A Choice That Changes You

It’s almost a joke. Azgov isn’t ‘true’ Heartland, but it’s the closest thing that Vander and Silco will reach within a third of a day’s walk. They’ve followed Zaun’s arterial River (every district names the river something new, for it is the river of a hundred names) where it forks and heads east. Leaving the EEZ required the possession of city-travel passes to present to bored border guards; entering the bay area will require a secondary pass that neither he nor Vander could afford, nor did they know what kind of bribes those particular guards might prefer. The Heartland was enough for them, for now: Azgov was a small district, occupying the niche between the EEZ and the river’s eastward turn into Solovneki, the Bay Area District where the river spilled out into the Blackwater Sea. Azgov was home to a very sturdy Freight Company, one who had branches in other Heartland districts, and even a couple of holdings in the Bay Area Districts of Murmondy and Magdalena. Azgov was small, but it was mighty, and had plenty of powerful links even through to central Zaun.

“Nice place,” Silco notes, as he lights another cigarette. The heaving and organic scents to the air match the sheer volume of people and activity in the area. So many shops, so many homes, so many pathways where people walked and climbed and ascended in rickety cable-cages or ziplines. Much of the EEZ was built down into the stone, the architecture squat and rounded. Here, in the Heartland, even the fringes that were Azgov? The buildings were taller. Much taller, and they tangled in and through and around each other. In the distance overhead, through the fog that obscured some of the taller buildings, Silco could even see skyways linking the upper levels. People who lived and worked in those towers would never need to set their feet on solid ground, instead traversing the world on steel and wire and glass. If he was up that high, and looked down, would he even see the ground or the river? Or would the view be obscured by Zaun Grey, by the smoke and fumes of the city’s beating hearts, the technological organs which covered the nation in perpetual fog?

“There’s nicer,” Vander shrugs. “But me an’ Da are Freight Folk.” He pushes his fringe from his face and scans the busy streets. They were paused by what might have once been a statue or shrine or a water-pump, but was now covered in posters and refuse and graffiti and plaster, rendering it into a shapeless but colourful way-marker. “Or, we were. He was. It’s been a while since he moved t’the business he’s in.”

“You think they’ll remember you?”

Vander shrugs again. “Been a while. But even if they don’t, I know enough of the lingo, and you’re downright charmin’, Sil, so I’m sure we’ll make friends no worries.”

Silco smirks. “Save the flirting for later.”

“Nah,” the blond grins, lazily. “Life’s too short.”

They weave through the organic streets – ‘organic’ shared between the worn-smooth stone beneath their feet as well as the heavy scents lingering in the air – blending in with the crowd and taking in the businesses at work and the allegiances on display. It might be the Heartland according to the maps, but Azgov had flags and graffiti from all over Zaun, advertisements for companies that would only sell on the east side of the River or in the district’s towers, posters for the lost and missing and those worth coin to bounty hunters. Hawkers called their wares, buskers and beggars raised their voices, and the sound of industry at all levels thrummed and growled. Everything got denser the closer they got to the waterfront, including security of all kinds.

Vander squints. “Don’t remember this fence bein’ here.” He swats the chain-link barrier experimentally, setting it to rattle, before pointing out several multi-story buildings. “That there’s the work office. That’s Imports an’ Exports, and that’s Customs.”

Silco claws his fingers into the chain metal and peers through to the other side. “I’m not seeing any bunkhouses for the workers here. Lots of guards, though.” There were some on patrol, some near every pulley and crane, and plenty more just lingering and looking generally armed and dangerous. He even saw one guard with a rifle, having a smoke break in an open watchtower.

“Yeah, well.” Vander grunts. “Cargo’s worth more than people. Y’know how ‘tis.”

“It’s why we’re here.” Silco pushes back from the fence. “If we cannot get to the offices, let’s try plan B.”

“Pub time,” Vander agrees cheerfully. “This way.”

A few dark side streets and some shoving through crowds later, and things get less dense: the crowds, the declarations of allegiance, and even the smells. Silco flicks ash from his cigarette - he hadn’t brought many with him, not wanting the guards to confiscate them at the district border - and notes the languages on the shopfronts and graffiti, as well as the designs embedded in the architecture: seashells, rolling waves, curved blades, serpentine fish. Across the air, occasionally competing with the sounds of industry, come strains of violin, horn, and waterside voices raised in song.

“Bilgewater folk,” Vander explains, proudly, when Silco has the chance to ask for clarity. “Adventurers who set their anchor here. Like Da’s people.”

“Plenty who didn’t have that choice, too, don’t forget,” a woman’s voice drifts over the din of the streets. “You wanna tell your friend the rest, sea-pup?”

Silco glances upwards, and sees a woman half-leaned out of a window watching them, a half-storey overhead. There’s a shirt in her hands, with more fabric and sleeves than the one she’s currently wearing: she’s using the light from the neon signs and ever-torches to guide her stitches, given the interior of her room seems quite dark. Her hair is bleached-gold and her face is smeared with a paste, a starfield of freckles that catch the light and glitter in reflection of the light outside.

Shimmer? Silco wonders, then discards the idea. The woman’s face is too round, her skin too smooth, so it is unlikely the glittering effect is from that corrosive narcotic, made in the sumps from chemical runoff. This is zinc and mica, maybe, a paste that gives the woman the sparkle and magic of Shimmer without the downside of skin and flesh dissolving. An altogether clever move, Silco thinks, to mimic the risks of the popular substance without putting oneself in actual danger.

Vander grunts, his brow furrowing. “The rest?”

“Ain’t just adventurers who put down their anchor on mainlord shores,” the woman sets aside her sewing and leans further out the window, her high ponytail hanging down over her shoulder. “Plenty of exiles from the isles washed up here, and plenty of cowards who weren’t strong enough to turn their blade on their fellow man to carve out a proper livin’, or even those who came south to find the land that the Mists can’t touch, for oh – oh, fellas – there are so many dead in Bilgewater, the seas all churning with them.”

Silco allows himself a faint smile as the woman’s lilting accent shifts into a storyteller’s sing-song. He smokes and listens, his eyes tracking the shifting freckles of light across the woman’s face and shoulders.

“And last of all,” the woman says, “Let’s not forget who the islands once held. Lots of folk whose blood is in those lands’ bones were thrown to the waves. Our ancestors made sure of that, didn’t we, sea-pup?” She winks, cheekily, though the smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

Vander grunts, arms folded and eyes dark.

“Oh, lookit you sulkin’. Have I ruined your stories for you? Sorry, fella.” The woman laughs, suddenly merry, and shifts her gaze to Silco. “You’ll find more Bilgewater folk out on the coast, all the Bayside settlements. But here? This is a slurry of cultures in Azgov, fella, so there’s bound to be salt in the soup. You’ll find plenty of signs like this around these parts.” She slaps her windowsill, to the the peeling mosaic of waves and fish built into the stone of the building. “But signs or not, most people here are proud to be born of Zaun.”

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with lookin’ back at legacy,” Vander scowled.

“Course not!” The woman nods. “Knowin’ where you’re from is important, so you can move forward. But for lots of us, a Bilgewater past is just tales passed down by families who won’t ever set foot on a ship again. The Heartland is a big ol’ chunk of Zaun’s circling drain, fellas. The only thing you’ll find here aren’t heroes or pirates or legends of any kind. Just people.”

“Well, good, because we’re here to meet people,” Silco interrupts placidly. He opens his cigarette case, and plucks out a fresh one. He flourishes it in his fingers, then holds it out in her direction.

The woman’s eyes track to the cigarette. “Well,” she smiles, her teeth crooked but bright as the paste across her face, “You’ve met me.” She leans forward and stretches her arm down from the window, her limbs long and pale enough to show a collection of fading bruises.

Silco offers her the cigarette, but it’s Vander who has to take it and make sure the woman gets it, seeing as he’s the taller of the lads. “Silco.”

“Serafina,” the young woman says. She blows Vander a teasing kiss. “And you, sea-pup?”

Vander scowls. He still scowls, even when Silco elbows him, and gives his name with bad grace, then turns around to scowl at the passing crowd.

Serafina graciously inclines her head at the two of them, lighting the cigarette and taking a long, lingering draw on it. After a moment, she exhales, her facial features slack with contentment. “What kind of people are you after?”

“Freight,” Silco says. He tries to make what’s left of his own cigarette last; he’s only got six to last him the rest of this trip. “Or at least people who are willing enough to listen to a couple of bumpkins.”

“Bumpkins? You?” The woman gestures to her cigarette, eyes wide with disbelief. “Not you, fella. You are a proper gentleman, I say.” Then she laughs, and goes back to enjoying the luxury of the mountain-grass smoke.

“I don’t think being a ‘gentleman’ is going to do me any good,” he says, “I don’t want my teeth kicked in, at least.”

“Hah! Fair. So, what’re you sellin’?”

“What makes you think I’m selling something?”

The woman’s eyes twinkle with mischief, and she arches her back to emphasise the swell of her breasts. “Everyone’s sellin’ in Zaun.”

“Sil,” Vander leans against the wall, sighing, “We don’t need this, c’mon. Let’s just stop wastin’ time.”

“Oh, beggin’ your pardon,” the woman scoffs a puff of smoke. “I’m not interrupting date night, am I?”

Silco gives Vander a look somewhere between curiosity and warning. They can detangle whatever the true reason for Vander’s surliness later. 

The blond teen scowls back at Silco. “We’re headed to a Freight pub,” he answers Serafina, arms folded and chin tucked low. “Got some business to discuss. That’s all you need to know.”

“Which one?” Her head is cocked. She’s still smiling placidly as she smokes, but Silco sees some tension in her pose. She’s no longer leaning out the window, she’s poised to withdraw. 

Vander frowns. “The Bloody Baron.”

“Oh, sea-pup, there’s nothin’ out here by that name.” She tsks, and flicks ash into the alleyway. “Most Freight folk drink at their Company longhouses, though you’ll find a few oyster-houses where the foremen and managers toss back a few. Sal’s, Breaking Even, and Handsome Jacobus’ House.” She smirks. “‘Hand Jobs’ for short.”

Vander, despite his sullenness, manages a snorted laugh.

The woman narrows her eyes knowingly. “But there’s no Baron out here, mate, with or without blood.”

“Longhouses?” Silco frowns.

Serafina shrugs, savouring one last long pull on her cigarette. “Story’s older than I am. Some fragments tried to defect to a different Company, cost the whole district a border line, not to mention all the profits and potential earnings. Since then, Freight’s been under careful watch.” She points down at Silco and Vander with the butt of her cigarette. “If you work Freight, you don’t work for a Company no more: you work for your governor.” She flicks the cigarette butt at the opposite wall, where it lodges in the crumbling mosaic amongst the rest of the refuse. “And so the Companies keep their lines hard.”

“Gods.” Vander runs a hand through his hair. “That makes this harder.” He huffs a short angry sigh through his nose. “Fuckin’ politics.”

Silco nods to himself, brow furrowed. Zaun’s internal territories were always in flux. It was just the nature of the city to cannibalise itself, shoring up walls with the bones of those who came before. Companies butting heads over territory and employees meant blocks and businesses were issue enough when it came to what streets one could walk and where was safe or legal to shop or sleep. But for Freight to be a District issue now meant that any disruption could result in the attention of those with capital-p Power, those who wrote the laws and raised their armies and taxes, who could strangle and starve thousands just to make a point. Silco lets his gaze rise to the towers, the looming structures barely visible overhead, and then let his gaze travel westwards, to the mountain-sized towers in the heart of the Heartlands, where Zaun’s Chief Executive Officers ruled all.

And he feels, in that moment, very small. A quiet cold breath puffs on the back of his neck, setting a shiver down his spine and his spirit faltering. What am I doing? Chipping a brick at the bottom of the pillar? It will fall. It will crush us all. He should just go home, and be glad that the Collective hasn’t drawn the ire of the governors of the EEZ, of all the districts that make up the southern mountain rim. Whoever they are, Silco blinks, as he realises he cannot recall off-hand the names of the Powerful People who own the land he lives on and the air he breathes. He knows the Company that owns the mine, and the Companies that work in rivalry or collaboration with it, but nothing further. Nothing beyond. He doesn’t even know the name of his own district’s governor.

… but then, it’s just as unlikely that the governor knows the names of anyone beneath them, either.

“The Longhouses,” Serafina continues, rousing Silco from his troubled musing, “Are living quarters, bars, shops, everything all in one. State-owned, walled an’ watched an’ warded.”

Vander wrinkles his nose. “Sounds t’me like they’re keepin Freight workers like animals in a pen.”

Serafina snaps her fingers and points to Vander, nodding.

Vander looks suddenly ill. “Gods, Da, why didn’ you say nothin’?” he mutters, running both hands through his straw-coloured hair. 

“Probably because he shifted sticks before the doors locked, sea-pup,” the woman says sadly. “Just one generation gone, and all the world shifts. Circlin’ the drain.”

Silco finishes his cigarette angrily, and grinds the butt out on the cobbles beneath his boot sole. It feels more important than ever to find some way to talk to these people. Someone has to be mad about this. Someone has to want to change things. Surely.

“However.” The woman leans her elbow on the windowsill, her head propped up on her hand. “Not all of Freight’s been contained. There are better ways than walls and paychecks to keep folk in line.” She smiles coyly. “I might know one or two fellas who work for Freight but who ain’t kept in the same cage as the rest.”

What were the odds of that? To meet just the right person who had just the right connection? Perhaps it was too good to be true. Silco looks at Vander, wanting his opinion, his thoughts.

Vander sighs, and shrugs. “We came all this way, Sil. Might as well try t’talk to someone.”

“Hm.” Silco looks up at the woman in the window again. “What’ll that cost us?” Nothing’s for free in Zaun.

The woman smiles, her crooked teeth gleaming, glittering with the same paint on her face. “For a gentleman like you, Mister Silco? Another one of your fine cigarettes, to be paid once we reach our destination. I’ll accept nothing else,” she adds, with the batting of her glittering eyelashes.

He manages a smile, or as much of a smile as his paralysed face allows. “Deal.”

