse beats, steady, and he crouches, laying the torch to the base of the tree.

Then he and Jinx retreat.

Positioned at safe distance, they wait. Smoke swirls. The wasps' buzzing grows high-pitched. The air fills with a strange, pungent odor. Inside the hive, Silco knows their senses are misfiring. They will begin eating the nectar. Becoming bloated. Becoming drunk. Soon their orderly internal system will devolve into chaos. Then the entire nest will empty itself in a frenzied panic.

Silco and Jinx watch, huddled together.

They watch the same way they'd watched the Bridge collapse. They watch unapologetically, because Nature is a game of want and take, with no framework of fairness, and their own natures have been shaped accordingly.

They are the children of a starved city, and they've learned to take what they need.

To relish the spoils.

Jinx's eyes glitter. "I can hear them."

"Count it down. When the time is right—" Silco presses his boot-knife into her palm. His own grips Vander's blade. "Cut."

Minutes pass. The hive judders. And a swarm of wasps, like a thousand dark stars, erupt. The insects spiral outward in a disorganized mess, the buzzing of their wings almost maddening. The smoke has made their world an incomprehensible hell. They are lost. Driven wild by fear.

Sometimes, that's all it takes. One little taste.

"Now," Silco says.

As one, he and Jinx surge. She zips toward the tree, knife in hand. Shimmer-speed makes her a blur. Leaping, she cuts down the emptied nest. Wasps, straggling, plummet from the canopy. Some twitch; others are stupefied. Lunging, Silco impales the nest. It breaks into two large sections. Jinx grabs one, and he the other.

Together, they run.

Wasps tail their heels, but they are sluggish from smoke. Silco barely hears the buzz over Jinx's whooping laughter. Together, they hurtle down the hill. They plunge into a gully, its muddy banks a slurry of clay. Silco splashes past the stream, and Jinx follows suit. The wasps retreat. All that lingers is their dirgelike drone.

"That's right, you little punks!" Jinx hollers. "Back to your mudhole!"

Silco bites down a smile.

The slushy embankment gives way to an overhang. They climb high, the stones crunching beneath their boots. Cradled in their palms, the broken halves of the nest are encrusted with dirt. Shaking it loose, Silco cuts off precise slices. The comb oozes a thick, deep-red fluid. The aroma is dizzying.

"Here." Silco hands Jinx a dripping slice. "Taste."

Gingerly, Jinx accepts a piece. Her half-lidded look verges on fascination.

"I've never seen this color before."

"It comes from blackflower. A rare genus that grows in the caves. It only blooms once a year. The sap is poisonous, but its nectar is potent. The cave-wasps gather it to nourish their larvae. Who, by the by, are as sweet as their mothers are bitter." Silco sucks the sticky residue off his fingers. "It's a fine substitute for bee honey."

Jinx bites into the gooey comb. Thick runnels of nectar drip down her chin. She cups her hand to catch it, giggling. Her teeth are limned with red. It's a vision no less sublime than the blazing sky that she had painted across Piltover.

His goddess of the harvest, savoring her bloodied cornucopia.

"It's amazing," she breathes.

"It has enough nutrients to keep you full for a day." Silco cuts a syrupy slice for himself. "Though I'd caution against overconsumption. It's known to cause hallucinations."

Jinx licks a red thread from her palm. "The good kind?"

"Deadly."

They trade sideways smiles. The last of the adrenaline burns out of their systems. In its wake is hard-won lassitude.

They sit, shoulder-to-shoulder, in the spreading silence. The sun creeps through heavy clouds, speckling the vista. A veil of mist leeches into the landscape, wreathing the wasteland in a greenish shroud. Silco inhales the heavy dust and the cloying whiff of nectar. Beneath that, he smells Jinx and himself: sweat, grime, smoke. They've not been so filthy since the night at the Cannery.

And Silco relishes every smudge.

The seething anger that so often manifests itself in undigested physical symptoms—the lockjaw, the headaches, the temper—is, if not erased, then cleansed by the physicality of hard labor. To live, after a lifetime of cheating death, is to live a little dirty. And Silco, beneath the tailored suits and spit-shined brogues, is the irredeemable byproduct of Zaun's dirt. A body bred for a brute utility—to haul, to hit, to fuck, to fight. A spirit that can toe the scratch against exhaustion—and still stay standing.

There is a dark satisfaction in that. A reminder that no matter what's taken from him, it will never strip him down to nothing.

Not while there is a little grit left to cling to.

"Mrrrr." Jinx makes a sated sound. "That was nice."

"The honey, or the chase?"

"All of it. Everything." She tips her head back. The sun gilds her lashes. "Even those dumb wasps."

"They're smarter than they look." Silco wipes off his blade and stows it in his boot. "They've survived for decades. So have countless other creatures. The Deadlands are home to a complex ecosystem."

"Yeah, but—how?" Jinx lazes against him. "There's nothing around. Just sludge-pits."

"The Deadlands weren't always dead. This place was once a fertile garden. It's where the outcasts of Oshra Va'Zaun dwelled. Sorcerers too dangerous to remain in the city proper. They lived off the land, and its riches sustained them. It's said they used alchemy to cultivate flora and fauna the likes of which only exist in fairytales. Trees so giant they sheltered villages. Groves of wildflowers the color of gemstones. Fruit that, when peeled, tasted of pure heaven. And, of course, honey-making wasps. The sorcerers would harvest their hives for the blackflower sap. Make potions and elixirs." A biting silence. "Or so the story goes."

"So what happened?"

"Means and ends. Oshra Va'Zaun was once a civilization of the future. But in its race to the top, it stumbled and fell to the past." He leans back on his elbows. "A thousand years ago, ours was no subterranean hovel. We were a thriving port situated along the isthmus that divided East and West Valoran. The Shuriman empire flourished. Our city was their epicenter of pride. Our jewelers were renowned for their lapidary. Our seafarers navigated a complex network of estuaries as far as the Freljords. Our alchemists had their fingers in everything from medicine to magickal artifacts. We had mines, too. And minerals. And metals. In short, we were a trading juggernaut." He stops. "Then came the Cataclysm."

"That's when they blew up the isthmus, right?"

