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Claudio is the one who brings you the packet this time. You like Claudio. He gave you a sugar skull on the day when everyone was singing and putting food and blankets out in the field behind the church, and you went out there after most of the people were gone. You’re real quiet and real good at making yourself small, even though you keep getting taller and taller, so no one noticed you as you picked through the weird little miracle offerings that they had all left behind for the birds and the beasts to eat: boxes of chocolates and homemade candies, nice-smelling candles, afghans and pillows dyed all sorts of bitching awesome colors. You took a little, here and there, ‘cause that all was a corpse field and there weren’t nobody who was going to miss a few purloined candies or a pot of paint here and there.
You snuck back into your kennel before daybreak, and that was when Claudio gave you the little skull, for the day of the innocents, he said. Words all broken and mangled because the only ones who speak so that you can understand it are Cal and the Boss, and Cal is busy a lot of the time, and the Boss is just the Boss. But Claudio delivers packages like you, sometimes. He’s a cool dude.
The package he gives you now is squishy and hefty in a way that means it’s been duct taped to hell and back. You hold it in your clawtips to get a feel for it, how to move with it, and Claudio waits for you to be distracted before he comes at you with a wet rag. You shriek and chitter and try to get away from the cold water, the, oh no, the paint dribbling down your face in streaks and smears, you just did that, you just did that why would he peel off your MOTHERFUCKING face like a MOTHERFUCKING ASSHOLE when you spent SO FUCKING LONG getting it just RIGHT--
“Shh, shh, no llores, hijo. Es tiempo de ir.” He fumbles, trying to juggle wet rag and now...now a needle, steel-bright and familiar. You freeze and let it slide into the crook of your arm, good, sweet and blessed-warm from the inside out. You feel the edge of your righteous anger recede like a bad dream. “Ir ganar dinero. Gane.”
You know that word, or something like it. You repeat it muzzily. “Gamse.” Claudio laughs at you and then goes about strapping the package to your narrow chest with more duct tape.
“Gane,” he says, and you parrot it back, but the needle is so warm and slow-liquid feeling and you can’t get your tongue around it.
“Ganse. Ganze.”
“Vamos, hijo. Gane.”
You repeat it over and over because you know that word, you’ve heard it (BROTHER) often enough since Cal brought you here from the place with the bright lights and the cages and the narrow-faced ladies in white jackets. You know what it means.
Go make money, kid. Go win.
~
Cal bought you when you were just a little wiggler, not even yet big enough to tell the ‘voodoos from a hornache. He bought you from a big place with lots of lights, and white walls and bars that separated your little room from the next one over. Other wigglers had kept you company there, but Cal bought you and now all you have is him. You think there was another Troll once, someone who taught you how to paint your face and how to sling the chucklevoodoos from your horns and your heart, someone who told you about motherfucking miracles, but the details are fuzzy and distant, and you can’t remember. It doesn’t matter anyways, because now you’re all alone but for Cal. You’re the best Troll in the business, Cal told you once, you’re the best runner any fine upstanding dude could ask for.
But even when you’re the best runner, sometimes you aren’t the best pet. Cal doesn’t like it when you try to talk too much ‘cause you aren’t good at it and you say some stupid fucking shit, and you mess up a lot, you get angry for no reason and one time you hit that guy until his hair went sticky and red. Cal said you did a good thing there because that guy was a motherfucking snitch, but he still hit you with the cane after, and he took your paints and your food bowl away for three whole days. You’re good at getting out without being seen, though, so even if you longed for your face your belly wasn’t all complaining on you too much.
You don’t remember much from before Cal. There was the bright place with the ladies in the white jackets, and your earliest memory is of a great big row of oblong shapes, all sorts of miraculous colors, lined up in the shallows of a massive pool, but other than that your whole life is Cal (HEY THERE LITTLE BROTHER YOU OKAY OVER THERE no no that’s not Cal, is it?) and the packages he has you deliver. He says you’d be a bona fide mailman if it weren’t for the fact that you’re an animal, so many happy customers getting their mail up in this bitch. When Cal praises you you feel like singing; you’re a good mule. A good runner, a good mailtroll. Cal says that someday, if you’re good enough and you’re always on time, you’ll get your own room, with a proper pile and everything. You won’t have to stay in the processing garage anymore.
