Hart had seen people drink from the gutters, dipping their hands greedily, desperately, into the filthy water. Without Duncan, was that what would become of them?
Penny and Roe trailed after Hart as she made her way down the narrow streets of the Gutter, keeping her eyes peeled for anything that might be of use lying in the mounds of litter on the sides of the road. The trash seemed to creep in further every day, carpeting their streets, pressing up against their homes. It wasn't hard to imagine the rubbish taking over, sliding in through windows and open doors, burying the Gutter and everyone in it.
At the edge of town stood the heap: a smoking pit of garbage. It was already covered with people, crawling over the refuse like flies, picking through it for sustenance. Somewhere in the crowd was Finn and maybe even their mother. Most of the Gutter kids were here trying to earn some extra cash for their families, their fathers and mothers working in the plants, or passed out drunk, or high, somewhere in the dark twists and turns of the Gutter.
Hart settled Roe and Penny on the outskirts of the pit where she could keep an eye on them. Other small children played and romped around them heedless of the filth beneath them. After all, it was the only environment they'd ever known.
Rolling her pants up above the knee, Hart waded in.
This close, the smell was overpowering. It wasn't as bad as the sewage that got dumped one ring further out, a wretched scent that sometimes got carried in on hot summer breezes. But still, the smell of rotting food and debris surrounded her. All the trash from the City, the Alley, and the Gutter got dumped here, but it was only the City trash the Gutter kids were interested in. They spent their days scavenging for anything that might be of value and then sold it right back to the idiots who had thrown it out—or, more likely, sold it on to the Alley. There whatever it was would break down further until it was thrown away again, and then it would end up in a Gutter home.
The great circle of trash.
Throwing one last glance at her sisters' tearstained faces, Hart began picking through the mess. She was good at this. She knew not to waste her time on junk, knew what could be repaired and what was beyond hope. She was even pretty good at fixing things, coaxing life into items that the City-dwellers had deemed dead. She wasn't as good at it as her father, but now … now she would have to be.
Metal was the most valuable. The City threw away an astonishing number of things with copper coils and aluminium plating. Copper, aluminium, tin, silver, and gold—all of it could be sold to the Alley factories and smelters. Selling to the factories meant the highest price possible, instead of selling junk and trinkets onto Alleyway brokers. The middlemen gouged the Gutter kids, jacking the prices up for their clients from the Alley and the City. No one from the inner rings was going to buy direct from a Gutter kid, so they had to take what they could get.
Hart knew some of the foremen at the plants, though, and knew how to haggle for a good price.
However, as she tucked a piece of wire into the sack slung over her back, she knew it wouldn't be enough. Not anymore. Not without Duncan's earnings.
Jerry-rigging old appliances to get a few more uses out of them, stripping wire for the copper inside—it wouldn't make ends meet.
Hart watched a nearby child, no more than seven years old, surface triumphantly with a shining circuit board. She shuddered. Fixing a toaster to work again made her family pennies—the real money was in the cracked screens and broken keyboards. What most people were looking for on the heap were electronics: gadgets that had outworn their welcome, replaced by newer, smaller, shinier models. Inside them was a veritable treasure trove of sellable parts, but those parts had to be extracted first.
It was Duncan who had made them stop. Hart and her siblings had combed the landfill for circuit boards and cell phones just like the rest of the Gutter kids, melting them down in a pungent heap for the metal inside. The melting plastic threw up dark, thick smoke that Hart could practically
feel
as she breathed it in, coating her mouth, her throat, her lungs. They coughed their way through the work and then long after: a deep, hacking cough that everyone in the Gutter recognized.
There was money in it,
real
money, not the chump change she'd get from the coffee maker sticking out under her feet. But Duncan made them stop, telling them that he made enough from the fights that they didn't need to work the heap. At least, not like that.
