[WAR II] {if i were a bird}

[Elysia]

{if i were a bird}

This is what I remember the most from my childhood dreams of being a hero: if I were a bird, I would never come back down.

This is what I remember the most from my childhood dreams of being a hero.

This is what I remember the most from my childhood dreams.

This is what I remember the most.

This is what I remember.

This is.

This.


“You need to be ugly,” Momma says, the half-stick of charcoal in her hand as she draws it across my face, some of it crumbling away in her hands and leaving great big black flecks all across her fingertips. I can’t help but stare at them, little freckles on her thumbs that I know are mirrored across my cheeks. “Scarlet, look at me. The best thing for a girl your age is to be ugly.”

I love Momma, so I look at her and wait patiently for her to tell me stories of the old days, of beautiful people in big fancy dresses like in the books and people who painted their faces with things other than charcoal and spent the days walking around but faster, faster, and gracefully, when it was called dancing. Momma’s told me those stories before, told me in a dreamy voice about the things that happened long before I was born and grew up and turned seven today, which was old enough for Momma to take out her stick of charcoal. Birds that sang. Stars that shone. Knights that defended. These are all fantasies.

My friends call me Scar, I start to mumble a little under my breath, but I stop short when I remember that Momma is my only real friend after Kip and his family got killed by smugglers, and Momma will call me whatever she wants.

And I don’t protest, whether my name is Scar or Scarlet or anything else altogether. The name isn’t the important part, is it? It’s the ritual. The charcoal. So I don’t protest. I’ve watched dozens—hundreds—of times before when Momma took the charcoal and smeared it across her face, covering myself in little grey freckles, smudging the rosy pink out of her cheeks, harshening the contours of her face so that the lines stand out more, making myself ugly.

Except Momma stopped doing that last year when one of the scavengers came to our house in the middle of their night and took most of the nice things we had after breaking the door and Momma’s nose and my heart and left us alone and scared. I don’t remember much about the day; everything was dark and it was blurry, but I remember that the day before, I had a dog named Rex and a sinking feeling that he was going to die soon, and the next day, I didn’t have either. I had those things. And Momma had a crooked nose and a jagged cut across her left cheek from a beer bottle they’d used as a club that would eventually make a hideous scar, so she didn’t have to resort to smearing charcoal to make myself ugly again after that, because she said she was ugly enough already.

I still thought she was beautiful, even when her face was red and puffy from the swelling and the tears. That was months ago.

“All done, Scar,” Momma says now, and holds up their shard of broken mirror to show me what I look like now. There is charcoal all across my face, and my long, black hair has been hacked short, the tips just reaching the collar of the over-large pants and a shirt that almost swallows me. I feel small.

I feel small because I am small. I am small and dark and almost indistinguishable from the rubble of the world around us, just like everyone else, and I am Scarlet Cridhe and I am seven years old today.

And now I am ugly, and that is good.

The boiler is talking to me, and it has been since last night, the day I turned seven. It’s still whispering, there, in the corner of my hearing. It’s like when there’s something in the corner of your eye that you can’t quite see, no matter how quickly you turn your head.

I can’t quite figure out what it’s saying, but the rusted heap of metal that only works, on average, two days a week is trying to tell my something. Even now, when it sits quiet and inert and innocent in the corner of the downstairs room along with the rest of their somewhat-useless appliances, I can hear it trying to piece a sentence together.

I try talking back to the boiler. There isn’t much to do anyhow, not when Momma leaves me alone in the house to find food, and conversation has been rare since Kip died.

So I decide trying to ask the boiler how it’s doing.

The boiler, quite characteristically, does not respond.

I try several angles, like being brash, and being loud, and being cheerful, and then I decide to sit and wait, in case the boiler is shy.

The boiler still does not respond, and by then Momma returns with week-old bread and two shriveled apples and a handful of peanuts, so we sit down and enjoy our feast.

“What did you do today?” Momma asks. She usually takes me scavenging—I need to learn these kinds of things quickly, Momma says—, but I gets one day a week to stay at home and play.

What did I do today? I shrug. Momma probably wouldn’t believe me anyway. Boilers can’t talk, she told me last night, and there’s no monster in my closet coming to hurt me.

The boiler treacherously sits in the corner and says nothing, the sneaky little bastard, and it continues to say nothing when I stare at it even as I climb the rickety staircase until it’s out of sight, and then I tuck myself in next to Momma and try to sleep. Sleeping is hard, though, because there’s so much to think about, and the boiler is whispering to me from downstairs again. Whispering, whispering, whispering, but I can’t untangle those whispers into any semblance of meaning.

And something very important has occurred to me now that I have time to think about it.

April is a nice time to bite the dust, I decide, but I’d much rather that Momma died another day.

Yet when I wake up in the middle of the night with a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach and a supernatural chill down the back of my neck and an empty thudding of a heartbeat, and I know, inexplicably, that Momma is not going to be here tomorrow.

Or, more accurately, I know that Momma is going to die tonight.

So when there’s a banging on the wooden door of our house a couple hours later and Momma scoops me up and runs both of us upstairs without missing a beat, I find myself following with mechanical acceptance. Momma has always stressed that she won’t be there for me forever, and while she says I’m too young to understand the world, I’m old enough to understand that someday, Momma will be taken from me, just like everyone else. And someday, I realize as I numbly watch my mother search the bedroom that used to be Father’s for a suitable weapon and come up empty, is today.

Momma is going to die.

I start understanding then. Momma is going to die.

The skeletons in the closet Momma has warned me about are coming, now, and there is no running from the monsters above her bed even if the ones under my bed don’t exist. Momma and I are trying to hide from an enemy that never fails to find its prey, and the other option is trying to fight an enemy that never loses. I open my mouth to protest, incomprehensible whimpers trying to become words like boiler-speak, through the fear flooding through the chill that’s been keeping me calm, but Momma grabs me by the shoulders and looks me in the eyes, her hands clenched so tight on my shoulders that it hurts. “Scar.” Nothing. Quick shake. “Scarlet Cridhe. Look. At. Me.”

I shut my mouth and obey without thinking, because Momma looks a little different now from normal. Her eyes and her voice is the same and her face are the same as always. In fact, I’m almost identical to the Momma whom I have always known. Except now Momma looks sad.

Momma’s fingers move wildly with minds of her own and her eyes are so wide that the whites look like two full moons set in her face, but when she talks to me, her voice is eerily calm, if a little rushed. “Scar, honey, look at me.”

I can’t help it. My eyes dart around the room, the thudding of my heartbeat in my ears overshadowed by the commotion downstairs, and my attention is torn from Momma by the distant sound of shattering glass. I want to look everywhere but at Momma, as if avoiding her face will mean avoiding the awful truth. I have to force myself to look back at Momma’s eyes, and then only to find myself in the overwhelming humanity in those mundane brown depths. She’s there for me. She always will be. She promised, right?

Unbidden, a memory pops into my head, a different ritual. Not with the stick of charcoal, but where we cross pinkies and promise. Promises mean that it’s going to happen, no matter what. Good People don’t break their pinky promises, Momma tells me, and I, Scarlet (Scar?) Cridhe, I am a Good Person.

“They won’t hurt you, I promise. They never do. Don’t be afraid.” Momma’s shepherding me to the back of the room now, and soon I find myself wedged in the corner between the well-worn bedspread and the rotting wall. Information pours out of Momma’s mouth, runs around my ears like water. This is everything I will need to survive, and Momma has only a few seconds instead of years to say it. But, even as I realize how important this is, I only hear chunks of it. “Find someone to take care of you, okay? Promise?” No response. “Promise!” There’s the pinky.

Somehow, the pinky makes it real. The pinky makes it true. The pinky means that Momma is going to die.

Terrified for the first time, I nod. Reality starts sinking in then. I don’t want to replace Momma. She is Momma. I don’t think I ever could. Not with anyone. But I just promised, I realized, and the thought brings bile into my throat. I promised. And heroes always keep their promises. I am a Good Person, and I just promised.

I don’t want to replace Momma, though, because everyone dies someday, and I don’t want to lose someone else like I’m losing Momma.

But Momma ignores me. “Don’t go out alone at night. Stay away from half-hearts. And for god’s sake, don’t replace anything.”

The fear sinks in then like lead weights. I’m going to be alone. I have to repeat that, and it still doesn’t make me feel like it’s real. I’m going to be alone, even more alone than when Rex died, or when Kip died, or when Father died when I was little, and none of them are coming back.

Momma is going to die.

“Everyone dies someday, Scar. It’s okay. That’s normal. That’s life. Momma loves y—”

She never finishes her sentence, not in that moment or any moment thereafter. The clanking intensifies and there’s a loud thud and then Momma is ripped away from her in a whir of gears and at some point they must’ve opened the door but everything is happening so fast neither of them noticed and Momma’s eyes widen and then squeeze shut and her head jerks away from my face and I can’t help it, I can’t help it, I can’t help her and instead I just close my eyes and scream soundlessly (or maybe Momma drowns me out) with a hoarse scream and then suddenly—

Silence.

They’re here.

I am going to die, just like Momma died.

But today is not my someday.

I retreat on hands and knees back behind the bed and curl myself into a tighter ball, my kneecaps rubbing up against my shoulders, but I refuse to let myself cry. I don’t think of myself as a coward, not yet, but I curl into myself and try to hide because I am little and they are big and Momma is in pieces and what else can I do?

One of the creatures tilts its head as it studies me, the harsh, silver features of its face hardly different from mine. They look so much like us, but they hunt us forever. They look so much like us. More metallic, though, and without the warm, muddy brown eyes that made Momma so human. Because she was my Momma, and those were her eyes. I look over to her eyes now, and they’re not warm or muddy. They’re dead. I know. Like a snuffed candle. Momma is dead.