"Right. Before, vessels sailed through our Sun Gates to pass from east to west. Our city made its wealth with the tithes levied on trade-ships. It was a small tax, paid in silver. But it was enough to build a prosperous empire." His lip curls. "Until our waterfront cousins—the Coastlanders—decided to make the Sun Gates into their private toll-booth. They struck a deal with a cabal of foreign merchants. They'd demolish swathes of land connecting the Eastern and Western shelf. Ships would pass in greater numbers. And, instead of silver, they'd pay with cargo: gems, metals, exotic spices. The Coastlanders would sell these commodities in foreign ports. They'd make a fortune. All without lifting a finger."

Jinx scoffs. "Sounds familiar."

"History's a tapestry of common threads. Often it's spun by the same greedy hands." His head lolls back. "The Coastlanders had the audacity to call their plan The Great Map of Progress. They believed they'd unite all of Valoran in a vast commercial network. They failed to account for one crucial detail: the isthmus was tectonically unstable. The detonation destroyed the peninsula, and caused a chain reaction that rippled outward, collapsing the seafloor. In an instant, a civilization was swallowed. Oceans rushed in, drowning thousands. The fissures cracked open, spewing toxic gases. The Sun Gates collapsed. Overnight, the Shuriman Empire lost half its revenue. The empire's power waned. And our people—Oshra Va'Zaun—became a nation of waterlogged refugees."

Jinx has taken the Hex-gem out. She bounces it in her palm, as if playing dice. In the sunlight, it is azure blue, speckled with pinkish motes.

"What happened then?" she asks.

"What indeed? Overnight, we became an allegory of pride's pitfalls. Before the Cataclysm, we were a land of plenty. Now, we were a land of want. Meanwhile, the Coastlanders became the beneficiaries. They used stolen riches to rebuild a new port at the mouth of the river. They rerouted our tributaries, dammed them up, and siphoned the waters north. They made their homes on our bones, and stymied our efforts to build ourselves back up. Worse, they made a mockery of our plight. They took to calling us Sump-dwellers. Meanwhile, they became a city of golden spires. They dubbed it—"

"Piltover," Jinx finishes.

"A self-congratulatory homage to the Pilt. A reminder that we were, and would forever be, beneath them." Taking a wisp of Jinx's hair, he twists it idly between his fingertips. "But ours was no submerged slum. It was a strongbox of buried treasure. The Cataclysm had swept away our infrastructure. But the silver, the gold, the gems... they were still there. So the Coastlanders—Topside—sealed us off. They claimed our reserves as theirs, then monopolized the means of extracting them."

"And the Deadlands?"

"They are the consequence. What is left once the pretense is stripped down to bare greed. The Cataclysm had left the old gardens fallow. But we were given no chance to cultivate them, because Topside poisoned everything. Their mining rigs irradiated the groundwater. Their deep-drills turned the earth into a quagmire. They built railway lines to ferry ore to the Black Minge and let the effluvium seep into the atmosphere. For decades, we fought to reclaim the land. We tried every possible approach: petitioning Topside; lobbying the Council; sabotaging the rigs. None of it mattered. Topside's means were superior. And their ends were to suck us dry." He lifts the strand of hair to his lips, then lets go. "Now the Deadlands are their own allegory. A wasteland fit for noting but ghosts."

"But here we are," Jinx says grimly.

"Here we are," Silco agrees. "Because that is Zaun's allegory."

He picks up a clod of dirt and crumbles it between his fingers. It's not sand, but close enough. He sprinkles the dust over his knuckles and rubs his palms together, a rough scouring. Jinx, observing, follows suit. The honey residue comes off their skins in a film of grit. Silco withdraws his whiskey flask. Wetting their fingers, they wipe off their faces.

"Life is stubborn, Jinx," he goes on. "In the dark, it will find its light. In the muck, its roots." He dusts his palms off on his ragged-edged coat. "In the stillness, its prey."

Unexpectedly, he whips his knife out. It arcs downward. With a crack, it splits the shelled thorax of a scorpion creeping toward them. The insect's segmented body jerks spastically. It is the same color as the stones: a deep, blood-hued obsidian. The spiny tip of its tail, curled over its head, is bright red.

The droplets of honey have attracted it. Now instead of bounty, it's met the edge of a blade.

Jinx hunkers close, chin balanced on her fist. "Sneaky."

"As I said. Life finds a way."

Silco's blade pierces deep. The glossy chitin splits. Dark runnels stain the soil. The insect thrashes in death-throes. It's a thing of pure malice; nothing like the diligent wasps. Its only purpose is to stalk and kill.

But even the most poisonous things have their uses.

Wrenching his blade loose, Silco slices off the scorpion's tail. A single drop of milky venom oozes from the barb. He daubs the liquid on his fingertip.

"Whatcha doing?" Jinx cringes. "It's probably radioactive."

"It's a neurotoxin. The venom attacks the central nervous system. In large doses, it causes paralysis. In small ones?" He lifts his finger, then licks the tip. It tastes acridly sweet. "It's a painkiller."

"Ewwww."

"You'd be surprised. In the mines, it was the anesthetic of choice." His gums tingle. A familiar coolness, the icy twin of a burn, spreads across his tongue. "One drop was like a shot of whiskey. It took the edge off a rough shift."

Jinx shudders. "I'd rather kiss Sevika."

"Don't knock it till you try it."

"Blech!" The shudder becomes a full-bodied retch. "Don't even joke!"

"I meant the scorpion."

"Sevika, scorpion. Potato, potahto!" She leaps to her feet. "Both'll sting ya the second your back's turned!"

She makes a show of dusting herself off. Silco hides a sideways smile.

Inside, he is never sure whether to be amused or appalled by Jinx's blindness to the nature of his and Sevika's arrangement. He supposes it's a testament to the demarcations he enforces in his world. The domestic flipside of his life with Jinx is subject to sordid speculation. But nobody—not even Sevika—crosses into its boundary.

Silco guards the dead heart of himself. He guards the sparking fuse of his existence.

Except the reverse is also true. Jinx has a mere bird's eye view into his and Sevika's dealings. A lens colored by grief and jealousy. To her, Sevika is a shadowy doppelganger of Vi, a stand-in for the shame of destroying her family. He's known that for a while. The same way he knows that if Jinx fully confronted the carnage at the Cannery in her secret recesses, the truth would destroy her.

It's a painful irony: the one truly responsible for that night is Silco. And yet he's also the only one who has seen Jinx, nurtured her gifts, given her purpose.