“I’ll be right down, lads.” She vanishes from the windowsill, and closes the shutters behind her. 

Vander exhales, and cracks his neck left then right. “Not how I saw today goin’,” he admits. “Had no idea about the whole Governor thing. Sorry, Sil.”

“This was never going to be an easy thing, coming all this way for a chat,” he leans against the blond, folding his arms and letting his gaze travel through the rope-and-timber platforms connecting the buildings around them.

“Still. Forgot how quick the city moves.” Vander sighs, and slings an arm around Silco. “Da’s friends might not even be here no more.”

“A shame we can’t get to the coast,” Silco murmurs. “Vander, do you know who the district governer is for Bergen?” For the district that contained Silco’s Collective, his mine, his home.

“No clue, Sil.” 

“What about Visby?” The district closer to Azgov, a district constantly in flux as it chased profit along the river or the coast or the mountains. Its borders changed monthly, apparently; he had no idea if that was true.

Vander frowns, and shakes his head. “The only governor I know is Pyotr Fecklestein, and that’s mostly because of the song what started after he shat himself to death. ‘In Rostock, the rats are eating well, we hear’…” He stops, embarrassed.

Rostock. A Heartland district, if Silco remembers rightly from that inaccurate map, somewhere west; it might as well be another world away, for all he knew. And as much a world away as these towers barely visible in the Grey overhead. “You’ve a good voice for singing, Van.”

“Tch.” For all it is a dismissive sound, Vander manages a smile.

The door to the tenement opens, and Serafina emerges. She’s balanced on a pair of hand-brace crutches, and her glittering silken skirt hangs hollow mid-thigh. “Seconded,” she says, grinning. “You’ve got good lungs, sea-pup.”

“Off with ya,” Vander growls, flushing. 

Serafina laughs, then smiles between the two of them. “Right-o, my fine fellows from down south, follow me.” Her whole body sways as she makes her way forward, the crutches clacking loudly over the cobbles and walkways and grates.

Vander and Silco exchange only the briefest of glances before moving to keep up. Serafina keeps a quick pace on those sticks of hers, muscles in her bare arms working as she supports her weight. Her ponytail sways with the motion of her paces.

“Are you sure you’ve not heard of the Bloody Baron?” Vander asks, as he ducks under a low platform. “Da said we couldn’t miss it.”

“Might’ve changed names, but I’m sure as the Grey.” The glitter-skinned woman leans all her weight on one crutch and half-spins to look back at Vander, then twirls all the way around and continues on with a hop to her second crutch. “Did he say where it was?”

“Down by the river.”

“All the best pubs are down by the river, sea-pup. Trust me, I’ve worked the waterside since mama stopped carryin’ me.” 

“Why would a place change names?” Silco asks. Nothing in Bergen ever changed. The river, the mountain, the mine, the Company tenement houses and the streets they were on had always been the same, as long as he could remember. Change didn’t come to the EEZ, not until he started kicking around. 

Serafina shrugs, and light catches on the glittering paint on her bare shoulders. She shines all over. “New owner, maybe. Or maybe they wanted to avoid any capital-t Troubles, what with their name being associated with rabble-rousers.” She hums thoughtfully. “Three pubs come to mind that could be the place you were after.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“We’re headed to one of them. Diver’s Bounty.”

Silco smiles to himself, and allows the indulgence of a shake of a head and a small chuckle. What a small world it is, for one he was finding was so much larger than he knew. He was a diver, wasn’t he? Or he had been, when he was younger and could fit into those narrow gaps in the rock.

“Good Bilgewater name,” Vander says, with a nod. “Probably the place, I reckon.”

Serafina playfully scoffs at him. Silco smiles.

-

It is a crowded place. The floor seems half-collapsed, and instead of attempting to fix the floor the clientele had merely adapted to it. Booths lined the tavern walls, on street level, then ramps and rampshackle platforms lead down into a barely-level pit two feet down where the rest of the tables filled the space. The air smells of all kinds of smoke, from the pit-fires where a perpetual stew bubbles under a cook’s watchful eye, to the oil lamps leaving yet more dark stains on the walls and ceiling, to each and every patron: no-one seems without a cigarette, cheroot, or pipe. 

Serafina, in her glittering body-paint and white shimmery dress, stands out like a star in the dark. Or at least how a star is said to shine; Silco has never seen one. He watches in mild amusement as their guide saunters her way inside, her crutch-strides now being accentuated by little flirtatious arches and sways. And people here know her, and greet her, and sullen silences turn to friendly nods and perhaps even a greeting as she saunters past.

“I didn’t realise you were a celebrity,” Silco notes, as he keeps pace with her. 

She just laughs. “I told you: I work the waterside. Everyone knows me here.” She flutters her eyelashes briefly, before returning to scan the pub’s interior. “Everyone loves me. Maddie!” She shifts all her weight to one crutch and raises a hand to wave, then acrobatically pounces her way down into the pit and strides her way past the crowded tables to someone on the far end of the room.

Amused, Silco does his best to catch up, with Vander keeping close behind him.

Serafina has thrown herself into an empty chair at a table currently hosting one other person. This must be ‘Maddie’: a young man with kohl-painted eyes, dark hair to his shoulders, and the whitest teeth Silco has ever seen. He is certainly giving Serafina a warm smile, but his eyes flick to Vander and Silco quickly, clocking them as strangers, and the warmth vanishes. He has no cigarette, no pipe, only a half-finished drink and a pile of papers that he sweeps into a pile and into his lap, out of sight. 

Silco gets his cigarette case from his jacket, and gets his payment ready for Serafina.

“Maddie, may I introduce my two new friends?” Serafina leans forward and accepts the cigarette from Silco’s fingers. “This gentleman here is Silco, and the big buff lad is Vander. They’ve come all the way from the southern sticks to have a chat. Lads? This is Madhukar. He’s with Freight. One of the last free Freight Companies, at least.”

Madhukar’s eyes travel with efficient judgement over the two of them. “You’ve got my ear for ten minutes, gentleman,” he says, flashing a very white smile, one that doesn’t reach his eyes. “And only because this sweet jewel has vouched for you.”

Serafina smiles, tucking the cigarette into her bustier, then reclines where she sits, her crutches leaning on the edge of the table.

At the man’s invitation, Silco and Vander take a seat. Conversation and music continue around them, but Silco is mindful of how many people here are keeping half an eye or half an ear on them. He’s used to that by now, but even so the scrutiny feels far more pointed.

“So.” Madhukar weaves his fingers together, leans forward to rest his hands and elbows on the table. “A chat? What about?” He looks at Silco first, then at Vander.

Vander shrugs, leaning back in his chair and gesturing to Silco, before busying himself with his pipe. Madhukar’s face tenses, slightly, and Silco wonders what faux pas Vander has committed. His fellow’s been prickly all afternoon, and they’re here to make a good impression.

So, with that in mind, Silco offers his cigarette case – it is gently waved aside – then tucks it back into his jacket. He tskes a breath, and begins. “I was born a miner. My parents were miners.”

“Rough work.” The Freight man arches an eyebrow. “Heavy cargo.”

“So I hear. I imagine you get paid more for the heavy stuff.”

Dark brows furrow: Silco can feel himself being assessed as much as rousing Madhukar’s curiosity. “Depends on how much we have to haul and how many we need for the job.”

“Different rates for different cargo?” 

Madhukar frowns, his eyes defensive. “Are you asking because you have something you need moved?”

“No,” Silco says. “But I am here to talk business. How much do you know about mining?”

The Freight worker snorts, amused. “You dig a hole in the ground, find the good stuff, put it in boxes and send it to us.”

“You know about the mine gas?”

“Gas? In stone?”

“Pockets of dead air,” Silco explains, “Sometimes just stale nothingness trapped in stone for ages. Sometimes it’s toxic, silent and eagerly-flammable. Mine-damp, we call it. It’s a sign of where best to start digging. When I was a boy, it was my job to crawl into crevices, down into the dark, and breathe. Find the dead air, so management can decide where to dig… and where to vent.”

The Freight man waits. He is not impatient, but it is clear he doesn’t see a point to this talk. His eyes pick over Silco’s face.

“I imagine not a lot of children work Freight,” Silco says. “Especially when it comes to lifting heavy loads.”

Madhukar’s eyes narrow slightly. “Course not. But there’s still work to be done. Courier work, message running, things like that. The rule is: if you don’t work, you don’t eat.”

Silco nods. “What’s the death toll like?”

Madhukar unlinks his hands and leans back, palms resting on the table. His face is suddenly very neutral.

“I ask,” Silco continues, “Because when I was young? Miners would die all the time. From the children checking for mine-damp, to those half-grown digging the holes for lights and lines and richer veins, to the adults and aged sorting the ore and shale or pushing the carts. A fact of life, learned young, that death’s everywhere. My own parents were…” Silco feels his throat seize up. He hasn’t thought about them in a while. The realisation stops him from speaking as much as the memory of their loss does. 

“My condolences for their passing,” Madhukar says carefully, diplomatically.

Silco exhales through his nose. He steadies himself. “Things have changed,” he says. He finds his voice settling into the same level tone and commanding cadence that it does at every Collective meeting. He is aware of more people listening in; he knows his voice has that effect. “We got tired of dying. We got tired of the negligence and the neglect and the way we were treated as expendable by those in power.”

And there, for a moment, Madhukar’s eyes gleam with interest. Something in that phrase has him listening intently. There is a purpose to his interest.

But Silco doesn’t have the time to decipher exactly what it is. “We, the miners, formed a Collective. Every one in the mines, from the children to the elderly, was a person worth hearing. Worth keeping alive.” He raises his hand, balances the palm, tips it down to the table. “In the past year, there hasn’t been a single child that has died in the mines. We stopped it from happening.”

“You stopped death?” Madhukar laughs, lightly mocking. 

“Near enough,” Silco nods, giving a small smile. “Turns out, when the workers outnumber the people in charge, the people in charge get a bit nervous about treading down too hard.” He flashes a brief glimpse of teeth. “After all, we have pickaxes and dynamite.”

Madhukar studies Silco again. Beside him, Serafina’s eyes are wide. Both of them are sitting very still, not moving.

“We still work,” Silco continues weaving his hands together, tapping his thumbs. “We still dig in the dark, still sort the ore and coal, still bring the Company the profit they’ve come to expect. But we changed the rules. We set our own shifts. We keep everyone fed and healthy. We have schools for the children and infirmaries for the injured, and even a kitchen so we have hot meals and a place where we can make and fix our own gear instead of waiting for contracted imports. We used to be crushed under the weight of our work, but now we’re… proud of it. Strong in it.”

Madhukar takes a breath in the silence that Silco leaves, then takes a pull of his drink. He hums, and frowns, then meets Silco’s gaze again. “And what’s that got to do with Freight, exactly?”

Silco tips his chin towards the man. “Because of what you said: you don’t work, you don’t eat.” He shrugs, and taps his thumbs together again, leaning forward on his elbows. “Most of Freight’s owned by the Governor in Azgov, I hear.”

“Most of Freight,” Madhukar echoes. Silco sees the spark in the other man’s eyes, but it’s guarded. “Some families operate locally, but…” The corner of his mouth twitches, a flash of tooth in a sneer. “You’ve it right.”

“A chain of command that ironclad must be…” Silco remembers his cigarette, and is midly disappointed to see it burned to the end. He stubs it out on the table’s empty ashtray. “Frustrating.” When Madhukar’s brow furrows, Silco sees agreement. “Work is prioritised to the governor’s favourites, I imagine?”

The Freight man swirls his flagon, then slides it to his right, within reach of Serafina. A gesture of comfortable familiarity. “Sometimes there’s not enough work to go ‘round, das. But that’s just business.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Silco says.

“Oh? You think so?”

Silco nods, his eyes locked on the other man’s. He sees that fire, that frustration. He wants to reach it. He understands it. He’s seen it and encouraged it in others, surely here he can do the same. 

For a moment, the Freight man just stares back at him. But then his eyes slide away, to Vander. “And what about you, big lad? You still like digging your holes?”

“Me?” Vander scoffs a laugh. “Nah, mate, I’m not a miner. Not even from the mountains. My Da and I run a pawn shop in Bergen proper.”

Madhukar blinks. “A pawn shop? So why are you here?”

Vander leans one arm on the table and grins. “Coz I seen a bunch of suits and steel-boots shudderin’. Coz Silco’s started somethin’ impossible, an’ I wanna stick around and see just how far he can go.”

“We,” Silco corrects, gently, for the Collective’s sake, but gives Vander a warm smile. Then he turns his gaze back to Madhukar. “I started the Collective to give us a better chance of surviving. Turns out, a few pushes to be seen as human and be treated fair—”

“Makes the rich folk shit themselves,” Vander interrupts, with a loud laugh. “Sil, tell ‘em about that Company kid.” And then he leans forward, keen to tell the story himself. “He shows up with a whole platoon, armed to the teeth. Turns off the air, thinking to choke the whole mine out. And Sil goes out there…”

Madhukar raises a palm, shaking his head. “Gentlemen,” he says, smiling in a charming way that somehow doesn’t meet his eyes. “I am very pleased to hear you have done well for yourselves and your people. But your mine is not the district of Azgov, and your miners are not our shipping-folk. What was dire need and a triumph for you is not the same for us.”

Vander huffs, and slumps back in his chair with his arms folded. Silco stays still, watching the Freight man.

Madhukar returns Silco’s gaze, level and firm. “The stakes are higher here,” he says simply. “You cannot possibly understand the danger you would put us all in, if we were to start making demands or changes like you suggest.”

“Then tell me,” Silco says. “Tell me about it, so I can know.”

But the young man shakes his head. “Your time is up.” He exhales through his nose, setting his jaw. “You have a good day, miner-boy. Don’t get mugged on the way home.”

Vander throws his hands up, and uses the momentum of the drop of his arms to rise from his seat. “C’mon, Sil. Sorry this didn’t work out.”

