Work Text:
Little Left Behind
by kaikamahine
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1]
Your name is Ren. You are eight years old. You have no mother, and no father, but you have your Nana, and a pen that’s cooler than any pen anyone else has because it changes color, and a monster who lives in your ceiling named Jinx, who won’t let you get a good look at her but who glows at night sometimes so that you know she’s there and you’re not alone in the dark.
2]
Until recently, you lived in a house in Upper Piltover.
It was actually one of five houses that got all crammed together on one block like narrow books on a shelf, and it was very long and very tall and not very wide, but since it had just been you and your father, you didn’t need one of those big fenced-in mansions like the ones uphill. Those belonged to the councilors and the shipping magnates, Dad said, the ones that got rich off Hextech and elevated their houses. Their families, he meant, when you frowned, struck with the image of all those houses floating in line like flying carpets. Oh, you said, a little disappointed.
If Piltover sat on the sea like a great big cake, that would be the very top tier, and honestly, you were glad you didn’t live that high. It seemed like it would be very noisy, with all those airships coming and going from the Hexgate.
But your book-spine house was just right, and your bedroom was the best part of it — it had a big bay window with a seat, and it was only a little taller than the trees on the road so you could see all the birds building nests in their crowns, and the automobiles chugging by on the brick-paved road, and the distant glitter of the sea. Your bed was in an alcove that was mostly bookshelves, accessible by a ladder that rolled — yes, exactly as cool as it sounds. Sometimes, if your father had had a very long day and he came in to read to you, stretching out on your bed with your pillow under his head, he would fall asleep like that, breaths whistling in and out through his whiskers. You’d ease the book out of his hands and sit on the top step of the ladder and read ahead in the story, pushing yourself back and forth on the rollers as silently as you could. You loved those days.
Your father wanted you to go to the Academy, so the tutor he hired taught you to read early and read often, and they filled your room with books.
You suppose if you’d shown half the love for, say, math as you did for literature, they would have found a way to fill your room with that instead, but you are easy to please and easy to buy gifts for, everyone says, and you are safe in the knowledge that any adult who says books are a harmless hobby for a little girl clearly doesn’t remember the last time they read one.
3]
You live a lot further downcity now, in Nana’s house. Your new bedroom is half the size of your old one, with green walls like the inside of an olive and an unfinished ceiling full of pipes that rattle and squeak and keep you up at night until you get used to them. Your window is rather small and not very clean and there’s no view of the sea at all.
You can’t keep the books you read, since they belong to the school, but at least for a little while you can sit on your bed and not be in your room at all.
Everything is very big and very scary when you’re eight years old, with no mother and no father, but when you’re reading, you can take the shape of your fears and make them the shape of someone else’s fears and watch them carry it for awhile, because they’re usually better at it than you are.
4]
Nana is your mother’s mother, of house Unnanlyer.
There isn’t much to say about the Unnanlyers, except that like most of the downcity houses, they had been wealthy and influential once.
You’d met her twice before at your mother’s arranging, a long time ago, and you don’t remember much from these encounters other than you both looked like she’d wrestled you into shape for it, stuffed into shoes with uncomfortable toes and blouses that tied with a ribbon around your necks. Like you, Nana looked like a tomcat that might at any second revert to its natural state.
But you’d met, which is more than could be said for anyone on your father’s side of the family, so it was decided that Nana would take care of you.
If you’d been asked, you would have said you’d’ve liked to stay with Lieutenant Hogarth, please. The lieutenant worked with your father, her desk was right next to his, and she had a twelve-year-old you didn’t have much in common with, but more importantly she had a yard with lots of small stone urns and potted plants and a curved bench that went around the trunk of a tree and was the perfect place, you imagined, to sit down with a book in every season, even winter. You would have loved to live there, with someone you knew.
But you were not asked.
5]
You just don’t know Nana very well, is the thing.
You try, but Nana likes to take small worries and add to their edges and add to their edges until they become very big worries indeed, until she can’t see anything else around them — like if it’s going to rain tomorrow and what shoes should she wear because the train tracks might be slick and she doesn’t want to fall down when she goes out. She listens to the weather report on the radio and gets very agitated if you talk and she misses it, because now how is she supposed to know if it’ll rain or not, Ren!
You are eight years old, and almost everything in the world is outside of your control, not just the rain.
Nana doesn’t seem to remember what that’s like, so it’s hard for you to sympathize.
You learned early on that the easiest way to head her off is to pat her hand to tell her that you heard, and to say, “You’ll make the best decision, Nana, you always do,” because that makes her rock her heels and harumph, pleased to hear it, and puts you in mind again of a tomcat, fluffing itself up. Age has squashed her face like a tom’s, and her hair is very orange, like yours.
The trick is to need something that she was going to do anyway, like heating up food on the hob, or a trip to the mercery to get new stockings, because the ones Nana donated to you are too big and puddle around your shoes. She doesn’t really make room for anything else.
And it’s not just stockings you need, either. Except for the outfit you were wearing when they came and got you, you don’t have any clothes, and the ones your Nana finds for you in the closet are probably, like, a hundred years old. Some of the collars have yellowed.
You don’t want to talk about it.
6]
When they came and got you, you were waiting in the entrance hall with your knapsack, a raincoat tied around your waist, and your shoes buckled to the third punch-hole, which was almost uncomfortably tight. Your tutor was going to come get you. It was ornithology day. You were supposed to go down to the harbor to watch the migratory birds.
Enforcers came instead. You didn’t know that it would be the last time you’d see your house, or you would have turned, you think, and looked. You would have said thank you, and good-bye.
You would have picked different shoes.
7]
You have your raincoat and your knapsack and the coolest pen that Lieutenant Hogarth gave you for your eighth birthday (guessing that a little girl who likes to read books might also like to write one) and a stuffed rabbit named Violet.
The last one had been from Jinx, who saw that you’d had to leave all your toys behind, too, and there was no point crying about it because there was nothing you could do, but you cried a little bit anyway, arms wrapped very tightly around your middle to keep the sounds in and wiping your nose on the same patch of blanket, again and again, and when you woke up to the sound of scrabbling in the pipes, she was there, on your pillow.
Her face was very pointy and one eye was too scratched to see out of, and each limb was a different color fabric stitched together. She fit into the cradle of your neck perfectly. She smelled like laundry, lemon and linen, like she’d just been washed, and you giggled at the thought of your monster Jinx waiting politely in line at the public wash with everyone else, just so you’d have a clean-smelling rabbit.
“Was this yours?” you’d asked.
If you turned your head just so, and rolled your eyes up as far as they would go without being painful, you could see her glowing between the pipes.
“My sister’s,” she answered, which was how you learned that Bad Luck comes in families. “Her name’s Violet. I held onto her all this time, which was pretty dumb, huh. But I think she stopped being ours a long time ago, and started being yours. I just had to get her to you.”
“Thank you,” you’d said, and kissed Violet on top of her small, soft nose.
8]
Nana doesn’t have money for a tutor, but there’s a finishing school four blocks uphill.
You think eight is probably too young for you to be finishing anything, much less school, but you passed the entrance exam they gave you and the only other options are twice as far away, so you will probably just have to take your time being finished. Nana walks you there so you know where it is and walks you home, and it’s important that she thinks you’re old enough to do this on your own, because you didn’t until you did it.
School is …
Well, you like your teacher.
She’s of house Shoola, but only a smaller branch of it, and she has dozens of books you haven’t read and all you have to do is take one to her and she’ll write your name down in her ledger next to the title of the book, and then it was yours to have for as long as you took to read it, which was never very long.
“Do you like to read?” Miss Shoola asks you.
“Oh, yes, very much,” you say, hugging Little Plants a Garden to your chest, “and I like to build things. I can make a tower out of cards this high,” and she says, “that’s very impressive, Ren,” like she means it.
Your father’s house had gone back to his family, after, which is why you don’t have any of your clothes or toys or books — technically it all belongs to them now, and it would be a while, Nana said, for them to sort everything out. She’d written them a letter to let them know what you needed, but that was all either of you could do. It’s not your house anymore — the family, you mean.
