Nate woke the morning after the funeral with his blankets damp from sweat, his heart racing from a bloody nightmare. He checked his trembling hands to make sure none of the scars had split open, that nothing was bleeding. He could barely remember what the nightmare was about, but the terror lingered like a third-degree burn.

It was still dark out, but there was no way he was going back to sleep. Nate pushed the covers off of himself, stretched out his back with a wince. Whoever said sleeping on the floor was good for you is a bull-shitter. Nothing good could possibly come from the pain in his back right now.

His phone was pulsing a light blue glow. A notification. He checked it, only to find eight drunk messages from Rivera and one from an unknown number.

Unknown (1) : 

There’s an assembly today in the High School Hall. 

It was sent at three am, around the same time Rivera was drunk texting him.

Nate: Who is this? 

With nothing better to do, Nate scrolled through Rivera’s messages.

Rivera: (8) 

why didn’t u tell me u played the violin u dick

Fiffeeeee, you wuss, come out with us.

Callum’s buyin

Death is so weid

*weird

can’t believe the guys just dead, u know?

Remember tat guy who was dared to take off his mask outside for like ten minutes? Didn’t his eyes bleeeed or something

Nattyyy stop ignoring meh

The unknown text-er was a fast responder.

Unknown (1): 

Sorry, its Ken. MacKenyu. Lacrosse, goalie, number 5. 

Nate knew even without specifics. No one can have a name and face like MacKenyu Furuya and not be remembered.

Rivera’s rat-arsed. Gave me ur number and told me to txt u about it. Its on the notice board in town.

Nate swallowed his irritation. Being friends with a gossip like Rivera had its pros and cons. Nate should’ve known one of the cons would be the distribution of his phone number. He was going to have to change his sim card again.

He tossed his phone aside for now and left his bedroom. He was about to make his way to the kitchen when he noticed the ray of light seeping through the gaps of the adjacent door.

Nate sighed. He stepped forward kicked at it. “Aurora.” There was no response. He kicked harder. “Aurora!” Still no response.

Nate tried for the door, only a little surprised when it opened. He peered inside and found his sister fast asleep over her covers on the floor. Her notebooks and pens were scattered across the white sheets, a fountain pen still dangled from her dainty ink-stained fingers. Aurora’s shabby little lamp burned bright at the far corner of the room. 

Their home wasn’t exactly a home, seeing as it wasn’t really theirs, wasn’t anyone’s in particular. But whilst Nate’s room lacked any personal embellishing’s apart from a neat pile of clothes and school books, Aurora’s was in every way a personification of herself.

Aurora’s bedroom had a contained madness to it, an organised chaos of paper and ink and books and pens, a serenity of cluster and an art of disarray. It was every artists dream sanctum. Everywhere he turned, there was a piece of her. It hadn’t even been half a year since they moved here. She’d left most of her life’s work at their other house further North, and already her walls were covered in her sketches, her paintings, endless sheets of biro and ink and graphite and watercolours and perfect scrawls of calligraphy, all taped and pined to the cement. The far wall had three rows of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves overfed with piles of sketchpads and notebooks and journals. You could lose so many hours just staring at the walls. 

Nate didn’t make it a habit to visit her room.

He glared at the girl sleeping soundly in his silk pyjamas, the girl with the long eyelashes, the palest hair, the palest skin that’d barely seen the sun, a muted version of their mother in every way. The thick silver shine of her hair was braided into two ridiculously loose plaits. Nate had styled them that way when they were kids out of sheer boredom. Aurora had loved it so much she kept the style for seven years.

Nate stared, and stared, and stared; as if staring would somehow make her disappear.

Look after her. Promise me you won’t let her go out. Never let her leave. His mother’s dying words to him. Of course her last thoughts would be of her youngest, of course it was Nate’s duty as an older brother to take care of her.

Had he ever had a choice?

Nate picked up one of Aurora’s slimmer sketchbooks and threw it at her. The cover smacked against her head and she startled awake with a violent jolt, her fountain pen goes flying.

She immediately reached for the kitchen knife Nate knew she had hidden under her pillow, but stopped mid-reach when she saw it was only her brother. Her shoulders deflated.

