Author: Wildbow

Gone and Done It – 17.1 | Pale

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Lucy’s overlarge ponytail was tied back with loose, ragged ribbons like the ones that were tied to sword hilts all around her, and the ribbons made small whipcrack sounds in the vicious wind.  The pom bobbed left and right and the necklace with John’s dog tag and Yalda’s ring slapped against her right shoulder.  Squinting periodically against the wind, Lucy stood still, weapon in hand, eyes skyward, her eyes bright as they absorbed the light from above.

A meteor without a ‘face’.  The disturbance as it parted atmosphere and tore through clouds obscured the front of it.  Peeling off from the sides were random items.  Children’s toys, kitchen things, a small house, a red carpet with horses running down it.

Smoke rose from the inside of the Arena below her, with a red glow emanating from windows and the cracks within.  Swords of varying condition were wedged into the cracks.  It was cold out, but she’d doffed her coat and hung it on one sword.  What she wore was the kind of thing she wore while training with Guilherme or in gym class.

Verona stood on the roof of the House on Half Street, bag by her feet.  Her mask was in three pieces, but the staples were gone.  Each piece was subtly different, in the glossiness of paint and shading.  One slightly more damaged and chipped, one slick, one with apparent brush strokes.  She kept her hands in the pockets of her secondhand coat, which had been dyed black but in the bright light from the descending meteor, the uneven application of dye was visible like the staining of a bogeyman’s skin and clothes.

Avery stood on a branch, Snowdrop sitting beside her.  The tree grew out of the shack where she’d done the Forest Ribbon Trail ritual, through the hole that had been made when Nicolette had reached in.  Lost Others gathered near the foot of the tree- a woman with her kingdom of urchins and rodents, a car, and a weirdly proportioned little kid.  Avery had the one piece of antler up by her brow, and wore a coat with a light tan ruff and an antler pattern bleached into the lower half.

The meteor plummeted, the resistance of air and reality making it a fight that gravity alone won.  As it got low enough that its lowest point was on a level with the highest point of the ski hills, trees began to lean away, and buildings creaked.  The smoke around Lucy blew back, and the bottom ends of her coat slapped against her knees.

“I barely had tae work at this’n,” Alpeana commented.

Lucy turned her head slightly, glancing over.

“Y’er all feelin’ tha identical way aboot this, sae how come y’er standing sae far apart?”

“Only in a sense, kind of?” Avery asked, from her perch on the swaying tree.  Ribbons tied to branches were whipping back away from the meteor that inched down.  “We can still talk, even if we’re at different places around the city.  Not that, hm… I’m not the person to say much about being far away, am I?”

“You’re fine,” Verona said.  “Doing what you need to.”

“But are we fine?” Avery asked.  “Is Kennet?”

“The idea was that this fixes things some,” Lucy replied.  Her breath fogged in the cold air, mingling with hot smoke.  “Lock things down so they stop slipping away and changing, stabilize, give the Others more ground to retreat to.  Free us to bring some Others in.  Ones who need sanctuary.”

The meteor had slowed the closer it got to Kennet.  Lines drawn all over the city illuminated.  It moved an inch or two every few seconds as it got close to making contact.

Verona tilted her head as she watched, then she said, “Feeling I got while doing the demesne claim is the Judges aren’t going to say no.  I’m not even sure they can.  But they were like, think hard about this and what I want to do.  With demesne and with this whole thing, I guess.  Pointed out some sketchiness with Toadswallow.  Rook.  Matthew, kinda.  A reminder about-”

“Miss,” Lucy finished, glancing back at the back parking lot behind the Arena.  Where the Carmine had died.  Where Miss had watched and done nothing.

Saying Miss’s name was a tiny tug that brought the meteor home.  It grazed the corner of a building, wind and burning air swirling around it, and it cast off a shower of deep blue sparks that shot skyward and parted clouds.  Light speared down in shafts.

Kennet shook.  Buildings swayed, and broke from the ground.  Trees with ribbons tied to every branch grew out of the city, and speared through buildings, lifting fragments away from the foundations.  Some buildings cracked like eggshells as they lifted away, and the contents multiplied, stringing together.

Like an orange peel removed in a single strip, Kennet began to break up into a lengthy segment that spiraled up from a central point.  Yellow flower petals and leaves began to pour down from above.  Lucy held onto the hilt of a sword that had stabbed into the rooftop as the Arena was drawn up.  Her boots scraped for traction as the roof angled slightly.

Miss, rose up from the center.  From head to waist- which was all that stuck up out of the crater, she was easily forty feet tall, hair longer and messier than ever, whipping around her.  Her back arched as she stretched, accommodating her new stature as the heart of this Kennet.  The parts of the path that penetrated the clouds allowed brilliant, opaque shafts of white light to stab down, obscuring her face and leaving her as a figure in almost complete shadow, because the light was such a contrast.  Motes and plumes of dust moved through the light and illuminated to a near-white.

“How’s things on your end?” Lucy asked Avery.  She fixed her eyes on the distant spot and she could see Avery as clearly as if Avery was five feet away.

“They’re retaking the territories.  They haven’t cracked the spot where we’re keeping the bulk of the third-stringers, Basil, and America prisoner, but they called in help for the rest.  We’re only like, twelve people when you count Thunder Bay and the people and Others who resent Musser.  And there’s a lot of people in Musser’s corner.”

Lucy sighed.  She turned to Verona.  “You get that project done?”

“Gotta love the segue from the brave rebellion against warmongering wizards to school stuff.  I’m like, seventy five percent done.”

“You know it’s due today, right?”

Verona went very still.  Then she chuckled.  “This is a nightmare.  Multilayered head-screwery.  Are you really Lucy?  Alpy, are you playing games with me?”

“Naw.”

“Fuck!”

“Don’t think you can skip homeroom and gym class either.”

“Mr. Bader is really squirrely if you even hint about it being that time of the month, so maybe…”

“He really is,” Avery said.  “It could work.”

“You’d still have to go to school and teachers talk,” Lucy said.

“Fuck!  Wake me up early?  Maybe I can squeak through.”

“Okay, A, number one, first thing, I’m not your fucking mom.”

“Okay, well, that’s fair, but-”

“And B, number two, sequel to number one, Avery?  Help me out?”

“We’re all dreaming.  Lucy’s dreaming too.  So how’s she supposed to wake you up early?”

“Alpeana!  Help me!”

“I know I said I dinnae haf tae work a’ this, but are ye really off tae stan’ thar nae appreciatin’ a good nightmare lik’ this ‘n then ask fer my help?”

“I can bring you stuff,” Verona offered, making a pleading gesture.

“Ahh’ll wake yeh.”

“You’re a softie, Alpy!” Avery accused.

The bodies started falling.  Citizens of Kennet, falling from the broken and uplifted buildings.  People unable to find purchase on the sloping, spiraling path fell from the edges.  Some dropped only five or ten feet, others a hundred, or two hundred.  They hit other parts of the path, branches, and other jutting bits of signage or debris.  One person hit a family of four with a dog, and all five fell.

