She went by Di now. Aphy and Aphro were Grounder names, but Di could be short for anything, and it had taken Adon weeks to find her, but only a few times saying her name to figure out that it worked. Aphro-DI-te. He smiled to himself because nicknames taken from the middle felt more personal, not truncated for convenience. He liked being Doni and Di in his head as he wandered the icy ground for a client object, imagining all the ways Mess might change his name, though he never came up with much. Me? Messe? Seng? Senger? Did people change the sound of letters for nicknames? When people called him Adon it never had the same inflection as Adonis—but Heather and the CAPT judges were the only people he ever remembered even calling him Adonis. 

Maybe a handful of Janes… and there he was back to Lu, wondering if his voice had changed with his long hair, if he still had that Grounder accent, if he would even understand people like Medo. Adon imagined meeting Lu, all the threats he’d prepared coming out useless as Lu cocked his head in confusion, unable to understand him at all. Adon practiced different accents as he wandered the ground on his missions, and soon he was called in to mediate between Ground sector disputes, Y dragging him into X’s meetings, her friends calling him with vague questions about Midder slang. He always answered, and he never cared why they were asking. He was pretty sure most of them were actually Y making sure he was still alive.

☆

Still bruised by his childish rejection in their school days, Sophia Silver had not left a note, but paid for the basic Pit fighter recovery package after his first victory, and Adon had woken to the first sponsor chain looped around his wrist, a sapphire S.S. printed in cheap plastic, probably from one of Heranika’s factories. He’d hated it, but continued to wear it after their escape, like a penance, tucked under his shirt sleeve for months while he spiraled blurrily between drunk days and long nights. 

He kept a flask in his pocket, but never drank enough to fully drop his guard, just a few drops to quiet his rage, weather the cold, survive the trip around chemical-spill puddles to find whatever it was he was looking for, whenever he felt like finding it. It hadn’t taken him long to build a reputation, as accidental as it might have been, careful to stay within Y’s rules: better alive than dead. Soon it was Artemis Diamond who came calling. Adon had stuck to his rules, no time promised, payment agreed before but transferred after, and though Arty hated that he didn’t get special privileges as head of one of the Quartet families, Adon’s indifference cultivated trust, and Arty needed people to trust, especially with Gideon the menace still cozy beside the Conductor even from the Charity House. 

Adon found brass knuckles for Y, bringing scrap metals to Pet-Ten’s smithy hidden in a labyrinth of ancient shops on the ground. He brought d’Arjon PPP materials, but stole them back with Y when she cried about them experimenting with gasses and swiftly educated him on all the reasons she hated d’Argon. He brought alcohol to Y for her new boss’ Wells club near the Broken Bridge, manning the docks and negotiating with the island smugglers. He found d’Arjon twice, both times for Y, neither for free. He took odd jobs for uncles’ bookie tents around the track during peak season, introduced Plies the dock worker to Nyx’s kitchen staff when his girlfriend got pregnant and he wanted a stable job that didn’t involve dealing with Vice smugglers. He helped Hector reach Medo when the old man hadn’t checked in for days, and in exchange for Hector’s relief, Heather handed over Mess’ school records. 

Messenger Caldera was an average Mids student in most subjects, struggling to focus but loved by his peers. His teachers tolerated his interruptions because they were funny, and he had joined nearly every extracurricular club at least once, remaining in various sports and theater productions for longer, but always moving on by the end of each term. Adon smiled and took the school photo with him, leaving the rest for Heather to throw out, ignoring the Personal Note section some well-intended teacher had added detailing their absent parents and missing brother. Adon was considered missing, because he was still a Grounder, a real one now, wrapped in sewn-together parkas to block the cruel cold as he squirmed beneath the lofty city, and he could only bring them bad luck. He could only be a memory and a quiet bank account that magically refilled itself.

 When he returned home to the greenhouse, Adon pulled on the ugly orange fur coat he’d left behind in his rush to find Medo because he thought the old man was actually in trouble, and it felt like armor. He was a twenty-three year old unaffiliated Grounder who took odd jobs directly from the head of the Diamond family, brought stray dogs to Bumo, and followed crazy old Medo through the ruins of Old Caldera, half drunk and shivering because the only other thing there was left to do was die, and he’d been the one to promise not to do that. 

Lu had pushed him and Adon had fallen, was still falling. It was nearly comical how long he’d been falling, now bored of fighting, of breathing, of flexing exposed fingers for a hint of relief from the burning cold of the endless shade as the city swayed above him. When his thoughts drifted to forgiveness, just to be free of the burden of his anger for a moment, it raged brighter, mocking him. He’d tried to exchange his life, to break a promise out of laziness, and his self-hatred was enough to fuel him beyond shame or guilt and he finally removed the plastic SS sponsorship bracelet and added it to the box of trophies, laughing cruelly at himself and the box of lifelines and leftover lives Y still said he hadn’t taken. She was adamant in her innocence, because her world existed equally inside and outside herself, but Adon’s had shrunk too small to be anything but empty. He was a pocket, and he kept the idea of Mess and Aphy living safe and happy lives tucked away with the same reverence Medo kept the last of his change, comforted by the useless jingle. 

