Rat had been back to the city many times over the last few weeks. She had even made it back to her old store at one point, but had found nothing there worth taking, except for the beans.
Rust knew how to cook the beans.
She had spent a long afternoon looking over all the little bits and bobs and tools. Now that the weather was improving and she wasn't in imminent danger of starving to death it was a much more relaxed affair, but still. There wasn't much there she wanted, and she hadn't gone back again.
Her laundromat was gone, but the cellar was still there, even if it took her two days to find it. There was some sort of slime growing down one of the walls, and the rats had moved back in. She didn't stick around there either.
The little garden under the building was untouched in form, but mosses and lichens were starting to creep their way in, and would eventually crack the stone and take it over, but it would be a slow process.
Rat had suspected that the building might come down before that ever happened, and now that they'd lost the three on the southern side, she was a lot warier about going back there.
Right now she was heading towards the fallen structures. The dust cloud had settled fairly quickly in the humid air, but she could taste the grit on her tongue and feel it settling in the corners of her eyes. It tasted of brick dust, and stained her fingers an iron-oxide red when she wiped it away.
Strange.
-
Three buildings had come down, and a fourth had been damaged but hadn't fallen. She could see where it had been scraped though, part of the facade torn away revealing the nothing within.
It reminded her of a child's toy, blocks knocked down, a sandcastle stood on by accident, but on a massive scale. Destruction on an unimaginable scale.
There was no way to describe it, as she stood there and stared up at the mountain of shattered concrete, all she could think of was safety glass and the sheer… Homoginy of the heap. It was all small pieces of concrete, no broken reeds of rebar, no belongings in the rubble. There wasn't even glass, that she could see, just piles and piles of grey concrete.
She poked around the edge of the mountain for a while and considered scrambling up the shale, but there was nothing here for her to find, and the other building looked dangerous, so she left.
-
She hadn't spoken to the being making this place in weeks now, since before her journey. It was like she had left them behind in the old store, left them lying on the shelves amongst the papers and dust.
She had tried, a couple of times, but the lock in her brain had engaged, the same one that prevented her from going home, from fitting in at school, from pressing the button on the gifted phone and saying she needed help.
She ignored the headache, the constant dull throb in the front of her head.
They had tried, they really had. Rat was pretty sure there was an entire support team dedicated to her case out there, sitting in a building somewhere. The fact that she had managed to stay on the streets as long as she had was more a testament to her talent at escaping, than to any lack of effort by the state.
She knew they were spying on her. She knew they sent people to the laundrette to make sure she was clean, that there were probably special deals worked out with every place she went into regularly. That the woman in the library who had questioned her one time had changed her shifts only a week later.
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Help was only a call away, all she had to do was shout, but she never could.
Rat stopped walking, staring down at the mossy green concrete, touching one of the pools with the pads of her toes, as if she could walk on water.
She had spoken today, and it had gone well. They hadn't commented on it, which was a relief, although maybe they were a little in shock from the collapses and would question her later.
Her rat brain flared up at the thought of that. It had been calmer lately, and she had enjoyed the peace. She had managed to convince it that the house was a mostly safe place, a good nest with food and warmth, and it had accepted that somewhat, but she had never managed to convince it that the people were to be trusted. Still, she accepted that. Her rat brain existed to keep her safe, and to trust was to weaken yourself.
She should move her backup den.
It was on the upper floor of a not-hotel, five stories up, in what should have been a storage closet, but which was actually, when you opened the door and then peeked around the corner, an extremely long room, taking up the space behind the bedrooms.
It was a good den. If you followed the long room to the end, it turned again, making the whole thing a big C shape. Nobody was going to walk that long through darkness in the hopes of maybe finding something at the end, and she had felt safe storing things there.
But it was too close to the collapsed buildings. She could…
She started walking again, towards the not-hotel, and as she walked she tried to talk some sense into her inner rat.
She could take the food back to the cottage, contribute to the communal stores. The few tools she had there wouldn't go amiss either, Shim would appreciate the saws she had found.
The shinies, the baubles and stones she had collected she could keep in her bedroom-
Or, you know, she could do the sensible thing, set up a new den over on the other side of the city, and then stay there. Or she could explore the woods more. There was bound to be somewhere out there where she could live safely. The cottage couldn't be the only dwelling, surely, there had to be other places out there.
If she needed a friend or companion, there was no shortage of animals around. She could tame some rats, or a monkey or something. Become a fairy tale princess with a flock of trained birds.
She had seen crows, and ravens over on the north edge, they were supposed to be smart and easy to tame with food. Grapes, maybe?
Hmm, grapes would be hard to source. Maybe they would settle for oats or dried peas? She could soak them first.
-
As night rolled in, she returned to the cottage. She had moved her den, as much as it broke her heart to do so. Half the food and tools had gone there, and she had bought the other half back with her, as a peace offering.
The kitchen was warm as she slipped through the door, double-checking that her feet were clean.
She pursed her lips as she stood there, unsure of how to approach this. She had bought stuff back before, sure, but she normally left it on the doorstep like a cat. Complicated. There was also the issue of the morning, although she was trying to put it out of mind.
After a moments paralysed deliberation, she took herself off upstairs.
They had given her the bedroom with the green door, and as far as she could tell, they respected her privacy with it. None of the traps she had set were sprung, everything was the correct orientation and exactly where she had left it.
It wasn't a big room, large enough for a single bed and some odd bits of furniture, but it was hers for now.
She let out a sigh of relief as she sat down on the edge of the bed, looking around the room. The bag had been heavy, and she was glad to be off her feet and back in relative safety.
The walls had been bare white when she first got the room, but she had brightened them up with the most vibrant paints she could find. She had collected things when travelling, too. Shiny rocks, bits of quartz and brightly coloured leaves from the forest, all arranged on surfaces or plastered to the walls. From the city, she had old tools, coins, paper wrappers and nonsensically branded tins.
It would break her heart when she had to leave it all behind.
She emptied her bag carefully onto the bed. She had brought back some of the ever-present BRICKs and BLOCKs, but also a new one named GIRDER, which she had found in an otherwise monotonously stocked sweet shop. She had four of those, and she stacked them off to one side.
There was a small bag of rice, and the dried peas. It was possible Rust would like those, she had mentioned that dried things would sometimes grow. Maybe the rice would also grow?
She frowned, realising she didn't actually know what rice was. It was… A grain? Right? Or was it like a sort of pasta…
If she'd been back in the real world, she could have looked it up, and the loss hit her as a now familiar pang. Even if they did well here, even if others woke up, what sort of society would they build, here in this broken world? Could it ever be as it was?
Would others even wake up, if the buildings were collapsing now?
"What happened?" she whispered.
She continued to empty her bag, the things she was keeping going onto the dresser and shelves, and when she was done, she bundled up everything that was left back into the bag and headed downstairs.