It’s two days before Rivin can walk again without hissing breath through his teeth. Roach scampers around like he's one of her sculptures — part of the environment. She's always moving, always leaving and returning with something shiny or dead.

  He’s watched her fill a slim notepad with captured insects, one page entirely stuck with sheer wings of various sizes and several others overwhelmed with close-up sketches; he’s not sure if it’s enjoyment or study that drives her, and she cackles or frowns too often for him to guess with confidence.

  Right now she’s settled on the feather-stapled stool in the corner, leaning over a dead drone in her lap with quick fingers that thread wire into an exposed valve core; even like this she won’t stop fidgeting, and her toe taps a rhythm on the floor, and her lips are ready to whistle but never make the sound.

  Rivin thinks she might explode — like it doesn’t make sense for her to be this still. He’s restless as well; has cleaned her stinking trash-pile home from top to bottom the second he trusted his guts to stay inside of him. The floor nearly sparkled (although some stains are permanent), and the desk had been organised and sorted, courtesy of Rivin’s system, which he had explained in detail while she ignored him over the solder.

  ‘Like this. If we alphabetise your contacts, you’ll know where to find everything.’

  ‘I already know where to find everything.’

  ‘Colour coding your piles could be beneficial. You like colours, right?’

  ‘Have at it.’

  Now, His toe matched hers on the tile. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Something sparks in her hands, and Rivin worries his bottom lip with his teeth. He doesn’t rush her. She only ever laughs when he does, and he’s smart enough to know that he’s at her mercy. That he can do little more than wait. He could scrub the counters again, maybe set her up a chore chart; stickers had really inspired Ricket.

  Roach sits up straighter to raise the drone high in the dim light, and from beneath a cleft of bent metal at the centre of its slate face, a blue eye blinks into existence. The drone emits a low buzz as the cogs inside begin to mesh, steam drooling out like mist from the cracks in the patched metal.

  When the girl drops her hands, it remains hovering before zipping across the room like a rapid little bird. Rivin ducks as the drone drops altitude and then bursts upwards once more, cracking against the ceiling; the poor, dumb thing grates against the roof of the cart with a terrible screech before clacking against the window pane. Kindly, the boy reaches up to grasp it, dragging it down a few feet so that it can whizz out the opening.

  “For Stubby,” Roach informs him when he sends her a blank stare, saluting the disappearing shadow with the spanner in her hand before scooting across the room.

  She smacks the heel of her palm against a dead monitor prior to checking the plug and securing it. Before long the feed flickers to life, and Rivin scoots in closer to peer over her shoulder. The video shows what appears to be the same drone streaking across the landscape outside; it buzzes through several effigies, dropping and rising at random intervals before sweeping into a dark and dingy tunnel thick with cushions of moss.

  The feed crackles as it descends, but they can still make out the shape of a wide tube in the change of light; it rattles deeper before zeroing in on a familiar tailless figure stalking in the wet, an unsuspecting mischief of ratlings scrounging by a fissure bursting with dense plant life.

  “He's been demoted. Too many write-ups.” Roach adds with a sigh. “Especially in the south tunnel.” The cat launches into the air as the drone crashes into rock, sending the vermin scuttling into safety. The cat too begins yowling in frustration before bounding into darkness to flee.

  “I look after all of my subjects,” Roach hums, already looking away from the monitor.

  Rivin blinks. “How long have you been alone?”

  Her smile twitches but doesn’t fall. “Define ‘alone.”

  ‘This again’ is a thought they share.

  “Without people.”

  “I have people.”

  His eyes narrow. “Where?”

  She smiles wider, doesn’t answer but doesn’t look away either.

  Rivin does. “I… know what alone looks like, Roach.” He’s not sure why it hurts to say, although he’s quickly distracted by the silly grin she pulls whenever he uses her name. It’d been hard to say at first, like spitting out something that was about to grow on you.

  “I live alone; this isn’t some sad, deep thing. Don’t look at me like that—” She steps around him and heads for the door, pausing only to turn heel and skip towards the stack of crates instead, grasping a few key essentials, such as several tattered scarves and a hat.

  Rivin watches as she tries them on, glancing upward at the mirror rooted to the ceiling, amber eyes replaced by red cutouts. He raises a brow as she poses with each item, flicking a scarf over one shoulder with flair before shaking her head. She tries on another.

