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Stillwater’s resident “problem child” makes a name for herself within the first few days of her arrival. It probably isn’t the reputation she’s hoping for.
Sure, the girl is strong, in that wiry, hollowed-out way fissure kids always seem to be. She’s got the wits of a brawler and the stance of a prize fighter. Her gray eyes are as sharp and quick as the flash of a knife. She picked a fight with a guard twice her size and damn near won.
But underneath it all - she’s a kid. Fifteen at most. Young and scared and so fucking angry, shivering with the force of it, her balled fists blanched white at the knuckles and her face dark with the shadow of some immeasurable hurt.
A handful of them recognize her as Vander’s girl - the Hound of the Underground’s oldest whelp, the one who hauled crates of liquor up the stairs by herself and spent her tips on crayons for her sister. The one who ran errands up and down the Lanes and taught the little ones how to fight.
A good kid. One who deserved better. Deserves better, in the here and now, every bit as much as back then.
They look at her, at the handprint bruises blotting out the freckles on her round face, and they make a decision.
The night after her first stint in solitary, when she’s dragged back looking haunted and trembling, one of the older ladies stays up to watch her back as she cries.
When the warden’s lackeys leave her bloodied and crumpled on the floor after one of their “chats,” the ex-apothecary slips her bandages, water, what precious little antiseptic can be scrounged in a place like this.
She doesn’t take the favors lightly. She bristles, flinches away, snaps with increasing insistence what the hell do they want from her?
The answers are different across the board, but they all boil down to the same thing, in the end:
I owe your old man.
He deserved better.
You deserve better.
The undercity doesn’t turn its back on its people.
Not now. Not ever.