Aurora Naomi Fife. Their mother used to look at her like she was God’s gift. All Nate could see was a feeble child with only a few more capabilities than a house-bound pet. The girl was mute since birth, deaf from an unspecific age, and fuelled her boredom with drawing, all day, every day. It was all she did, all that she was content to do. 

Nate pointed at the lamp. “What did I tell you?”

Aurora blinked up at him for a few seconds before checking her phone. She furrowed her brows at the time like it insulted her, then looked back up at Nate. Her eyes were soft; a bigger, brighter version of Nate’s own, and her lips did that thing she did when she wanted to express sadness. It was her ‘sorry, my bad’ face.

“The door too. How many times do I have to remind you to lock it?”

Aurora read his lips, her eyes still bleary with sleep. She mimed to herself, then her head, and then the door.

I thought I locked it.

“So I teleported in here, did I?”

Aurora looked down dejectedly at her ink-stained fingers. Nate glanced to where her fountain pen that had skidded off to and went to pick it up. It was an old pen, the red paint peeling off on the sides, the nib worn. He wasn’t sure where their mother fished it out from, but it was lasting Aurora a while. He turned to hand it back to her, but put it out of her reach when Aurora grabbed for it.

“Next time I tell you to lock the door, what are you going to do?” Nate enunciated every word. Aurora looked two seconds away from rolling her eyes at him, managed about five more seconds of defiance before finally miming to lock the door shut. She was already sixteen, but if she was going to act like a six-year-old then Nate was going to treat her like one.

“And when I tell you to turn off the lights?”

Aurora mimed turning off the lights, sarcasm sparkling in her eyes. She was good at that. Nate figured she probably had to be. When words failed, the next best thing was body language and facial expression. Sixteen years of silence and she’s probably got it down to a tee.

“Good.” He handed her the pen. Aurora took it with both hands.

Take care of your sister.  A sickening part of Nate was so glad he’d never have to hear those words anymore, wouldn’t have to read those stupid post it notes from their mother saying the same thing over and over like a broken record. 

Antoinette Fife hadn't been a good person. But she was the strongest person Nate had ever known, a woman who’d fought tooth and nail for them when no one else did. And when she died, she hadn’t gone quietly. It’d been months since her death, but Nate still felt lost in the absence of the thing that had held them up for so long. 

What was he going to do with graduation around the corner? The last time Aurora had stepped outside was when they had no other choice, when Nate was the one to drag her out of the house himself.

Ever since Aurora was born, Annie had protected her with an obsessive zeal, enough so to imprison her youngest child within the comfort of whatever they labelled ‘home’, within the clean filtered-air, untouched by the toxic fumes, the dangers, the threats.

All his life, Nate had followed his mother. Without her he felt like a solider waiting around for orders. At least school gave him something to do, at least hockey burned his energy, at least Richmond was somewhere to be. Where was that now that Will Rigby had gone and burnt it to shit?

Nate didn’t realise he’d been in a daze until Aurora gave him a little wave. She handed him her phone where she’d typed out a note.

‘we’re out of milk’ 

Every day before leaving the house Nate had to check the ventilation system was working, that the windows were locked shut, that his mask had new filters in; no gaps, no tears, before putting it on. He’d message Aurora after a few minutes of leaving the house, reminding her to put the locks in. It was exhausting, but necessary.

When Annie took Nate and Aurora and ran for their lives seven years ago, she took a shit ton of money with her. Some hers, some not hers, all blood money, but money all the same. It did not mean they were rich—very much the opposite. It meant they had money to fall back on should shit hit the fan; it meant that they had to be careful, so careful that should anyone breathe the wrong way, it could cost them all their lives.

Careful. Careful. Careful. Have you ever thought of a word so much, heard it so often, that it stopped being a word altogether? Nate had always been careful. Because the times where he wasn’t had consequences, which he paid for in blood, sweat, tears and bruises. Aurora had it easy. She didn’t have to be careful at home. She could draw all day and night without being careful.

Nate had school.

Smile, Nathaniel. Blend in with them, talk to them, whatever. Just don’t trust them.

Nate could only imagine how badly Annie would’ve beaten him if she knew he’d given his number to Rivera. Harmless, dim-witted Rivera. He could imagine the sting of each hit, the dull ache after, the silent whimpering of Aurora in the next room.

