16

The first time the beggar girl nodded to him Tycho thought it was an accident, the second he knew it was intentional. She glanced from beneath lank hair, nodded and kept walking.

The night streets were full of those who caught each other’s glances and looked away. A quick glance and a slight nod. He’d acquired membership of a clan for whom this was enough. No one tried to talk, no one wanted to talk. The nod simply meant, I’m not your enemy. He knew, looking at the girl, that she wasn’t his enemy. Her spirit was too thin to make her anyone’s enemy but her own.

He wondered, however, how she knew he wasn’t hers.

The third time they crossed she smiled. A fragile flicker, demanding he comfort her in some way, maybe simply by returning her smile. The days were far too bright for him, the light too dangerous for his eyes. He wondered what her excuse for living in the night world was. This city was full and it was empty. That thought led to separate iterations of empty.

Back from the busy thoroughfares were other, emptier streets in this city of the living; because although the obvious places were crowded, there simply weren’t enough of the living to crowd the edges. There was, however, another city. Really empty, behind this one. It shared identical streets and brick-floored squares, identical churches and squat fortified towers. When Tycho entered it the living disappeared and the sky became silvery. The world in the empty city looked solid close to, but thinned and became translucent immediately beyond. Those in the city of the living showed in the streets of the other city like shadows.

Tycho had reached a point of wondering if all this had some deeper significance; or if was simply how this world was. For days dead children had followed him, shouting pleas he couldn’t hear. And then one night they were gone. He had another memory, of a Nubian with silver snakes for hair. Unless she’d been one of the ghost children. And now most of that memory was gone too.

She was young, the beggar girl on the night street. With a filthy smock and bare legs and rags wrapped round her feet and tied at her ankles with twine. Sometimes she was alone, at others with a glowering older boy. Occasionally, a younger boy was there too.

The time she smiled she was alone.

In the time it took the moon to swell from new to quarter full Tycho had discovered how to move between cities, hide himself in the shadows and steal all the food he needed. This would have been something if he’d been able to enjoy it.

Everything he ate tasted like ash.

He drank water from habit, fed when he remembered. But his piss was almost black and it was days since his bowels had worked. He should be starving to death. Instead, he simply felt hungry. If only his stomach knew for what…

“You,” he said.

She stopped, turned herself and smiled.

“You know me?” he demanded, and watched the smile drop from her filthy face. Without knowing it, she looked around her. Checking for exits. The alley behind the fish market was long and narrow, and more of the crowd were moving against them than going their way. She tried to shrug his hand from her shoulder, then let herself be gripped by the arm and dragged to a doorway.

“So,” he said. “Do you?”

“Yes…” His expression must have scared her, because she began shaking her head almost immediately. “I mean no. I mistook you for someone else.”

“How do you know me?”

She looked at him, debating her answer. In the end she told the truth, perhaps because she was scared by now. Of what he was. Of what he might do to her. Or of the fact he might know the truth already.

“I pulled you from the canal.”

He stared at her.

“Don’t you remember? I thought you were dead. And then you opened your eyes and looked right at me…” She blushed, the change to her skin unseeable in the darkness for anyone but him. Not that there was anyone wanting to see.

“You pulled me from the canal? The night I…”

Turning her face to the fragile moonlight, he stared into her eyes and watched her blush deepen. A salt mix of fear and arousal rose from her body. When he sniffed, her blush deepened again. Only his grip kept her in place.

Her breasts were tiny beneath her thin smock. Its hem showing more leg than was decent in a girl of her age. Tycho tried to imagine her naked, or half exposed with one breast visible and a trickle of blood beneath.

“You’re hurting me.”

No, if he was hurting her she’d know.

“Your name?” he demanded.

The girl hesitated, wincing as his fingers gripped tighter. “Rosalyn,” she said. “And I’m sorry about your shackle… Josh sold it,” she added. “I stole it, but Josh sold it. I’m sorry.”

“What shackle?”

She really looked at him then.

Tycho knew there had been chains. They trapped him in darkness and held him fast. He had fleeting memories of those chains. Fire, then chains.

“The shackle that was hurting…”

Reaching his wrist, Rosalyn lifted it into the moonlight, gaping at the perfect skin where scars should be. The shock in her face was enough to make Tycho remember scars should be there too. He would have said so, but she had already dragged herself from his grip, and was pushing through the crowd, with her head down and her shoulders hunched, careful not to look back.

Tycho let her go.