Without him, she'd spiral deeper into derangement.

And without her, he'd be dead in a hundred different ways.

So he let her antagonism for Sevika go unchallenged. He let her see only the parts she needed to understand. Jinx's world is starkly boxed into black and white, and he let her keep those boxes because she needed them to keep going.

Sevika's own grudge against the girl made it easier. There were times when Silco wished, out of pure pragmatism, that they got along better. Times where he was tempted to take Jinx aside and explain how much more complicated his and Sevika's relationship is than Jinx understands. How far it goes beyond the confines of the mission. What happens between two people behind the scenes. Behind closed doors.

Except he cannot do that either.

He's denied himself a partner because he trusts nothing and nobody. But also because Jinx trusts nobody but him. Clever as she is, at her core she remains a child. She needs a safe haven, and he is hers. She cannot envision that Silco has secrets outside of her, or moods influenced by antics that aren't hers. Why would she, when she is, de facto, the center of his world?

A bitter smile tugs at Silco's lips.

Is it wrong to cherish her innocent myopia—even as he deplores it?

His smile fades.

For a man who leaves little to chance, the consequences of his own myopia are not lost on him. Last night, he'd chosen Jinx over Zaun. He'd let Sevika handle the fallout, and left to reckon with his own. That it was an act of monstrous selfishness can hardly be denied.

Now, he measures the price.

When he returns, will Sevika be there, waiting? Or will the Eye resurrect to find his city aflame?

His XO, gone. His streets, a battlefield. His bed, empty.

And his future—

"Hey." Jinx's fingers snap. "You alive in there, Silly?"

"Still kicking." With a grunt, he lifts to his feet. "Scorpion venom makes me drift, is all."

"You're so weird."

He cherishes the lazy fondness in Jinx's voice. He offers her the crook of his elbow; she enfolds it, and nuzzles close. A small shadow traipsing alongside him on dainty feet.

The sun has begun to dip west. It will be evening soon. The river flows south, its tributaries feeding the sludge-pools. In the distance, the old railway bridge looms, its rusted trusses silhouetted against the green curvature of the horizon. Soon, they'll hit the oxbows, and in time, the settlements.

They've crossed half the distance; the rest is a matter of dogged grit.

Jinx knows it as well as he does. Her fingers thread themselves into his buttonhole. Her eyes hold the same gleam as when he'd first led her into his shadowed domain—half-trepidation, half-trust.

"How d'you know so much, anyway?" she says quietly. "About the Deadlands and stuff."

"Think this is your little fiefdom, do you? Vander and I used to come here all the time."

"Really? Why?"

"To escape." He gestures to the expanse around them. "Graveyards and gardens. Both are repositories of treasure. The stories of Oshra Va'Zaun, a city buried beneath the waves… it was like a fairytale for us. After our shifts, we'd sneak off to explore. Sometimes, we'd stumble across an abandoned ruin. Or a relic half-buried in the sand. Or the bones of a prehistoric beast. We'd fight over who'd get to keep the skull." He scoffs. "Fools. We could've sold it and split the profits."

"Always the entrepreneur."

"Other times, we'd find a pocket of pure nature. A tree, laden with fruit. A grove, bursting with blackflowers. Luckiest of all, we mapped out the oxbows of fresh water. Pure blue, and completely untainted." His sigh is a wisp of a thing. "It was our small drop of paradise."

Jinx perks up. "Wait. There's clean water here?"

"In strategic spots."

Silco leads her westward. The snaking curvature of the gulley flattens into the smooth expanse dryland. The landmarks disclose themselves like the pages of an old book. One by one, he navigates them: a crumbling, moss-furred causeway, a broken pillar of stone, a boulder shaped like a skull. Finally, a low spike-studded wall. It stretches eastward, bisecting the landscape. Silco vaults it, and Jinx follows.

"Ooh," she gasps.

"You smell it, hm?"

"Water." Jinx's nostrils flare. "Fresh water."

The scent lures them downhill. The gradient becomes steeper. Ahead, a copse of petrified trees stands out against the horizon. They are the bleached white of old bone, and gnarled as a witch's hands. Beyond, the earth slopes into a hollow. A stream unfurls, a narrow ribbon of blue. It flows into a deep curvature, the banks lined with cattails. The water is aquamarine, and gleams mirror-like. On the surface, placid; below, Silco knows it is full of secret riptides and unyielding currents.

If he and Jinx keep on their path, hugging the shoreline, they will soon cross into the first flagstaff of industry: the surreal nighttime landscape of pipes and twirling exhaust smoke from Zaun's refineries.

The waters on that side run black and scaly with pollutants. But here, the basin is littered not with broken glass and dead bones, but with eggshell-smooth pebbles and swaying weeds. A broken trestle—all ragged iron girders and concrete, as if chewed off by giant teeth—juts halfway over the shoreline.

The same spot Silco and Vander used to leap off of on blistering afternoons, the air shimmering with humidity and turning the Undercity into a hothouse.

"Whoa," Jinx breathes. "This place is a gem."

"Vander and I thought so too." He points to the trestle. "We once risked broken necks to climb that thing."

"Yeah?"

"On sunny days, we'd jump in to cool off. It was always the temperature of bathwater at the shore. A good spot to wash the grit out of our clothes."

Jinx follows his finger to the trestle with her eyes. "Is the water deep?"

"Sixty feet at most."

"Good enough."

"What—?"

She rounds on him, snatching his hand in both her own, prancing backwards in front of him. "I wanna swim!"

"It will be twilight soon."

"That's happy time for us."

She tugs him with the steam of ten girls. Silco finds himself swept along in her imperious grip. Yet her momentum is its own magic. The pebbles feel like cotton candy beneath his feet; the wind sings like windchimes in his ears. This is the sorcery his Jinx weaves. Wreathed in the mania popping off her, he finds an answering zest surfacing from his own depths: the sharp-eyed and raw-boned sumpsnipe who grew up half-feral on Topside's scraps. The one who secretly cheers every time Jinx sets off a bomb; the one who soundlessly applauds everytime she kills the killjoys.

Everything he is, so is she—magnified tenfold. The lasered focus of his own passions struck through a prism, and fractaling into a thousand rainbow sparks.