Silco doesn’t rise, not for a moment. He’s still watching Madhukar, and those guarded eyes. Silco knows that guardedness. He knows he’s been heard, and understood. The spark is there, but… what can one person do against the wall of The Way Things Are? Madhukar has heard him. Plenty of people eavesdropping also heard him. That’s all Silco wanted, to be heard. That’s how it starts. But there is so much more to say, and no chance to say it.

He gets to his feet, fixes his vest, and turns to follow Vander to the door. There’s a lot of the room they’ll need to cross, all that uneven ground.

“Wait!”

Madhukar lets out an exclaimation, lifting the papers out of his lap in an effort to save them: Serafina has jumped up so quickly that she’s knocked the man’s drink over with her crutches. 

The glittery-skinned nightwalker slings herself around into Silco’s path, her crutches almost skidding on the mismatched wooden floorplanks. “Wait,” she says, pleading, her eyes still wide, as she fights for balance. “You… how d’you do it?”

Silco cocks his head slightly. 

“Your Collective,” Serafina says. “How’d you get people to… to listen?” 

Like this, he thinks. 

Serafina leans her weight on one of the crutches, freeing a hand to grab Silco’s sleeve. He crooks his arm, instead, like the gentleman she’d joked him to be, and escorts her to an empty table, pulling out a chair for her. She sits, not taking her eyes off him.

She looks scared. Desperate. There’s a very hungry hope in her eyes. It’s not quite a fire, but maybe… maybe it could be enough. After all, he’d come here to talk.

Vander glances at Silco, then gives an amused sigh. “I’ll get us some drinks. Hope our money’s good here.” He’d brought a bunch of cross-district currency with him, and not all of it had been spent on the border bribes. 

Silco trusts Vander to handle the necessities in the background. For now, he was asked a question, so it’s time to do what he does best, what he came here to do.

“I don’t know much about you,” Silco says, studying the woman’s face. “Or the work you do.”

Serafina’s nose wrinkles slightly, a bit of amusement showing through the tension. “What, you’ve never had business in bed before?”

Silco gives a brief shake of his head. Not at the mines, no. He’s never felt the need for it. He’s always been so tired with the work, and the apartment has always felt too empty of love to leave at night and too full of grief to bring someone to share it. There were whores enough in Bergen, some of them did quite well cashing in miner’s scrip and Company tokens. But he’d never shared companionship for coin. 

The glittery-skinned woman hesitates. Then her eyes flick across the room, to where Vander is leaning at the bar. “So you picked him up instead, for free? Sorry,” she amends, quickly, “Don’t mean no disrespect—”

Silco, regardless, snorts. “No, it was funny.” It’s the right return to a teasing joke, a response that helps ease a bit of tension out of the woman’s tightly-gripped hands. “But the work I mean’s more in the nature of it, rather than the body of it.” He tips his chin to the room. “You’re respected here.”

“Course I am,” Serafina frowns slightly. “This is home turf.”

“People here listen to you.”

“Yeah.” Her brows furrow. “But that’s not what I mean.”

“You mean ‘other people’.”

Something about the question scares her into silence. She gives only the smallest and jerkiest of nods. 

Gentle. Easy. He’s dealt with scared people before. People are most fearful when they feel alone. “So tell me about the work. Is it just you in that tenement?”

She shakes her head, pulling her ponytail into her hands to pull nervously, soothingly, at it. “Thirteen of us. We split day and night shifts, so we have enough to pay rent.”

“Rent? Who to?”

“Fella by the name Makrus.”

“Thirteen to one.” Silco hums softly. “Those numbers seem a bit off.”

Serafina’s fingers hook into her hair.

“I get people to listen,” he continues, gently, “By having the numbers.” He glances across the room, where Vander is bargaining for a pair of pints; Silco’s gaze, on the return journey, catch Madhukar of Freight watching intently, closely, from the table right behind him. 

“Lots of miners down south, I hear,” Serafina says stiffly.

“There can’t be only thirteen nightwalkers in the whole of Azgov,” Silco raises an eyebrow. 

She wrinkles her nose at him. “There’s more than just us, don’t be daft. But they’re competition.”

“Says who? The man who collects your rent?”

Serafina’s mouth opens, then closes again. She frowns, and smoothes down her hair. 

He knows he could push the point more. But this is a woman who doesn’t need to be pushed. She needs to see a way out. “Numbers,” he says, trying to build up the courage. It’s one thing to talk to people you’ve known all your life, but baring your soul to the wrong stranger could end badly. He swallows the lump in his throat, laces his fingers together, leans his elbows on the table. “When my parents died,” he says, quietly, looking at his thumbs, “I was given a cheque. Enough money to cover the apartment for years. All I needed to do was keep my head down.” He lifts his gaze, and holds hers. “But I went looking for the numbers. The ledgers. And I found the Company spent more on replacement pickaxes than they did on the people who brought me into this world.” It still makes him sick, to remember it. Still makes his fingers itch to steal a few more pinches of dynamite.

Vander sets a flagon of something dark and potent on the table, then eases himself into the chair at Silco’s side. Feeling Vander’s hand on his shoulder, that brief reassuring squeeze, gives Silco a bit more of the strength to continue. To breathe, even.

“Numbers,” Serafina says quietly. “Not just people.”

He nods. “The Company owned everything. The buildings we lived in, the tools we used, the food we ate, even the air they send into the mines. But if we stopped working, they’d had nothing. We have the numbers, so we should have the numbers.” He unlaces his fingers and leans forward on his elbows, smiling faintly at Serafina. “So. Tell me about this fellow who collects the rent.”

“S’not just him,” Serafina narrows her eyes against the unpleasant familiarity she has with this person in her mind’s eye. “He shows up with three, maybe four fellows. Just to make sure we all stay in line. We don’t got the option to just stop workin’, y’know.”

Silco sips from the dark ale he’d been brought, and lets the silence exist for Serafina to fill it. 

“Makrus doesn’t own the building,” the woman says, frowning to herself. “Just collects rent on it, for someone else. Dunno who.” And her eyes slide to one side, and narrow at the middle distance. It’s something she knows she should know, but she’s never thought about. Her eyes flick back to Silco, then to Vander. “Rent, an’ protection,” she adds, like an almost necessary afterthought.

It’s Vander who speaks up now. “Protection? From what? The gov’nor?”

“From bad customers,” Serafina says, “From…” And she pauses, her eyes narrowing. Then she scoffs, and taps the edge of the table with a mica-painted fingernail, and her lips press together sourly.

Silco knows the look, knows the realisation she’s having. “They’re manufacturing the danger you’re in, so you’ll pay.”

“S’the way it’s always been,” Serafina taps the table again.

“Always is,” Vander shrugs, and sips his ale. “Why would there ever be an alternative?” He gestures with his thumb towards Silco. “More than one mining Company in the EEZ, y’know. Competition, kinda like you said you had. Least, ‘til Sil and the Collective started makin’ friends along the other mines. Now the Collective’s more people, not just one worksite. Everyone’s still workin’, just… the Company – Companies - don’t decide life and death like they used to.”

There is a sharp clack as a third mug is set on the table. Silco looks up, into the inscrutable gaze of Madhukar, who pulls his own chair up, taking a seat with a fresh drink in hand. Behind him, and in many of the tables, other folks are listening with the same deadpan keenness as this Freight man. His expression is very difficult to decipher, but it doesn’t seem overtly hostile.

Serafina doesn’t even acknowledge Madhukar joining her, or his defensive posture and seat at her side. She’s looking at Silco, rolling her lower lip between her teeth as she does so. “There’s dead air in the rock, you say.” That hungry desperation isn’t in her eyes anymore. Now it’s sharp, and thoughtful, and something else. “There’s worse out on the streets. Plenty to kill you, or worse.” She looks at his scars, and chews her lip again.

“I don’t doubt it. But, again, you’d know better than I.” Silco keeps his eyes on Serafina, maintaining their conversation, but he is aware of the way that Madhukar is looking at him. There’s measurement in that gaze, the sense and implication of being balanced on a set of scales. He’d come here to speak to Freight, and Freight was listening. But this woman in front of him, her skin painted with sparkles, means more in this moment. She, and what Silco would say to her, carries weight and more importance. “… I won’t lie, it wasn’t easy, getting people to listen. And it certainly didn’t happen overnight, or with everyone immediately rallying. ‘The way things are’ might be awful, but it’s familiar.”

“Familiarity breeds contempt,” Serafina murmurs. Was she quoting something?

Silco shrugs and takes a sip of his dark ale. “Comfort, I’d say. People will pick comfort over change, more often than not.”

Serafina’s brows pinch together, and her lips purse. She almost seems about to nod.

Madhukar half leans towards her, letting their shoulders press together as though to transfer some strength to Serafina. “So why didn’t you, miner boy?”

His gaze flicks to the Freight man, then back to Serafina. “I got angry,” he said, simply. “Angry enough that ‘the way things are’ felt like kindling.”

Vander chuckles, and downs the last of his drink. “Sil, we gotta go. Gotta make it back before the border pass expires.”

Silco tsks, but nods. “Never enough hours in the day,” he shrugs, and throws his drink back too. When he sets his flagon back down, his attention is still on the shining nightwalker. “I know this is your turf, but you called me a gentleman—”

Vander sighs heavily.

Silco ignores him, continuing, “So if you need someone to walk you back, I’d be happy to oblige.”

Madhukar tsks faintly, straightening in his chair. 

But the nightwalker’s lips curve in an amused smile, some of her unease banished at what now seems to be a running joke shared between herself and this skinny miner from the southern sticks. “It’ll cost you a cigarette.”

“Now, or when we get there?”

She hums, thoughtfully. “In advance. Can’t have you running off on me.”

Silco inclines his head, rises, and flourishes his cigarette case at her. She laughs, spends a moment to deliberate, then plucks out one to secure in her bustier.

“Most men would try to negotiate prices,” she arches an eyebrow at him, as she rises and secures her crutches in place.

“Oh, should I have done that? It’s my first time.”

Vander rolls his eyes. “Gods almighty, Sil, you’re a right trial sometimes.”

Serafina giggles. “Easy, sea-pup, I’m not gonna steal your man. He couldn’t afford me, anyway.”

“Likely,” Silco gives a grin that his face makes lopsided, “A miner’s pay isn’t worth the tin it’s made from.”

Vander huffs, throwing his arm, and makes for the door. Serafina is not far behind, teasing the young man gently. 

Silco pauses, and looks at Madhukar. The Freight man looks back at him, indecipherable. 

“East Bergen,” Silco says. “If you need to find us, or blacklist us, or anything else, you’ll find us in Bergen.” He turns aside, fixing his lapels and giving the other man no time to respond. That conversation, after all, had come to an end a while ago. He catches a lot of eyes on him as he catches up with Vander and Serafina.

He has to wonder about this place. Most of Freight in Azgov is owned by the governor of Azgov. People kept behind fences. So what kind of Freight is this, that they have a whole building, and food and alcohol, and a place to sit and smoke in prime working hours? There’s so much of the world he doesn’t know. At least he’s sure that today wasn’t a total wash. 

“— throw you over my shoulder and carry you the rest of the way,” Vander grizzles.

“That’ll cost you another cigarette, sea-pup!”

“Silco’s payin’, not me!”

“Oh, so you’ll share?”

Silco breathes a laugh. “I take my eyes off of you for two seconds,” he tsks to Vander, then crooks his elbow to Serafina. 

She laughs, and waves him off, striding forward on her crutches, leaving the men to keep pace behind and aside her. 

The streets feel different, in lengthening shadows, as lanterns are lit and brighter lights from the towers and rope-platforms above cast down weird finger-long shadows through the Grey. Sunset near Bergen feels slow, gradual. This is barely afternoon, and it feels like someone’s drawn a curtain, and then shone a searchlight over it; being out on the streets feels illicit, anticipatory. Silco rests his hand on the hilt of his knife as he walks, and Vander’s eyes cast back and forth, watching faces and glancing down alleys.

“Clever clogs,” Serafina notes, her voice a whisper. “An’ here I thought I’d have to tout you a warning.”

“Not everyone from the sticks is a fool,” Vander murmurs. He glowers at a passing stranger, who quickens their pace to pass by so he can keep minding his own business. 

“Never said either of you were.” She pulls up short for a moment, and frees one hand from her crutches to touch part of a crumbling wall. In the hazy dimness, Silco thinks he can see a shape in the mosaic, a smear of blue paint all that gives it any meaning. “… Azgov’s rife with landlords,” she says, even quieter. She stares into the dark, and swallows. 

Landlords. The term itself makes Silco’s skin itch, but it carries the weight of more than just ‘rent’ and ‘power’. She’s waiting here for a reason, biding her time. Hiding?

Vander glances at Silco, then shifts around to stand at Serafina’s other side. She gives a small breath of a laugh and pats him on the arm, then looks to Silco. A smile is creeping across her face, and the mica sparkles on her cheeks.

“No jokes,” Silco warns, gently. “He’s just being polite.”

Vander grunts. “Figured you’d feel better bein’ inbetwee— gods dammit.”

Serafina snorts in an effort to stifle the laugh. Silco rubs his face with his hand; he’s not hiding a smile, he certainly is not. 

“Gods damn you both,” Vander brings up both hands and rubs his face. “Augh. Are we near your tenement or not, woman?”

“Not far now. Few more blocks.” She takes a breath, then leans on her crutches and swings herself forward. She’s moving gracefully still, but now her head is down and there’s a definitive attempt to lengthen her strides. Silco and Vander keep up, shadowing her like they’re her hired muscle. What people there are tend to give a wide berth, or duck aside entirely. Between Vander’s size and Silco’s face, they have a menacing presence that keeps them safe from this odd dusk-light tension.

Serafina breathes a sigh of relief as the tenement comes into view. The door is open, two women languidly posed for passers-by, but they immediately straighten up, alert and tense. (Or… no; Silco frowns. The tension had even been in their affected casualness. Or is he overthinking?)

“They’re fine,” Serafina hisses a hushed whisper, as she pivots and turns back to face Silco and Vander with a grateful smile. “They got me back safe. I’m safe, I’m back safe…”

“As promised.” Silco inclines his head. “You take care.”

