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Silco’s an unsocial child, at least according to his mother. “Always wrapped up in that noggin of yours, with no room to spare for the rest of us out here,” she says, sometimes, with one of her weary smiles.
He disagrees. There’s plenty about the world around him he’s interested in. Just not the roving gangs of kids his age who only want to spend their time chasing after overlarge sewer-crawling bugs and rats.
His time spent alone isn’t from a lack of nearby children, either. The mining colonies are practically bursting with people, crammed together in clusters and stacks of rickety metal-roofed shacks. Like the one he shares with his parents, tucked away in one of the larger caverns.
Communicating with even the more pleasant ones can be tricky, sometimes. It’s a little like he has ideas that make sense in his brain, then stall out before he can twist them into words that'll make sense aloud. He doesn't slip into the easy rhythm of casual back-and-forth conversation that they expect. So, on the whole, Silco usually just keeps to himself.
He likes to watch people from a distance, he likes to scale the fissure architecture at night until he reaches an isolated spot where he can crane his neck and see the stars up above, he likes to read whatever dog-eared books his parents can scrounge up every now and then with what little extra money they have.
It's fine. It's not a very eventful life, though, for the most part. Until he meets Jinx.
-
He first sees the girl on his way back from the market. It's one of his father's rare days off from work in the mines, and his parents are spending a day stocking up for the month. There's only so much he can contribute, so he's given a bag of nonvaluable essentials and basics to run home with while they stay and haggle.
Silco pads along a stone pathway lit by chemlights, the cheap kind that have their luminescent compounds diluted with oil to stretch their lifespan longer.
Soon enough, he comes to a vast, open chasm.
A sliver of eye-searingly bright sky blue is visible far above, at the very top, where it's not blocked with filmy solarglass paneling. The cliff faces on either side of the chasm are interconnected with catwalks and reinforced metal bridges. Not all of them are that structurally sound, but they're densely interwoven enough that even if one does break, you won't fall far.
Enormous caves, some natural and some blasted out manually with mining charges, line the walls. Openings to the tunnels leading to other fissures and cavern systems are marked with brightly lit signage.
Silco continues on his way to the residential section housing him and a few hundred other families who work in mining and manufacturing for the topsiders.
He hears a creak, a thump, and a muffled curse from above. He should probably keep it moving, but despite himself, he turns to see what it is.
There's a strange looking girl ambling across the rooftops of a row of shacks and cobbled together houses. She's walking light footed like a cat, with long, long blue braids trailing behind her as she moves.
A panel leading into a large ventilation pipe forty feet up in the air is swinging back and forth, like someone had recently opened it.
Well, that explains the thud, he guesses. How did she not break her legs?
As if hearing his thoughts, she stiffens and turns to look at him with a sharp birdlike movement of her head. Her eyes are large and glowing, an electric pink that illuminates the angles of her otherwise-shadowed face.
Silco steps back a half pace, but she doesn't move. Just tilts her head to the side like a curious stray. She looks surprised, her eyes widening.
Her clothes are odd, made of the typical work-stained materials found down here, but seemingly reinforced for combat rather than any specific job. The knuckles of her gloves are studded with spikes and her boots look custom-modified to break shins.
Suddenly, she darts forward in a motion that doesn't make sense. People don't move that fast. Her eyes leave a faint trail as she goes, like a sparkler or glowing hot fire poker being waved quickly through the air.
She lands in a crouch on the edge of a rooftop and grins at him.
“Yeesh! You’re tiny, aren’t you? I mean, that makes sense, I guess, but still. You’re a shrimp,” is the first thing out of her mouth. Silco blinks up at her where she perches on the rust-eaten roof, pointy elbows resting on those striped pants.
She's not wrong, he doesn’t think his head would reach her ribs, but being insulted by a glowing-eyed thing with impractically long hair feels unfair.
"Who are you?" he asks. He'd wanted to say what are you, but figured that would be too rude. It was already risky enough to interact with a stranger, but he was too curious not to.
She eyes him. "Jinx."
"Like a curse?"
She smiles without her teeth, this time. "Yes. You're Silco?"
He steps back again, instinctively. "How do you know that?"