When the thing speaks, its words come out steely and strained and almost human, but in a hundred echoing voices at once. “There is a female child here,” the thing that took Momma says, steely eyes studying me intently. I can’t help it. I shrink back. “Requesting orders.”

The other one, the one by Momma that I can’t quite see over the expanse of the bed, responds without turning back. “Leave it.”

“Leave it?” The first creature’s face contorts in what might be confusion, and that moment is what will stick in my mind years later when I understand that these mechanical beasts have weaknesses and can be destroyed. But for now, I’m terrified. They killed Momma and now they’ll kill me.

“We do not kill the young.”

“It has none of its kind left. It would be happier out of its misery,” the first creature says. There’s a puff of air from the pistons that make up its nose that almost sounds like an annoyed snort. “Killing it would be a mercy.”

I’m scrambling backward by this point, hands and feet moving of their own accord until they scrabble uselessly against the aged plaster of the wall. White flakes of drywall gather under my fingernails, but I’ve got nowhere to run. I’m little and they’re big and Momma’s dead.

“Leave it,” the second creature repeats in a hundred voices of its own, peering over to look at me with an expression bordering on disinterest stretched across its perfect, unchanging face. Its eyes, steely silver and all icy depths, focus on me, and then it turns away. “We do not kill the young.”

The thing locks eyes with me, and I see a promise in those perfect, silver eyes, unblemished by beauty or sticks of charcoal. They do not kill the young. They do kill the not-young. When I am not-young, they will find me, and they will tear me to pieces just as they ripped apart Momma.

But for now, I am young.

So they leave me alone and splattered in blood. They’ve left me with my life, but that’s about it.
Hours later, I am still wedged between the bed and the wall. It’s blazing outside, but there’s an icy chill creeping in my bones that refuses to go away. I sit there, staring at the splashes of red on the wall with numb disbelief.

Momma is dead. Today was her someday.

I can’t budge until the sun begins to pick its way over the horizon. The light rouses me from her trance, and, without warning, I know what I have to do. I have to move. I only have so much time until I am not-young. And I must make use of it.

I smudge the tears out of my eyes mechanically, catching the little crimson freckles on my face and smearing them as well, before methodically going through the house and gathering whatever useful supplies I can find. I cannot stay here. I promised to Momma that I would never stop running. I pinky promised. And Good People do not break a pinky promise. So I load it all into Momma’s backpack, which is far too large for me. But it’ll have to do.

Momma is dead.

I pause by the bathroom where Momma used to make me ugly. The shard of our mirror is still there, and the stick of charcoal, and the three-legged wooden stool that used to have four legs. Everything else about our run-down house is the exact same as it was on my birthday, except Momma isn’t here anymore, not really, not the way she used to be.

Momma was right, though. They—whatever they are—did not hurt me, did not break my neck with inhuman speed and leave me in a pile of arms and legs on the faded carpet with a thin trickle of blood coming from my mouth like they did with Momma. Instead, the things left me exactly how I was before, but now I am lonely. Lonely or dead? Which would I prefer?

I can’t stay here. I can’t stay somewhere with a boiler that whispers insidiously to me and a bed that is splotched with blood and Momma splayed out on the floor of my room. I don’t want those things, can’t want them anymore, because they’ve all been taken from me and they’ll never come back. I know this. I know this with the same burning finality that told me that today was Momma’s someday.

Everyone dies someday.

My first encounter with the half-hearts is the one I’ll go back to when I inevitably fear the world that unfolds around me and want to hide away like I did when the half-hearts first came. But I have to be brave, I’ll tell myself, and I’ll tell myself every lonely night thereafter. The bloodstained little girl cowering in a corner dies that spring night, and I force myself to walk away from that plaster and that corner and that house and never look back.

We’re only human in the end.

Momma’s backpack is painfully light on my shoulders when I realize that I have no options. I can either do this, the unspeakable, or starve. Momma told me time and time again not to replace anything—I promised, and Good People always keep their promises—but it’s not like I have that much of a choice.

The visit itself is going to be a small affair, just the tiniest bit of my right pinky, and I tell myself this again and again as she walks up the steps. I’m pretty old now, I tell myself, almost eight, and I at least look old enough that the man behind the desk with the dry skin, salt-and-pepper hair, and replaced arms doesn’t bother asking any questions when I tell him in a quavering voice that, yes, I’m twelve years old and doesn’t need parental consent for this.

Actually, he stares at me with eyes that bore into me like drillbits and needles and threaten to cut me in two, but I try to stare back at him and look older. Momma told me once that I was tall for my age, and most of the time it’s hard enough to keep me fed so I can grow more, so maybe lots of legal adults are as short as I am.

But he raises his eyebrows dubiously, casts an appraising glance up at my noticeably too-young face, and returns to entering information rapid-fire into the database console at his fingertips. Most the survivors are emaciated and scrawny like I am, so it doesn’t matter that I’m under four feet, but there’s something in my eyes that never fails to show how young I am. Momma told me this, and whatever that thing in my eyes is, I hate it in times like these. The machine beneath him whirs insistently. “Scarlet Cridhe, you said?”

I nod, suddenly fearful. If he looks too far, he’ll find what he has likely already assumed: that my parents won’t be giving consent for their seven-nearly-eight year-old daughter any time soon, because they’re dead and gone. That this girl’s mother was killed by half-hearts when she was seven, and this girl’s father died long before that. The whispering boiler and dead Kip, my only two real friends that I can count when I try to remember, aren’t going to vouch for me any time soon.

My legs tense. I can outrun the aging man behind the desk if it comes to it, and I’ll be out of the office by the time he reaches the door.

The machine beeps, and the man scans the screen in front of him with supernatural speed. My heart sinks. He won’t pity me, of course. Orphans are as commonplace as dirt these days, and even if I explain that I have no legal guardian to speak of, he won’t be phased. I bite my lip, prepared to bluster and lie until—

“You can go right in.” The man seems almost bored as he hits another few buttons and the door behind him opens with an audible click. “A doctor will be with you in a moment.”

I freeze, my mouth open to refute, and then I hold my tongue. He’s not going to stop me. I did it. I lied. I am not a Good Person, because I lied, but it still works.

This is why I’m breaking my promise starting with the pinky. It feels less like betrayal that way.

I force my breathing back to its normal pace and walk over to the open door, blood roaring in my ears. This is my last chance to turn back. Half of me wishes the man at the desk had questioned me, because I know I wouldn’t have argued whole-heartedly if he’d told me that I couldn’t get the replacement.

But the other half of me is starving. I need money, and I need food, and I can’t ask Momma for help anymore. Practically everyone replaces something at some time or another, that half of me tells me. We all have to. We don’t need to be afraid.

I’m afraid.

Momma told me not to, Momma told me not to, Momma told me—

I’m not too nervous about the actual replacement. I still have a few years of growing left in me, but if I can’t get anything to eat, that’ll probably be gone, too. I’ll probably end up perpetually in a child’s body, stick thin with awkward angles all over the place caused by the hunger. That’s what all of the survivors look like these days. But my hands were always naturally large. That’s why I had decided on the finger; I figured my hands won’t grow much more, and I’m pretty sure I’ll get a good enough price. High quality, never broken, gently used. There isn’t much questioning to it.

I think.

I won’t feel a thing, he says. The doctor, his mouth and nose obscured by a powder-blue mask, pricks my right pinky with a needle, and the whole hand is numb in thirty seconds.

His grey eyes are kind when he looks at her and asks, “Just the third metacarpal, right?”

I stare at him in blank confusion. He may as well be speaking to me in that lyrical language Momma used to sing while braiding my hair.

One day, it won’t hurt a little, like a big, open sore that reeks of someday, when I think of Momma.

“This little bit right here,” the doctor says, gently prodding the top part of my right pinky. I can’t feel it anymore, not now that he’s made my hand go numb, but I can see his own delicate index finger beside my grimy nails. It’s an odd feeling. I know I should be able to move my hand, but it’s already gone, so when I try to twitch her pinky in response, nothing happens.

So I nod my head instead, because I can still move that. The pinky is all I want to replace. Because I can’t break a pinky promise I can’t make, and I can’t make a promise if I replace this.

The doctor turns around, reaching behind him for a tray of gleaming tools. They smell like the rest of the room—metallic and sterile, with just the slightest undertones of blood. In that same calm, too-cheerful voice, he says, “Your hands are done growing, and they are quite large already, so you will be getting thirty-five credits. Is that okay?”

I can do a lot with thirty-five credits. Feed myself for a month, maybe, if I find a seller in the black market who won’t try to rip me off. They took Momma a lot more seriously than they do me, for some reason. I could probably even get ration cards for a week. Maybe even buy a train ticket on one of the days where the trains still run, find an area that isn’t infested. Get enough fake documentation to bluff her way past the checkpoints and enter a military city.

The doctor is still looking at me expectantly, so I stammer out an affirmation.

He mistakes my hesitation for nervousness. “There is no need to be afraid, Scarlet.” My friends calls me Scar. He most certainly is not my friend. “You will not feel a thing, I promise.” He turns back to his tray of tools and produces a gleaming metal replica of the stubby little bit of pinky he’d poked before. “I can even replace it with this lovely prosthetic for two credits, if you would like.”

No. I broke one promise to Momma already. To replace my real pinky completely would be to break another. And I am still going to be a Good Person. I shake my head firmly.

“Your loss, I guess. They work wonders.” The doctor adjusts his mask. I briefly wonder if he’s replaced his teeth and lips and nose or if there’s still skin beneath the fabric. His eyes do the talking now.

