Roach leads them through the twists and turns of her complicated path home. The last of their journey onward is shy of an hour's trip, but it feels far longer, stretched by exhaustion and loss.

  Rivin scarcely recognises any of it — in the haze of his old agony, he hadn’t taken the environment in, but every now and again things begin to look familiar, just slightly, in colour or sheen. Like a tripwire or a glint of strategically placed reflective material, the threads of carefully laid traps, then again in stripes of paint and handprints; abstract art he couldn’t have understood at the time but surely followed on instinct.

  Finally, they reach their destination. Roach’s tram cart home sits exactly as he remembers it — save for the presence of its feline protector by the cold droid heater and all the light and the warmth it once held. The bulbs on the sign have burst and broken, and the effigy's finally haunt over welcome—even with that hat.

  His eyes search for her, but Roach is already palming Sen off to Slink and darting ahead, kicking a generator to life and tossing a lit match into a tin barrel; it blares into existence, drenched in an accelerant.

  Sen, standing on his own now, watches the flame warily. “I-Is that safe? What about the air?”

  “Don’t worry,” Ricket consoles, “We’re alright now.” He sounds certain. Unknowingly so.

  Roach waits by the door, holding it open. “Ding. Ding. The doctor’s in.”

  Once inside, she directs the crew to get the wounded seated.

  None too suddenly the Queen of Junk transforms, stepping into the shoes of a tiny physician, conducting her nursing staff. Her hands—steady now—are rinsed, her tools sanitised, and her face—her face is a twitchy mask, a performance again—pretending to be anything but a little girl who's breaking.

  Rivin steps in to assist her; he doesn’t know what else to do. He passes a rag when she gestures for it and moves a stool closer when she elects to sit. She works on Coel first, concerned most with a gaping wound nearest to his throat: a rune torn open. “More flower,” she hums, gesturing blindly towards her desk.

  Ricket finds them in a small velvety pouch and passes it quickly.

  “A petal for the petal?” Her head tilts too far to one side.

  Coel bites hard on his lip, weary of her or the pouch, likely both.

  “It will help with the pain,” Rivin promises.

  She drops two dried pieces into his palm, and the child quickly throws them back, swallowing with a gulp that makes the wound pulse open.

  “Eager bug,” she says, passing him a flask of old water, and he gulps it down quickly. “Good, good. Time to be still.”

  She examines the rest of his agonies carefully, her brow growing deeply furrowed. The wounds themselves, while made by a blade, appear to be complicated burns, the deeper tissue severely damaged and—in some parts—already destroyed.

  “These weren’t always burns. They’ve become them.”

  Rivin swallows thickly. “Sen.” The boy doesn’t look up. “You said you were… boiled?”

  He grits his teeth in response, raking his good hand through blonde, highlighted hair. “Every angel gets boiled…”

  Coel tries to speak, his voice raspy and stolen. “We’re all a part of it. Th-That’s what they said…”

  “A part of what…?”

  “That doesn’t matter!” Roach leans back, her voice booming in the tepid quiet; her brow is damp again, her eyes rapidly shifting. “You’re a part of us now… huh? The future, the future, right? We’ll make the future right! We’ll fix it, we’ll fix it! I can fix it!”

  Her words are nonsense. More so than usual, but then her gaze hardens as quickly as it first changed, falling once more upon her patient.

  She says, dark and empty, and in a man’s voice: “Sit back, Coel. This will hurt.”

  Quiet reigns as she starts with a saline solution, wiping away the filth from the opened flesh. Coel tries his best not to whimper or flinch, but the uncovered burns are the worst, left open and exposed, unlike the wounds once trapped beneath the gauze, and hot water had rendered much of the damage permanent.

  Ricket takes Coel’s hand, and Rivin passes the flower remnants to the other children. Slink is pacing. Each clap of his boot against the tin becoming an irritating chip in the doctor's concentration. She cranes her neck and grinds her jaw but remains focused.

  Rivin handles it. “Slink, get a fresh bucket. There's a spout out back.”

  He's quick to take the excuse to leave, nodding vehemently. Roach, steady now, readies her bone needle, threading it with thin twine.

  “You’re going to act up when I do this. You’ll need to be held down.” She pulls back to look him in the eyes once more; despite the statement, she waits for him—doesn’t move to act as he chews hard on his bottom lip, staring wide-eyed at her first and then at the sharp instrument gripped in the hands. Hesitantly, he nods.