"Because I'm a jinx," she says simply and shifts out of her crouch to sit. Her legs kick out, swing back, and the heels of her boots thunk solidly against the front of the house.
"Anyways. What's the situation with Topside like right now? Oh, and who's in charge around here?"
Silco squints at her, baffled. "Shouldn't you know that?"
She waves a hand in the hair in an eh, maybe gesture dismissively. "I know plenty."
"Do you?" he dares to ask, a little dubiously.
"I know your mom has a silver ring with abalone inlay, that she could probably make decent money selling, but she doesn't want to, because it's from her mother. Who you never actually got to meet. And your dad has bad knees."
He stares up at her in alarm. "What?"
"What?" she asks. Before he can answer, or even try to parse that, she swings herself off of the roof and lands effortlessly, springing back up in a fluid movement. He tries to duck, but she's faster than him, and scruffs his hair, messing it so his bangs get in his eyes. It's an oddly casual motion, like it's something she does often.
"I'll be seeing you around," she says placidly.
That's probably not good.
-
Sure enough, he sees her again, nearly a week later.
This time, he's up at the docks, by the edge of the water. Debris often washes up, pulled in by the tide, and sometimes things fall to the wayside when the dock workers and sailors are unloading cargo.
It's a decent place to find odds and ends. Anything actually valuable is rare, but most things can be sold or used by someone.
Silco's wading through the shallows, worn overall pants rolled up to his knees. He has a sturdy stick to poke at anything that catches his eye.
Something moves, a little ways out in the distance. He sees a dark shape near the surface of the water. He draws back slightly, worried it might be a shark or predatory fish, but doesn't think anything dangerous could reach him in a foot of water.
A head of bright blue pops up behind a wave.
Jinx coughs and splutters, flailing. She spins, apparently reorienting herself, until she sees him and waves enthusiastically. There's a piece of kelp tangled in the buckle of her glove.
He hesitantly waves back. What even is she?
Jinx paddles to the shore, finding her footing and standing up. She's soaked and clearly not dressed to be swimming. The dramatic swoop of her bangs are plastered to her face.
She tucks them behind her ear, and then, without warning, shakes her entire body like a dog drying itself. Silco squawks and drops his stick as he's speckled with water. "Hey!"
"Sorry," she says, not sounding very apologetic. "Overshot it. Hey, how'd you get here so quickly? I just saw you."
"It's been a week," he says bemusedly.
"Ah. Double overshot it, then. Don't mess with the arcane, kiddo."
"The arcane? Like magic? What, are you a mage?" he asks. That would explain a lot.
"Nah. It's complicated. Long story," Jinx replies. She starts methodically wringing the water out of her braids, and glances at him. "Find anything interesting?"
Silco just accepts it, at this point. He's not getting any answers, but she doesn't seem dangerous. Just inexplicable.
"Not really," he says. "They brought in a shipment of wire and spare parts for the mining equipment yesterday, so I was hoping, but no luck. I guess they usually pack expensive materials really securely, anyways."
Jinx seems to perk up at the mention of the cargo. "Wiring, huh," she muses. He's not sure he likes that tone.
"Did you mean to be in the ocean?" he asks. "Nope," she says. "Just have a habit of washing up here and there, apparently. Like flotsam."
She fishes his poking stick out of the water, and trudges back into the ocean. She stands still for a long moment, stick poised, then abruptly stabs into the water. She withdraws it with a large fish spiked perfectly through the eye, still wriggling a little.
She grins triumphantly and proffers the stick back to him, fish and all. Silco accepts it wordlessly. He's not entirely sure Jinx is real, but the fish is, and it looks healthy enough that it honestly wouldn't make a bad dinner if he brought it home to his parents.
Jinx looks up at the sun, staring directly into it without reaction. "Oh, shoot. Timing. Gotta go," she says, and sets off.
-
Jinx takes to showing up in random locations, all around the underground.
Silco sees her carefully meandering across high-up cables and pipes that probably weren't meant to support human weight. He sees her sprawled in unreachable crevices in the rock face, and fiddling with scraps of metal atop buildings and storefronts.
She frequents the same secluded underground creek and less trodden pathways that he does. Occasionally, when helping his parents around the house with cleaning or repairs, he'll hear a pitter patter of footsteps crossing the roof.
