It's hours before they talk again.

  Roach had long ago ascended into a grate, unlocking it with one of the many keys that rattle in her hair, muttering under her breath. She doesn't say goodbye, only disappears while trailing a long line of pots behind her, all tethered to each other and clattering through the tunnels overhead until there's only quiet, only the soft thrum of an unfamiliar hideout.

  Rivin opens the tin of fish with his good hand, smelling it suspiciously before deciding to risk a taste. Thankfully it's simply fish, strong with its own odour but edible. Before long, he’s replacing blood with brine and looking around the room again.

  The portraits are chaos — a messy kind of genius. There’s a woman with haunting emerald eyes and a red silk-strung turban; dead ants are taped to the paper, slipped into slices and folds like they're crawling out of her caricature.

  Another portrait has no noticeable qualities other than glasses sketched with glare and smokey, gaunt skin; more corpse than man.

  A third stares with eyes far too realistic and haunting, grinning wide with a collection of animal teeth glued between sketched lips; he notices a discontinued Halidom sigil sketched into the figure's jacket.

  Before long, Rivin’s grunting as he strains to get to his feet, his vision blurring as he steadies himself against a stack of crates that almost topple over. His ankle is still throbbing, and he’s forced to favour his left leg, staggering towards the desk where a chaos of notes and pages are shoved into drawers but also stacked into messy piles.

  He glances at the leather-bound book—he knows he shouldn't—and fingers through it curiously. Inside, he discovers a plethora of journal entries, most of which have been defaced with crude images, collectables and plant matter.

  The original writing is slanted, rushed and beautiful — surely not the hand of Roach. Strangely, the journal does not start at the beginning, and while the first handful of entries are mundane and legible, they quickly skew beneath haphazard art that devours and replaces any previous script entirely.

  Day 501.

  The patient succumbed to the venomous bite before the antidote could be traced.

  Spine Snake milked. Supplies replenished for the next client.

  Day 510

  Disaster. The client was deceased before aid could be administered.

  Day 525

  Two more cases of the —. Prescribed balm for the pain. Sent them home.

  That tot keeps bringing them in. ———

  I’ll call her little plague.

  Day 532.

  Child—suffering with infection of both the right and left limbs.

  Amputation is necessary.

  Unsuccessful. Bled out — stopped.

  Cried loudly. Must invest in —-

  Day 551.

  The little plague is back. She helps me stitch.

  Patient died — braid — memento.

  Day 563 is an entry entirely covered in the crude but familiar drawing of a huge man haloed in smoke, so alike to the mural they’d seen back at the cathedral.

  ‘Leaving’, Ricket had called it, or rather said it was called. Rivin can tell that it’s been painted with a little bit of ash mixed in, perhaps the very same used in the tunnels.

  The rest of the journal continues with imaginative abstract art and phrases lost to him without context. Some pages are logs, others hold poems, and several are taped or pinned full with leaves or small dead insects.

  Rivin notices that many are also accompanied by Roach’s likeness scribbled in haphazardly into some part of the art, like a chicken-scrawled guide used to project her reaction or mood in the moment, he guesses.

  He wouldn’t call her talented — not in the traditional sense — but there’s something about the scribbles and half-baked poems that softens the crease in his brow.

  Rivin also notices a different recurring face on the pages too. A boy’s likeness that accompanies hers, although their expression never changes, often holding up a sign with differing emotives or phrases pencilled in as a replacement.

  DRAB DAY.

  CLOSE CALL.

  ???

  ˙?˙

  There are multiple tears in the book before he stops appearing altogether, the paper having been ripped out in a rush. The book as a whole was fat with her essence, defaced by lumpy, bright, dead things all pressed into art; the visions of a rotting childhood still blooming in the dark.

  With just the flick of a page, the journal of the dead had become a collection of cherished things. The lived-in moments of a girl entirely alone.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  When Rivin reaches the end, the final page is void of any art or character — though there are fingerprints scuffed over the edges where she didn’t bother to wipe her hands — instead, it only says in what he assumes is her best handwriting:

  It never ends.

  He closes the journal, sliding it back into place too straight and too neat amongst her chaos. He’s still teetering on the edge of whatever drug she had been administering him, but the pain is biting the longer that she’s gone. He’s starting to feel cold again, and he quickly seizes one of the girl’s many blankets, draping it around his shoulders like a shawl.

  He staggers towards the door, repurposing an old metal pipe as a tool to support his weight. He wonders if she’ll mind him using it, but then he spots the blood on the other end and what might be brain matter stuffed into the bottommost hole—he hopes it’s not human—and scrunches up his nose before quickly (and with great disgust) rattling the pole into a half-filled bucket of collected drip water.

  Filthy, he thinks. She’s actually feral.

  Rivin is all too eager to leave the strange cavern of trash and filth, sneering as he opens the door to behold the rest of Roach’s strange kingdom. He expects complete darkness, a wasted landscape, and smoke. Instead, glowmoss and ivy spiderweb up the damp walls in great density.

  Swarms of lightflies crowd whisperslugs clustered over the high cavernous ceiling, conversing in the phrases of ghosts – save for those who chime in with what he now recognises to be Roach’s voice, like little ancient echoes.

  “Ever heard of it?”

  “Use your wrong hands!”

  Trash has been fixed into sculptures — art. Silent vigils and guardians all stacked up like visitors turned to stone. A cat without a tail sleeps soundlessly at the bottom of one repurposed Spectator drone turned outdoor lamp; the alloy figure is red and glowing with heat. It's holding (or rather fused to) a sceptre with a neglected string dangling over the sleeping feline’s purr.