The nightwalker smiles, but it doesn’t quite meet her eyes. “You know your way back to the border from here?”

Silco glances to Vander, who shrugs a casual nod. “We’ll be fine.”

Serafina wrinkles her nose, somewhat unconvinced. “You take care, lads. Don’t get caught.”

Caught? By whom? Or by what? Silco inclines his head, and turns to go. 

Serafina and the other two nightwalkers squeeze through the tenement door, and shut it. A lock clunks into place. The light on the other side is turned off, no more beams through the gauzy curtain. The street is so much darker now, definitively enclosed in shadows between the old walls and the taller buildings and the rope-made paths overhead.

Vander squints. “The hells is going on,” he murmurs, as he catches up to Silco. 

“Something we weren’t ready for,” Silco murmurs back; he’s paused, frowning. “Carlisle didn’t mention any of this to you?”

The blond shook his head. “Azgov weren’t this tense when Da were here. He wouldn’t’ve let me come without my hello-stick if he knew it were this bad.” He bites his lip and inhales through his teeth. “Sil, if I didn’t know any better, this’d read like a real good place for a trap.”

“… I know.”

Light shifts in the street, a small slice of it cutting through the darkness outside. Silco glances towards the source. The upstairs window where Serafina had been sewing before, when they first met her, has illuminated. The shutters are drawn, but Silco sees the light, and the shadow of a woman. She’s watching them leave.

Serafina had touched the blue bird for them, not for her, hadn’t she?

Cold instinct hits his spine. Silco rests his hand on his knife, and turns to see someone coming out of the nearest alley, grinning at him. 

“See somethin’ you like, friend?”

Silco’s heard the word ‘friend’ used like a threat before. Sometimes it’s subtle. This time does not feel subtle. It’s spoken through broken teeth and backed by companions who have their hands resting casually on nail-embedded bludgeons.

Silco reads the situation quickly, from the figures sauntering out of the darkness, and the way Serafina retreats further from the shutters, and how even the mosaic patterns on the wall seem to be still, trying to be invisible behind the trash and grime. One of these thugs must be Makrus, Silco guesses. This is how Makrus controls his streets, and his possessions, and no-one passes through without giving the landlord his cut. This is a situation that needs to be diffused. And this is, above all things, about business.

“Pretty,” Silco says, leaning into his EEZ accent a touch more than necessary. “But not really worth my coin.”

The man who must be Makrus smirks, his gaze sliding to Vander, then back to Silco. “I see, I see. Shame, really. They’re worth the time and energy.” And he grins, and his companions all make knowing, ugly laughs. 

Silco sees something in his periphery. In the opposite alley, through which he and Vander had just walked, someone in shadow is staying just out of sight. Watching. Tense. A third party? Part of the trap? No, it doesn’t seem so. But it almost strikes him as absurd. What kind of a pantomime is this? Silco wonders. And then, a thought. A pantomine? A performance? So be it. He can play a role or two.

So he shrugs, in Makrus’ direction. “We’re looking for something else. Don’t s’pose you have any suggestions for where a couple of lads from the sticks might find fun that suits them?”

Vander picks up on the mood shift as well, and drops his arms to his side, looking more the big slow bumpkin. “We’ve coin burning a hole in our pockets a-night, we do. An’ a right need to spend it ‘for the dawn.” He nods, his head bobbing, his eyes wide and simple. It’s a remarkable transformation; he’s a good actor.

Makrus struts forward, looking Silco up and down, then Vander. “Might do, might do, dear lads. This isn’t the only cathouse in Azgov.”

“We’re not here for cats,” Silco says, politely. He doesn’t let the smile reach his eyes.

Makrus’ men guffaw like it’s the funniest thing they’ve heard. Makrus tsks them to silence, then reaches into his patchwork coat to produce a card that he shoves into Silco’s hand. Surrepticiously, like this is some grand secret, and his heavy hands enclose over Silco’s somewhere between entreaty and threat but heavy on the latter. “I got the only folk worth fuckin’ in Azgov, lad. Any of the houses with his symbol on the door? It’s mine. You’ll spend your coin there and nowhere else. Get me, get me?” The men heft their clubs suggestively.

“I get you,” Silco nods his chin. Vander grunts the affirmative.

“Lovely, lovely!” Makrus lets go, and steps back to join his men. “We’re headed to the Lock for a drink, care to come along?”

“Next time. We got… things to do. Things of yours.”

“Ha! Right you do, right you do. Cheerio!”

Silco watches the gang of thugs leave, then looks at the card. A skull, impaled by a curved spear, haloed by five nails. He looks up now, and sees the same symbol amidst the graffiti on the tenement facade. It wasn’t huge, it wasn’t noticeable, but now he knows what to look for he can easily see it. It is ugly and threatening, a brand of ownership on the building and the women who have to call it home.

“That man has a very punchable face,” Vander says evenly, rolling his neck and folding his arms. 

“Next time,” Silco echoes. He turns to the shadows, and flicks the card in the direction of the darkness.

A hand snaps out, snatching the card out of the air.

“Get the numbers,” Silco suggests. 

Madhukar nods, his eyes dark and angry, before he slips back into the shadows, and then away into the streets. 

There were plenty of miners who couldn’t work: the injured, the sick, those with inherited conditions, and so on. Sometimes these people were compensated by the Company, but more often they were not. These people still needed to eat; the Collective began to see to it that no-one would be without a meal, or without work. And soon more ideas were offered at the meetings: these folk who could not work in the mines would not be out of work entirely. They could teach mathematics and language to the children who weren’t needed in the mines. Others could clean and maintain the masks and mining equipment, and share the techniques needed for such care and maintenance. There could be classes for literacy and mathematics, there could be classes for cooking and clothing repair and other basic needs, there could be classes for music and storytelling. And, one of the most eagerly-embraced ideas of all, there could be changes made at the mines to make the newly-implemented breaks a little more comfortable.

The Collective Canteen had been built with scrap and rubble, broken carts and rusted beams, squared-off blocks of discarded mine stone, and draped sheets held in place with rail spikes. It squatted near the mine entrance, puffing smoke from jerry-rigged chimneys. It was so beautiful in its ramshackle ugliness, because it had been made by a community with love.

Three months after its opening, Silco lifts the canvas doorway and looks inside with a small proud smile. The ovens, the benches, the shelf of battered pots and pans and implements, the jars of donated grains and spices… it wasn’t much, but all of it was the Collective’s. This hadn’t been his idea: look what the people had come up with on their own, as they pushed for things to be better, as the spark was shared between them. Those who couldn’t work in the mines took shifts here, making meals that children would deliver below to the crews. People could have proper hot meal to fill the belly, not just a smuggled crust of bread in a coat pocket to be eaten while the foreman wasn’t watching, like they used to. The Collective was growing. People were taking care of each other. Things were getting better.

“There’s coffee on the stove.” A voice interrupts Silco’s thoughts. The Canteen saw workers coming and going all the time, each taking their turn with service, but Maryam had been here the longest. An arm injury had brought her here, but a pregnancy had been a good-enough reason for her to ask if she could stay. She was too far along to swing a pickaxe, but she was organised, and trusted, and happy to help.

“I can smell it,” Silco says, letting the canvas fall closed behind him. “I’ve been thinking about a cup since my shift ended.”

Maryam waves her pen vaguely at the stewpot behind her, a huge battered thing, set on top of a broken and overturned minecart. “Then help yourself.” She is busy with tallying the day’s takings, flicking beads on an abacus and counting the thin tin and copper coins in front of her. Not everyone could pay, but those who did made it easier to fill the larder for the rest. And when everyone was fed, everyone benefited.

Silco grabs a scuffed enamel cup from the rack and slips behind the counter. The fire that had been burning under the minecart is down to its last coals, and the dark liquid in the stewpot isn’t steaming. Still, coffee is coffee. He dips his mug to fill it, and takes a quick thirsty gulp of the bitter brew.

“You know Kassandra?” Maryam asks. She glances up at Silco joins her at the counter. “In Work Crew Jussi?”

Silco thinks for a second, then nods. “Yes. Married Tyr last season?”

“That’s her.” She nods, sweeping a small stack of coins to one side. “She has a cousin in Production, in Bergen proper, and might be able to get something to add to the stews. She says the cousin can get her a few sacks of leftovers. Might even be able to make it regular if we’re good to them.”

Silco nods thoughtfully as he sips the coffee. “It won’t be cheap,” he notes, “Even with a family discount.”

Maryam shrugs, her mouth pulling in a wry smile. “Maybe we should invite Production into the Collective.”

He laughs, dryly, incredulous. Why would Production need a Collective? The workers in the city no doubt have protections and wages far better than those who perform hard labour on the outskirts. “We’re doing very well as it is. Better than expected and in such a short period of time.”

“Mmm,” she hums, tapping her pen on the counter. “But we can do better than leftovers and grocery donations from home kitchens.”

“We can?” Silco asks, mildly. When the woman just grins, he laughs and nods to her in salute. “You have an idea. You’re ambitious.” He’s pleased. He so loves seeing the way ideas and hope bloom these days.

“I’ve been here long enough that this place is my baby.” Maryam looks around, proudly, then sets her hand on her belly. “I’m going to have this child here, I’ve decided. Spill blood and bring life out on this hard-packed earth.”

Silco raises his mug in a silent toast. He recognises the words having some kind of rite quality to them. He had never learned his parents’ religion, and had no community outside of the mines. But there are those who toast, and so it follows that this seems like a statement worth toasting; there is power to it, and more the power to her for it. More power to all of them.

“I do have an idea,” Maryam continues, as she finishes her count and swipes the coins into an old lunchbox. “It’s not one that’s gonna take off anytime soon. But there’s plenty of tunnels where the ore’s run dry and the coal’s chipped out. Ones near the vents, so air’s not sour. What if we made use of some of that dead space?”

Silco frowns in thought, nodding as he considers how much of mines gets abandoned or buried whenever it no longer produces. “In what way?”

“Well.” Maryam folds her hands over her belly, smiling, “What if we made a garden? A few boxes of shit and soil, and we could start growing mushrooms.”

Mushrooms. Silco’s mouth involuntarily waters; he looks at the woman in wide-eyed admiration. 

“Collective-grown crops for the Collective canteen,” the woman smiles serenely. “And who knows? Maybe we could even start ranching rats.”

“My gods. We’ll eat like kings.”

Maryam laughs. “I s’pose I’m cleared to bring it up at the next meeting?”

“You don’t need my permission t—” He freezes, hearing something outside.

“Well, I thought I’d—” 

Glass shatters. Fire blooms against the wall of the canteen. Maryam screams. Silco dives for her, shielding her as best he can with his scrawny frame, hauling her to her feet and moving at staggered, stumbling swiftness as they make for the canvas wall, for outside.

He hears it louder now, the sound of footsteps and angry voices and then, as he and Maryam push out of the flames and smoke, he sees them. Strangers, illuminated by torches and glow-tubes and moonshine-bottle grenades.

Another one of those grenades hits the side of the canteen, and the strangers howl and cheer. Maryam screams again, this time in outrage and fury. Miners still around after their shift are running to sound the alarm, to gather pails of dirt for to smother the fire, and to come to the aid of Maryam.

Silco stares at the fires. His eyes are wide, and all he can see is the canteen up in flames. Everything burns, and he feels cold.

Maryam is still screaming, pulling herself out of the teenager’s arms to address the strangers with curse and fury, but she doesn’t get far. She staggers, and falls, clutching her belly. One of the strangers moves to stand over her, arm raised as though to strike her.

Silco moves, then, whip-fast, charging forward. He doesn’t have the strength to tackle the man to the ground, but he has a pretty knife he carries with him always. A few rapid jabs are enough to drive the man back, but now— Silco grits his teeth and braces himself, standing between the pregnant woman and the angry mob. His hand grips the knife in a tight fist, trying to keep from shaking.

He can see them now, this mob. Rough and filthy and furious, armed with pick and shovel, men and women with bared teeth and fury in their faces. He realises with an odd jolt that he is staring down a group of miners. Strangers, yes, but miners. 

“What in the good hells are you doing?” He doesn’t have a voice that carries, not with his lungs burned out, but they’re not watching the canteen burn anymore. They’re watching him, and they hate him, so they hear him. “Why are you doing this?!”

They didn’t come here to talk. They came with fire and weapons and hate. They cuss him out, and call him bastard, and say he and all his kind deserve this. Silco scans their faces, and sees the anger he’s familiar with, the kind of anger that once had him pinned against a tunnel wall with a pick at his throat. They have the same fury he did: he’d thrown dynamite into a tenement with that anger, and in the same way they’ve made their grenades to burn down this canteen. 

They’re strangers to him, but they’re miners. They must come from another Company, another part of the mountain. But why are they attacking the Collective? Why are they calling him a bastard?

There’s no time for rhetoric. There’s no air left to speak, because it’s all being used in the fire burning down the canteen. All he can do is hold his ground and protect Maryam, as ash falls down over him and the canteen collapses into charred wood and smoking metal.

Yakob, Maryam’s husband, slam-tackles one of the strangers to the ground, and starts laying in with his fists. He’s not alone; other members of the Collective charge down the hill and throw themselves into the melee. Silco glances to Maryam – seeing her well, but there’s despair in her face as she watches the Canteen burn – before he snarls and charges forward to join the fight, to protect what’s theirs.

It’s a brawl of blood and fists and ash and the gleam of Silco’s knife, under a grey fresh-smoke sky.

---

“Right, that’s the bandages done. Let’s see that eye of yours again,” Vander says, peering in.

Silco obediently lifts the bag of ice chips off his face, squinting with the good side of his face.

The messy-haired youth gives a low impressed whistle. “Swelling’s down, but you’re gonna have a hell of a shiner, Sil.”

“I didn’t even know my face could bruise,” Silco admits, putting the sodden icebag back against the right side of his face. “I thought the gas-paralysis prevented that.”

Vander shakes his head, then resumes his close scrutiny of Silco’s battered hand. For a man with large hands, he is being very careful, very gentle, and very thorough. When he presses against Silco’s knuckles, Silco winces at the pain, and Vander eases his touch immediately. “Describe the pain there, Sil.”

