Pretty waited three nights after Brat disappeared from the gaol. On the fourth, the hunger pains were so bad that they woke her up. She must not have been sleeping long, because there were still tears on her face and in her hair. The rats hadn’t yet smelled the moisture and come to lick it off.

The child-coffin-sized brick chamber the twins called home was always pitch black—it was so far underground not even the ghostlight could penetrate—but Pretty could see fine. It was bright light her eyes had trouble with. She hoped it was night out.

Pretty didn’t want to go aboveground. The Closes weren’t safe, but they were safer, and they were twice as safe if you were two, Brat always said. There were narrow shafts where you could scamper if bigger, meaner kids or grownups came after you, and plenty of places to pop out onto the street, run around to another hole, then slip back home without being followed. If you had a good spot tucked away from drafts like Pretty and Brat did, then the Closes were a cozy haven in the winter and a cool retreat in the sweltering delta summers.

But there wasn’t no food down there. She couldn’t drink rat blood like Brat did, and she didn’t know how to sip medicine off people and animals even though her twin had tried over and over again to teach her.

She had promised to hole up and wait for Brat, and Brat had promised to come back with food. She loved her twin and very nearly worshipped that endless swaggering optimism. But even she knew you couldn’t trust a word Brat said.

That was why Pretty had been crying. Brat wasn’t coming back. The two of them had never been apart so long. Their cramped little home felt empty with only one twin in it.

Pretty took off her headscarf, combed her long black curls with her fingers, then tied the scarf on more neatly. It was a proper headscarf, like the women and girls in the low streets wore. Brat had snatched it for her, supposedly off a merchant cart rolling up River Street from the docks, but more likely, given the fine hairs that had been caught in the knot, right off some girl’s head while her back was turned. The fabric was greasy and threadbare, but it stopped the rats from chewing her hair like they did her twin’s, and it had come from Brat trying to make her happy, so that made it beautiful.

Her dress there wasn’t much she could do about. It was getting short in the skirt, but not short enough yet that she had to find some trousers or leggings to go beneath.

She crouched and made her way out of the chamber, down the angled shaft to the three-way. The center one stopped in the middle at a cave-in. The righthand shaft went to a chamber like hers and Brat’s, but the boy who had been living in there had coughed himself to death last winter about halfway down the tunnel. Probably crawling for the Seep. Cats and close-rats went instinctively for water when they died. Every year, rag-covered bodies had to be drug away from the Seep or a fell miasma would collect there and kill a bunch more close-rats.

She climbed down the rusty metal staples driven into the Clutch, a round room with an arched doorway half-buried by fallen bricks and washed-in mud from a century of flood seasons. That was their first line of defense from the adults who used the Closes. Most of them wouldn’t chance crawling through that pinch point on their hands and knees, and if they were crazy enough to try it, bricks could be hurled down on their heads from the shafts above.

There weren’t a lot of adults in the Closes anyway. By the time they’d grown, most of the lost children calling the Siu Carinal underground home had found something on the surface world that kept them from coming back. Hangman’s nooses, whoring houses, and thug work were the most common. You had to be on the watch out for the adults who remained behind. Excepting the skeletal addicts, who could barely be bothered to move except to sniff out their next fix, the grownups in the Closes were dangerous.

Pretty avoided them by avoiding the Windings, the long maze of switchbacks and gap-toothed doorways that used to be the buildings lining the main promenade of Old Siu Carinal. Anyone could hide in those, but most often it was big anyones.

Brat always took the Windings because they were a more direct route to the market. But Brat could outrun anybody; Pretty couldn’t. She took the longer way around, through a crumbling tunnelway to a big, arched room that the close-rats called the Echoes. Ancient pictures of unknown gods and demons covered the peaked ceilings high overhead, bouncing back every footstep and word in endless mocking voices. The adults in the Closes never went that way, and even most of the kids shunned it, because of the fearsome creatures depicted on the crumbling plaster.

From the Echoes, it was a long crawl beneath a bath house, a boarding house, and a dead temperer—who only really worked in the month before the Carnival of the Dead, but whose business stank of corpses that were laid by year-round—then through a hole in wood skirting and down an alley.

Pretty stopped behind a broken, turned-over wagon, watching the market. It was loud out there, and the breeze raised goosebumps on her skin. She shivered. People swarmed everywhere, real folks in real clothing.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Folks with food. They were buying it from bakers or pigeon sellers or haggling over produce from farmers come in from outside Siu Carinal. Her mouth watered and her head went giddy for a second. She caught hold of the broken wagon axle before she fell and rubbed her face hard to try to wake up. Her stomach cramped painfully, punishing her for wanting what she couldn’t have.

No one noticed the dirty face under the dirty headscarf. All night long, she watched and prayed to the Cormorant that somebody passing by would drop a scrap. She’d have to stay alert and run when it happened. Lots of close-rats would be watching for the same thing. If only she’d been faster last time, she would’ve gotten to that loaf of brown bread Brat had thrown her way.

