Super-Flowered
Part 44
“Fuck off, asshole.” They were the only words Jeremy had heard Charlie say, but he was enthralled. The kid was incredible. Not that Jeremy thought of him as a kid. In fact, Jeremy was a couple of years (he didn’t really know how old he was, but Charlie said he was probably a couple of years younger than him) younger than him, but Charlie seemed so much more than that. They met in the days after the revolution, with so many new kids on the street after anyone who worked for the royals, in one of their mansions, or with their carriages, even some children of ambassadors and lords survived, but they didn’t remain that way for long if they went blabbing about it, so for all anyone could possibly know, they were dead. Either way, there was a sudden influx of street rats, and the Asylum was swamped by kids of all ages, begging to be let in. Most of them learned how to survive, by and by, but some, like Jeremy, flourished in the new world.
Jeremy remembered nothing. Some of the others said they remembered nothing, wailing and crying for hours if it got them a penny, but Jeremy had wandered down to the Asylum and started taking messages without a word. One morning he had gone down at sunrise, with the rest of the kids at the Asylum, to find a small, but very heavy package for a Miss Eliza Tompkins, on Coen. The note scribbled on the top said that there was a bag of coins for taking it to her. Normally, one of the older boys would have taken the package; it smelt like blood money and cargo they didn’t want to damage. But Jeremy was the first one down, and he didn’t want one of the older boys to snag a goldmine that could feed Jeremy for a week. It had been raining heavily that night and was still going in the morning, so Jeremy clutched the package under his shirt and ran, bent over to protect it from the rain, until he had crossed over the Dohn bridge, and had to stop to check the address.