And Nana doesn’t have any playing cards, calls gambling a dirty undercity thing to do, which is frustrating because you aren’t playing gambling games, you’re building towers. And not even that. What you’re really doing is building triangles. You make a lot of little triangles and when you put them together, it’s suddenly a tower standing on its own — how is that not the niftiest thing, this idea that you doing something small, over and over, means you can also do something big?
You tried it with toothpicks, because Nana has plenty of those, but it’s just not the same.
9]
The other kids at your school are …
Well. You’re the youngest, and some of them board with Miss Shoola and some of them, like you, live close enough that they can just come up for the day, so there was already a divide between you, something that made you stand out as you while they all got to be them, and that was before they learned who you are.
You’re … not likely to make any friends among them, you don’t think.
10]
Your father’s name was Marcus. He was the Sheriff of Piltover.
He died three months, eleven days, and you don’t know how many hours ago.
There’d been a blockade, halting travel between Piltover, where you lived, and old Piltover, Zaun, where only dirty, dangerous, illegal people lived, because most of it had sunk into the sea. So it was them, and enforcers on the bridge over the River Pilt, and insects that weren’t insects but bombs, and your father wasn’t blown up but he was blown away, and he hit his head, and something very pointy went through the back of his skull and came out with one eyeball stuck on the end and he died choking.
You aren’t supposed to know this, you don’t think, because you’ve read a lot about children who do very brave things and sometimes have hard things happen to them, and those books don’t talk about fathers dying by impalement, but the other kids at school have parents who read the papers and they tell you that’s how it happened, and you have no reason not to believe them.
They tell you that your father was corrupt, that he was taking pay from the Council to keep the bottomfeeders in check but was also taking bribes from Zaun, and they helped him become Sheriff in exchange for doing their dirty work. They tell you he got good people killed so he could keep taking money.
(You ask Nana if that’s true. The money part, not the impaling. She shushes you — it’s almost time for the weather report — and won’t look you in the eye, and that’s how you know.)
They tell you it’s a good thing your father died, because now Piltover can focus on cleaning out the rot he left behind.
They tell you this, again and again, because they like it when you put your hands under your hair, over your ears, because it means they can taunt louder, and they like it when they can see the tears slipping down your face. You can feel them on your chin. You can taste your own snot on your upper lip. You try not to make a sound.
In your previously limited experience, other kids usually back off when they see you crying, but while Miss Shoola is very kind one-on-one, she seems more intimidated by them as a group than they are of her, and once they realize they can get away with it, they do it every time.
One boy, Kirkin, who surely is closed to being finished, he’s got to be, had the great idea of sticking a syrupy glob on the end of a stick and pretending it was his eyeball, jutting out, and he’s ready with it in case you ever look at him on accident. You don’t always look away in time.
“Please stop,” you try to tell them, “please stop. I get it, okay?”
But that just makes them laugh, and mimic your voice in falsely high, piping tones, like copy-birds, and then your face is red and burning as well as wet.
It wakes you up in the middle of the night a lot, gummy-eyed and breathing very fast, certain every shadow in your room is your father and you’re going to have to see what it looked like, sharp object stuck all the way through the head that used to rest on top of yours, pretending to snore when the tutor was taking too long to leave at the end of the day. And you’re so very, very, very scared, because you know you’ll never stop seeing it, never, never, never, not as long as you live —
And then, in the awful dark, Jinx starts glowing.
It’s her eyes first, two narrow pinpricks of pink up by the ceiling, and then her veins, too, radiating from her face to her shoulders, pulsing in time with her heartbeat. It’s not light like a lamp, you can’t read by it, but it’s light enough to see there’s nothing in the corners of your room.
She keeps glowing until your breathing slows down to match.
11]
Contrary to what other adults try to tell you, the thing Nana is most proud of in this world isn’t her daughter, your mother. It’s her furniture.
There’s a ten-seat dining set, an upholstered chaise and two wingback chairs and an armchair, too. “Genuine article Hoombolts,” she says, pride oozing out of the corners of her voice like filling out of a custard, and you don’t know what that means, but then she follows it up with, “they’re five hundred years old,” and all right, that’s a little impressive. Piltover has only been on this side of the river for three hundred years — you just covered that in school, as part of the General Heimerdinger chapter.
They’d belonged to her husband’s family, but she negotiated for them strenuously for years before their marriage, and now they have a place of honor in her home, out of the sunlight with special coverings to preserve their color. You’re not allowed to sit on them or climb on them for any reason, and you’re certainly, never ever allowed to even bring food into any room containing one.
This means, at first, that you eat standing up in the kitchen, before you find you can take food to your room and Nana won’t mind, because there’s nothing valuable there.
She doesn’t make money, as you understand it. She tells you that she’s too old for speculative ventures like the other young houses make; all she can do is hold onto the wealth she has until she’s safely dead and it can pass back into her family, and that’s her furniture.
This seems kind of sad to you. Like maybe it’s one of those things that will make sense when you’re older, no matter how much you don’t want it to make sense.
12]
Like the furniture, you’re pretty sure Jinx came with the house.
She’s been here as long as you have, anyway.
You’ve read a lot of books about houses infested with ghouls, or poltergeists leading a chain of sprites like a piper, and others that turned out to be friendly ghosts all along. It’s neat that your Nana’s house gets to be one of those, even though Nana doesn’t seem to know it’s haunted. How many eight-year-olds get to say they live in a haunted house?
Okay, you haven’t actually seen Jinx do any haunting.
But surely not every monster can be good at haunting, just like every eight-year-old can’t be good at reading or math or kickball, so that’s all right. You won’t tell.
You’re not sure what kind of monster she is, exactly. She won’t let you look at her, growls and scrabbles further back into the pipes if you accidentally shine a light in her direction, so all you know is that the rough shape of her and that she can make herself glow, like those flowers in the deep, deep, deep.
You asked, of course, when you first realized you weren’t alone in the dark.
“I’m a Bad Luck Jinx,” she said. You could hear the capital letters in her voice. “And you’re Ren, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” You hadn’t heard of those, not in any of your books and not in the stories that your father’s lieutenants would tell sometimes, about beasts that lived in places far from Piltover.
“Okay. Good. I’m in the right place.”
“Oh. Did I take your room, Jinx?”
“My room’s up here.”
“Okay. Let me know if I bother you. Good night.”
Claws, scrabbling on the pipes.
“Um.” She sounded indignant. “Excuse me? You’re just going to go back to sleep? I’m in your ceiling.”
“If you were going to eat me, you would have done it already,” you said, with the confidence of someone who’d read about this exact scenario, even if it wasn’t specifically related to a Bad Luck. “So I’m going to treat you like a friend until you are one. We share a room.”
“... sure. Okay?”
You were on your way to school the next day when the obvious answer hit you: she had to be from the undercity! Nobody knows what goes on down there — at least, not that they’ll tell you — but you’re pretty sure Bad Luck is one thing they’ve got in abundance.
13]
Coming inside and getting the front door securely shut behind you is a relief so powerful it’s near-physical, like standing in heavy sunshine and then suddenly stepping into shade. The breath goes out of you and you lean against the decorative filigree for a moment, before slipping your shoes off and going to tell Nana that you’re home.
You grab two of whatever fruit is available in the kitchen and run up the stairs to your room.
“Hi, Jinx!”
A slithering noise over your head; something long and skinny like ropes drag against the pipes.
“Hi, Ren,” Jinx says back. “You’re bouncy.”
“Yes,” you agree, happily, and pause for a moment before carefully lobbing the second fruit upward. Something shoots out and spears it, moving too fast for you to see. You only know it happens because of the pink vapor trail it leaves in the air behind it. You hear her crunching a moment later. “Miss Shoola had a new book! She held it aside, just so I could borrow it!”
“Oh?”
You clamber onto your bed. Its squeakiness and old-smelling sheets do nothing to diminish your excitement, not today. You pull the book from your knapsack: Little in Red.
When you open it, its spine pops for the first time, and you wriggle your toes in delight.
The Little series is your favorite right now. Little Moves In, Little Plants a Garden, Little and the Airship. Little is an eleven-year-old individual, which is a hard state of being for you to fathom, but you’d already read most of the books with eight-year-olds in them, and nine-year-olds too because you’re not that far off, and it turns out Little isn’t so different after all. Almost everyone is bigger than they are, but they’re very smart about it, and sometimes they have to stop and admit they can’t do something, and that’s as important as realizing they can do something.