I don’t know what they’ll do with that finger. There can’t be enough to eat, but perhaps the plasma or the bone marrow or all of the big words on the posters outside are contained in that little fingertip. It’s powerful, I know, powerful enough to make promises with Momma that the Good People will keep forever, so maybe it’s worth something to these people.

Everything will be all right, I repeat to myself, trying to quell the shaking that’s starting to roll in. We can get through this. I’m glad that my finger is numb, even though that spark of pleasure makes me feel like a coward. But painless things doesn’t seem quite as pressing, and I’m able to push all of my fear into a quiet corner of my mind and forget, even as the doctor finishes up his final preparations. I allow myself to debate for a minute, to keep my mind off of the fear that slowly settles around me like smog. I don’t want to be numb, but it feels so much better than fighting back.

But I don’t want to be a coward altogether. So instead of closing my eyes and looking away, I pin my gaze on my right hand and refuse to back down, even as the doctor sets the prosthetic metal stump back on its tray, sterilizes his bone saw with a quick spray of clear liquid, and cuts.

I stumble out of the room fifteen minutes later, my right pinky noticeably shorter, and hopes that I’ll never stop feeling numb.

The nights get longer and colder, and although I pull my jacket closer and closer around myself and curls up smaller and smaller every time, it doesn’t help. So when I see the warm glow of a fire in the distance, with a spiraling plume of smoke pointing to it almost like an arrow, I can’t help but stumble in that direction.

Thirty-five credits only gets you so far, but I’m not replacing anything else. I need my fingers to survive. I need my toes, my legs, my arms, everything. I’ve heard that they’ve started taking kidneys and organs as well, and replacing them with fascinating metal pumps that serve the same purpose.

But I can’t, so I starve.

I peer at the group that has gathered in the back of the alley. All of the people there are taller than I am, but they are just as dirty and look just as hungry. I can’t help but stare at them, jealous more of their shared smiles than of their fire, and then jealous of their fire all over again because it’s just so cold.

And I can’t help it. Whatever they’re roasting on that fire smells good, and I take one nervous step forward, and then another, and then another, and then there’s a sharp clink as my foot connects with a broken bottle and sends it rolling innocently into the wall—

Suddenly a dozen pairs of eyes are trained on me, and then a motley collection of pipes, switchblades, and even a two-by-four studded with nails appear seemingly from out of nowhere and are aimed in my general direction. Some corner of my mind notices that they’re roasting what looks like a dog over their fire, and even though I’m reminded of Rex, who is dead, another corner of my mind is suggesting that the meat would probably taste delicious, even if a bit stringy.

“Who the ***** are you?” someone asks, and I remember that I’m not quite welcome by this fire yet.

I open my mouth to reply, but by then, two of the group—hulking men who are taller than I’ll ever be, muscled, eyes hard and devoid of mercy—have already cleared the short distance between me and the oil drum-fire. They tower over me, nearly double my height, and I already feels uncomfortable looking up. The men aren’t friendly, I decide immediately, and I want to back away, but they match my steps backward and I find myself with a brick wall at my back and nowhere to run.

“Just some scared little girl,” the second one says, looking at me and then turning away. He returns his weapon of choice—it’s a long metal rod with a hook on the end, and I remember that Momma told her this was called a ‘crowbar,’ like a kind of bird that used to populate our neighborhood—to a strap on his belt and starts to walk back toward the oil drum.

Maybe they’ll let me stay for the night. I longingly imagine the warmth of their fire and food, and the second man doesn’t seem particularly hostile to me, so—

“A girl, though,” the first man says, and there’s something in his intonation that makes me very, very uncomfortable, but there’s still nowhere to run. I don’t quite know why, but I’m afraid. The man squints at me. “And I’m kind of pretty.”

Unconsciously, I raise one hand to check the smudges of charcoal on my face that Momma promised would make me ugly, and I finally realize what the ritual must be for. I’m not sure why the man is staring at me like this, and I only want his fire and his food, but I’m wondering if maybe it’s not worth it and I should just cut my losses and run. Momma always told me there was a point at which what I lost wasn’t worth what I stood to gain, and maybe I’ve reached that point.

“Jesus *****ing Christ, Jed. She’s probably not even thirteen.”

I’m twelve, but I can’t tell him that. I have no breath. I am going to die.

“Hey!” a voice shouts from behind me. Stupid, stupid. There are ten people here and only one of whoever has taken it upon themselves to be my savior. “Leave her alone!”

I halfway turn to see a teenage boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen, standing at the end of the alley, hands on his hips. He’s got a strange, elongated weapon in his hand that tapers to a dozen razor-sharp points, and I realize that this idiot is going to try to fight them.

Well, he can fight. I need to run.

But there’s nowhere left to run, nothing but brick walls and barriers, and I know that I’m fast but not fast enough to get out of the reach of his lead pipe, which is practically humming—

The lead pipe is whispering to me. I can hear it now, a hundred voices all talking at once so I can’t quite pick out what any individual one is saying, but the pipe is talking to me, and suddenly I don’t feel so afraid anymore. The man is tall and muscular and I don’t even know what he wants but I think it’s probably bad, but the metal, the metal is telling me something important.

The first man says something that I, distracted by the pipe, don’t quite hear, and he’s leaning in closer to me already and I don’t know why, because I’m already checking his someday and finds that it’s today, this hour, this minute, and—

There’s a clank on the roof above them, and everyone looks up. I’ve already got a good feeling of what’s coming, though, so I have enough sense to start running away, saved only by the knowledge that they won’t touch me because they do not harm the young and I am mostly young enough.

I back away, so fast, so very fast, until I almost run into the teenage boy who tried to save me. He doesn’t move, and I’m not sure if we should, either. Half-hearts come in droves, and they’re usually drawn to movement. We freeze.

So we get to watch from the end of the alley as half-heart after half-heart drops in from the rooftop, drawn to the oil drum fire like moths, and I remember belatedly why it’s been so long since I’ve seen anyone with a fire in these parts. There’s screaming, and I can only watch numbly as the weapons once pointed at me are put into actions, but the metallic beasts aren’t even phased as one of the adults breaks the top of her nail-studded two-by-four on a half-heart’s head. It turns to her, head tilting to one side, and then it picks her up and throws her into a wall.

The man who was too close to me and the man who told him to stop are next, and soon the shouting dies out and everything is quiet. The half-hearts climb away the way they came, leaving the oil drum turned sideways with the fire dying out and me quivering at the end of the alley.

Their possessions—dried food, ration cards, a box of matches, a large grey jacket—make their way into Momma’s backpack. I’m so tempted just to sleep there for a few nights, warmed a little by the embers of their dead fire, curled up as far away from the stench—in the colder weather, the bodies rot slower—but I can’t stay here forever. Or at all. I have to leave the cities by nightfall, or else the half-hearts will return. The supplies won’t last. I’ll freeze. Momma warned me against hypothermia. She said it would happen gently, like falling asleep, and that almost sounds nice except I promised to her that I would live through this.

The last thing I take from the camp is a burned-out stick from their oil drum fire, because I’m almost out of charcoal for Momma’s ritual, but I can’t stop now. And I think, as my stomach grumbles and my vision clouds over a bit from the cold, that I’ve learned that the survivors can be worse than the monsters. And I think I understand why Momma said the best thing was for me to be ugly.

The boy hasn’t spoken since I started looting the camp. In fact, he hasn’t moved. He keeps the same, slack-jawed, stricken expression that he’s been wearing since the half-hearts attacked. I wonder how much of this he’s seen before. Surely he must have lived through hell before; there’s no way he could get this old and this tall and not see the wretchedness of death.

I turn to walk out of the alley, and he still hasn’t moved. Numb, I think. I’m tempted to offer him some of the loot, but I don’t think he’ll take it. It’s not like I really owe him anything. The half-hearts, terrifying as they are, took care of the mess.

I wonder if I should act like he does—scared and stunned and staring. But I was like that when Momma died, and I can’t do that again. If I stop moving, I’ll die. If he stops moving, he’ll probably die too.

He’s wearing a strange costume with a mask and gloves on that don’t seem to do anything for the cold. There’s a zig-zagging pattern painted across his grey shirt with what looks like black oil, and I wonder, impulsively, if he thinks he’s being a hero. Like those stories Momma told me, of the masked and caped guardians of the innocent.

We, the innocent, can have no guardians. If we did, the half-hearts wouldn’t be allowed to prey on us.

He opens his mouth to say something, recognizing that I’m still here for the first time. “Did—”

Then it happens. There’s a crash downstairs, interlaced with the musical tinkle of broken glass, and I stop. I look at the oil drum, whose fire has died enough that I can’t see the end of the alley. The bodies aren’t easy to see. I start thinking. For a split second, I wonder if the people by the fire have come back, if they’ll be mad at me for stealing their stuff and leaving them to the half-hearts die.

But the dead don’t come back. If they did, I’d still have Momma. I’d have Momma back in a heartbeat.

The thought of what is in the house is more worrying. So I find myself backing away from the alley, heart roaring in my ears even as I search behind me with a free hand for a way out. There’s no one left for the half-hearts to target but us. It’s hard, you see, to do this alone. I can’t watch the alley and look for escape at the same time. I fumble around on the ground, fingers scrabbling for salvation, but all I find is a shattered chairleg before the door slams open.

Am I not-young enough to die? Today isn’t my someday, but I can never be too sure. The boy behind me stands, terrified and frozen, and I check.

It’s neither of our somedays.

I don’t even think twice after I recognize the attacker as a half-heart. It’s too close to run away from, so I act on instinct and lash out with the chair leg in my hand. The wood splinters against its metal skull, and, just like that, I’m weaponless. This is the thing that killed Momma and all these people and no doubt so many more, and I have nothing.

