REAPERS - Book Two: The Hunger and the Sickness

29

The city grew more uneasy by the hour as Skinner made his way back toward the Gutters on foot. An intense calm strangled the streets, that strange stillness before the clangs of thunder sounded. The people were restless. Too much hunger, too much sickness. Peaceful demonstrations were things of the past, found to have no effect on deaf ears above in either the towers or the heavens. The impoverished were made to believe their lives had no meaning and so they behaved accordingly. Bands of wrongdoers full of piss and spit prowled in search of play. Food and poverty and inequality and boredom threatened to combust into bloody havoc. Burn a shop or kill a cop in the name of a cause or none. Rioting felt on the cusp.

"Nice trotboxes, blood." Skinner felt the speaker's presence just before he heard the words. "Nice trotboxes, I spake." Louder now, thirsty for confrontation.

Skinner took the idiot talker in with his eyes. It was the bearded and muscled leader of a pack of fistboys who'd just emerged from a coughing alley to his side. The thickly whiskered man held out a muscled arm and pointed at Skinner's feet. "Could use me a pair like that."

The boots had been splashed with mud and worse during Skinner's jaunts across the city but this beardfaced mugger knew his footwear well and judged the pair as good and was right. Skinner's soul seethed at the notion of letting these cockgoblins take his trusties. He'd just broken the damn foothides in. He turned to flee and found more of the ogrish cunts blocking his way. They circled like jackals. But were lower in fact than any such animal. These were the sort of men the Nation—always in want of able fighters—still did not trust with a sword, even in the lands of others. Too despicable to serve as the most expendable fodder and too unsavory to represent the country's ideals in the eyes of foreigners. Filthy with sickness of the body or character or both. Men with records, crooks and scoundrels best kept from the ranks. Not unlike Skinner himself. It seemed a city of mirrors through which the repeater walked, distorted reflections of him in their twisted panes at every turn. Like those bottles in the Last Leg, everywhere.

"Can tell a man by the leathers he wears," said the bearded frontman. "Might be rags on his back... but if he's got fancy mudpipes, he's got coin."

"Unless he spent it all on the boots," Skinner said. He calculated his odds. Tried to think like a Reaper. These degenerates likely carried out this performance of theft day in and day out, had made a routine of it, picking off an unending string of easy marks of which Skinner was but one small and insignificant bead. The repeater cursed himself. He should've seen the danger coming. There were always signs if one looked for them. It was no wonder he bore that scar on his palm. He deserved that permanent mark of shame. No true Reaper would have let himself fall into this dire predicament. Skinner's mind had been elsewhere in his long trek through these wretched ways. On those vanished kids and not his surroundings. The missing had become like friends to the repeater as he walked in their paths and scrutinized their lives. Though he never had known them in life, the lost ones felt kindred. Loneliness, they shared. All the snatched were in many ways too reflections of his younger self or those he had known. As Skinner walked he'd caught himself whispering promises of deliverance to the children's ghosts in the odd chance they listened. Damn, he'd gotten soft. He needed to harden up fast. Here might be his chance, if this encounter went to fists or worse. But first, the repeater would try to fight his way out with his tongue. "I can tell you where you boys can get your own pair right low. Know the way to the Night Market for the next three nights. Happy to share the cant. Fence had a crateful of beauties to pick from. Even manticore hide, if that's your dance."

The offer fell on deaf ears. The gangboys moved closer, stinking of menace. Skinner turned in slow circles and watched for which man would come at him first. He raised his fists, knowing the knife was sheathed there in one of those prized boots if he needed it. But for now he would not introduce such lethal rules for fear of dying by them. He sketched a mental plan. He would take down the smallest of the bastards and try to create an opening and run like hell. He found his target—not quite the smallest, after all, for that diminutive man looked to be a mean scrapper who moved like a rangy worm. Skinner's chosen prey was instead a young wick that looked to be new blood, uncertain of this hard game. Said so with body and eyes.