“Can you read?” you ask, and immediately bite your lip, because that was rude. “I mean, do monsters read?”
“Sure,” Jinx says.
“Do you go to school?”
A pause.
“No. We don’t … have that, really, not like here. If you’re lucky, you’ve got a good family or group to run with, and the older ones teach the younger ones everything — how to read, how to cook and sew and repair parts, how to climb and dodge and steal — the important stuff. If you don’t have a group, I’m not sure what you do. Go to the Firelights, maybe? Or the temples?”
“Would you like to borrow my books?” you ask, magnanimous in your newfound wealth.
A longer pause.
“No, I … the print is too small. My eyes are — no. They — they go too fast now, I can’t get the letters to line up. I keep hoping it’ll go away soon, it’s hard to read my own workbooks. Singed is no help. It’s all, ‘you are the mutation, Jinx, you are the dead revived. You are the trial and the error both,’ which, whatever, blah blah legacy, I just want to know when I can read my own recipes again. I don’t ask for much!”
“Oh,” you say, and think about this. “Would you like me to read to you?”
This time, the pause is longer than all the previous ones combined.
“Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
“I don’t mind,” you say, already thumbing past the title page. You know exactly what voice you’re going to give Little. “Dad used to read to me, but he was too slow and I’d always read ahead. It’s better this way.”
“All right,” says Jinx, quietly. “All right, Ren, if you want.”
Happily, you scoop Violet up off your pillow and tuck her under your chin, and you get started.
14]
You are not an orphan.
It’s very important to you that people know this, even when it makes them uncomfortable, like they think maybe it’d be better if you were.
But you’re not. Your mother is alive. Somewhere. She just didn’t like you very much, so she left.
She never said that, exactly, but it has to be true, doesn’t it? Why else would she pack her suitcase, the one with the green-blue-purple friendship braid around the handle that your nanny helped you make, and leave very quietly in the dark grey dawn before you or your father were awake, and be gone through the Hexgate on the first departing airship?
Your father tried to look for her, of course, but enforcer resources were for people who’d been kidnapped or gone missing, and it was clear, sir, that your wife left of her own free will. There’s not much we can do. Not even you can bend the rules here, sheriff.
Nana doesn’t know where she is, either, hasn’t heard peep from her.
So there’s no way to tell her that Dad is dead and you need someone to come take care of you and that’s her job, but she’s not doing her job and so Nana has to do it instead, and nothing annoys adults faster than being stuck with a job they think someone else should be doing.
15]
“Please don’t say that, Ren.”
You take Violet’s long ears and curl them up against her head like ringlets, holding them in place with your thumbs. “But it’s true.”
“No, it isn’t. Your mom didn’t leave because she hated you. She left because your dad was a spineless, dirty, corrupt enforcer with a head so full of his own hero complex he probably couldn’t love anybody — except for you, maybe.”
“Hey!”
“Sorry — wait, no I’m not. But listen — your mom couldn’t take you with her because that would be kidnapping, and then he could use enforcer resources to track her, and she’d never be safe.”
You try to follow this, but Jinx talks very fast sometimes and understanding her is like trying to cup water in your hands; some always runs out the cracks.
“But why did she leave?”
“To save herself, if I had to guess. She couldn’t have taken much, they’re very particular about what goes through the Hexgate — I should ask Tall and Taller why that is, they invented the stupid thing.” She taps her claws on the pipes, thoughtful. “You know what she should have done? Taken you and gone to the undercity, you can hide forever down there. Enforcers can be told to look, but they’re too busy being scared of breathing bad air to do it well, trust me.”
And you want very much to keep talking about how maybe your mother didn’t hate you, maybe she was just scared, but that’s a very big thing to think, so you focus on something smaller instead.
“You’re from the undercity, aren’t you?”
“Sure, but I’m not very popular there right now, so I have to lay low for awhile. I’m so familiar with your ceiling, it’s gross.”
“Oh,” you say. “I’m sorry. Can you tell me about it?”
“No.”
You wait.
“I meant the undercity.”
“Oh!” Her eyes blink. “Hm, I could probably draw it better. Tell you what. Leave your notebook out and I’ll sketch it for you while you sleep, so you can see.”
You’re already on your feet before she’s done talking, heading for your knapsack.
You even let her borrow your pen. “But you have to be very careful with it,” you tell her, “and you can’t use up all the ink, I don’t know how to get more.”
“I promise,” says her voice from the ceiling.
16]
For all that you’ve grown to rely on her being there while you sleep, she’s usually gone by the time you wake up for school.
“Got terrible things to do,” she tells you when you ask. “They aren’t just going to do themselves. I got everybody up and running, sure, but that takes work.”
You’d be worried, but you think that if your father said he was off to do good things and then it turned out he was doing bad things instead, then maybe when Jinx says she’s off to do terrible things, it might not mean what you think it means, either. You could ask her to stay, you suppose, but then she might say no. You don’t want to think about that.
So you get up and you put your notebook in your knapsack and you take the custard-filled breakfast pocket Nana leaves you (say what you want about Nana’s priorities, she never skimps on breakfast,) and you eat it on your way to school, all around the edges first so the perfect, crispy, gooey center bite is the last one you get to savor.
If you’re lucky, you arrive before the other kids have established their court around Kirkin and you can sit in the hall and look at what Jinx drew for you.
Your favorite pen in the world is fatter than a lot of other pens, and this is because it has seven different wells of ink inside it, and you can change which color ink feeds into the tip by depressing a tab near the cap. Jinx, you find, understood when you lent it to her, because her drawings utilize all of them — and sometimes in ways you haven’t even thought of, like using the blue ink to cross-hatch behind the red ink to make shadows.
You’ve never seen the undercity, of course, haven’t even stood on the bridge, but the sketch artist in your father’s department had to do crime scenes sometimes, and you saw those, even though you probably weren’t supposed to. You’ve seen it in black-and-white, always looking down; the clocktower and the catwalks and all the buildings shoveled together without a thought for code, the shadowy people turning their faces away.
Jinx’s drawings are the opposite of that.
Bright, riotous, colorful, and always looking up, the way it is when you’re smaller than everyone. It feels like you’re on an adventure: Little in the Undercity.
Slowly, over weeks, she shows you the upper levels, closest to Piltover, where a lot of people have gotten sick, lost limbs, been augmented in ways they shouldn't, but look cool. The middle levels, where one can live their whole life aloft on the catwalks without touching the ground or seeing the sky. The deeps, where there aren’t many humans left at all. She draws smiling people, and hurt people, and angry people, and people hugging. You hadn’t given much thought before, that life in the undercity could be joyful, as well as hard.
You’re looking at them again in the evening, and close your notebook with a sigh.
Above your head, Jinx “hrms?” in question.
“I don’t think my mother would have been very good at living down there, even if meant she got to keep me,” you confess.
“Maybe not,” says Jinx, “but I think you would do just fine.”
You smile, pleased by this assessment, even if you know that as long as Nana’s in charge, you will probably never get to go anywhere. Not because she’s a bad guardian, the way they are in books sometimes, but just because she isn’t interested in any experience that takes her away from home.
17]
One day, you spot something familiar in Jinx’s drawings.
It’s in the margins — a doodle, if you’re being honest — of a very skinny man only a few lines big, who manages, despite this, to look like he wants to lecture you. He’s got one blue eye and one red, and the red eye is surrounded in dark black scratches. Recognition prickles somewhere on the back of your neck, and when you finally place it, you fold the corner of that page down.
You — okay, actually, you totally forget about it, but you remember again later that night, when Jinx is eating the parts of your dinner you don’t want.
(Nana grumbles about waste if you don’t clear your plate, like it’s her own bronze coins she’s scraping into the compost, but it also doesn’t occur to her to cook anything you like, so Jinx is the best solution to both these problems.)
You hold the notebook open and loft it up to get her attention.
“I know him,” you point to the page. “He came to visit my dad.”
“I bet he did,” says Jinx, “but usually your dad came down below to see him.”
“Oh,” you say. “That makes sense. Dad seemed really surprised.”
You learned a word the other day from Miss Shoola: understatement. It’ll be awhile, you think, before you’re confident enough with your regular-statements that you can start making them understatements or overstatements, but you might be able to recognize when other people make them, now that you know what they are.
