Read Aethosphere Chronicles: The Rat Warrens Online

Authors: Jeremiah D. Schmidt

Tags: #coming of age, #betrayal, #juvenile, #gangsters, #uprising, #slums, #distopia, #dubious characters, #elements of the supernatural, #steampunk and retropunk

Aethosphere Chronicles: The Rat Warrens (4 page)

BOOK: Aethosphere Chronicles: The Rat Warrens
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His instincts proved spot-on when Lydia
froze. “What is this, Fen?” Her tone came out harsh and
clipped.

“I’d think it’s pretty obvious,” he jokingly
muttered out of the corner of his mouth.

Lydia, however, found him less than amusing
and pulled a banded stack from the rest. When she held it up she
looked like a younger version of their mother, all in a rage just
before she used to yell daggers at them for one thing or another.
“It’s full of notes, Fen! Where did you get this?”

Folding his arms over his narrow chest, Fen
turned and pouted. “Found it.”

“Found it,” her tone dripped with
sarcasm.

“Yeah, ‘found it’…lying next to a trudger…as
he had his back turned. Pissin’.”

“Fen, this is full of notes—full! Ludwigs
bound thick as my hand, Fen! There’s easily got to be thousands in
here. Thousands!”

“Could be…” Though the concept of thousands
was lost on him.

“You’ve got to get rid of it, baby brother,
and pronto. This isn’t trudger loot, this is got to be rat lord or
companymen money, and someone’s going to come looking for it, sure
as death.” She dropped the stack of notes back down into the sack
the way the Gutter Lady had dropped that dead rat to the ground.
Then she took the whole thing and hurled it at her brother. He
caught it in the chest and staggered back, coughing from the impact
of all that weight. What he hadn’t the heart to tell her was how
the whistlers
had
given him a hard chase through the slums
already, and that it was only by happenstance and strange
occurrences that he’d lost them at all. But he kept that to
himself, because for some reason hearing her telling him ‘I told
you so’ wasn’t exactly high on his priority list this
afternoon.

“Okay,” he surrendered, hanging his head down
to his chest in shame. “I’ll get rid of it.”

Lydia planted her hands on her hips, though
narrow as they were, and hidden beneath the layered patchwork
canvas of her scrounging pants, it was hard to tell where they
might be. She stood firm regardless, looking down on him with stern
reproach and occupying the room’s center like Emperor Peter’s own
personal Nocshatten elite. “Make sure you do…go toss it to the
Drain Line and let the Maw have it, and then let’s never, ever talk
of this again, you hear? …No one else knows you got it right?”

“Right,” he blurted in confidence, having
completely forgotten about his run-in with Ratter.

“This is exactly why you should come back and
scrounge with me.” She unbuttoned her soiled coat, “me and my
gals—”

“You and the
Dame Squad
,” Fen threw
his skinny arms in the air and waved down the notion as though
driving back a bad stink. “No way! I’d never hear the end of it
from my mates.”

Lydia shrugged off the coat while her face
turned sour. She scoffed. “That pack of rat pup losers…? Who cares?
Besides, ain’t one of them a girl anyhow? That one you were real
close with all those years back…”

“…Eddy.
Er
…Edrika,” said Fen, noticing
how skinny his sister was looking these days. The suspenders she
was wearing barely held up her pants. “Well…yeah, I guess; but best
not call her a girl to her face.”

“Still, just think about it, okay. I worry
sometimes, and this little stunt here’s stifled my ability to trust
in your judgement.” She turned to a barb of metal on the wall and
motioned to hang up her coat, stopping just as it hooked. There she
held tight for a moment, motionless, with her back to Fen. He could
see her undershirt was going threadbare, and in places he spotted
pale flesh peeking through, and the bones of her back beneath that.
“There’s been talk through the slum,” she added softly, “of
mischief gangs disappearing, Fen, and I know your crew. There’s not
an ounce of sense to found from the lot of you, and I don’t need to
be losing you too.” When she turned back to him, Fen thought he saw
tears in her almond-shaped eyes, but in the dim firelight it was
hard to tell. It just might have been some reflection caught funny.
“You hear me?”

Chapter
4

A half hour later Fen stood on a tangle of pipes
stretching between the first and second Fat Sister, perched over
the coursing green-brown waters of the “Old Big River” Drain Line.
The stench happened to be manageable today. The Sisters had
recently run through their monthly flush cycles and the raw sewage
was fairly diluted for the time being. Only a hint of excrement,
methane, and ammonia remained.

