Scarred

Chapter 1-2

Delia doesn’t come back down—I don’t blame her. She knows the routine.

When we have regulators in the main room, I don’t want her near them, and she’s more than happy to stay in the kitchen. Thing is, these men sniff her out like dogs. They howl for want of a soft body beneath them, someone they can force their way into and now Maeve’s of an age where they’re starting to notice her, too.

I’d rather the both of them stay out of sight when men like this ride in, scaring off our usual customers and looking for trouble. Can’t they stick to the Outlands and leave those of us left in the cities to die in peace?

When I tell her to run, Delia listens. She races up the stairs that curve above the kitchen into the attic space, bolts the door, and waits for me to come up behind her. She knows what it is I do, what I go through to protect her.

The first time she heard my cries and crept downstairs only to find me lying bloodied and beaten on the floor, discarded like a broken toy tossed aside by a careless child. She held me in her arms and wept, whispered that I didn’t have to do it, I didn’t have to let them do it to me, I could’ve hidden with her and let them just go about their way. Then she stitched up what she could, put salve on the rest, helped me up the stairs and into my narrow bunk and told me it didn’t have to be this way. “We’ll find someone to help us,” she promised.

I didn’t have the strength or the energy to ask her who she had in mind. There are no superheroes, no one to police this lawless world—all that we have left is each other. I do this for her. She’s my little sister, and the only family I have.

When I could find the words, I told her what our da said, right after the first attacks leveled most of the city. I was what, eight? And he took me aside to tell me he had to go. There’s a war going on, son, he said then, as if I was too young to notice the men who disappeared from our community, shipped off in camouflage trucks. I can’t shoot and I don’t have it in me to kill, you know I’m against fighting of any sort. But I’ve got family to think of. Sometimes what you have to do is the only thing you CAN do, and s**t on what you want. You’ll get by, remember that. As long as you got someone else to think of, you’ll manage to get by.

I have Delia to think of, and she has Maeve. We’ll manage to get by.