The bottom of the stairwell was blocked by a metal door and unlocked with a key quickly retrieved from a pocket in a field of many, patchwork storage dotting the utilitarian fabric of her loose-fitting pants. She held the heavy door open for her customers but let it close with a slam—a crisp and sobering sound that sharpened the air in that pre-op period. Inside was sparse, but gave the appearance of being adequately supplied for the tasks the fleshcrafter performed. There was a gurney, a couch, and a light that, when lit, nearly seared pupils more accustomed to the darkness preceding its glare. It was less frightening in sight than sound—basement surgery just had an inherently malicious ring to it.

“Sit,” was the woman’s command. “Any questions or concerns before we get started?”

Kaden laughed at Eoran’s protest, his story out now. He’d have to remember it for later, the admission worth at least a week of teasing when they were recovering. The genuine hospitality Orika extended to the elder Toriet boy was enough to quell any trepidation he felt in regards to getting his eye spooned out and replaced with a younger, newer model.

“Is it going to hurt him?” Kaden’s primary concern was for Eoran, after all. “And the recovery time—is it significant?” Directly translated: Would their mother be beating the living shit out of the both of them for desecrating their bodies later?

Orika spoke above a fanfare of clatter, the opening movements of a brisk preparatory symphony. "Oh, it's going to hurt you both but that's the nature of what you guys signed up for. The procedure—heh,” said as if she had never considered the formality of the term prior to that moment, “itself won't take long, but trading eyeballs is no simple thing for a body to undergo, you know? Even though you're related, the matter is still foreign." She hammered the lid of a jar against the edge of the counter she worked on, frustrated by its lack of cooperation. However, sated by its punishment, Orika turned and folded her arms across her broad chest.

"Since you have the blood, I imagine the healing process might be quicker for you. Not sure about the little one, though. Might help that he's getting some of your blood with that eye—you could probably help him out when it's all said and done. There will be bruising, there always is. Full sight will probably return once the connections have had time to get used to each other again. I can link them up, but I can’t exactly make them talk. It's a gamble, but that's life, right?" She smiled exuberantly.

Lep, from upstairs, entered a moment later. Her arms were wrapped around a lunch cooler full of ice.

"That it? You guys ready?" Orika looked to both in turn. Eoran swallowed hard, then nodded.

Kaden, as far as a teenager going into a random basement selected by his fourteen year old brother to have his eye gouged out by the pluckiest fleshcrafter in Port Haven, managed not to look phased. If this was what Eoran wanted, no, needed to find stability in his life, to realize the immigrant dream their parents had trained into them before they could even walk, then what was a little pain?

A little pain was nothing for a lifetime of success.

“Thank you Orika,” the blood caller said as he sat where he was directed. “That sounds fine. Your hospitality and discretion is incredibly appreciated—I wish I could tell you just how much this means to me and Eoran.”

"Yeah, well, don't get too moony. It's not for nothin'." Orika did have a business to run, afterall. It seemed a minor few details of her and Eoran's earlier conversation remained undeclared. She moved behind the boys and placed her hands upon their shoulders. Lep sat the cooler on a bar cart-turned-surgical stand, wheeled it to collect the necessary tools Orika previously gathered, then parked it in front of where they were staged. Glass and brass filled the valley formed in the space between the Toriets' knees.

The fleshcrafter's assistant was an infinitely more restrained individual. She quietly doled out a diaphanous liquid into two jars and held them to each boy's nose. When Eoran lifted a hand to take it, she gently chided the young boy. "Nope. You'll spill."

His hand retreated to take Kaden's instead.

Lep kept her eyes alternating between them. She cooed, "Relax. Breathe slow. Breathe deep."

The liquid smelled like a mockery of candy. It was a machination of convalescence, a gateway made from compacted molecules commixed to form a synthesis of slumbersome vapors. Its bottle was brown but the label had been removed. Now, it only wore shreds of ghastly chalk, the aftermath of its glaringly obvious clandestine acquisition.

