The next morning came with the same aches that were the parting gift of every night. The boy clambered to his feet and looked across the room to find his companions had already departed. That was not good news; it meant they would already have snatched up the nearest bones, and he would have to look farther ahead for his tithe that day.

After a small, brief breakfast to slake what he could of his hunger, he picked up his bag and headed back out into the streets. There was a wind that morning, hot and strong, though for all its ferocity it did nothing to disperse the fog that clung ever to the world. That was a veil that could not be parted. All the wind served to do was pick up the dust on the streets and hurl it around, forcing the boy to reach up and draw the cloth around his neck up over his mouth and nose. He did not have any goggles, so he simply squinted his eyes and kept going.

He had been walking for an hour or so when the sound of engines met his ears, faint at first, but approaching. He knew such cacophonies well; they were the trumpet call to herald the coming of a gang. Keeping his head down, he moved over to the very side of the street and kept walking.

He did not have to wait long for their arrival. The sound gradually rose until he could pick out the individual contributors: the low groan of engines; the crackling of wheels passing through the stones and dust; the tramp of boots upon the ground; the occasional angry word of a raised voice; and loudest of all, the persistent growl of something larger, not an engine or a tire, but the rumble of a caterpillar tread over a hard ground. Some strong, heavy machine was coming.

He saw people first, clad in clothes the pale shades of sand and stone, much like his own attire. Cloths were wrapped about their heads and they wore dark goggles to stay the dust, while in their hands they gripped old, battered firearms, no doubt salvaged from the remnants of some older, broken gang. For their part, the vanguard tramped past the boy with nothing more than a glance in his direction.

Then came the first vehicles. Two cars, side-by-side, rolled out from the fog. They were aged and dented, armoured with sheets of old iron that had been bolted to their sides and speckled with dozens of tiny black bullet holes over the years. The dust had turned them the same shade as the clothes of the people who had come before them, but through that grime their headlights still shone a dull and fading white. The windows were shaded and cracked; within, drivers and passengers alike peered ahead with suspicion, as if they expected the road itself to rise up and betray them ― and who knew, perhaps in this city that was a prudent thing to fear? One could never say where and in what manner danger would raise its head.

After the cars came more people, and as they marched by, a great shadow emerged from the fog behind them. Like all that had come before it, it was weathered and old, and it moved slowly, with a clumsy, lumbering sort of effort. Beneath the long tracks underneath it, the gravel it passed over was ground into smaller pieces, and those pieces into dust. A long iron cannon reached out in front of it, while on top a hatch was raised, and someone stood with their hands on a smaller gun. Their gaze turned to the boy for a moment, but passed over him when he shrank away against the wall at his back.

Two more cars followed the tank, and more people. The gang was a larger one than the boy had seen before, though not the largest in the city by a long way if some of the travellers’ tales he had heard were to be believed. Fortunately, they seemed uninterested in him. Indeed, they had almost all passed when one of the men making up the rear group broke off from the rest to approach him.

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The man held a gun like all the other walkers, but he lowered it as he came near and looked down at the boy. ‘You alone here?’ he asked, his voice raised a little to beat the wind, though still muffled behind the cloth over his face.

The boy nodded.

‘And anything other than dust and broken things to look out for down that way?’ The man nodded down the street.

The boy shook his head. ‘No, sir.’

That drew a laugh from the man, who turned to speak to one of his companions a little further back. ‘Hear that? You’re all to call me “sir” from now on.’ He turned back to the boy and pulled his mask down. ‘You should come with us, lad. There’s strength in numbers, and safety. We might look fierce, but only so as we look out for one other. You’ll never want for tithes with us, food neither.’

Again, the boy shook his head. ‘No, thank you.’

The man was silent for a moment, and the boy felt a brief stab of fear that, having rejected the offer, he might now be fair game. But then the man nodded. ‘As you will, then, and keep an eye up. There’s screechers in these skies. I’d pray that the idols take you to the gardens, but you’re going the opposite way from us. Best of luck.’

With that, the man set off to rejoin the gang, the last trailing members of which were disappearing into the fog. The boy watched him with some sadness as he followed them. He had been wrong about numbers. One or two people could hide with ease, duck into a house or behind an abandoned vehicle, but when there were ten, or twenty? When cars and tanks rolled by with such noise?

He remembered the screams of the other gang, from a long while ago. He remembered the head, the slashed car, the other bodies. That gang had been fierce, all right, and it had done them no good. Noise and strength and confidence drew the predators of the city to them like a swarm of corpse carvers to carrion. The safety was in quiet, in going unnoticed, in hiding and, when need be, fleeing.

As he pressed on, he thought about what the man had said about the gardens. They were a paradise of light and water and plants, a vision from a dream, something everyone knew of and hoped to one day find, yet at their core most knew the search was in vain. The boy had never met someone who spoke of them with such ease before, and that simple confidence gave him pause. Maybe there was something more to the tale than just dreams. Maybe out there somewhere, at the very heart of the city, there was a place where you could live without tithes or hardship, under a clear sky with green all around.

As his thoughts spiralled, the boy moved on, and when evening came upon him he realised with a sudden chill that he had found no bones. Gripping his knife, he quickened his pace and pressed on, sending glances through each window and door he passed, hoping that there might be a skeleton inside, or a lost bag, or someone huddled there. But there was nothing, and the darkness bred only greater worries. Overhead, the cry of a screecher pierced the fog and sent a foul shiver down the boy’s spine.

The sound provoked, in an instant, an old and well-learned response his mother had drilled into him from as early as he could walk and talk. He dropped his head and sprinted to towards the closest building. The door was too far, so he leapt towards the window, in his haste only just clearing it, and tumbled on to the floor within. Even then he did not stop, swinging around as he drew his knife from his belt and held it up in a guard. He held his breath for several seconds, then let out a sigh and lowered the blade.

The screecher’s call was a hard thing to track. Whether the creature was metres above you, swooping down on silent wings, or half a mile off taking instead some other poor soul for its prey, you could never quite be sure. The boy’s mother had taught him that the proper thing to do when the beasts were nearby was to hide and wait until you could be sure they were gone.

But he didn’t have the luxury of that option. The sky was already growing dark, and he had no bones to pay.