Page 5 of Of Monsters Of Kings

Oh drat, I’d gone and called their boss a skull to their faces. That was it then. I held my breath, waiting for a killing blow.

Mother won’t know what became of me.

Instead of killing me, the crew tilted their heads in eerie unison. I froze anew and entirely—an instinctual freeze of a critter as the owl swooped from its perch. I’d never frozen in such completeness, in body and mind, but I recognized the feeling as any animal would. My instincts screamed so that my thoughts shoved at one another and scattered. My trembling muscles couldn’t decide in which direction to run. Only… a person who’d faked their mother’s death to her friends and acquaintances nine months ago, moved everything including her invalid mother in the dead of night to a new part of the city, and then fought every day since to survive was not a person who always obeyed her instincts.

She didn’t always ignore them, but certainly, she did not always obey them.

The skeleton crew exchanged a lengthy look, and I sagged once free of their attention, panting hard. The whirling of my panicked mind swept me away, trying its best to drown me. How did someone move my cleaning cart so quietly? Why didn’t my master key work on the laundry door? Where was Frank? Where was everyone? What would I do without a job? What would Mother do if I died here? Why had the crew tilted their heads in unison?

This skeleton crew made all others I’d seen seem like harmless children.

An enormous hand gripped my elbow.

I blinked up at Ox. Surely the ground should shake with each of his steps, but I hadn’t noticed him walk over.

“You can come with us,” he stated.

A reflex denial balanced on the tip of my tongue, water clinging to an icicle’s pointed end. My instincts, in other words.

His statement sank in.

I can go with them.

They’d take me to their boss. I could ask him for a job. This might work out.

My focus lowered to Ox’s grip on my elbow, and though my mind still wanted to shove and scatter, I noticed how he kept a surprising looseness to his hold. His relaxed grip suggested that I could pull away, and I replayed his specific wording.

You can come with us.

Did he mean to say that I could choose the opposite too? How bizarre, how… unprecedented. Skeleton crews didn’t offer choice. Their skull would be enraged if he caught wind of them acting with autonomy.

Ox’s grip told me I could say no, but refusal was as impossible as they’d professed Hotel Vitale to be. If they wanted to speak of possibilities, then only one remained open to me and my mother.

I nodded my permission. “I will come with you.”

Chapter Two

Up the spine I climbed.

This corner of Vitale was foreign to me, which was saying something because I was born in this walled city, and I’d die here too.

Stag unlocked the rusted entrance to a rundown apartment, then tucked the key into the breast pocket of his shirt. My mother would speak, in lucid moments, of how the world changed one day long ago. She knew the truth of what happened from her mother, and her mother knew it from hers. These truths had been meticulously passed between our ancestral mothers to reach me, the fiftieth daughter. That was how I knew The End happened exactly twelve hundred years ago and that the way we lived now was similar in some ways to how people had lived before.

The End froze progress, and our tiny population, inhospitable world, and crushing lack of resources had ensured progress never defrosted again. Mother would speak of the differences in the way we lived now too. She’d told me once of how finger pads and clicking buttons used to open some doors.

When I’d asked her what would happen if the pads and buttons broke, she’d laughed.

That is why we use keys now, my Patch.

And that was also why we walked in Vitale, why we mended, why we preserved, why the health of the soil was the most important thing in the world—important enough to earn a person their death if they sought to tamper with it. Without the soil, we were finally dead, not just mostly dead, and twelve hundred years of gathering survivors, building walled cities, and figuring out how to squeeze what we could from this hostile globe would’ve been for naught.

“You can go up,” Sand Cat said to me.

That was the first sentence spoken since we’d left Hotel Vitale.

I climbed the narrow stairs behind Ox and Stag. A glance back told me that Sand Cat didn’t intend to join us. He’d planted himself in the apartment entrance.

After five flights of stairs, Stag stood aside for me to pass.

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