A Mischief in the Woodwork - By Harper Alexander Page 0,50

laced on, and kept my sensory graces peeled for signs of Tanen stirring. When it was clear he wasn't going to sneak away before anyone else woke, I rose to fix breakfast. It was ready by the time the others joined the living, and I was free to position myself for my treachery.

When Tanen slipped around back and made his escape from the premises, I took up the painstaking chase.

*

It was a wide, open road, silent as the night, a taut line between my quarry and me – as if we both walked the same tight rope, and me, trying to be stealthy about it behind him. Surely he could feel my vibrations. My only hope was to stand still at a distance and watch, until he had nearly disappeared, before trailing after him.

When he reached the city, I ran.

I came to the gates too late to track his exact whereabouts, but all it took was recovering my breath to its normal capacity before I heard him.

What I could only hope was him.

At first, when I quieted, I was faced only with the packed emptiness. A great breath of powder whispered back at me, from where it coated everything like petrified snow in the heat. Then the whisper was cracked:

A crumb of rubble spilled down a gulley. The hairs on my body pointed toward it.

I moved.

Tanen's grace among the rubble was decidedly decent for an amateur, I decided as I listened and trailed his crumbling scent. He could not match my silence, but he would not wake the dead, either. He would not be fooling any wardogs, but during the day he would avoid the most important hazard: causing a shift with clumsy feet.

I was a little slower than he, ascertaining my silence in his wake, but I was confident I wouldn't lose him. He wasn't graceful enough for that.

We were well into the jungle of city when my stealth was nearly sabotaged; climbing a steep ascension, I propelled my knee up next to my body to give me a nice hoist, and the fold sent a sharp pain into my gut. A sound halfway between a yelp and a gasp fled my lips like a bat from a cave.

I cut it short, still wincing, and the pain written on my face doubled at the silence beyond my niche. I cursed myself, thinking I had just alerted Tanen to my presence.

But I cursed him when I identified the source of my pain; one of the metal pieces lining my protective corset, jutting into my ribs from the position.

Probably his plan all along, I grumbled to myself, always so pessimistic about his intentions. To skewer me.

I breathed a sigh of relief when the slight chafe of Tanen's passage resumed on the other side, and carefully unfolded myself.

Practical indeed, I muttered inwardly about the garment. More like sinister. Grotesque. I am wearing a contraption.

Never mind.

Sweat trickled down my neck as I pulled myself upward and onward. It was sticky beneath my corset, and I did not look forward to peeling the article off at the end of the day.

I huffed a piece of hair out of my face, my hands busy. Over my shoulder, I stole a glance at the sprawling mess of city below. It was quite a landscape from here, a sea of architecture. Pieces of it glistened, playing with my eyes. It seemed to go on forever. There were no edges, at this point; only haphazard boundaries. One of which: a shadowy ravine that snaked through it all, at the base of the slope that rose into this bluff. The rubble dropped off like a waterfall of shadow into that cracked void.

It looked so deliciously cool down there, I thought for a moment at that strained, wistful height. I couldn't see another drink of shade for what seemed like miles.

Then I was climbing again, drinking my sweat instead. Luxuries were only myth or illusion. Grit and sweat were real. They were my true lifeblood.

My nails took on a dirty white as I went, packed with the sullied cake flour of the baking land. There was scarcely any grip on the powder-sleeted surfaces. I found myself being grateful for my spider-silk fingertips, for they seemed to reinforce my traction where it threatened instability.

I paused for a moment at the spectacle of a striped, tube-like length of cloth protruding from the cliffside. Securing myself, I tugged at it. It was positively saturated with dust, but a majority of it rained away