“It’s okay,” Shay’s mother said with a tired smile. “It doesn’t hurt.”

She was lying.

The backstreet healer’s clinic was noisy with the chatter of visitors, the cries of the infirm, and the atonal beeping of old machinery. Shay’s mother shared a room with five others. One of them was already dead, but hadn’t been disposed of yet.

The cold concrete walls had once been a light blue, but years of accumulated messes and blood spills had stained the lower half a spotty brown, with scattered spatters going almost up to the ceiling. The pale fluorescent light tubes in the ceiling flickered sporadically. The tattered greenish curtain drawn about the bed did a bad job at separating them from the rest of the clinic, the dirty fabric fluttering weakly in the turbulent air given off by the rattling radiator mounted to the nearest wall. Despite the heat it gave off, the room was bitterly cold. Shay pressed her hands between her thighs in an attempt to warm them.

“Mom,” she said. “I think maybe it’s time.”

Shay’s mother had been beautiful once. At least, Shay seemed to remember her that way. What lay before her now in that lumpy bed could hardly be described as human. Her hair had been removed, replaced by a shiny skull plate that shone in an oily rainbow spectrum when it hit the light. Her eyes had been made larger, her tongue longer, her teeth made retractable, like a snake’s. Her fingers were ribbed and wet with a clear, viscous substance that she constantly excreted. Her oversized breasts wobbled beneath the covers, one slightly larger than the other. Her lips, too, had been inflated to a freakish extent, forcing them to part in a small O even when neutral. Her face was studded with dark amber beads that made loose, radiating patterns. They flashed in the flickering lights together with the cold sweat that streaked her features.

They had ruined her.

Even then, her smile was still beautiful.

“Please speak up, honey. I can’t hear you.”

Shay took a deep breath to strengthen her voice. “It’s time, Mom. You need to tell me who he is. I won’t have anywhere else to go, after…”

Mom’s brave smile twisted up into a grimace. She reached out with one trembling hand, and Shay leaned forward so she could caress her cheek, even though it left a trail of cold slime running down her neck.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she whispered. “But he’s dead. Don’t go looking for him once I’m gone.”

“Then…”

What do I do?

“Don’t worry, Shay. It’s all going to be okay. Back home, in the drawer of my nightstand, there’s a letter. Bring the letter to the queen.”

“The queen?”

Shay’s mother nodded. “Yes, the queen. At the palace. Get an audience with her personally, if you can, and…” She trailed off for a moment, eyelids flickering with pain, before her gaze focused back up. “Have her read the letter. She’ll see that you’re taken care of.”

“What’s in it?”

“It… doesn’t matter. It’s probably best if you don’t know. Just know that once the queen sees it, you’ll be okay.”

So she said, but her face betrayed anything but confidence. She herself didn’t believe what she was saying. Not more than halfway.

But Shay agreed to take the letter anyway, and promised not to open it.

The healer—a tall, blue-skinned thune—came in some time later to check on Shay’s mother, and reiterated that there was nothing that could be done. The infection had spread too far.

Mom descended into feverish delirium, and the things she said stopped making any sense. Then, in the end, all she would say was ‘I’m sorry’. Over and over again. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’. She died later in the evening. Shay didn’t cry. She couldn’t cry.

Tears only attracted sharks.

The healer returned to discuss disposal options. Her Knowlink interface floated in front of her, made of a bluish see-through hardlight, and she scrolled through it with two long, slender fingers while barely sparing a glance at Shay.

“Right, so there’s burial, that’ll be a few thousand depending on what you want to do for arrangements, plus about two hundred a month for a decent plot. There’s preservation, that’ll be about ten thousand plus…” She cut herself off with a glance at Shay, realizing the price range of who she was talking to. “There’s cremation. That’ll cost you five hundred. Or you can send her to the corpse farm free of charge.”

“Corpse farm,” Shay said numbly.

The healer nodded and pressed a few buttons on her interface. “All right, then. I’ll have the other fees sent to your system. It comes up to about 8 000 flora. It’s possible to pay in installments, if you’d like.”

“That’d be good.”

They both knew it, but neither of them said it. Installments or not, corpse farm or not, there was no way a thirteen-year-old girl could pay any of that. But the healer didn’t care, and Shay didn’t see any point in arguing.

It was both cold and wet outside, the sidewalks piled with slushy, dirty snow. Shay wrapped her thin jacket about herself; chin stuffed under her collar, hands tucked into her armpits. The wind tore right through her like a hail of cold knives anyway.

Alone.

All her life, Shay had been almost alone. But now the circle was complete.

The city swallowed her up as she walked its streets. Northmark was a great, dark, brooding pile of metal and concrete. Buildings were packed tightly together and rose high above her head, black skyscrapers looming tall and lanky like monsters ready to snatch up lost little children.

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Countless cars were stuck inching along congested roads, the rumbling engines and honking horns and squealing wheel hubs fading into a disquieting background racket. Rattling trains passed on the airborne skyrails overhead, and occasionally a multi-legged scuttler would climb up off the street to attach itself to one of the rails as well—a huge metal spider suspended from a strand of silk—and unfolded wheels embedded in the ends of its legs to propel itself along above the busy traffic.

Sickly green light from the vigor conduits mixed with the pale blue of the street lamps, framed against the starless black sky. The conduits ran hither-thither everywhere, see-through pipelines of thick, nim-rich fluid connecting the city like a network of veins. In one spot, a conduit running along the facade of an apartment building had begun leaking viscous fluids onto the sidewalk, forcing the pedestrians to make a wide circle around it. It smelled like musty rot.