The train trestle curves in a stump over the sloshing waters. The nailed rungs are even creakier than Silco remembers. Some are rotting; others missing entirely. Jinx picks her way across them in a sprightly game of hopscotch. Silco follows more slowly, a measured side-to-side. The trestle's reflection quivers in the deepening blueness of the water. The shallows are still as clear as in his and Vander's heyday.

Jinx cocks her head, "What's that?"

Through the glassy pane of water, Silco glimpses a dark whiplike shape. A deepwater fish. Sickle-jawed and predatory, it spans as large as two grown men. Almost sensing their scrutiny, it crests for a moment. Its dorsal fin slices like a blade through the surface. Between needle teeth, Silco sees a clotted bolus of mangled meat. A riverbird caught in its jaws.

Jinx eyes the creature with fascination. "Pretty!"

"It's from the Deep."

"Why's it out here?"

"Winter sleep."

"Huh?"

"As the temperatures drop, river life goes dormant. Especially the fish and amphibians. They gravitate to the deeper pools and subside into a kind of torpor. They rouse with the season's change, warming up as the water does. This one must have been swept downriver by the rains. Now it's trapped in the oxbow."

"So it's by its lonesome."

Jinx's body radiates an antsy subterranean thrum. Silco recognizes it. He sets a hand on her shoulder. "Child, these creatures are territorial. Better to—"

He may as well be blowing bubbles. Jinx hops to the farthest edge of the trestle. Kicks off her boots, and shimmies off her jacket. Puff-Puff hits the planks with a dull clank. The riverside breeze raises gooseflesh on her bare arms. Her tattoos, in the dying daylight, are stained to the faded blue of ink smudges. The choppy ends of her hair ruffle as if under invisible fingers. Smiling, she raises her hands, her body arrowing itself.

Squealing—"Whooo-hooo!"—she leaps into the water.

"Jinx!"

There is no splash when she lands. Only soft-spreading ripples. Instinctually, Silco hurries to the trestle's edge. He pictures the sharp-mawed fish lunging at her in a fit of fury. That's what predators are hardwired to do. One can't expect them to behave otherwise.

Or expect Jinx to.

Bubbles helix along the waterline. Giggling, Jinx surfaces like a mermaid. Wet hair clings to her skull. She thrusts triumphant devil horns into the sky. Astonishingly, the fish doesn't attack her. Gliding along the river bank, its eye glows redly. But it stays at an arm's length. Two predators sharing the same shore.

Jinx skims deeper into the oxbow before turning to wave at him.

"C'mon, Silly!"

"Jinx, get back up here."

"Make me!"

She dives and disappears. The fish flicks its tail and disappears too. Secondhand sunrays fill the slack water in sparkling emerald curtains. Above, Silco imagines the night circling like a low-flying vulture. Below, he imagines death the same way. Holding its breath. Waiting to break the evening's skin.

"Jinx?"

Five seconds. Ten. Twenty.

"Jinx!"

Silco lets his boot and coat drop on the trestle beside Jinx's belongings. In an eyeblink, he's shot into the river.

The first icy kiss makes him gasp. Then he's plunging below the surface, disorientation bleeding into the opposite. Water is his refuge, after all. Soft, secret, sinister. Ready to envelop him as soon as he steps into it. The world melts to a muted dreamland. Sunlight slants in the thinnest prismatic bands. He glimpses the whiskery darting shapes of catfish. The somnolent sway of river stalks in the silt.

No Jinx.

His lungs throb—airless panic. Kicking, he spears through the water's surface. He floats, gasping raggedly, his good eye slicing left and right.

"Jinx—where the hell are you?!"

Then he sees her.

Like a mythical sprite, she ascends with the deepwater fish. Her small hand is caught in its scales; her body flows in tandem. Moving like liquid, like luminosity, like lightning. The fish thrashes, doubling on her, intent on tossing her off. Its scythelike jaws snap, the promise of power turned to violence.

Jinx is undaunted.

Between one breath and the next, she's caught hold of the fish's dorsal fin. The beast jacknifes, droplets flying, tail whipsawing. Jinx has already leapt astride its back. Her silhouette is so incongruously small. A pixy riding a sleek ballistic torpedo. Yet her body is electric with glee. Hair wild, teeth bared, eyes a-glitter.

Caught together, she and the fish roll through the river; every half turn sends her under, and she surfaces each time spitting water and laughing. Letting the big fish tire itself out, a primordial clash of wills beautified into a ballet. Both hands gripping its sturdy fin, legs squeezing its flanks, until the beast stops spinning and submerging, trying to subdue her.

Impossible to try.

That's what Silco loves about her.

Evening is falling cool and edged with distant stars. An effervescent haze hangs over the water. Silco floats at a distance, and begins to smile. His earlier panic is gone.

Jinx is strong. She can handle herself.

She can handle anything.

By the time he cuts a gliding stroke toward her, the mysterious fish is subdued to a sullen trance. Up close, the iridescent cupola of the sky limns the contours of its scales: traceries of multicolor blurring into blackness, Silco glimpses his reflection—inked tendrils of hair, bladelike nose, mismatched stare—in the eerie red convex of its eyeball.

Jinx giggles. "Lookie. I made a friend."

She is sprawled languidly on the broad curve of the fish's back. Fading spears of sunlight quiver around her in the twilight. Her small hand plays along the fish's flank, a caress, a claiming.

When Silco meets her eyes, she beams. She always loves to show off to him.

Reaching out, he traces his fingertips along the fish's snout. A texture sharp as fiberglass and yet smooth as sandblasted stone. Its mouth yawns open to reveal daggered teeth, rows upon rows. The outward ring is blunted from age. Not a small-fry; this creature has seen brighter shores and better days.

Same as him.

"Who'd grow old, eh?" he murmurs.

"Not me," Jinx singsongs.

"No, never you."

Eternal and exasperating. That is Jinx in a nutshell. Like catching the tail of a comet, and letting it drag you at velocities that defy description, beyond time. And yet the awe is enveloped by a shocky tendresse, because the comet wears the costume of an ordinary girl. Her tears streaked in contrails; her heart a pulsing ember of stardust.

How does one prove a worthy father to such a child?

Where does a cunning, crooked, callous man like him even begin?

