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Zippy’s earliest memory is of wedging her tiny body into a crevice, her chubby fingers wrapping around a shiny object before shimmying back out and presenting it for inspection.
She doesn’t remember where they were, or what the object was, but she does remember the warm feeling that filled her when Brack patted her on the head and said, “Good job, little Mouse.”
She was just Mouse, then. Brack didn’t bother to name her for at least a year after she came to be with him.
Sometimes she wonders how that had happened, what the real story of her presence in his life was. Whenever she had asked, he’d always said that he’d “found” her. Short, to-the-point, and entirely unhelpful. A couple times, when he was drunk and in one of his better moods, he’d tell elaborate stories about rescuing her. From what, it always changed, but he always painted himself as the dashing hero rescuing the damsel in distress, and little Zippy was enraptured.
Now, she knows better. At best, she was an orphan he’d picked up to do his dirty work. At worst, well, she tries to push those thoughts from her head.
She knows better than to think that there is anyone out there who she matters to.
Brack had been her whole world, when she was a kid. She’d lived to see him smile at her, to earn his passing touches and gentle words. All she ever wanted to do was make him proud of her, like a good little Mouse.
Now, she isn’t sure who she’s more mad at, him for using her like a tool, like she was nothing more than the rope in his pack, or her for letting him.
(It’s him. It has to be him. She was a child. She didn’t deserve that.
It is a familiar mantra, well-practiced over the years. She’s still working on believing it.)
Looking back on it now, she can see all of the signs, lined up neatly with Scrapper runes warning of danger scrawled across them. She can see them in the way he hardly ever looked at her when he wasn’t giving her an order or teaching her a lesson, and only ever smiled at her when she had a bit of scrap in her hand. In the way his lessons were only what was absolutely necessary to survive and do what she was told. In the way his harsh words burrowed their way into her heart every time she made some minor misstep.
The only time she remembers him being truly affectionate with her was the day he gave her her name. They’d been searching a ruin for something to sell when the floor started to cave in under her feet. Quick as a fox, she’d grabbed the loot she’d managed to find and booked it to safety, sure-footed even on the unstable ground below her. Brack had watched, an amused little smile on his lips, as she almost barrelled straight into his legs in her haste, only barely managing to change her trajectory in time.
“Zippy little thing, aren’t you?” He had said, reaching out to pluck the artifact she had been holding out of her hands. He paused for a moment as he stared at the thingy (hey, she wasn’t a Chronicler, she only knew enough to know what she could sell). “Zippy, that’s what I’ll call you. Keep up the good work, Zippy.” He shot her a wide grin. At the time it had made her feel like the most important thing in the world, but years later she knows that he was mentally tallying up the credits he could get from her haul.
After that, he would always comment on how quick she was, how he could always count on her to get in and out in no time at all, how useful her speed was to him.
It only took one time where she wasn’t fast enough for him to abandon her completely.
~~~
The day Zippy’s life fell apart started the same as any other.
Brack had found a new mark for her, a big one. Though it didn’t look like much, a glorified pile of rocks towering above them with a couple runes drawn shakily across the surface. The runes were what made it interesting, though. Brack had explained it when he’d first started bothering to tell her why he was sending her into a random cave or crevice.
“You see these marks here?” He’d gestured to the squiggles carved into rock, too neat and uniform to be natural. “They’re Scrapper runes. They signal to Scrappers that other Scrappers have been here. This one,” he traced his fingers across one of the markings, “means danger, while this one,” he traced another, “means that there’s no scrap here. That doesn’t necessarily make it true, but the more of this mark you see, the more likely a place has been completely cleared out.”
He turned on his heel towards her, grinning like a maniac. “When you see a danger mark, but no all-clear marks, that’s when you know you’ve hit the jackpot. ‘Cause that means some Scrapper found something, but was too much of a wuss to get at it. And their loss is our gain!”
Brack had of course failed to mention that Scrappers don’t back out on finds for no reason, and going into a ruin like that was incredibly risky. But telling her that would defeat her purpose, that of an expendable body so he could have the payout without risking his own neck.
All that is to say, this particular pile of rocks was covered in danger runes and not a single all clear one. The holy grail in Brack’s eyes.
Years later, she learned that this spot was called the Mousekiller, for the number of boys and girls who had lost their lives to those stones.
When she is feeling whimsical, she likes to imagine that it was a test, given to her by Brack or by whatever higher power was out there, a trial by fire to prove that she deserved the life given to her. She might have failed Brack’s test, but she likes to imagine she passed in the eyes of something larger. What that power was, she didn’t know or care, maybe that god that the Anabaptists were always raving about, but it makes her feel a little better about the hell that she had gone through.
She’s procrastinating, she knows she is, but she doesn’t want to think about the trial she had faced.
But it’s either confront it now or relive it in her dreams for weeks, and she’d rather get it over with.
Zippy had been 12, by her own estimation, when she’d got down on all fours and crawled into that glorified tomb, a small lamp gripped in one hand and an empty sack across her back to contain her treasures. No flask, of course. Good little Mice had to earn their water.