They all saw what happened to their neighbors. Not just the coughs that reverberated through the flimsy walls of the houses, growing worse until they just … stopped. No, it was worse than that. Babies were born wrong, their bodies scrawny and weak, their eyes dull. Slow children, small children, children with deformities that didn't keep them from joining their parents on the heap, breathing in the same toxic fumes as everyone else.
Duncan said he refused to let his children turn out like that, or their children after them. He wanted grandchildren as bright and lively as his own kids, he'd say, smiling gently at Hart. Hart had no plans to bring a child into this life, but she agreed with her father, relieved when she and her siblings left the burning piles of plastic behind.
But now—Hart watched the child run to his mother with the circuit board and thought how much money they might get from it. Money her family was going to desperately need.
The day crawled by. Hart ignored the growling in her stomach. She hadn't packed a lunch that morning, and she wasn't sure they could afford it anyway. She saw other kids eating from the pit: apple cores, moldy bread and hunks of rotting meat. Watching them eat the literal trash beneath their feet turned her stomach, and she forget her hunger. She wouldn't stoop that low. She hoped she'd never have to.
Hart slogged through the heap, kicking refuse out of her path. Bottles and cans clinked against each other with every step she took, and bits of paper floated into the air. Her eyes caught on a word and she stopped, staring down at the crumpled newsprint beneath her feet.
Fights Keep Us Safe
the headline blared, over a picture of two hardened men facing off in a ring.
"Let the criminals fight each other," Mayor declares. "Better than fighting us."
She picked up the paper with shaking hands. She had heard it all before, but she couldn't help searching the faces of the men pictured, wondering if they had families waiting for them. If they had made it home after the picture was taken. Or if they were already buried in some nameless fighters' lot. Maybe next to the new grave that would bear her father's name. Her eyes tracked down the article, anger bubbling up inside of her. The newspaper had some 'experts' weighing in, declaring that the fights served the greater good, keeping "known criminals" off the streets and under the City's watchful eye. Men who hadn't yet been arrested for murder, rape or theft eventually would be, the 'experts' declared, unless they were allowed to exhaust their violent urges in the ring.
Hart crumpled the paper fiercely in her hand. Her father had never hurt anyone outside of the ring, and never would have. He hated the violence of the fights, but his children had to eat. Every man who got in the ring had someone to feed, and the City wasn't giving them any other way to do it. They could take their experts and statistics and shove them, as far as Hart was concerned. Her father fought to keep his family alive, and look where that had gotten him. Bile rose sharply in her throat, stinging, and she dropped the wadded ball of paper back onto the heap, letting it sink into the filth where it belonged.
When the sun started to dip below the horizon, Hart picked her way back to the edge of the trash. Roe and Penny were right where she had left them, waiting with more patience than little girls should have. Sometimes Hart saw the children in the Alley, through the fence. They ran and laughed raucously, mindless of the cares that might weigh on their parents. She wanted that for her siblings.
She wanted them to have a better life than just picking through trash.
Finn found them as Hart was collecting the girls. He didn't say anything, just fell into step beside them, his own sack bursting to near full over his shoulder. Hart reached over and touched his arm, squeezed his wrist for a moment.
Chapter Two
Vivien was home when they got back, curled over herself in a chair, her head bent. Hart didn't know what to say—didn't know if there was anything to say—so she just upended her bag on the floor and began sorting her findings. After a second, Finn joined her. Roe and Penny twined around their mother like needy cats, curling into her grief.
They would leave the items to be repaired at the house and work on them in the evenings. Everything else would get taken to the fence to sell. Hart put all her metal findings in a smaller bag and collected the rest in a large sack. There was nothing of any particular value, but she had to try. Sometimes Duncan would go with her to the fence to make sure she wasn't hassled, that she got the best deal.
Now Hart would have to fend for herself.
"Can I come?"
She nodded stiffly; Finn shouldered the smaller of the two sacks and followed her out of the house.
They walked silently towards the Center. It was dusk around them, the few lights of the Gutter flickering on.
"Hart?"
"Yeah?"