The collecting blood around and below Miss began to tint the light red.

With arms slick with blood from elbow to fingertip, Miss started to reach out with a cupped hand to stop some falls.

And then she stopped.  She let bodies fall.

“We’ve got some shit we’ve gotta resolve, huh?” Lucy asked.

“I had a rough conversation with Rook when I tried to get her to let America go,” Avery remarked.

“Yep,” Verona replied  “Saw her too, during the demesne claim.  I can imagine how cheerful she was with you.”

“Guilherme’s not doing so hot,” Lucy commented.  Her eyes tracked the ongoing chaos.  Goblins emerging from the crater.  There was a distant gunshot.  “The Dogs are a bit rudderless.”

“Might be nice to be rudderless for a bit,” Verona said, angling her head toward Lucy.  “After being on task in a super hardcore way or being bound for, what, their entire existence?”

“Yeah.  But I dunno.  They aren’t all as nice as John,” Lucy noted.  “Which, you know, no obligation to be.  They’re people, they have the right to be free to be assholes or be saints.  Whatever path they want to take.  But if they end up being assholes, they can be really dangerous assholes.”

“We or someone else stop them if it comes to that,” Avery said.

“Yeah.”  Lucy sighed out the word.  She looked over at Alpeana.  “How are you?”

“Ah’m na asshole, I dinnae think sae, anyway.”

“I meant in terms of… dealing with crap, I guess.”

“Tough work?” Verona asked.

“It helps that ye’ve brought me things.  Thare less folk, tae.”

“There being less people around isn’t super great, though,” Avery remarked.

“Aye.”

The sheer number of people who were falling and hitting the sides of the path were staining the light further up.  It was more red than white now.  There were more gunshot sounds.

Lucy thought of Alexander.

“We appreciate you helping us meet like this, Alpy,” Avery said.

“Aye.  Ah feel bad, nae daein’ mair, afore.  Ah let Mari know tae much.”

I feel bad, not doing more, before.

“What the heck do we do?” Lucy asked.  “Pull out?  Change plans?”

“Mmm, that might be problematic,” Verona said.

“But if we don’t trust the outcome…”

“It’s really tied up into my demesne now,” Verona said.  “We really need to make this happen.  The tricky part is figuring out how.”

“Tied-” Avery started to reply, but a sudden shift of the landscape around her meant she had to grab for something to hold onto.  Snowdrop held onto her shirt, reaching up to grab the corner and stabilize her.  “Tied up how?”

“Let’s just say a lot of stuff goes wrong if we don’t end up with a Lost Kennet.”

“Technically, hmmm,” Avery replied, “It’s more like a Found Kennet.”

“Right.”

“And this whole thing is actually not how it’s going to look, at all, when we’re done.  Are you drawing from all three of us to put this scene together, Alpy?”

“Och, aye.”

Lucy folded her arms.  “We’re getting sidetracked.”

“Just saying,” Avery replied.  “We should know what we’re building.  We’re not Alice going through the looking glass.  We’re doing the loose equivalent of building Neverland.  A quirky, fantastical place with its own rules, that Lost and other Others are comfortable in.  There will be Path-like parts to it, but it’s not a Path.”

“Yeah,” Lucy said.  She paused and tried to think of a way to reply that didn’t sidetrack things further, and she couldn’t.  “Got it.  Verona?  What were you saying?”

“Just that we committed.  I committed.”

“On a scale of one to ten, how much does this screw things up for you if we can’t pull this off?”

“Like, a seven?” Verona asked.

“That’s bad,” Avery noted.

“Pretty bad, okay,” Lucy replied.

“But I have a really good imagination so just because I can think of worse things, don’t think a seven is all that low.”

Lucy sighed.

Verona pushed her mask up so it rested on top of her head.  “And a claim is going to go out as part of us setting this up.  So Avery’s right.  The scene won’t look like this.  We won’t just be hanging out like some people with their thumbs stuck up their asses watching an eclipse.  We’ll be defending the whole process.”

“God damn it,” Lucy muttered.

“Sorry.  The Judges are dicks.”

“I’m a little snagged on the part where you said people have their thumbs up their asses?” Avery asked.

“Yeah,” Verona replied.  “That’s a thing.”

“I see it all the time,” Snowdrop said.  “Most people do it.”

“You hang out with goblins,” Avery pointed out.  “So I suspect they’re the-”

“The rare type who don’t do that,” Snowdrop finished.

Lucy shook her head.  “Let’s not dwell on Verona’s odd goblin-like habits-”

“Ha,” Verona replied.

“-or weird phrasings.  Am I right if I read this as us being locked into this?”

“Well, life will really suck for me if we don’t get it done,” Verona said.

“And you’re not sharing the particulars?” Lucy asked.

“I don’t want you to fuss over it.  I’ll handle it, somehow.  But we shouldn’t back down on this.”

“So we’re set on building this Los- Found Kennet.  We’ll have to defend it while we put it together, or time things like we did with Verona’s demesne.”

“Yep,” Avery said.  She was a few hundred feet higher up than Verona, lifted up by the ongoing spiraling of Kennet.  And Verona was higher up than Lucy.  Her voice and Verona’s voices came at a volume that made it sound like they were right next to Lucy.

Lucy watched the representation of Miss rise higher.  The sun moved as if it dangled from a string.

“Can we trust you, Alpeana?” Lucy asked.

“Aye.  Unless ye’re aff tae hurt the others, somehow.”

“Just… really want to protect the people.  I want to protect the Others.  You.  Some of the Dog Tags.  Chloe.  I want to stop Musser.  But we’re all on different pages.”

“Even us,” Verona said.

“A bit, yeah.”

“Or different corners of the same page?” Verona asked.

“Rook wants to win a war.  Miss wants her Kennet… and maybe this is a shot at that for her, but are we really okay?  Toadswallow is building his market.  We’re bringing in…”

Lucy struggled to find the words.

“Some tricky allies,” Avery said.

“It’s more specific than that.  We’re all on different pages and we’re all befriending and recruiting people who are acceptable to us,” Lucy explained.

Avery was descending from her roost.  Onto the path, walking down as the spiral rose up.  Here and there, she jumped down onto buildings and fragments of road.  “I summoned a bunch of Lost I think would be pretty cool to have around Kennet.”

“For sure,” Lucy said.  “But you’re great, you’re kind, you’re cool.  So if you pick some types that are more your vibe, we get Others who are great-ish, or kind-ish, or cool-ish.  But when Toadswallow picks allies, we get Tatty and Peckersnot-”

“Technically Peckersnot’s more my recruit,” Verona interrupted.

Her house was drifting closer now.  A house on a floating island of land that was going the direction Verona wanted.

Lucy used her Sight.  A giant sword fell from above, glanced off the spiraling path, and struck the side of the Arena.  A representation of that pain.  That night.

She walked up the flat of it.  “Point is, he also had Peckersnot kill.  And among those he’s brought in was the Milkmaid, who Verona described.”