  Roach dips her head in response. “Riv, hold him.”

  He does, grasping the boy's shoulders and keeping him steady. “Shouldn't that flower make him sleep?” Guilt is already coiling tight in his gut, for Coel looks right up at him, wide eyes quickly filling with tears, pupils huge but still innocent, still scared.

  “Not like this; it’s only one component. It’ll help the pain, not much — much better for breaking down sticky doors.”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Rivin tries to catch her gaze, offering a crooked, pale smile over the child spread beneath them.

  “That door didn’t stick.”

  She looks up, her features soften, only for a moment, and she smiles too.

  “All my pieces stick.”

  Slink returns with the water just as the first thread is pierced through flesh.

  Rivin holds him firm and while Coel cries out, he doesn't ever tell them to stop. His small body is cramped tight when she finishes; the skin neatly sutured. Then, she tends to the rest of his wounds with a clean, wet rag.

  The oily, pungent bandages of the Angels are dumped into a pile as more and more of the scripture is revealed from beneath each binding. The skin beneath is healthy and pristine, and the writings even more so. There’s another gaping wound on his thigh that needs stitching, but her fingers linger over the freshly exposed engravings — the first of many in their own tongue. She shakes her head before tending to it, and once more Coel is held through the pain.

  Next she moves onto a trailing of round burns up his spine, dabbing them with a violet ointment from an unmarked jar. Rivin can see that her stock is somewhat replenished since his visit. The flowers' petals are evidence enough. He’d never seen them grown anywhere else.

  She must have gone back there.

  His eyes narrow, somehow wounded by the realisation.

  What happened to ‘never alone’?

  He’ll approach her later, adding it to the ever-growing list of things he needs to confront her about.

  Finally, she spares as much gauze as she can on the largest of the wounds and has Chip help the boy into some spare clothes.

  The INVINSIBLE DUO shirt returns to cover the terrible remnants of the boys' journey before Chip bundles Coel up in blankets on the corner cot and shares the shreds amongst them.

  Everyone watches Roach resume her work before she pauses, looking up with thinned eyes, fingers twitching mid-air.

  Rivin turns. “Someone stoke that fire outside.”

  Slink takes the second opportunity to leave and darts ahead.

  “Ricket, get something cooking, huh?”

  “Y-Yes!”

  “No.” Roach rejects. “I want him to watch.”

  The boy gulps, fidgets nervously. Rivin leans down.

  “Can you?”

  He nods. “Y-Yes.”

  Rivin sighs. “Dammit. Chip… get cooking.”

  Chip nods. He spies tins stacked messily on the higher shelves and begins to sort through them—powdered milk and soup—before he follows Slink out the door to prepare.

  Relieved at the quiet, Roach returns to her task, assessing a wide gash on Sen's torso. As well as a fractured wrist, she immediately sets it with a splint. Rivin helps her keep Sen steady as she cleans and closes the largest of his gashes, while the boy writhes and whimpers through his teeth.

  “Those bastards,” he swears, spitting at the floor. “Those cave freaks—those moles—I’ll ruin them for this.”

  She cups his face, smoothing salve from her thumbs against either cheek. “Not tonight you won’t, little bug.”

  Sen watches her closely. Cautious. Dumbfounded.

  Rivin wonders if he looked much the same after she patched him up.

  “Ever heard of locusts?”

  The boy squints. “Yes… How do you…?”

  “Good, so you know their play.”

  “Wh-What play?”

  From outside, the fire pops in the darkness.

  “They sleep in the ground. Wait for decades. Build their armies, and when they wake up, they devour entire continents.”

  “I don't—”

  “You’re still a grub, grub.”

  “Idiot, locusts are a plague—”

  “Hunger is a plague…” Rivin murmurs from her side.

  Roach beams. “Exactly!” She clasps his hands now, freshly bandaged and clean, eyes boring into his own. “You're hungry, Sen.”

  “I…” He hesitates. “I'm not… like you.”

  “You are. You’re not done sleeping yet. Just like us.” She squeezes his fingers. “When you wake, you’re going to devour, right?”

  He blinks. Stares hard at the girl before him. She leans forward. Too close. Far too close for boys like him who recoil deeper into the tinny walls.