“Uh. Ouch?”

“Sharp, stabbing, lingering?”

“Sharp, I guess? Fades to an ache?”

Vander massages around the ache, then gives a small grunt of relief. “Nothing broken, then. Good t’know.”

Silco blinks with his good eye, his lips pursing in the best smile his face would allow. “And you know this how, exactly?”

Vander opens his mouth to answer. But his father answers first, busy as he is in the kitchen.

“He were apprenticed as a doctor’s boy,” Carlisle Vander grizzles, slamming a cleaver into root vegetables with more aggression than they deserved. “Five years of trainin’ an’ workin’. Waste of a good education, ‘coz he turned tail an’ ran soon as the work got too tough.”

Vander’s face creases in exasperation. “Dad.” It was a warning, a plea, an attempt to interrupt what was clearly an argument hashed and rehashed on-and-off for years.

“It was your ticket to a better life,” the older man throws a scowl over his shoulder. “Did we scrimp an’ save for months to get you the joinin’ fee? That we did!” 

“Dad.” Vander gives Silco a look of mild apology. He hasn’t let go of Silco’s hand, and still circles his thumbs around the shape of Silco’s knuckles. 

Silco, though, lowers the bag of ice and stares at the messy-haired youth. “You were a doctor?”

“Just an apprentice,” Vander mutters.

“Couldn’t handle it,” his father offers, scathingly. 

“Dad, enough. I already tol’ you what it was like.” His accent always became more pronounced when he was at home. “It weren’t a life fer me.”

“Imagine what you coulda been,” Carlisle tossed the rough-chopped vegetables into the pot, where they hissed in the oil in protest. “Coulda had a proper future.”

“Weren’t the future I wanted, Dad, so drop it.” He pauses, and looks at Silco’s hand, and face, and the bandages he’s just finished binding, and a flush of colour rises in his cheeks. “I know enough, learned enough. Didn’t need more. We’ve been over this.”

“You weren’t born a doctor?” Silco feels like he’s missing a significant piece of context. “And you just… you left? You can do that?”

“Well, yeah.” Vander says, managing a lop-sided smile.

“Not everyone’s born into a profession like you, lad,” Carlisle offers, shrugging. “Not everyone in Zaun’s born t’a Company. Some gotta buy their way into somethin’ new, or they pick up what they can, where they can. S’why we’re runnin’ a pawn shop.”

Silco feels the ice in his hand and the ache in his hands and face, and is suddenly conscious of how big the world is when you’re not pinched between stone and darkness. “People can choose where they work.” It’s a revelation. It makes him feel small, and ill, and in the same way he felt when he stood on the edge of the Ironspikes and looked south to see the world unfurled vast before him. A world within view but just out of reach.

“Aye,” Carlisle mutters, giving his son one more dark look, though now at least it is tempered with a grudging acceptance. “They can.”

Vander pulls a face at his father, then gently lets go of Silco’s hand. “You’re stayin’ the night again, Sil?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” Silco still has too much adrenaline in his system, after the fight, after dousing the fire, after getting clocked in the face, after having his hand and face touched with such care by Vander. “I don’t want to cause you any trouble.”

Carlisle grunts. “If your Company wanted t’fuck us over, lad, they’d’ve done so already. Not like you two’ve been subtle about your sneaking off.”

“Dad!” Vander buries his face in his hands.

“Dinner’s in the pot an’ cookin’ up.” Carlisle ignores his son and gestures the ladle in a vaguely-threatening way in Silco’s direction. “You’re stayin’ t’eat, but after that I don’t give a rat’s arse what you do with your time or where you lay your head. Get me?”

“Thankyou, Mister Vander,” Silco says, politely, lips quirking as he fights not to smile. He’s familiar with the old man’s surly affection now, and hears the invitation to stay the night for what it is. “I appreciate it.”

The old man grunts, then gets back to work.

“‘Mister Vander’,” the younger mocks, under his breath.

Silco smirks a little. “You’re the one who doesn’t like being called by your first name,” he points out, in the same whispered tone. “Warwick.” Pronounced ‘worrick’; Carlisle, too, was not pronounced how it was spelled, being ‘car-lyl’. It was a habit of Middletongue to pick up and discard rules of language as it saw fit, especially when it came to names. 

Vander the Younger flushes a slight pink. “Shut up.”

“Make me.”

Vander looks like he plans on making Silco shut up, with his eyes dropping to Silco’s lips and a grin starting to form. But then Carlisle calls for his son to set the table, so the young former-and-not-currently-a-doctor Vander sighs and gets to his feet and wanders across the room to help.

Silco puts the ice back against his face. He thinks about being born a miner. He thinks about the miner who gave him this black eye. He thinks about the fire that burned down the Canteen, and the view beyond the borders, and his jaw sets with renewed determination.

---

His cigarette is burned almost all the way through, but he’s barely noticed. He and a few others from the Collective have been watching this other mining site for the better part of two hours now, noting the differences between the Company that runs this place and the one that owns where the Collective toils. The conditions are as different as night and day. Silco nurses his anger. 

The whistle has blown to signal the end of shift, but the emergence of miners from below takes agonising hours. Company agents and security check each miner for ore or shale they might be trying to smuggle out. Equipment is collected and scrutinised. Each shuffling, miserable miner is given their scrip and made to depart the property. It’s pitch black, but for the floodlights trained in the ragged folk shuffling out from under the earth.

“Looks like a prison camp,” Gesso hisses softly. Silco agrees, but says nothing. He just finishes his cigarette.

Most miners shuffle off towards the Company-owned tenements. But there’s many more who make their way to the mazelike slump of tents and shacks that pock the mountainside, homes built between the air-pumps and shale-vents. There’s a larger building, sitting humped like a tumour at the start of the path, where signs proclaim in symbol and rough-painted sign of food and drink available. It seems busy. Crowded. Yet it lacks the usual jollity of a tavern. It is the first target for so many, including the crowd the Collective have been observing.

Silco drops his cigarette and grinds it out under his shoe. “Let’s go.”

As expected, he finds many familiar faces. But before they can give him another black eye, he starts to ask them questions and drawing comparisons between this mine and the one they attacked last night. Those who aren’t so deep in their cups can give what answers they can. The hostility remains between these miners and the handful of Collective folk. But Silco knows how to talk. He pulls at their pain, and shows them a spark. Money is a good way to get people to pay attention. But power? Power is a good way to get people to listen.

“Your Company bleeds you, your Company denies you your pay and your freedom, and your Company tells you we are to blame… and you believed that?” He meets the gaze of the man who slugged him across the face, and spreads both palms out, a query to make every one of them think, before he addresses the tavern interior. “The Company needs you. But they need you to be their wretched servants. They can’t ever let you think or fight for yourselves. They’ll tell you it’s for the sake of the business, or necessary for the bottom line. But really, you know what they want. They want you to be numb and obedient and to say ‘thank you’ for every crumb.” He cocks his head, and seeks out the gazes of those who seem the most infuriated. “Don’t you think you deserve better? We did. That’s why we formed the Collective.” 

It’s morning by the time Silco and the others return, after hours of sharing their stories and explaining just what kind of steps they took. It’s dangerous, of course it is, to take the steps that the Collective has, to take that risk and challenge the hand that squeezes your throat. But it’s something to think about. So they give these miners time to think. 

Over the next few weeks, there are strangers that join the meetings at the Collective, listening, questioning, cultivating their own sparks. And by the time the Collective Canteen has been rebuilt, the next Company over is starting to feel the tables turn, and understands that their plan – to get the miners to squabble between themselves – has backfired in the worst possible way. For the Company, at least.

---

The map is several conflicts out of date, but the shapes of most borders and landmarks is at least recognisable enough for his needs. Silco traces his fingers around the Ironspikes Mountains, the northeast-to-southwest border that encircles Zaun, then further still in an unbroken curve up to the northwest where Piltover claims. Past these mountains stretch vast plains: the indistinct blur of the Freljord’s snowfields and coasts, the river-crossed forests before the rigid borders of sunny Demacia in the west, the rocky gravel-strewn lands of Noxus to the east, and The Great Barrier, the barbarian-settled mountain range that separated the civilised states from the wildernesses of the Shurima Desert, the Voodoo Lands, Urtistan, Kumungu, the Plague Jungles and the ruins of Icathia. Then far far south, Bandle City, safe from wilderness and conquest by these natural and dangerous barriers, but still able to reach the rest of the world due to their flying machines and their access to the coast. The world committed to paper, and yet not all of it. There was so much more in the details lost to paper, and even more across the sea.

Silco traces his fingers over the map again, this time over the rough sketched lines of the trade routes that connect Zaun to Noxus. A war machine is always hungry for ore and stone. The fruits of Mother Zaun keep the tyrant Darkwill’s hunger keen.

“Zaunite iron,” he murmurs to himself, “Beaten into armour and swords, taken all over the world.” Wherever Darkwill’s desire for conquest took him. South past the mountains, east across the sea, even west and north to Demacia and the Freljord, and further still. The rocks that passed Silco’s hands from the grinder and into the shipping bins could end up rusting and abandoned on some foreign shore. It was fascinating to think about.

He turned back a few pages, leaving the world behind, and looking instead at Zaun. The inaccuracies of the map were now even more obvious, with Zaun being divided simply into six districts. Even the river was the wrong shape: it would be a decade or more before towers and factories and Company rivalries started changing the shape of the city and securing the shape of the land into something more defined, more easy to claim and control. But even now, against the back of the Ironspikes, the district that the Collective first bloomed in was known – then and now – as Bergsen. It had been a big district. Now it was one of the many fragments of the Economic Exclusion Zone. A modern map would no doubt show how many shards the EEZ was in, how many Executives had their hands on territory and were refusing to share.

Silco had grown up thinking the Company was everything. To know that they were merely a fragment of the companies that were owned and fed profit back to the head of the district was … something. To know he was a tiny piece of a tiny business of a tiny corner of one of Zaun’s smaller border towns… it could make a man feel almost insignificant.

Instead, Silco took a pull at his cigarette, and swept his fingertip over the southern curve of the Ironspikes Mountain on the old map, letting his vision blur. There were a lot of mines through these mountains. There were a lot of other businesses, too. And the river started here in these mountains as well, fed by underground springs and snow-melt. The underground tunnels - watched and guarded by the private armies of each district’s Executives - might be the way that trade goods from Zaun got through to Noxus, but all of Zaun’s businesses used the river to bring those goods to the border. 

Silco swung the heavy atlas closed and tapped his cigarette into the ashtray. “Vander.”

“Yeah, Sil?”

“Your father used to work Freight, right?”

“Yeah?” The young man’s lips twist in sudden wryness. “What’re you schemin’ this time, Sil?”

Silco hummed thoughtfully. “I’m just thinking about making some new friends.”

“An’ you want some introductions?” Vander sighed, chuckled, shook his head. But bright mischief lit up his face. “Well, I might still know some folks. When do you wanna make the trip?”

He hadn’t noticed, amongst the song and the hard work and the thoughts of what he could accomplish next. But now he cannot help but notice. He cannot help but notice, because there is no mining crew coming to meet them, to load up the raw materials into the carts before they take their break. There are no miners… and there is no sound above the echoes of whistle and song and pickaxe and shovel, all of which are fading.

“Masks!” Silco shouts, his voice a harsh bark in the tunnels. “Masks, now!” Song and discussion between the cart crew die, and confused faces turn his way. Silco is already fumbling with his own rebreather, and as soon as the straps were fastened he screams again, louder. “Masks! Mask up, now!”

Slowly, the others begin to hear it. The silence. The fans are still. The fans that pump in fresh air from the surface, that prevent the buildup of toxic and flammable fumes, are not turning. The silence is deafening, and deadly.

Without the fans, the mines are nothing but an extensive tomb complex. Or, Silco thinks, as the old childhood fear began to stir in him, like the vast cavernous stretches of a hungry creature’s internal organs. Mouths and gullets and stomachs throughout the rock, stirring, ready for a meal.

Silco starts barking urgent orders. There should be a work crew around the next bend, coming to deliver their work to the carts; two of the cart-crew are sent to find them, to get them masked up. Another is sent to the alarm box, further in, to pull the bell and let the tunnels above them know of the danger. Yet another is sent to go and try to find the foremen who were supposed to be stationed here, to find out why they hadn’t sounded the alarm. Silco picks the eight of the cart-crew who had families deeper in to do the dangerous - but necessary - work of going to find them. Deeper in, the gas could be more potent, making it a greater risk that even their masks might fail to protect them. But they are children of the mines, all of them, with scarred lungs and the desperate fear of leaving their loved ones to die in the dark, so while they may be afraid to go, they would be more afraid not to.

“The rest of you, with me.”

Silco takes off running, following the tracks back upwards. Adrenaline flooding his system gives his strides length and speed, and his mind picks over what comes next. Why had the foremen not sounded the alarm yet? Surely they would be invested enough in their own wellbeing to put out the alarm for masks, perhaps even calling to the surface for answers. Unless they weren’t at their posts? Why wouldn’t they be? They worked here, too. There’s no sense or reason in flooding the whole mine with gas. Even if they hated negotiations and breaks and the power the miners were gaining, the foremen worked here too, so there is no sense in turning off the only source of air that feeds the whole mines. 

The Company hated the thought of work stopping, and thousands of dead miners would make the work stop most definitively. Even if the foremen sided with the Company, they worked in the mines; unless they abandoned their posts, the foremen had to be here, suffering with the miners, because not even the Company would let them all down. The Company paid excellent lip service as long as they profited; turning off the fans was not a profitable move.

But regardless of how, if the fans were not working, then every second, every breath, brought the whole mine closer to becoming a death-trap. Some of the newly-dug tunnels might have been overwhelmed already. Maybe some of the other miners heard the strange silence, maybe some were masked up. But how many of them were distracted by the work, pushing just a little harder so that they could enjoy their break even more, and had missed that background hum to which they were all accustomed to?