  It's a rotting, trash playground for the loneliest girl in existence.

  There's light bleeding in from all sorts of places, a sign blinking in the distance and on the edge of darkness, and neon bulbs flashing in and out of power.

  IF YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU’RE ALREADY DEAD! (If you’re alive — touché.)

  Rivin feels his heart twitch. He closes the door and waits without meaning to.

  When Roach returns, it's with fanfare in the shape of pots and pans being dragged once more over metal, heavier than when she first left with them. The young girl crawls out of the grate with all the grace of a cat rather than a child, but she’s panting and sweaty, quickly beginning to pull each pot through before untethering them carefully, each vessel now filled with trinkets, food tins and parts alike.

  “Spotted Lav’s boys in the tunnels again,” she says without looking at him, too busy with her haul. Rivin has seated himself on a bench stapled with flat cushions; he barely has the strength to rise and greet her, managing only to lean forward and hunch over his knees as she rattles about.

  “Probably looking to cut us out of the deal completely,” he grumbles. “Bastard wants to make a buck off our corpses.” He has no doubt that that’s exactly what Lav and his goons are doing. Searching the tunnels to see if he was successful, and to rob his dead body if he wasn’t.

  Surely word had gotten around by now. He’s certain his friends already think that he is dead, his body decaying at the bottom of some big cliff all peppered with holes that go right through. It felt surreal to be alive after it all. He’s still not entirely sure that he’s not dreaming or perhaps trapped in some strange purgatory.

  “Settle there, jawline.” The girl laughs his worries away before wrenching a dented teapot out of the treasure trove of items she’s collected, turning it bottom up and rattling out something small and barely furry into her palm.

  She tosses the pot over her shoulder, admiring what appears to be the slowly decaying skull of a ratling, front incisors catching the dim glow and still faintly browning with old blood; she giggles, pets it lovingly down the snout with her longest finger — old skin wears away with each stroke — and welcomes it home.

  Rivin feels his eye twitch. Definitely purgatory.

  “They won't find it.” She sets her new companion atop the statuette from earlier — the horse missing its head — and positions it to overlook her papers. If she notices the straightened journal, she doesn’t mention it.

  “What do you know?”

  “I know all.” She spares a sly smirk that feels strangely similar to a slap to the face before continuing to sort her haul. “It’s safe. Don’t worry about it. You and your things have been granted safe passage after all. I’m a gracious host, as I’ve mentioned.”

  When Rivin leans back, it’s because he’s wholly unprepared for this child-thing, this feral, efficient girl. As if to slight him further, she dives a fist into her trouser pocket and tosses him a familiar green stone tethered by snapped thread.

  He catches it and stares hard at the horrifying and familiar gemstone, now dull, now cold. The rune is almost invisible again save for where the blood had gathered and crusted. Rivin places it gently on the seat besides him, looking at anything but. His heart is aching worse than any bruise.

  “My friends—”

  “Safe.”

  He relaxes. Just slightly. Just enough to relieve the pressure in his spine. “I can't stay here.”

  “You can't leave.”

  “Could you stop me?”

  Roach laughs loudly but doesn't answer. She doesn't need to. The pain flaring up in Rivin’s body speaks loudly enough. She must notice, for it’s a blink before she’s at his side and tilting her head, amber eyes like curious little lamps that catch the beads of sweat forming on his brow.

  “Are you hurting?”

  Rivin hesitates, but the flare is exhausting. She’s not stupid, and as much as he’s playing tough, Rivin isn’t either. He knows that he shouldn’t be up, shouldn’t have even moved from his place on the floor where she’d first tethered him.

  He nods, flitting his eyes away like there’s shame in admitting the pain is too much to bear.

  She only smiles and reaches into another bulging trouser pocket to pull out a capsule bottle. “This is the good stuff.” She empties two into his palm. They’re certainly not antibiotics but rather something crushed and pressed into sealed pods, tinted with a slightly rosy hue.

  “My recipe,” she elaborates, looking confused when that makes him hesitate rather than commit. “You’ve had it before. Trust me.”

  He doesn’t, but he listens, and she hands him bottled water to wash it down. Once they’re swallowed, Rivin pinches his eyes closed and waits for the burn to return and the pain to die away. Roach doesn’t bother him, instead returning to sorting her acquisitions, happily giving him solitude through the grit of resurfacing agony.

  In the building buzz, she’s quieter now, less careful when extracting items from the pots, and when he’s numb again, Rivin asks through tingling lips, more drawl than full sentence, “Am I your captive now?”

  “My ward. “When you can leave, you can leave”; it sounds like a promise.

  Rivin shakes his head but doesn’t open his eyes. He’s puzzled by her and a little unnerved, mostly tired again, mostly hot and falling deeper into a blur. He’s not sure if today had confirmed anything for him or if he’s just as confused as the moment he first felt her hand wipe away the blood and the sweat from his brow.

  “You should really clean up ‘round here.”

  She snorts. “Right. About you owing me...”

  Rivin feels himself smile. She’s still being quiet when the warmth sails him away.

  There’s a rustle of something soft and warm besides him before long, the sound of sheets wrapping over his shoulders as he’s tucked in with careful fingers. He doesn’t resist or argue when she leans into his side and settles there like some stray on the porch; she smells like dirt and dead things—but growing things too.

  His heart is a drum, but it isn’t throbbing anymore. When the darkness comes, flowers bloom behind his eyes.