  “Do you ever answer questions?” He enquires, ire creeping into his voice.

  In the hours since she’d dragged him back from death’s cold embrace, Rivin had learnt nothing about the girl herself save for the pictures on the walls. In fact, Roach had proven to be a creature entirely stuck inside of her own head, and he was but a visitor to a strange and dreary wonderland.

  He’s not even sure if she’s even asked him his name yet. He’s also not sure why that upsets him.

  “Questions are boring; I prefer showing to telling.” She tips her hat at her reflection, but her eyes are watching him from the corners.

  “You give off nutcase.”

  “Even in this hat?”

  “Especially in that hat.”

  Roach spares another smile, wrapping the chosen scarves around her neck and heading for the crates again; this time she pulls out several bangles and bracelets alongside a familiar watch — it’s not Rivin’s (which he’d let her fix days ago), but it’s certainly a Halidom band, and judging by the blink of red, it’s also in working order.

  “You don’t talk about yourself either.”

  “You don’t ask.”

  The girl tilts her head like that had never occurred to her. She’s looking at him again, freckled face quizzical. “You’ll just answer?”

  Rivin offers his hands when she waves him over and allows her to try out the bangles one at a time. “That’s how asking for something works.”

  “No lies?”

  “That depends. Is that what you expect?”

  She shrugs and grins toothily. “Lips are for lying.”

  “Who taught you that?”

  She looks away and doesn’t answer.

  “You’re doing it again.”

  “So, tell me about yourself.”

  “Lazy. What do you know already?”

  Roach snickers. “Enough.”

  “Stop that.”

  “I know that you have to get home and that I’m going to get you there,” she beams from beneath the brim of that ridiculous hat and then tilts her head again. Her eyes are warm when she says, “Do I need to know more?”

  Rivin glances away. Flexes his fists. He doesn’t know what to say. She’s right, isn’t she? Does there really need to be anything more? He’s got enough to worry about. Enough death on his knuckles and blood in his nightmares.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  He’d barely noticed her months ago, hadn’t stopped for just another beggar-looking child. Why should this be anything more? Hadn’t he learnt? Mouse’s scream still echoed in his dreams. One of many now — but the loudest. Could he truly afford to care about anyone else? Could his heart take it?

  Golden eyes search his face, flitting over a furrowed brow and pursed lips. She leans in closer. “Your name is Rivin, and your eyes are the colour of my favourite wrench. You don’t sleep much unless I’m beside you. You don’t like dirty things, but you’ve got hard-working hands. You talk like you don’t care about anything, but you’re trying to get home because whatever weeds have rooted here”—she prods his chest with a now bejewelled pointer finger—“are worth dying for. What more do I need to know?”

  Rivin recoils, but only slightly. He’s too busy staring with wide eyes and parted lips. “I don’t need you to sleep—” he begins to defend but pauses, biting his tongue to raise a brow instead. “You know my name.”

  Her smile grows wide enough to dimple both cheeks. She hadn’t used it once. His budding frown deepens as Roach rids his wrists of bangles and keeps her favourites before she heads for the door again. “Of course I know your name. I told you—” she spins to wink before bludgeoning it open with her hip, “I know everything.” Rivin glares after her figure as it disappears from the doorway and follows through before it closes, descending the small metal steps at the base of the cart.

  He doesn’t let her skirt the issue: “You’ve been ordering me around like a servant.”

  “There’s an earned hierarchy in these lands — trespassers? Way down here,” Roach drops her hand past her hip.

  “Trespasser? What happened to Ward? To a guest?”

  “See? Rising up the ranks already!” She claps her hands before skipping beneath an orange spotlight wrung with blinking red bulbs — the light they leave on the turned-up earth looks almost like flames. Rivin approaches her side; he isn’t quite limping anymore, although he’s still favouring one leg.

  They’d depleted most of the painkillers days ago, but the burn along his torso has ebbed into something more uncomfortable than purely painful. Roach’s stitches had held, and somehow, against all odds, he was still alive and getting stronger. His fingers trace the bindings beneath his shirt — gauze that hasn’t become stained this time around — steel eyes following their path.

  Home felt tangible. Real.

  “Who taught you to stitch?” When Rivin looks up, Roach is almost completely inside of a metal pipe protruding out of the ground, her legs kicking bare air as she reaches for something at the back.

