Page 15 of Obliterated
Kieran
Ihaveaplan.
It might be a stupid one, a reckless one. But it’s a plan.
Actually, if we’re getting technical, I’ve got two.
Turns out, the brothel—like Max called it back on the docks—really isn’t that bad. At least not at the part where I’m stationed, where Joyeus dropped me after hauling me off to her domain once I got registered.
It’s old and rundown and moldy. Sure, there are things happening here that I don’t want to know about, screams that keep me up at night, but there’s also food. Water. I’ve got myown room. Four walls. A door with alock,in a building with security, in a city with actual walls. This is the safest I’ve been since my mother was taken from me.
She didn’t get infected. She didn’t turn. She didn’t even perish because of her addiction.
No, she went out the old way, by a fucking disease from the old world. They called it theflu.
It still was and always will be, the worst time of my life. My worst memory. It didn’t matter what came after, the trek through half a continent, settlement to settlement, bartering scraps and coin just to keep moving, keep running, keep going, until I reached Ibitha. The safe place, according to Mom.
A place far away from here,she whispered on her deathbed, her fingers rubbing the curved scar on my wrist from a wound I can no longer remember.
All she wanted for me was a place where I could live. Survive.
And she was right about Ibitha.
It’s at least better than where I came from, the big city I left behind. Rotting, broken, crawling with crime. A place where fish didn’t come steady from the ocean, where food was always scarce, where war between factions and settlements never stopped. Always fighting for scraps, for the best quarters, for clean water, for control.
And then there were the cults. The Walker-worshippers, lunatics who thought infection was salvation. Or the scientists that still claimed power, funded by whatever crumbling excuse of a government we had over there. They were worse. Always prowling for test subjects, always making people disappear. Blood drawn, bodies never seen again. All under the pretense of finding a cure that will never come.
Not that my mother ever let me near much of it.Not safe,she said.Never safe.
If I wasn’t at the excuse for a school they had there, she kept me inside our three room apartment, in a rotting giant of a building that held an entire community within its bones. Floors stacked on floors: trade floors, medic floors, black-market floors. You could find anything in there if you had coin, or blood, or flesh to spare.
But she never let me see much of it. Too protective. Too desperate to keep me untouched by the filth outside our door.It’s not safe,she’d whisper every time I so much as glanced toward the stairwell at the end of our floor.It’s not safe, it’s not safe, it’s not safe. Stay safe, Kieran.
Live, Kieran. Live.
I still knew what she did besides her day job to keep me fed, keep me safe. And the irony isn’t lost on me I’ve ended up staring down the same fate.
Because in a way, that place isn’t so different from here. Trade flesh for safety, virtue for coin. Where there are people willing to pay, prostitution will always exist.
But not yet. Not me. Not now.
Like I said, I’ve got two plans I have to work out before I’m eighteen… as far as they know, at least. The first is simple: Become indispensable. If I make myself irreplaceable, Joyeus won’t shove me into a room to get fucked for coin like the rest of my colleagues.
Maybe some would call it selfish, but I see it as survival. A way to protect the piece of me that still hopes. Still dreams. Because if I had to go there, really go there, sell myself like that every night, for five years? I might keep breathing, but the last part of me that makes memewould wither and die.
It’s not like anyone would mourn me if I couldn’t live without it and decided enough was enough. Maybe that would even be a blessing. One less fight. One less burden. Maybe I’d even see my mom again, if I believed in that kind of thing.
But I do believe in something. Or maybe I justneedto. Some tiny, stubborn part of me still sees a future. Still refuses to let go… even if I have no one, am no one, and have nothing.
I shake it off.No. Not going there.Not again.
I finger the silver chain around my neck as I head back to my room over the faded red carpet, fresh from patching up one of the girls. Some creep tried to choke her while fucking her. Thank the Gods she managed to fight him off, but they called me early in the morning to help her, treat the bruises on her neck and the scratches on her skin. They trust my hands because I know what I’m doing. They learned that fast, after the first bar fight I stumbled into, when one of us walked away with a shard of glass buried in his arm.
I can stitch. Clean wounds. Stop bleeding. Basic stuff, nothing fancy, but enough. My mother taught me everything she could, making me practice on dead meat whenever she scavenged it.
She used to be a nurse in our building, stationed on the medical floor—the only reason we even got an apartment that was safer than most. She’d drag herself home after endless shifts, collapse into bed, but still take the time to show me how to wrap a bandage, how to disinfect with whatever scraps we had.
But like so many, she got caught in drugs after using them to keep herself awake and alert. Started doing other work to keep her addiction alive. At first she only left in the dead of night, when she thought I was asleep. Soon it turned into whole days she was gone.
