Chrome was a ghost town in the late afternoon hours. Thin shadows crawled along the dirt roads in the wake of the setting sun and Mira thought they looked a lot like lanky scarecrows. Houses contoured in shadow were the only things that greeted Mira and Amelia on their walk towards Mister Oreson’s shop. If there were any people in Northern Chrome enjoying what was left of the day, they slowly shuffled inside or paused their work at the sight of them strolling through town.

Amelia kept her head down the entire time, slightly bowed with her hands clasped in front of her like she were a maiden coyly avoiding attention. Mira had a feeling it was less about avoiding attention than it was just wanting to be bothered. In her mind, there was a distinct difference between being stared at and being actively pestered, though the two went hand in hand on more than one occasion.

But no matter how small or unimportant Amelia tried to make herself seem, people inevitably caught on. It didn’t help that Magic’s ailment for the last few weeks kept her isolated from the rest of the town. Mira didn’t know the last time any of the townsfolk saw Amelia Cooper outside of her house, but it had to have been a while for people to gawk at them. Feeling slightly defensive, Mira straightened her posture and stared people in the eye as she walked past. The seamstress put a gentle hand on her shoulder, shaking her head.

“Keep your head down, Mira,” she whispered. “Don’t make eye contact. Ignore them.”

Mira didn’t like that idea. It always worked with her peers. Being stared at was a challenge not many people were willing to return. “Why?”

“Because the less you pay attention to them, the less likely they are to bother you. Ignore them.”

You could do what I do and ignore it. I don’t like my nickname, but the less they can see how much I really hate it, the less fuel they have.

The memory hit Mira like a slap to the face, hard enough to get her to trip over her feet. She regained her footing, but the rebound wasn’t fast enough. Amelia slowed in her steps. “Something wrong?”

“Magic told me something similar. That’s all.”

The seamstress smiled ruefully. “He’s a smart boy. Always has been. I just wish he’d think more instead of rushing into dangerous things.”

“Dangerous like ‘going to school’ dangerous?” Mira asked, discomfort rumbling in her stomach.

“Not quite,” Amelia replied, and Mira felt dizzy from the relief. “Just in general. He gets so caught up in his own head sometimes that he doesn’t really seem to consider things as they are. I told him repeatedly that if he didn’t want to go to school, then he didn’t have to. We could’ve reversed everything whenever he wanted to. But he already had it in his head that Bennett and I were expecting him to. That it was something he felt obligated to do.”

“He said he wanted to make you both happy.”

“I know he does. He always has and more so after Bennett passed.” Amelia paused as if there was a thought she was about to finish, a thought she didn’t want to finish, and stared blankly ahead. Mira debated on asking her about the collapse, what happened that day to put Magic into the condition he was in. But Amelia only pointed a little ahead and said, “Will’s store is just up ahead. We should get a move on. Make sure we have everything we need so we can head back.”

And Mira, unable to breach the conversation, just nodded her head and kept walking.

As the two approached, Mira spotted a tiny, black quail hopping along the porch rail, wings flailing around in an attempt to fly. The bird sang a loud, obnoxious sounding song that made her feel oddly at peace and she couldn’t help but smile a little once they arrived at the steps. The quail, dubbed “Treble,” belonged to Mister Oreson—noted by the plastic, yellow band around his left foot. After an unfortunate run-in with the front window as a fledgling bird, he’d broken one of his wings which left him unable to fly once it healed. As the story went, Mister Oreson felt bad releasing Treble to die in the wild, so he kept the bird and Treble stuck around ever since then.

The quail got extra jumpy as Amelia approached and even she couldn’t frown forever. She scratched the bird’s beak and forehead. “Afternoon, Treble,” she cooed. “Good bird, guarding Will’s shop.”

Mira smiled, stroking the side of the bird’s face, the feathers soft beneath her fingertips. But it did nothing to quell the thoughts and questions rummaging around in her skull. “Amelia?”

“Yes, Mirabel?”

“Do people do that often? Stare at you or Magic?”

The woman hummed, giving the bird a final pat on the beak before turning to look at Mira. She seemed sharper in the shade. “Often enough. You get used to it after a while. It started happening more when people realized that Bennett worked in the mines and it got a little worse after Magic was born. The ignorant ones and the ones who were lucky enough not to send their loved ones to the mines were the ones who gave me the most trouble. But I learned to have thicker skin.”

Irritation raged in Mira’s blood. “Fuck them.”

“Watch your language, Mira.”

“But it’s not right, Amelia! You shouldn’t have to deal with that. And they should be minding their own damn business. It doesn’t concern them!”

The seamstress smiled, a wistful one that she’d seen her father make whenever he thought about Mira’s mother. Whatever memory Amelia recalled didn’t last very long, but she placed a hand on Mira’s shoulder and shook her head with the tiniest of chuckles. “Benji always says that you remind him of her,” she said. “And I can see why. Roslyn was like that sometimes, very hard headed and set in her beliefs. You embody her.”

