White Knuckle Grip

Hetty Brown didn’t like the casino. Her reasons were numerous and multifaceted.

The most aggravating reason was sitting across the table from her, half-obscured by the cigar smoke that hung thick in the air. Pinstripe suit, his hair oiled back and his pencil-thin mustache sitting, sharp as a switchblade, over his lip.   He didn’t actually blend into the wallpaper, but he did look like he fit in, here. Like he belonged. It was a mark against him.

Her own shiny secondhand dress had looked fancy enough in the thrift shop. The deep indigo fabric had reminded her of the Starlight’s glowing holographic addition to the city skyline. The dress hadn’t held up well, though–had seemed almost glaringly cheap the moment she’d found her way to the upper levels of the casino. Even the platter-carriers had raised their eyebrows at her.

Hetty took a deep, smoke-filled breath, and tried to ignore the superior way he was smiling at her, focusing instead on the cards in her hands, doing her best not to bend them. Her grip was suited best for repairing the heavy machinery at the Luminarii Shipping Company. Things more fragile than steel tended to crumple.

She grimaced at the cards. It was a bad hand.

“If you’d like to fold,” the man on the other side of the table drawled. He must have oiled his voice as well as his hair, to talk so smooth. “Our companions already have.”

He made a wide, liberal gesture to the other seats at the circular poker table. They were all empty. The chairs had been pushed back in varying levels of frustration and disgust. One was still tipped on its back, the legs splayed garishly upwards, like a dead insect. One man had taken Slick’s winning streak even worse than the others, and he’d needed to be escorted out.

Hetty glanced at the chips on the table, the metallic rectangles glinting with the promise of great wealth, though they were next to worthless themselves. Considered folding, of only to find a table with more agreeable company. But—she wasn’t even halfway through, and she’d come here to lose her money. Slick’s winning streak helped with that. A few more rounds, some daring betting, and all her chips would be gone, lost in the gnawing, money-hungry maw of the city’s upper class. It would be back where it belonged.

She shook her head.

“I’ll see your bet, and raise you by fifty percent.” She said, picking up a few more tiles from her slowly shrinking pile and tossing them in the center of the table with a decisive clack.

“What?” she asked, when the man shook his head. “I can lose my money as well as anyone else here.”

She splayed her cards on the table. A three of dusts, a nine of ore, and a six and ten of voids. and Slick looked at them, then at her, before cautiously laying down his own hand. It was comically huge, in comparison to her own; a void captain and three officer cards in descending order of rank. Slick looked suspicious as he pulled the winnings towards himself, adding its wealth to his growing pile. Hetty leaned back in her chair, grabbing her glass of chilled apple cider and taking a refreshing sip. She didn’t know why things tasted better in crystal glasses, but they did. It was one of the few things that she and the casino owners could agree on.

Slick frowned at her, his eyes narrowing.

“Are you drunk?” he asked. Rich words, from a man who’d been downing shot after shot all night. She’d touched nothing but her apple cider. 

“Nope,” Hetty said, popping her lips obnoxiously and tipping the glass back, gulping the remaining liquid down to the dregs before setting it down on the green velvet tabletop. “Another hand?”

Slick frowned at her bit longer, and for a moment, Hetty was convinced that she’d have to find another table for the remainder of her evening, after all. Then he smiled, and shook his head.

“I’d be a fool to miss my chance at skinning you completely, wouldn’t I?” he asked, waving his hand for the cards to be dealt out. Hetty’s own smile felt closer to baring her teeth.

“I think you’re a fool either way,” she said.

“I’m not the one losing all my money.” He pointed out. The center of the table rose with a small hiss of hydraulics. It spat out fresh hands for them both before receding again. Slick picked up his hand and sorted through the cards, sifting them through his fingers and setting them in order. His mouth was quirked up in a small, deeply aggravating smile, and Hetty clenched her fists, hating him.

“You think losing money’s all people have to fear in the world,” she said, picking up her own cards without so much as looking at them. “That’s why I could look at someone trying to fit wings to a pallet jack and still see someone far wiser than you’ll ever be.”

