Chapter 86

“A favor?” Luke couldn’t help but laugh.

“Yeah.”

“Why would I do a favor for you after you made me chase you to get back what you stole from me? Just because you stopped running?”

“Well it’s not like I was really planning on taking it! If I had been, you wouldn’t have found me.”

That might have been true, but there was no good way to prove it. Then again, the kid wasn’t breathing hard, so he could have kept running, and given how high his strength and agility had to be in order to pull off a mid-air cartwheel five feet off the ground, maybe there was something to that.

“Okay, let’s say I believe you. Why did you take them in the first place?”

“If I’d walked up to you on the street and just said, ‘Hey mister, wanna help me out,’ you wouldn’t have listened.”

“Maybe not, but I don’t see how this makes me more likely to actually help now.”

“Because I gave you back the food,” the kid said. “I’m taking a chance here. We really need that food, but only because we can’t get to ours. It’s blocked off, and none of us are strong enough to get to it.”

“Oh, I see. You saw me lift the wagon and figured I could help you too.”

“Yes! But, uh, I don’t have any money to offer you.”

Luke eyed the kid up. He was wearing ragged clothes, was barefoot, and was crusted with dirt. His hair was long and matted, uneven from where he’d probably tried to cut it himself with a knife or something. The other kids had looked much the same, and Kazos was too cold to be walking around dressed like that, unless they had no other choices.

Luke groaned. “What exactly do you want me to do?”

“Okay, so we’ve been squatting in the old textile factory on Mills Street ‘cause the Bloody Knuckles pushed us out of our old place a few months ago, but the factory is right on the edge of the territory line with the Grinders, and they hit us with some shit they stole from an alchemist or something. It dropped the whole second floor and killed three of my guys.”

“What the fuck,” Luke muttered, but the kid just kept on talking right over him.

“So that’s bad enough, but we had all our food stored in the basement, and now there’s all this crap blocking the stairs. We’ve got food for everyone, for at least a week! Hell, more since we’re down a few guys, but we can’t get to it. We’ve been trying to excavate it, but some of the stuff is just too heavy to move.”

Luke technically had the time to help. He had all day, after all, and the only thing left to do was get some new clothes. That wasn’t even particularly important to him. Every time he got new clothes, they ended up trashed anyway, so there wasn’t a strong need to keep buying them. At best, he wanted one set that he kept stored away and only put on when he needed to go into a town.

The question was less whether he could help and more if he even wanted to. He didn’t owe these kids anything, but it sounded like life had already knocked them down and kicked them in the ribs a few times, and it didn’t cost him anything to lift a few pieces of heavy debris out of the way. He was more concerned about whether or not the kid was telling the truth, and what kind of trap he’d be walking into if it turned out this was all some sort of scheme.

He figured the orphan street gang thing was probably real. He’d been in town for barely an hour and there was no way those kids had gotten in the state they were in that fast. It wasn’t a matter of dressing a kid in rags and rolling him in the dirt; there were blisters and calluses that came with long-term exposure. That kid’s feet were practically leather at this point.

Luke reached forward and grabbed the kid. “Okay, here’s the deal. If you’re fucking with me, if this is some kind of trap or scam or what the fuck ever bullshittery you might have come up with, I’m going to come after you, personally. So, you tell me the truth now. Do you need help, or are you fucking with me?”

The kid’s eyes got so big they threatened to fall out of his head, and he gulped twice before shaking his head. His finger moved in a circle over his chest and he said, “No trick, man. I promise. I swear by every god in the Pantheon.”

Luke let him go and said, “Fine. I believe you. Take me to this place and I’ll help you dig it out.”

“Y-yeah, no problem.”

They took a few side streets, seemingly at random, before the kid said, “I’m Avlir, by the way.”

Luke grunted, but didn’t reply. He wasn’t going to tell anyone his real name, and his previous fake name was officially retired. Zea would no doubt be able to suggest a new one off the top of her head, but Luke would want to talk to System about common names for the area.

“So how long were you a Guardian?”’ Avlir asked.

“What makes you think I was?”

They paused for the kid to squeeze under a loose board in a fence. Luke glanced around once to make sure no one else was in the alley, then jumped over it. “Well, you can do that,” the kid said once he landed on the other side. “But also I feel like I’m about to shit my pants just looking at you.”

“Gross. Why is this fence even here?” Luke asked.

“Territory marker. We’re about three blocks away from Dust Rat territory, at least what’s left of it.” There was a note of bitterness in the kid’s voice. “Fucking assholes. There isn’t even anything good there. They just wanted it because they’re big enough to take it.”

“I’m not going to have a bunch of street gangs harassing me because I helped you, am I?”

“They’d be dumb as fuck to even try. Don’t tell me you couldn’t crush someone’s skull with your bare hands if you wanted to.”