After he and Dad had their talk, Dad had gotten down on his knees and grabbed your shoulders and shook you and told you never, never, never to let that man into your house again, and this made you a little indignant because you hadn’t, thank you, he was already inside with his friends and you assumed someone else had let them in. But you didn’t point that out, because it was beginning to dawn on you that you might be in trouble, except he followed it with, “It’s not your fault, you didn’t know. I’m not mad, Ren, I promise,” and then he held you very tightly and mumbled, “my Ren, my one and only, oh, what am I going to do.”
So that was confusing, until you realized he wasn’t mad. You could see that he was greyer than paper and sweating. He was frightened.
And adults get frightened by so many things that make no sense to you, so you hugged him back and let him fuss, and tried not to roll your eyes when he asked you, a few days later, if you’d like to go stay with a friend for awhile, maybe, or, actually, it wasn’t a bad time of year to move houses entirely, try something fresh, huh?
That thought hurts a little, now.
You look at the drawing again. The eye told you he’d been from the undercity, because you’re not supposed to have augmentations like that in Piltover. You wonder if this proves Kirkin and the other kids right.
“Did you …”
You jolt from your thoughts and look up, startled. Jinx’s voice is almost as small as yours.
“Did you like him?”
“Oh, yes,” you say, because however Dad made you feel about it afterwards, you do remember that. You smile up at the ceiling, conspiratorial. “He wasn’t very big, and the people he brought weren’t very big, either, so I wasn’t scared.”
“Hey! We were very scary, thank you! Small thugs? Hm, Leper, probably. He died, I think. Oh! I bet I know the other one — super uneven haircut, dyed fake-black?”
You smile again, because until you saw her, crouching down to inspect your bookshelves and saying, oh fuck yeah, Janna and the Toad, fucking love that one, it had never occurred to you, not even once, that you could have a bad haircut on purpose.
“Yeah, that’s her,” Jinx says, dryly.
But the most important thing —
“He taught me how to build card towers.”
“Oh?” She slithers over the pipes. “I knew you liked reading, but I didn’t know you like building things, too.”
And you say, “Well, how could you. Nana doesn’t have any cards.”
The next day, when you squeeze yourself into the shadow of a bust of some bat-eared historical figure you don’t recognize and wait a beat to see if the other kids have spotted you — no, not yet, thank Pilt — you crack open your notebook and then gasp.
Today’s drawings aren’t the adventure-story stuff. It’s, it’s, a full page of triangles and polygons and hexagons and you see at once that they’re supposed to go together — some of them, anyway, and you’re supposed to figure out how. It’s like the time your tutor took you to the General Heimerdinger Museum while they were doing a special exhibition on the early days of Hextech (“never mind that we’re still in the early days of Hextech,” she muttered, but she was from a house of chronic mutterers, so you’d learned a long time ago to parse what was important and what wasn’t,) and you looked at diagrams of their machinery, taken apart. It was all just shapes, small things put together to make something big. And that big something could compress the arcane.
You laugh, loud and bright and not even worrying about Kirkin even though he’s sure to hear you and come find you so he can squash your joy all small again, because Jinx is doing the same thing. She’s giving you all the small pieces and asking you to make a tower.
You are, all at once, so very happy that you know her.
Or, rather, that she knows you, and understands.
18]
There’s a man you don’t know in your kitchen.
Valor comes around every three days to check Nana’s larder and replenish whatever she’s low on, since she has trouble getting it for herself. They would sit together on stools in the kitchen and meal-plan the intervening days, and you’d hover nearby, listening. You like Valor’s voice. It’s like something you’d give a character in a book.
This man has Valor’s bag but isn’t Valor, and to say you’ve learned your lesson about strange men inside the house is — ha! — an understatement.
Nana doesn’t seem alarmed — “oh, poor lamb,” she’s saying, as you fetch yourself up against the doorway, “I caught that when I was his age, it knocks you flat, doesn’t it?” — but you watch him anyway as he circles the kitchen like a fish in a bowl. He rumbles something to Nana, too low for you to hear, and Nana says, “Oh, that’s kind of you, yes, she should be around. REN.”
You jump a foot. You make yourself wait a moment, so it doesn’t look like you’d been standing right there, and then you enter the kitchen. “Nana?”
“Well, hi there!” says not-Valor, showing you all his teeth. “Heard there was a young lady in the house. I picked this up on the way here.”
It’s a cupcake in a little cardboard box. “Thank you,” you mumble.
His voice makes you want to run back to your room and lock the door, but that would be rude, you think, even if you explained it very carefully, so you put the box on the counter and you wait until Nana has pigeonholed him into discussing meals. Then you edge for the door and slip into the hall.
You’ve almost made it up the stairs when he says, right behind you, “You’re Marcus’s little girl, aren’t you?”
You stop and turn.
Not-Valor’s teeth wink at you from the bottom of the stairs. He has quite a lot of them, flashing out of his face the way some predators display lures, trying to trick prey.
“Ren,” he says, even though you don’t say anything back. He lets out an abrupt laugh. “Valor said it was true, but I thought he was blowing smoke castles because he wants to make every important news event about him, right? But he was happy to take more money from me for the information than that penny-pinching orange tom of an Unnanlyer ever gave him.”
And that hurts — a thin, narrow kind of hurt, like managing to papercut yourself on your favorite book, because Valor didn’t have the voice of someone who’d sell you out for money. Shouldn’t.
He’s coming towards you now, slowly.
You try to take a step backwards for every step he takes forwards, but it’s hard because you’re going up the stairs without looking and your legs aren’t as long as his.
“My brother was on that bridge, you know,” he says. Again, you haven’t said a single word, but maybe you aren’t supposed to. Maybe you are supposed to be a mute audience, to this, the way you’d been when the Zaunite came to see Dad. “I spoke to him before he left the house that morning — you never saw a person more pleased to go on that job with the Sheriff.”
His voice hitches, drags, a lame leg he’s pulling behind him.
“Shouldn’t have been there. Shouldn’t have had to die for such a spineless, corrupt, two-timing worm.”
Your heel scuffs the landing. You find your voice.
“My dad died that day, too,” you say. “He’s dead. You can’t punish him.”
“No,” not-Valor says easily. “But I can remove his legacy from the world just as easily as he removed mine.”
“I don’t think that will solve your problem,” you try, but your voice comes out weak, thready, because you are increasingly certain you are not meant to win this argument. He has something on his side that’s too heavy or too noisy for him to hear anything else. A lot of adults are like that, true, but you’ve never felt so unsafe because of it before.
He stops moving slowly and starts moving quickly, coming up the stairs. His eyes and teeth shine. A noise catches high in your throat, and you spin on your heel and pelt down the hall.
You do not call out for Nana. What can she do?
(This is a terrible thing to realize about the woman who is supposed to take care of you, but knowing it’s terrible doesn’t make it any less true, and if there is room in your head only for something terrible or something true, you’re not wasting your time with the terrible.)
A hand snags your elbow.
You — you weigh nothing, nothing at all, and —
Your body comes right off its feet, and you scream, “JINX! JINX, JINX,” and not-Valor says, “hey, now, none of that,” and shakes you until you stop making noise.
With one hand he holds you aloft and with the other he opens the bag at his hip, and —
He’s going to shove you in there, isn’t he, and you have a sudden, vivid image of yourself tossed off the bridge like a bag of kittens. Like contraband in a story. You stretch your mouth even though you’ve got no air for screaming, because the horror in you is yawning just as wide and you’ll disappear into it all the same.
Then —
His hand jerks so hard it telegraphs through your whole body. He says, “what the …”
— and something collides with you both.
You hit the ground unexpectedly, ankle turning under you and dumping you onto the carpet, but you don’t care because there are no hands on you anymore, and you get anything under you that can conceivably hold your weight and you scramble back, away, something, somewhere —
Your head collides painfully with the hallway paneling, and you hunch down like a bug and wrap your arms around your head and squeeze your eyes shut.
The noises behind you are abrupt, fleshy, and over very quickly. There’s a gross, wet pop! and then silence.
One beat.
Two.
Something hits the ground, very hard, like a bookshelf falling over.
Downstairs, Nana lets out an angry shout.
“Jinx?” Your voice barely makes it past your teeth.
“Shh, Ren.”