His parents think it's a raccoon, and plan to catch it, but never can. By the time they're outside, there's nothing there.
He asks Jinx, once, what she eats, if she doesn't have a job. She tends to answer his questions, these days, if they're not about her past or plans. She shrugs in one of those full-body movements she does, a braid jostling out of its rhythmic back-and-forth swinging at the motion and whacking him in the back of his calf.
"Whelps,” she says nonchalantly. “Grubs like you. I go after the bigger kids, the ones with some muscle on them. You’d make a good toothpick, with those skinny bones, but then I’d need a sewer rat or six for dessert.”
He frowns at her.
“No you don’t.”
“No?”
“You don’t have the right teeth to live off meat. Carnivorous mammals have sharper in-chi-sers-”
“Incisors?”
“Those. And even fish have beaks to crack shells. So you can’t live off bones, either, you’d just get splinters.”
Jinx stares at him. Then she bursts into raspy giggles, undignified and snorty. Silco’s brow furrows a little, he doesn’t like being laughed at—but she doesn’t really sound mocking. More honestly amused.
“Teeth! My teeth are plenty sharp, thank you. I could gnaw through steel, if I tried,” she says, chest puffing out. “And anyways, you get too many of your words from books.”
"Not enough," he says glumly. "Books are too expensive. Some of the neighbors don't mind me borrowing theirs, but we don't have that many at home. And I've read all of them a couple times over."
Jinx hums, noncommittal, and goes back to kicking a rock along the path in an attempt to trip passersby.
Three days later, she shows up with a bag slung over her side, and fishes a stack of books out of it. Silco gawks, and she drops them into his hands unceremoniously. He staggers under the weight.
They're all shiny new with brightly colored and laminated paper covers. Not the usual kind with solid, undecorated covers, that are sturdy enough to withstand being passed from hand to hand.
"These are from up top," he says in surprise. "How'd you afford them?"
She snorts, and musses up his hair in the way he's become slowly resigned to. One day, he'll slick it back, or just stop having hair long enough to get in his eyes. "I didn't."
He stops and looks up at her. "They're going to come looking for you! Or put out a notice about a thief, or something."
"Whaddya think of me? I'm sneaky. I can be a ghost, if I want to. Bet you they're not even going to notice."
Silco reluctantly subsides.
His father's at the mines, and his mother's busy doing mechanical repairs for a client, so he brings the books home. There's an empty space in the wall, behind a loose wooden board that he'd pried up ages ago.
It's a little nook, not big enough for a person, where he keeps a few odds and ends. Like colorful clamshells, pebbles, and a few dried flowers. His parents probably wouldn't mind if he kept most of the trinkets out in the open, but sometimes it's nice to have a secret just for yourself.
Silco carefully organizes his books in it, one by one, after reading the summaries. Jinx grabbed him a variety, from real historical accounts to stories about magic and monsters.
He studies them for a second in awe before he slots the board back into place.
-
He doesn't see Jinx for three weeks, then she shows up with no warning behind him.
"Heya," she says, and Silco yelps. He whirls around.
"Don't do that," he grumbles. "Anyways, where have you been? You're usually only away for a couple days."
She furrows her brow, making a considering sound. "I don't really know. To be honest, I wasn't actually supposed to show up here in the first place. Me meeting you in the first place was mostly a fluke. Or the universe responding to what I wanted, instead of what I tried to make it do."
He doesn't know what to say to that. The idea that she might stop showing up one day makes him feel a little sad, so he doesn't ask about it.
"Where are you heading?" Jinx asks him. It's sunset, late enough that the stars will be visible up above soon but not so late that his parents will freak out about him being gone.
"To see the stars," Silco answers. "You can see them pretty well if you find a good spot, higher up, in one of the huge open fissures."
"Hm," Jinx says. "Do that a lot?"
"A little bit," he says. "It's cool. We do get glowing bugs down here, and tons of mold, but not usually anything like stars that you can see above you."
"Wrong," says Jinx cheerfully. "C'mon."
Silco stumbles after her as she turns right around to walk further down into the caves. He can't quite match her pace, so she slows herself a little bit. He still has to hurry.
She leads him down a route he doesn't recognize, twisting and turning through tunnel systems. The amount of people they see thins out until it's just them, walking through empty caverns and passages.
