City of Ruin, page 2
NINE YEARS LATER
The sun sears relentlessly against my skin. It’s the first day in nearly a month that the cloud cover has dispersed, much to my chagrin. Without the dense fog to hinder our duties outdoors, Mistress Orson has us excavating the graveyard, scouring what little unchurned earth is left for human remains. Because fogless days are so rare, there is much work to be done from dawn until dusk.
I should appreciate the reprieve manual labor provides from the monotonous tasks we’ve grown so used to in the bonehouse; the picking and cleaning of remains, and the stench of the kiln room that permeates my nose, even outside in the breeze. But I don’t.
Wiping my arm over my sweaty brow, I glance quickly at the children, ensuring they aren’t sickening in the heat. All of their faces are red with fatigue, their brows damp with perspiration, but though their chests are heaving, they don’t look close to fainting. Yet.
Nell’s hands leave bloody prints on the shovel as she scoops another spadeful of soil out of the hole she stands in. Roman works tirelessly, lost in his own world; his thirteen-year-old body is already honed from so much toiling. Evie’s eyes are red-rimmed from the crumbled headstone that fell on her foot. And while Beatrice and Jon dig absently, accustomed to their miserable lives, they work without complaint alongside me.
As my charges, the children are the closest I have to family in this dreadful place, and I fear the day they will be taken from me, like everyone else. A familiar spur of resentment burns hotter than the sun under my skin at the mere thought, and rolling my sore shoulders, I get back to work, biting through the sting of my blistered palms.
“If you want your supper, you’ll work faster!” Mistress Orson calls in her shrill voice. Even as she paces near me with long strides, I can barely hear her over the three dozen huffing orphans, our shovels scraping through the rocks, and exhumed bones clattering into the wheelbarrow.
For two decades, the Bedlam Cemetery has been mined for human remains, and though it was once a mass graveyard full of Londoners who’d lost their lives to disease, it’s now an empty boneyard riddled with holes. With such little sunlight in a fog-plighted land, fertilizer is even more important than the men who work endless days in the factories, and the women who work beside them when they aren’t repopulating the great fallen city.
“Stay focused!” Mistress Orson thwacks a child on the back with her crop, and I grit my teeth. She adjusts the spectacles perched on the tip of her pointy nose and continues to pace. Everything about her is wraithlike, from her waspish voice and narrowed teeth to her lean frame and crooked fingers. Had I not seen her bleed before, I’d wonder if she weren’t one of the ghosts haunting this land.
I heave another spadeful of upturned soil out of my way, flexing the blisters on my hand as I curse the Council for their power-hungry ambition.
Sometimes I curse my mother for dying and leaving me to this fate. Sometimes I curse my brother for dying in that earthquake. But mostly I curse myself for not dying beside him.
I wish the Shift had finished what it started centuries ago, and we’d all become bones consumed by the earth. There would be no one left to disentomb those lucky enough to have escaped a fate where both breathing bodies and the dead are traded like currency.
2
SELENE
I gaze through the window at the mist-cloaked cemetery. I should be working alongside the children, but my mind is too restless. A temporary reprieve from the unrelenting sun has turned into days of working indoors once again. The hissing steam, hammering, and grinding of bones have become an all too familiar melody that echoes in the hospital’s kitchen.
On the days we’re stuck inside the Bedlam Orphanage and Workhouse, processing fertilizer for the Farming District, I find it all too easy to lose myself to the fog shrouding the world. The windows steam with the heat of the kiln, and I wipe the condensation away. The blisters on my hands have healed, replaced with cracked skin from soaking and scrubbing laundry, and callouses have re-formed on my fingers from cranking the grinders ad nauseam with the children.
There’s movement in the fog, and I shiver despite the heat permeating the room, then watch and wait to see what might appear.