“Oh aye!” Alpeana chimed in.  “Ah meant tae tell ye!  A’ve seen that lassie afore!”

“In a nightmare,” Verona commented.

“Aye,” Alpeana said.  She leaped up to the strip of roadway that was getting close to the Arena, latching onto the underside.  “Tha witch hunter Raph.  Show’d up while ye were away, lassie.”

“Aye,” Verona replied.

Avery hurled a pebble at Verona but missed.

“Tha Milkmaid lassie got him started.  Set tha lad on his path.”

“Whole lot of mutilation, killing, traps, and murder.” Verona remarked.  “Maybe a five out of ten horrifying, but again-”

“We need to have a serious talk about your rating scales, Ronnie,” Lucy interrupted.

“I can imagine us in a bad situation, Verona briefs us, says it’s a three out of ten bad, but she’s feeling very imaginative that day…” Avery said.

“Point is,” Verona said, raising her voice and enunciating more, “some weapons supplied by our man Toadswallow, before the gentleman act and monocle.”

“It’s all kind of crappy,” Lucy replied.  “And I don’t know what the answer looks like.  I know I’m no angel.  What I did to Paul, scratching his car, pulling a knife on him, the curse of cowardice… I called John over to the Blue Heron with the general idea he might do what he’d do.  But- but.”

“A lot of the Others we’d be relying on here have some bad history,” Verona finished.

“Aye,” Alpeana said, from above them.  She hung from the underside of the strip of earth.  Snowdrop reached up to try to touch the end of her hair.  Alpeana went on to add, “If ye ‘bide long enough that gives ye a lot o’ time tae git intae bad habits.”

“Wee bit of murder, sometimes?” Verona asked.

Avery tossed a bit of rubble at Verona.  It bounced off Verona’s mask on the top of her head.

“Maist o’ us come from humans or human behavior an’ if we get tha ill luck o’ bein’ a tad murdery by nature then that’s a thing we’ve git tae deal wi’.  Nae anybody gets tha chance tae be better.  Running scared fae tha stairt.”

“Fae?  What?” Lucy asked.  “Sorry, I didn’t get that at all.”

“Others come from humans, usually, and a lot seem to come from the less-great parts of humans, right?” Avery asked, looking up from the bit of road she was on.

“Aye.  Seems sae.  I willnae lie.  Ah haven’t murdered any, but I’ve scared a lot o’ folk.”

“And given circumstances, not everyone gets the chance to figure out another way than the murder or the scaring folk stuff,” Avery went on.  “Born fighting, or born into intense situations.”

“But like, okay, Alpy, I hear you, but there’s a point where you can’t say someone’s off the hook just because they had crappy parents and a bad upbringing.”

“I dunno.  You can be a bit off the hook,” Verona replied.  “Question is like… look at the Mussers.  Or Fernanda Whitt.  How many chances have the young kids had to really clue the fuck in?  How much did Reid have?  How many chances has Musser had to not be a puckered asshole, that he’s turned down?  Because I could buy Raquel not getting many opportunities because she’s barely had time away from her uncle and there’s a lot of programming to work through.  Musser?  Nah, fuck him.”

“There’s a line,” Lucy offered.

“I think Raquel is coming around a bit,” Avery said.  “We chat.  Mostly about movies and stuff.  I got her into that show Sheridan likes.  Drives her crazy how they portray rich people and it’s absolute trash, but hey.  I think if I had the chance to meet up with her, she’d be open to a heart-to-heart.”

“That’s cool,” Lucy told her.

“That’s what this is supposed to be.  A chance,” Verona said, indicating the meteor crater and the giant, bloody Miss.  Ragged and bloody bodies were draped over every surface, along with things from ruined buildings.  Darker Others were pouring out from below.  “Except you guys have clearly got anxieties about this stuff.”

“This comes from you too, numbnuts,” Avery said, before turning to Alpy, “doesn’t it?”

“Aye.”

Verona made a dismissive sound.

Lucy shook her head.  “There’s a line.  And I’m not sure how okay it is to point to Guilherme and expect him to pay for things he did five hundred years ago.  Or the Dogs of War who’ve evolved, starting out as agents of War itself.  Or, Alpy- I get the feeling you’ve kicked a lot of people while they’re down.”

Alpeana turned her head around to look at Lucy from a better angle.

“It’s a bit shitty.”

“Tis tha way things work,” Alpeana replied.  “When you’re doon ye’re in a good position to be kicked.  Birds are up thar and they don’t get fecking kicked much.”

“But you’re contributing to it.”

“Ah’m an agent of tha universe, lassie.  Representational.”

Lucy sighed.  She really didn’t want to get into a heated debate, and some serious nightmares were pretty minor in the grand scheme of other stuff they had to wrestle with.  Like Toadswallow and Crooked Rook.  “I dunno.  I’d say there’s a line and some stuff’s way in the past or people and Others were different people and Others before, fine, maybe.  But we’re definitely in a position where we’re doing this big ritual and it sure seems like we’re partnering with a lot of Others who aren’t on the side of that line where I’d give them a pass, you know?”

“The line might be different for each of us,” Avery noted, quiet.

“For sure,” Verona replied.  “Yeah.  I think I’m okay with more than you guys are.”

“You guys have the council meeting tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah,” Lucy replied.  “I’ll patch you in, if you want.”

“I’ll try to get away from everything.”

“I might’ve tipped our hand about this stuff,” Verona said.  “Telling Toadswallow I want him to allow another leadership vote, everything considered.”

“We need allies,” Lucy said.  “We’ve got to get the others like Miss and Toadswallow to the point we can trust them… and to get there we need other people we can trust.”

“Tall order,” Verona remarked.

“How much time do we have?” Lucy asked Avery.

“Before what?  This?” Avery asked, indicating the ritual.

There was no more light coming from the sky.  There was just darkness and the red of blood painting Miss and the places the bodies hit.  Soaking everything.  The ground below teemed with Others of the sort they had been fighting since May.

It left her with a sick feeling in her gut that wouldn’t go away even when she told herself this was a collaborative nightmare.

“Before Musser regroups,” Lucy clarified, once she found her words again.  Her eyes searched the scene.

“Rook would be the better person to ask,” Avery admitted.

Lucy frowned, and the nuances of the expressions on her face seemed to communicate her intent to Avery.

“Yeah,” Avery said, to things unspoken.  “A couple days?  I think Musser is probably busy consolidating his hold on Toronto.  Rook will handle keeping the people prisoners.  It might be better if we’re not directly involved in that.  At least not any more than we currently are.  Some people will be really pissed.”

“Then we have a couple days to get sorted.  Ideally with a distraction ready for Musser.  Something he can’t ignore.  We’ll have to settle things at home and be ready to do the ritual.  And be ready to defend things.”

Verona nodded.

“Let me know wha’ I kin do,” Alpeana told them.

I’m not entirely sure I trust you, with what you do to people, Lucy thought.  It might be the opposite of justice.

But that’s where we’re at, huh?  Where I gotta let that slide?