She felt proud of herself. Proud of the cold calm that was settled over her, keeping her voice even. She could feel her blood was up, could feel the familiar rage, but she wasn’t out of control. She stood up, and Slick actually leaned back in his chair, possibly expecting a repeat of the chair-throwing incident form earlier. Instead of trying to land a punch across the table, though, Hetty picked up the trays of tiles she’d gotten at the casino’s front counter and dumped them, one by one, on the center of the table. Tile after tile clattered across the green velvet, and even Slick, with his precious metal cufflinks and perfectly tailored suit, looked awed, a little, at the glittering wealth. He looked at her, disbelieving. Far from feeling satisfied at his bewildered expression, it only made the fury wrapped around her bones curl tighter. How dare he offer her his attention only now. How dare he see nothing, nothing in the world but money. How dare he and all the rest of this dismal world weigh everything against a gold bar and find it wanting.

“I’m not here to win,” she snarled at him, gesturing to the chips on the table. “I don’t want a red cent of this. So take the bet. Take it all. It’ll be barely a blip in the bank account for you, anyway, so take it.”

Slick was still staring at the money. He giggled—giggled, like a kid or something.  

“I–,” he started, a little of the oily ease gone from his voice, “This will be—A lot more than a blip. Far more than a blip, for me.”

Hetty sat back down. She was tired. This was almost over with, and she could go back home, and pretend it had never happened. She could be free of it, if he just took the bet.

“I see your bet,” Slick said, and took his own mountain of wealth, shoving it out into the center of the table. He smiled at her when he did, like he’d just proved a point. “And I match it.”

His grin was getting on her nerves, but at least this would all be over soon. “See?” he said. “I can take risks, too.”

She shook her head, tossing her cards on the table. She didn’t want to dignify that with a reply. Besides, this would all be over once Slick laid out his own hand, and then she could go home, and lose this place in its own poisonous haze, like a fevered dream.

Slick—wasn’t laying out his hand, though. He was staring at her cards. Silent, with that shell-shocked look on his face, he was the least insufferable she’d ever seen him. She frowned at him. “What?” she asked.

He shook his head, scattering his own cards over the table haphazardly, and scrubbed his fingers through his hair, mussing the perfect coif he’d been sporting. Three captains and a lieutenant, she thought. It was a good hand. What—

She looked down at the cards she’d tossed on the table, suddenly realizing that she’d never so much as glanced at them.

Four supernova cards stared up at her from the table. Gold leaf glittered on their green-and-purple surfaces. The highest card from every suit. It wasn’t just a good hand, it was an unbeatable one.

Oh. Oh no.  

“Well played,” Slick said, still shaking his head. His perfect, razor-thin mustache was quirked up at one end, and his hair hung limply over his forehead. His reaction to losing was more respectable, she guessed, than the one man who’d thrown a fit and almost broken his chair. She would have preferred that anger over this, though—he was impressed. Like she’d planned this. Wanted it. Like she was no better than one of them.

“I didn’t—another round?” she stuttered. “Another round. Sit back down. I don’t want—”

But no, Slick was already pushing his chair in, picking up his glass and draining the last drops of amber alcohol from it.

“I know when I’ve been played,” he said, setting the glass back down with a dull thud. “And I should have known to quit when I was ahead.” He grinned at her, and the image of herself that his eyes reflected bore no resemblance to the woman she knew she was. “I do have to say—If it hadn’t been for that awful dress, I might have clocked what you were doing hours ago. You really looked the part. It’s a nice touch.”

He left before she could get up to punch him, and she was suddenly alone in a room filled with low light and drifting smoke, staring at a pile of shiny chips worth twice what she’d come here with, chilled apple cider curdling in her stomach in a way that made her wish she’d gone for something stronger.

—

Surprisingly, and utterly against every warning about the place that her mother had ever issued, the casino wouldn’t let her leave without her money. She tried. She was stopped at the door, and smiling women in fitted tuxedos showed her to the counter where she could turn her chips in and get the cash amount recharged onto her ID card. None of them raised their eyebrows at her dress now.