The thing lurches forward and reaches for me, and suddenly, I have to wonder. Am I not-young enough to be killed, now? It’s only been a few years. I can’t be old enough to die. No one is old enough to die.

But this one is trying to kill me.

It’s really the last conclusion that puts everything in perspective.

The half-heart staggers fully to its feet, metal eyes whirring, and then it focuses back on me. I scrambled backward, but the room only has one door, and the hulking monster in front of me solidly blocks that. It tilts its head, laser pupils dilating as it sets its targets on me, and I wonder if I could’ve taken this thing on even if I had a good weapon.

These are the things that killed Momma. I don’t think I could.

I stare at it, and it tilts its head and stares at me. Every visible, clanking inch of it is covered in polished metal that seamlessly melds into the monster before her. There’s no weak point that I can see, and the half-heart can bludgeon me to death before I could ever find one. That’s probably how Momma died in the end.

I wonder what it sees with those razor-sharp eyes as it stares heartlessly back at me.

I need to run. This is a fight I can never win. I can never win. So I choose to run instead, and I’ll be proud of it. Good People don’t run—they fight to the last breath, like the people in those stories Momma used to tell me did—but they and Momma have something very important in common. They, like Momma, and unlike me, are dead.

Today is not my someday.

So I feint at the monster with my splintered chair leg, pretending to stab at its hated, metallic face, and then I’m leaping over the half-heart and running as fast as I can, even as it tries to counterattack. I’m already gone, though, slipping out of the alley and careening down the street. I hope this monster is alone. They tend to come in groups, always at least two, but perhaps I’m lucky. This is the first time they’ve come for me before, though.

Perhaps I’m old enough to draw their attention now. That’s a worrying thought.

I hear it behind me as the thing clunks down the street, its feet making almost-human contact with the asphalt road while the rest of it clinks along like one of those armored knights from the fairy tales. I jump down the last four steps of stairs and barrel out of sidestreet into the main road. My foot hurts and my ankle rolls out from beneath me when I make the landing and miss a little, but I can’t stop. If I stop, I’ll die.

I briefly wonder where the boy is, if he’s going to follow me like the half-heart is, or if he’s going to stand still and let it kill him.

When my bare feet, calloused from years without shoes, make contact with the cracked asphalt of the road, my entire mindset switches to running. As I run, the wind plays with my hair, tickles my nose, sings songs in my ears. I can pretend that I’m flying through the streets, like those magical creatures Momma used to tell me about. Birds, she said. They were soft and feathery and wonderful, like clouds, but they could walk through the air instead of being trapped here on the ground. They called it flying—it was like dancing, but better—and they would effortlessly defy the earth’s screaming, silent gravity.

If I were a bird, I would fly away from this land and never return.

I pretend that I can fly as I speed around burned-out cars and the cracking plastic remains of a sign that halfway spells Tesco but falls short on the second curve of the ‘s.’ And, behind me, I can hear the half-heart on my tail. There’s something intoxicating about the chase, though, some giddy joy that buoys me up and keeps me tumbling forward, even though my feet are shredding against the road and my lungs are on fire. The pain, I tell myself, like Momma can’t tell me anymore. The pain is a reminder that I’m alive. My arms pump like pistons with every collision that my feet make on the sun-warmed pavement.

I want to live like this, I decide, feeling giddy laughter bubbling up in my throat as my legs send me leaping onto the dented trunk of a rusted-out BMW, which is whispering to me even though I hardly have time to stop and listen. My heels almost fall through the roof when I land, and I can feel the metal dent even more beneath the balls of my feet, and then I’m in the air like a bird and suddenly on the ground again in a blur. My hair streams out behind me like ribbons, and I pull my jacket and Momma’s too-large backpack closer to my body as I swerve hard to the right.

The boy is gone. I’ve abandoned him, and he’s no doubt been met with a terrible fate, but I could never have saved him anyway. Masquerading as a hero, surely he could handle himself?

I like to think that he’s okay.

The monsters—half-hearts—were built to prey upon humans. A half-heart has more strength in its steely arms than I will ever will, and it can run for days on end without tiring and kill me with a flick of its iron fingers. They are nature’s perfect killing machine, even if they’re anything but natural. I’ve heard rumors of idiots—or, really, really Good People—that can stab a half-heart, yes, but by the time most people get close, the creature will have had plenty of time to snap their necks in its iron grip.

I don’t bother with fighting, though. I run. They’re fast. I’m faster.

There’s a crack like a piece of wood snapping, and suddenly he’s appeared in front of me again, gangly form unfolding ten feet in front of me. He splutters indignantly, limbs flailing, and then he collapses to the ground, swearing angrily as his ankle rolls out awkwardly beneath him.

How?

He catches sight of me, though, even as I try to sprint past him and hope that he doesn’t know me. From the ground, he looks up. “Hey!” he shouts at me, legs curled awkwardly beneath him. “Slow down!”

Is he insane? Does he actually think I’m going to stop and let myself get killed? I don’t even bother respond, but keep running. Don’t look back. I never have.

But really, the curious thing about Chase is that he quite literally does fall from the sky. One second, there is just empty space in a street littered with discarded soda cans, and the next second, there he is again, floating five feet in the air this time before he falls to the ground with a harsh snap, cradling his wrist. “Hey!”

I make the mistake of stopping to look back, by which point he’s already pulled himself to his feet and is staggering after me in a paltry imitation of the drunkards I’m learned to give a wide berth. Maybe he’s drunk. Maybe I’m drunk; Momma says (said?) that people do strange things when they’re drunk, and seeing strange boys falling from the sky could be one of them.

“Hey!” he shouts stupidly, focusing on me. He extends a hand toward me, and I can’t help but cock my head. In his other hand, he’s got that strange, white blade, strangely illuminated by the rising sun and intricately curling into a dozen points. I don’t understand it. But those thoughts quickly vanish as he shouts, “Hey!” again.

Idiot. Doesn’t he know that—

Right on cue, the half-heart comes clanking down the street, drawn like a moth to flame, and, just like that, I’ve had enough of this situation. I tighten backpack’s straps and prepares to run, toes digging into the cracked cement of the street.

“Hey!” the idiot shouts, as if utterly oblivious to the fact that he’s attracted shining metal death to us. We’re going to die with him around. “Wait for me!”

Like hell I am. I round the corner and get halfway down the next street—devoid of traffic save for the stalled out, rusted cars—when I hear his footsteps and strained breathing behind me.

“Hey!”

I honestly don’t understand how he’s made it so far while being so stupid. I’m not sure if, in the time since he’s arrived within earshot, he’s done anything that won’t make me end up cold and dead like Momma. I’d turn around and shout at him to please, please leave me alone, but it’s not worth wasting my breath, not when I have at least another mile and a half to go before the edge of the city, and probably another quarter mile from there to lose the half-heart. Assuming the idiot hasn’t brought any more down upon us, of course.

“I’m not a half-heart!” he shouts in my ears, still thumping after me.

Obviously not. Half-hearts wouldn’t be this stupid. And sometimes humans can be worse monsters than half-hearts, so there’s absolutely no way I’m turning myself around unless he could magically teleport them out of the trouble he’s dragging them even deeper into. I shake her head and keep running, hair streaming out behind me in ribbons of midnight. If I ignore him, if I pretends he’s not here, maybe he’ll go away. Everyone leaves me someday. Perhaps his will be early.

And still the half-heart clanks after us, the staggering boy and the dashing girl, and it hasn’t killed us yet. And it’s sure not going to kill me.

A fire escape looming in front of me catches my eye, and I vault on to it before I can stop myself out of fear even as the steps begin to shudder against my unexpected weight. The momentum of my leap carries me well onto the rusting platform, which hiccups and releases a cascade of dark-red flakes from my weight, and then I’m running up the rickety staircase, wisely choosing to ignore the swaying of the precarious metal structure in favor of putting as much distance between myself and the half-heart as possible.

The boy, with his injured wrist, lags behind on the ladder, and I wonder if he’s going to make it. He seems to have a strange gift, though, one that sends him jumping from place to place in midair that’ll keep him alive, so I don’t even question it anymore.

I’m halfway up the second flight of stairs by the time the lumbering half-heart manages to make the jump to the dangling ladder, and it’s then that I make the crucial connection that half-hearts have weaknesses, too. Nature’s perfect killing machine cannot be flawless.

Their weight doesn’t make them slow, but it makes them graceless, so while they’re able to keep pace with me, they’ll never make the leaps like I can. The weight difference has no effect on how fast they fall, but they’re bulky enough that they’ll never get airborne.

I can outrun them. I can do this. I am a bird. I am Scarlet Cridhe, and I am ugly, and I am a bird, and I am alive. My heart has torn itself to shreds from the exertion and my lungs are on fire and my feet are bleeding freely from the friction, but I am alive.

I reach the top of the building, where the bricks are blazing under the sun, but I don’t care. I can’t. I run, a bloody trail of footprints behind me, and in second I’m honing in on the edge of the roof, straining to look over at the next building, the half-heart clanking after me.

I see it in a flash, in the same way I sense somedays. The half-heart will die. It will fall to its death and it will die. I will survive.

And by the time I’ve calculated the gap between this building and the next and I think I can make it, it’s too late to do anything but think anymore. There’s no turning back now; my momentum will carry me off the room whether I jump or not. My feet are moving of their own accord, pounding into the cement, and then I tense my legs and there’s no solid ground beneath me, just air. I scythe though the empty space, arms flailing uselessly out at my sides, and that’s when I decide.

I can do this.