It’s been a while since he last said that, though. Maybe he’s forgotten.
~
You are walking through the desert. You’ve been walking forever, ever since you got dropped off a couple miles from the fence. Claudio gave you the package, taped securely around your ribs, and he gave you a backpack with some water and some food, a sealed letter, your paint pots.
And some needles.
You know you aren’t supposed to use them unless you can feel the righteous anger all up in your head, but you’re real tempted, because it’s hot and dusty and you really just want to find someplace shaded and cool so you can rest. But you can’t rest because there’s a motherfucking fence you have to get over, and there’s a time and a place you’re supposed to be at. Cal came down from the office to tell you where to go, that’s how you know this is some important mail you’re carrying. You have to climb the fence, and there’ll be a car waiting for you to take you to someplace called Arizona, and from there you...
You step too near a scorpion and narrowly avoid being stung. You decide to stop daydreaming while you walk, and for a few hours you do nothing but watch your feet. The package seems to get heavier and heavier with every passing minute, and you’re sweating up a purple storm all up in here. Your shirt’s all soaked through with it, and your horns are dirty and muzzy from the wind and sun bothering them.
It’s way dark before you see the fence, off in the distance, and you double pace it just so you can say that you don’t need to walk anymore. You know this one stretch where there ain’t hardly nobody, not usually, anyways, and you hunker down in the scrub so you can listen to the sounds beyond the barrier. They’re all shouting words you can understand, like Cal, but he tells you you can’t be listening to anybody else but him and the Boss, you got that hijo, you don’t take orders from nobody but me and Boss. So you only take orders from Cal, ‘cause you ain’t never even seen the Boss, you only know he lives somewhere else and he’s always watching you and Cal with those fancy cameras installed all around the compound. So you have to be extra careful not to fuck up when you’re where he can see you.
The voices behind the fence die down a bit, and you have some water and some bread and salami. You used to get the TrollChow, but a while back Cal said it would rot your thinkpan and make you develop weird, he saw it on the television, so now you get water and needles and bread and coldcuts, and sometimes vegetables. You weren’t about to tell him no, you don’t think you could go without salami nowadays. It’s pretty much the best miraculous motherfucking thing ever.
Significantly bolstered by food and rest, you stand again, and approach the fence. There’s cameras here, too, but it’s dark and you’re sneaky. You have to crawl along the ground in some places, but eventually you’re close enough that you can feel the warning tingle in your horns. They start to sing, the chucklevoodoos humming in your blood and your ‘pan until every bone you’ve got is rattling along to the tune. It’s a melody of fear fear fear, pushed out onto the people you can feel behind the fence, be scared be afraid there are monsters here be afraid go go go. Your teeth chatter with the effort; you don’t like the walking, but this is actually the hardest part. Every time you do this it feels like the people are harder, more solid at the center. It’s more difficult to make them go away.
But you keep at it until your ears feel cool and sticky and your nose gouts a stream of purple blood into the dust, and then there’s a loud bang bang bang, and silence. The people on the other side have left.
You check to make sure the package is secure against your ribs, wipe the blood from your nose and ears, and then begin your ascent.
~
A man with a black car waits for you on the other side. It’s so shiny that you don’t even recognize it as a car for a minute, you think it must be some sort of giant beetle crawling along, but no, there’s a man and he gets out of the car when he sees you emerge from the darkness. He’s short and he’s wearing a plain but serviceable hat, and one eye is covered with bandages. You think of that time you tripped and almost dropped a package into the furnace, and Cal had to be called down from the office so he could tell you how close you’d been to fucking up beyond reprisal, and then you’d had to wear some big band-aids on your face for a week and a half because Cal had taken the cane and hit you hit you hit you until you’d forgotten how to move, and then he’d grabbed a rake and smacked you ‘cross the face with it for good measure because you had fucked up even if you hadn’t fucked up real bad.
