Aethosphere Chronicles: The Rat Warrens (12 page)

In the brief chaos that followed, Fen made a
dash for it. His only thought was escape, and his guarantee was the
hovel. The secret entrance, if he could reach it in time, would
hide him away and give him and his sister the chance to come up
with a plan. If she had the money, they could make a run for it,
right to the sky-level, and that thought brought him renewed hope
as he raced towards the border of the Pipeyard.

As Fen slid down the axillary flow pipes
towards Skitter Row, he knew he’d made it, and when he dropped into
a trash pile and resurfaced again, it was to the familiar shuffle
of pedestrians moving between the Pillars and Slag Town. A second
later and he was rolling out amongst them, stirring up a commotion,
but he hopped to his feet and bolted north before the locals got
too rowdy. At last his salvation came when a cluster of steaming
pipes appeared, set back off the road, and Fen’s heart soared with
relief. He took one quick glance back to see if Time’s goons or the
Bednest Boys were watching, and then he slipped into the steam.

Normally Fen held his breath when passing in
and of out the pipes, but today his breathless lungs heaved in
rage. He couldn’t help when he sucked in a mouthful of sulfurous
steam, and coughed himself ragged like a two-token a day smoker. He
continued to wheeze as he dropped to his knees and crawled the
three meters through filth and broken glass to the break in the
pipe that would take him all the way to the hovel.

Inside, he climbed to his feet and kept right
on running till he burst into the shelter that he shared with his
sister.

“Fen Tunk,” she cried out, shocked, and an
entire brewing-can full of rag-tea went spilling all over the
scrounge she’d been sorting in peace only a moment before. “What’s
gotten into you, you damn maniac,” she leapt to her feet,
“barreling in here like some bloodtracker on the hunt!”

“The money,” he wheezed breathless, “what did
you do with it?”

“With it…? Money?”

Never had it been clearer that she had no
idea what he was talking about. Not with her face flushed red in
confusion, her eyebrows furrowed, and her mouth left agape like
some balloon guppy inflating its air sac. At least, not at first
anyway. If nothing else, Lydia was whip-smart and quick with an
insight. “You’re not talking about that rucksack I told you to toss
in the Drain are you? Fen…you didn’t do it, did you?” Her voice
rose steadily in hysterics as her bright eyes widened, “you stupid,
brainless, imbecile. You kept that money, didn’t you!”

“
Err
,” Fen was reluctant to admit to
the obvious.

“
Come on, I can see a light at the end of
this,
” a voice echoed up through the outside pipe and the Tunks
turned to one another and locked eyes. “
I think we found
‘em!
”

Fen winced as Lydia scowled and held up a
threatening fist. “You’ve ruined everything!” She didn’t hit him
though, instead she just shook her head, growled, and then rushed
off to shove as much stuff in her pack as possible. “Well, don’t
just stand there, you moron. Grab what you can. We’ll have to
escape up through the roof.”

But without specific direction on what to do,
Fen froze. Suddenly there was too much to grab—to even think
about—and as his sister ran from one side of the room to the other
(adding to her collection a pick-trowel, some rope, her compound
oculars, a satchel, and a can-lantern), Fen just stood in the
middle of the room, slack and stupefied.

“Come on, let’s go,” she barked after only a
few brief seconds, in which she went from wearing just some baggy
shorts and a tank-top to adorning full-on scrounger gear. Then she
scampered up the ladder to the second floor.

Without a thing to his name but the clothes
he was wearing and the switchblade in his pocket, the stunned youth
followed, wrapping his hands around the ladder rungs just as the
first boy came skidding into the hovel. It was Ratter, and he
turned his snarling face on Fen and screeched out, “I found
him!”

Off Fen went, scrambling up into what used to
be his parent’s room, then Lydia’s, and now…whatever ratty
eventually found his way here. The small room smelled pleasantly of
clean soap and spicy scents, but it was gone in a flash to be
replaced by the mildew and filth of Fen’s room as he climbed
higher. In the gloom of Lydia’s torch, Fen saw her bounding towards
the loft ladder on the opposite side of the room when her feet
sailed out from under her and she went crashing down on her side.
Candles clattered and rolled in all directions, having been freed
from their hiding place under his blankets, and Lydia rolled to a
sitting position and inhaled sharply in pain. Her hands snapped
around her ankle and held firm as she sat there a moment,
rocking.