For a minute, Mira felt her brain stop working. She knew that her parents and Magic’s parents were all friends growing up, but for how little Amelia referenced her by name, Mira was almost convinced that she’d forgotten. It relieved her a little to know that her mother existed in more than just her father’s liquor bottles.

“But,” Amelia went on, “no amount of stubbornness could change people’s minds. They’ve had their chances. It’s not my responsibility—or Magic’s, or anyone unlucky enough to have family members in the mines—to make up for the ignorance of others. I know my truth. I will be more than happy to invite them to a trade if they insist to my face that I should’ve been grateful for my best friend’s sacrifice.”

Mira wasn’t quite sure what to say to that, so she settled for saying nothing at all as Amelia waved her inside of the shop.

Mister Oreson’s store was a dinky little thing with creaky wooden floors, chipped paint along the walls revealing a chalky white beneath the baby blue. The countertops were a pale beige wood, some of which were dented, filled to the brim with seasonal vegetables and fruits and some of the out-of-season fruits that undoubtedly went up in price.

Separate from the fruits and veggies were the meats, displayed on shelves in cuts ranging from thin slices to thick slabs that would take ages to cook all the way through. Today, Mira ignored those and went for the flickerfruit and mangos (which were luckily in season, so they cost less) while Amelia picked the jyan berries and chatted away with Mister Oreson.

He was a much older man, jovial and kind with an ever present smile on his face that he used to greet the regulars with. Mira thought of him a lot like one would a generous grandfather, looking out for everyone and even taking a few hits to his profits if it meant lowering the price for those who couldn’t afford their groceries. On several occasions, Mira had watched Mister Oreson completely ignore some of the items Magic would pick out when the two were young and only charge what her brother could reasonably afford. She had thought the man was just getting senile and forgetful at the time. It wasn’t until Mira herself had forgotten to bring enough funds to cover her own food errands one day that she realized the truth of it.

There were very few people who cared for mining families enough to spare them the trouble of worrying about their money. Mister Oreson was one of the few exceptions.

She’d been in the middle of filling a small back with the glowing fruits when she heard the chatter. Mira didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but Mister Oreson was slightly hard of hearing and Amelia was straining to keep her voice quiet, but loud enough.

“What’s wrong now?” asked the storekeeper, the worry in his tone obvious.

“He won’t eat,” Amelia said, her voice wavering. “We’re trying to see if he’ll eat something if it’s sweet enough.”

“Is it bad?”

A pause. A tap of nails against metal. Nails on a wedding band. “Benj said we might have to consider outsourcing.”

“Grimmshollow?” The shock in the man’s voice made Mira fumble with one of the fruits; she scrambled to recover the runaway melon as her eyes darted towards the conversation. No way in hell her father suggested that without telling her.

No. Way. In. Hell.

She promised him.

Fucking hell, she promised him.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Mira wasn’t about to lose the last promise she’d made to her brother.

Amelia’s lack of an answer, though, confirmed every bit of it and Mira felt her heart sink miles into her gut. She didn’t want to show it on her face that she’d been listening, so she swallowed that feeling and placed one more flickerfruit into a bag as the seamstress took a long breath in through her nose, nodded, and said, “I can’t do it to him again, Will. Not after before.”

“Then here’s hoping this little plan of yours works,” said Mister Oreson. His pale blue eyes found Mira huddled by the fruit and he waved her over amiably. “Let me ring up those fruits for you, Mirabel,” he said. “I’ll take those off your hands.”

Mira stood there, rooted to the spot. It took her a minute to unglue her feet from the wooden panels, aware of each shift in her weight as she stepped forward and placed the fruits on the table. Sounds and sights blurred together, the sensations merging in her mind. Mira didn’t know how long she’d been standing there by the counter watching Mister Oreson ring up fruit, but Amelia’s hand somehow found its way to rest atop Mira’s shoulder, a guiding force until the cold December air brought her back to her senses.

And the seamstress, with worry on her face, stood in front of her with a grip that rivaled a vice. “Mirabellis,” she urged, “look at me.”

Mira blinked. “Huh?”

Relief flooded through Amelia’s face, the crinkles fading, her face soft. Like she hadn’t expected Mira to respond. “You were spacing out. Is there something you were thinking about?”

There were a number of things. Where was she expected to start? The fact that the boy who was basically her brother was a delirious mess on her living room couch because of memories from the collapse she knew nothing about? Or the fact that her father was planning on sending Magic and his mother away to Grimmshollow damn well knowing what the ordeal would do to them both? To all four of them?

What a path they’d walk …

But now is your time to ask.