This guy’s bandages are thicker, though. You wonder if Cal got him with a rake too, or if it was something worse. You have trouble imagining what would be worse than an angry Cal with a rake. A knife, probably?
“You must be Lil Cal’s Troll. God, you’re an ugly fucker. Could put an eye out on those horns, though.” He sounds at once bitter and approving. Your gaze skitters back to the bandages over his eye, and then away again. You don’t want to be caught staring. If you stare and the guy doesn’t like it he might have a cane like Cal, and you can’t, you can’t...
“Well, come on, dumbass, we’ve got mail to deliver.”
Your ears prick up. The guy must be a mailman, too. You climb into the car’s passenger seat at his direction, obediently sliding the seatbelt over your shoulder and curling your arms in half-moons around your ribs, where the package presses safely against the thrumming of your bloodpusher. The guy climbs into the other side, then starts the car and pulls away from the shadow of the fence.
“You weren’t seen?”
You shake your head.
“I heard gunshots. You kill anybody?”
You aren’t sure what constitutes ‘killing somebody’ in this case, so you raise and lower a shoulder.
“Goddamnit, Troll, open your fucking mouth and talk already, I’m too busy and pissed off for this mime bullshit.”
Your voice is cracky from disuse, from your dry throat, but you give it a shot. “Dunno.”
“What the fuck were the gunshots for, then?”
You pull onto the highway, so you figure it’s safe enough for you to dig out your water and your food. You’re supposed to save some of it for the return journey, but there’s got to be a hose or something where they’re going, right? You can refill the water bottle there. You answer before you guzzle, though, “Dunno. Made them scared. Bitchtits scared little birds. One shot and the rest flew away.”
“Cryptic asshole nonsense ain’t much better than mime bullshit,” the guy says, and you shrink back in your seat. “Whatever. If it wasn’t you that pulled the trigger, I think we’re good. You got the package?”
You tap your ribs, and then uncap your water and drink, deeply, lavishly. It’s so good you think you’d cry, if you had any water for tears left in you. The guy stares straight ahead.
“We got a long drive,” he says. “You might as well get some rest or something. I don’t care, just don’t fucking bother me.”
“Yessir.” You down the last of your water, and then carefully tuck it back among your supplies. Your claw brushes the letter Claudio gave you, sealed and pretty in a cream-colored envelope. You wonder what it says.
You’re too good of a mailtroll to pry, though.
You shuffle your legs for a bit, trying to get comfortable in the cramped little car--the guy ain’t much shorter than Cal, but every inch lost makes your stupid long legs crave the open air--until the guy snarls at you to stop fucking squirming. Then you just hunker down as best you can, and you close your eyes against the scenery flashing by and the tingle in your horns, and you sleep.
~
You are dreaming. There is a wall between you and the outside, shiny and opaque like a soap bubble. Through it, distorted, you can see the figure of someone else, They’re tall and their hair is messy and wild, wreathed around their indiscernible face. You press your hands to the soap bubble but you matter how hard you push you can’t get through; this is bad, you think. You have to get to that other person. It’s important, really important, you don’t know why but you have to. So you push harder, and then you resort to trying to bash the damn thing open with your horns, but all you get is a headache, and the rage mounting in your breast threatens to eclipse your whole self.
Then the figure on the other side raises its hand and puts it to the soap bubble. You splay your fingers and do the same, your palms overtop each other. They are very nearly the same size.
HEY THERE MY FINE INVERTEBROTHER. YOU DOING OKAY?
No. No, no, you are so far from okay there aren’t even any words to describe it anymore. When you were a little wiggler everything was miracles but you’re older now and you can feel the rage creeping in at your seams. The figure on the other side of the wall inclines its head.