“Can’t you just—” she sighed, and leaned her forehead on the glass partition between her and the overly-cheery cashier. “Just. I can leave you tips, right? Can’t you just take it?”

“Oh, I assure you, Ma’am, the Starlight pays each of its employees a more than comfortable wage,” the girl chirped, the smile almost hiding the hungry look in her eyes. “We would never jeopardize our positions here by taking cash gifts from patrons, though I appreciate the offer.”

Go away before you get me fired, Hetty translated. Okay. Fine. She’d have to—do something else with it all, then. Tomorrow. She’d find some way to get rid of the money. Tomorrow.

The girl handed her pale blue plastic card back to her, and then slid something else across the counter. It was slim and pale, the shape and size of one of the casino’s chips, but not quite the right color, and without the distinctive brand of the Starlight embossed on it. Hetty frowned, picking it up.

“What’s this?” she asked, turning it over in her fingers.

The girl on the other side of the counter shrugged.

“I don’t know, Ma’am. One of our patrons must have betted and lost it. It’s yours now, though.”

It was strangely heavy, for something so small. Hetty turned it over again. It seemed like a solid piece of metal, perfectly smooth. It was pretty.

She put it in her pocket.

—

Outside the casino, the air was clear and clean. The street lights were heavily colored, reflecting against the streets in glittering glory, but even that was better than the hazy lighting inside the casino. Hetty glanced upwards, gazing for a few moments at the deep indigo sky. Stars made small pinpricks of light, and on the horizon, the rings of Yamuna, their neighboring planet, swept across the sky, the light it cast back on them interrupted by the jagged lines of apartment buildings in the distance.

Hetty’s feet didn’t want to move. Her work coat was wrapped around her shoulders, hanging unzipped over her chest, the grease-strained canvas a drastic contrast to the shiny fabric of her dress. She wrapped her arms around herself, not quite able to tear her gaze away from the sky.

The choked feeling rising in her throat was deeply unwelcome, and she tried to swallow it, tried to keep the burning tears out of her eyes. She couldn’t. She started walking, raising her hands to wipe at her face, a gesture which made her feel small and childish. She hated it.

The apartment was empty, and she didn’t want to go home to it.

She’d had time, in the months since the accident, to clean the place up. She’d shoved Tare’s belongings under the bed, and put Elle’s blankets in the corner, folded carefully.

The small studio apartment no longer looked like three people lived in it, but that didn’t mean it was empty. Elle’s collection of strange spices from other planets still lived, untouched, in the cupboard above the freezer. Tare’s notebooks, full of stories he’d never finish writing, lurked under the bed. Hetty still caught herself almost using his writing pen to jot down a list, and unthinkingly putting it back in the mug, finding a dull pencil to write with instead.

A brusque apology letter from Lumarii Shipping Company still laid, ripped and crumpled, in the garbage. Tragic accident. Deepest apologies. Due diligence.

The price they’d set on her sibling’s lives was enough to make sure that Hetty never had to worry about making the rent again.

It was too much money for one person to have. It was nowhere near enough money to even begin to make up for the loss.

She wanted it gone. Had just tried to get rid of it. she’d failed, somehow, and now, she just didn’t want to go home.

It’s hardly a home anymore, with no one inside it.

—

The streets outside the Starlight were intermittently busy. Few people were walking—the wide sidewalks were heated and well-lit, but the elegant women in shining fur coats and the men in tailored suits only used them to exit their sleek black hovercars and enter the various buildings that decorated the boulevard. Hotels and casinos, clubs and restaurants. Places with no real purpose but to give people a place to exist in for a while, surrounded by lights and smoke, glitter and shine. It was pretty, really pretty, and it made Hetty feel like her chest had been carved out with one of Elle’s serving spoons.

It was almost a relief when her feet started to rub painfully in her heeled shoes. The pain felt like something real, something grounded.

When the look of the streets began to change, that was a relief, too. The lighting became less colorful, the dim street lamps glowing green, and the buildings became taller, squarer, closer together. The effect was like being funneled into a maze, or sealed into a box, as if the very landscape wanted to say, you’re stuck here forever.