He swims abreast of the fish. Jinx rides on its back. Their paired shadows are a rippled distortions along the river-shore. The fish slices along like a guillotine blade. Silco keeps pace with it, momentum spun with a sinuous scissoring of his legs. Jinx lazes on the fish's back, arms and legs outflung, eyes half-lidded.

"Didn't know you could swim so good," she says.

"I enjoyed swimming as a boy."

"Sure ya won't born with gills?"

Silco smiles without mirth. "Vander used to ask the same thing."

"Well, were ya?"

"Some things are just in the blood. They come naturally." He lays a palm along the fish's side, an inch from Jinx's starfished hand. "It's the same with your gift for tinkering."

Her smile fades. "Gift. Sure."

"It is a gift, Jinx." This time his smile is almost wistful. "Nobody taught you to make magic out of the Hex-gem. Or build guns from garbage. Not anyone in the Lanes. Not a professor at the Academy. You simply knew. I've seen it time and time again. You're the real thing. The rest of us are caught up in the nitty gritty of solving life's puzzles. Not you. You tap into your power intuitively."

Jinx's eyes dip, two softly-doused fireflies.

The fish carves a graceful arc through the searing blues of the river. The horizon is lit up with the otherworldly glow that presages nightfall. In the distance, the interconnected neon lights of Zaun are a living jewel box. Silco's jewel-box. His nexus of power.

And yet without Jinx, it may as well be an abyss, his body suspended in its center, empty-hearted and empty-handed.

Quietly, Jinx says, "We should take it home with us."

"What?"

"The fishy." Jinx pets its flank. "It could swim in the balcony pool."

"And keep you company, I wager."

"Only 'cause you're too busy now."

Something jerks in Silco's chest, a shark caught on a barbed hook.

"Jinx…"

The last embers of sunlight leech from the sky. Droplets fall in silvering streaks down Jinx's cheeks. Water—or tears. She saws an arm across her eyes, and looks straight ahead. Her profile is pensive.

"Would it be so bad if—?"

"If?"

"We stayed out here?"

"It will be chilly soon."

"No, I mean... out here forever. Just us."

The shoreline is overhung with vaporous shadows. The fish makes for the deeper currents, subtle strokes belying a keen sense of hunger. It is a night-feeder, Silco guesses. He keeps pace with it. With Jinx.

It has been years since he's had an evening such as this. No deadline beyond the sun and its ambit. No schemes or strategems or subterfuge. Only silence, sky, shadow. The world is nothing else, but there is no need to look beyond Jinx, for she is the center of it all.

A treasure worth a nation.

Silco whispers, "Is that what you want?"

"If it was?"

He makes a sound between a sigh and a chuckle. "We'd have to leave it all behind. This thing of ours. The crew. Home. Everything."

"But we'd have a fresh start. Without all this—all the rules and laws and expectations." Her smile is a bittersweet slice. "We could go to Bilgewater? I'd commandeer us a ship. We'd call it, um—"

"Schrödinger's Cat?"

"Pfffff. You can't name a ship after a cat. Even I think that's a jinx."

"What then?"

She ponders a moment, then snaps her fingers, "Ooh, I know! We'd call it the Maidenless!"

"Why?" Silco deadpans. "No wenches?"

"Ah, quit it!" She flicks water at him. "If I leave the naming to you, it'd get saddled with something lame like Scylla and Charybdis. Or The Megalodon."

"I'm fond of megalodons."

"Too obvious."

Silco gives it a moment's thought. "How about… Şahmaran? Like the Zhyunian myth?"

Contemplatively, Jinx's little hand caresses the fish's scaly flank. "Hmm. I like it. The SS Şahmaran. With Captain Silco and First Mate Jinx. We'd find ourselves a crew from Buhru. They worship snake-y stuff there, don't they? And I hear they're good with blades. We'd sail across Runeterra, and make ourselves a literal killing in the gunpowder trade. Maybe I could design and sell Hex-cannons—"

"Not Hex-harpoons?"

"No long-range booms," she says. "Anyway, cannons are more fun."

Silco hides a grin. There's his girl.

"All right," he says. "The SS Şahmaran. Our emblem would be a woman with a sea-serpent's tail. We'd outfit our vessel with long-range cannons to cut through the hulls of even Noxian warships like butter. We'd also have small motor-powered skiffs that could attack galleons in swarms. We'd plunder them for treasure, of course. But our biggest treasure would be ransoms from abducting the seamen from insured Demacian and Topside vessels. Afterward, we'd pay our crewmen in gold nuggets instead of coinage, so they couldn't be traced by any government or guild."

Jinx gives a sideways smile of respect. "Always two steps ahead, ain’t ya?"

"If we're going to be pirates, we ought to do it right."

"Does that mean there'd be grog, too?"

"Naturally."

"And wenches?"

"At port, sailors will do what they will."

"I mean for me?"

Silco's palm rests on Jinx's knee, lingering dangerously close to her tickle-spot. "Settle for a talking parrot."

She shivers and giggles. "Maybe someday."

"You mean the parrot?"

Her eyes go guilelessly round. "Suuuuuure. Who else?"

They float across the surface, their bodies mirrored by the water. Jinx reaches out a tentative finger to trace the outline of Silco's unscarred cheek against the seeping dusk.

"I know," she says with a sigh, "it's all just pretty prattle. But think about it? We'd be… free."

"Zaun is free."

"I mean a different free. You could be yourself. I could be myself. We could be whoever we wanted. Or just be us."

Silco hears the tremor of uncertainty in her voice. Guilt knots in his own bones. Free. That is what Zaun symbolizes. A chance to live their own lives away from Piltover. Away from shame and subjugation. That is why they fought. Why they suffered and broke and bled.

Bloody Sunday. The Day of Ash.

Now the dream has birthed itself into life. And with life, there are responsibilities. A clean slate with a fine print.

Freedom comes with no wings, but strings attached.

Silco says, voice low. "You could be yourself in Zaun."

"I can't."

"You can. I'll make sure of it."

Jinx blinks wetly and shakes her head. "I thought so too. I thought…"

"What?"

"I thought it would be over."

"Like a new chapter?"

"Like a bad dream." Jinx's lower-lip quivers; she catches it between her teeth, "The ghosts. The voices. The past. After Vi went away, I thought I could too. I thought that everything would go away with the Bridge."

Silco puts his fingers on Jinx's cheek. The water drips down her hair, onto his hand.