Finn glanced up at her, looking younger than his twelve years. "What are we going to do?"
She wanted to reassure him, to tell him that everything was going to be fine, but he was too old for fairy tales. "I don't know, Finn. I really don't."
"Do you think Mother can get a job in one of the plants?"
"With her back?"
Vivien had been hurt in a factory accident years ago, before Hart was even born, crushed by the machine she was working and fired on the spot for having caused a disruption.
Not to mention, there
were
no jobs. Nobody wanted to admit that, to accept that there were people for whom work would never be found, people who would just be left to rot in the Gutter, scrounging for what they could to survive. The plants weren't hiring. Hadn't been for years. Everything was outsourced out of the city. Trucks rolled in from places Hart had never heard of and would never see, loaded with goods that would soon end up in the landfills and then in the sack on her back. The city used to make goods for themselves, but they didn't anymore. They just bought stuff cheaper and threw away more, and the number of people living in the Gutter seemed to grow every day.
"Can I get a job?"
Hart sighed, reaching over to squeeze his shoulder. "No, Finn. You're too little yet."
The only jobs for little boys were the ones too dangerous for adults. Squeezing between equipment, climbing high in the rafters, and coming home to your family in a box. She wouldn't let it happen, not to her brother.
They made their way through the cramped streets, ducking low under dangling lines of drying laundry, bright spots that danced gaily against the drab background of the shantytown. The twists and turns in the road would be incomprehensible to a stranger, but the Gutter inhabitants navigated them seamlessly, turning into what looked like dark dead ends, only to squeeze out into another main thoroughfare. Hart and Finn moved easily through the maze of streets, light on their feet, constantly alert to their surroundings. People were known to jump kids on the way to the fence, stealing the goods off their back.
"Look who it is," a voice sneered, and Hart froze where she was halfway through a gap in a run-down fence. Only Finn's hands pushing insistently at her back could force her to step forward, into the street where several girls stood, watching her with unimpressed eyes. They were mostly her age, some a few years younger. Girls she had grown up with, running through the streets of the Gutter, working the heap in the day and sneaking out of their houses at night.
"Ooh, got a date?" Misty said, watching Finn squirm through the fence after her. The rest of the group cackled nastily. "Oh, no. Just your brother."
"Couldn't get a date if she tried," one of the younger girls taunted. She was probably only fifteen, but her face was coated heavily in makeup, eyelashes black, lips red, her top cut low enough to show the way her tits were pushed up to her chin.
Hart straightened, squaring her shoulders as she faced them. "At least I don't get paid for all of my 'dates'."
The girl sneered, crossing her arms under her breasts to emphasize them further.
"Everyone knows the only way you'd get a man to fuck you was if you paid
him
," a third girl said. Hart remembered Lacey from when they were children. Her eyes tracked lower to where Lacey's hands crossed over her swollen stomach.
She was only seventeen and had probably never known the father's name. He was probably just some man who shoved bills into her hand before wrenching up her skirt.
"Looks like staying away from the fence has kept me out of all kinds of trouble," Hart said quietly.
Lacey snarled and lunged towards her, bright red nails flashing in the dim light that filtered down between the buildings. "Just because I actually
like
men," Lacey growled, her pregnant belly pushing against Hart as she got into her face. "Just because we actually have to
work
to support our families," she continued and Hart bit her lip, stung.
"You think you're so much better than us," Lacey said, her fingernails digging sharply into Hart's jaw where she grabbed her, her face close enough that Hart could see the chalky clumps of makeup in her lashes and smeared around her eyes. "But you still spend all your time staring at our tits."
Hart fought to keep her eyes from dropping down at that comment, knowing Lacey's breasts were practically right in her face, shown off in a tight top that stretched uncomfortably over her belly. She sputtered, shocked. "I—I don't."
"Leave my sister alone," Finn growled, shouldering his way into the fray. Lacey glanced down at him and laughed.
"The only man you can get to fight your battles?"