Fatty air. The oily market fumes made Serib’s skin feel unwashed. Though, she could hear people crunching hungrily into crispy food, and saw them dipping the chunks into a coating hot sauce.

“Focus…” Shay nudged the growing girl.

Serib supported Shay through the plodding shoppers, while Shay’s other hand strafed like a stilt or walking stick along the buildings to her side.

“The smell…” Serib hid under her lightning cloak, but Shay could hear her nose going through sniffs, and the girl's voice worried her.

“What is it?”

Serib answered but Shay did not hear. She felt the need to itch her arm, and lifting up her sleeve a spider was biting where needles had been. Swatting it off she felt feverish, by her wounded shoulder or chewed by old Grief, curling almost foetal and wretched in the street. Between dreams. Serib was more or less dragging Shay now to the shop’s door and many an 'Oi' was shouted as Shay's stiff shell tripped up the other passers-by.

∞

“Hold on…” Shay warned, shivering in chills not there as Serib sweated from the sunlight. “I don’t think I was completely daft… open it slowly.”

Serib did so, and following Shay’s instruction she saw nothing at all as the door opened inwards, showing old sunlight to the new shop. A bell above the door jingled lightly.

“There are trap-trip wires covered in a vanishing powder.” Shay explained, but Serib could see nothing at all. “Thankfully I was young, and never thought a child and a cripple would rob me - the wires are too high up to be our problem. Crouch down here.”

Serib took a deep breath, crawling on her belly underneath whatever certain death hung above and around. As Shay was closing the door with her boot, someone out there had of course spotted their strange behaviour, and was making their way over.

∞

She kicked the door shut with a slam and shuffled back to make a few odd, rhythmic knocks on it with her foot. The lock sealed with a crinkling noise little sooner than a fist was smacking the flimsy door from outside.

∞

Shay wriggled towards the back of the shop keeping herself flat on the ground, away from the invisible wires, mentioning all-while with urgency what Serib needed to do. This ladder and those steps over there, how high to go up each, what the shape of the jars would be and their contents, sniff these but not those, glowing or dry or powdered or slimy. Serib was eventually carrying a shop of her own stacked up high in her arms and almost falling over.

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“Throw it all that down near the door and don’t breathe in. Make sure everything smashes.”

Serib did as was told, lobbing and hurling plates and jars shattering their contents into one another on the floor. Small pinches of stuff fizzled larger. What unearthly gas fathomed up from the concoction soon mingled unknown with normal air. A blurry version of the door opened with a duller bash than Serib expected and the do-gooding commoner, a set of moustaches to his ears groomed fine as you like, could not see Serib or Shay. He glanced around someone else’s shop never having seen the inside before, daring not to step foot inside, noting every odd jar and mound.

“I saw two unjolly weirdos crawl in here.” He noted to a companion. “What a pong it is!”

Shay was staring intensely, hoping:

‘Do not touch the wires… just walk away…’

∞

“Smells awful, I wouldn’t.” Another of the commoner’s friends convinced them to close the now broken-open door, and a commotion was quick to spark outside the ajar: "Not very silvery of you is it, ol' pal?"

“This chester.” Shay butted her head against some furniture, laying there clutching at her shoulder. “Rolled in leather. You’ll have to drag me, after. To the tunnel. We can’t wait for me to come back.”

Serib panted trying to get the heavy chest to open. The whack of its lid on the ground drew the attention of those souls outside.

“There are ruffians I tell you!” the moustached man could not twiddle loudly enough.

Shay had the air pressed out of her when Serib placed the unusually heavy roll on top of her. The girl was unable to resist taking a look: syringes there slotted - of already prepared ‘medicine’. Heavy as Grief. Shay waffled:

“I’ve been shot and all sorts before, but this is something else. The pistol laced with something… or the spiders… why do I keep seeing spiders and their purply webs, protecting little eggs. I can’t move my arm. Can you see the spiders? The webs they weave…”

Serib dragged Shay towards the back of her shop. As Shay was fumbling through the leather roll with what was now her good hand, she saw bloody globs and pools being left on the floor by her shoulder. Some grim infection like an oil was shining in the smear of her blood. Gritting her teeth with a sigh she told Serib:

“That ladder… eighth shelf.”