Hetty had grown up in this maze, though, and to her the press of buildings was a comfort. Their plain concrete faces and utilitarian edges did not expect anything of her but what she knew how to give. Hard work and a harder face. Fists clenched against any possible threats. Things that she knew.

Speaking of threats—

“Stop right there.”

Hetty startled, realizing that she’d been staring up at where the apartment complexes turned into a interwoven mess of concrete above her, obscuring the sky. She was in a narrow alleyway, only a few blocks away from her own apartment building, but there was someone standing at the end of it, silhouetted in green light. A very skinny someone, a few inches shorter than she would have been without the heels on. She frowned at them, and the person stepped forward, popping their knuckles and leveling a glare at her.

Her mouth quirked up slightly, and she shook her head. It was a kid.

“What are you doing?” she asked, trying and failing to keep the humor out of her voice.

“What does it look like?” the kid asked. “We’re robbing you.”

Okay, this was good. This was really good. Hetty turned around, and saw that the other end of the alley had been blocked off by a few more of the kids. There were a good half-dozen of them, and if you stuck them all together, they might have been the size of a mildly intimidating adult.

It had been a long time since Hetty had been robbed. Usually, it happened when a new gang took over the area, and was trying to convince people of the use of paying their protection fees. She’d never had a problem paying the fees—it made the grocery budget tight sometimes, but so did rent, and the power bill. It was just—how things were.

There was no way, though, that these kids had displaced the Scarabs. That gang had serious muscle, and more members than some religions. They’d held this area for half a decade now. It was equally unlikely that the kids didn’t know this was Scarab territory.

No, it was more likely that someone had hired these kids, and promised enough money that they’d collectively decided to risk the Scarabs’ wrath.

Hetty had a fair idea of who that was, too.

If Slick had just showed up and asked for his money back, Hetty would have given it to him. She didn’t want it. She didn’t care if he had it.

But no, he thought that she was some kind of money-grubbing con woman, someone who had to be threatened and bullied into giving up some money she’d stumbled on by pure chance.

Also, he’d sent kids to do his dirty work, and that just didn’t fly.

“You could try to do that,” she said, “And you could get a bloody nose from it. Or you could walk away, and I’ll let you off without one.”

The tallest of the children, the one who’d cracked his knuckles, scowled at her.

“We can take you.” He said, in a low growl. His voice must have dropped recently, if he was still showing it off like that.

Hetty couldn’t help it. She laughed.

“Maybe in a few years, kid,” she said. “When I’m all grey-haired and talking about the good old days, and you’ve grown another few inches. For now, your best bet is to go back to the guy that hired you, and let him know I’ll talk to him in person.”

She walked forward, intending to step past the kid, when footsteps scuffed on the ground behind her.

“Griff—” the knuckle-cracking kid shouted, and Hetty turned to find a tiny blur flying at her head. On instinct, she grabbed it, letting the force of the kid’s leap swing her around, and found herself with an armful of scrawny limbs that all lashed out at her with the righteous fury of an angry cat. She twisted her fist into the back of the kid’s shirt, and held him out at arm’s length. He growled, trying to kick her, but he couldn’t quite reach. What age even was he, she wondered?

The leader had his arms out wide, signaling the others to stop, his eyes fixed on the kid Hetty was holding.

They were loyal to each other, which she respected. It was also really convenient. She was too tired to get into a fight, and would really rather not punch kids, anyway.  

She lifted the kid she was holding—Griff? And jostled him slightly, looking the leader in the eye.

“I’m keeping this,” she said. “You can have him back once you get whoever hired you to come talk to me. Okay?”

The kid’s lips peeled away from his teeth. He was angry, but he knew as well as she did that he couldn’t do anything about it. It wasn’t a fun feeling, that kind of anger.

“What’s your name?” she asked. He scowled at her, but said,

“Pell,”

“Okay, Pell, I’m not gonna hurt your friend. I’m not gonna hurt you, either. I just want to talk to the guy who hired you, and I don’t want to be robbed tonight.”

Griff snarled and tried to scratch her arm. She ignored him.