"Relax. Slow. And deep."

The edges of the room wavered, uncertain about the laws of their geometry. They were made cold by the spectrum of light hovering above them like a dying sun, a supernova burning through the concrete atmosphere of the basement sky.

"Relax slow and deep

The world was sinking in upon itself, swallowing itself into the slow weight of its own deep core and slowly relaxing into the deep tides of the chemical hypnosis" fighting to take them into the, absence of slow soundscapes and the impermanence of deep planate. angles the nothingness of existence lurking just beyond their world of, colors and warmth and slow and deep and relax eddied the asseverations of a clarion call too deep to be retrieved from the militant night

Orika laid the boys down and pulled a stool on wheels over with her foot to sit. Once Lep adjusted the light above so she could better see, the work began. It was quick, but bloody, a series of sacrificial slices upon the tips of her fingers made so she could better sew the pair back together. The eyeballs squelched as they were pried and severed from the viscous home of their former sockets, they slurped as they were slipped into the moist confines of their new homes and attached on the far side of each ocular moon. The spilled blood was a product of communal indiscretion, gathering hair into wet tufts, beading into plashes on the grimy tile floor.

And then, a short time later, it was back to the realm of the living.

Eoran woke, groggy and still heavy and hurting more and more as the vapors continued to fade. He was greeted by the blushing blue of a new dawn. They were moved to a run-down recovery suite of sorts so the girls could attend to the mess, an empty private room near the front of the shop. He rubbed his forehead, his cheeks—gently. Flakes of dried blood clung to his fingers.

“Eoran,” the older boy groaned, flaking blood off his jaw, lethargy still keeping his fingers heavy, arms weak. “Mom’s going to fucking murder us.”

Even now, the bloodcaller was more concerned about their next hustle than he was about his own pain, his own temporary blindness—even though that was of extreme concern to Kaden. How was he going to go through his time at Augustine with one eye? He couldn’t be Ossan AND a pirate. The juxtaposition would be too much to bear.

“Are you okay? We need to figure out what we’re going to tell mom and dad.”

“Yeah...” Answer, agreement, commencement of another grift; it was all the same to Eoran in his current state. “Uh... do you think they’ll notice we’ve been gone all night? Kaden, if she comes at me from the side, I’m toast.” The younger boy lifted a hand to map the edges of his absent periphery.

“Yes I think they will notice that we have been gone all night,” Kaden replied flatly, trying to decide on the phrasing of the eulogy that would be engraved upon his urn. Kaden Toriet, almost a scholar until he was murdered with a kitchen cleaver for violating curfew while recovering from impromptu basement surgery. “We can... blame trenchants. Or one of the uncles. They’d cover for us, right?”

Eoran leaned back, pressed his disheveled hair into the wall. A few stiff strands caked with blood and sweat crunched audibly under the weight of his skull.

“I think it has to be a trenchant,” Eo reasoned, “I don’t trust any of the uncles, ‘cause you know one of them is just going to get super drunk and spill it to the whole neighborhood. It gives them the upper hand, where if… if we escaped from a trenchant then maybe mom and dad’ll just be happy to see us. Our lives are worth more than some injuries, right?”

“But why would a trenchant mess with our eyes? How do we explain the fact that we might be half blind now, both of us?” Kaden’s words were low now, the vibrant red of his nerves candid on his face. He was going to have to give up nearly all of his savings to pay for this operation too—how would he explain THAT to their mom?

“I don’t know,” Eoran said, resignation both appending itself to and exacerbating the lugubrious haze he struggled to emerge from. He closed his eyes, although in actuality the action was more singular, and thought through the assiduous pain that thrummed throughout a whole half of his face. He refocused (poorly).

“It was a fight. Maybe they just kept punching us in the eyes. Or they punched one of us in the eye then pushed us down some stairs when the other one tried to stop them? You ever see someone and you just want to hammer their face in? Something like that. If we start rumors as we’re walking back, then the story practically will make itself. People can’t keep anything to themselves—the neighborhood’ll do the work to make the story true.” Eoran turned his half-blank sight to his brother. “I could probably take a few more bruises. Can you call blood like that? Can you make bruises?”