Pretty gulped. She would have to be braver, too. It wasn’t just speed that had lost her their meal that night.

She trembled from head to toe when she thought about running out there with all those grown above folks. An above kid might push you in the mud and spit on you or throw a rock at your head, but above-adults were worse. Much, much worse.

Folks came and went throughout the night, but most of them kept their eyes and hands securely on their food.

Near dawn, a drunken dockworker tripped and dropped the roasted pigeon carcass he’d been gnawing on. Finally, her chance had come!

But Pretty couldn’t move. She shook, and her heart raced. Her fingers cramped around the broken wagon lever, though she wasn’t sure whether she was trying to pull herself out into the street, hold herself where she was, or just stay standing upright.

A stray dog sprinted out into the street and snatched the carcass. Immediately, a howling chorus of close-rats burst from an unseen bolt hole across the street and chased after the mutt, flinging stones and stabbing it with sticks. They were going to get the bird or they were going to get the dog, but one way or another, they would eat.

Shivering and sweating, Pretty dropped back against the wagon. She was perversely glad she hadn’t made it out there, but now what was she going to do? She had to eat. Her whole body felt like a hollow bone she was so hungry.

Tears of frustration welled up in her eyes. Why was she always so scared? Why couldn’t Brat have kept this one oath in their whole lives and come back? Why didn’t the Cormorant ever send Pretty some invisible medicine, like he sent Brat?

Pretty hugged her empty, aching middle, blinking hard and trying not to cry like she would in their safe little home chamber. She was so exhausted that if she fell to sobbing, she might end up dozing right where she was, and you never wanted to doze on the low streets.

The ghost city and its ghost river were getting thin, fading as the black sky caught the early rays from the rising sun. Soon she’d have to take off back into the Closes or get terrible burned.

The last stragglers and latecomers were making their way through the carts and stalls—riverboat hands just finished unloading cargo, buskers looking for a drink after a long night of playing for the promenades uphill.

A flash of magenta caught Pretty’s eye. A beautiful, flowing overskirt, draped like a sunset over the ruffled burning-sky orange of the underskirt beneath. A tall, graceful lady wearing rich uphill finery was leaving the grocer’s cart with her purchase, a single heart-red apple in hand, as if she were too happy with it to put it in the basket over her arm.

Pretty couldn’t look away. She’d never seen anything that beautiful on the low streets. It was like watching a blue moon moth crash into a mud puddle and flap around ‘til it drowned.

Didn’t that lady know she ought to get out of there?

As if she had screamed that last thought, the lady stopped suddenly and looked straight at Pretty.

The lady smiled. Not the sort of predatory smile Pretty had seen on rich lords and ladies before. This smile was as graceful as the lady herself. Sad, too.

The lady held up her red, red apple. Jiggled it a little. Then she held it out as if offering it to someone. With her empty hand, she beckoned.

At me, Pretty realized. She’s talking at me.

All awe and hunger and frustration disappeared in a thunderbolt of pure terror. Pretty ran for her life.

***

The next night, Pretty was even hungrier and more desperate. She couldn’t stay in, even if that uphill lady had tried talking to her. Pretty slipped out and hid in the recesses of the alley, promising herself this time if somebody dropped something, she’d be on it. She had to. She had to get something inside her guts.

The lady was there again, swathed in finery of lavender and pearl. She was much earlier this time, meandering down Market Street, just her and her basket, talking to sellers and scrutinizing wares. She never did get bothered or accosted, which hardly made any sense.

When the lady passed in front of her alley, Pretty hid in the ruins of the broke-down wagon, her heart thundering like a flood season storm. Blood rushed in her ears and pounded in her head so hard that Pretty almost fell over, but the fine lady didn’t look her way.

As she passed by, however, a red, red apple dropped from her basket and rolled over to bump against a broken spoke of the wagon.

Pretty didn’t move.

The lady didn’t look back. She strolled on, lavender skirts swishing in the ghostlight.

A shout and the slap of bare feet on mud. Some other hungry eyes had seen the apple fall.

Pretty’s hand shot out like lightning and snatched the fruit into the hiding spot with her. Cries of treachery went up outside the wagon, and somebody started shoving broken pieces aside to find her.

Cradling the apple close, Pretty scrambled out on her belly and crawled into the Closes, skinning up her knee and banging her head in her haste. She didn’t stop to breathe until she was safe in her and Brat’s little chamber.

***

The apple was gone from stem to blossom end in seconds, but Pretty spent the whole day dealing with the flux and stomach cramps that came from eating after so long without.

In spite of that, the food replenished something inside her, something she’d been sure would die without her twin. She had needed food, and she’d gotten it all on her own, and she hadn’t been caught by anybody.

Coming back to the market night after night, that was all she’d had to do. Brat hadn’t always succeeded, either, but try enough nights in a row, and food was bound to find you. Maybe that was Brat’s secret.

When she was sure she could make it as far as the market without dropping her stomach, Pretty was going back again.