Daughters of Men

Chapter Two

Kai opened her eyes, blinked several times, and closed them again. A breath slipped out of her, through parted lips, the air whistling softly between the slight gap in her top front teeth. She rolled onto her side, her head shifting on the pillow until she found the part of the coarse fabric that was somewhat cool against her cheek. Her face no longer hurt where her mother had struck her. It hadn't pained her for hours, and yet she still prodded the skin with gentle fingers, as if there was a great wound there that would take weeks, even months to heal.

She looked out again, the darkness of the bedroom not as daunting this time. Beside her, several feet away, pale veins of light came into focus. Her gaze latched onto the window, and she shifted again until her face was turned towards the sickly yellow glow. She stared at the illumination, anchoring herself on its narrow threads until their gleam remained as she squeezed her eyes shut.

Another breath, and she counted the seconds until the pounding in her head, her chest, her throat, all began to slow. Around her, the other objects in the room took on more defined shape, greater detail. Not two feet away was the edge of her brother's pallet, his head nestled deeply in a pillow she'd fashioned for him, its innards stuffed with all manner of rags and clean refuse. Against the grey of the pillow's fabric, his hair was nothing more than another smudge of shadow in the poorly lit room.

She watched the steady rise and fall of his chest until her attention returned to the window. Letting the thin blanket tumble away, she scrambled onto her knees and crawled across the room, her hands encountering the dust and grime that no amount of sweeping could clear away entirely. When her eyes were level with the sill, she straightened up and aligned her gaze with one of the wider spaces between the warped wooden boards nailed across the window.

The lights of London were bright to her sleep-dimmed vision. Ochreous and somehow thick, the illumination seemed to draw its fuel from no discernable source, and yet every building, every sagging rooftop and broken chimney basked in the pallid radiance. A drizzle of moisture coated the roof that slanted out beneath her own window, and Kai admired it from her cramped pose, the way the liquid caught the light and held it in its thousands of oily pearls.

A few more hours until daylight, she told herself. Before the building awoke with the sounds of footsteps, of stoves being cajoled into life, of curses sent skyward as the fickle plumbing denied another person of water with which to break their fast and wash the veil of sleep from their heads.

She would have work in the morning, running errands down by the docks, carrying messages and parcels and fetching anything and everything assigned to her. It was a boy's work, but she was faster than the rest of them, and she'd never once had the deliveries entrusted to her stolen from her hands. It paid more than anything she'd have earned toiling away in a factory, though that wasn't much of a boast. And it allowed her the freedom of wearing trousers, of running and dodging through the streets, of spending those occasional bonuses for a job quickly done on a hot baked potato, its skin golden and crispy and dripping with grease.

A loud thump, just outside the door to their flat, turned her face from the window. She glanced at Isak, but he did not stir. It was a knack he had, to always drop into a deep and oblivious slumber within seconds of settling down for the night, while her own rest was too often disturbed by dreams, by every groan and creak of the building, by the rapid pounding of her own heart.

Her weight shifted back to the balls of her feet as she scuttled towards her bed. She plucked at her blanket, at the ragged edges of her mattress as she pressed her ear to the wall and listened. Beyond the thin wood and cheap panelling, out in the corridor, the shufflings came and went. And then there was the clomp of a booted foot, the grumbling of a grown man's voice, but the rest of remained nothing more than a hum of noise that shuddered through the building's old bones.