I’m flying, if only for a moment, and it feels so impossible that I can’t help but love it. Back when I had Momma, or really even further back when she still had someone besides me, people told us things with the foolish expectation that we’d actually listen. Simple adages, like how everyone dies someday or how it’s better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees. They tell us that we’re slaves to gravity and that we’ll never be able to fly, and all my life I’ve wanted to laugh in their faces.

I feel like those heroes in the stories Momma used to tell me, like a bird. Not a bird. Not a plane. I am Scarlet.

I should get a fancy name and do fancy things, like the Good People. That starts today.

So here I am, not-dying, here I am living on my feet but not in the way they expected, here I am tumbling through the air like a bird and winning. The next building rushes up to meet me, and I manage to roll into the ground so I don’t break my legs straight off and instead skid, catching myself and shredding the skin from my hands and knees, but that’s okay because I’m not dead and I don’t think I ever will be. I pull myself upright, too adrenaline-filled to feel the pain, and I watch in mute fascination as the half-heart attempts to make the jump after me and misses.

It hits the ground five stories later and explodes in a beautiful circle of silver. I look over my roof, the hurt slowly catching up to me, and realize that I’ve found a way to survive. Almost poetically, I can see the sun rising across the skyline of the building. I’m going to make it.

I’ll die someday, like everyone does, but that’s not today.

From the street, I watch a second half-heart scramble up to the body of the first, muttering something under its breath in a multitude of voices that I can’t quite understand. I get the gist, though, when it turns to look at me and narrows its eyes in focus before it turns to begin climbing up the face of the building. I’m so exhausted, but I have to keep going.

There’s a crack like breaking wood again, but I don’t turn around to face it. So he made it after all.

I remember with a pang the advice that Momma gave me once, before she freckled my face with charcoal and blood. I was supposed to find someone who could look after me, but who could replace her? She’s not my pinky. I can’t.

He does not catch up. His footprints do not grow louder in my ears as he plows forward through the rooftop, scattering empty tin cans and a cloud of dust in his wake. He does not reach out and put a calloused, too-strong hand on my shoulder to stop me. No. He simply appears in front of me, this time with his feet planted properly on the ground, but it’s still like he fell from the sky. Against every instinct I have, I don’t move, if only to keep myself from running headlong into him and his oafish, slanted smile.

The first time I saw him wasn’t a joke. He actually did appear from the sky. My eyes fly suspiciously to glare at him, and then I’m backtracking frantically, having already done the math in my head. I can outrun half-hearts, but he’s the bigger threat right now. I need to get away, exhausted as I am, because I don’t know what to expect from this crazy idiot and his ability to jump through space.

And by that point, it’s really too late to do anything, because the boy has grabbed my wrist and the world vanishes in a rush of color.

And, this time I find myself falling from the sky. I manage to catch myself on the balls of my feet and land gently, flying the remaining four feet to the ground and sinking into a fluid crouch, but there’s still the issue of what just happened. I scramble backwards as fast as I can, rolling into a standing position. My head’s spinning with nausea, and I can’t find my familiar, cobbled streets.

I’m already scrambling away, eyes wide. I hate the wastelands. I could run for miles and miles out here, sure, but I’d never get anywhere. There are no landmarks, no defining features to this homogenous plain, and worse still, there’s no sign of a city on the horizon.

I know the wastelands, of course—that’s where the majority of humanity ekes out pathetic survival, and I return here during the summer months to barter off my loot for what I can’t salvage or find in the cities—but I also know that there’s no navigating the barren plains. Nothing grows here, and the winds and the snowfall ravage the lands for six months out of twelve, but for most people, it’s a better option than living in the cities, where it’s said a danger even worse than half-hearts lies.

I’ve never liked the survivor groups. I haven’t actually found a person she has liked since Momma left, but I don’t intend on starting now. People have the unfortunate tendency to die on me, and I have the unfortunate tendency to know exactly when, so fostering relationships hasn’t been something productive for me.

Speaking of which. “That was a close one,” the idiot says lazily, brushing himself off and turning to look at me, that same slanted smile creeping up his face the way sweat drips down it. He seems genuinely happy, though, and he hasn’t tried to knife me and take my supplies, but I’m not taking any risks. “Good thing I could get us out, right?”

I lunge at him and his stupid face and punch him in the jaw as hard as I can, which isn’t very hard but it’s definitely enough to send him spinning to the ground like a puppet with no strings, and by that point, I’m sprinting away. I have to get back. I have to get home.

The idiot has a friend, though, and she's already walking toward me by the time I remember the other reason she never liked the survivor groups—they’re like little flocks of vultures, and they don’t hesitate to pick off anything that’s not part of the fold. And I’ve never had a flock, not since I lost Momma. “We’re not trying to hurt you,” the idiot boy says in a slow voice, pulling himself to his feet.

I have none of it. He didn’t save me. He kidnapped me. I duck under his grasp and elbow him in the square of his back before sweeping out his legs from beneath him haphazardly—the effort almost grounds me as well, but I manage to catch myself just before I fall—, sending him tumbling to the ground, but he hasn’t even landed before I’m sprinting away. I just want to be left alone. Can’t they see that?

I’m almost clear when the short woman, easily five years older than me with a gentle face hidden behind glasses, stands up calmly and takes three short, precise steps to clear the distance between the two of us. “Stop,” the woman says.

Like hell I will. The woman is barely taller than I am and looks like the chipped china dolls I saw in the broken store windows once; what can she hope to—

She catches my wrist and twists it neatly, sending me spinning around and cracking two bones in my hand with a deft snap. I immediately go limp, gritting my teeth to stop myself from crying out. Her hand feels like it’s on fire, though, and it takes all of her effort to remain silent and keep myself from collapsing. The pain is a reminder that I’m alive, I tell myself, even as I begin to choke on my breaths. It hurts.

“Stop,” the woman says again in a voice as sharp as obsidian, and this time, I do.

The idiot’s name is Chase, as it turns out—fitting—, and the woman who broke my wrist is named Rachel. I don’t care; I want to get away from this group of lunatics as fast as possible.

Chase smiles at me again—how can he be so goddamned happy during the end of the world—and apologizes for scaring me. He seems to be expecting something in return; perhaps an apology for bruising his jaw, which he rubs at distractedly as he speaks, or an acknowledgement that he “saved my life”, which he brings up whenever he can.

Nope. If he liked his chin the way it was, he shouldn’t have kidnapped me. I was doing just fine in the city.

“Chase has the ability to teleport,” Rachel explains in a tired voice, as if speaking from rote. She barely looks at me as she fashions a splint for my wrist out of a few sticks and a strip of cloth. “Don’t ask why; I haven’t the foggiest, and whatever research we have accomplished is classified.”

I end up asking her a lot fewer questions about this than she expected, I think. First, I want to go home as fast as possible. And second, this world is far from normal for us, the least of which begins with my ability to tell her when I’m going to die. It’s like guessing somedays. I can see through time, and he can jump through space. This, honestly, makes a fair bit of sense to me.

Rachel, as it turns out, can’t do either, although she seems to have a knack for breaking wrists.

Although I certainly wish that I could jump through space instead. It would be much faster than running. People would kill for that, I realize. I say so.

“They would,” Chase says proudly, his smile like a medal of honor. “They’ve tried.”

“You’re only supposed to be scouting out the towns,” Rachel mutters to him. "None of this intervention stuff." She throws the rest of the sticks that she didn't need for my splint into the fire.

Fire. At least here, in the wasteland, the half-hearts won’t try to kill us for that. They don’t stray out here, but that’s because nothing survives—no trees, no birds, no people. Just plains of grass. If we stay here for too long, we’re going to die. I know this.

Chase tries to sound guilty, but his face remains the way it always was. “I had to save the lovely lady here from the half-heart,” he says, raising one arm and inching it closer to me.

That’s not exactly how I remember it, but I don’t bother correcting him. I just want to go home, but I don’t even know which direction home is.

And yet half of me is fascinated with this strange crew. Somehow, they have the guts (or the stupidity, perhaps; I still can’t tell) to be optimistic in this world, to believe in heroism out here in the wastelands. Momma told me that humanity fell long ago, and that people stopped looking out for anyone besides themselves and their friends, and yet he tried to save me.

Even if his attempt was mind-blowingly stupid and left me stranded out here.

They want to be heroes, Rachel says, sharpening the spear of wood that she apparently saves as a weapon. She doesn't use metal, but she won't tell me why. Heroes, though. That’s who they are. They go from town to town and try to save lives. She goes by Sleight, perhaps a reference to her stature, and she used to blitz the cities and punch out half-hearts left and right. Enough blunt force trauma, she explains, and anything will eventually go down.

I can’t help but be impressed by her tenacity.

Chase brings the tactical advantage with his ability, he says, and I can’t help but agree. He sure doesn’t bring the brains—he has, quite creatively, picked his hero name to be ‘Chaser.’ Because he can teleport. And because his name is Chase.

“What do you call yourself?” he asks. I must’ve mumbled under my breath, because he answers, “Starlet? Like a baby star? That’s kind of cute.” He pauses, and then, clearly proud of himself, he announces, “You should call yourself Starling. Because you run so fast, like a bird.”

He’s an idiot, and Rachel might be for following him, but they’re both selfless. I’ll give them that.

I plan to get back home when my wrist heals. Instead, I don’t get back home ever. We fall into a routine, as much as I hate it. Because, as much as I hate that, we do better in a group. I can run fast, but Chase can move anywhere he wants in the blink of an eye. And, whether I choose to admit it or not, the half-hearts have started to eye me carefully. I’m running out of things to steal.

Sleight pulls me aside one night, after I spend the day running through the city and gathering us supplies before returning to the dropoff point, where Chase teleports me back to the wilderness.