The land is riddled with stories of ghosts and apparitions, of haunted woods and creatures left behind to survive in the toxic elements. I sometimes convince myself I see them—the dead—walking in the thick gray; through the mist and shadows, between the trees and ruins. It’s easy enough to believe because death still lingers here. It stalks the shadows of the ruined buildings, threatening to collapse, and rides in with the rumbles of the shaking earth. Death breathes down our necks as we work our fingers to the bone to rebuild the once thriving city, and creeps in with the fog that kills our crops without proper sunlight. Where millions of people once flourished, a few thousand of us pray to get through a single day in New London.
The lights flicker, submerging everything in darkness for a heartbeat as the coal-powered generators hiccup.
Having loitered at the window long enough, I’m about to turn away when three children emerge from the fog. Beatrice and Roman haul a handcart toward the sorting room where Henrietta’s orphans discern what bones need to be cleaned before they can be processed to powder. All of their clothes hang too large or fit too small, and the hollows of their cheekbones protrude just enough to show they aren’t starving, but they are never full either. Yet, despite the tasteless porridge they are forced to eat, and our unfeeling masters, Beatrice still smiles, and my heart warms a little.
Tucking a loose strand of hair back into my braid, I eye the animal carcasses collected in the cart. Rats. Cats. Foxes. Birds. Even a dog, whose corpse looks weeks old, has been laid out as an offering. Despite the gruesome task, Beatrice says something that makes her brown cheeks part with a wider grin, and Roman’s curly hair flops into his face as he laughs, playfully shoving her shoulder.
The shawl hanging around my shoulders bunches in my grasp. This could not be what my mother, or my brother, intended, and yet, her words have never left me. There will be darkness. There will be fear. But there is hope and goodness—you must trust in that. You must fight for it. You must fight for all of them. These children need me, perhaps as much as I need them.
“You’re not holding it right, stupid,” Jon chides behind me. “Do it like this—”
“Don’t be rude,” I reproach, my gaze never leaving Beatrice and Roman as they disappear into the death room, as the children have deemed it, the sorting house door swinging shut behind them. “And get back to work.” I glance back at the children playing at the table. They look sheepishly at me, and I hide my smile. “Hurry now, before you get into trouble.”
The truth is, the children’s bickering has become a strange sort of salve on my soul these past four years they’ve been in my care—a daily comfort and a reminder that I am no longer alone. For now.
For five years, I’d held my breath, waiting for whatever would come on my sixteenth birthday. Because William never took me away like he’d promised. He couldn’t. And my father never came for me. And while everything did change the day I turned sixteen, it was not as I’d expected. I was not sold to the highest bidder to work in the City District’s factories, like the other young women. No, to my mistress’s displeasure, I was kept and promised to be cared for by Master Orson himself, though it wasn’t without a cost of its own.
“What is this?” The brittle floorboards protest behind me. “Selene!”
I spin around as Mistress Orson shrieks my name. She grabs Evie by the arm, nearly pulling it from her socket, and drags the little girl from the table bench to her feet. Production at the fire wheel beyond them halts as everyone—children and caretakers alike—watch with unease.
Mistress Orson wrenches the nine-year-old in front of me, and Evie looks both shamefaced and frightened as her watery, blue gaze shifts from the headmistress to me.
“Is this you doing your duty, Selene?” Mistress Orson hisses at me.
Evie’s face blooms bright beneath the dust coating her cheeks, and narrowing my eyes on the headmistress, I have to bite back a reproach. Despite my empathy for Evie, I flash her a you know better look and refocus on the irate woman in front of me.
“While you’re over there daydreaming again,” Mistress Orson continues, “your charges are—look at this!” she practically shouts as she takes a scraping knife from the little girl’s hand. “Playing on my time?”
I press my mouth shut as I reach for Evie, guiding her protectively to my side. I can feel Mistress Orson’s glare blazing against my face before I meet her gaze again.
“Surely,” I start, keeping my tone in check as best I can. “You can’t begrudge the children a little distraction. They haven’t had a break all day.” But Mistress Orson doesn’t know the meaning of joy, and she hasn’t the slightest ounce of compassion.