Now she was dead. And Nate couldn’t decide if he was a monster for that slight relief he felt every time he came home or if he was just a scared, hopeless child.

It was a hideously balmy morning and the Dust had come down thick in the humidity, filtering everything in a peachy-pink haze of lung-clogging bacteria. In the long list of things Nate hated, spring and summer in Venoir had to be somewhere near the top. And Nate hated a lot of things.

Surprisingly, the Richmond Sixth Form uniform wasn’t one of them. Nate didn’t mind the ashy blue dress shirts, the black trousers, the blazers. Or maybe he just liked that he didn’t have to wear his own clothes to school. There was no way he could blend in with people from the North in the same pair of jeans every day and the same three long-sleeved shirts. Today though, he was going to have to go in his own clothes. Assembly didn’t count for a uniform, and Nate was more than certain they wouldn’t be trying to squeeze the entire Sixth Form student body in with the High School it was attached to. If Richmond were smart, they’d call off the rest of the year. Make the students hand in their last assignments whenever (Nate did finish his philosophy essay in the end) and ditch the last week of movie nights and random quizzes.

No more being careful. No more pretending. No more ice hockey games with Rivera. Nate should try to find a job. Retail places would take him without asking for an address or asking too many questions. Maybe then he’d be able to afford an actual place for them.

Every weekday for years, Nate took a twenty-minute walk from his house to get to the bus stop, get three buses to the Skyway Station where a sky cart would take him straight to Richmond. It was a pain in the ass to commute an hour there and back, but Nate got his paranoia from his mother. Either it was genetic or contagious, he wasn’t sure, but he told himself it was better safe than sorry. It was better this way.

The Skyway system was a glorified version of ski-lifts modified into a hazardous transportation system. Nate came here more often than he should, just to get to the highest level of the decrepit station and stare out into the city, overlooking the obvious divide of the North and South, united only in the fog of pink that drowned it all.

Venoir was deadly, but it was quite a sight. 

Nate took twelve flights of stairs to get to his empty platform because in the infinite things of things he didn't trust, elevators were one of them. He perched himself in his usual seat--a long plastic bench the shape of a horse shoe--right beside a neat row of pastel vending machines.  

If someone told him that Venoir was another word for the place of vending machines, Nate would be dubious but not surprised. You couldn’t walk down the street without spotting at least ten of them outside somewhere. Some sold drinks, some sold mask filters and eye drops, some sold tobacco and booze. 

Nate sat with his shirt clinging to his back from the heat, his mask tight against his face.

The phantom screech of the violin echoed in his ear. He shook his head, as though fighting an irritating gnat, and watched the heat waves rise up off the city. 

Dandelion, watermelon, orchid, apricot.

The carts screeched at every stop. Back and forth, back and forth. It calmed him. There was something tranquil about being so still in a place that never stopped moving. It gave Nate the same satisfaction as someone being indoors, looking out the window on a rainy day with a warm blanket around him…

Well, maybe not that comforting. Nothing outdoors could be so comforting, with a bulky-ass metal and leather contraption wrapped around your head and over your nose, your mouth, your eyes watering every so often.

Lilac, honey, ash, bone.

“Hey, sorry.” Nate startled at the voice beside him. He hadn't heard someone coming up the stairs. Nate spun and found a girl, startling pretty, skin a touch too light to be dark, a touch too dark to be light, smiling at him from behind a monstrosity of a mask--burgundy straps, grey lining, double filters with decorative 3D butterflies. Every about this girl screamed one word: Southside.

“Is this the way to Richmond?” She asked.

Nate nodded. Even if the eccentric mask wasn’t a major give-away, the stranger was also head to toe in black; black leather biker jacket, black crop top, black fish net tights, black heeled boots, black backpack with cat ears. Her hair was dark too; long, heavy looking loose waves. She had the body and the poise of a ballet dancer, but the fashion sense of a punk rocker.

“Oh good,” she beamed. “D’yunno anywhere to eat near there?”

Nate smiled a little with his eyes. “Dougie’s diner. Huge sign. You can’t miss it. If you get platform 6 downstairs, it takes you straight there.”

“Awesome. Thanks for that.”

Nate waited until the stranger walked away before letting his smile drop. For no good reason, Nate felt a chill run up his spine. 

His mind did not associate good things with the South.