I remember...the...shivering.
They saw what I was.
Cut me I bleed Thames water.
She's still making that noise. Hours now.
Not that I been asleep exactly. Fading in, fading out.
She reminds me of Jenny.
Dream thing.
But real.
Right from the back of her throat it comes.
Guk guk guk GUK guk guk HAAAK.
She's rocking. Older than old. Ancient. In her papery claws a thick stoney bowl and a funny little cosh.
She grinds and grinds away.
Now the noise comes from the front of her gob, tongue up by her baccy brown pegs, wet-spit-drenched sound sucking short sucks up to a hard stop.
SutsutsutSUTsutsutSUTSUTsutsuutsuuut.
Find myself trying to...read it. Shut up Skelly. Losing your thread.
I remember the shivering.
I'm stuck in the Tower. Intense mullarkey. Shotgun shenanigans. Stuck. Panic. Rat too far from the river.
Then the prickling acros the top of the old scalp. A crown of delightful pin pricks. I'm gurgling with the pleasure.
Blanky is shouting at me 'They're coming! Big shivers! Close the door!'
I ain't got the foggiest Blankerton. All shriek to me.
Then it's like a big thing, sweeps in.
"I don't wnat your help." I say
But I take it.
I take it and run.
But it ain't me. I'm like a little drone - RC urchin 500. Some big Shiver riding me like a biped.
Whatever it is, it knows how to move, when to move, without being seen.
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And I'm out of the Tower.
Then I'm picked up at the back door.
Carried in a shit-you-not boner fried sack.
He's sitting next to me still. Huge bugger.
And I'm in this room now. Only the three of us now. Bigboy, crone and half-dead Skellyboy.
"What the mong mee is she doing?"
Bigboy looks at me all of a sudden. Looks me up and down. Tiny little smile, gone before you see it.
"She. She's writing soft."
There was a lot of people here before though.
I never felt nothing like it.
The shivering.
Can't move. Can't talk. Shudders coming through me so hard think I'm gonna rattle my bones apart. Trying to wrap myself in a ball like an unborn baby. Trying to stop every little drop of heat escaping from me. Not enough. I need heat. Can't think of anything else. Can't move. Teeth ACTUALLY chattering. Muscles all locked up. Tongue hurts. Wait for it to pass, but every new wave is stronger.
They saw what I was.
Cause they stripped me down. Saw me all yellow, all the broken lines under my wrapping paper, heard the fever talk, heard me talking to the Shiver in my head. A witch as plain as day. But they didn't sling me in the street and call the filth, or toss me to the hunters and make a few cals. No they wrapped me up in the biggest all-pile-on, a hug of hot stinking bodies. The pressure. It should have felt awful, a dozen bodies piled up on top of me, crushing me - but it didn't. I...I loved it.
Now I'm wrapped up in more blankets than there is me. Sweat running down my face.
There's a glow inside me.
"Why am I glowing?"
Guk guk guk GUK guk guk HAAAK.
"We stuffed you up with good cals little brother. 5000 straight down your neck. You got to feed the Rhizome kid. Or it'll eat you alive."
Now my hands reach my face, find the little tube, follow it up to my gob.
"Calm down hangchwee, it is safe. Don't chuck up that sweet goop. Ain't cheap. Finest chitin slop. Vitamin enriched."
I try not to yank the tube out. Focus on the glowing sun in my belly, slowly flooding my scrawning limbs like a magic potion.
"5000 cals in a day? I ain't eaten that in a good month." I whisper.
"Yeah well, body don't like rapid change, so your little bumhole is like to pay the wages of this particular sin."
SutsutsutSUTsutsutSUTSUTsutsuutsuuut.
Blanky is mysteriously quiet. I wonder if he's afraid of the crone.
I think of the boys. I need to go.
Creeping dread, sneaks in around the corners of my food high. Nothing good happens in Riverside. Every silver lining has a cloud.
It's when, not if, these witches are going to sell me. Sound like Manleb.
I try to get up.
"Listen hangchwee, you got expensive tech in you, and it is rarer than white shit that a kid survives this long. So, yeah we are trying to recruit you. And we ain't the only ones neither - but it has to be a choice. For us, anyway, it has to be a choice. So you can go - when you are ready."
"Tech? What tech? I ain't got no chrome."
He laughs, then I think maybe it's a woman.
"What do you think it is then? Let's you talk to an AI inside your own head? Lets you hack drones with your own bare bonce?"
"I dunno. I guess I thought it was a disease."
They go serious. Stare up at the filthy window that sheds the only light in this cellar hole, this rat shit hiding place for a Witch's church.
"Yeah I spose that's true an all. Fungal pathogen that can think. Worst of all nightmares. And maybe yet, our only hope."
I look again, without thinking at the crone's hands. And see finally what she's doing.
She's crushing up old bits of circuit board, old chips. Spitting into the bowl.
It's machine code.
Blankie whispers in my imaginary ear.
SutsutsutSUTsutsutSUTSUTsutsuutsuuut.
And then she fixes me, terrifying, unblinking stare, nails me to the wall through my eye sockets.
She heard him.