And you almost sob with relief. She came, she came. No one will defend you except the monster in your ceiling.
She says, in a strange, gentle voice, “Stay there. I’ve got to … take our guest elsewhere.”
Something horrible occurs to you.
“Is he hurt? You just — you just hit him on the head, right?”
A long pause.
“Don’t look, Ren,” she says.
“Okay,” you mumble.
So you push yourself standing with one hand over your eyes, but you need the other hand to feel your way down the hall, and you have no spare hand to block your ears. You can hear it, the thunk, thunk, thunk of a limp body going down the stairs, one at a time.
But you can also hear Jinx, cursing.
“Stupid — fucking — heavy, what do they fucking feed people up here —”
And that's so normal it takes the whole thing and compresses it into something so much less awful.
19]
An hour later, you are in your bed, sheets tugged up around your ears and Violet pressed very hard into your neck so you could rub her patchy ears, when you hear the vent rattle on its hinges.
You pause, and yes, there it is — Jinx’s blue tails scrape as she crawls over the pipes.
“Hey,” she says, before you can say anything, “did you know there’s, like, another dead body in the cellar? It’s really old, I think it’s been there awhile.”
This successfully derails your train of thought.
Since your train of thought had been obsessively replaying what just happened, starting with seeing Valor’s bag on a stranger’s hip and ending with that bag opening up to swallow you, this is something of a relief.
“Oh, yeah,” you say, pushing yourself up. “I think that’s my grandfather.”
“What the fuck,” says Jinx.
You are definitely not allowed to say that, but maybe being a Bad Luck entitles you to more bad words than most people.
“She only wanted his furniture,” you try to tell her. “It — oh, it made sense when Nana explained it.”
Jinx whistles lowly. “You Pilties are a lot weirder than I gave you credit for.”
You open your mouth —
And burst into tears.
“Woah, hey!” Two glowing eyes appear above your head, wavering in alarm. “What did I say! Oh, no, Ren, is this because that guy wanted to kill you?”
“No!” you sob, even though yeah, that had been frightening. You’re not likely to forget that feeling any time soon, you don’t think, when he’d grabbed you and rendered you completely insignificant, like he could throw you around with no more effort than you could throw a stuffed rabbit like Violet. “It’s my dad! He wanted to hurt me because of my dad!”
Jinx scratches overhead, uncertainly.
You ball up your sheets and bite them and you scream, but it doesn’t help, all it does is fill your mouth with the taste of old fabric, and then your sobs don’t even leave you with the breath for that.
“Everyone — everyone says it! Everyone says my — my dad was a horrible person, a horrible sheriff, and I’m horrible because I love him — because there’s no way he loved me — and it’s better that he’s dead —”
“Ren —”
“Everyone says I must not be remembering right — because I’m just eight — but that can’t be true! I remember differently! I remember differently from everyone! He’s my dad and I love him. I know what I know! It’s mine, it’s mine, he’s mine and I’ll love him always.”
And you shove your hands under your hair, covering your ears and grinding down so hard you hear your own blood rushing, and then doing the same to your eyes until golden sparks shoot across your eyelids, as if by pressing hard enough you can keep the memories where they are: Dad’s whiskery kiss on your scalp, him falling asleep without finishing the chapter he was reading to you, the tone of voice he used with you that wasn’t anything like how he spoke to anyone else.
“I can’t let them — twist it, just because they want him to be bad!”
And then, suddenly, there are arms around your chest, and they catch you there and hold you tight. They are snaky and they are grey, and one of them is patterned with blue like scales, maybe, or like clouds. They squeeze you very tightly, and you’re so surprised it almost makes you stop crying right then.
It has been a long time since anyone hugged you. Nana never seems to think you need it, or maybe she doesn’t need it and assumes that’s true for everyone else, too.
“You’re right, you’re right,” Jinx says, against the top of your head. “Ren, I know exactly what you mean. They did the same thing to Silco. Everyone kept telling me he must have been using me, and they wanted me to agree with them so they could box the whole thing up and never talk about it again, but,” another squeeze, “he loved me. I know it. He loved me, too.”
Your breathing had calmed as hers sped up, and now you’re both somewhere in the middle.
You pat her arm. The skin is tough. Once, in the book-spine house, you left your rocking horse too close to the radiator, and the heat blasted a patch of its velvet hide as tough as leather before you realized your mistake. Her skin feels like that, like it’s been burnt a lot.
It seems to stir her, because she draws herself up and says, very seriously, “I’m sorry for the things I said about your dad, Ren. I shouldn’t have taken my feelings out on you, just because you’re younger than me and don’t know how to fight me yet.”
“It’s all right,” you mumble, even though it isn’t.
“It’s not all right,” she says, like she knows. “You’re right, he loved you. You hold on to that, okay? Hold on to it like it’s bright and shining.”
And you say, “okay,” and, “you too,” and hug her elbows to you, as tight as you can.
20]
You try to tell Nana you don’t feel well enough to go to school the next day, but that doesn’t fit with the schedule she’s already made, so she decides not to believe you and convinces herself she’s doing best by making you go anyway.
Jinx has a gift waiting for you when you get home.
You drop your knapsack practically on top of your feet and run to your table. There’s a little bow and everything.
It’s the size of a handball, metallic, and painted in neon colors to look like a dragon. It even has a jaw, jagged like a steak knife, and tiny wings on its back as complicated as the inside of a pocketwatch. You hold it up to the light from the tiny, dirty window, and yes — you recognize it. You’d watched it come together in overnight sketches in your notebook.
“What’s his name?” you ask the ceiling, soft with adoration.
“Nigel,” comes the reply.
“Nigel?” you echo. That’s not a name you expected for a dragon.
“What’s wrong with Nigel?” she huffs, but you’re already laughing, because duh! She’s a monster! Of course she’s going to give a dragon a human name!
“Nothing, I love him.” You trace his nostrils with your fingertip. A small ring sticks out of the back of his head.
“Careful,” Jinx says, when you tilt his oblong body to inspect it. “Don’t pull on that. He’s a grenade.”
“Oh,” you say, in a completely different voice.
“He’s not dangerous,” she tells you, so exasperated you believe her immediately. “I’m not letting you handle a real grenade until you show me you can handle a knife — oh, geez, every dead person I’ve ever met just yelled at me all at the same time, did you hear that? I said I’d teach her, yeesh.”
“Erm, okay,” you say.
She sighs. “He’s just a powder bomb. If you pull that pin and throw it, it’ll explode into a cloud of smoke, giving you a chance to run. Now, Vander always said the best weapons are the ones you never have to use, but that’s not very interesting, so I hope you pick a good moment to use him.”
“I will,” you say.
You turn Nigel over in your hands again, and then give him a hug, because he’s got that kind of face.
“Not dangerous until I pull the pin, right?” you check.
“Yeah,” she says. “Mostly. Should be.”
21]
You put Violet on one side of your pillow and Nigel on the other, but Nigel’s too round and he wants to roll down the mattress with you where you’ll probably squish him in the night, so you put him on the same side as Violet and use Violet’s patchwork arms to corral him into place.
As you nestle under your covers, you ask, “Do monsters have a lot of special powers?”
“Not as many as you’d think. What do you need?”
“No, nothing. I was just curious. You mentioned dead people.”
“We can’t talk to the dead,” Jinx tells you, patiently. “Well, sometimes the dead talk to me, but I don’t get to control it.”
You push yourself up onto your elbows, curious. “Any dead?”
“No, not any dead, just the people I’ve killed.”
“Oh.” You sag back again.
Amused, Jinx says, “That’s not the reaction I usually get.”
“I thought maybe my dad could talk to you, and you could talk to me. But you didn’t kill him, that was someone else.” Your jaw cracks on a yawn. “Don’t worry about it.”
And Jinx is quiet for a very, very long time, so long that you’re starting to fall asleep; that feeling like you’re gently detaching from your mouth and your hands and then, as you’re climbing out of yourself, you miss a step and jolt awake, and you almost don’t realize she’s speaking.
“— and I have to care. I have to care that I killed them, for them to take a spot in the chorus line.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” you say, but your mouth is mushy. “How can you kill something and not care?”
If she answers, you don’t hear it.