“What happened that day?” said Mira, one hand resting on the railing of the porch. It wasn’t lost on her that Treble had stopped singing. “What happened to you and Magic the day of the collapse?”

Amelia paused, tightening her grip on the bag that—presumably—Mister Oreson had given her as if it would keep her stable. She cast her eyes elsewhere, the earthy green and brown glowing a little in the sun. Mira wasn’t sure if the woman was just trying to figure out how to word it or gathering the courage to even divulge the information.

Or, she considered, both.

Then, Amelia took a breath, leaned against the railing and pressed two of her fingers against the bridge of her nose.

“It was supposed to be a simple day out,” she whispered, shoulders already shaking. “We should’ve just stayed in that day. But I had errands to run and Magic was beginning to enjoy going on errands because he always went with you on your own chores. We went to pick out flowers for dyes. He was so excited …”

Amelia placed the bag on the floor, using both of her hands to drive her thumbs into either side of her nose, just at the part where the bridge met her forehead in the same manner one would push away a migraine. “He was upset that morning because Bennett had gently asked him to go to bed on time because he’d stayed up late. Magic thought Bennett was angry with him and wanted to apologize when he came home.”

I’m sorry. Mira remembered his pleas in the bathroom stalls; after his fits on the couch. I’m so sorry.

Bennett.

“It was a solid plan and we went into the store, got the flowers we needed and walked around town. I wanted to turn our early morning outing into a small mother-son day. But …” Amelia stopped, allowing a deep inhale to regulate her breathing, which was starting to quicken. “The stars had different plans, I guess.”

Mira assumed that the seamstress had managed to walk away from the event relatively unscathed if only tortured by her grief. Looking at her now, nervously twitching what remained of her open fingers and tapping one of her feet restlessly on the porch, Mira knew that to be false.

Amelia was just as broken as her son, but far better at masking it.

“The smoke came from nowhere,” said the seamstress. “It felt like an earthquake followed by a massive plume of soot and dirt and ash … You couldn’t breathe without burning your mouth from the chemicals. And everyone—every single person outside that day—panicked.

“Everyone ran home, but the problem with that was that no one seemed to care who they trampled in the mess. I don’t know when I lost him, but he was right next to me and then he was gone. It took me five minutes of pushing and shoving other people out of the way to find him on the floor, curled on his knees and begging, pleading for people to stop stepping on him, to leave him alone … for me to find him. But no one could hear him over the warning sirens. As far as Magic knew, he was alone. He had no one there to stop people from stepping on him, tripping over him, stumbling over him in the crowd. I lost him. And that moment ruined him. My son,” Amelia added in a whisper. “My precious boy …

“Sometimes I dream of that moment, those few seconds that ripped him from me and the minutes after that had me desperately pushing people out of the way to look for him. Because I saw the ones who couldn’t get back up, the dirt on their skin. Young or old. I prayed he wasn’t among them. But we both came away from that being just as broken as the trampled bones and I don’t know if they’ll ever fully set.”

Mira looked away, directing her focus towards her house. She’d heard of the aftermath as being one of the worst occurrences in Chrome’s history. But she didn’t think people had actually died not too far beyond her house because of the fear of others.

Amelia reached to grab the grocery bag, rubbing at her eyes in a failed attempt to hide the tears streaming down from them in shiny ribbons. “We’ve spent too much time here. We should get going. Check up on your father to see how he’s doing.”

With a solemn nod, Mira stayed one step behind her mother figure. Neither spoke on the way back to the bakery, the silence heavy in the approaching dusk. It was a hard thing to chip away at; not even when the two got to gathering the equipment to blend and dice the fruit was there any kind of conversation between them.

But the more this quiet dance between the two of them continued, the less oppressive it felt and Mira much preferred this to being forced to speak. They found a rhythm between chopping fruit, pouring yogurt, mixing the ingredients before placing it in the blender. The sudden whirl and churning of the materials made Mira yelp, which must have amused Amelia because she laughed for the first time in almost three days.

It was a kind of peace Mira longed for and she stood there, leaning into the seamstress’ side watching the smoothie swirl around inside the glass blender. Amelia draped an arm around Mira’s shoulders, nose touching the top of her head.

All Mira wanted was to hold fast to this, wrap it around her finger like a too-tight string to keep it emblazoned in her memory. But she knew it wasn’t likely to last. And when it didn’t, when Amelia took her arms away from Mira’s shoulders and poured the drink into a cup complete with a straw, that moment of calm easily got pushed away for the overwhelming dread as she followed Amelia upstairs to the living space.

There were plenty of ways Mira envisioned finding her father when they returned.

The scene before her was definitely not one of those.