Legs pumping. Eyes stinging. Heart pounding. Silco is a creature of effort, the worry fuelling his run. The elevator had already risen back to the surface, so the sloped tunnels upwards were the only path out, step by step through the dim light and the shadows. And every level they ran, Silco and his three companions heard none of the fans turning. 

That shouldn’t be possible. There are eight generators, each of them designed to take the responsibility of a different section of the mines. For them to all fail at once was not possible, bar a district-wide catastrophic power failure.

Run. Silco chews his suspicions into the side of his mouth, and forces himself to keep running. By now, the alarm has been raised, and the siren is echoing through the tunnels, the work songs replacing with cries of alarm and dismay. Others who did not have masks - there aren’t enough provided by the Company for every miner, when they sign in for the day, and not everyone can afford one of their own - join Silco and the cart-crew in their run to the surface, desperate for air, for survival.

He feels himself flagging. His burned lungs can’t sustain him, his body doesn’t have the strength after such a long run. He falls behind, as miners stampede towards daylight. Someone else will make it there before him, someone else can see why everything broke down. Someone else can make it right. It doesn’t always have to be him.

But then the folk of the mines form a wall ahead of him, or even turn around and go back into the tunnels, putting their backs to the stone even as they crane for fresh air, air they did not seem willing to go out to get for themselves. Silco braces one hand against the stone of the walls, wheezing through his mask, feeling dizzy from the sudden exertion in oxygen-poor slopes.

The miner nearest to him looks at him with fear on her bare face. “They have guns,” she says, her voice a rasp from the bad air.

Guns. Silco feels it like a punch in the gut. Someone did this deliberately, someone wanted all of the work crews - every man, woman, child - choking to death in the dark, and they are here to enforce their cruelty with weapons. Who, the foremen, Company men, a rival mine, who? Someone with guns.

“Helvetti.”

The miners are looking at him. They are all looking at him, shaking in the dark from fear or gas-poisoning or anger. They are looking at him, at this young man with fury in his eyes who has inspired them and guided them this far, because they do not know what to do now.

Silco does not know, either. But there are people in the dark who need to breathe. He needs the fans turned back on. 

He is afraid to do this. But he is more afraid not to.

Silco pulls off his mask and passes it to the woman who is struggling to breathe. He straightens up, hands clenching into fists. And then he steps forward. He does not need to push through the crowd, because the miners step away for him, peeling away from him like shadows from a lantern.

It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the light, so for the first few steps he is walking blind. Even daylight filtered through Zaun’s persistent cloud cover can be too much to those who stay beneath the earth. He blinks away the glare, following the mine-cart tracks to keep his passage in a straight line, taking the time to assess the blurry shapes that have taken formation before the mine. As his sight returns, little by little, he can see some automobiles, a van or two, parked close by, but nothing that speaks of a paramilitary presence. There are guns, yes, and as his eyes focus he sees them casually levelled at him. At least fifteen, maybe twenty of them, in the hands of those who look… clean. Monied mercenaries, guns for hire, tenth day professionals, casual thugs with clean soft hands closed around stocks and triggers. Clean guns in the hand of clean folk.

They have these guns ready, but none of them open fire as Silco steps out into daylight. That must mean there’s someone here who hasn’t called the shots, yet. Or maybe one dirty, scrawny teenager isn’t enough of a threat to waste a bullet on.

He blinks, he focuses. Silco’s eyes pick out the only one in the crowd who doesn’t have a gun. Body language of confidence and control. But as Silco blinks away the last of the glare, he cannot help but feel incredulity creep in. That is who is in charge, really? 

They’re a joke. They’ve garbed themselves in studded leather and machine-pressed cotton. They’re sleeveless, showing off ornate geometric tattoos, arm-bands of leather, and muscles an infant would be proud of. They also carry carefully-painted lines of a Shimmer user, the chemical burns and residual glitter accentuating the knuckles of their hands and the cast of their cheekbones. They have a gold ring in their nose and gold pins in their ears, connected by chains to a series of golden studs. Real gold, too; Silco can see where the metal is dented in places.

They’re a kid, somewhere in their teens, but soft in a way a miner’s child never would be. Younger than Silco, even, if the neatness of their teeth are anything to go by.

Silco eyeballs this youngster, then keeps walking. Heading for the fan generators. The security fence is open and there are a cluster of mercenaries around it. He needs to get there, to get the generators running again. There are people in the dark who cannot breathe.

“Oi.”

Silco keeps walking.

“Oi, shit-for-brains, you best stop walkin’ or you’re a dead man.”

Silco steps up onto the track rail, and then over to the other side. Still walking.

“I’m talkin’ to you! Hey!”

By now Silco has come face to face with one of the mercenaries outside the generator gate, who seems decidedly amused by how things are progressing, at how Silco just walked past the ‘man’ in charge. She doesn’t level her gun at him, and those around her are grinning or smirking. What threat could one lanky miner be?

“Turn the fans back on,” Silco tells the woman.

She just snorts. “Ain’t I’s the one in charge, cutter.” She tilts her chin towards the youth pretending his voice hadn’t cracked on that previous ‘hey’. “S’him you need t’play nice with.”

“I don’t have time to barter with infants,” Silco says, as he feels the spark growing in his chest. “Turn the fucking fans back on.”

She’s not impatient, but she doesn’t like when people completely ignore the chain of command. A little rebellion is cute, but he’s pushing it. “Now, cutter.”

He holds his ground. There are people in the dark. “You want to explain to the Company why all their workers are dead? You want to take that kind of responsibility?”

The youth’s voice is closer now, right behind Silco. “It’s my mine, shit-for-brains, and I say the fans stay off.”

Silco turns, slowly, and there is no time to feel the victory in watching the youth momentarily flinch (yes, boy, these are what real scars look like, the scars of poison and near-death, not the scars you paint on when you get high for fun; this is what real danger does to the skin and the eyes). He doesn’t say anything, because how can this child own the mine? The name on the Company papers is prestigious, yes, and monied. But it’s older than Silco, so certainly older than this boy. Silco’s lip curls in disdain for the sight before him.

The tattooed teen takes offence. “You don’t think I know what you shit-shovellers have been doing? Someone needed to teach you a lesson. So here I am.” He pokes Silco in the chest, relishing in the two inches of height he has over Silco. “Da’s been sayin’ how much trouble your little ‘collective’ has been making, how much it’s costing him. Someone had to do something.”

Silco dusts off the front of his shirt, as though the mine dust were more appropriate than the touch of a shitheel with too much money. “So it’s not your mine. It’s Daddy’s mine, and you’re hoping this makes him proud of you.” He snorts his derision, though he is keenly aware of the ticking clock, of the danger that he alone can undo. He is not distracted.

The teen sneers down at Silco. “You should learn your place.”

“And where is my place, exactly?” Gas is soft, and subtle, it only takes a spark to ignite it. It only takes a spark.

“With the rest of you worthless pieces of garbage belong. Six feet un—”

Silco drives his elbow into the teen’s chest, hitting that spot in the middle of the ribs that can leave someone gasping, breathless. The teen staggers back, losing his balance. Silco follows through, stepping forward, drawing an arm back for a quick jab of a punch to the tattooed teen’s face. Silco is not strong, by comparison to the miners. He cannot swing a pick without tiring. But a single punch is no problem for a man who pushes carts all day, and this one strike seems to exert more force than the teen was expecting… or could handle.

Such a punchable face and no-one has followed through before? Hah.

There are carts on the rail. Silco works with the cart-crew. He sees to the maintenance and wellbeing of every single cart. He knows the right pressure to place to make them slow, or speed, or move along the tracks counter to gravity’s gentle incline. 

So when the teenager falls back into an open cart, stunned and gaping and limbs all askew, Silco barely even has to look to know what part of the cart mechanism to kick. The gears grind with sudden alarm, and the cart seems to dart back up the hill like a startled beast. The miners who have risked sunlight and bullets to stand in the cavern entrance see the cart coming; they call for ‘gangway’ to those behind them, and everyone steps aside to let the cart whizz past, down the empty track and into the dark.

Silco turns back to face the mercenary, who is holding her gun with less certainty, her eyes wide as she looks at Silco.

“Turn the fans back on,” he says, as he shakes the pain out of his hand. The shitheel teen had a hard skull, and Silco’s knuckles feel bruised. “Unless you want to be responsible for him, as well.”

The mercenary looks at the others around her. Their master, their meal ticket, is suddenly at risk. They never thought this could happen. They never even dreamed that with all their numbers and their guns that it could ever go like this. Now they’ll be answering to a higher power, a power with more money and a lot less patience. Perhaps no patience at all, if this son has any value to the business.

They could have opened fire, but hey missed their window of opportunity. Silco’s out here in the open, but the ore miners are coming forward with pick and shovel. The numbers are shifting. There are thousands of the miners, and not even guns can change that.

“Better hurry,” Silco says, folding his arms, glaring up at the woman. “Depending on where in the gas-flooded mine that cart ends up, he could be dead in a matter of minutes. I imagine that won’t look good on your record.”

“Fuck’s seekes,” the woman hisses, staring at Silco. “What are you?”

He meets her gaze, unblinking. “I’m someone who wants the fans back on. Now.”

---

There is an illusion of sunlight here. Silco cranes his head back to look at the hazy layer of Zaun Grey, and at the way strategically-placed lights on this building send beams through it. The electricity costs must be exorbitant, but the effect from street level is that this building - with its finely-crafted architectural facade and mosaic entryway - is an oasis in the grime. 

Artifice. Showmanship. The territorial display of some kind of ornamental animal. Silco is looking at the district headquarters of the Company.

Silco rolls his shoulders, then strides forward to cross the street, headed for the thick brass double-doors. There is no security outside the building to chase off riff-raff like him. The facade of the building is intimidating enough: all that light could blind and burn.

There is a small airlock, designed to keep the air outside out and the air inside in. When he steps through to the interior proper, it hurts to breathe for a moment. Fresh air, cold and crisp. Forget the lights, the cost of this building’s air processing would fund a mining operation for a year. Though, no, he cannot discount the lights; they are a soothing colour, but bright enough to illuminate everything, to let guests see just how neat and precise and clean the interior is, compared to the outside world. 

There is a receptionist at a desk at the other end of the lobby. Her polite vapid expression is tight as Silco coughs in the clean air, but she is paid enough to maintain her perfect hair, perfect nails, perfect uniform, and a perfect customer-service attitude. 

Silco holds her gaze as he coughs once more, steadying himself, before he strides across the open floor. There is status and wealth in this floor, and in the columns, the high ceilings, the framed oil paintings of the industry leaders and financial partners, but Silco does not look at them, leaving them merely to be noted in his periphery. He does not have time to appreciate that everything about this place is designed to make those who enter look and feel shabby and dirty and small in comparison. He doesn’t have time for that, nor does he care to. He maintains his eye contact with the receptionist, watching that professional smile become more and more rigid as he approaches her with confidence.

“I’m from the Miners’ Collective,” he says, as evenly as the too-pure air allows. “I have a meeting with the Head of the Company at twelve-twenty-five.”

The receptionist was clearly expecting ‘the Miners’ Collective’ to have brought more representatives. One is a relief, but still… this might still be one too many. She invites him to take a seat.

Silco thanks her - with matching false politeness - and says that he would prefer to stand. After all, it is twelve o’clock already. He sees no reason to sit down for twenty minutes. He will remain in the lobby of this fancy building, dirty and rough and in his shabby work clothes, and completely at ease under the gazes of the painted individuals who have never worked a day in their life. Silco takes three steps back from the desk and waits, hands lightly clasped behind his back, ignoring the plaintive attempts to get him to move out of eyeshot of anyone else who would wish to enter. Silco continues to politely decline further invitations to sit as the moments tick by, ambling back and forth in the lobby without doing anything in particular. Just being present is annoying enough.

He knows the Company means to shove him off to one side, to make him wait until it is a convenience for them to see him, despite the open candour in the invitation he received. Therefore, he will not be a convenience. He will be noted, and he will not be ignored, and he will be difficult until they accept he is here not as a slave or a pet or a beggar. He is a worker. He is here to represent the mines, and all who do the real work. 

He could have - maybe should have - brought others with him. But the invitation was for him alone, identifying him by name and employee number. Neither of which the receptionist has asked for, of course, which amuses him to no end as she calls him ‘mister’ or ‘good fellow’ in an effort to get his attention. He doesn’t look up; he’s a miner, and young, and cannot afford any title, and she should have remembered to ask for his name, as part of her job and under the veil of respectability, even if she didn’t like his muddy boots or direct eye contact. Oh, which reminds him… 

At the twenty minute mark, he taps the heels of his boots against the tiled floor, dislodging the mud he brought with him. It wouldn’t be good to track it into the building any further; they probably have carpets upstairs.

The Company’s intent was clearly to unsettle and unnerve him while he waited. He was prepared for that, so it did not work. And the longer he was made to wait, clearly the more mess he was going to make. At twelve-twenty-eight, the receptionist gets a buzz from a device on her desk, and with the terse, clipped remains of her professionalism she tells Silco the room number he can go to. He is offered the elevator.

Oh, but he feels like taking the stairs, doesn’t he? Maybe trudging more mud into the building? At least, until the elevator arrives with a pleasant (insistent) ding, ready and waiting for him. Very well, if this is most convenient for everyone involved? So be it.

It was so much faster than the elevator in the mines. So much smaller, too, with mirrors and brass and all so clean and well-lit. It isn’t practical at all; it’s a show piece, matching all the rest of the Company building. It is claustrophobic in here, but he is used to smaller spaces. Here, he stands on his own two feet, and is not held by the earth but instead elevated over it.

He steps out of the elevator, down a hall, to a door half-ajar for him. The mine owner - a board member of the Company - is waiting to meet him.

The man sits behind a desk, behind which his walls are lined with books and framed pictures - paintings, but also the greyscale photographs and newspaper clippings of clearly important events - as well as other signs of education and privilege. There are piles of papers on the man’s desk, so neatly-arranged, they couldn’t possibly have been what he was working on. They are there to show how heavy a work load the man has.