"The past never goes away, child."

"I know."

"You know, but you don't."

Jinx's eyes seek his. He meets her bemused stare, the pale angles of his face melting into a darkly-patient smile. "Despite your being seventeen and through a hundred stripes of hell, your world is still open-ended. Forwards and backwards. You can look to the past and remember only the hurts. Or you can take them as lessons. A vow to be stronger. To never let something—someone—hold you back. Armed with the knowledge, you walk forward…"

"But never forget?"

"Exactly. You learn to break patterns. Stop living in the shadow of your own limitations."

Jinx smiles. But the sad gloss remains in her eyes. "Easy for you to say."

"Is it?"

"You get whatever you want."

"I wasn't born with the tools to forge my dreams, Jinx. It took grit and sweat and blood to shape me. You know that." He smooths back her wet hair, the cool touch a counterpoint to his warm tone. "It's different with you. Once you know what you want, you go after it without stopping. Like you did with the Hex-gem. Like you did just now. Calling this creature to heel without a second thought. Your fears are no different. You just have to trust yourself. Let your instincts guide you."

A frown digs between Jinx's brows. "What if it's still all black?"

"Sometimes the things that burn the brightest can't be born except in blackness. Stars are only beautiful because the sky is so deep and dark, right? It's the same for people. Sometimes they can only find their light in dark places. They only know themselves once they cross to the other side."

"Other side?"

"Past the edge of despair."

"What if I fall over?"

"You won't." His palm cradles Jinx's head. The touch is as steadying as his tone. "I'll be right there. I promise."

Tears slide from the corners of Jinx's eyes, Shimmer-stained. But her eyes burn with a cleansing fire. After a moment, she smooths a hand along the fish's flank, then slides off and into the water.

As soon as she lets go, the creature ripples as if out of a dream. Its snout angles, the seam of its mouth parting to expose the glint of pointed teeth. Silco and Jinx stare into its huge eye. Deep red, a replica of Silco's own left eye and Jinx's paired ones. A strange sense of recognition passes. In the next eyeblink, the fish dips below the surface in a graceful sweep, bubbles churning in its wake.

It fades within the oxbow's dark mirror. Silco and Jinx remain. Their reflections align with the dim stars in the curving nightscape.

Two predators sharing the same dreams.

Wiping her cheeks, Jinx smiles. "I had fun playing with him."

"I believe it was a she."

"Yeah?"

"And she'll be here until the rainy season."

Jinx whispers: "What about you?"

"You already know the answer."

She reaches a streaming hand, and he takes it. They twine fingers; two different sets of calluses fitting together. She tugs him close until their foreheads touch.

She whispers, "I'm sorry."

"Sorry?"

"About running away. The blackguards. The blast. Sorry for all the mess."

"Ssh. It's finished, my lovely."

A small sound escapes her, a tiny gasp like a sob. "I might... might need some help gettin' my head back on straight."

"I'll give it," he says simply, "until the end of my days."

He is rewarded with smile: lip-bitten and trembly.

"My hair too," she goes on. "I could use a makeover."

Silco's lips touch the blue strands clinging wetly to her temple. The ruined fringe makes her resemble a sea urchin. Some of it sticks up in unruly spikes, and the rest rasps jaggedly at the edges.

So many years of braiding and bonding. Gone, all of it gone.

He thinks of how long it took to accustom himself to his changed face. His new face. The scars he accepts now as the price of survival. The brand of the change-bearer. The man nobody dares to look in the eye. The man who cannot undo his past; only walk forward with the knowledge that what he lost was never the sum of what he truly is.

Jinx is different. What she's lost is so much worse. But it isn't irreversible. Hair grows back. Hearts heal. Hope can rise from ashes. She will never have the same carefree naivety of a child in a different city. But she will have the choice to stand proud and walk tall in her own.

A phoenix come home to roost.

"I'll smooth out the edges," he promises. "Give you the Hellion Cut."

"What's that?"

"It's how they'd cut our hair at Hölle. The boys and girls. Bangs straight across. Like pages in a Demacian court."

"You think I could pull it off?"

"As you do everything else."

Jinx passes her arms around his neck, her cheek against his, scars to smoothness. The sweetest physical solace. They are both buoyant under the surface: an intimate medium between body and spirit. That's the magic of water. It leaves nothing but the essentials behind.

An embrace in the empty air of the real world is so much more loaded with complications.

And the older Jinx grows, the more complicated it becomes. It must happen, and how can you end it, with no watery medium to keep you together, only the awkward falling-away, out of a kiss or off a cliff, out of the corner of your eye, out of sight and mind?

It will happen. Someday. Eventually.

But not yet.

Not yet.

"Thanks, Silly," she whispers.

"For what?"

"Bein' here. Telling me all the stories. Brightenin' up my day." She nuzzles close. "I'd be too scared in the dark."

Silco knows she doesn't mean the literal dark. But, in that same darkness, he finds the right words. "We'll go on together."

"Promise?”

“To the moon and back." Gently, he detaches. "Come home, Jinx."

Jinx nods. Her hands knots with his: he can feel her succumbing to the seduction of trust. Nectar on her tongue. Heat in her gut. Water on her skin. The past months, she's phased in and out of life, sometimes rocking forward and other times falling back into the fugue of old misery.

Silco needs to keep her from relapsing. Keep her in the same world he's in—but sweeter, warmer, safer. A place where reality doesn't split, and the skies don't bleed fire.

Where the specters in her head aren't real.

He tugs her away the depths, a mermaid's fairytale in reverse. Their shadows trail like eel-tongues across the rippling surface. On dry land, gooseflesh pebbling their skins, they wring the riverwater from their garments. Then, wordless, they dress and continue to hike through the shifting night.

The cold is a satisfying ache. Taking Silco's hand, Jinx swings their linked arms in a slow arc.

"Hey—Silco?"

"Hm?"

"When we get home, am I still...?"

"What?"

Jinx bites her lip; feigning coy. "Am I still grounded?"

"Abso-bloody-lutely."

The night is pricked with stars.

In the distance, Zaun is a beckoning bonfire. Silco and Jinx drift toward it, side by side. The rough path travels along the swale of oxbows before yielding to the swift-running Pilt. As they draw nearer to the city limits, Jinx takes Silco's hand again.