Pell glanced between them both, distrust plain in his eyes, then nodded. He gestured to the others, getting them to come around behind him, keeping an eye on her the whole time.  

“I’ll tell him to talk to you,” he said, “But if he doesn’t—”

“I trust you’ll tell him.” Hetty said. “Whether he comes to talk to me or not, I’ll let Griff here go in the morning. Just don’t try and rob me again.”

“It’s Griffin,” Griff snapped at her, trying to kick her again.

“Hey,” Pell said, solemnly, catching the kid’s attention. “We’ll be back for you, okay?”

He looked at Hetty.

“We’ll be back for him.” He said, and she nodded.

“I know you will.”

—

She closed the apartment door behind her, and only then did she let the dirty little street gremlin go. He snarled at her, which she guessed was fair enough, and she took off her coat, kicking the fancy heels away from her aching feet as she did. The carpet was worn almost threadbare, but it was familiar, and thus a comfort to her aching toes.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. Griffin had his fists up, and he glared at her. She could have gripped both his wrists in one hand.

“You’re hungry,” she concluded, moving him to one side of the hall so she could walk past him. “Come on. Eat.”

The kitchen was just large enough to house a small freezer-fridge, a two-burner hot plate, a sink, and a tall shelf full of all the food that wouldn’t spoil at room temperature. Griffin followed her in, his steps slow and cautious, as if the floor might burn him if he walked too confidently.

Hetty usually made herself plain mashed buckwheat cereal. Fancy cooking had been Elle’s domain, and treading into the territory usually occupied by her sister made Hetty’s heart ache badly.

Plain mashed cereal was plenty nutritious. But it didn’t taste good. And she wanted, suddenly, to make something that tasted good—for the kid’s sake.

She reached up, grabbing the flour-stained book that had been Elle’s from where it was sitting on top of the fridge. The book crackled as she opened it, and the pages were gritty and rough under her fingers, but she found a recipe quickly enough—a kind of soup that Elle had always made when one of them was sick. It was a good soup, filling and warm and quick to make, and Hetty read over the ingredients quickly.

“You can sit,” she said over her shoulder. “Food will be ready soon.” Griffin startled slightly, but found a stool and sat down.

“Do I get to know your name?” he asked.

She glanced over her shoulder at him.

“It’s Hetty.”

—

The kid was suspicious of her, but he was hungrier than he was wary. He devoured every bit of the soup, even though it wasn’t anything close to as good as Elle’s cooking. It was crazy how much variance there was in the outcome of the same recipe.

Still, if Hetty could feed a half-starved street urchin with her cooking, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

She offered the kid Tare’s cot for the night, and was met with suspicion a second time. She didn’t push it. Griffin accepted, though, in the end. It was strange, digging the cot out from under the bed, unfolding it in the spare area between the bedroom and the kitchen. She hadn’t expected to ever do that again.

She was able to convince the kid to shower, and she gave him some of Tare’s old clothes, and all the blankets that Elle had spent evenings repairing with needle and thread while they both listened to the newest chapter of one of Tare’s stories.

Once Griffin was settled, Hetty went to shower, herself. She stripped out of the shiny blue dress, unable to feel at all tired past the overwhelming ache in her chest. The pain of it was worse than ever. It wasn’t just the emptiness of having lost them, now. It felt like an angry rat was stuck in her chest, tearing at her with claws and teeth, all rabid fury and no sense.

Her siblings were gone, and she wasn’t just sad. She was also so furious that she’d been barely holding herself back from looking for fights wherever she went. She was so done that she’d been living every day as if she was just an empty shell that went to work, did her job, came back, and ate.

She wasn’t, though. Empty. She was still herself, still here. They’d left her here. All of her. It wasn’t their fault, but they had. And she might not really know how to be herself when they weren’t here, but she was going to have to figure it out. She had years of existence left, and no matter how much it might hurt, she had to do something with them, something that wasn’t just existing.

She turned off the shower spray, and pressed her head against the wall, closing her eyes. She had to do something with her life, now. Without them. It hurt and it felt good. It ached, and it felt like healing. She hated it, and for the first time, she felt like she had something to do that wasn’t hating things.