“I… yes.” The young scholar would continue to be perplexed by his brother's forethought—but fear made men out of boys. Or at least made them scramble to cover their tracks as best they could. Producing a matchbox full of needles from his pocket, that darkened youth pulled himself from the recovery bed. Kaden pulled a needle from his pack before he put the matchbox away, poised to draw his blood: to call the bruises, to color their skins. “It'll hurt a bit. Are you ready?”

“Yeah.” Eoran picked himself up off the floor and stumbled the short distance to his brother. He was in too deep to say no to a little more pain now.

Hands shaking, Kaden pricked his finger, a fine drop of blood forming in the grooves of his fingerprints. They sat there, hunched, the blood caller murmuring the old prayers their father had taught them as he turned his brother's skin yellow and purple from their story’s violence, turned his own wrists the color of rope burns. They were like ancient storytellers, drawing evidence of their mythology upon their skin to prove their belief, their existence, an offering to a God that traded in blood blisters and welts.

Eoran sat quiet as he was contused even if his expression was telling its own harrowing tale. His bones ached as his platelets were guided by the adjuration of their momentary master; his muscles mourned their brief loss in the redirection forced by the remote whispers of his brother's tongue. Mutely, he hoped that the bloodcaller's sacrifice was payment enough for their petty knavery, or else he would have to devise some way to make prayer-apologies retroactive, hide a glass body from his mother’s keen gaze. The boy was entirely confident he could pull the wool over his parents' eyes—he was less so when the object of his chicanery was sacrosanct.

“We just have to maintain the story,” Kaden reassured his brother, guilty in the orchestration of their subterfuge. Maybe in the future, he would see misfortune as a reprisal for his complicity in the coverup, but for now, it seemed the best option. “The same story to every person who sees us.”

“And we have to be seen by every person that’s out,” Eoran reiterated, bringing the point of bent knuckle to his good eye and furiously rubbing to stimulate irritation. It was the finishing touches to the ruse—tears, sniffles. “Alright. Let’s do this.”

Kaden’s own face, already hollow, affected a shell-shocked indifference that read from a thousand yards. “Every person. Let’s go.”

They didn’t encounter another soul until they hit the main street, well away from Orika’s surgical theatre, but the souls they encountered were many when they crept into the daylight near the morning markets, the vendors just beginning to set up their stalls.

“You poor boys!” Nana Omayan exclaimed, dropping her bolts of fabrics to comfort Eoran’s trauma, to assess the damage Kaden sustained. “Your mother has been looking for you all night—tell Nana Omayan what has been done to you.”

The rope burns, the bruises, the trauma to their eyes,

and under it all, the tiniest untraceable prick of

Kaden’s lying fingerprint.

"I met Kaden on the way h-home from Uncle Enji's last night because he got into Augustine and we were all really happy for him and celebrating b—but then some trenchants wanted to see our papers and—and—and they wouldn't let us leave and then they… they...." Blubbering trumped cohesion. Eoran clung to the clothes Nana Omayan wore, gripping her skirt, clutching at the silks draped around her elderly form to better sow his seed of deceit. The waterworks were in full effect. His head was pounding from the surgery now, and while he would have preferred that it didn't, he couldn't deny that it was not lending some authenticity to his performance.

A crowd quickly gathered from the commotion, expressions of sympathy mixed with indignation cursing Port Haven's broken system. The true gift of the Toriet boys may have been their ability to inhabit their elaborate falsehoods, but Eoran liked to tell himself it was survival of the fittest.

The elder Toriet said nothing, his brother’s performance more than enough to secure their safety, to cement their story in the heart of the community. He stared with his one good eye into the street, a sunbleached billboard announcing open recruitment for Amstead’s proud military in the shadow where his vision no longer reached.