Adon pulled the ghost gun up and shot at the grounder kicking his dogs until the crazed man fell and the gun jammed. The dogs surged forward at their fallen enemy and Adon sprinted over to them, pushing dogs away from the grounder with his feet, “hey, hey, stop, you don’t know where that’s been,” tweaker dogs were the last thing he needed. 

“Stop it, gross,” he shooed away another round of curiously sniffing dogs, one of them snapped at him, but the others jumped at it, and before he knew it, Adon was desperately pulling dogs apart by their napes before jaws could lock on necks. He’d warned Medo about leaving the collars off, but the dogs found ways out of them anyway. The dogs and their packs existed outside any training or discipline, and soon Adon was bodied out of the dog fight, left breathlessly watching the show of dominance that had shifted from protecting him to claiming territory between the feral packs. He tried to rip away the juveniles eager to jump in and prove themselves, sweeping at investigating pups jumping out from beneath protective planters, but the dogs were fighting, and Adon could only drop his hands and wait to clean up the carnage.

The last two tweakers had enough sense left to stumble out the way they’d come, following D’Arjon’s guys through the storage room door, leaving Adon with four cold bodies and two unconscious ones Y was attempting to lasso together. She wound the rope back up and tossed, missing a second time. 

Adon closed his eyes, inhaled, then picked up a discarded bat and banged it against an exposed pole as he exhaled. A dog barked at him and he barked back until all the fights pittered out into limping huffs and grudging sniffs. He waddled over to Y, kicking through piles of overturned dirt and righting several fallen trees. 

Y finally landed a rope around her prisoner and skipped over excitedly, pulling it tight and tying their hands with a pack of zipties and wires Adon used to keep tree branches in place. She eyed the corpses, biting her lip, “don’t you have a compost?”

Adon’s mouth fell open in disgust, pointing at his vegetables, “gross, I eat this.”

Y shrugged, fidgeting with the rope in her hands, “don’t plants need like, minerals and shit? Trees eat people, don’t they?”

Adon blinked at her, “never tell anyone you shared a cell with me.”

“Sorry oh mighty teacher,” she stood, kicking at an unmoving foot, “just bury them. Plants need people,” she smiled at him, mocking a Mids PSA that had somehow made its way to Grounder ad spaces when they were kids. Every Grounder knew it, but not a single one of them knew what it was supposed to be announcing or encouraging.

Adon rolled his eyes, turning her away from his rows of broken plants and upturned tables, “they need to not have Sheet Music anywhere near where it can be ingested by them and then me.”

Y nodded, slowly understanding that he was worried about more addictions than he could manage. She shrugged with that unhinged smile, “I’ll take them with me then.” 

She stepped sideways to get a better look at the lines of his face in the dim light, but tripped over a grunting body, “fuck, shit!” She fell slowly, flailing for Adon’s hand, but he snatched it away at the sight of the knife in hers. 

Y landed hard on the Grounder, her new knife piercing his arm, “shit, sorry, sorry.” She jumped up, pulling her knife with her, but the man remained unmoved, staring at the ceiling with a dazed smile. “Sorry?” She toed him, unsure if he was dusted or dead, holding up her knife with a smile, “I guess it works!”

Adon snorted dryly, “it’s a knife.”

“It’s a Pen-Ten knife.” She sighed at his ignorance, “you’re so lucky they like you.”

“No, you’re lucky they like me. They like most people.”

“Not me. Hey,” she shook the Grounder, “I won’t bury you if you’re not dead. Sorry about the arm….” She waited for a response, but none came.

“If you stopped trying to kill everyone, more people would probably like you.”

Y smiled, her adrenaline quickly draining. She laughed at her shaking legs and sat beside Adon, letting the dogs lick her clean without worrying too much about what might be so tasty to them. “I didn’t try to kill you,” she chuckled.

Adon nodded, laying flat and watching his chest rise and fall, expecting it to slow as he caught his breath, the dogs in the corner dispersing, three of them limping, but all of them alive. Adon wheezed out a laugh, annoyed he couldn’t catch his breath, “and you’re lucky I like you.”

“No, you’re lucky I like you.”

Adon rolled his eyes at Y’s sharp smile as she pulled him up. They dragged each other to the locker room showers, hovering near the warm furnace as they peeled off sweaty and bloody layers, half-heartedly comparing fresh wounds until Y found the alarming hole in his side where the knife had caught him. Her jokes fell away in unnerving seriousness, swatting Adon’s inspecting hands away from his side as he twisted away from her. She instructed him to keep trying to breathe slowly while she called Medo on Adon’s comms because he wouldn’t answer hers, pacing nervously and biting what was left of her nails until Adon smacked her hand away from her mouth. 

Medo answered excitedly, then gruffly when he realized it was Y and not Adon. She told him to come take care of the dogs and he showed up in minutes, proving once again to Y that the crazy old grounder knew everything that was going on and did, in fact hide nearby to scavenge the corpses, never offering warning or assistance, even to Adonis Caldera, his once-prized pupil. She really hated him, but Medo cleared out the dogs and ran them over to whatever other shelters he’d marked while Y cleaned his wounds with the last of her energy, watching him squirm half-consciously away from her.

She dunked Adon into a cold bath, dried him off, then tucked him into his bed beneath piles of blankets. She sat to keep watch beside him, but was asleep in seconds. 

Y woke to Adon’s comms buzzing and squaking, jumping up to answer Aganus about a docks shipment Adon had been very clear about, but ignoring a summons from Arty, who seemed to think Adon belonged to the Quartet as his personal assistant. He paid well enough, so she understood why Doni took the jobs, but she wasn’t going to do Artemis any favors. She called Thenus and Pleis on her own comms, who happily carted out six bodies once she signed off their training forms and gave them the rest of the day off. She asked no further questions and they provided no further answers. 