22]
You have learned that the single most dangerous time of day is right after Miss Shoola says classes are done. That means it’s time for the day-kids to go home, and it’s recreation hour for the kids who board. It’s the time of day you are no longer Miss Shoola’s responsibility, and you are not yet safe at home.
Even at a dead run, it still takes you ten minutes to cover the four blocks back to Nana’s house. It used to take longer, but you have gotten very, very fast since you started school.
Today, Kirkin is ready for you.
You’re not surprised. Earlier today, Miss Shoola asked him a question about why birds migrate, and he said, “I don’t know,” and she said, “Ren, how about you?” in her blundering, well-meaning way, and you should have said, “I don’t know,” too, but you forgot, thinking about your old bedroom and the view of the trees on the road, the nesting birds, and you answered correctly, and Miss Shoola said, “very good, Ren,” and behind you, you heard Kirkin suck in a breath.
He’d gotten his bicycle out of the shed. It’s a beautiful machine, painted blue as the sky, and he’d rustled up everyone else who had a bike, too, and wanted to join.
You take one look at the waiting mob, and you bolt, like a rabbit for its hole.
They are faster than you on bikes, but they have to keep to the road, and you don’t.
You vault over low retaining walls and squeeze through the bars on neighborhood gates, and you cut through yards and alleys and hedges, dodging lackluster herb beds and rusted equipment, and you think you might make it, but they know where you live and you can hear their wheels clattering over the bricks, catching up to you, as you break for your front steps.
A rock hits you in the back of the head. It pitches you forward.
You slam into the ground with a shriek of pain.
“Nice shot, Jules!” Kirkin cries. Your knapsack slides sideways, trying to fall off; inside it, Nigel thumps into your shoulder. You scramble upright, peering through the dancing black spots in your vision and hastily shoving your old, yellowed dress down, even though you can tell by the hooting that it had flown up when you fell.
They’ve formed a loose semi-circle around you. Eight of them — no, nine, there’s Jules on the end. It’s the usual culprits, the boys and girls and Yverne, who isn’t either.
You close your hands around the straps of your knapsack. You think about Nigel.
But they know where you live. If you use Nigel today, they can just do it again tomorrow and then you wouldn’t have Nigel.
“Why are you doing this?” you ask. You have the voice of an eight-year-old. You cannot help this. “Why won’t you leave me alone?”
“Oooo, leave me alone,” comes the mimicking chorus, trying to out-falsetto one another. Then, snickering.
Your face heats.
“Your daddy’s the crooked Sheriff of Piltover,” Kirkin informs you, like this is news.
“And I said you were right! About all of it, about everything!” And you keep the truth to yourself, bright and shining. “He's dead! What more do you want!”
He laughs, like this is funny, like you’re just too funny to take seriously, and your heart sinks.
Something wet slips down the back of your neck, from where the rock hit you.
And then —
A yelp, to your right.
Someone’s bike clatters down, back wheel spinning and clicking, and you start to turn in that direction but then Jinx’s voice says, “Well, aren’t you just the smallest grub?”
You jerk your head around front, heart leaping. Jinx? Outside? She’s never come outside before! And she definitely won’t like it if you look at her now, so you don’t, but her shadow appears suddenly, elongated on the sidewalk in front of you — humanoid in shape except for the two tails dangling behind her.
She’s got Jules by the chin and is holding him two feet off the ground.
You watch his shadow pedal its feet, can hear him squeaking, as Jinx takes one swaying step, then another, coming up behind you. You can feel her glowing, this close; it radiates off her like poison, like heat.
Everyone else has gone very, very still. Not even the birds are making noise.
“Let me ask you,” says the predator, says the monster, whose shadow falls on you all. “Nasty little grub who thinks he can pick on my Ren, do you know why they call me Little Fishbones down below?”
Jules whines.
“Because,” Jinx answers, soft and sing-song, “I killed the biggest shark in those waters and the fallout is still falling, so I toppled the tower upstairs and that’s still falling, too. Caity dearest says that when we all go to war, it’s the smallest and most helpless who get ground up first — and you I could squish without even thinking, and no one would even miss you,” and you watch her jaw open.
The shadows of her teeth are very long, and she snaps them shut in front of Jules’s face. He squeals like a pig.
“What is that thing?” demands someone, in a voice that trembles. “What is it?”
It’s Kirkin, of course, and any other day, you’d be gratified beyond words to hear his voice as weak as yours, but right here, right now, with Jinx like a furnace at your back, it just makes you mad.
“She’s my Jinx!” you cry, and —
There’s an abrupt little give somewhere inside you, like someone’s come and loosened a valve on a shrieking pipe. Steam whites out your vision, so you go onto your tiptoes, clench your fists, and let it out.
“She’s my Jinx and — she’s mine, she’s my Bad Luck and we’ll show you! I don’t want to ever talk to any of you again! EVER. I want you to GO AWAY.”
And it feels so big, what’s coming out of you, like you’re three times your size, too big for your voice, and static pulses on the inside of your eyelids in time with your blood. You see Dad.
“Get out of here! Go on, go away, LEAVE ME ALONE.”
You’re not sure, in the end, who breaks first, because suddenly it seems like they’re all moving, all at once.
Jinx shrieks with laughter and heaves Jules over your head.
He hits the ground and rolls, and scrambles to his feet so fast he pitches himself forward in the other direction, barking his chin hard off the red paving bricks. He grabs his bike and almost knocks Yverne down in his haste to get away.
They scatter every which way, and in less time than it’s ever taken, they’re gone and you are alone on your own front step.
Almost alone.
You cover your eyes with one hand and reach out with the other.
Jinx takes it. Her claws are long and pointy, but not especially sharp — they feel a lot like fingernails. The two of you turn and she leads you up the steps, one at a time.
“That was so cool, Ren,” she says, in a whisper that’s just for you. “Like something Little would have done. Cooler, even!”
You grin, but —
“Are you going to get in trouble?”
“Oh, maybe, but not for that. Those were the worst bunch of thugs I’ve ever seen, they deserved what they got. I might be in trouble, though.”
A beat.
“Okay, don’t be mad, but.”
Another beat.
“Wait, what am I saying, your grandmother’s got a dead body in her cellar. I broke into your old house this morning and wrote GIVE REN BACK HER STUFF OR I WILL GET YOU in big neon letters all over the walls.”
“Oh,” you say. And, “That wasn’t very nice of you,” but you’re heart’s not in it.
The time it’ll take to wash it off is more attention than your father’s family has paid you in your entire life.
You lean against her leg, feeling fond. She drapes her tails over your shoulders, like a hug.
23]
No one says a single word to you in school the next day.
Miss Shoola blinks a lot, like she can tell something’s off, but if she didn’t say anything before, you doubt she’s going to say anything now.
It’s the best day you’ve had in months.
You’re bursting with excitement to tell Jinx about it, but as soon as you open your bedroom door, you can tell something’s wrong. The room is dark, and close, except it always is so that’s not weird, but there’s a smell — like food that’s been left out too long, like the inside of a bandage, meaty and gross.
“Jinx?”
“Ren?” Your hair stands on end. She’s never sounded like that before. She sounds like you. “You’re back early.”
“No, no, it’s the usual time. Are you okay?”
“Fine,” she says, very unconvincingly. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I just gotta … stay here … and not move … just for a little bit.”
Slowly, you slide your knapsack to the ground. “Did something happen?”
You don’t think she’s going to answer, but then she does, and it’s yet another voice you’ve never heard. It hisses, spits, like something being dragged out by the tail.
“Yeah, I went — Sevika stabbed me! Stabbed me! In my own home, gutted me like a fucking carp, like — like she would have done to Vander, I bet, if she had the arm back then, like … and yes, before you ask, yes, I deserved it. But just because I deserved it doesn’t make it any less fucking annoying, you know?”
You’re not sure if you’re supposed to agree. “Yes?”
“I would have done the same thing to her if she was the one who — but she was faster, fuck, she was quick. Smart, too — to set up a watch on my workshop so she’d know if I came back to it. Yes, I know, shut up, Mylo.”
She says a few more things, but it’s like how your tutor used to mutter: you’re pretty sure it has nothing to do with you. You frown and crane your head, but you can’t see who she’s talking to.
Her ghosts, maybe? She said they talk to her.
If Nana’s house has a monster, maybe it also has ghosts.