“Fen? What the crap?” She eyed the candles
and snatched one up and shook it at him.

Contrite, Fen tiptoed his way through all the
jumble to aid his sister. “I’ve been trying to figure out a way to
tell you…”

“Well, you must have bought every damn candle
in the Pinprick,” she said, tossing it to the floor as Fen moved to
help his sister. They’d just returned her to her feet when from
below more boys could be heard intruding into the Tunk’s abode. “Do
you know he had a place like this,” Nickle’s voice rang out in
accusation.

“No,” Eddy replied softly.

“We got to go, Lyd,” urged Fen in a horse
whisper while Sam Time could be heard from below asking which way
they went.

With her arm over Fen’s knobby shoulder,
Lydia explored her footing with a few tender steps, then pulled
away, “It’s okay,” she whispered, though it was clear she was
favoring her left foot, but how could Fen argue, especially when he
heard people starting up the ladder. They didn’t have the time. So
he tried just pulling her along, but like a finslug she slipped out
from under his grasp and then urged him on with a shove.

Fen stopped and stood his ground. He wasn’t
about to turn tail and run while his sister gimped behind him, so
he gestured instead for his sister to go first. Faced with her
brother’s stoic refusal to move, she shook her head and smirked.
“Chivalry doesn’t suit you, baby brother,” she chastised him, but
at least she hobbled by.

“Well, I don’t plan on making it a
habit.”

One at a time, they climbed up to the loft,
first Lydia then Fen, and as he watched his sister struggle on the
climb, he figured she must have sprained her ankle good. Though
tough as she was, Lydia made no complaints whatsoever and pretended
at walking normally once she reached the landing. Piles of junk
waited for them, cluttering the unoccupied room on the fourth
floor; unoccupied because Art never got around to reinforcing it.
So they had to step gingerly on their way towards the back corner,
where a stack of sturdy construction debris lay piled halfway up to
the ceiling. Their father had intended to turn this empty attic
into a room for Fen, but motivation was the first thing to go, and
after Diane left, he never gave it a second thought. So Fen shared
his sister’s room, until she got too old for it and moved down into
the common room.

From below they heard the candles scatter
once more, and the whole hovel shook when someone crashed to the
floor yowling in outrage and pain. Sniggering and laughter
followed, but a sharp order from Sam shut them all up. “Get it
together and get after ‘em!”

Up up up, Lydia and Fen climbed, and once
they reached the ceiling, Lydia pushed aside a creaky tin panel.
Fen squinted in the murky twilight, spilling down through the
support joists in ghostly fingers as Lydia’s shadowy outline
encouraged him up. “You’ll have to go first so I can lift you the
rest of the way,” she said.

“I can make that climb up myself.”

“You? You got pettily little-kid arms, Fen,
so stop arguing and come on,” she squared herself beneath the hole
and cupped her hands together in preparation of hoisting him up.
Her face was nothing but grim determination in shadows. With little
choice, Fen did as she bid and in no time at all he was on the
roof, looking out over the snarled mess of the Pipeyards.

Fen positioned himself over the escape hatch.
“Alright, now you,” he said stretching his arms down to pull his
sister up, all while carefully balancing on the overlapping metal
panels.

She barked a laugh at him, “Just move out of
the way—”

But as Lydia reached up she grunted and then
fall into darkness. In horror Fen stared down into the gloom,
hearing items being kicked around in amongst muffled screaming.

“I got his sister,” yelled Nickle, and Fen
could just make out the pair struggling in a tangle. The albino
boy’s arms and legs were wrapped around his sister from behind,
leaving her staring up at the ceiling with Nickle beneath her. He
had one hand over her mouth as she tried to scream out, and when
Fen and his sister locked eyes, her expression told him to run.

An instant later and Sam Time’s leering face
appeared in the hole. With a quick swipe he reached out and grabbed
for Fen’s collar, but Fen fell back, kicking out with his right
foot even as his rump struck hard and dented the roof.
Impact.
Crunch. Howl.
The satisfaction Fen felt when his heel met Sam’s
face tickled inside his stomach like a sweet treat, and that hard
crunch filled him with an unexpected glee that rocketed his head
into the clouds. But when the goon fell back and took most of the
fourth floor with him in a horrendous crash that rocked the beam,
Fen’s satisfaction turned to panic as he envisioned Lydia tangled
up in the destruction he could hear pancaking down through the rest
of the hovel. Fen probed inside, circling the hole in a tizzy, but
the dust kicked up made it impossible to see anything, so he
hollered for Lydia instead, but she never responded.