Eventually, Silco can hear the faint sounds of water on rock.
"One of the sea caves?" He asks in surprise. Bordering the ocean the way it does, the outer and lower edges of the undercity have pockets full of water, and semi-aquatic caverns bordering underground pools.
People don't usually bother to set up shop near them. They're too humid to keep chemlights working well, and the salt in the air is hell on machinery. It can be risky, too, since the tides and currents will sometimes drain a cave, only to flood it later when the movement of the water changes.
"It's safe, right?" Silco asks her.
"I know this city like the back of my hands," Jinx reassures. "Kind of a weird expression, don't you think? But yeah. We're good."
Jinx takes a small handheld light out of her pocket and flicks it on. "This way," she says, and Silco follows again.
He quickly sees why she needed the light. They're down far enough that nobody's bothered to set up even basic lamps.
They reach a large, hollow cavern. "Ta-da," Jinx sings and throws an arm out to gesture, her voice echoing in the space.
Silco looks up, and up. There's… stars? Underground? Oh, he realizes. Glow-worms. The ceiling of the cave is completely covered in little bluish white dots. Some of them twinkle. They let off enough light that once his eyes have adjusted, he can see his surroundings dimly.
"I never see more than a handful of these at a time," he says in awe.
"Oh, yeah. I'm pretty sure they usually hang out in these huge colonies, down in the sea caves. We usually just see the stragglers up further away from the water."
Silco turns in a circle, slowly. They do look like stars. Not as faraway and grand, but they make up for it by flickering and being faintly tinged blue. It's beautiful.
He sits for a while, arms wrapped around his folded-up legs, neck craned back to look.
Eventually, he realizes he hasn't heard from Jinx in a while. He glances around to find her, and sees the shape of her standing by the cave wall. He gets up to go over.
She has a palm pressed to the stone, as she examines the pink tendrils of fungus stretching across it in long, root-like branches. The stuff is glowing faintly, in a rhythm. It's nowhere near as bright as the glow-worms, but it pulses on and off slowly. On for a few seconds, off for a few seconds.
"Hey," Jinx says suddenly. "Wanna see something cool?"
Silco nods. Realizes she can't see it. "Yeah."
Jinx pulls out a pocketknife, and nicks the side of her hand very lightly. Just enough for luminous pink blood to well up. Silco stares.
"Even your blood glows?" he asks.
Jinx carefully presses the cut to the plant growing across the stone. The glow inside of the root-like structures stops pulsing, and instead, brightens. The glow of Jinx's blood brightens, too. Her wrist is facing Silco, and he realizes that the veins close to the surface are faintly glowing too.
"Whoa," he breathes.
The glow of the roots eventually starts pulsing again, but much faster this time. It's like a— "Heartbeat," Jinx says. She offers him her other wrist, and he takes it. Sure enough, the filaments are glowing exactly in time with her heartbeat. He looks around, eyes wide, and sees that the entire fungal network, stretching eighty feet across the slope of the cave wall, pulses in the exact same rhythm.
Silco's mouth is open. "What are you?" he asks.
Jinx laughs, stepping away and wiping her hand on the black fabric of her other arm's glove. "I already told you," she says, smiling. "A jinx."
She wanders off to go look at the ceiling worms, casual as can be. Silco stands there for a moment, then follows. He flops down on the cold cave floor, peering upwards again.
"Earlier, after you were gone for a while, you said you didn't mean to come here," he starts. Pauses. "Are you… going to start showing up less often? Or go away completely?"
Jinx glances down at him, brow furrowed.
"I don't really know, shrimp. I think maybe, yeah. It's not really in my control, but I don't think I could stay forever if I tried."
They're quiet for a second.
"But," she says. "Not to spoil the future, or anything, but you are gonna see me again. I can promise that much."
"Whoa," Silco mumbles again.
"You get your dad's crappy joints when you grow up. Sorry," Jinx adds, and he laughs. This entire thing hasn't felt real. It's crazy.
"Can you stay a little bit longer, today, at least?" He asks hopefully.
Jinx considers.
"For sure," she says, and sits down next to him.
In the dark of the underground, the patterns of light scattered above their heads look like an entire galaxy.