  Her voice drops low. Intimate. Dangerous. “I am, Sen. I’m going to eat it all.”

  The boy scoffs, searching for the words needed to argue, but he doesn’t appear to find the right ones. “You can't possibly think like that. You’re going to die. We all are. No one escapes The Hole.” His gaze flits to the floor. “Mercy ends down here.”

  “Mercy trickles.” Roach corrects, so softly beneath her breath, she’s searching his face now, examining more than just the cuts on his skin.

  “You can’t give up,” Ricket pipes up from his seat, fists neatly folded within his lap, still earnestly paying attention to every beat.

  “What do you know?” Sen’s response is venomous, stronger now than every bone in his body, but so too are the ducts of his eyes that push fat tears down the apples of his cheeks. “You don’t know anything! You—You—”

  “You're not from here, are you?” Roach looks the child up and down.

  Sen hesitates, mouth opening and closing like a fish caught on the sand.

  “I am…”

  “No,” she says softly, calmly. “You’re not.”

  “I was taken—”

  “You were raised somewhere else.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “You’re Skyfat.”

  “I-I’m just— They-they took me—”

  “You—” She’s upon him in an instant, grasping one of his arms. Rivin thinks she might rip him to pieces—her energy certainly insinuates so—and so he launches in to stop her, only to find that her eyes are wide and trembling, her other hand clutched to her heart, curling up the shreds of her shirt in a fist that causes her knuckles to bloom white.

  “You’ve seen it—” she’s gasping, searching for breath and unable to find it.

  “Roach, are you—” Rivin pauses. Stares at her face.

  Wonderment. It pools in her irises. Soaks down her cheeks. It overtakes her pieces and spreads them all out to sea.

  “I have to—” she’s gasping, “I have to see it; you can’t stop me from seeing it!”

  “I-I’m not trying to do anything—” Sen defends.

  “Not you.” She grips him again. “You’ve got to take us—you’ve got to help us break through Sen. You’re a bug now. You’re a bug now. Don’t you want to see it again?”

  “G-Get off me!” Sen whimpers.

  “Roach!” Rivin pleads.

  “You are the future! Y-You are! Riv said—I-I said. I was… You’re supposed to help us—this will make it right, you’ll make it right—I can fix it.” She’s incessant. Manic. Completely the opposite of the restrained nurse she was playing moments before.

  “Roach, you need to back up—”

  She does, but only to clasp her head in her hands and cover her ears, fingernails digging into the side of her face.

  “Ev-everything that burns, rises up. Everything that burns rises up!”

  Rivin’s heart begins to thunder — the children have all begun to cry.

  “Roach—!” He doesn’t know what to do, can only follow his instincts — he grabs the seams of her jacket and pulls her in, crushes her into his chest, and uses all the strength he can muster to keep her together.

  “I’ll rise up,” she whimpers—but doesn’t cry—into his shirt.

  He remembers then the old burns he’d seen inside the temple — the ones he can now feel trailing her sides, her stomach.

  “Everything that burns…”

  He holds her tighter, tucks his chin against her head, and begins to stroke her hair. Gently, Rivin unwinds the many knots from the chaotic tresses, brushing, brushing — like he used to do with Mother. Like she used to do with him.

  “Roach…” He tries her name again, and his voice must soothe her, must bring her back, for she feels lighter in his arms very suddenly, more like a bird and less like a girl. Something so fragile – he mustn’t be rough, mustn’t be himself.

  She tilts back her head and peers up at him with sad, swollen eyes that refuse to shed tears, but they’re hers — her eyes.

  “I have to break through, Riv.”

  “You need to rest.”

  “I’m okay, I can still—”

  “Batshit. You’re not okay.”

  “I need to be.” Her eyes drift to the children, the neglected two who have yet to be treated; Rivin doesn’t let her look at Sen again, tilting her face away when she tries.

  “Ricket—” The boy stands to attention from his seat — white in the face. “You were watching?”

  “Y-Yes.” He squeaks.

  “Good. Get the other two ready. Doctor needs a breather.”

  “Yes!”

  “But—” Roach attempts before Rivin snags her wrist and tugs her towards the exit.

  “You need to take a step back, Roach.” Firm. Definitive.

  Without another word, she follows him out the door.