“Thanks,” she replied.

“Lucille,” Guilherme intoned.  “If I must tell you again today that you must mind your expression while fighting, I’m liable to force you to wear that bared teeth grimace for the remainder of the day.”

“Yeah, don’t do that,” Lucy told him.  “You don’t ‘must’ tell me anything.”

“Focus.  You’re my student, you represent me.  You know little of what I must do.  And you’re Bracken’s enemy.  You represent yourself, there.  Represent yourself as someone unflinching.  Bulletproof, as you say.”

“That was a good tie-back,” Lucy told him.  “Sometimes I don’t think you listen to what I say.”

“It was a failing on my part.  Vulgarity is the lowest form of wit and bending the knee to modern language is a lowering of a similar sort.”

“What’s he on about?” Bracken asked, quiet.

“Just go with it,” Lucy replied.

“Spar,” Guilherme told them.  “Keep your expression neutral and confident, Lucy, and don’t be subversive.  I can infer what you’re whispering and I won’t brook disrespect.”

“I’m telling him to cooperate.”

“Dust your hands and spar.”

Lucy rinsed her hands in the dust, then squared off against Bracken.

It was an exchange of physical blows, fist to upper body, fist to chin.  They were wading through some of the loose glamour and that dusted their feet.  Her bare feet slid on the icy stone floor, and she had to believe there would be traction.

“Go Bracken.”

Bag was on the sidelines.  Bracken’s little brother, sitting on his bag, hair badly combed, ready to go to school.

He’d been told to stay quiet so he whispered instead, and it was actually very distracting.  She wished she’d taken off her earring.

Bracken had the edge over her, because yes, she’d trained, more with weapons than anything else, but Bracken had real-world experience throwing punches.  And there was that annoying sticking point that he was stronger and he was bigger with longer limbs.

And Guilherme was making the injuries they sustained last for the entire pre-school sparring session.  She’d been scraped up the back of one arm earlier and it wasn’t healing.  Bracken had a notch in his eyebrow that kept opening up and bleeding.

Keep your expression still.

With her eyes, she tried to will for Bracken to understand and know that she’d gone up against the Family Man.  She’d fought Stew Mullen.

Her earring did catch incoming footsteps, many of them accompanied by a scraping sound.

“Damn, did I miss stuff?  Fuck me!”

Bracken’s eyes moved off to the side to identify the voice.  Lucy ducked low and went at him.  Reflexively, he punched for her, but his hand whiffed through her hair behind her head.

She closed the distance, and pummeled him, a series of five or six blows in rapid succession to the gut, forehead knocking against his sternum.

He tried to back off, and she leaned hard into him.  His left hand scraped against her back, fingers digging into the ribs of her left side and pulling her top askew, trying to get her off balance and positioned for an incoming strike with his other arm.

“Go go go go go.”

She drove the heel of her hand hard into his side, and didn’t pull her hand away post-punch, pushing at him to get away from the elbow that was coming down at her.  He missed.

At a glance, she confirmed that he’d at least had the decency to dust his elbow.

He tried to move back, and his foot bumped hers.

She stopped willing for the dust to have traction.  She moved her foot with his on rock that was slick because it had dust on it.  His foot didn’t find traction there either, because her will overrode his.  He sprawled.

“No, come on, get up.”

“Enough,” Guilherme told them.

“I barely even got started,” Bracken protested.  “I can fight, that didn’t hurt that badly.”

“Too many fights end more quickly than that.  I’ve instructed you in what to do, you haven’t internalized it.  Let this feeling of an unfinished fight sit with you.  Dwell on it.  Internalize what I am attempting to teach you.”

“I learn better by doing.”

“Apparently not.”

Lucy huffed, straightening out her top.  The stone floor of the cave was cold enough it made the bones of her feet hurt, but she pushed that out of mind.

Melissa had turned up at the entrance.

“You got my text,” Lucy noted.  She picked up her phone.  The last messages were her telling Melissa they were sparring & asking if they could meet before school, and a check-in with Verona.  “I wasn’t sure because you didn’t reply.”

“Jumped straight in the shower and then hurried over.  I figured I could use my scooter but apparently I can fu- muss up my ankle just standing and using my other foot to push.  Hi Bag.”

“Hi.  Do you have candy?”

“Uhhh, no but I have a couple dipstick’s desserts.”

Lucy sensed Guilherme wasn’t in the mood to let her get distracted, and returned to her sparring position.  She couldn’t help but ask, “Dipstick’s desserts?”

“I was feeling nostalgic!  Got a few dipstick dinners too, but those are way worse than I remember.  Five dry crackers and five weirdly plastic-y bits of pepperoni.  Or a ‘burger’ with a weirdly processed lump of meat.”

Lucy shook her head.  She watched as Melissa handed over the dipstick desserts.  Little plastic containers with tiny cookies, frosting, and sprinkles, with the namesake stick built into the container, ready to be torn away.  Bag took them with zero shame.  “Are you bribing Bracken’s little brother?”

“Focus,” Guilherme said.

“Why would I want to bribe him?” Melissa asked, doing a very bad job of sounding innocent.

“I wondered if we were done, if you were frustrated with Bracken,” Lucy said.

“No.  We’ll have another lesson.  For this, I must ask Lucy to go away.  Melissa, Bag, if you would cover your eyes?  I would rather keep certain matters a secret.”

“But-”

“For only a moment,” Guilherme cut off Melissa’s protest like he’d expected it before she said anything.

“And guys?” Lucy interjected.  “If someone like Guilherme gives you something or asks you to do something and gives you a serious warning, you should do it.  This isn’t a warning where it’s funny to fool around.”

Sitting by the cave entrance, Melissa covered her eye and pulled Bag closer to her to cover his as well.

Guilherme dumped a load of dust onto Lucy.

The dust was cold.  It made her numb on contact where it touched skin, and where it touched clothing it made the clothes cold in a way that emanated that cold.  She held still and let him work.

Am I supposed to fight while freezing to death?

The numbness wore off with a sharp and exaggerated pins and needles feeling.

“You may uncover your eyes.”

Lucy wasn’t human anymore.  She was a very large fox.  Large enough her shoulders came up to Bracken’s chest.  Large enough that the only thing keeping Bag’s innocence intact was the fact he was five and didn’t necessarily know how big animals were supposed to be.

“Bracken, you’ll fight this beast.  Beast… I hope you’re capable of applying the lessons I’ve taught you.”

To this shape?

In a way, it was a turning of the tables.

She was bigger.

Bracken bent down to pick up a piece of the fighting stick that Guilherme had had them using at the start.

“Unarmed, Bracken,” Guilherme said.

Oh.  Guilherme was upset Bracken hadn’t internalized the lesson and advice.  Lucy had fangs and claws and she was bigger and probably stronger.  Bracken had only fists.  This was meant to be a lesson.  A humbling.

Bag was watching.

But if she threw this, she’d be the one to upset Guilherme.  Worse, if he battered her and this glamour proved fragile, it would threaten Bag’s innocence.