She wasn’t sure what it was that she had to do, but she knew she had to do something, and that was new.

With the shower no longer running, she heard a sound. Like a door opening, several floors below. Like Slick, come to ask for his money back.

It was time to do that something. Whatever it was.

—

Griffin was soundly asleep on the cot in the kitchen. The kid snored like an old man, and Hetty felt her lips quirk up. She tossed her work coat on over her clothes, and walked out the door.

The hallway lamps glowed a sickly green. The other apartments were only signified by tarnished metal doors. Sometimes a door would be muffling a child crying, or thumping music, or two people screaming at one another, but it was late enough that the hallways were mostly silent.

As soon as Hetty opened the stairwell door, she saw someone climbing up it in a rumpled, if expensive, suit. Tagging behind him, Pell jogged up the stairs. His head was down and his shoulders were slumped.

The man in the suit was familiar, but not in the way that Hetty had been expecting. Instead of Slick’s oiled hair and thin mustache, she saw the square, clean-shaven face of the chair-thrower, the man who’d gambled away more than he could handle and ended up getting himself thrown out of the casino.  

She closed the door to the stairwell behind her, and crossed her arms, leaning up against it. The man looked up as the door clicked shut, and froze where he stood, his hand gripping the railing. They stared at each other for a few moments.

“What do you want?” she asked.

He blinked at her. “You’ve got something of mine.”

She frowned, unwrapping her arms and shoving her hand into her pocket. Her fingers closed around a small, cool thing. Something that looked like a gambling chip, but wasn’t. She pulled it out.

“This?” she asked. “What is it?”

The man swallowed, drawn to the tiny object like a metal shaving to a magnet. It seemed to take him effort to tear his gaze away and refocus on her, and when he finally had, his eyes were blazing with determination.

“None of your business.”

Fair enough.

She flipped it at him with her thumb, sending it flying through the air like a tiddlywink. Startled, he lunged to grab it out of the air, nearly falling down the stairs to catch it. Whatever it was, he thought it was worth cracking his head open. She had a sneaking suspicion that it really wasn’t.

“You should keep better track of your things,” she said. “Or at least hire better thieves.”

 He looked from it, to her, and back. He rubbed his thumb over it wonderingly, lovingly, like a mother stroking her baby’s cheek. He glanced up, suspicion and relief at odds in his eyes. She shook her head, and kicked off from the wall, turning around to open the door and go back home.

“Do you know what you’ve just handed over?” he asked, as she put her hand on the doorknob.

“Nope,” she said, turning the knob and opening the heavy metal door with ease.

“It’s—it’s worth more than life itself,” he insisted. “It’s more power—more knowledge—than most people ever see in their lifetimes. It’s—”

He sounded so desperate. So…obsessed. She felt bad for him, and it was that, more than anything, that made her turn back around.

“It doesn’t matter what it is,” she said, frowning down the stairs at him. “All that matters is what you use it for. I just bought myself some peace and quiet.”

That shut him up. He looked more confused than anything. It was probably like talking to a brick wall, but—

She sighed.

“Just. Whatever you use that for?” she said. “Make sure it’s worth it, first. Okay?”

She turned to Pell, who’d watched the whole exchange in silence. “You want to get your friend?” she asked.

The kid nodded, and she gestured him up the steps after her. Together, they left the man and his precious token in the stairwell.

The apartment was as dark and quiet as she’d left it. Griffin had stopped snoring. Pell was doing that same walking-on-lava thing that Griffin had done. When he saw Griffin, all curled up on the cot in the kitchen, he halted, and blinked. His hands twitched, like he wanted to grab Griffin and run, but couldn’t quite make himself do it.

“Do you kids have somewhere to sleep?” Hetty asked, keeping her voice at a whisper so as to not wake the kid. 

Pell shot her a suspicious look. “Yeah,” he said. She didn’t believe him.

“That’s good,” she said. “That you’ll have somewhere warm to bring him, once you wake him up. Somewhere safe. With food.”