“You don’t receive my generosity, food, and board for playing, Selene. Or for daydreaming. Unless someone else has taken it upon themselves to ready the bone powder for shipment tomorrow and I’m unaware?”
“No, of course not,” I say with little conviction. I know better than to leave the children to their tasks unsupervised; but if I cannot find focus after being cooped up for days, how can they?
“Perhaps going to bed without supper will help you all to remember how precious food is, and how lucky you are to have two square meals every day, when so many others go hungry.” The headmistress wags a gnarled finger at me. “I could’ve sent you to the laborers, Selene,” she reminds me. “I still can and they would offer me a pretty penny for you, bum leg and all. Perhaps I should, despite my husband’s protests.”
The children whimper at the thought, and I purse my lips again to keep my tongue from lashing out and worsening the situation. “I assure you, that won’t be necessary,” I grind out. Even if Master Orson would try to keep me, there is little he could do if the headmistress breathed a word about me—an able-bodied woman of good breeding—to the wrong ears. Because at the orphanage, I don’t serve the Council of Four’s purpose, I’m simply one man’s pet and plaything.
“We’ll get back to work immediately,” I assure her, and nod to the children, urging them to return to their tasks. At least here we work in a protective, steel-framed asylum with reinforced rooms to sleep in, safer than many of the buildings still needing to be retrofitted in New London. “I’ll make sure we fill the barrels to the brim today. We will finish the task.”
Mistress Orson eyes me up and down, her distaste at my mere presence as obvious now as the day I was placed under her and her husband’s care. A mangled, gimpy little girl they didn’t even know would survive after the accident. “See that it’s done, Selene, or I will ensure the children work on Sunday, dawn to dusk, while everyone else is resting.” There are a dozen threats in such words that come so easily to her.
“As I said, we’ll see that it’s done. Won’t we?” I glance at the children and they nod as one.
Mistress Orson doesn’t seem convinced as she turns with a stomp of her foot, her starched skirt swishing around her legs, and she heads toward the other orphans working at the far tables across the kitchen.
She calls her work in the poorhouse “charitable”, but I’ve read enough in my twenty years to know that charity is much different than servitude, and that the price we must pay for their meager gifts of porridge, hole-ridden clothes, and drafty beds, make them no gifts at all.
“I’m sorry,” Evie whimpers, her eyes welling with unshed tears.
Heaving a sigh, I nod to the scraping table, where the children have assembled structures made of bones, and shake my head. “It’s done,” I tell her, but there is no ire in it, simply exhaustion. “Come, we have much work to do. I will help.”
Evie and Jon blink at me, twins in a world where having a single child is both a blessing and a curse; more mouths to feed, and yet more hands to put to work in order to survive this desolate landscape.
Nell, fourteen years old and the eldest of my charges, clears her throat. “Sorry, Selene—”
I wave their remorse away. “What’s done is done.” I walk over to the bench to sit beside them. Though my knee gives me fits, I move well enough. “Come,” I add more softly. “I know it’s difficult, but we must stay focused. If we don’t have to work Sunday, I will read to you.”
“But—Mistress Orson said no more—”
“Don’t worry about that now,” I tell them as I weave my hair back away from my face. “I will speak with Master O—”
The world bellows, the ground rumbles beneath our feet, and the workhouse fills with a cacophony of screams as everything creaks and shakes around us. Nightmarish memories threaten to swallow me, and it’s all I can do to reach for the children.
“Under the table!” I shout, and they move without a second thought.
Though I can gauge the magnitude easily enough after twenty years, and know that we are safer in this hospital than we would be in most places, it is Beatrice and Roman whom I pray for. But I know it’s likely for naught as I hear the echoing crack and crumble of the sorting house, and another part of my heart threatens to tear to pieces.