Benji was sound asleep on the floor, resting his head on the sofa cushion beside Magic who, dressed in a baggy sweatshirt with the hood up, also looked to be sleeping soundly (though Mira knew that wasn’t the case). Her father didn’t stir, nor did the pale, sickly boy on the couch beside him. Both of their glasses were crooked, the frames tilted and raised above the bridges of their noses from the way their faces were positioned on the sofa.

A thin trail of water snaked down the side of the couch; her father must have just gotten Magic there because, as Mira and Amelia approached, Mira noticed the small pool of water leaking through the fabrics of his hoodie, the discoloration obvious. She tried not to laugh at the ridiculousness of the scene and did everything in her power to hold herself together as Amelia nudged Benji repeatedly until he awakened.

“Benj,” she said, placing the smoothie on the coffee table as Mira sat on her knees nearby. “Benj, we’re back. We have everything and it’s all made, too.”

Benji woke with a sharp inhale, the only noise from his mouth being an incoherent “Hm?” that told Mira he hadn’t heard a word.

“If you want to sleep,” the seamstress continued, “I can take this from here. Mira and I could handle it if you need the rest.”

“It’s fine,” replied Benji with a croak; he cleared his voice to return it to form. “It’s fine,” he repeated, rubbing at the silver watch on his left wrist and stifling a yawn. “But I’m not too upset with the kid to leave him now.”

“What’s that mean?”

“He put up a nasty fucking fight in the water. I think the steam spooked him. That was my fault. He clocked me square in the face a good few times but I opened a window and turned the vent on to get most of the steam out of the room and eventually he relaxed and fell asleep in the tub. Not that I’m surprised. He can barely sit himself up if at all. The kid’s exhausted. But the fight of getting him in the tub and staying there? Brutal.”

Mira squinted as her father sat up a bit straighter, his back against the arm of the couch. Now that she got a better look at him, he did look a little beaten up. A bruise was beginning to color parts of his forehead and there were specks of blood on his bottom lip.

Amelia’s smile was small, but it didn’t reach her eyes. She grabbed the smoothie from the table. “You think it’ll work?”

“One way to find out.” He motioned towards Mira with his chin. “Bella, you want to give it a try?”

She didn’t want to.

And she certainly wasn’t keen on listening to her father knowing that the attempt would be useless and it was just the confirmation her father needed to send both Magic and Amelia away. But they’d already gone through the trouble of buying the materials, making the food. That was the least of what she could do.

Mira braced herself as she took the smoothie from Amelia and shuffled closer to her brother. She shook him carefully by the shoulder. Not even the baggy set of his clothing could mask the twig that was his arm. “Mags,” Mira whispered. “Magic, can you get up?”

“Mom,” he mumbled. The crackly hoarseness of his voice unsettled her.

“Not Amelia. It’s Mira.”

“Mira?”

“Yeah. Can you open your eyes? Look at us?”

Magic gave a tired groan, equivalent to that of a stepped on, creaky floorboard. He didn’t even have the energy to reply let alone make eye contact with them.

Don’t give up yet, Mags, she thought desperately, attempting to wedge the straw of the cup into his mouth. Please.

The utensil grazed his face and then, with the little energy Magic had left, he pushed it away with his lips.

Mira took a breath. Attempted again. This time, he lowered his face and nestled under the blanket.

She placed the smoothie back on the table with more force than intended as Amelia reached forward to place a hand against her son’s forehead, feeling around the sides of his face. “He’s still really warm, Benj,” murmured the seamstress, a worried waver in her tone.

“Keep the smoothie on the table for now,” Benji replied. “We’ll see if his appetite changes overnight.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then we do what we have to.”

Amelia stared at him with what Mira considered murderous intent. Something venomous glinted in her green and brown eyes like a snake ready to strike. It was a fleeting dare, a challenge, and eventually the seamstress gathered herself, stood, and perched along the edge of the sofa with not a single thing to reply with aside from her hitched breaths.

Benji seemed to sense the error in his statement because he got up and sat beside his friend, silent as she leaned and sobbed into his shoulder. In silent solidarity, Mira did the same, but placed the side of her head against Magic’s. He was still mumbling, still deliriously rambling about things under his breath. She tried to match some of them to words but found nothing. Only the mutterings of a boy far beyond her help.

Their parents’ chatter was starting to peter out.

She rubbed one of her eyes. Her lack of a sleep schedule was starting to catch up with her even though it was nowhere near close to being her normal bedtime. Sleep was coming to drag her under.

And she might have zoned out complete if she didn’t catch the brief coherent word coming out of Magic’s mouth.

“Stay,” she heard him whisper through racing pants and wheezes. “Stay here.”

Not just her name. A plea. A request. But Magic was beyond understanding and she wondered if she was only hearing things.

Mira nodded her head. “I won’t go anywhere. And we’ll find a way.”

Her brother went silent after that, taking up his incoherent speech again. They weren’t going to lose him.

Or so she hoped.