In his shaking right hand Fen held the stolen
pack by its strap, dangling it out over the murky waters. He
loosened his grip a measure and the pack slipped just a bit, but he
didn’t let it fall—couldn’t—not yet. The thought of all that cash
being fed to the main drain (the one they called the Maw) was
almost too much to bear. There were ‘thousands’ in the ruck, and
that might buy a whole lot of sky-time he figured. Sure there were
bound to be men looking for this treasure, but the Pinprick was a
decent sized slice of the Rat Warrens, and Fen knew just about
every nook and cranny (at least that’s what he’d thought before
encountering the Gutter Lady). Still, to feed all that cash to the
drink seemed a sin beyond redemption.

He stashed the bag instead, shoving it up
into a busted pipe in the Sister’s side, in a place where he had to
climb a bit out over the Drain Line to get at it. He’d been worried
at first about someone down at the tail end of North Scumside
looking up and seeing him, but the area he’d picked had a lot of
up-flow pipes and the shadows were pretty deep near the roof.

After it was done he was huffing and puffing,
but in a place crawling with people, he knew the more treacherous
the hiding place the less likely its discovery. And as far as he
knew, Nickle and Eddy were about the only ones in the Pinprick
brave enough to make that climb with any confidence. Even Fen had
felt the jitters as he pulled himself up that last meter and
stretched his arm out. His heart had been knocking at the Sister’s
thick steel encasement for sure, probably stirring up all the old
clap-jaws repidiles rumored to be swimming around inside.

About a quarter hour later Fen finished
climbing down from the Sister with a pocket crammed full of notes,
and with every intention of visiting the Bartermen’s Exchange. The
lure was too great not to. Now he’d the sense not to bring more
than a single stack (even splitting the bundle and rubbing it in
filth), and his brilliant plan included going from barterman to
barterman so as not to attract too much attention by dumping it all
at one place. It seemed a solid plan, and he was feeling pretty
proud of himself as he balanced on a pipe with his chest puffed
full and his chin held high. He’d forgotten all about Ratter and
his invite until he was passing by the Little Brothers and he heard
his name (or rather his grating nickname), yelled aloud.

“Hey, Sunshine!” Ratter squawked out first,
and if it was only the scrawny mouse-faced boy, Fen might have just
waved a greeting and kept on walking by. But when the whole Bednest
Boys gang broke into a chorus of, “Sunshine!” he knew he’d have to
stop or risk deep offense.

Fen groaned as he altered course. It wasn’t
that he didn’t like his mates, but having a pocket crammed full of
cash changed a perspective mighty fast, and only reinforced the
notion of how he wasn’t particularly keen on the prospect of
sharing. Maybe if he could count on them keeping their yaps shut,
or not sneaking off with an extra share when his back was
turned…then maybe. But truth be told, he stole the backpack on the
solo without a lick of their help and that made the haul strictly
his by virtue of
scrounging rights
.

Whatever his decision on the loot, he screwed
up a cavalier grin as he came tiptoeing across the pipework. He
hopped a break and climbed over a coupling then hollered back,
“What’s up, you pack of losers?”

“You’re looking at it, mate. So where you
been off to this morning?” asked Nickle as he came leaping off his
perch up on one of the Little Brother’s broken catwalks. He landed
cleanly on a metal platform below, where Eddy, Ratty, and the
others had already gathered to receive Fen. As Nickle approached,
he pushed back the mop of his dreadlocks, which were so blond as to
be virtually white. In fact, everything about Nickle was devoid of
color, from his flesh right down to the faded patchwork clothing he
chose to wear, and even for a Hierarch his eyes were white; the
pupils appearing more charcoal than black.

“Decided to do some poking around the North
Walk,” explained Fen as he dropped down into their midst. Though
nothing about them suggested they suspected he had a secret, Fen
couldn’t help but feel like he was being scrutinized. The Goat had
stopped rolling a toke to cast a black-eyed gaze on him while Beaut
came rounding on behind him.
Maybe the dandy rat pup is just
shifting position because the gangway’s got crowded, but does he
have to stand directly behind me?

“For any reason?” pressed Nickle with a sharp
smile.

