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Chapter 34 - The Price Of A Smile (Part 2)
🕑 Added 2023-01-10 05:26:19 +0000 UTCLan and Bo devoured the bread in seconds, too hungry to savour it. Even though the bread was stale, it tasted like ambrosia. Every mouthful was heaven, every bite a miracle.
It was around midday, so the bus wasn't as cold as the previous night. But even then, their breath fogged up as they sat huddled together.
Neither could remember the last time they were truly warm. Or rather, they didn't want to remember.
"Did you steal from Mary again?" Bo asked suspiciously, only feeling guilty after he had eaten his share of the bread.
Lan shook his head and grinned, "No, I managed to grab it in the drop." He raised his head up high as his ego inflated like a balloon.
"Wow…" Bo smiled, but it was half-hearted at best.
"What's wrong?" Lan asked, "are you still hungry? I can try and find-"
"No, it's not that," Bo lied, he was hungry, but that wasn't why he was down. "I just-"
"Yeah?"
"I just wish I could help you…." He trailed off glumly, looking down at his bony hands. They were so thin that every muscle, bone and sinew could be seen at a glance.
Lan shuffled over, pushing through the blankets and hugging Bo, "You are helping me," He said with a smile.
Bo wouldn't meet Lan's eyes, "You're stealing from Mary and giving me half the food. And I just sit here." His hands trembled.
"But Bo, it's not your fault," Lan hugged him tighter, as though afraid Bo would disappear.
"Okay…" Bo never once looked at Lan. He just trembled with uncontrollable frustration and self-loathing.
Lan took a shaky breath and tried to change the subject. "Is the rabbit you've been drawing Thumper?" He asked softly.
Bo's eyes widened, and he suddenly looked up at Lan, "Thumper? You know the cartoon?"
"Yeah, a girl I met at the drop told me about him." Lan sighed internally, relieved that he had managed to change Bo's self-destructive train of thought.
"Cool! I love Thumper! Mummy and da…." Bo trailed off, and tears welled up in his eyes.
"Bo! What's wrong?" Lan had never seen Bo this emotional. The boy was usually very reserved when it came to things like this.
"I'm never going to watch Thumper again," Bo sniffled. "Mummy always watched it with me and…." He choked on the words like a lump of steel lodged in his throat.
Lan teared up himself and hugged Bo tighter than ever before. He was so fragile Lan was scared the boy would snap in two If he squeezed any harder.
"Do you think my Mummy will ever come and get me?" Bo asked quietly, his voice a meek whisper that shook with the desperate desire to hear an answer he knew wasn't true.
"I-" Lan ground his teeth, feeling the omnipresent shadow of the Bridge looming over him. "I don't know…."
"Yeah," Bo deflated like a burst balloon, losing all his energy to cold, detached apathy.
Lan jumped in, "But even if she doesn't come to find you, we can track her down ourselves!"
Looking up at Lan, Bo's eyes were that of a drowning child seeing a rope tossed into the water. "But I'm too weak,"
"For now," Lan muttered, "But if we get accepted into an academy, and they train us to be big and strong, imagine how easy it would be to find your mum then!"
Bo's eyes flickered, "Yeah, but I can't apply for another year since I'm only nine," Lan paused; he knew that the academy only accepted students at 10 years old. He was already 10, and he probably would only get in if he applied soon. But if he got in and left Bo in this bus on his own, would he survive?
Lan took a deep breath and decided to lie, "I'll wait for you to turn 10, and we'll apply together," He said shakily, knowing he had just blocked his one and only chance of becoming a pathfinder.
"Thanks," Bo sniffled, smiling sheepishly. "We'll be Pathfinders together!"
…
"Yeah…"
***
Days passed, and weeks turned into months. Lan watched his eleventh birthday pass by without any fanfare. He never told Bo the truth.
It was the first birthday he spent without them.
That night, he left the bus and cried alone on the shattered hull of an abandoned ship. The Bridge eclipsed the moon and a vast portion of the stars, so he sat mournfully in its shadow, weeping for what might have been.
In the time since then, Bo's health had improved thanks to Lan's best efforts to get him more, better food. Every day that Lan woke up and Bo looked healthier was like an angel's blessing. He couldn't say when he first started genuinely caring about Bo, but now he viewed him as family.
However, Bo's tenth birthday approached all too soon, a looming spectre that haunted Lan's dreams. Soon, Bo would be leaving him. He just knew it.
***
The night before Bo's birthday, Lan couldn't sleep. He had never been a great sleeper, but the past few weeks had been hell. Soon, he would be alone again.
Alone.
Forever.
He glanced at Bo's peacefully sleeping face and couldn't bring himself to wake the boy up. Beside Bo was a stash of drawings he had done. The earliest ones were of Bo and his parents, but as time passed, Lan appeared more and more frequently in the pictures, taking their place.
Lan glanced at the drawings and smiled. Bo trusted him. Bo needed him. He hadn't let Bo down.
