Simoom Rising

Chapter Ten

Pit District, Simoom
Four years ago

Harmony

After Sila passed, it was just me and Travers left. At first, I wasn't good to him—not the sort of mother he needed then. He was lost, but I spent most of my time crying, curled up in a ball on the soiled mattress in our room, or in the bar drowning myself with drink and trying to pick up men—though nobody would touch me. I thought at first that maybe I was just too ugly or everybody was just too polite, too nice. It was only afterwards I realized Pitters guarded against people getting too close.

Travers was eleven then. He tried to take care of me; he picked through trash for food scraps or anything he could sell or barter to pay for our board. I doubt what he got covered our rent, but the landlady never kicked us out. Then Travers started stealing. I didn't know nothing about it at first. I wasn't hardly aware of things going on around me—still in that blanket with my dead Sila—until one day Mancy came and pulled open the door to my room. He ordered Travers in in front of him. Dusty tears dropped down my boy's face.

"What the hell are you doing Madam?!" Mancy hollered in my ear, and me, with a hangover, wincing. "Wake up!" he yelled again. "I caught your boy, red-handed, in my abode, stealing my supplies, stealing my supplies!" As if to say, I suppose, it was okay to steal other people's supplies, but not his.

I remember looking at Mancy through bleary eyes and thinking I had never seen a more gorgeous man—even better looking than my dead husband. Maybe it was because Mancy had been in the Pit for years before I arrived. The dust has a way of smoothing out all your rough edges; it makes you glow with good health, even as it fills up your lungs and cuts off the air. Most people in the Pit kept their hair short or sheared it off completely—less for the dust to cling to. But not Mancy; he left his dark hair shaggy and wild, and it curled this way and that, and his beard, he trimmed to a perfect point—quite a feat of personal grooming considering our water situation. That morning when he stomped into my room, he was like a grey blizzard blowing in and throwing everything out the porthole.

I know what you're thinking, Vestra, sitting in the bar with Mac. How can I be talking about the same paunchy, middle-aged drunk locked up in a cell down the corridor from me? The man who'd confess to anything just to be left alone? How can that be the same Mancy as that tall, thin, gorgeous man I remember being with just a few years ago?

But he is.

"Keep your boy in order!" he said to me, hauling me off that mattress to shake me awake. "Do not think of leaving this room, boy," he hissed at Travers. "It is beyond contempt to abandon one's child to the dust. It is called parental neglect, Madam. And you are going to pay for everything this little thief has stolen from me!"

"I didn't steal nothing from you. I was just picking through your trash!" Travers said. He tried to sound tough, but I knew he was scared.

"Today you were rummaging through my refuse, but yesterday and the day before that? Items have been disappearing from my pantry for weeks now!"

"It wasn't me. It wasn't me, Mom...Mom..."

I had said nothing this whole time. I knew somewhere in the fog of my head I was failing Travers, but I couldn't stop myself, and even at that moment, he wasn't my main focus. I just stared, just stared at this whirlwind of a man. I wanted—well, I don't know what I wanted exactly—him, I suppose. I wanted Mancy.

I must have looked a mess, but I think I tried to smile at him. Whatever it was Mancy saw in my face it stopped him from shaking me. And then he muttered, "Bloody Hell."

That day he bought me and Travers the first good meal we had had in weeks; and he paid our landlady the credits we owed her. Two days after that, he moved us out of that boarding house and into the main bunker. Omari was not happy about it.