Does he know something
, pondered Fen,
or is this just one of Nickle’s little games?
As the de
facto leader of the Bednest, Nickle was always grilling them like
some rowdy trash dog defending its little corner of crap, or else
was scratching at everyone’s deepest inner thoughts like an alley
cat wanting in. “Inclination,” stated Fen, adding a slight shrug as
though the notion came out of nowhere, and went equally as far.

“And you never thought to invite us along,”
the gang’s leader feigned at sounding hurt, while Ratty slunk in
beside him and snickered like the consummate little suck-up he
was.

“Didn’t think it was your style to scrounge,”
replied Fen, suddenly aware of how close Durreem was standing
beside him, “not when you can hide away in a dark corner and—”

“I’da gone with you, Fen,” chimed in Eddy as
she snaked her sinewy body through the press of young boys. Today
she’d worn a hectic blend of leathers, chains, and fishnet
stockings that set Fen to baulking. Since taking on womanly
features her dress had become increasingly scandalous, and seeming
less capable of containing the kilograms she continued to pack on
with each passing week. But as Fen silently judged his old friend,
Eddy stepped right up into his face to tease and pull playfully at
his hood and collar as though nothing had changed between them.

“Sure you would, Eddy,” teased the
scruffy-faced Shoat as he watched Fen brush the girl away, “Get
Sunshine all to yourself.”

The girl spun on her heels and kicked at the
boy with her knee-high boots. “Piss off, Goat.”

“Ratty said you were being chased by the
whistlers,” inquired Beaut, changing the subject, “even through the
Crawl, I hear.” That got the ruckus to die down. All eyes were back
on Fen, and he felt a frog lodge deep in his throat. “Up-level cops
don’t normally do that…do they?” The gang’s resident pretty-boy
turned his attention to Nickle, looking for confirmation.

Ratty (the little rodent who was responsible
for all this undue attention), piped in for him. “Yeah, ain’t
normal at all. Right, Sunshine?” Fen wanted to wrap his hands
around the smaller boy’s skinny throat and ring it hard. “So
whatever came of that pack you was haulin’?”

Fen locked his seething eyes on Ratter. “Had
to ditch in the Crawl to lose ‘em,” he lied while trying to keep
cool, but his temper was on the cusp of boiling over.

“Oh, that’s a pisser,” Rattigan responded
with a kick at the pavement, oblivious as to how close he was to
getting decked, “did you get a look at what you snagged
though?”

“Never got a chance.” Fen was sick of Ratty’s
face and he turned from the gathering to look out into the yard and
its knotted pipework. Beyond the industrial fog he could just make
out the Pillars. All the hovels piled up around the forest of
I-beams looked like blocky trash shoveled up into piles, and its
people like ants crawling over it all.

Eddy joined him, leaning on the rusted
railing. She even nudged him with the side of her hip to capture
his attention. “Must have been something good for them to chase you
into the Crawl.”

“Only the accursed Nequam could know,” he
muttered back.

“Well, you missed a hell of a dustup with the
Scumside Prowlies,” hollered Nickle, his voice ringing loud and
true. It might even have carried right to the Axillary, just past
the Pillars, with all the mist snaking through it. “
And
, we
raided ol’ Gibbs hoard good this time ‘round.”

“Again,” Fen shook his head and ran his hands
over the railing’s rust chips, dislodging them and sending a grimy
rain clattering down into the pipes below, “that old fart can’t
have much left these days. You couldn’t have nabbed anything of
worth. He hasn’t scrounged in years, and most his hoard is in
newsprint all rotted to mush these days.”

“Man’s got rats in Maze Town he breeds on the
regular for the butchers,” offered up Ratty in eager glee.

Fen turned and glowered. “You went after his
livestock?”


Live
-stock?” Nickle slapped his knee
and grinned around to the other boys, “
Live
’s a misleading
word after what we done.”

“Done?” said Fen in a low voice. “What did
you do?”

With pride, Nickle slapped Rattigan on the
shoulder and the smaller boy beamed, grinning from one overly-large
ear to the other. “Ratty here worked up a boomer and we used it to
blow nearly the whole lot to hell. Snatched up a feast in dead rat
before the smoke cleared.”

“You just…blew them all up.” Even by Fen’s
standards that was harsh. To steal a couple rats was just good fun,
but to senselessly kill a man’s whole herd, and an old man near the
end like Gibbs, was taking it too far. Fen lowered his eyebrows and
clenched his jaw in a scowl. He swept his eyes through the
gang.

BOOK: Aethosphere Chronicles: The Rat Warrens
6.26Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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