Fen ran as fast and hard as he could, scrambling over
the jumbled roofs of the Pillar shanties, thundering down refuse
cluttered alleyways and crowded catwalks, sometimes slipping,
sometimes crashing down on his sides, and sometimes tumbling head
over heel. But none of that mattered, the pain, the dark looks from
weary passers-by, none of it. Through the tears and the bawling
this dark world became a blur of shadows. He’d lost everything, his
parents, his friends, his home, and now his sister Lydia. What was
he supposed to do? Where was he supposed to go? Thousands of other
kids wandered the Warrens as listless ghosts, was he to become one
of them?

Fen’s legs continued to take him on their own
hidden course, less frantically as the hours passed on, until the
pain of fatigue and injury pushed him to rest; to crawling into
tight corners or beneath shelves of concrete, anywhere he could
find that didn’t already hold a ratties nest. Days marched on,
trumpeted by the whistles and horns of the Sisters but Fen heard
only his own soft crying, the snuffling as he sucked back the snot.
He might have curled up and died in a small dark shaft, in amongst
the centuries’ old garbage, but hunger finally drove him out;
hunger and the need for light.

Staggering into the Node, squinting blindly
in the Pinprick’s brilliance, Fen shuffled past the chalk line
without a second thought, and then planted himself on
his
bench; the bench where years back he and Lydia and their father had
enjoyed a rare moment of bliss. Sure, it had cost a man his thumbs,
but in the Rat Warrens, even free came at a price, and if one
person wasn’t willing to pay it, someone else certainly was.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise at all
when a sunkeeper came thundering up, hollering and cursing. “You!
You damned rat pup, off that bench this instant!” But Fen wasn’t
about to move. Instead he closed his eyes and tilted his head up to
the skylight to feel the kiss of the sun on his face.

A rock-hard fist smashed his cheek in an
instant, knocking him clean off the bench. “You be in big trouble
now, sonny-boy.” Someone new clinked his tongue, and from the
cobbled ground, Fen cracked open a bloodshot eye to discover a
bruiser standing next to the sunkeeper now; both lording over
him.

For whatever reason it sent Fen spiraling
into a rage. Tears burst from his eyes as a roar burst from his
mouth. He was up on his feet in an instant, then jumping, and
before he realized it he had the bruiser by the ears, clawing and
biting at his face.

“He’s gone feral!” screeched the sunkeeper.
“He’s going to kill, Hobbs! Someone get some more bruisers…or the
dangermen; someone!”

Fen struck out with teeth and nails until a
blow to the side of the head dislodged him, and sent him crashing
to the ground. A flurry of kicks kept him there, and when they
finally stopped not a piece of Fen was left that didn’t feel like a
bag of crushed gravel. At that moment everything came spilling out
his mouth in a blubber of crying and yelling; he confessed all;
about the bag of money he’d stolen, of trading it in for tokens, of
Time, and of Time’s plan to take down the rat lord. Before Fen knew
it he’d attracted a host of the rat lord’s men, and they dragged
him to his feet after he fell silent, carrying him off to a dark
place. It didn’t seem like they’d gone far, but Fen couldn’t tell.
The minutes had intensified the pain of every cut and bruise he’d
received, and there wasn’t a part of him that didn’t have at least
one or the other, and most had both. In the dark it was hard to be
sure of anything, and the place he’d been taken was darkness
complete.

There he lay, curled in a ball for hours, or
days, or months, Fen had little concept of time. Lost and
forgotten, with nothing but his pain to keep him company, he did
little else but cry into the sooty floor, but eventually a
mechanical clunk and the rusty groan of a heavy iron door opening
pulled him into the present. A flood of light followed, leaving Fen
squinting in a daze. It might have only been the guttering glow of
a gas lamp, but to Fen’s atrophied eyes it roared as brilliantly as
the sun. He grimaced with the effort of lifting his brutalized arm
to shield his eyes.