Her fingers tremble; he squeezes them until they steady.

Stealing a glance, he finds her staring down at her boots, then up at the sky. Her expression is half-lidded and strangely empty. Not in a hollow way. More as if she's been swept clean. Still, he'll have to watch her closely the next few days. The calm is no guarantee that another meltdown isn't around the corner.

Yet he finds himself grateful, too. The Deadlands—half-graveyard, half-garden—have served their use. Nourished Jinx's spark; buried her hurts. Not forever, and not entirely. But enough to carry her forward. Or, at the very least, to carry her home.

And not a moment too soon.

Because the sooner they get home, the less Silco dreads the locus of pain in his left temple, as the Shimmer-dose fades and the ache begins. A dull pulse at first, then the pulse will become a pounding, and the pounding a drillsaw of red-hot pain that will carve through his skull and deliquesce his brain. His bad eye will begin seeping blood. His senses will go haywire. He will be non-verbal in six hours, and hallucinating in eight. At that point, his survival will be down to a toss of the coin.

Without Shimmer, he'll be dead within twelve.

It's a reminder: today was no grace period, but a close shave.

He is always on borrowed time.

Especially when it comes to the biggest issue. The crux of Jinx's every meltdown. The hinge of his every lie.

Vi.

She is dangerous to Jinx's well-being. Physically; emotionally. Her specter is enough to send Jinx into a downspiral. How much worse if she meets Jinx face-to-face?

Silco cannot allow it. The next few weeks are crucial. His bargain with Medarda will be sealed with the Peace Treaty. One that is a true catalyst for Zaun's success, rather than a noose around its neck. Surrounding the Treaty will be a hundred loose ends and bared necks, which he must tie together into a knot—then pull at the right moment to secure the whole bloody thing.

Until then, Vi must be kept alive. Kept close.

Afterward?

Silco's fingers are threaded with Jinx's. He tightens his grip.

Jinx says: "We've got company."

"Hm?"

She points with her free hand. Silco spots a pin of smoke wafting through the air. They cross a graveled road, following the smoke. Silco keeps Vander's knife at close range. Jinx cocks Puff-Puff. It is not uncommon for smugglers to lay low in the Deadlands. Best to stay on guard.

Bestow a warm welcome.

In the distance, a fire crackles. Six blackguards—playing hooky despite the Code Blue—sit in a self-satisfied ring. Bottles of beer are passed over the flames. One guard smokes a joint as fat as a baby's arm. Two others are on their knees, having a go with a whore: one getting head while the other pounds her from the rear.

Jinx rubbernecks for a closer look. Eyebrow crooked, Silco pirouettes his finger. She grumbles and turns away. She's a child of Zaun. She's grown up in the thick of vice, without a scrap of shame. But Silco prefers to observe a modicum of propriety. In spirit of fatherhood, if nothing else.

He says, "Evening, gentlemen."

Four blackguards turn. The other two carry on plowing the whore. Lust is a myopic beast. As it is, Silco doubts they recognize him. He and Jinx are scruffy from their downriver journey. Silco's hair is an ungroomed tangle. Jinx's trademark braids are missing. They are both dressed like grubby travelers.

Like prey.

On cue, the blackguards exchange nasty smiles. Two pairs intercept Silco and Jinx on either side. One sets a gloved hand on Silco's shoulder. The other juts his gun under Jinx's breasts at an obscene angle.

"Evening, granddad," one guard says. "Where're you off to?"

"Business in the city."

Jinx unrolls a sticky-sweet smile. "And a lightshow after."

The second guard nudges his gun closer. "I can give you a real lightshow, girlie."

"Um? Ewww."

The man licks his lips, circling her slowly. The way he eyes her top to toe makes his intentions blatant. "Your daddy a farmer?" he asks, addressing her backside. "'Cause that little onion's got a sweet hook to it."

"F for Effort, bozo," Jinx snorts. "And my Daddy's right here."

"Yeah? I don't see anybody." He reaches for her arm. "Let's go 'round back, huh? I'll peel you for a little taste."

There's a saying in the Undercity: She can outdraw lightning. It's practically dedicated to Jinx. Nothing outpaces her trigger finger. Between one blink and the next, a weapon can materialize in her palm—and blast a target to shreds.

For once, Silco's blade beats her bullet.

The blackguard feels cold steel bite into his jugular. He blinks, as if thinking it will go away. When it remains angled across his throat, he scowls. "Where'd you get that, Grandpop?"

"I took it off the Hound of the Underground."

The blackguards crack into laughter. They stop when neither Jinx nor Silco join in.

"You did, huh?" the first guard says. "You even know how to use it?"

Ordinarily, Silco doesn't use a knife to threaten. He uses it to kill. But he's in a sporting mood. He nods, and the point of the knife dimples flesh. It opens silkily; a bead of blood rolling. The blackguard curses. Silco tips his chin with undisguised relish. Between tangled hair, his bad eye glows red.

"It's easy," he says. "Like peeling an onion."

Disbelief gives way to recognition. The guards' faces contort. "Chancellor?"

The two men in the background disengage from the whore. One covers his genitals with a heaped bundle of clothes. The other hides behind the squealing girl like a meat-shield. As one, they snap off salutes. "Sir."

"Why aren't you at your posts?"

"On—on break, sir."

"Is that so? Pardon the interruption."

"N-Not at all." The blackguard with the knife at his jugular withdraws his hands off Jinx. His smile is an ingratiating leer. "Haven't had any excitement since the Siege."

Silco doesn't return his smile. "I'm certain you'll find plenty here."

"Sir—?"

Silco's rage—that lidded pot of ichor perpetually set on a low simmer—keeps bubbling. His patience is the only thing keeping it from popping off the stove. "Is this how you greet all travelers? Or only those without a passphrase?"

"Pass—passphrase, sir?"

"Oh, that's right." He angles the blade into the obliging softness of flesh. "There isn't one."

The blackguard yelps. His friends blanch.

"Sir—p-please—"

"No explanation?"

"Please, I meant no offense—"

"Just thought you'd commit one, hm? A good old-fashioned frisk. Or whatever else you call it when rape's not quite de rigueur."

A wet gurgle. "I-I thought you were trespassers, sir."

"Do we look like trespassers?"