“Gross,” Luke said again, like he didn’t routinely aim for the skulls of the monsters he fought. But the icky stuff got on the mace then, not on him, so it was different. Though it was sometimes a bitch to get it clean again. Just wiping it off on an animal’s corpse didn’t do a great job, and there wasn’t always a handy stream to soak it in.

Now that he thought about it, nobody had given him any shit about his weapon in Kazos, and he’d seen a lot more people walking around armed. Not even the gate guards had glanced at it twice. People seemed to be a higher level in general, usually at least 15. Even Avlir was level 6 or so, and he was just a kid. Luke didn’t want to think about what exactly Avlir had killed to gain 6 levels.

They crossed another side street and came out into some sort of manufacturing district. The buildings were all a lot wider, many of them were two or three stories, and there seemed to be an abundance of some sort of brick used as a building material instead of the more common wooden homes. Shutters were a lot more common, and also many of the buildings had multiple chimneys. Sometimes they had sloped thatch roofs, but sometimes they were flat instead.

“Labor Row,” Avlir said. “This is where all the bigger workshops are at. There’s another street at the end that leads back to some older ones that have been abandoned.”

“And that’s where you guys are squatting?” Luke asked.

“Well, we were, back when there was space.”

“Right. Okay, let’s get this taken care of.”

The longer they walked, the more of Avlir’s crew Luke spotted. Some were loitering on the way, others started trailing behind. None of them got too close, which was fine by Luke. The idea of being swarmed by a bunch of little kids trying to make off with whatever their sticky little fingers could grab didn’t sit well with him.

Once they were past Labor Row, and out of sight of all the people giving him odd looks, they turned to a smaller street. It had been some sort of gravel once, but had been overtaken by weeds long ago. There was barely a path through it, more of a line of beaten down plants than any actual trail. Two rows of sad, beaten, broken down buildings lined either side of the road.

“Which one is yours?” Luke said, not that he needed to. There was only one that very obviously had been damaged recently. One of the walls leaned in and had broken away near the roof. Luke could see refuse and debris through the crack it made, and some sort of wooden support beam jabbed out of the second story shutter, which had been broken away.

“This one here,” Avlir said, pointing to the one Luke had picked out. The kid led him around to a back door, which only opened about six or seven inches before getting caught on something. He was able to squeeze through, but Luke couldn’t.

“If I put a shoulder into this, is that going to cause any problems?” he asked.

“No, we piled stuff there deliberately to slow down any other gangs trying to swarm us. Just give it a shove.”

There was the sound of something scraping against the floor and the door pushed open another foot or so. Luke left it that way and slipped inside. Immediately, he scanned the factory floor for anyone else hiding there, then looked up through the hole in the ceiling to the second floor. It was no wonder the kids weren’t able to dig through it; some massive machine of some sort, very much a monstrosity of thick and heavy iron, had crashed through the ceiling and was now laying on the ground level as the centerpiece of a demolition scene.

There was a trail of excavated stone and wood leading up to it and circling around it, presumably what the kids had managed to haul out on their own. “I’m guessing no one was able to squeeze through the inside of that,” Luke said.

“No, the guts of it are all still there. You’d have to be a literal rat to squeeze through it all. Not even our youngest could manage it.”

Luke shrugged off his bags and set them in a corner. “You’re responsible for these,” he told Avlir. “If anyone tries to take anything from them, I’m coming after you.”

“Got it, boss.”

“I’m not- whatever. Stay over there so I don’t accidentally clip you.”

Most of the debris was wood of various thicknesses and sizes. Luke started grabbing chunks at random and tossing them across the room to pile up in a relatively empty corner. It would have been back-breaking labor a few months ago, but not now. It only took a few minutes to clear all of the big stuff out of the way so that he had room to drag the machine itself aside.

Luke grabbed hold of it and heaved. It pulled forward an inch or two, then settled back into place. “Damn, fucker’s heavy,” he said, trying again. This time he managed to drag it half a foot before it settled back onto the floor. It took another ten minutes of dragging to haul it completely to the side, not helped by the fact that as the machine moved, the whole building shook and the partially collapsed wall started being more collapsed.

“How much farther do you need this to go?” Luke asked.

Avlir eyed up the open space where the machine used to sit. The floors were completely ruined, many of the boards broken and new holes leading down into the dark dotted the area. “We could throw some stuff down one of these holes until we have a pile to climb down. The actual cellar doors are right about there though, just another foot or two away.”

Luke heaved backwards a few more times, and a minute later, the first door came into view. It had been busted and most of the stairs collapsed. “Well, looks like it’s going to be a jump down no matter how you do it,” he said, examining the remnants with the street kid.

A low groaning sound came up from the hole. The two of them exchanged glances, and said at the same time, “What the hell is that?”