She was pretty sure that Guilherme would lay the blame for that on her, rather than taking it himself.

No.  There was one solution.

To take all the lessons of the day.

Staying calm, composed, and threatening.  She didn’t break eye contact.  She moved a few rapid paces to the right, then a few less to the left.  Bracken shifted his feet each time.

No obvious hitch, gaps, or weaknesses.

She dashed into the shadows.

Bracken’s expression and reactions were her best way of tracking how well he could see her.  She changed direction a few times, dipping further into shadow, and waited until she had an opening.

She pounced on him, almost from behind, and slammed him to the floor of the cave beneath her weight.

“No!” Bag shouted.

Teeth found his neck.  She kept them there, not breaking the skin.

“You can draw blood,” Guilherme told her.

She didn’t move.

It felt like he had an expectation.  Some idea that she was an extension of him, that she was supposed to obey, supposed to draw his conclusions without him even saying them outright.

And she’d failed to do that.

“That’s all.  We’re done,” Guilherme told them.  “You said you had limited time, and that time is up.”

He didn’t sound happy.

She let Bracken go, then retreated to shadow.  She had to work to find a way to shake free of the glamour.  It was tenacious, and tough enough that she wondered if Bracken really could have cracked it with his fists.

Bad assumption there on her part.

Scraping herself against rock, she managed to get some purchase, and then she got a hand out and through, breaking it from within.

“Can I come out now?” she asked.

Guilherme didn’t respond, walking away.

“I should hurry home and shower off this dust before school.  You could scooter by me while we talk, Mel.”

“I could but do I want to?”

“I invited you over.”

Melissa made a disgusted sound.  “My ankle is f’ed up right now, though.”

“Lucille.”

Lucy turned to look at Guilherme.

“There is a river a very short distance from the cave entrance.  There is no need to go home and shower.”

“It’s what, around five degrees out?”

He didn’t reply, disappearing deeper into the cave.

Lucy hesitated.

She walked over to the water and knelt down by the shore, and used cupped hands to get water and rinse her face, wet her hair, and rub her arms free of the dust.  The gouge in her one arm came away like a dribble of nail polish that was stuck stubbornly to the back of her arm.  She got her pits, rinsed her hand, and rubbed her neck.

It was cold, numbing, and she felt it in her bones, but there was no pain with that cold.

Normally that would be a very bad sign.

But here, she used it as an excuse to sort herself out.

She got cleaned up, even splashing water on her shoes to get the dust, and then wiped wet hands lightly across her top and jeans.  With the residual dust she managed to wipe away, she rubbed hands together, then fixed her hair with the glamour, and got rid of a few damp spots on clothing.  She returned to her stuff, pulled on her sweatshirt, and then got her jacket, pulling that on as well.

She could feel Guilherme out there, looking.  Seeing if she’d take his strong advice that she do this instead.  Seeing if she’d recognize that the cold wasn’t hitting her like usual, washing up like this.  Which, sure, that was cool.  But she would’ve rather had a warm shower and felt more clean.

Her bag was last.  Her phone rested on top.

Verona:
it’s as good as I’m going to get it. going to start getting rdy

“Guess we don’t need to loop back to my place,” she told Melissa.  “Let’s go to school.”

“Yayyyyy, school,” Melissa said, with less than zero passion.

“I like school,” Bag told her.  “My friends are there.”

“Hold onto that, okay?  Friends too.  They’re important.  Don’t ever abandon them.”

Bracken had a bit of a sullen atmosphere around him as he got his things together.  He looked back at the cave, then at Lucy, then he looked annoyed and frustrated.

“Oh, I was going to ask… Guilherme?” Melissa called out.

“What are you doing?” Lucy asked.

Guilherme emerged.

“I was wondering, I want to get in shape again, and I wouldn’t mind kicking ass, but my ankle is kinda screwed up.”

“It is,” Guilherme replied.  “And?”

“Any advice?  Or maybe I could become a student?”

“What the hell, Mel?  I warned you about this,” Lucy said.

“I have some, and you could potentially become a student, but you should talk to Lucille first.”

“You don’t even do physio?  You want to train like this?”

“Sure.  I think it’d be better.  Stubbornness fuels me.”

“It’s good fuel,” Bracken said.

“See!?” Melissa asked.

“Oh my god.  I don’t know, okay?  Let me- we’ll talk about it.”

“You’re trying to think of a way to say no but you can’t think of a good reason right now.”

“Sounds about right,” Bracken said.

“See?” Melissa asked.

“Bracken agreeing with you isn’t the validation you seem to think it is.”

Melissa gave her a very disgusted look.

“That was a very Verona look.”

“Huh,” Melissa replied.  She limped a bit as she walked and picked up the scooter that Bag was fiddling with.  “I think she shot me a look like that when I mentioned joining the Dancers.”

“Yeah, probably.  Are you going to be okay walking on that ankle?”

“Ugh.”

“Hey Bracken?” Lucy asked.  “You want to support Melissa, help her?  She could use the cane and lean on you.  I’ll look after Bag.”

Bracken looked at Lucy as if he was suspicious of some trick.  There was a guardedness about him that made her wonder if she should have said anything.  Because he was a sore loser.

He bent down.

“Bow down before me,” Melissa said.  “What are you-”

“Nevermind.”

“Wait, what were you doing?  Wait, sorry,” Melissa said.

Bracken stopped.  He looked at her, then frowned, bending over again.  “Sit on my shoulders.”

“The entire way to school?” Lucy asked.

“You shush,” Melissa retorted.  “Seriously, shush.”

“I carried rubble for fifteen hours a day with the Foreman.  I can carry her.”

“Flattering, wow,” Melissa said.

“My brother is strong,” Bag said.  “He’s the strongest non-adult I know.”

“Pretty cool,” Melissa replied.  “Hauling rubble and crippled girls.”

“I’m not going to haul anything if you don’t sit.”

She got settled sitting astride Bracken’s shoulders, and Lucy braced Melissa from behind so she wouldn’t end up flopping backwards when he straightened up.  With the ground being slate beneath them, Melissa would cracking her head like an egg on the stone shore.  They got upright without needing help from Lucy.

Lucy put Bag on the scooter and held the handles, which were too high for him to really use.  Here and there, the uneven rocks meant he had to step off and then step back on again.

“You mentioned Verona,” Melissa said.

“Uh huh.”

“I get I was annoying before.  I wouldn’t want to join the Dancers now.  But it feels like sometimes she really doesn’t like me.  Avoids me and doesn’t join the conversations.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not sure how much of that is me not realizing it wasn’t really Verona and then running away with the wrong idea, but… am I wrong?”

“You’re not wrong.”

“Cool, huh.  Why?  Is she ableist?”

“She’s friends with a mute eyeball monster and a mute… tiny eyeball monster.  She can be insensitive as hell with some stuff but when it comes to quirks, abilities, disabilities, and all that other stuff she is shockingly open minded.”

“Right, sure.”

“I’m friends with three dragons,” Bag said.

