and under the cover of darkness he left the shelter of his basement. From the local chemical mills, he would gather fungi that spored in the rubble and rust of demolition. Over where the highways led out to the district outskirts, he knew of a spot where string vines grew in patches, between the cracked pavement slits.
They were palatable enough if boiled with salt.
Travelling light, Jonah tucked the scavenged vegetables into a plastek bag and stole his way through the darkest lanes and drainage pipes. At all times, he watched his back carefully, looking for a glimpse of the stick‐men. Jonah remembered a time when it had only been a brisk stroll from his hab to the outer townships. Now the creeping, hiding and constant panic took him hours.
Back home in his basement, his family waited for him – his daughter, Meisha, and his wife in the corner, looking mousy and long suffering.
They ate in silence, concentrating on the task of spooning, chewing and savouring. It made the food last longer that way. Quietly they ate, hidden from the outside world.
It was not until they finished that Jonah heard a cracking on the floorboards above. A low groaning of the wood, soft at first but growing persistent as it crept close. It sounded, quite dreadfully, as if someone was treading across the abandoned rail station above them.
Had he been followed? He had never been careless when foraging for food or water in the city.
They held their breaths. A shadow glided across the boarded up windows, rippling through the tiny slits between the planks.
The fear in him was so great. Jonah knew very well what those stick‐men did to people.
Pushing the sinking fear from his mind, Jonah closed his eyes and began to count. Slowly, with his breath still and taut in his chest.
The footsteps faded.
Meisha hissed a low wheezing breath. It was too soon.
Suddenly and without reason, the lone candle flickered out.
The door buckled with a sudden crack. Jonah screamed in shock without meaning to.
The door warped under the pressure before popping uselessly off its hinges. Meisha began screaming because he was screaming. Soon his wife followed suit and they were all shrieking in terror as the stick‐men skittered into their shelter.
Their limbs shot through the door first, long and fluted like finely carved lengths of ebony. This was followed by the uncurling spindle of their torsos as they swooped beneath the door frame. They moved so fast that they seemed to flicker.
Jonah fumbled for the shotgun beneath the blanket trunk. He had once been an enforcement officer, when Imperial law had still been relevant on Belasia, and that weapon 4
was the last remaining vestige of his pride. It had pained him when his wife had insisted he keep it locked away from the children. Now it was too late. Jonah never got to the shotgun.
They came to him with such speed, kicking him in the jaw with a finely pointed boot and sprawling him onto the floor. In a daze, Jonah could not see how many there were, he only saw the whirl of tall thin bodies. In the dark, their armour matched the hue of a midnight sky and their faces were enclosed in tusk‐shaped helmets.
‘Pa!’ shrieked Meisha. ‘The ghosts are here! The ghosts are here!’
A stick‐man aimed his rifle at her, the razorblades that edged the weapon flashing with his movement. It was said by some that their guns spat poison. Jonah leapt to his feet, his fear suddenly forgotten, and lunged for his daughter. But the stick‐men were too quick. An armoured fist punched him on the chin and blackened his vision entirely. The last thing he remembered was the shrieking.
JONAH AWAKENED SLOWLY to pounding pain in the back of his head. He was groggy and it took him a moment to realise he was not in his own home any more. He panicked with a start and began to fight against the paralysis of sleep. With a thrust of conscious effort he forced his eyes to open.
He lay in an old armoury of some kind, likely the PDF staging station in St Orlus Precinct. The tin shed was unlit except for the bay of small windows that let in hazy shafts of sunlight. A thick patina of blackened soot covered the inside of the corrugated tin shed while old tools still hung from the roof racks in cocoons of dust and spider webs.
The place had been stripped of its equipment during the civil war, likely