“Didn’t you want to leave?” she asks, with the same cool tone that she used when she was bandaging my wrist after she broke it. “I don’t ask because you’re not welcome here or anything. I just don’t want you to feel like you’re staying because you have to.”

I think about it. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, actually. But there’s something nice here, something more than just running around and surviving. I realized this two days ago when Sleight punched out a half-heart right before it broke a little boy’s neck.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t help,” she'd told the boy, who was staring in shock at his dead mother, but we hadn’t made it in time. “I’m sorry.”

I see it in Sleight. It’s in Chase, too, but a lot less. She wants to change the world. She’s heard the stories of the times before the half-hearts, when life was beautiful, and she thinks that Sleight has the power to bring things back to the way they were. She wants more than just to run around until the world fixes itself. She wants to change things.

She is, I realize, a Good Person, undeniably better than I am or ever will be.

Do I want to leave? I shake my head.

Sleight sighs and runs a finger through her hair, which she's got hacked short to keep it out of the way. “Good,” she murmurs quietly. And then: “God, you’re so young.”

She’s right, of course. But I’m almost twice as old as I was when Momma died. I’m learning.

There’s a price to be paid to be heroes. The clothes we wore, the weapons we had to use, those all had a price. We could barter a lot, yes, but that involved finding loot, which was my job.

There was just one problem: the more we raided a city, the harder it became. There were always fewer supplies, fewer unchecked houses, and always, always more half-hearts. But we needed food. We always needed food. Like a hoard of ravenous locusts or something, I imagined. We’d descend on a nearby city, gather enough resources and suck it dry until we could go to the next city, and then we’d leave.

It had to stop. And that’s how I ended up in the replacement center again.

I’d been putting it off for a while because I can’t find a knife, I tell myself, but I know that’s not true. Either way, when I see the shard of broken window hardly larger than my palm, but sharp enough to break the skin, I know that it’s time.

I’ve always liked having long hair. It makes me feel free and graceful in the wind, and my ribbons of midnight trail around me so beautifully when I run. I feel like a bird. The whole thought process is a little vain, yes, but surely I can spare an iota of vanity in the apocalypse, right?

Wrong. I’ve been lucky to get this far, and I’m not about to sacrifice all of that luck for something as petty as beauty. There’s no one left to look at me and judge anyway. Sleight and Chaser, Rachel and Chase, neither of them give a damn.

The hair holds on to my skin like its drowning, but I manage to hack away at it in the end. I shake my head and am surprised to find it so much lighter, with the tips of my former ribbons of midnight hardly reaching my ears.

But that’s okay. I still have them, even if they’re a little broken. It’s the end of the world, after all, and I should know better than to count things as lost when I can still hold them between trembling fingers.

The hacked-off skein of my hair goes for eight credits on the black market. I’d been hoping for at least ten.

For the night, though, we can feast. We sit around our fire, hungrily tearing off chunks of cat, and Chase looks to the sky and tells us stories of the past.

He’s almost like Momma.

Almost.

We live for two years before we hit the first snag and Chase’s strange weapon shatters against a half-heart. He must’ve held it wrong, he says morosely, trying to fit the fragmented pieces back together, but he can’t. He doesn’t understand what he can and can’t fix.

The world, for example. He can’t fix that.

But we need to survive, and we’re out of food and money and things to lose at this point, and I don’t even know where to begin. But we need to survive.

The others are empty, but I’ve got a little left. I’ve still got a little left.

When I come staggering back from the city that night, not teleported with Chase and three hours late, Sleight (Rachel?) is waiting for me. My legs almost give out on my, exhausted as they are.

“You’ve been gone for a while,” she says quietly, but I’m too exhausted even to think about lying at this point. What would I even say? I see her eyes rove up to my backpack, where my cargo is strapped, and her eyes widen and narrow as she makes sense of it. “What the hell?”

I try to feign ignorance so I can stumble around Sleight and return to camp. Every inch of my body hurts, and even standing is sheer agony. But what I bought with my visit was worth the price I paid. It has to be. This is what Momma told me.

Sleight holds out a hand, and the contact on my sore shoulders is enough to make me stumble for real. I remember how she broke my wrist on purpose, but now I’m breaking me down on accident. “How the hell did you afford those?” she says in a calm, deadly voice colder than the deadest winter.

I feel myself freeze a little as I search for a lie and comes up empty. It’d been so easy to lie before, but now I feel myself falling to the center of a frozen ocean, the currents dragging me down as all of my lies begin catching up to me. I open my mouth to reply and then close it wearily. There’s no point.

“You’ve been doing this for a while, Scar,” Sleight says. Her voice has grown a little more gentle, but there’s a hard edge of steel beneath it all. How long has she known? “How much do you even have left to give?”

What does Sleight know about sacrifice? I can hardly bite back my own seething remark, even as the voices whisper at me to let loose.

And even though I said nothing, Sleight knows. She knows. “It’s not the right thing to do, Scar,” she says firmly, drawing myself up to her full height, standing for a moment like a giant. “No one should have to give that much of herself and expect nothing in return.” She waits for a response and gets none. “You’ve been fighting it off so much longer than most, but it’ll consume you. You’re killing yourself, Scar.”

And so are you, I retort mentally, but I hold my tongue. We’re both killing ourselves in the name of heroism, and there’s nothing glorious about it. No amazing exploits. It’s a grind, each day, one that leaves me more tired than the last. Starling runs so far and so fast, and Sleight fights so hard, and Chaser keeps them alive at the end of the day, but there’s no glory in it. We’re all killing ourselves slowly, so what does it matter if I’m just speeding it up or slowing it down?

Sleight grits her teeth in frustration. “What did you get in return, at least?” she asks, sounding frustrated.

Wordlessly, I pull out four long, white objects out of her pack. I’m gentle with them, although I don’t really know why—I was told that they wouldn’t break, not for a long time, if they were used properly. Tapering down to a razor sharp edge, these blades are elegant, cold, and white, but they will have to do.

“These must have cost you an arm and a leg,” Sleight says quietly, and she realizes the terrible pun a second too late. “I’m sorry.” Her eyes cloud over with pain.

So am I. But sorry never fixed anything.

They cost me an arm and a leg. They actually cost me two arms and two legs, because I replaced both my femurs and both my radii so we could keep fighting. This is what the man in his powder-blue surgical mask told me. I feel bloated and heavy now, because I had to replace them with those shining metal replicas, and I can hear them. They’re whispering to me, like the boiler did.

The third time Chase watches a half-heart dismember a teenage girl before we get there in time, he almost loses it.

There’s nothing beautiful in the work that we do. I don’t like to think about it, but if we fail, people die. That is inevitable. If we succeed, people live to die another day. That, too, is inevitable.

“Promise me,” Chase whispers in a strangled voice, so quiet I can hardly hear. Momma, I remember with a bitter shock, is dead. She died so very long ago, back when I hadn’t replaced my pinky or my arms or my legs. Most of these people haven’t seen death before, not like the way she saw Momma—

His hands, for once, are limp by his sides, and there’s a little tremble in his fingertips that isn’t helped by the warmth of her hands. “Promise me that you’ll kill me instead of letting them take me.”

It should be an easy enough promise. I should be able to take his hands in mine and look deep into those blazing eyes, my heart filled with emotion, and tearfully promise him that, yes, of course I’ll kill the one of the only people left in the world that matters to me at all, and he can do the same for me because this is some sort of magical fairy tale where we can make these promises and never expect to have to come through with them.

Someday soon, Chase will leave me, but I don’t want it to be by my hand. Perhaps this makes me a coward.

And this promise is more than just words. We’re heroes now, even though I’ve grown into Momma’s backpack and out of my pinky, and heroes don’t break their promises.

“Starling.” He’s practically whining now, an edge of tender desperation creeping into his words. Half of his face is illuminated by the sunlight to our right, but the other half stays in darkness. “Star, please. We’ll do it for each other.”

This isn’t fair. He can’t possibly make me make this choice.

It’s not Chase who’s making us make this choice, though. It’s this messed up world of half-hearts and heroes.

So I nod, even as the murmuring voices in my mind scream at me in enraged protest.

I know I’m swimming in an icy sea of lies, and every additional mistruth that comes from my mouth only makes that ocean grow. Chase is somewhere out there afloat, desperately trying to pull me out from the depths, but I know it’s only a matter of time until he sees the light and manages to fly away before he succumbs to the wind and the waves.

And leaves me to drown, of course, but that was always a given.

I distribute our blades carefully. Rachel won’t take them. She refuses, no matter how dented her own weapon is, because she knows the price. So that means Chase and I get one. I take the shorter ones because I’m smaller, and Chase gets the longer pair, but really, it doesn’t matter. We’re gearing up to be Good People in a world of despair. We’re fighting a losing battle, and it doesn’t matter if we have better weapons than before because there’s no winning this fight.

“Don’t you ever wonder why I don’t teleport with Chase?” Rachel asks me that night, as Chase tries fruitlessly to get a fire started against the relentless winds on the plains.

I have wondered, and I’ve been wondering, and I’d assumed that I’d wonder forever, but if Rachel will tell me, then so be it.

“We got into a pretty bad scuffle with some raiders a few months before you showed up,” she continues, tonelessly, eyes fixed firmly on the dark sky. “They broke my back.” Pause. “I ended up replacing six of my lumbar vertebrae, Scar. Chase can only teleport organics. If he tries to take metal, it doesn’t make it. It stays behind.” She doesn’t elaborate, but I can imagine that first time that she and Chase tried to teleport, and she ended up on the ground at their destination with no spine.

I have four rods of metal in my body instead of arms and legs.

“There’s something else you need to know,” Rachel tells me a few seconds later, a secret burning in her eyes.