“Are you?”

“Toys,” Bracken said.

“They’re not!  They just pretend to be toys!”

“They’re toys.”

“No, nuh uh!  They’re dragons and one breathes shrapnel like the stuff from when the oven at the smoke factory exploded, and one breathes a mist that makes your skin peel off like in that one movie Mr. Pearlman couldn’t believe I watched, and one breathes candy but he’s the meanest one of all.  He’ll make you sick so you need to jab yourselves with needles every day.”

“Bag’s friend at school just found out he has diabetes,” Bracken said.

“That’s it.  Diabetes!”

“Verona doesn’t hate you, I don’t think,” Lucy told Melissa.  “In fact, you’d probably get along super well.”

“Uh huh?  Is this weirdo can’t-tell-you stuff again?”

“She had a nightmare.  A special one.  And in that nightmare, you were friends with her.  And it was a pretty screwed up life.”

“Huh,” Melissa replied, looking down at Lucy.  Then she repeated herself, “Huh.”

“It’s up to her if she wants to tell you more.  But I guess she doesn’t want to do anything that would help reality line up with the nightmare.”

“Huh.  Okay.  That’s weirdly ominous.”

“If you want to know more maybe you ask her.  I probably said too much already.  But she doesn’t hate you.  She’s just scared about what’s going to happen.”

“Okay,” Melissa replied.

Lucy picked Bag up and lifted him and the scooter up to get them over a ridge.  As they got to the slope that went up to the road, she helped them get up, and then kept a very firm hand on the scooter handles, so Bag wouldn’t go zooming off.

“Harder to deal with than me saying the wrong thing or doing something I can fix with an apology.”

“Yeah,” Lucy agreed.  “But that’s what we’re dealing with.  Lots of stuff that’s really hard to deal with.”

“If you ever decide you need a cranky, crippled fourth member, I’ll get started on carving a dragon mask.”

“A dragon?”

“Bag likes dragons.  I’d be in Bag’s good books forever, right?”

“Yeah!  Dragons have wings and four legs, and drakes don’t have the wings but they have the four legs, and then there’s wyverns, who only have the two back legs, and lung dragons-”

“I got him a book on dragons from the library,” Bracken said.

“-and turtle dragons, and dragon gods-”

“You can’t have a dragon mask,” Lucy told Melissa.

“Does that mean you’re thinking about it?”

“No.  I’m not thinking about it.  But that just means you extra can’t have a dragon mask.”

“-and Saint George killed a dragon that was so poisonous it poisoned everybody!”

“That’s really poisonous,” Melissa said.

“Yeah!”

“They’re animal masks,” Lucy told Melissa.  “Dragons aren’t animals.”

“Sure they are.  And they’re badass.”

“They’re so cool!” Bag piped up.

“Bag agrees.  Bag, do you think if I became a witch with an animal mask, I should be a dragon?”

“Yeah!”

“It doesn’t even suit you,” Lucy pointed out.  “They’re symbolic.”

Bracken sighed heavily.

“Reason I called you was I wanted the rundown, just in case.”

“The rundown?”

“On the stand-ins?  For while Ronnie and I were away?”  The Fetches, for while we did the demesnes ritual.

“Well, if it helps, Mia thinks you’re a great listener.”

“A great listener?”

“Yeah.  So, I don’t suppose you got your stand-in to write down what Mia told her?”

“…No.”

“Okay.”

“She was supposed to avoid people.”

“She did, but Mia doesn’t let you have alone time.  It’s because she’s insecure.  That’s why she’s all friendly-friendly, buddy buddy.”

“Let’s not make this a gripe-about-the-dancers thing.”

“I’m going to gripe a little.  She invited me to be polite and I went because I had to keep an eye on your double, right?”

“Yeah.  You went?”

“Sure.  And I held my tongue and tried to be nice and crap.  The gist I got was Amadeus has a girlfriend now.  In the city.”

“Oh no.”

“It’s going to happen, right?”

“But only after two months?  Not even?”

Bracken sighed again.

“Verona was pretty antisocial though.  But I figured she wanted it that way.”

“I guess.  Okay.  Anything else I need to know?  Stuff I missed?”

They made their way to the school in a relaxed, fairly roundabout way, and Bracken put Melissa down as they got to the fence that contained the fields where the younger kids got out for recess.  Lucy split off from them and found Verona, who was chaining her bike up to the fence, where it joined a dozen more.

“Did you get it done?”

“Just barely.  I only did a quick pass for spelling issues,” Verona replied.  “I’m afraid to look at it.  If I see an issue it’ll annoy me for weeks.”

“Yeah.  Well, good luck.”

Verona waved to Jeremy as he got out of the car.

“Wallace been in touch?”

“Yeah.  It’s been nice.  Nothing too special, just talking a lot.  Watched the same movie and then talked about it on the phone.”

“Cool.”

Jeremy headed their way.

“How’s the house?”

“Getting underway with some stuff.  Mostly trying to connect it to the undercity and leave a way to get to the third place, when we get there.  I really want to put some time into it later, but I should do a patrol run of the undercity.”

“I can, if you want.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.  You get that demesne in order.”

Jeremy caught up with them, walking against the loose crowd of kids making their way up the path to the school entrance.  And that was all they could say.

The bogeyman Killwagon was a man in a wheelchair, with big chariot-style wheels with blades jutting out of the hub.  He was muscular, and dragged an old fashioned covered wagon behind him.  The roof was wood, and it looked like it had mechanisms to fold off to the side and away.  A trail of spiked chains dragged behind, and gobbets of meat and the occasional bit of roadkill were stuck to the spikes.  He looked unkempt, hair shaggy and beard extending down to his lap, and he was dressed in rags with a blanket over his lap.  Bogeyman taint shaded his outfit and the wagon.

Once he got going, he got a fair bit of speed.

The Dog Tags Grandfather and Miles stepped out in front of Killwagon, and the bogeyman turned the wheels, skidding to a stop.  Grandfather put a foot out, resting it on the blade that stuck out from the hub.

“You ran over a stall,” Grandfather said.

“It was in the way.  Whoever put it there is a dumbass,” Killwagon growled.  “Roads this clear, barely any cars?  People will want to go fast.”

“You’ve got it backward.  The stall was there because there are no cars.  Don’t go that fast,” Grandfather told him.

“Are there traffic laws?” Killwagon asked the nearest bystander.

“There’s no traffic laws,” Killwagon told Grandfather.  “You’re not cops either.  I want to go fast.”

“Why are you even still here?” Grandfather asked.  “You helped bring things in, that’s great, but maybe you’d be more comfortable back in the Abyss?”

“I’m here because I want to go fast,” Killwagon replied, raising his voice a little.  “Why is this so hard for you to understand?”

“The rules are you don’t put people in danger.  There was someone in that stall.  You’ve nearly clipped a few while zig-zagging across the road.”

“Can you bend over?  Show me the top of your head?”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“I want to see.  Do you have a blowhole, soldier boy?  Did you eat a bullet and go clean through?  Hole in the brain?  Only way I can see that would explain how you’re as shitfuck stupid as you are and still walking and talking.”