Rough stones scraped her as she went, digging in even through her thick layer of protective clothing, but she didn’t even pause. It was slow going, as she made sure not to disturb any of the potentially loose rocks. The tunnel stretched on for a while until opening up into a small… cave? Cave felt like the wrong word. It was more of a large gap in between some boulders, maybe three paces across at its widest point and tall enough to stand up in but only if she stooped down.
It also contained more scrap than Zippy had ever seen in such a small area.
She grinned, and quickly got to work shoveling as much as she could into her bag, carefully measuring with her eyes to make sure it would still fit through the narrow opening.
And then, just as her bag was almost full, it all went wrong.
She heard the sound of rock scraping against rock, and before she could do more than whip her head around, it had happened. Something shifted, raining down rubble into her tiny little hideaway. She hadn’t been hit with anything larger than a pebble somehow, but the already narrow space was half the size, taken up by a pile of loose stones. Stones that completely covered her only exit.
She couldn’t help but stop and stare, panic fizzing in her veins, before shaking herself. Good Scrappers could keep a cool head in any situation, she told herself as she fell to her knees and began to dig.
At first, she worked quickly and efficiently, no movement wasted, but as she pulled more and more rocks away, only to reveal nothing but still more rocks, she got more and more desperate. The sharp rocks cut deeply into her hands, shredding first her gloves and then her skin. Soon each stone she grabbed was slick with her own blood.
That’s around the point where her memory gets blurry. There are flashes of color and sound and sensation, blood splatter and dirt under her ruined fingernails and her own sobs echoing back at her, but nothing coherent.
She knows she never called for help, though. Even then, she knew no one was coming.
She does remember the moment her lantern light went out, one clear moment amid the chaos. She’d stopped, suddenly convinced she’d gone blind, or a rock had fallen and hit her, or that she’d keeled over from sheer exhaustion and was now a ghost. It took her a solid minute of blinking dumbly, her eyes trying in vain to adjust to the darkness, before she’d realized what happened and got back to work.
It was harder in the dark, but that wouldn’t stop her. Giving up wasn’t an option; it didn’t even occur to her at all. She was a Mouse, and that meant the entire point of her existence was to keep going.
On bad days, all she can think is pathetic.
She doesn’t know how long it took her to escape. Hours, judging from the soft light of twilight that she emerged into, a contrast to the harsh light of day that she had left behind when she had entered. It didn’t matter to her then, all that mattered was the sweet relief of breathing fresh air, free at last.
She must have been quite the sight, stumbling across the Borcan landscape, covered in dirt and accompanied by the steady plip, plip, plip, of blood dripping from her hands and leaving a gruesome trail in her wake. Not that anyone was around to see it. Not that anyone cared.
She reached their little base, or what was left of it. It was abandoned, the fire pit long gone cold. “Brack?” she called out, voice hoarse from panic and crying and dehydration.
There was no response.
She fell to her knees as it hit her all at once. He’d left. She hadn’t been fast enough, been smart enough, been good enough, so he’d left.
It was a miracle she’d survived the next few weeks. She’d stumbled upon a Spitalian who had taken pity on her, bandaging her hands and giving her some water, but after that she was on her own. It was lucky she’d somehow managed to keep the bag of scrap she’d grabbed, so she could buy herself some food and water and bandages, and even luckier that she mentioned where she found it at just the right time to earn herself a modicum of respect from some other Scrappers, but even with that, she spent the next weeks relying on herself. And, humiliatingly, whatever stranger decided to take pity on her.
She hated it. For so long, her only company had been a man who mostly ignored her existence unless she was doing something for him. Having people constantly in her space, helping with the smallest tasks because her hands were useless, making her unable to do anything, was mortifying.
And of course they weren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. There was always some little favor to do, some little task that she could carry out. Usually it was delivering messages or other small packages, using her zippy little legs to carry them across whatever distance they needed to go.
She quickly realized she couldn’t do it. She resented it all, even her own name. So the moment her hands were healed enough, she ran.
(It was a good thing, too, since she’d unknowingly gotten involved with the Cartel. Oops.)
She discovered quickly that as much as she preferred being alone, it also meant she had time to sit with her thoughts. And the more she thought about it, the more she realized that Brack hadn’t been any better than the people who’d helped her when she was hurt. Brack had used her and abandoned her the moment she stopped being useful. Even if she had managed to get out before he’d left, he wouldn’t have bothered to tend to her injuries, because she couldn’t hunt for scrap without her hands.
(As an adult, she shudders to think what would have happened had Brack still been there.)
That was the day that she decided: people are not to be trusted. The only one she can rely on is herself. The scars that mar her hands are a constant reminder of what happens to innocent little Mice who believe otherwise.
Zippy the Mouse died in the cave that day. She is Z now, and she refuses to be used by anyone else.
(It won’t be until she meets a ragtag group of weirdos while hired to escort a dead body to a pig farm that her conviction will falter. But that is a story for another day.)