But still, there was an uncomfortable, gnawing thought at the back of Lan's mind.
'What if he forgets me?' It was horrible to think, but as he looked at Bo's sleeping face, Lan felt a slight sense of despair. He almost wished Bo wouldn't get accepted to the academy. Then they could spend-
'No.'
Lan took a shaky breath, 'Bo's future is more important than mine. I'll just…' he scrambled for some sort of consolation, for anything that would make the loneliness feel better.
As he did so, his eyes were drawn to one particular picture. A small rabbit with an eyepatch and buck teeth.
Suddenly overtaken by some primal desire, Lan crept out of their nest and climbed the creaking rope out of the bus. The boneyard was haunting at night, with twisting shadows that shifted and creaked, groaning in ghostly wails.
Creatures scuttled to and fro, sifting through the darkness for food scraps, and if there were none, they ate each other. The eerie groans were occasionally punctuated by a strangled yelp or a ghastly, tortured screech as some… thing breathed its last.
Lan wrapped his ragged cloak around him, warding off the darkness as much as the cold.
He quickly bounded into the night, following a route so familiar that he could do it with his eyes closed. The only deviations he made were a result of distant footsteps or human voices that floated through the night air. Anyone out at this hour wasn't doing honest business.
Neither was Lan, for that matter.
He left the boneyard and slunk into the District, making his way straight for the wall. In the past few months he had been in the District, he hadn't seen anything related to the rabbit, which meant there was only one other place he could look.
'Over the wall….'
Lan flitted between crumbling buildings and ramshackle huts on the brink of collapse. Since it was late, he knew to avoid where Mary worked. She had warned him time and again about visiting the night district after dark. Never, under any circumstances, should he go there.
Heeding her advice, Lan was left with no choice but to walk through one of the dreaded sewer streets. It was the fastest way to the wall and also the most unpleasant. 'I'll just take it as a practice run,'
After a thoroughly rotten journey, blissfully free of any child traffickers, Lan arrived at the wall. It loomed over him, impassable and unscalable. Its smooth, grey surface had no places for footholds and standing over five metres tall, there was no building high enough to jump across.
It was impenetrable. In theory.
Lan wasn't planning to climb it but instead pass through the wall. Or, to be precise, pass under it.
When he walked over to the open sewer, some primal instinct rejected his idea outright. He couldn't do this; it would be insane. Every fibre of his body screamed at him to stop, but he didn't listen.
Lan slowly took off his rags and stuffed them under the floorboards of an abandoned building. Wearing only his faded underwear, he walked over to the open sewer. It was two metres deep and equally as wide. The bottom was filled with gunk so foul it's better left undescribed.
But that didn't stop Lan from climbing into the sewer and staring along the tunnel that ran under the wall.
'So, it's true!' He thought excitedly when he noticed the sewer block was broken.
A long time ago, he had heard a rumour that the sewer block, a metal grate that stopped people doing what he was about to do, had been broken on this particular pipeline. 'Thank you, drug smugglers,' Lan thought for the first time in his life.
He had chosen this method for that exact reason, and after forcing down bile from the smell of the sewer, he began to wade under the wall. It wasn't far to travel, maybe ten metres through the muck, until he reached a platform he could climb up onto. But those ten metres had been the longest of his entire life.
The second he climbed out of the sewer, Lan took off towards the nearest exit. He quickly found metal rungs leading up to the street above and climbed them, eager to escape the rotting stench. Unfortunately, he was met with a solemn, harsh reality when he reached the top. It was locked.
Helplessly, Lan climbed back down the ladder and moved on to the next sewer grate and then the one after that. Each time, he climbed them with hope and each time, he climbed back down into the putrid smell, dejected. Every single grate he came across was locked.
'Please, drug smugglers, all I'm asking for is a way out!' Lan fell back on the people who broke the sewer block, to begin with. He felt like there was no way they wouldn't have arranged an exit.
And he was right.
He opened an unlocked grate with trembling hands, tears brimming in his eyes.
'Thank you, drug smugglers,' He thought for the second time in his life.
Not only had they been kind enough to break the lock on the grate, they had even left a change of clothes hanging in a plastic bag on one of the rungs. They were far too big, with the shirt almost reaching Lan's knees, but it was better than no shirt at all, so he was happy.
'Next time, I should put my clothes in a plastic bag… although hopefully there won't be a next time,'
Lan clambered out onto the silent streets with trepidation. He didn't know exactly what he was looking for, a toy shop? Where else would he find something, Thumper-related?
His original idea had been to steal a tv and some Thumper DVDs, but he quickly realised that wouldn't work. Besides the infeasibility of carrying a tv through the sewers, there was no electricity in the bus to power it.
His next best idea was a Thumper-related toy that Bo could remember him by after he had moved into the academy.
All Lan had to do was find one.
Comments
I have changed the reason Lan didn't get into an Academy. This changes nothing retroactively, just going forward. (The primary reason stays the same, it will just be more nuanced now)