I tell her a terrible secret as well, something I’ve been holding from her for months.

Her someday is soon.

She nods, as if she’s been expecting it for a while. What she spills in return is something terrible, something even worse.

When we wake up the next morning, Sleight is gone, just as she's promised. She spilled her horrible secret, and now she is running away from us as fast as she can.

Chase doesn’t catch on so easily. “Where’d he go?” he asks, searching around the ashes of their fire and finding nothing, as one might expect.

I should’ve stopped her, but I don’t think I could’ve.

The voices whisper in my head that it was for selfish reasons, but I ignore them. I was selfish, yes, but it was necessary. There was no swaying Rachel once she made up her mind, and there was no need to die with her in vain. We shall keep soldiering on in her name. Right?

Chase pieces it together at last and curses under his breath. “We have to go rescue her,” he says finally. He’s already moving, gathering their scant belongings with distracted fingers.

Rescuing. What does he know about rescuing? He kidnapped me and called it a blessing, and here we still are.

Calmly, quietly, deliberately, I put my hands on Chase’s backpack and pull him back down. We aren’t going after Sleight; to do so would mean to die. Chase tries to pull away. “She’s going to die out there, Star!”

My friends call me Scar.

And of course Sleight is going to die. That’s what she wants, isn’t it?”

“We have to go after her, Star. She’s part of our team too.”

This is what the Good People are supposed to do. Sleight went on a suicide run into the city because she knows a terrible secret about us all, and I can’t let Chase find out what that secret is. I can't.

“Star, we can still save her!”

We both know that we can’t.

“Star, we have to!”

We don’t.

And we don’t see Sleight again thereafter.

Instead, we settle into a sort of routine, an endless cycle that I can’t help but hate: in the day, we raid cities and try to spread word of our fight against the half-hearts that will only ever end in tragedy. At night, we curl up together under a ratty blanket in grasses of the wastelands and try to fight off our nightmares. If we run out of food and can’t salvage anymore, I’ll replace something. Quietly, so that Chase doesn’t know it. I don’t teleport. I can’t. To do so will kill me.

And one night, it happens. I’ve been fearing it. I wake up with a start in the middle of the night and sit straight up, eyes widening and heart racing as the sudden knowledge fills me and replaces the rest of my thoughts with a sudden and overwhelming sense of helplessness. It’s nearly autumn now, time for change, but I curse myself for sensing this change coming for months and dismissing it out of—

No. I’m not afraid. That’s not who I am. Before I left, I warned Sleight, and she said I was better than this.

Unconsciously, I clench my fingers, pulls up a handful of dust, and feels the fear in it. But I can’t calm myself when I’m sitting still. I want to hide, to run, to fly away from all of these troubles, but I know I’ll always be too slow to escape the sweeping event horizon of Chase Danson.

It’s almost like he knows what I’m thinking, because half a second later, he overtakes my silence as well. Chase feels me move and stirs, drowsy at first and then instantly alert when he feels the tension radiating from me in thick waves. “What’s wrong, Star?” he asks, his voice filled with the kind of weary acceptance that comes from hundreds of these awakenings.

Above me, the stars are bright and multiplied and beautiful, shining with cold, precise light down on them from the uncaring vaults of the sky. Maybe they should fall to earth in a crystalline shower of starlight shards—and why wouldn’t they, when my world is ending?

I lock my jaw and turns my head, unable to look him in the eye and tell him what we both must have figured out by now. Against my will, a long, low hiss escapes from the gap between my teeth and my tongue. It isn’t fair.

“Whose?” He knows. He knows, no matter what I’ll tell him, so why doesn’t I just give it away? Who else is even left?

But I can’t. I never have. Not with Momma, not with Rachel. These terrible secrets.

Yours, I want to whisper, but the very thought—of defying my tradition of silence or admitting the awful truth; I don’t know which—drains me of the willpower. So I think it instead, lips welded shut, shouts it desperately in my mind until the reality echoes in my ears in a deafening cacophony and I can’t possibly run away from the grim truth that’s loud and large and looming enough to wake me in the middle of the night and send a chill through my bones. My hands clench against our blanket. Tomorrow, our bed will be too big for one person. I can probably sell half of it and feed myself a while longer, continuing to eke out my existence fiercely, but what is the point?

It’s yours, Chase Danson, I tell myself another time, because it’s so much easier than telling him. Today is your someday.

I don’t tell him when we walk to the city instead of teleporting there. I don’t tell him when he starts chasing after the screams and looking for people to save. I don’t tell him anything, too heavy to run after him. I stand there, silent and treacherous, and I wait for my secret to destroy us both.

Standing on the edge of the bridge, feeling the autumn wind blowing my jacket close to my back, I can taste the surging storm in the air. I have to survive this. I have to. Chase won't, but I will.

There’s a clanking sound beneath us, and I react without even thinking. I lunge for Chase and pull him down, splitting my knee on the concrete—but that doesn’t really matter, now, because I can just replace whatever goes there later—just in time as a lone half-heart comes lumbering up the road below them.

I peer over the cement guard rails of the bridge, judging the distance—it’s at least a fifty foot drop to the ground below the highway, so the half-heart isn’t going to make it up to us, thank god. But I’d kill it without a second thought if it came to that, so I’m not even sure why I’m so thankful in the first place.

I turn to creep away. We can’t kill the half-heart, and it can’t kill us, so there’s no point to continue staring the danger in the face when there’s supplies to be gotten. We have a lot to do today. I need to get supplies, and Chase needs to die.

Chase accepts the loot I pass to him and makes to follow me, but then he freezes up behind and I know we’re doomed. “Star,” he whispers in a quiet voice, the kind that is always the harbinger of bad news.

I don’t turn around.

“That half-heart looks kinda like Rachel. Er, Sleight.”

I still don’t turn around.

“Star?”

The half-heart doesn’t just look like Sleight, I know. I know, and I’ve known for a while, even though I didn’t dare accept it out of fear. It’s not fair, of course.

The half-heart is Sleight.

That was the secret Rachel spilled, the fruits of her research, the reason why neither humanity nor I can hope to get out of this hellhole alive. Half-hearts were people, once. It’s in the replacing, she’d explained. They don’t know how or why, but the people who replace things turn, ever so slowly. And it started with the eyes, the silvery eyes that Sleight had when they first met and that I have now that I’ve replaced my corneas to pay for gasoline in the summer.

I wasn’t surprised when Rachel pulled me aside and told me in a quick, urgent voice what would happen soon enough. I’d almost relaxed, a little, as if finally facing the truth and saying it aloud made things so much better. I’d known for quite a while, actually, although I’d been a little afraid to put the clues together and flat-out say it.

This is why they bothered with replacing. They didn't need my pinky, or my arms, or my legs, or anything else I'd given to them. They didn't need to weaken us anymore by taking away our flesh. They could already destroy us in a heartbeat, breaking our necks. But there was a reason they didn't kill the young, why they offered us replacement instead of death. If they let us try to eke out survival a little longer, they could get us to start replacing our human flesh, slowly but surely. And it would whisper to us, like the boiler and my bones, whisper until we replaced more and more, until we became one of them.

The weapons we wielded? The blades that used to be made of my bones because we were so afraid of using metal as a conduit for half-hearts? They didn't care about those, either. Bones could break. Metal could not.

They'd been leading us on for centuries with the promise of our continued existence. Stupidly, we'd believed them.

The voices in my ears begin to whisper a little, murmuring dangerously like footsteps among dried leaves, but I push them out of my mind. I’m not going to turn. Not yet. There’s so much more that I have left to do.

We can’t save her, I say in such a matter-of-fact voice that’s so heartless that I can hardly believe it’s mine. But we can’t. I know it, in the same certain way that I know about somedays. I know it because I’m completely and utterly sure that if I succumb to the metal’s voices like Sleight must’ve, there’s no turning back.

Chase doesn’t listen to me, of course. He never did. “We have to.”

I tonelessly ask him why, and Chase whirls on me, truly angry for the first time I’ve seen him. “Because she’s our friend, Star, and that means we die for her.”

No. Because Chase wants to be a hero, and that means he’ll die for anyone, because heroes always keep their promises.

I think quietly of the pair of half-hearts that killed Momma. They were people too, once, but for some reason they stopped being people and started being monsters. That doesn’t surprise me; people are monsters inside. We all are.

But we can’t save Sleight. Not can’t, as in we’ll be hurt or killed if we try, but can’t, as in she’d sold too much of herself away starting with her spine and there’s nothing left but a rotting husk to fill the void.

“I’m going after her,” Chase snaps, and pulls his blades off of his back. “She would do the same for us.”

I don’t move.

“Are you really going to just stand there?”

Yes. Yes I am. I’m going to stand here and die another day, I think firmly, my lips firmly pressed shut.

“You’re just going to pretend that that didn’t just happen?” Chase splutters. He searches for more words, tries to formulate some sort of coherent argument, but the shock of the past five minutes leaves him utterly floored.

I begin to move away. We need to go. Sleight chose her fate, and I’ll choose mine. I run because I’m a coward; Sleight ran because she could feel herself turning into a monster and didn’t want us to be caught in the crossfire.

Chase stays behind.

Chase stews as he walks. Sleight can be saved. It wasn’t fair any other way.

By the time he reaches the street below, the half-heart with Sleight’s face is gone. He looks around, confused, hands tightening uneasily around his blades, and then something hits him in the side of the face, hard. He rolls to the ground, head connecting painfully with the earth that becomes his sky, and then he pulls himself upward.

“Rebellious armed hostile identified.”

Chase finds Sleight’s steely eyes facing him, so flat an emotionless and so unlike the Sleight, or even Rachel, he thought he knew.