"Sir—"

"Lie better, boy. It's why we trained you." Silco jabs the blade deeper. A few drops of blood patter onto the blackguard's boots. "Unless it's Topside's book you're taking a leaf from."

"Sir, please—"

"Please what?"

"D-Don't kill me—"

"Shh." Silco pats the blackguard's cheek with the flat edge of the blade. Blood smears his skin. "Relax."

A tremor shakes the blackguard. "Sir—"

"Did I say 'kill you'? You're making an awful lot of assumptions for a man in your position." He turns to his daughter. "What do you think, Jinx?"

Jinx stands like a steel spring, coiled and deadly. Her eyes glitter. She is looking at Silco as if a stranger has seized control of his operating system. The sense that his skin will split apart at any moment and whatever pushes through will be nothing but knotted rage and teeth and blood.

A look Silco is familiar with. But now it's as if he's seeing double. Jinx with her veneer of flippant menace. Jinx as a weapon with no trigger—only a blindness that leads her straight into her own blackout.

Violence is her element. It is also her torment.

Last night, he'd witnessed its starkest depths.

Silco bites his tongue, severing the rage rising up. His edged tone evens. "What's your name, boy?"

"Davis, sir. Davis Trello. Please—"

In a single movement, Silco withdraws Vander's knife and stows it back in his boot. "I'm not going to kill you, Trello. But I will tell you what's going to happen next."

The blackguard snaps to attention.

"You're going to walk thirty paces eastward. You're going to draw your weapon. You're going to count to a hundred. Then you're going to shoot yourself in the head."

Terror twists the blackguard's face. "Sir—"

"Do that, and you die a martyr." Silco smiles, no more than a reflex of jagged teeth. "Else I'll take your martyrdom into my own hands."

"S-sir—"

"Go."

Quaking, the blackguard obeys.

Silco doesn't spare him another glance. Turning, he addresses the two men cringing behind the whore, her arms across her breasts, her hand a figleaf over her groin. One of them has managed to drag on his trousers. The other is hastily buttoning up his shirt. "You lot. Where is your motorcar?"

One blackguard points. "Behind the hillside, sir."

"We will be taking it."

"Yes, sir."

"And your supplies."

"Yes, sir."

"Out of the way. Now."

The blackguards peel away. Silco and Jinx stroll past, as if their appearance is the ordinary summation of an ordinary day. The motorcar waits by the roadside. Silco opens the door for Jinx to climb in, before rounding to slide into the driver's seat. In the rearview mirror, the blackguards stand in a stupefied circle.

Further off, blackguard Trello kneels by the roadside, pistol kissing his own temple.

A kiss that lingers.

And lingers.

Silco's bitten-down rage becomes a spring-loaded trigger. Snatching Puff-Puff from Jinx's belt, he shoulders his torso halfway out of the car.

Takes aim.

Fires.

The slug rips through the night and slams into the blackguard. He topples, a hole bursting open at the corner of his skull. His brains spill like an oil slick in the firelight. Not a dignified way to die, but he's dead regardless. The remaining blackguards cower. The whore shrieks hysterically.

Silco snaps, "Back to your posts!"

"S-sir!"

One blackguard seizes the howling whore by the arm. He yanks her along, almost dragging her by the heels. Together, they flee the hill.

Silco returns Puff-Puff to Jinx's lap, before turning the ignition. The motorcar cuts a U-turn and pulls out. He drives the same way he does his knifework: a smoothness edged in casual whiplash. Keeping the wheel steady with two fingertips, he fiddles with the dashboard: adjusting the air-conditioning so no air blows into his bad eye, then hitting the radio dial.

No emergency broadcasts on the First Chancellor's disappearance. Either Sevika is holding down the fort—or a secret coup is in progress.

He'll know soon enough.

Silence lapses. Tipping his head back, Silco savors a breath of the night air through the unrolled window. At his side, Jinx is silent. But he is moved to doting at the blue shape of her skull, its chopped alarum of hair fluttering everywhere. She cradles Puff-Puff in her lap. Her fingertips trace it without focus, as if it is a divining rod.

Quietly, she says, "That was a nice shot."

"I was aiming for his jaw."

"Then your aim sucks!"

"For a one-eyed man, I'm good enough."

Jinx says nothing. Her chin drops on her fist; her expression holds an intense stillness that mirrors the Deadlands. When she speaks, it comes from some place nearly as far-off, the words threading through the wind's song.

"Y'know, I could have done that."

"I know how to tune a radio, Jinx."

"I meant—"

Silco's notched lip tightens. "I know."

(A child to do a man's job.)

No more.

He's done sanctioning blood on Jinx's hands. No matter her innate capacity for it. She's suffered enough. For him; for Zaun. Now he'll make sure she has a place in the city. But it won't be in the shadows. If she must live, she must learn to walk among the living.

In the limelight. By his side.

Silco lifts an arm to cup the back of Jinx’s neck. "Keep your gun at hand," he says. "But keep it pointed toward the ground."

"Huh? Why?"

"Because bombs and bullets did the trick." He squeezes her nape. "Now I want you to aim higher."

Jinx's left knee jiggles. Her perturbed eyes flit beneath spiky lashes. "Like where?"

"To the moon and back."

They trade brief smiles. But once they hit the road, Jinx grows quiet again. Beneath her puckish moue, Silco sees the old uncertainty. They're both light-headed on leftover adrenaline, Jinx is far from settled in herself or in her new role in Zaun, a fact that is playing hell with Silco's own nerves and his future stratagems. And yet in this moment he is unaccountably glad, because his child is back.

Back in her rightful place.

Deliberately, he says, "You'll be all right, Jinx."

"Yeah?"

"You can do this. We can—and we will."

Jinx gives him wobbly smile. "I'll try."

"I'll be counting on you."

"And crossin' your fingers?"

"What for?"

"Unjinxing the jinxing."

Silco's voice softens with pride. "I wouldn't dream of it."

Jinx pounces into his arms. Her body holds the rich heavy scent of deepwater, intermixed with motes of her own natural sweetness. The brightest life blossoming from her pores. The purest hope. Her fingertips trace little doodles against his shirtfront.

XOXO.

Silco keeps her cradled close, one arm around her and the other at the wheel, his cheek nestled gratefully in the blue heap of her hair.

The embrace lasts until Zaun's skyline peaks—and multicolored neon engulfs the darkness.

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