Politely, you clear your throat and you say, “Excuse me, ghosts, but could you please leave Jinx alone? Can’t you see she doesn’t want to play with you right now?”
It’s the words you wish Miss Shoola would have said, just once. It might not have stopped anyone, but it would have meant a lot to you.
Then, “Jinx, I’m sorry, but I’m coming up there.”
“No,” she rasped. “No, I don’t want you to see me.”
“I’m sorry,” you say again, looking for something to climb. “But if you’re hurt, I have to help you.”
You wind up using the bed railing and the closet door, propped ajar enough to give you leverage to push yourself up and grab for the first pipe, and then it’s not difficult at all. Grime leaves black smears on the front of your smock. You balance with your knees and try to edge sideways, from one pipe to the next.
“Careful —” Jinx’s voice starts, but you’ve already put your hand down.
You yelp and snatch it back. That pipe is hot!
“ — that’s a steam pipe,” she finishes, apologetically.
And then you get your very first look at her.
A board’s been laid across several pipes in a row, creating a low room of sorts. You see blankets, a pillow, and a lot of equipment; saws, wrenches, a very old lamp you’re pretty sure you recognize, and something you don’t recognize at all. It’s too large for the space, pointy at both ends, and the first thing you see is its ribs, because for a second, you swear they’re moving. It looks like a giant metal shark.
And in the middle of this —
You sit down next to her head and cross your legs.
“You don’t look like much of a monster,” you tell her, trying to be gentle about it, because maybe she doesn’t know? “You look like a girl.”
She groans faintly and shakes her head, thumping it against the board. What you had thought were her tails is just hair, as long as she is tall and as blue as yours is orange. Two toolbelts overlap on her hips; now that you’ve seen Nigel, you recognize the line of grenades for what they are. She has clothes, not fur, and her claws are just hands, covered in scars. Her face is like yours, except colorless with pain and sweating.
“No, no,” she insists. “No, I’m not. I’m the worst monster of the lot, I promise. Can’t be a girl, bad at being the girl, good at ruining everything, everyone says. What ruins everything? Bad luck, bad luck Jinx.”
You pet her hair. It’s as instinctive as reaching out to catch something that’s falling.
“ — bad luck, monster she created, monster he fed. I am, I am the dead revived, the trial and error both, the mutation —”
Her eyes flash, lighting the whole space in pink.
“ — and what do mutations do?”
She stretches, bare feet spasming, and then you see it.
It extends across her whole belly, an awful, lopsided kind of mouth. When she moves, the halves rub against each other in a way stomachs are not supposed to. She’s already stained the board beneath her body. That’s where the smell is coming from.
Once, on one of the days you didn’t have school, Nana let you sit with her and listen to the latest installment of her radionovela, and some parts were very dull, but in it, a man was stabbed, and the doctor said, it penetrated the wall of his gut, there’s nothing we can do, and then the man died and the violins made a lot of sad noises about it. You make the connection.
“You’re going to die,” you realize, and the horror is too big for your voice, so it comes out strained in a whisper.
Jinx hears you, and her eyes shudder open again; the glow in them practically swirls.
She shows her teeth. “Do you — do you think the Shimmer will let me?”
This time, when she groans, the wound gapes on its own; sticky tendrils stretch like spit on a yawning mouth, glowing pink, and as you watch, each tendril swells and pulls, swells and pulls, pulsing one-by-one, like it’s — like it’s knitting the halves together.
“Gotta,” she pants, “gotta tell Sevika — she’s got to try harder than that — if she wants to kill me!”
You suck in a breath. Then you push up onto your knees, looking around. The space is thick with dirt and dust, and you’ve read more about injured people than you have about injured monsters, so you’re on firmer ground here.
“Jinx, I know you said you don't want to move, but can you? I’m going to put you in my bed.”
“No. No, I can’t.”
“You can. You’re hurt. You need a real bed, and clean towels, and —” You rack your brains. “Broth? And you can’t wear those belts, it’s just pulling the wound apart again!”
It takes your very best cajoling, your very best wheedling, the very best of the obnoxious kid you try hard not to be in every other situation, but you lure her down out of the ceiling. You pull back your sheets and you put fresh towels down and you lie Jinx down on them.
“Stupid — Piltie — soft —” she mutters, which you’re going to take as a thank you.
You’re going to have to wash those towels yourself, so Nana doesn’t see them bloody, but you think you can do it. You know where the public laundry is and you know what to say, which is half of any errand, after all.
You clamber up next to her head.
After considering it, you take Violet and you put her into Jinx’s hands. She scowls a little bit at the scratched-up eye and says, “can’t get rid of you, huh?” and tucks her where she belongs, against her neck.
“What are you trying to do, anyway?” you ask, thinking about that big shark up there. You can’t figure out what that’s for.
Her eyes watch yours.
“Too many things, probably,” she says eventually. “But right now? Trying to be for you the sister I wish mine had been for me.”
Which sounds sweet, you’re sure, but it makes you sigh a little bit, because it’s not particularly actionable, is it? It’s not like helping her clean up her toys or put away her clothes. You can’t help her with that one.
You put your back against the bedrail and you put her head on your lap and you say, “Okay, Jinx.”
“What?”
“You are going to rest now. I’m going to keep watch.”
Actually, what you need to do is you need to go intercept Nana before she starts dinner and persuade her to make some kind of sick-person soup instead. Or maybe just have her help you get your own started — you’re not tall enough to light the gas yourself yet, but you can probably do the rest. You think.
“My turn,” you say, softly, as Jinx breathes and glows on your lap.
24]
You’re coming back with Nana from the corner store, where she’d picked up a copy of the weekly specials and a pack of cards for you (nothing with any suits, of course, she doesn’t want you to be a gambler, but you don’t care what’s on them,) before being caught by the register by someone she hadn’t seen in years, which you endured with what you felt was exceptional patience.
But you are coming around the corner on your street now, and Nana jogs your shoulder sharply. “Ren, what is that, can you see?”
You register, first, that many of Nana’s neighbors have come out to stand on their own stoops, and above them — faces in windows, watching. Next you register that the street is crowded with vehicles, all of them the same color with the same official-looking crest, as familiar to you as the view from your bedroom window.
Nana’s house is surrounded by enforcers.
Oh, dear, is your first, immediate thought. That’s an overreaction. It was just Kirkin.
One breaks off from the rest and intercepts you.
“Young Kiramman!” Nana clutches your arm, shuffling you back so that her body shields you. “What’s this about?” Her voice goes sharp, the way she makes it so it doesn’t shake. “Querulous” isn’t a word you know yet, but as soon as you learn it, you’ll tuck it away, because that’s Nana all over.
“Mrs. Unnanlyer, ma’am.”
The enforcer is very tall and very long, with straight blue hair and serious, stern eyes like your father’s — your houses are related, you think, but distantly; her father and your father share an ancestor fourteen generations back. This isn’t as useful to know as everyone seems to think it is, because Ms. Kiramman doesn’t even look at you now.
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, ma’am, but we’ve got reason to believe a dangerous criminal has been using your building as a hideaway. We know you’re not at fault,” she adds, when Nana gasps. “You couldn’t have known. We’re trying to flush her out now.”
“Wait — you’re already in my home? Without my permission? Oh, no, my upholstery,” Nana moans, “what have you done to it?”
Ms. Kiramman’s face does something so deeply familiar you almost smile.
You wonder what they’ll think about the body in the cellar, or if Nana’s forgotten about it. Maybe she’s got papers for it — that happened to your father sometimes, people possessing something that should be illegal, like dead bodies, and it turns out they were a special exception.
And then there’s a shout from below.
You all look.
The cellar door bursts open, and out flies Jinx — oh, no, are they after Jinx? —
— and you are astonished all over again, how small and grey she looks, in the daylight up against the building where you both live. She looks like the girl she insists she isn’t. The slash on her stomach is a lot better than it was last week, but it’s still angry red. Her boots are too big.
Nana sucks in a shocked breath, and lets it out involuntarily. “A bottomfeeder! In my home? Cockroach!”
“Ma’am,” says Ms. Kiramman in a harder voice, and you don’t dare look away from the scene at the bottom of the street to check her face and see if it’s disapproving.
If Jinx had hoped to catch the enforcers off-guard and make a break for it, it doesn’t work: they close ranks around her immediately. Each one is helmeted, carrying shields as long as they are tall.