Pell only looked at her more suspiciously, and a little angrily, too. He thought she was rubbing it in—everything he didn’t have. Everything he couldn’t give.

He couldn’t give them that, but—she could. She really could.

It would mean filling the tiny apartment with people. The food would be eaten, the spices used, the pens written with, the notebooks read—

 It would mean that life would keep going. Without Tare or Elle in it.

“You would be warm here,” she said. “And safe. And fed. If you like.”

It hurt, saying that. But it felt good, too.

—

A half-hour or so of convincing later, and Hetty was ushering seven small children into an apartment that hadn’t been half large enough for three people. Pell was herding them, apparently trying to keep them all from touching more things than they could help.

Another half-hour after that, the children were fed and warm and as suspicious as ever, and they’d all managed to make themselves fit on the bed, while Hetty took the cot in the kitchen.

She laid on it, unable to make herself go to sleep, though she was truly tired now.

She leaned over the side of the cot, reaching into the pocket that Elle had sewn into the bottom of it. Her hand closed around the worn spine of a notebook. She pulled it free, looking at the cover, where Tare had put the story’s title in precise block print, and Elle had drawn beautiful, curling patterns over the rest of the cover, as decoration.

She opened the notebook, flipped to the part where Tare’s blocky handwriting ended. It stopped mid-sentence. He must have been interrupted while he was writing the story, and planned to come back to finish the chapter later. It had been a good story. She’d never know how it ended, now.

She looked at the cut-off sentence for a moment. Let the grief hurt. It would probably always hurt, at least a little.

But then she turned the page, picked up a pen. Tare’s special pen. She wasn’t writing a story, exactly, but she thought Tare would probably approve, all the same.

The money she’d been paid for losing Elle and Tare wasn’t enough. Nothing would ever be enough to make up for their loss. But, like she’d said—

It wasn’t what it was. It was what you used it for. And it was enough to help this gang of kids. To keep them alive, at the very least, and fed well, and maybe comfortable enough, safe enough, so they could do things like write stories, or mess with fancy spices, or even, when the time came—help a few others.

She started writing down a list. Just things they’d need. A house, for a start. With eight bedrooms in it.

People held on to what they liked. To money, or to power, or to odd little shiny things that were easily mistaken for gambling chips. But the things that were worth holding onto—the things that mattered, that gave you a reason to live at all—weren’t things that you could keep or throw away. All you could do was hold on with a white knuckle grip, and hope they didn’t slip through your fingers.

---

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  Deep in the silent warehouse, along the right side of a long aisle, between the ragged remnant of fairy wing and a coffin bound with engraved steel bands, something glowed. It spread green light over the coffin’s engravings, and shone through the fairy wing’s translucent cells. It showed up the clumps of dust on the floor, and Linh tended to use it as a reminder of when the place needed sweeping.   The tank of amniotic fluid was bolted to the floor. As he went on his rounds in the night, Linh had to take care not to trip over…
• Strength of the CedarsMarch 31, 2021
  The sun was strong–blindingly so. It baked and stank in the rich mud on the shores of the Lake; it glittered through the reeds and lilies, and smothered itself in the dense needles of the pines. In spite of the morning’s golden glow, the sky was dark. Above the green-tinted cliffs at the far edge of the lake, clouds the shade of slate slowly edged closer, changing shape as they came. Prince Terrigan, standing at the very edge of the Lake, hooves splayed to let the mud seep pleasantly between his toes, took it all in–the lake-clear, sun-muddied air, the…
• White Knuckle GripFebruary 28, 2021
  Hetty Brown didn’t like the casino. Her reasons were numerous and multifaceted. The most aggravating reason was sitting across the table from her, half-obscured by the cigar smoke that hung thick in the air. Pinstripe suit, his hair oiled back and his pencil-thin mustache sitting, sharp as a switchblade, over his lip.   He didn’t actually blend into the wallpaper, but he did look like he fit in, here. Like he belonged. It was a mark against him. Her own shiny secondhand dress had looked fancy enough in the thrift shop. The deep indigo fabric had reminded her of the Starlight’s…