3
SELENE
My knee aches in the drafty water tunnel, running beneath the hospital. As always, the cold wreaks havoc on my battered joints, and the stifling memory of pain and claustrophobia from that day long ago sends a chill shimmying over my skin. I still feel the crunching of bone as ruins crumbled around me, and the earth’s roar, reverberating in my ears. I can still feel the very moment William’s hold on me became lifeless. Unable to breathe in all the dust, I was certain I was dead too.
“Selene?” Henrietta says, startling me.
I turn, the bare bulb flickering in the tunnel, making the wash pool glitter. I take the wet stockings she hands me to hang on the line. Even the stench of tallow, wafting through the tunnel from the boiled bones above, does little to take away from Henrietta’s innocent beauty. Her dark lashes flutter around bright eyes. At only sixteen, I wonder how long before the light in her green gaze dims, and worry lines form instead. For even if she did not lose any of her charges in the quake two days ago, it might only be a matter of time before she does. Or perhaps she’ll be sold first.
Tears prick the backs of my eyes as I think of Roman’s curly, ashy brown hair and how his big, mischievous blue eyes will never shine again. I’ve seen dozens of children cycled through the orphanage in my time, but lost only two charges—the first was Caroline, the hardest for me to soldier through. And now, Roman.
I swallow thickly as I think of the children in the church with Sister Sarah, granted a half day reprieve after processing their own friend for the kiln. But in spite of the heaviness thick in my heart, a part of me wonders if Roman and Caroline were given a mercy over the fifty-seven others I’ve watched be shipped off to God only knows what sort of merciless fate.
“Thankfully, there are only four aprons and two petticoats left,” Henrietta says with a gratified lilt, and I blink my sadness away; there is no place for it here.
I snap the stockings onto the clothesline, along with a dozen pairs of others, drab gray petticoats, and stained aprons.
“If I have to wash one more load this week,” she continues, “I might actually scream.”
“The children needed a reprieve. I appreciate your helping me today.”
“As if I had a choice,” she mutters, but there’s no annoyance in it, just the depressing truth.
“Wait—” I straighten a little. “Henrietta, where are your charges while you’re down here?” It sounds like a complaint, though it’s anything but.
Henrietta glances over her shoulder and hands me a wrung out petticoat. “They are picking through the rubble for useable brick and stone with one of the other crews. Or at least, four of them are.” Her voice saddens, and clearing her throat, she turns back to the laundry basket. “Theodore and Jeffrey were sold to a landowner in the Manufacturing District this morning.” She submerges an apron in the rushing water.
My breath hitches. “The Collector?”
She shakes her head. “No. I guess I should be grateful for that, at least.”
“Still, I’m sorry,” I whisper, understanding all too well. Although the children are put in our charge to keep in line, friendships and bonds are easily forged when all we have is each other.
“Don’t be,” she says brusquely. “It’s not a labor camp at the quarries or a steel factory, where they would surely die before their twenty-fifth birthdays.” She shakes her head. “Their fate could be far worse.”
Henrietta’s words are true, but I know that doesn’t lessen the sting; she will never see them again. And until she is sold away herself, she’s expected to take on new charges and act as if the previous children in her life never existed at all. I swallow thickly, wishing time would slow, because Nell’s time is coming far too soon.
“It’s not Sunday,” Henrietta muses. “So how did you manage to send your rascals to chapel?” She meets my gaze. “Mistress Orson has been working your charges longer days than the rest of us without reprieve.” She shrugs. “It’s surprising, is all.”
I sigh and take the dripping apron Henrietta hands me, unruly blonde hair falling from its braid and into my face. My hands feel like cracked leather as I wring out every drop I can manage before hanging the apron on the line. Once again, the lights flicker, leaving Henrietta and me in momentary darkness. With a distant clang and rumble, the lights flicker on again.
“It’s to punish me,” I finally say. Henrietta glances up at me, absently scrubbing another stained apron with what’s left of the soap. “The way Mistress Orson overworks the children,” I clarify. “She says it’s to keep us occupied from our sadness, but I know it’s because Beatrice is too injured to work, Roman is gone, and more than that, she hates me.”