Scar was right. There’s no saving Sleight. But it’s too late now.

Chase grits his teeth and tries to do something, anything, but Sleight is fast. They were always well-matched before, but now Sleight is stronger, faster, more precise, and Chase finds himself on the defensive, flailing his blades around as he tries to find a killing spot without dying himself. He rolls backwards just in time to dodge a punch that would’ve flattened his ribcage, but then he finds himself scrambling into the metallic feet of another half-heart.

Holy hell. There are more of them. Chase lunges outward and stabs the one behind him, his blade easily passing through its metallic torso, but there are still more, so many.

“Sleight, stop it!” Chase shouts, but he gets no response. He tries another tactic. “Star, help!”

Although he’d learned long ago that relying on her would get him nowhere. And he’d seen that look in her eyes, he knew: his someday is here.

He roars in defiance and starts skewering as many as he can, but there are too many to fight, too many to flee from. They start filling his vision, the blood and the silver, and even as he fights off the horde, he knows that the fight was over before it even began. But he’ll be damned if he dies like a coward. He will die on his feet rather than his knees, and he will not beg for mercy from the silver eyes of the half-heart with Sleight’s face that he suddenly hates more than anything in the world.

This is how I imagine Chase prepared to face his someday. He was alone and afraid and in his last moments, he cries out to me, who will never listen to anyone because I'm not that kind of hero. I'm not. I run instead of stand. Flight instead of fight.

But against my will, I look back.

I can’t seriously be thinking about doing this. I stand on the edge of the rotted-out overpass, though, and I’m thinking and I’m serious. Today is Chase Danson’s someday. I feel that in the pit of my heart, knows it with the same chilling finality that told me that Momma and Kip and Rex the dog were all going to die when they did, and I know better than anyone that fighting fate is stupid.

But how desperately I want to try.

In slow, dark monotone, I begin to curse. I damn the half-hearts for making me make this choice. I damn Chase, for being too brave and too stupid and too slow. But most of all, I damn myself for getting buoyed along in this wave of optimism and joy that was and is Chase Danson, for ignoring the sinking pit in my stomach that told me about somedays, for rescinding all of my mantras and allowing myself to feel something as petty as feeling.

Today is Chase’s someday. I know that I should accept it. Everyone dies someday; everyone has a someday; my goal is to put off my someday as long as possible in the name of living for the present. That is how life is. I grit my teeth; I shouldn’t even be considering anything because this is how we operate. No heroics. End of story. Die another day.

But I already know I’ll feel hollow and broken and half if I turn away from him now, and leaving Chase to the half-hearts is worse than killing him.

I promised. I pinky promised with a pinky I don’t have, and I have to keep that promise regardless because I’m a Good Person. I am Starling, and that makes me a hero.

For the first time in a long time, I let myself think, and just as quickly, I understand. I see no point in dying another day if there’s nothing left to live for between then and now. I’ve grown attached to this quaint concept of saving the world.

Damn Chase Danson for making me think like this. Damn. Him.

But it’s not about Chase in the end, not ‘about’ or ‘because of’ or even ‘for’ him. It’s about and because of and for me, and my choices, and how sick I am of being afraid.

Oh god. I’m actually weighing my options instead of just abandoning the situation right away. I could be miles away by now.

The grim finality of my decision begins to set in then. There will be no turning back from this, no more running. That’s the price I have to pay. I was never really much to the group to begin with, I tell myself. I wasn’t the brains or the courage or the heroine and her pretty dog too. I was just the heart. And nothing really needs a heart in a world where the heroes get screwed at every opportunity and the role of a heart can be taken by a box of wires and pistons.

I was only ever just the heart in a world of half-hearts. Half a heart. And soon enough, I won’t even be that.

My bare feet curl unintentionally around the broken concrete lip of the bridge, and my fingers start shivering uncontrollably, even though it’s only moderately cold outside. I can feel the storm brewing behind her, pressing my jacket closer to my back, and I’m struck with the idea of standing here forever, just teetering on the edge of everything, but what is the point?

So I do the only thing that feels natural. I take a deep, shuddering breath, tighten my grips on the white blades in my hands, and fly.

There is a desperate, wordless scream as I launch myself from the top of the rotting overpass, the wind playing with my hair and tickling my nose and singing songs in my ears as I fly, and then gravity reasserts itself and I hit the ground at all the wrong angles with a harsh snap.

My right ankle shatters into innumerable pieces upon impact, but I ignore the blazing pain that threatens to wash me out to sea. I have to. The left leg, with its titanium alloy, buckles but stands firm underneath me, and one leg is really all I’ve ever needed to fight instead of run, right? I tell myself that much as I act without thinking and allow my instincts to take over. I make a graceless, one-legged leap to the half-heart holding Chase and thrust the sharpened white blade in my hand deep into the base of its skull. The oil floods around my hands in pools and sticks to my fingertips—except for the third metacarpal on the right pinky finger, which was lost long ago—but I yank my hand back, fingers clenching around the blade, and begin clearing out a circle around me with mechanical precision, filled with the uncontrollable desperation of the damned.

Chase’s hands are free now, and he grabs on to my right arm. Oh god. He’s going to teleport me. Judging from the amount of organic flesh I have left, the attempt will kill me flat out.

Despite myself, I pull back, and it’s easier for a moment to pretend that my motion was to impale the next half-heart rather than face reality. “No,” I try to say, but the words get stuck in my throat and don’t quite make it to my lips. So I shake my head instead.

Chase has none of it. “We have to go!” He’s confident and powerful and ignorant like always, and he just doesn’t get it. “Scar, come on!” He doesn’t see Scar, not really. He just sees an image of her, one that’s nothing at all like reality. “You can’t win this! We have to run, Scar!” Chase shouts, and for a split second, I wonder if he’ll just leave me here, even without the revelation that I—

I pull my wrist out of his grasp before he can make the teleport that’ll send me flying in a hundred directions at once. Funny that he’ll lecture me about running. I know better than anyone how to run, but I also knows when and where and why, which Chase will never understand.

And now is not my time to run. Now is not the time for me to die another day. The chilling finality had sunk in a while ago, but only now does I begin to feel cold and broken, like I’ve been walking on thin ice all this time and only now plunged into the dark waters.

“Listen to me!” I shout.

Which he never has. Which no one ever has. Until now. My voice is more like a roar, and somehow my crippling flight has given me the strength I need to whirl around and stop, panting, as I glare at Chase with dark brown eyes that are slowly starting to turn silver, as they have for months. “Chase Danson, listen to me!” The world is clear before my eyes now, clear and broken and horrible, but I can see. I can’t run in this clear world, not with my broken ankle and metal bones, but none of that matters any more. Not now that—

It seems to click for him then as I snap the neck of an incoming half-heart with a wild lash of my replaced fist and superhuman strength. In a single, horrible moment, Chase understands why I can’t teleport, and he recoils without even thinking. I can’t bring myself to look at his face as the comprehension dawns across it, followed shortly by horror.

Instead, I close my eyes, which is a blessing, because then I can pretend that the rough shove I receive in the chest doesn’t come from Chase even as I scream, “Don’t just stand there! Run!” and then, “Die another day!”—this time not a mantra but a command—to a boy who is all too glad to leave me in the dust. Even if my legs are broken so I can’t run away with him, I can hide away in my mind and ignore the disgusted grimace on his face that would’ve destroyed me if I’d allowed myself to watch.

So I ignore Chase and adjust my grips on the blades as the wave of half-hearts descends upon us, drowning out the sounds of his receding footsteps as Chase does what he knows best and runs off to die another day. He’s clear of the horde in a handful of desperate seconds, and then he throws me one last disgusted look before he makes the teleport and vanishes.

In the final moments, I chose not to think about what is or what will be; those thoughts hurts too much. So I think instead of what was: the fearful little girl who is no longer and the naïve little boy who was so much larger than life and death and who had no right to fall into my life to make me question everything I ever stood for. I let myself bask in those memories for a few seconds rather than accept my existence as a miserable, shattered being.

I can outrun a lot of things, but this is not one of them.

And then I do something I haven’t done for a while and decide to be brave. I face that miserable, shattered being that will only ever be grounded and reaches into that dark void where my broken heart is, even though the shards like glass cut my fingers to pieces. I search through all of the broken fragments that were and are Scarlet Cridhe, that fearful little girl who grew up to be so jaded, and I pull out the biggest one, the sharpest one, and hone it razor-sharp. I’m broken, but that only gives me a weapon. I’m the useless one, but even the spares have their uses. I’m just the heart, but that means nothing if I don’t want it to. I am Scarlet Cridhe, the miserable and shattered and broken heart, and I won’t regret that. Ever.

I am Scarlet Cridhe, and today is my someday.

So instead of running away, I look at the half-hearts, find that pit of hatred for their almost-identical silver eyes that’s been in me since I was just a jaded little girl, steel myself, and charge.

It wasn’t my someday before, but it is now—I changed that. I’m going to die today.

That’s okay. There are worse fates.

My last coherent thoughts are that I am flying, really and truly flying, and the earth beneath me can only roar in frustration as I gracefully defy its silent, screaming gravity. If I close my eyes, I can pretend I am bird.

But this time, I won't fly away. I can't. I have something to fight for. I'd spent years wandering around, looking for something to live for, and I found that instead. I found something worth fighting for. Something worth dying for: the idea that there can still be Good People.

I am Starling, a Good Person, and I've learned this. I've learned what Momma must've learned when she was facing death and desperately tried to draw the half-hearts away from her seven year-old daughter. I've learned what I wish the rest of us could've learned faster. I've learned too little too late, but better late than never.

It's not when you die, or even how: it's what you die for, and why.