  “Bleeding is just the body telling you it wants to live,” her answer echoes in a voice unlike her own, somewhat nasally and terse. Rivin helps her out of the tube, wrestling with her ankles. When she’s on the ground again, she’s holding another small animal skull, her beaming smile reflecting a dead snarl.

  Rivin scrunches up his nose. “You… Just left that there, huh?”

  She looks at him finally, disappointed on his behalf, like he's missed something vital by not getting the reference. She turns away once more to fix the skull to the top of one of her scrappy vigils in the yard. “Seamus the Leech,” she adds.

  He hasn’t heard that name before, but he thinks back to the journals, the handwriting that didn’t belong to her. “Should that name ring a bell?”

  “He was a mentor, I guess.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Somewhere else. Hopefully not hungry anymore.”

  He watches as she removes the skull and replaces the empty nub with one of the scarves from her neck, draping it over scrap metal shoulders and topping it off with the hat. “You can learn a lot from dead bodies.”

  Rivin crosses his arms over his chest. “I'm not sure I want you to elaborate.”

  “You’re giving me mixed signals. Should we change your bandages? I feel like that was a good segue.”

  “I can do it,” he waves her off, seating himself on the steps as she wrestles with the zip of her fanny pack. Before long, she’s retrieved a — familiar by now — leather satchel and handed it over.

  Rivin carefully removes the twine before his fingers freeze and hover. He’s never looked inside of it before, and he’s glad for that fact now that he’s all stitched up. Roach is watching him expectantly, with a toothy grin like a beam of sun, entirely unprepared for the horrified change in his face.

  Her brows furrow curiously. “What now?”

  “Are these… bone?” He’s gesturing to the pack, to the thin utensils strapped into their respective places on one side of the satchel, beautifully hand-carved and cartilage-white. Horrifying, gorgeous — and he doesn't want to touch them and hopes she didn't use them.

  “They’re clean.”

  Something twitches behind his eye. “Are they…” He inhales sharply as he repeats the question. “Bone?”

  “They're one of a kind!”

  “Why are they shaped like that?!”

  Roach looks similarly appalled and gaping — her mouth opening and closing. “Genius is lost on you!”

  “You only use these on dead people?” He might be hoping.

  “Fifty, fifty,” she shrugs.

  “What does that even mean?”

  “A lot of dying people can't be helped. We tried anyway.”

  She’s back to dressing up the idols again, trading bracelets and scarves and tweaking tilted skulls and straw-stuffed heads.

  Rivin is still staring wide-eyed at the terrifying items, all innocently nestled amongst medical necessities. He’s still not sure that this isn’t a dream. He chooses not to pry into the craftsmanship further for his own sake, swallowing the building lump in his throat.

  “This is his, then?”

  Roach nods, stroking her chin. “Surgeons make good carvers.”

  “He was a surgeon?”

  “The best in the sun!” She bursts up with her arms widespread.

  Rivin removes his shirt and starts carefully peeling away the bandages beneath; they only stick on the parts closest to the wounds. “How’d he end up down here?”

  The girl pauses enough to linger. “The dark is where dreams are made.”

  “More riddles.”

  “Not riddles.” She clicks her tongue. “Source material.”

  Rivin raises an eyebrow. “Are you a radio?”

  That earns him a laugh. “A collector.”

  “He came here willingly?” Rivin hated that.

  The worst excuse in the world. Somehow there were people that sought the Lowrealm’s rotted embrace, those foolish few with the privilege to tour the Halidom sewers as though it were something to be studied and marvelled at. Tourists to Hell. Some went mad with the sickness of darkness, lost to the allure of the forgotten realms — the collapsed stacks of crushed civilisation and the luxuries afforded to a corpse city without morality. No heart. You didn’t need it in the Lowrealm; in fact, it was perhaps a detriment to anyone that existed beneath the crust.

  “Not exactly.”

  Rivin distracts himself with the last of the antiseptic, padding it onto cotton before dabbing at scabs on his torso — the worst of which is two feet long and streaking from his left hip to his right shoulder. The pain is a welcome deterrent, but he’s growing tired of her half-answers. Perhaps she notices. “He was a scholar, really. T’was a cure that brought him to my kingdom!”

  Rivin hisses when the isopropyl stings. He glances up through a thick of dark hair. “A cure?”

  Roach is fidgeting again, barring any dress-ups, touching the bone in her hair. “It’s a love story, really.”