Richard Miles, the Dog Tag that had come in when Doe had left, started laughing.

“That’s not helping, Miles,” Grandfather said.

“There are no traffic laws!” Killwagon shouted.  “Eat a bullet, soldier boy, get it to go through the brain.  I’d believe it if someone said you were oxygen deprived and your poor brain was a rare as shit case of someone doing better with a vent-hole between their brain and the outside.  Get some oxygen in.”

“You can ride but you can’t do it downtown.  Not if you’ll risk killing anyone.”

“But I didn’t kill!  I’d know if I had!  And I want to go fast downtown, so fuck you, don’t test me, or you’ll see what real road rage looks like.”

“What if you took the spikes off the wheels and got rid of the chains at the back?”

“Chains at the back are what catches my dinner.”

“And the blades on the wheels?” Grandfather asked.

“Entertainment.”

“Do you even need dinner?” Lucy called out.

“Huh?  Whossat?” Killwagon asked.  He pushed on his wheels a bit to reorient until he could see her.  “Witch girl.”

“Yeah.  Do bogeymen even need to eat?”

“Helps.  I can get stronger by murder, you don’t want me doing that on your roads, fine-”

“Or places that aren’t roads,” Lucy pointed out.

“-I can make people afraid.  Doing that some.  And I can eat, that’s the third way I can stay strong.  Keeps me going, means I don’t need to kill and scare all that much.  All I need is some roadkill, bit of fire sometimes.”

Grandfather elaborated, “People are complaining, and they’re going to the Bitter Street Witch about it.  She came to me.  Said we had a single shot at making this right before she put her people on it.”

“I could go back to doing what I usually do,” Killwagon said.  “Poor ol’ me, Guy in a weird wheelchair by the side of some road in the middle of nowhere.  Maybe by a crashed van or something.  Let ’em get close, all concerned-like, then say or do something that’ll get ’em running.  Let ’em go on their way, go around some shrubbery and whatever, get my wagon, go after ’em.  Nice long road with barely any cars, and there I am, pushing myself along, fast as their car can go.”

“Do you kill them?”

“Nah.  Not for a long time.  Why?  You care about killing that didn’t happen in your territory?”

“I care.”

“Handful of times, to get out and get free.  Couple more times once I was out, at first.  I was pissed, scared.  And I didn’t know what I had to do to stay out, just knew it was there, looking, reaching, waiting.  So I killed two different times, before I figured stuff out, found a haunt, found some friends who’d explain how all this worked.  So yeah, I killed sixty years ago, witch, ‘cept it feels shorter to me.”

Lucy sighed.

“What are you going to do, if you gotta kill and scare the shit out of people to keep from getting dragged back to hell?  I’m a one man Omelas, and I can’t fucking walk away can I?”

Miles laughed again.

“I have no idea what that means.”

“Read more.”

Grandfather walked over to stand next to Lucy.  Lucy shook her head a little, then went back to the core of things.  Couldn’t get baited, and she had to keep the peace.  “Don’t be an asshole, don’t run over stalls, don’t buzz near people… not in the downtown area, anyway.  If you provoke a situation as a guest and it ends up breaking the rules, we’ll have issues.”

“Aye aye.”

“And pay the stall owner back.”

“I don’t got much except weapons.”

“That’s not-”

“Yes!” a voice called out.

It was a woman from the undercity.  She had bleached hair and wild eyes.  She hurried over.

“I give you a weapon, and we’re square for the stall?”

“Yes.  If it’s a good weapon.”

“Can you admit it was a shit location for a stall?  Edge of the road?”

“Will that get me a better weapon?”

“Sure.”

“It was a shit location.”

“It was a shit location!” Killwagon raised his voice, twisting around to fix his gaze on Lucy and Grandfather.  He smacked the cab of his covered, old-timey wagon.

The roof unfolded, and a gun the full length of the wagon, which was maybe eighteen feet long, unfolded from the top, mounted on an accordion-like apparatus.

“You can’t have that.”

Other sections folded down in sequence, revealing various goods.  Things from the Abyss, judging by the rust and staining on them.

“There’s more in the back.  Just watch yourself.  There’s a tripwire at the door and there’s a shotgun mounted on a timer, your weight will start it.  It’ll blast away your kneecaps after thirty seconds, so pick fast.”

The woman hurried to climb into the back.  She took about twenty seconds to pick, and came out holding a cleaver that was about two feet by three feet across, with a serrated edge.  She could barely hold it, gripping it by the handle and the open hole in the top corner of the rectangular blade.

“Can I buy something?” Mallory asked from the sidelines.  Lucy hadn’t seen her.

“No.  Fuck you,” Killwagon said.  He looked at Lucy.  “We good?”

“Anyone else he needs to make reparations to?” Lucy asked Grandfather.

“I don’t give a shit about reparations,” Killwagon said, with the tone of a delirious and indignant elderly man who wasn’t totally in touch with reality, even though he didn’t appear that old.  “I want people to stop riding my skinny ass, I want meat, I want to go fast.  Giving her shit is supposed to get you off my ass.”

“Nobody else for now, don’t think,” Grandfather told Lucy.

“The Bitter Street Witch,” Lucy said.

“Take something, give it to her.”

Lucy approached the side of the wagon.

Killwagon reached back and pulled on a section of the wagon.  A vertical wooden plank slid down, and steam hissed out.  Lucy flinched, ducking down.

“Don’t waste my time.  Pick fast.”

Slowly, the gun that was sticking out of the top lowered.  It was angled to shoot the road about thirty or forty feet ahead, but it straightened out before disappearing inside.  The back door slammed shut by some mechanism, and the side compartments started to fold up.

Lucy grabbed a thing of brass knuckles that weren’t brass.  Maybe bone, with rust on the metal that had been set into it.  The bone was so stained and tarnished that it was almost black, except for the parts which were most vulnerable to being scraped off when it was roughly handled.

“Okay?  Nice and easy.  Keeping the peace?” Lucy asked.

“You’ll be in pieces if you don’t get out of the way of these wheels,” Killwagon said.

Lucy stepped back and away from the blades that stuck out of the wheel hubs.

Killwagon started to push himself along, slowly at first, but then gears beneath the chair kicked in, and the momentum he slowly picked up seemed to get locked in, and everything he did to push himself along just added to the speed.

“He’s helpful.  Kind of man who’ll help you move, because he has a truck.”

Lucy turned around twice before she looked up and saw the source of the voice.  She wasn’t sure, but she suspected the goblin had been behind her, but had swiftly relocated to throw her off.

Bubbleyum.  The pink haired goblin with garish, almost clown-ish makeup sat with one knee folded over the other, chewing gum.  She was wearing an eye-searing, neon-pink dress.  Toadswallow’s lady.

“Bit of a jerk.”