Numb beyond his bitterness and spite, Adon anonymously filled the abandoned stipend account, transferring Asylum credits to cover the house and Aphy’s college fees, and when her private Asylum fines and debts were paid off, he relaxed. Gideon had no reason or means to chase him, the Flock had disbanded ages ago, and there was no record of any debt traceable to his Aphrodite or Messenger Caldera. Aphy used the money, he knew because it never seemed to accumulate in the account, always there were a few credits left, enough to buy a dinner if he was starving. She didn’t spend it lavishly, just enough to stay healthy and fit in the Mids’ changing trends, her luxury purses and perfumes coming from boyfriends and birthday gifts. 

Adon left them presents too, but never hovered to see if they got them, and Aphy never called to say thank you. There were quarantines and contamination warnings for them to fight, Adon didn’t want to make himself another stressor. They were safe, and healthy, and smiling, and that was all that mattered. 

☆

It had taken Adon all four and a half years of fighting in the Pits to build the kind of reputation Y had touted by the end of her first week, and most of his opponents’ fears came from his association with her rather than his own track record. Ysmena was a psycho and a legend. But since they’d escaped, since she’d found an elusive purpose in life following some mafia prince’s goal to reform the Wells, she’d stabilized. She gave herself missions using the skills they’d gained in the Pits and X gave her reasons to use them, without any of the regret or remorse Adon harbored, joining a cause and meeting new and old friends. All Adon had was the cold, and he descended into it willingly. 

By the end of his first year out of the Pits, his reputation as the Finder was solid enough that the Grounders mostly avoided his fluorescent coat. By the second year, even Arty was wary of demanding too much, rumors of the Pits circling him as people shuffled further away from him, except for Y. 

Y thought Adon had maintained his miraculous warmth, because he was quiet and smart and still smiled. But she began to worry as he disappeared on gradually longer searches, wondering if she’d been wrong, if he was too frozen and she’d fallen for his facade like everyone else. She hated being the same as everyone else. Not to Adon. She refused. They were to each other what their siblings who’d betrayed them should have been, and she reminded herself to trust him. If not his will to live, then at least his spite not to die. They’d survived worse—no matter what the Ground could throw at them, the Pits would always be worse, so she let herself get caught up in her own life, obsessed with X’s goals of rehabilitating the Wells.

Adon was gone for days or weeks on a hunt, tracking through old maps and zipping into hazmat gear to follow Medo’s vague directions or one of Bumo’s oldest dogs. He roamed moldy archives and let the world fall away as he shined flashlights and headlamps through windows, snapping glow sticks and sticking them to slimy walls like a gingerbread trail, even though he never followed them out. He found an antique clock for an Upper collector, retrieved a Clearwater elder’s childhood doll carried away by folktale floods, brought up stacks of illegal books, and continued to supply Pen-Ten with boxes of metals they could sort themselves, ignoring the same lecture about alloys every time they complained.

Adon had just returned from a successful hunt for Arty, who’d wanted a specific old guitar as a nostalgic gift for the Conductor’s birthday gala. He’d just closed the door behind him, boots still on, when he got the call. It popped up on his helmet screen as a simple bouncing red cross and the word Emergency where the comms registered caller IDs. Adon ripped off his glove and swiped to answer. 

“Hello?” His voice shook, expecting Mess, or Aphy.

“Hello. This is an automated service provider calling from E.M.S. Med-Pod with an emergency alert. An anonymous emergency contact from your list has been checked-in. Please stay tuned for pod location. If this is an accident or mistake, we apologize for the inconvenience, you can register the error by pressing report comms error at the bottom of your screen. For personalized nav-directions, sync your device now. For unsynced directions, press download. The keycode will be sent via this comm’s thread when a registered device is within range. Please proceed to Med-Pod: A13-Navy-Sector4-Layer8-POD: 3768B-5.

Adon dropped the guitar on his bed and hung-up. There were only four contacts in his phone, all of them registered as emergency options, but only one of them would be in the Arcade. He rushed out the door in a flurry of excited dogs, most of them turning back when he reached his bike. He jumped onto his jerry-rigged rail access line, landing roughly on the illegal sub-rails and riding toward the Arcade without a thought for Security. He climbed up through the sleet of the open rails, into the tunnels, jumped tracks, wove through transport platform crowds, ditched his bike because no one in their right mind would bother stealing it after what he’d done to Phaios after his joke, and pressed into a full Midgate transport cart without a ticket. 

He smelled like wet fur and smoke, but Grounders hovering between the Mids and a single eviction notice to the Wells didn’t care, all of them with the same absent eyes, and the Midders from higher layers heading down to the Arcade simply looked at him like a tourist attraction, a story to tell  their friends.

☆