In the distance, a giant, lifeless eye glared down at her. Only a sliver of the dead god was visible over the skyline. Ral, God of Hunts, brown-haired and green-eyed and with such proud, strong features. Big enough to be a small mountain. He had been dead a long time now, since before Shay was born, but almost no trace of decay had touched his body aside from a sunken pallor to his skin.

It was creepy. Almost like that dead gaze was a final, stubborn curse against the people that had betrayed and slaughtered their own gods. And he refused to let them forget that betrayal. Him and the other immortals scattered around the city would look down at them with that same eternal disapproval for centuries or millennia until Northmark was dust along with every manwen inside it.

Maybe I wouldn’t mind seeing that future, Shay thought idly to herself.

It was a long walk home. She would have taken the skyrail, but she didn’t have the money to spare. By the time she got in, her shoes were soaked. She kicked them off, peeled away her socks, and shrugged out of her jacket, then padded inside the dark, cramped apartment. Turning on the lights didn’t chase away any of the darkness—not the ones in her mind’s eye.

Digging through the fridge, she pulled out a meal of rice and stew in a plastic tub. She sat down at the kitchen table and began eating it cold with a spoon, not bothering to heat it up.

It was the last meal Mom had prepped for her in advance, before she got too sick and had to stay at the healer’s.

While she ate, she tapped the metal implant embedded on the inside of her forearm. With a flickering blue light, her interface came to life. She tapped through the menus onto her linksphere banking extension.

Mom’s debts had already been transferred over. And the overdue bills. And the healer’s fee.

Shay had the Assistant in her implant count it all up. She owed a little over 35 000 flora, almost all of it consolidated under the Estates and Holdings of Lord Magus Wick Tanserly, the Lion.

She had a little under 50 in her account.

There was no use worrying about putting anything aside. There was no way she would have enough money to cover any of it, whatever she did, so it was best to just pretend it didn’t exist. She’d probably get evicted next month. Maybe the electricity would get cut off before that. She wasn’t sure how that worked.

Feeling a choking nausea well up in her throat that threatened to have her expel her dinner, she swiped the interface away with an angry backhand.

She finished the last bit of her mother’s cooking that she would ever taste.

But she didn’t cry.

Tears brought sharks.

Shay tossed the tub into the amassing pile of unwashed dishes and headed to Mom’s bedroom at the end of the hall. She paused at the threshold, not quite wanting to go inside. But there was no choice. She went through and was forced to smell the floral sweetness of her mother’s cheap perfume. Going into the nightstand next to the unmade bed, she dug through empty and half-filled pill bottles along with other bits of assorted garbage. There, at the bottom, was a letter.

The envelope was old and wrinkled with dried spills. There was no writing on it, and when holding it up to the light, Shay couldn’t make out any of the writing inside, just that it contained a small rectangular data chip as well.

Shay didn’t have to wonder why Mom had bothered to write up a paper letter for the High Queen of the Concord. No linksphere message would ever reach her, nor any of the Crown’s higher servants.

It’s not like they’ll listen to me, either.

This is seriously the big plan Mom came up with? She might as well have told me to go find the giants in Aldenlore and ask if I couldn’t trouble them for some of their ancient gold pretty please with sugar on top.

It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

The next day, Shay went to the Hall of Heroes, High Queen Avalla’s palace in Northmark, to give her the letter. It was in the Kingswatch district, which was much too far to walk from Devil’s Shame. She was forced to get a train day pass, bringing her down to just 20 flora left in her account.

Kingswatch was in the nice part of town. Brighter, cleaner, everything sparkling like crystal, with pleasing, softly curved architecture all around. Servant constructs swept the sidewalks and wiped glass panes, carefully maneuvering around the well-to-do in their immaculate suits and robes and dresses.

As expected, she was stopped at the wrought-iron gates of the Hall of Heroes well before she could ever reach the expansive marvel of white stone and gold domes and hovering decorative obelisks. Four guards stood watch outside the closed portal. When it became obvious that she wanted to get inside, one of them approached her with his hand raised.

“Step back a bit, girl,” he said in a businesslike voice, neither kind nor unkind, one hand resting on the stock of the rifle slung around his neck. “If you want to take pictures, do it at a distance like the other tourists.”

“I’m not a tourist,” Shay said. She held up the letter, feeling a bit ashamed about the shabby condition it was in. “I have to get this to the queen.”

The guard frowned deeply. “Uh… I don’t think that’s possible. Where are your parents, little girl?”

“Dead.”

“Oh. Well, we don’t really take letters here. If you want to send a message to the Crown, there are several linksphere accounts that accept—”

“The queen has to read the letter.” She thrust the letter insistently at the man’s face, despite already knowing that she couldn’t change his mind. “It’s important.”

Of course, she herself didn’t even know why it was important, but that didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered.

“We’ll see to it that someone reads it,” said another of the guards. He approached and took the letter from Shay, making a big show of putting it into the breast pocket of his fine, blue and gold uniform and patting it to mime that it was safe there.

The first guard gave him a baleful glance, and the second one shrugged. “What? She’s just a kid. Have a heart, will you? It’s probably just a birthday wishlist or something.”

Mom had told her to get the letter to the queen personally, but Shay didn’t feel like embarrassing herself even further by arguing that point. The queen was never going to read the letter anyway. No one close to her was going to read it. She would be lucky if the guard himself decided to have a look at it later, instead of throwing it in the trash where it belonged.

Maybe I should start stealing, Shay thought on the train home, watching a sleeping businessman with his briefcase tipped on its side on the floor.

If only I was good with my hands.

Or anything else, for that matter.

Or maybe I should just kill myself now. While I can still do it under a roof, with a full belly.

But she knew that wasn’t going to happen. She wasn’t strong enough for something like that. She was just like her mother, that way.