I KNOW IT’S HARD, LITTLE BROTHER. IT’S HARD AND NOBODY UNDERSTANDS. BUT YOU’VE GOT TO BE STRONGER THAN ALL THAT. OUR 
HAS UP AND GIVEN YOU THIS CHANCE TO BETTER YOURSELF, DO YOU KEN? THE FINE GENTLEMAN IN THE FOUR-WHEELED DEVICE WITH YOU. OUR 
HAS BETRAYED HIM, MY BROTHER. YOU SHALL BE THE INSTRUMENT OF HIS DESTRUCTION.
You don’t understand. You don’t understand, you don’t understand, you don’t...
SHOOSH, MY BROTHER. I KNOW YOU GOT TROUBLE WITH YOUR ‘PAN AND GETTING YOUR REMEMBERING ON, BUT WE’VE DISCUSSED THIS BEFORE. THOUGH OUR WAS OUR SAVIOR AND OUR SALVATION, WE MUST GROW AND MOVE BEYOND 
INFLUENCE. THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO DO SO. DO YOU KEN?
You want a needle. You want a needle so bad it hurts, but..
You ken. You get it.
HERE IS WHAT YOU MUST DO.
You ken. You listen.
The rage subsides. For now.
~
You wake and for a minute you don’t know where you are. You flail your arms out, panicked, trapped, trapped, that bright place with the bars between you and everyone else and...
An open palm smacks against your cheek. You’re too stunned to even be angry, and then you remember.
The guy who picked you up is staring at you through the open driver’s side door. He has a truly massive cup in one hand, and a plastic bag in the other.
“I didn’t think you could look like any more of an asshole than you already did, but you flailing around like a dumbshit chicken sure proved me wrong,” he says, and climbs into the seat. He hands over the plastic bag, and you take it numbly. “There’s food and shit in there. You’re gonna need it.”
Confused, you paw through the contents of the bag: a plastic bottle of some purple liquid, a sandwich wrapped in yet more plastic, a candy bar. You go for the bottle first, because you’re still thirsty and you’ve never seen purple water before. You almost spit it out over the windshield when you taste it, though. Sweet. And fizzy.
“What, you don’t like Faygo? You some sort of fuckin’ haute cuisine critic now?”
You shake your head and, in defiance of the guy’s sneer, drink some more of the...the Faygo. You actually sort of like it. It’s definitely not water.
“We got maybe an hour’s drive left. Keep that mail close until we reach Snowman’s crib, all right?”
And then you remember. The dream. Was it a dream, or a memory? You don’t know how it could be a memory if it didn’t happen yet. Your head hurts, behind the sweet-fizz of the Faygo and the confusion of waking up in someplace you’ve never been before. You pick at the plastic covering the sandwich.
“Um, mister dude...”
“Slick.”
“Um?”
“Name’s Spades Slick. Either call me by my name or don’t open your trap at all.”
“Mister Slick,” you try. “I don’t think we ought to be going to this Snowman motherfucker’s place is all.”
He turns to you, slowly, until you can see the bandages covering his eye. His expression is somewhere between annoyed and incredulous. “What the hell did you just say?”
You shrink back a little. You can feel rage clawing at your head, but this is so, so important, you wouldn’t have had that dream-vision if it weren’t, and you are going to be motherfucking HEARD even if you have to SMASH A FEW FUCKERS’ HEADS in to do it. “They’re gonna, um, they’re gonna...”
“Spit it out, chucklehead, I ain’t got all day.”
“THEY’RE GONNA MOTHERFUCKING KILL YOU.”
He freezes. You freeze. It’s a big old freeze party up in here. For a second it’s like you all are statues and someone went and left you in this car as a weird art project. Then Slick reaches up to touch his bandaged eye.
“And how do you know that, huh?”
“I heard it from this motherfucker who knows all what he’s at. He said the mail’s been tampered with.”
“Tampered with.”
“Yup. He said, uh, it ain’t the real shit.”
Slick slides a finger beneath the bandages and scratches around his unseen eye. “That so. Well, pardon me for not believing a fucking Troll when it says...”
“He said Snowman’ll do more than stick a cancer stick in your motherfucking eyeball this time ‘round.”