She snarls at them.
You can see the flash from here, and then she blurs, because even if she was human once, she’s not one anymore. She’s here, then there, and the only reason you know the path she takes is by the trails of glowing vapor she leaves in her wake. Her eyes are burning pinpricks of light, holes in her face, and she slams into the shields, then slams into the ones opposite, back and forth very quickly, trying to break the corral they’re making.
Enforcers stagger on impact. One goes to his knees.
But she doesn’t have her grenade belt.
Of course she doesn’t, you told her not to.
And it’s strange, actually — in the books, the heroes always have to muster up their courage when they’re about to do something frightening, even Little. And you have to do that when you’re going down the hall alone at school, but you don’t have to do it right now.
This doesn’t take anything at all.
“Ms. Kiramman.” Your voice doesn’t shake.
You take her sleeve and tug on it, and after blinking in surprise, she follows you when you lead her out of earshot, wanting to protect Nana from what you’re going to say. She drops to one knee to look you in the eye.
“Ms. Kiramman,” you say to her, in the strongest voice you can manage; something like an eleven-year-old’s, like Little’s. “I’m sorry for the trouble, but that’s my monster. Her name is Jinx. She is my monster and I think that makes her my responsibility, and I don’t think she can be the criminal you think she is, because she lives in my ceiling and she’s always getting me out of trouble.
“I’m sorry,” you add, just to be sure, because that’s important. Adults always want to hear that, probably because they didn’t hear it enough when they were your age and everything was out of their control.
Ms. Kiramman’s gaze had gone very sharp while you were speaking, and when you stop, her eyes bore into you, like she can peel you like an apple.
You focus on the brim of her hat, trying to avoid it, but she doesn’t let you.
“Ren Unnanlyer, look at me,” she says, and you heave an internal sigh and brace yourself to be dissected. “You’re right, her name is Jinx, and we’ve been hunting her for awhile. She’s wanted for … a lot of bad things, and,” she raises her voice when you open your mouth, “don’t ask me what they are, I can’t tell you until you’re older.”
You know that one. It's in your books.
“That just means you can’t tell me until it’s relevant to the plot.”
“What? No, I mean, I can’t, because,” and she does something very strange: she reaches out and tucks your hair behind your ear. “Because it’ll make you sad and make you mad, and we’re trying to stop the cycle of revenge, okay? Also, I can’t, legally. Ren, I’m serious.”
You fold your arms, pressing your lips together.
Ms. Kiramman points a finger at your chest. “But Jinx cannot be your responsibility, because she is a grown woman and if anything, she has a responsibility to you. Do you understand me? What is happening right now is the result of her actions, not yours.”
“But —” you try, and to your immense horror, you feel your throat tighten.
You can’t cry now!
You’ve never needed to be taken more seriously in your life, so you can’t cry! All anyone does when you cry is taunt louder, or pretend they can’t see it, and the problem doesn’t go away.
Fortunately, Ms. Kiramman hasn’t noticed yet. She’s sighting down another line of thought like it’s the barrel of a shotgun.
“When we got word that she’d been seen here, right after she left that harassing message at the previous Sheriff’s residence — your old home, yes, sorry — we worried that it meant she had … fixated on you.”
This makes you blink.
“Why — ?”
She grimaces. “We know why, but unfortunately, just because you know exactly why a mentally ill person is doing what they’re doing and what led them to act out on others the way they’d been acted on doesn’t mean we can just turn it off. We need to remove her from this situation, it’s not safe for you.”
And she puts a hand on your shoulder and looks you right in the eye.
“I’m sorry,” she says, like she means it. “I’m sorry we didn’t rescue you sooner, Ren.”
“No,” you pull back. “No, you don’t understand. She’s my friend.”
Ms. Kiramman’s mouth makes a regretful shape.
You know what that means, too.
“Please,” your voice rises. “Please, she’s my friend, you can’t take her, I get nightmares if she’s not there, she protects me from people who want to hurt me because of Dad — please, she’s all I’ve got!”
“Oh, Ren. I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize it was that bad. Someone should have paid attention sooner.”
“Someone did!” you cry. “You can’t take her now, just because you noticed! Look, look,” you slide your knapsack off one shoulder and flip it open, rummaging for your notebook.
If you can just show her — all those weeks of Jinx drawing for you, the care she put into explaining it all — then she’d understand, right?
But Ms. Kiramman goes very still, very suddenly, like a rabbit does when a shadow falls over it.
“Ren,” she says, in a different voice. “What do you have there?”
Your hand connects with metal.
Nigel.
You jerk your head up.
Ms. Kiramman’s eyes are very close to yours, and she has gone remote behind them, like someone who has pulled a door closed.
She is not asking you because she doesn’t know. She is asking you because she does.
You find yourself thinking, once again, that all the books you’ve read have been wrong about bravery, and maybe they were written by adults all along, because it doesn’t feel like something you’ve got to summon. You know you’ve got to do something brave, even though you are just eight years old and everyone is so much bigger than you are, so you just do it.
You close your hand around Nigel and shove the knapsack, hard, into Ms. Kiramman’s chest. Because she’s down on one knee, it knocks her off balance. She falls on her rump.
You spin around.
You’ve gotten very fast since your father died on the bridge over the River Pilt, and now you need to be the fastest you’ve ever been.
You run — no, you fly down the street, weaving between the vehicles parked sideways on the slope, aiming for where the enforcers have managed to box Jinx into a very small space indeed, like they think if they pile on her all at once they’ll be able to subdue her.
Fumbling for Nigel, you find the pin, and there’s a moment where you’re scared it won’t work, you’re not strong enough to wrestle it free —
But then there’s a click and the pin slides out, smooth as butter.
Nigel’s jaws jump to life in your hand, chattering. His tiny dragon wings start churning the air.
“JINX,” you scream. “JINX.”
And you can’t see through the bodies of the enforcers now that you’re this close, but on the other side of them, the howling stops, mid-noise.
You don’t know what you’re supposed to say next — blind, maybe? Your father would know, and you will never be able to ask him — so you skid to a halt and wind your arm back and shout, “Jinx, it’s Nigel!”
And then you throw him.
His wings catch the sunlight. His jaw moves, happily.
You’ve never had to consider whether or not you’re a good shot before, and you have to admit it’s very satisfying, watching the arc he makes in the air before he hits the sidewalk, smack dab where he needs to be.
The enforcers ripple.
Someone starts to shout something.
You think you hear, from the middle of the ring of riot shields — a single, bright, girlish laugh.
And then Nigel detonates.
25]
You have a memory, and you don’t think it can be a real memory, because it’s got your mother and your father in it and you don’t have too many memories where they were both there at the same time.
But maybe your subconscious knew you needed it, so it cobbled together a couple different memories to make this one, because in it you are small, in a very frilly swimming suit, and you are up to your waist in the surf with your father holding on to one hand and your mother holding on to the other, their legs like pillars on either side of you. And they are laughing, and you are laughing because you’ve never felt anything like the way the water rushes away from you in the retreating surf, like it’s trying to pull you along with it.
“Look, Ren, look, lovey, here comes another one.”
The wave is just a swell, at first, like the hump of a blanket, and then you see it put its white cap on, and your mother says, “Marcus, that’s a big one, that’s,” and their hands start to pull you back, but not soon enough.
The wave crashes on you much too fast and too hard, and it picks you up and tears you from them like the anchor they provide for you means nothing at all. Your mouth is full of gross salt water and you don’t think to close your eyes, so you can see bubbles and sand and little floaty bits before you see sky again, and then it deposits you, much more gently, where there’s no water at all. You’re too shocked to cry and you blink very fast until you can see again through the droplets clinging to your eyelashes.
Close by, your mother’s mouth is a perfect “o” of surprise, hand still extended out in the shape of you, and your father’s splashing towards you, and then, seeing that you’re fine, he starts to grin, and that’s the first thing you register, his mustache parting and the show of teeth behind it, and so you don’t cry, because it’s okay. It’s okay. He’s grinning and it’s okay.
There’s nothing to be afraid of.
] and one
The explosion picks you up and lifts you off your feet like a wave, and you, Ren, you are not scared at all.
You spread your arms and wait for Jinx to catch you.
-
fin