But Silco is not impressed. Stone and ore weighs more than paper.

The man introduces himself, but does not ask Silco’s name. He has that forced polite look of someone who intends to humour his audience, while making his own decisions afterwards regardless of what is discussed. He is asking Silco to explain himself - and the Miners’ Collective, if that is who Silco truly represents - about why they would threaten their own livelihood like this.

Silco doesn’t introduce himself, or simper or plead. He opens with dates and numbers, solid proof of the mine’s productivity increasing season by season. He ties each season to the plans of the Miners’ Collective, to the demands made for proper death and injury payouts, for safety, for alternating shifts. It is too soon in the season to definitively tell if the addition of short breaks has increased productivity as definitively, but Silco is able to mention the increased output that, if allowed to continue, could lead this to being the most productive year yet. And it is not just input and output he is able to describe, but also to the actual finances, to the decreased cost in death and injury payments which should, in theory, be an increase in profits for the mine owners, of which the Company should be well aware.

The Company Leader’s fixed and vapid look has faded. There’s something wary in the man’s eyes now. He hadn’t expected a miner to be eloquent, or capable of rational thought, let alone to have a fine grasp of business acumen.

Silco briefly outlines some of the future plans discussed by the Miners’ Collective, in the availability of equipment and tools, education for the children, and an increase in wages. Before the Company Man’s hackles can rise, protective of his money, Silco gently explains. “We want to work, all of us. This is our livelihood, and we are all proud of what we do. We are only fighting for these improvements because we know that workers who are fed, prepared, and safe produce more, and can work harder.” Words carefully-chosen to appeal to a man who has never set foot in the dark.

“And yet,” the Company man said, “You nearly killed my son.”

Silco shook his head, grim, pitying. “Your son was under the belief that the Miners’ Collective is a detriment to your business. As I have already explained, the opposite is true. It would seem your son does not know the proper way to run a business. Perhaps this experience will be the education he is sorely lacking.”

“If you think…”

“Your son,” Silco interrupts, “Brought an army of mercenaries to the mines and turned off the generator fans, intending to kill every single miner in the complex. In addition to the fact that mercenaries cost money, sir,” a terse little word, spoken as emphasis rather than respect, “Replacing an entirely workforce of men, women, and children is even costlier. Not to mention that kind of population would have to be brought over from other districts, which would be an entire new headache for you, dealing with red tape and import and relocation taxes. And then, let us not discount the fact that the mine would be full of corpses, which is in no way an easy thing to undo. The cleanup would take months, and the morale of the new workers would be far too low for productivity. Your business would suffer immensely; perhaps, even, no new workers would even be found, because of the reputation of the Company’s brutal clean-slate policy. A reputation which other Companies would use as a worst-case scenario, to motivate their own workers while demeaning you and yours even further. Perhaps you would have been brought to answer to your shareholders, or to Zaun’s ruling board, if they deemed this mismanagement egregious enough.”

He puts his hands on the Company Man’s desk and leans forward. The man is listening, his eyes on Silco’s.

“That is the scenario your son’s actions would have led to, had he been allowed to continue unchallenged. I am sure you can understand why, from one man of hard work to another, why the Miners’ Collective could not allow this to pass.”

The Company Man’s eyes narrowed. But it is from the challenge as well as from the thoughts, the weighing up of options. The consideration of numbers and facts and the threat of a darker (less profitable) future.

“You need good workers to run a business,” Silco says, quietly, evenly. “And the Miners’ Collective is made up of the best there is. The improvement of our circumstances is the best case scenario for your business. We are loyal to our work. You could give us a reason for our loyalty to increase, along with our productivity.” He straightens up, leaning away from the desk. “We would not have killed your son. But he did not know what he was doing, putting your business at risk like that.”

‘Your business’. Not ‘our lives’. Silco chooses his words carefully. He has been speaking to the miners and foremen for years, now, he knows how to craft the phrases that matter, though it does seem bitterly unpleasant to have to cheapen his life, and the lives of the miners, just to appeal to a Suit. 

Silco lets the Company Man thank Silco for his time, endures the useless platitudes of ‘we’ll see what we can do’. Silco understands that he is being dismissed, that nothing will be done. Why would it? The Company has a line to draw, and this line is so often the bottom line they mean to maintain.

Silco takes the waiting elevator back into the lobby. The mud and dust he has left on the polished tiles has already been swept away. The receptionist pretends he is invisible. The airlock seals definitively behind him, as he leaves the building and goes back out into the poison air where he belongs.

But for once - for once - someone higher up the chain has listened to him. Perhaps he could be allowed to hope, cautiously. 

—

Vander’s laugh filled the space, drowning out the laughter and the static-touched music coming from the jukebox on the other side of the room. The beer they were drinking was sour and lukewarm, and the air smelled of stale smoke and vomit and piss, and far too busy, but it felt like a reward after the day Silco had endured.

Most people don’t get to see the inside of a business like that. Vander hadn’t been the only one listening, with other tables either eavesdropping or leaning in to ask questions of their own. But now in describing the meeting with the Company Man, most lean back and shake their heads, either out of disbelief that a youth in canvas coveralls and patched-elbow workshirt would have been allowed it, that this must be a tall tale, while others wanted nothing to do with Companies or Suits during their time off. There weren’t many miners in this part of town, but everyone who came to this bar had a hard profession of some kind, as all work was hard in the streets of Zaun. Folk could sympathise, of course, but they were smart enough not to listen too closely, in case those in power came to call.

So it is Vander alone who listens, and grins, and laughs at Silco’s boldness. “Surprised he didn’t toss you on your arse for that. That was it? Just a ‘your time’s up, off you trot’?”

“That was it.” Silco sips the sour flat beer, and shrugs one shoulder. “I’m wondering if I should have told him about plan to ask for increased wages. It certainly feels like it shut a door.”

“Well, then it’s the Company’s job to open it again, yeah?” Vander grinned, and chuckled. “I can’t believe you went there alone.”

“It was just a,” he raises his free hand to make air quotes, “‘Friendly discussion’. So I didn’t see the need to.”

“Didn’t think a Company could be,” Vander makes matching air quotes with his own free hand, “‘Friendly’.”

Silco smirks. “Well, we’ll see.”

Vander shifts, sliding his free hand to support his chin, elbow on the table, just looking at Silco. His messy bangs half-obscure his face, tempting Silco to fix them. Silco, somehow, manages to abstain. It will make Vander pout, after all.

Vander tries not to pout. “So,” he says, “What’s next?”

Silco’s thin shoulders pitch up in a shrug. “Back to work. More meetings, though we’ll need to find another place to hold them, just in case the Company or that shitheel kid decide to stir up trouble. But just work.”

Vander’s mouth opens, then his eyes flick under his hair towards the door. His expression changes. “Oh, wow, speak of the demon himself.”

Silco snorts into his drink, choking on a brief laugh. “You’re not serious.”

“Sorry, Sil, but the shitheel’s here. You summoned him.” He smirks.

Silco glances over his shoulder. There he was, that tattooed teenage twit. “He’s brought friends,” he notes, seeing the three others following his head. The shitheel was making a direct beeline to where Silco and Vander were sitting. Someone must have run off to tattle. Someone listened, and decided to find power, hoping for a reward. It happened, from time to time, so Silco was not surprised. 

“Friendly,” Vander notes, and both of them chuckle together, before they decide to finish their drinks. Vander finishes first, of course, but Silco sees no reason to rush. By the time he puts down his mug, the shitheel and his friends are all around the table, glowering down at Silco.

“Evenin’, lads,” Vander says, as Silco finishes up. “How can we help?”

“Mind your business, morshkoy-pyos,” says the one on the left.

Silco looks at the teenager. The Company Son has fresh bandages around his neck; an emergency transplant of his eso-filter, it looks like; mine gas could corrode and melt the fancier models. There’s a sallowness to the teen’s face, too, a pinch to the skin that tells of paralysed muscles similar to Silco’s own, but much much milder. Gods, it must be nice to be able to afford all kinds of medicine and surgeries, to have you back on your feet the next day after inhaling a lungful of mine air. 

Silco gets to his feet, again claiming the small advantage of height he has over the tattooed teenager. Vander, too, gets up, and his advantage is greater, standing head and shoulders after all of them.

“His business is my business,” Vander says, stepping up with his teeth bared in what might be a smile, “So let’s try to be civil, tar’han.”

The teen sneers at Silco, eyes full of hate. “You,” he growls, surgery and implants doing for his voice what puberty could not, “You need to learn your place.”

“The last time you said something like that,” Silco says, quietly, “You ended up on your ass, and then six feet underground. Think your threats through, little boy.”

“I’m sixteen, you—”

“And I’m seventeen,” Silco interrupted, impatiently. “What’s your fucking point?”

“Wait.” Vander leaned in. “Hold on. Sil. You’re seventeen? No. I refuse.”

Silco looked up at Vander in amusement. “I am.”

Vander blinked, pushing his hair back out of his face. “You’re younger than me? How in the good gods damn…?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Silco grinned, feeling the skin of his face moving, “Were you expecting me to be your sugar daddy?”

“Well, it would’a been nice, but I’m just…”

“You know I’m broke, right?”

Vander pinks up quickly. “That’s —! That’s not the—”

“Hey!” The shitheel stomped his foot. “I’m talking to you!”

Silco noticed at this point that the bar was certainly very quiet, that people were watching either to see a fight or averting their eyes so they didn’t get involved. The music had stopped. Even the shitheel and his friends seemed to realise how much of Zaun was watching them at this very moment, but there was pride at stake. Pride that had certainly not been undermined by the petulant foot-stomp.

Silco let his smile drop, a sudden and frightening return to neutrality. “Then say something worth paying attention to.”

“You need to be taught a lesson—”

“Really? Because your father seemed to think it was your education that was lacking, not mine.” He folds his arms. “You want to inherit a hole in the ground full of corpses? Or do you want to man the fuck up and learn how the world works?”

Vander snorts a laugh, a laugh that turns into a disapproving hum as the shitheel brings out a flick knife, and the others all pull weapons out of the jackets and pockets.

“No,” says the shitheel, in a voice gravelly and intentionally intimidating, “You need to learn how the world works.”

Silco smiles. “That’s a very nice knife. Isn’t it, Vander?”

“Very pretty.” Vander agrees, leaning his hand on his chair, casually shifting his weight. “Would you like it?”

“You know,” Silco says, “I think I do.”

The shitheel was getting tired of being interrupted. “You’re going to pay for—”

Silco had very sharp elbows. That could be why he was constantly patching the elbows of his shirts and jackets. The bandages around the shitheel’s throat are too easy a target. Vander hefts the chair, and then one wild haymaker. Silco goes for a wrist, an elbow, a jaw: quick aggressive jabs with unexpected force.

“Thumbs out!” Vander cheerfully reminds Silco, as they both clean up the last man standing.

“Thumbs out,” Silco shakes out his bruised knuckles, smirking. He glances over to the bartender. “Sorry, good fellow, we’ll take this outside.” 

Vander grumbles something about the heavy lifting, but tosses the gagging, choking shitheel over his shoulder, then grabs two wrists and one ankle, dragging the shitheel’s three unconscious friends out behind him.

Everyone in this room is here because they know their worth. Not as numbers on a pay sheet or a death payout, but real people that have been abused in the dark for too long. There are at least a hundred of them, crowded in this dim basement, smoking and drinking and airing their grievances.

Silco’s gaze travels over the faces, to where a few of the mine foremen sit in this crowded place. He had not expected those who lived comfortably to discover a conscience, but it was a pleasant surprise. Perhaps they’re only here because they fear ‘industrial accident’, - a term that has become a euphemism for ‘revenge’ in the mines - but they have had their turn to speak, to talk of their fears, of the hold the Company has on them. They may be paid more, but they are no less in a stranglehold. There are some good foremen, if they are willing to speak up and act on the miners’ behalf, if they are willing to endure suspicion from those below them, if they are willing to join the same fight. 

In four months, the mine has become a very different place. It is still dark. The work is still hard. But the deaths of miners are fewer. It is a good start. 

Silco is itching for what comes next.

More miners take their turn, saying their peace, being heard by their comrades as they speak of injustices and cruelties. The same stories told in different ways, the habits of the foremen and mine bosses and the Company laid bare for all to see. Some just want to speak and be heard, which is dangerous enough. But some want more, cultivating the same rumbling discontent and fire within them that Silco knows intimately. It’s these folks who are building something stronger. The number of those who are too discontent merely to complain grows daily.

Eventually, Silco will stand. He will make a point of thanking all the speakers and greeting the new visitors by name, before he calls the meeting to a close. There is work to do tomorrow, more shifts down in the mine, but they will continue to hold those in power accountable. He calls for watchfulness for corrupt behaviour, and to never let anyone be left on their own when pressure is exerted by the foremen or the bosses.

“We are stronger together,” he says. “Do not forget that. They will try to break up these meetings, try to split up work crews, try to silence us. Our dissent is bad for business.” He gives a thin smile as some scattered chuckles rouse through the room. “But we know what we are worth, and that we should be treated with greater respect.”

There is no call for violence. Violence should only be a last resort, a lesson learned through the months of their growing numbers. Punishments could be more frequent than the Company capitulations. So, no violence. Only unity, a line that must be recognised by those who look down from above.

Casual conversation becomes to warm the room. Families prepare to take their children home, while others linger for the tea and coffee, or come to Silco to hastily discuss concerns about Company interference or foremen who have abused their last chances to amend their ways. Silco listens, and nods, and gives each speaker his undivided attention. But he is mindful of the presence of the messy-haired youth, the one from the pawn shop, leaning against the wall and waiting for him in the background.

He’s watching Silco, and smiling faintly, with Silco’s coat in the crook of his arm. He’s a patient man, and this is important. He waits, and Silco is grateful.