  “A cure for what?”

  She answers softly, whispers it like a song, “the rot, the rot, the rot.”

  “The rot?”

  “Disease.”

  Rivin doesn’t understand entirely, but he’s seen enough sickness to know why it might drive someone to desperation. To dark. He’s not the first to watch disease hollow out a soul. His heart is aching again, and he tries to redirect his attention to the wounds on his back — something in his shoulder clicks when he reaches too far around, and the girl quickly steps forward but doesn’t offer, not until he nods his approval, and then she quickly busies herself with tending to the gore of his back, the youthful skin now marred with deep gouges and burns.

  She’d stitched him up as best as she could, but scarring would be inevitable. Her fingers are cold and gentle, and it doesn’t hurt quite so much when she dabs at his cuts. Rivin relaxes but, naturally, gives a steel grey glance at the needles again, and his shoulders stiffen up once more.

  “If I catch you doing something weird, I'll break your hand.”

  “A logical conclusion, cadet.”

  “Cadet?” he asks over his shoulder. “A queen of roaches, a medic, a general?”

  “Budget cuts.”

  He nearly laughs. ‘You can’t be real,’ he wants to say but says nothing instead.

  “It’s healing pretty well,” she confirms after a moment, rubbing the remnants of an empty container of salve onto warped skin. She skirts around him, already reaching to replace the bandages, fingers a little too hard now, a little too like a desensitised doctor.

  She looks older than her twelve years crouched over him like this and with the harsh line between her brows, but her eyes shine like little discs of amber, and something dying blooms again in his chest. He can see the history in her now. Scars of varying shapes that dapple her skin, a jagged crisscross on her chin, a pale pink line on the height of her cheek, a still-healing split in her bottom lip, and the beginnings of an old burn streaking down her neck.

  Most of all, there are dozens of freckles scattering a scrunched-up nose, disrupted only by aged blemishes. She’s so young. Just a kid. Just like Mouse is. Was.

  Just like Mouse was, Rivin.

  She notices his staring before his eyes can dart away, flashing a smirk and softening her touch just enough for him to notice while he glares at the skull catching the light. After a moment that stretches for far too long, Roach beams and leans back, admiring her handiwork.

  “You look good.”

  Rivin’s already reaching for his shirt again, pulling it over his head in a hurry. “I heal quickly.”

  “A commendable quality. We make a great team!” She offers her hand for a high-five.

  He doesn’t take it, and her fist drops back to her side.

  “I’m going back.”

  A tepid quiet strums the space between them as the girl blinks once and then again; she tilts her head and smiles crookedly, this time at the ground. “Lav’s boys are still haunting the tunnels.”

  “I’m not asking for permission.”

  “Was I offering it?”

  There’s something brewing in his belly and sticking to his throat. “I need to get back.” To what I have left. To what I already stand to lose.

  “I know that.”

  “I’m ready.”

  She doesn’t agree, and instead she rises, dusting off her hands. Her grin is crisp when Rivin stands to meet her. “I suppose you could make it.” Amber eyes flit him up and down methodically now, lacking a certain warmth that may have flickered there once before.

  Rivin might not realise, but he stands taller beneath the weight of her gaze, his fingers tightening into fists. “I need to get back to them, Roach.”

  He tries to tell himself it’s just because it’s vital, because they’re in mourning, because Ricket is probably having nightmares and Chip is likely crying over Mouse’s cold cot and Slink is most definitely blowing up something precious and because there’s a gurgling in his ears that he can’t escape.

  It’s just because there’s no room — no room in his heart for anything more. Not when scars heal twice their size.

  Roach studies him for a moment longer, one arm draped around herself and the other poised in thought; she rolls a royal hand in lamentation before darting up the steps behind him, kicking at the door. It swings open.

  “Fine.” She turns to glance back at him, catching the edge just before it swings back enough to strike her in the face. “But we’ll have to go the secret way.”

  Rivin swallow that sticky thing again. “We?”

  She smirks. “Unless you know it?”

  His heart is still aching. He glances away, feels like a coward for reasons he can’t describe just yet. The girl moves off the step, one leg hovering over the gap, and while one hand grasps the rickety door to keep her balanced, the other tips up his chin. When their eyes meet, she’s smiling again, mighty and bright. “Let’s get this over with, trespasser.”

  Her tone is warm, but Rivin notes the demotion.