“My dear, we’re all jerks.  Trick is, you get enough jerks together in agreement, you get to make the rules to manage the other jerks.  Sometimes you pick on the other jerks, sometimes you try to make things better.  Usually that second one doesn’t work.”

“And?” Lucy asked, wary.  “If it doesn’t?”

“Try again, if you’re brave enough.  Or wait for the next jerk to take a shot,” Bubbleyum replied.  “Dearie, if you want wisdom, you’d better go to Toadsie.  All’s I’m going to tell you is these jerks aren’t all your jerks.  These jerks, some of them think that every time you come around, they’re getting more rules put on them.  More punishment.”

Lucy looked out over the Undercity.

“They don’t like rules.”

“So I gather.  But we need the rules.”

“Sure.  So… get your jerks together.  Lay down the law.”

“We’re doing that tonight.  Council meeting.”

“My first one!” the goblin said.  She uncrossed her legs, inadvertently flashing Lucy, who tried very hard to not let the image attach in any way to her brain, then she stood up.  “Your friend wanted Toadsie to retire?”

“Just calling another leadership vote.  Maybe he’ll win again.”

“He’s your jerk, you know.  Thinks the world of you three.  He’s good with kids, good with goblins in progress, but he gets so proud talking about you all, you’d think he grew and dropped a second set of nuts into his ballbag.  Chest all puffed up.”

Lucy nodded.  “He’s great, and he is great with kids.  Great at teaching.  We saw that at the Blue Heron.”

“He’s my jerk the most,” Bubbleyum said.  “My man, my hero, my hopes, my warmth in the cold, my light in the dark, my wet in the dry.  I wouldn’t trade anything for that deflated bullfrog charm.”

Something in the way she said it sounded menacing.  Or intense.  It was hard to put a finger on it because her voice wasn’t entirely human and there was a subtle fray to it.

“Yeah.  Of course.”

“It’s nice to meet one of these students he’s so fond of.  Ask him for lessons sometime.  He’d love it.  He’d enjoy it more than it takes out of him.  Dee’ll teach you how to be a bump in the night.  There’s others.  All you gotta do is ask.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“And if you ever want to fight like a goblin?” Bubbleyum asked.  She blew a bubble, and let it pop, before drawing the mess back into her mouth with three tongues.  “I teach that crap.”

“Okay.  Something to round out the Faerie duelist stuff, maybe?”

Bubbleyum stepped a bit closer.  Her eyeline was roughly at Lucy’s beltline, but she looked up.  “He’s mentioned you overheard.  That it’s all the same, eh, my dear?”

Another bubble, another pop, while the goblin maintained a half-lidded, casually uncaring gaze, with bold blue eyeshadow on the half-lids.  She stuck out her tongue again to get rid of the popped bubble mess, but this time her tongue had a piercing- a tiny blade.  She wicked off the gum with tongue contortions and drew it all into her mouth, before clicking her tongue, squinting one eye.

“Yeah, somehow.”

“Somehow,” Bubbleyum said.  She gave Lucy a pat on the hip, then turned to go.  “Win these jerks over or get enough on your side to make them listen.  Like your Bitter Street Witch did.  But if you keep going like this?  You’re going to get in a disagreement and it’s a rare goblin who’ll survive a one against six-hundred brawl.  Rarer human.”

That’s the problem though, Lucy thought.

Who do we have that we can truly lean on?  Hell.

“I thought about reaching out to Zed.  The hacker,” Lucy said.  “But they’ve done so much for us already.  I think he finds it gratifying, helping out, but there’s a certain point… asking for help over and over again, I want to pay him back somehow.  So that’s out.  For now, anyway.”

“Mm hmm.”

Low clouds swirled around the ski hill on the far end of Kennet, and made the view of Kennet itself appear more monochrome and faded out.  Like a sketch roughly outlined and shaded.  It felt more sleepy than usual.

“Nicolette, she’s busy setting up a business.  And dealing with Seth.  A lot of our peers, like Liberty, Raquel, Fernanda, they’re in awkward spots.  I think they’re trying not to mess with us too much, but if they get really serious orders?  They might.”

Lucy leaned hard into the wooden railing, forearms digging into wood, hands clasped together.  Taking in the view.

“Part of the issue is that if we did change the leadership… what happens?  Is there really anyone valid that’s better?  Matthew, maybe, but he’s going through a separation.  Kind of.”

It was getting late in the day.  Her mom was at work, so that simplified things a little bit.

“Sorry, I’m throwing a lot of names and things at you that you probably don’t get,” Lucy said.

“I don’t mind.  Vent.  Tell me.  I’ll just take it in and I’ll ask if I’m too confused by something.”

“I want you to-” Lucy started.  She stopped.  “I want you to get it, because I want to put you forward as an option for leader of the council.”

She turned around.

Louise sat in a porch chair, a little distance away, a big jug of iced tea beside her, half-empty glass right there.

“I’m not sure I’m leadership material.”

“Have you ever- ever led?” Lucy asked.

“After I started getting sick I was dispatch for the trucking company.  Then I was dispatch manager for a month.  Did pretty well, if I say so myself, but then I got sicker.  Got too hard to get in and out, I took disability.”

“Would you?  Represent Kennet above?  Because you’ve been good to Matthew, and to Snowdrop.  I know it would be tricky.”

“I don’t know a lot, kiddo,” Louise said.  “I don’t know the background.”

“Yeah.  But… isn’t that kind of what we need?  Someone who can hear the basic story and make a call?  Someone without skeletons in their closet, who can sanity check us or morality check us?  Someone told me we need people on our side and you’re one of the least jerkish people I know.”

“No skeletons in my closet, kiddo.  I think the only person I was a real jerk to in my life was myself.”

“There’s no guarantee you’d even get elected, but we talking before about you representing the people of Kennet.  Along with Melissa.”

“Melissa.  She sounded happier, last time we talked.”

“She is,” Lucy replied.

“Good.  I don’t mind representing.  I’m just surprised you thought of me.”

“Melissa’s too young, other people aren’t- they aren’t aware of.  And I know this is a big ask and we’re putting you in the line of fire-”

“I’m dying.  Slowly but surely.  If I got stuck in a gang crossfire and died, it wouldn’t be shaving off that many years from my lifespan.”

Lucy frowned.

“Why me, though?”

“Because- I think of the moment you met Ken.  You crossed paths and you seemed to really like him right off the bat.”

“Did.  Funny thing, I’m not usually like that.”

“He’s- you love Kennet.  I thought about it and I think that’s what you were feeling.  And I think we need some of that love.  I told Avery and she and Snowdrop were big fans of the idea.”

“This won’t upset Matthew any?”

“Don’t think.  Not much.  I know he thinks you’re pretty cool.”

“He’s helped me out around here.  My decrepit, thirty-five year old self.  Wouldn’t want to betray him.”

“I don’t think it would be.  He might even like the idea.”

“Then sure.  We can give it a shot.  It’s a vote?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I’ll run.  Can’t promise a big campaign.  Whatever that would look like.”

“It’s in a few hours.  The meeting.”

“Perfect,” Louise replied.

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