It is late before they make their way out, and even the scarves and coats can’t quite keep out the winter chill. Silco fishes in his pocket for a cigarette, and the other for his lighter, needing something in his chest that wasn’t the cold. After all his life in the mines, it feels like there is a crust formed on the inside of his lungs, a crust that lets him breathe in the gas-tinged air of the underground but that cracks and burns when the cold air touched it. He can’t afford the implants - the eso-filters that so many could - so cigarettes will have to do. They’re cheaply bought with Company credits; it’s rare to find a miner who doesn’t have the same crusted feeling in their lungs from the gas and bad air.

“Sorry ‘bout bein’ late,” the messy-haired youth says, as they walk together. “Didn’t miss too much, did I?”

Silco allows himself a faint smile, the cigarette tip glowing like an ember as he inhales the healing smoke. “You’re usually so punctual, Vander. What happened?”

“Oh, you know…” Vander grins. “I just happened to pass a couple of Company boys while they were off to dinner.”

Silco feels a spike of alertness, unease. “How do you know they were Company?”

“I heard them mention the address.” Vander brings grease-strained hands out of his pockets, revealing a collection of spark plugs and engine wiring caught in his fingers and dangling over his broad palms. “Decided to have a look at their fancy cars before they came to visit.”

Silco exhales a plume of smoke, pleased at Vander’s initiative, but now thinking ahead in pensive concern. If the address of their meeting place had been known, that means they would need to find a new one. Good news and bad news, that was always the way, but it was important to keep one step ahead of the Company’s attempts to shut down the miners’ growing collective.

“You didn’t miss much,” Silco says, watching as Vander pockets the car parts. “It was the same story, told in a different way.”

“True,” Vander says, wiping his hands on an already-well-greased handkerchief, “But every story’s important, right?”

“Right.” Silco smiles approvingly. “You’ve been paying attention.”

“I always pay attention,” Vander grumbles, good-naturedly. “How long have you known me?”

“Long enough that I shouldn’t need to praise you,” Silco muses.

The messy-haired youth sputters. “Now, hold on.”

Silco laughs. It’s a ragged sound, but it’s a sound he can make, now. He didn’t think he could, but when it comes to the pawnshop boy, anything seems possible. Anything is possible.

Vander grins back, then exhales a breath visible in the chill air and folds his arms. “Snowdown’s almost here,” he notes, glancing up at the hazy sky.

Sometimes snow would fall over Zaun, grey and gritty from soot. But more often, it was dense grey sleet and dense mists and freezing winds, with frozen pipes and howling wind and lingering chill that walls couldn’t keep out. Snowdown was a time to huddle together with family, and think of better things. 

Silco takes another drag on his cigarette. Just walking, for now. 

Vander fills the silence, as he so often does. An observation of the weather becomes an observation of the weather as it pertains to Silco. “You gonna need another coat?”

Silco gestures to the one he’s wearing, and the scarf besides, both of them courtesy of Vander and the Last Chance. “This is more than enough, thank you.” A brief glance upwards, and a bare quirk of a wry smile. “You do spend a lot of time fretting about me.”

“Well, someone’s gonna keep an eye out for you.” He nudges Silco with his arm. “You keep forgettin’ to look after yourself.”

Silco, chuckling, nudges back. “Insurrection won’t raise itself. But I’ll be fine.”

“Oh, Silco.” Vander heaves a sigh, still smiling. He nudges Silco again.

Silco answers, with a little more force. And somehow it becomes a battle, two young men shoving and jabbing playfully at each other as they weave their way through the chilly streets of Zaun, never quite enough to bruise or unbalance. They’ve done this before, countless times, on countless walks, these past few months.

They ease up on this game. as they reach the river road. This is where their paths diverge, where Silco will follow the road uphill, back towards the mines, and Vander will go downstream, to the pawnshop and his home. Neither of them speak, as they go to lean on the graffiti-covered wall and look down into the listlessly-flowing canal. It’s a ritual, to linger here for a while longer, to smoke in the dark before going home. Silco lights another cigarette; Vander fishes out a pipe and a tin of dried tobacco.

“These are easier,” Silco tells Vander, waving the cigarette demonstratively.

Vander gives a rough bark of a laugh as he packs the leaves into his pipe. “Dad’d have a fit if I chose ‘easier’ over ‘the old ways’.” He puts away the tin and rubs his thumb over the pipe’s bowl, pressing down any loose leaves.

There were so many who came to Zaun with their traditions and rites and ways of living. Silco couldn’t begrudge those who had something to hold on to; Zaun could wear down so much, but its people could be stubborn. As well they should be. Zaun wouldn’t be the same without them. 

Silco is starting to remember what it feels like to have something of his own to hold.

Vander braces an arm on the canal wall, leaning forward and down towards Silco. Silco puts the cigarette into his mouth and leans in, inhaling so the glowing ember of the cigarette touches and ignites the pressed tobacco. Silence, and focus, just the two of them breathing, watching the embers, until pipe and cigarette smoke rise together.

It is cold out. Neither of them ease back from each other, as they lean against the wall, watching the river, the city, and all of Zaun, exhaling their warm smoky breaths into the evening air. The wind isn’t as biting, with Vander blocking most of it.

The canal is an ugly thing. The river is choked, this time of year, with debris and residue, and the water crawls rather than flows. The water level won’t rise until the spring, when the rains and melt flush through the walled channel, turning the grey fluids a cleaner brown. For now, it’s chest-high mud and debris and chemical foam, and is a broad artery right down the middle of Zaun.

But on the other side of the river, across the canal walls, there’s more of the city, more of Zaun’s districts. There are wide stretches of warehouse and workshop, the slope of hills cut with roads, the towers string with cables and platforms and blinking lights. In the distance, almost lost to the darkness of night, are the mountains and cliffs that shield Zaun from the sea, a dark wall except the scar that opens out to the eastern port. This ugly river they’re looking at reaches all the way to the sea, eastward, as well as clawing northward into the heart of the Zaun city. Silco has seen the view over the southern mountains. Maybe, one day, he’ll see the eastern sea.

He looks up at Vander. Vander is also looking down the eastern view, his eyes distant and thoughtful. He must be thinking about the sea, as well; he’s an open book, and Silco knows him well.

And, sure enough, Vander murmurs, “You ever think about taking some time off?”

Silco smiles to himself. “Time off?”

“Yeah. We could take a trip down to the coast.”

“To the coast?”

“Get some sun,” Vander is smiling, now, lost in his thoughts. “See the water. Real water, not…” One palm lifts from the stone, gesturing to the canal in front of them.

“Real water,” Silco murmurs, flicking ash from his cigarette. “Real sunlight.”

“Yeah.” Vander nods, exhaling smoke through his nose. “Could be nice.” He takes the pipe from his mouth for a moment, thinking. “We should go.”

“Together?”

“Together.” He nods, and looks down at Silco.

Silco finds himself smiling. “Doesn’t sound too bad. I’ll think about it.”

Vander smiles back. “Yeah?”

“Maybe when it’s warmer, though.” Silco shivers, and looks back to the view, bringing his cigarette to his lips. “Cold as balls out here.”

Vander snorts a laugh. “Cold as Janna’s tits.”

Time off. Silco thinks, looking at the distant dark shapes of the broken barrier, past the haze and the city lights, where you might even be able to see the sky. Time off, and someone to go with, and then a home and a job to come back to. Vander makes the impossible sound so easy, so within reach. Maybe it isn’t impossible.

He breathes in his cigarette, and the smell of Vander’s tobacco, and he thinks about sunlight and the sea. “Cold as a w—”

He stops. He feels warmth spill across his skin, from that spot behind his ear, electrifying down his neck and arms and across his chest, around the gas-burned lungs and to the heart that quickens, unexpectedly, and then down to his toes. It happens in an instant, lightning-fast. A little jolt, all from a brief touch.

He looks up, his hand going to touch that spot on his neck, the gap between his hair and his scarf that had apparently been too much of a temptation for the messy-haired youth. Vander grins, somewhere between proud and sheepish, unrepentant but prepared to apologise if necessary. Breathless, teetering, hopeful.

Silco blinks, and blinks again, but the spot behind his neck continues to burn, touched by tobacco and stubble and the press of Vander’s lips. Even under his fingertips, the sensation doesn’t quite subside.

“Almost Snowdown,” Vander says, quietly. He’s blocking the wind. His face is earnest and his voice is low, like he’s sharing a secret.“Too cold to go to the coast, but…”

The hand Silco raised to touch his own neck now reaches up to touch Vander’s, to hook lightly under the youth’s scarf. He pulls, and Vander doesn’t need to apologise. It’s not as cold, today, as it might be. Silco hasn’t felt this warm in a long time, and this warm lingers even when they have to pull apart to breathe.

There’s a heartbeat, as they catch their breath, as they look at each other. They are both thinking about how warm it is. They both are breathless, teetering, hopeful, exhaling smoke and incredulous joy.

“Your hands are cold,” Vander whines, putting his pipe back between his teeth, and holding Silco’s hand between his own. “I’m gettin’ you gloves for Snowdown.”

“I don’t need gloves,” Silco says, amused, feeling oddly buoyant. 

“I’m gettin’ you gloves,” Vander says, 

The soft growl of his tone makes Silco smile all the wider, feel all the warmer. “You’re getting me gloves, fine.”

Vander grins, holding Silco’s gaze. “Yeah.”

There’s a blare of synchronised klaxon somewhere in the city, as some night-shift begins in factories through the four districts that border this part of the river. It’s late, very late.

Silco sighs, grinds out his cigarette between a graffiti’d pair of names, then flicks the extinguished stub into the river. Vander sighs, releasing Silco’s hand, then taps out his pipe on the edge of the stonework. This is how they’ve always marked out the end of their ritual. Today is so different. Today, neither of them wants to walk away first.

“You got work tomorrow.”

“I do.”

“Will I see you after?”

They haven’t moved apart. They should, but that spot behind Silco’s ear is burning, and Vander’s eyes keep dropping down to Silco’s mouth, and Silco’s eyes keep dropping to Vander’s, and the shadows both do something to their eyes. 

“… yes,” Silco says, quietly. “You will.”

Vander’s smile is like the sunlight. It breaks out and warms Silco’s skin. “I’ll save you dinner.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I will, though.”

“Okay,” Silco says, like he has before. Capitulating to Vander’s kindness, over and over again. And now here they are, standing this close, and they haven’t even said goodnight.

His hand raises, touching the spot behind his ear. He makes a small noise in his throat. Vander grins. Silco finds himself grinning back, as much as the gas-paralysis allows.

“Tomorrow,” he says. 

“Dinner,” Vander says.

Silco nods. Vander nods. Slowly, they pull apart. Vander goes north along the river. Silco goes south along the river. It’s dark, but they both look back, now and then, to catch a glimpse of the other’s movement under the hazy streetlamps.

The warmth follows Silco all the way back to his apartment, to the hollow rooms and the frozen pipes and the letters slipped under his door. He dreams of the sea, and sunlight, and Vander.

-

Silco sees the date, the next morning, as he signs in for his mask: his birthday. The fact stays on his mind all through the shift, through the sifting and sorting of ore and the pushing of carts and the smell of grease and dust and sweat, thoughts chasing him through the dark and through the glare of the mining lamps both. His parents should be here, to celebrate with him, to ward off the cold and cheer him with the traditions of his people, a people he has no connection to. The day weighs on him, heavy enough to make it hard to breathe, and he burns through most of his cigarettes on his break. 

He feels lost. He wants nothing more than to go home and crawl under the covers and let the exhaustion of the work day sweep him to oblivion.

But he promised Vander he would come over for dinner. It’s simultaneously the last thing Silco wants to do and the only thing Silco can bring himself to do.

He signs out - seeing the date again, no mistakes here - then pulls up the collar of his coat and goes into Zaun proper. It’s a long walk. His body aches. The cold scrapes at his lungs, chills his scalp and his fingertips and his knees. He takes the circuitous route in case the Company has sent someone to follow him, but his heart isn’t in it. He’s thinking about his parents, dead eight years past, and how today seems a mere tombstone on the passage of time. 

Above the shopfront of the Last Chance, the windows are warm with light. Silco stands there, and thinks about that warmth, about the spot on his neck where warmth like that slipped under his skin. Silly. Childish. But he wants that warmth. He doesn’t want to be alone. It is a thought so powerful that it almost makes him gasp: he doesn’t want to be alone. He hates the feeling, a feeling that follows him everywhere, even to the meeting of the miners’ collective or to the crowded tunnels and passages with whatever work crew he joins. He feels alone, but he doesn’t want to be.

He’s here for dinner. He takes the side door, and climbs up, and knocks. He realises he has come straight from the mines, that he’s filthy and tired and cold, but as soon as Vander opens the door, it doesn’t matter.

It is warm, in Vander’s home. Vander makes it warmer still. And on the table, with two plates of dinner waiting, is a bottle of alcohol. Silco does gasp, then, choking on something which feels like grief but doesn’t taste quite the same. He knows that bottle. He’d pawned it, months ago, when he first met Vander.

Vander’s eyes slide to the bottle, then back to Silco. Sheepish, but proud. “Saved one of ‘em. Just… just in case, y’know? In case we had something to celebrate? And, um, yesterday…” He falters, finding a silence he wasn’t expecting to fill. “… Silco?”

Silco doesn’t know what to say. His heart is pounding, his throat feels tight. His parents should be here, pouring for him to drink, telling him stories and celebrating this landmark sixteenth birthday. His parents should be here, but they’re not. The bottle is here, and there’s dinner, and the apartment above the Last Chance is warm, and yesterday he was kissed for the first time by the young man who saved this bottle and brought it out tonight. Silco doesn’t know what to say. 

Before Vander can think he’s done something wrong, Silco hugs him. Tightly, fiercely, shaking. This isn’t grief, but it feels so similar. It’s mixed up with something more. It’s mixed up with everything. And it’s all because of Vander. How does he do this? How does he make the impossible seem possible? How does he put dreams of sea and sunlight in Silco’s head, and a lump in his throat, and a jolt that leaves him breathless from a single kiss? How does he know the right thing to say and do, every single time? It isn’t fair. Silco has no way of preparing himself for any of it. He’s fallen and he doesn’t care; he’s buoyant, and giddy, and gasping for air in what could be a sob or a laugh, or both, or neither.