She cleaned as best she could, running a box of bandages and disinfectant to Medo for the dogs, then punching him in the gut for not warning Adon, who had saved him a dozen times just from the cold. She returned to Adon with a fresh vial of clean ink Junior had made himself, adding another tally to his arm while he was knocked out form the drugs Medo had guiltily handed over, but only after she’d hit him. 

Twenty-nine lines, each time Adon had almost broken his promise. She pushed his hair away from his face then went to find the clippers. She sniffed the hat by his bed and frowned at the mildew smell. He was going to end up with some fungal infection and she’d have to drag him above the midgate to get it treated in a Med-pod and then he’d be watching his back for weeks thinking the Pits were going to reach out and drag him back under. She smiled and tucked him in, patting his cheek with an annoyed huff, he was her traumatized baby boy and she could shave his head while he was unconscious if she wanted to.

☆

Bored while Adon slept, Y rifled through the small loft apartment overlooking the messy greenhouse, laughing at Adon’s trophy grave-brick box of pits necklaces and rings––she’d sold hers immediately, but many of hers were won with a different kind of sacrifice and Adon had always been more sentimental and sorry than she would ever be. She smiled at several of the chains, remembering the victories they’d fought for. She was proud of him, for surviving, for keeping something in him the rest of them had given up: empathy, hope, or whatever made up his chewy center. She closed the hinged lid and slid the box back onto the crowded night stand piled with plant guides and textbooks he’d hauled out of an old papermill swamp. She frowned at him, sweaty and kicking off blankets despite the cold blowing through every crack in the tall window frames. He didn’t belong there. He wore the grit like the blankets, a thing that could be removed, while the rest of them bathed in it and let it soak into their skin, wafting in the sillage of Grounder scents.

Adon had been tired from the day they’d met, always arguing with himself before hitting back. But lately… lately he didn’t hit back as hard, or fast, or sometimes at all. She was worried he would give up soon, that she’d call and there would be no answer, that she would show up and not hear Adon ranting about what the tweakers thought would happen if he was growing the raw materials for Sheet Music––if they thought they’d just try eating the sticks and leaves until they died from withdrawal, without any understanding of the process that created such a versatile medication the Conductor sold to Upper Med-pods. His stool at the diner would be empty. She would let herself into the warehouse and find only silence, no dogs, no body, just overgrown plants picked clean, abandoned and stretched out searching for him beside her, leaving her to wonder if he’d jumped or gotten lost, if it was an accident or if he’d hidden away like a sick cat. 

Adon stirred in the bed, stretching his forearm above his face and staring at the new line in the row of tallies. He smiled lazily at Y, dropping his arm with a croak, “thanks for doing it while I was out.” There were few small mercies in their world, and Adon was someone who survived off them like delicacies. 

Because of this, Y was always grateful around him, his mere presence reminded her to savor the smallest bites of cake. “Are you okay?” She perched on the bed, and they both knew what she meant.

Adon chuffed, “fine.” Watching the doubt crease her face, he smiled more genuinely, pushing himself up, “I’m not going anywhere. I still have to get Messenger through school… if he wants.”

“That’s right,” Y nodded encouragingly, remembering the siblings tethering him to survival where hers were the tires bouncing her off the docks, unmooring her ropes just to be assholes. She climbed beneath the covers beside him as a gust of cold sleet pittered against the cinder block walls. 

“Hey, who’s your boss?” Adon snickered knowingly at the ceiling. 

Y shrugged unashamedly, immune to teasing but stuffing a pillow in his face anyway, “I found my person. Don’t be mean.”

Adon nodded, his smile fading, “I hope I never see mine again.” He ran a hand over the ink tallies on his inner arm, then licked a finger and rubbed it over the newest line as if it might be pen or eyeliner, smudging away, but it remained.

Y shouldered him with an offended scoff, “I did it myself, and you definitely almost died this time. You turned so white, I thought you were a ghost. You probably died four times, but we’ll call it one or you’ll run out of space.”

Adon laughed, “just checking.” He rolled onto his side to face her, wincing at the wrinkling bandages over his fresh wound. Adon and Y folded around each other conspiratorially, just like they had when they were locked in the cages of the pits, shivering for warmth against their own broken bodies and the weight of trophy chains. “Who’s your person?” Adon let his eyes flutter closed, searching for any distraction from the pulsing burn in his side, “tell me about them?”

Y smiled, pulling out an ancient brick phone and swiping through blurry photos on the cracked screen, telling a whole story about the Conductor’s rebellious son, the Wells’ beloved party boy who was gossiped about synonymously with fan-fic tales of brooding mafia princes and Byronic Sheet Music addicts, but who was really ten years sober and still struggling, beat up by his friends on the daily (because anyone regularly in contact with Y caught both intentional fists and stray elbows), and trying to run a legit club in the Wells, away from the Arcade, where people could take a break and dance and sing and remember why life was worth struggling through for just a minute. 

She spoke proudly of his plan to take on the Quartet, of the rivalry with d’Arjon, who everyone in the Wells knew because he’d filled the hole Gideon had left, then grown wildly, unchecked and backed by Security because he was some big-name Upper’s kid. She only ever called him X while caressing Adon’s hair out of his face until he fell back into fitful sleep, since they were out of the reliable pain meds. She continued rambling about hopeful dreams of parks and safe libraries, no more corridor collapses or elementaries used as collateral. She and X had plans for Wells kids to dream about any future, not just the self-defeating and contradictory ones of sacrifice or escape, debating to climb or dig, calculating how long to hold on, knowing full well how insatiable the warring Ground of the city on stilts really was. 

☆