“How the fuck did you know...?” Slick stares at you for a minute or more, and then he shakes his head. “Okay. Okay, fine, your asshole informant’s not bluffing, I guess. Shirt up, kid, let’s take a look at the package.”
You lift your shirt, and Slick pulls a knife from his pocket and delicately cuts the tape from your ribs. You’re scared, but also sort of excited. You’ve never seen the mail that the Boss sends before, but now you’ve got permission to look. Maybe it’s food. Maybe it’s money. The Boss really likes money, he spends a lot of time making it and giving it to other people.
You flinch as Slick peels the tape back from your skin, and he hisses and tells you not to be such a fuckin’ baby. But he uses his knife to open up your sandwich, too, so that’s okay. While you eat, he carefully cuts away layers of tape and oiled packing paper, like peeling an onion, until finally he reaches the core of the package.
“Looks all right,” he says. You aren’t sure what to make of it. It’s just a bunch of baggies of white powder. “Jesus, this has got to be like twenty pounds. Lotta fucking money to trust to a Troll.”
“That ain’t money,” you say without thinking, and immediately quail back when Slick looks at you. He snorts.
“Not yet, it isn’t. Still. You’re absolutely fucking sure your...’friend’...said this wasn’t real?”
“Abso-motherfucking-lutely Mr. Slick.”
“I’m going insane,” Slick says. “Trusting a goddamn Troll. You’re the asshole that’s gonna get me killed, Jesus Christ.” But he uses his knife to cut a little hole in the outer layer of plastic, and he takes out one of the baggies and holds it up. He checks it against the sunlight coming in through the windshield (you must have slept longer than you even thought), and then he opens the baggie and sticks his finger inside.
“Feels...” he says, but doesn’t finish his sentence, as he then sticks his finger in his mouth. “Bluh. Fuck. Fuck. This isn’t fuckin’ H. You...” He stares at you. “You were right.”
You shrug and stuff the last bit of your sandwich in your mouth. You aren’t even sure what being ‘right’ means in this case. Your dream gets foggier and more distant by the minute, but you still recall that shadow on the other side of the wall, how familiar it was. Your ‘pan shies away from this line of thought, but you can’t help but feel there’s something you ought to remember about...
Slick gets out of the car. He stares in at you, and then says, “Well? Come on.”
“Huh?”
“Christ, you’re dense. This car belongs to the big C. You think he don’t got it bugged to hell and back? Come on. No, wait. You belong to him, too. You got a tracker on you? Or in you?”
You don’t know what a tracker is. You realize that there are a lot of things that you don’t know what they are. Or what they do, or what they’re for.
This upsets you. No, it makes you motherfucking angry.
Slick must see the banked rage in your expression, because he climbs back into the car with a sigh. “Fuck. Okay. I don’t know how it works with Trolls, but I saw that special with Morgan Freeman narrating and it said you aren’t as dumb as you look, so here’s the deal. I repay my debts. Do you get that? Don’t matter if it’s to big C or some scruffy nobody Troll. And right now? I am in your debt, and it is pissing me the fuck off. So I’m gonna take you someplace where there’s people who know what the fuck they’re doing when it comes to you shits, some kinda fucking school or something. Got that?”
Take you someplace? Not back to Cal? But...but you’re Cal’s Troll. Cal needs you to deliver the mail. You shake your head. “I can’t, my fine motherfucker, I got to go back to Cal, he’s got important mail for me to deliver and...”
“Don’t you get it, you shitfucking stupid asshole? Cal doesn’t give a good goddamn about what happens to you. You’re his drug mule. He can find another purple Troll if he has to. You mean less than nothing to him. Do you hear me? Less than nothing.”
There’s a problem here. The problem is that you don’t really know what happens next. The anger that’s been quietly building in your horns and your thinkpan all up and. MOTHERFUCKING OVERFLOWS. And you black out even as you start making this horrible noise and you just. CAN’T. Handle it. You don’t know how long the blackness lasts. You don’t know what happens during. But you remember when Cal first got you and you were just this tiny little wiggler, and he took you in his arms and then he put you in the processing garage with a few blankets and a food bowl. And he was the only one there so you thought of course, of course this is right. But now Slick is telling you it isn’t, and there’s some other place with other people who know better, and you just...don’t understand?
You hurt. You hurt. Your horns ache with the ringing of the ‘voodoos and you think of all the times you stood outside. THAT MOTHERFUCKING FENCE. And vomited your bilesac out from the heat because the people on the other side were between you and delivering the mail. And how many times your ears started bleeding because you kept having to push harder and harder before they’d leave. And how there was no one to come and get you after. You had to climb back over the fence and find the car waiting for you and sometimes it wasn’t even waiting, you’d have to go and sit in the sun and the dark until it came.
You think of Claudio and his little sugar skull and how Cal never gave you no skulls, sugar or otherwise, and how he took away your paints more times than you could count, and you remember, you remember...
(IT’S ALL RIGHT MY FINE LITTLE BROTHER, IT’S ALL RIGHT. I’VE TAUGHT YOU AS MUCH AS I COULD. YOU’LL SERVE OUR NOW BUT IT ISN’T THE END. I’LL TELL YOU. I’LL TELL YOU EVERYTHING, YOU JUST HAVE TO REMEMBER IT. And then bang and then silence, and your hands were wet and your eyes were wet and they were very nearly the same color and he was looking up at you with the most peaceful expression you ever did see on any fine motherfucker’s face, and on his lips were the words YOU’LL BE FREED SOON LITTLE GAMZEE IT WILL BE ALL RIGHT.)
~
You open your eyes and you are in the desert. Except it isn’t just the desert; there are buildings around you, short little buildings and tall ones and paved streets. You are lying between them and the desert, and it is so peaceful. When you examine yourself, you find a fresh puncture wound in the crook of your arm. That makes sense, you guess.
You remember. You...you...
No. It’s gone again. Most of it, anyways. But you still have the backpack. You dig through the contents: your water bottle, another water bottle, two bottles of Faygo (!), a few sandwiches (!!), and...a piece of paper? The letter you were carrying is gone. So is the package you were supposed to deliver.
You squint at the paper, but the scribbles on it don’t resolve themselves into anything you can understand. No one’s ever given you something to read before. You didn’t need to know how in order to deliver mail.
No, not mail. Slick said it was something else. You don’t think it much matters anymore.
You tuck the letter into the inner pocket of the backpack. You’ll see if you can find someone to read it later.
“Gamzee,” you say, testing it, tasting it. It sounds right. Feels good. “Gamzee Makara.”
You heft the backpack up onto your shoulder and start walking.
TO WHOEVER FINDS THIS STUPID BRAIN-DAMAGED TROLL:
THIS ASSHOLE SAVED MY LIFE SO YOU’D BETTER TREAT HIM WITH SOME FUCKING RESPECT OR ELSE YOU’RE GOING TO FIND A KNIFE BETWEEN YOUR GODDAMN EYES. HIS NAME IS GAMZEE OR SOME SHIT LIKE THAT, AND HE NEEDS TO GET TO THE ADDRESS BELOW PRONTO.
HE HAS ALL HIS SHOTS AND HE’S A GOOD TROLL EVEN IF HE GETS WEIRDLY FUCKING ANGRY SOMETIMES. FROM WHAT I’VE SEEN HE SEEMS LIKE HE’D BE FINE WITH OTHER TROLLS.
HE’S DOPEY RIGHT NOW BECAUSE HE’S ALL FUCKED UP ON OPIUM. HE’LL NEED TO DETOX AND HE’LL PROBABLY GO THROUGH WITHDRAWAL. THAT’S WHY YOU NEED TO TAKE HIM TO THAT ADDRESS, DIPSHIT.
AND IF I HEAR THAT HE’S BEEN HURT OR HE ENDS UP DEAD IN A DITCH SOMEWHERE, I’M GOING TO FIND YOU AND CUT YOUR FUCKING STOMACH OUT, ARE WE CLEAR?
FOND REGARDS,
MR. SPADES SLICK