(or; keg – a small thing in a smaller world. bravery and heroics are for dead people).
They are this: cold kisses and colder smiles. Ruzza’s lips burn ice along Keg’s skin.
Shady Creek Run is the kind of place that breeds violence and bleeds betrayal – the streets under Keg’s boots are paved in blood and bone and bodies (so many bodies, there are so many bodies, Keg has buried so many bodies). She’s lived here long enough to know better than to get attached to anything. Anyone. Permeance is a pretty lie – everything is a stab away from being long gone. There isn’t much in this town worth keeping anyway, is what she tells herself.
“I need to talk to you,” Keg says, arching into the way Ruzza kisses along the base of her throat. They’re in bed in the morning, holed up in a rented room with sun bleaching the floor white and empty walls bracketing them in.
“Talk?” Ruzza says, voice thick with suppressed laughter. She digs her nails in tight, tighter, so that she rips at skin and paints blood along Keg’s thigh with her fingers. “I don’t feel like talking.”
“No, we need to – ah,” Keg says. “You bit me.”
“Oh my god, shut up,” Ruzza says, and then they’re not talking anymore.
Keg kind of…it’s complicated, okay. She’s working with limited options here.
And it’s not like she can’t hit things! Keg is very good at hitting things – one of the best, in fact. It’s the only thing she’s good at, so she tries her best to live up to her (broken, it’s all broken, shattered and bloody and gone) dreams, and it’s sort of working. Keg can adapt. In every job interview that she’s ever had (one and a half), she’s named “adaptability” as one of her key personal attributes, up there with “can take a punch”. Of course, then the asshole has asked if she could spell adaptability, and Keg’s hazy visions of skirting legality had gone down the drain with a knuckle to his stupid, smug face.
Lorenzo comes along during a period of Keg’s life that she likes to call “more fucked up than usual”, which is saying something. It was a weird stretch between enforced formal schooling (which was a joke, but not Keg can read – sort of – and write – sort of – and she doesn’t know what to do with that), and a corpse. People look at her stubble and her grin and think, nope, and either walk away or walk closer. Keg’s knuckles are tattooed with bruises every night, when she goes to sleep tucked away in whatever corner is closest. She runs with some kids, and then she doesn’t, and then she does. Her gang life is like her love life, which is to say – messy.
“I’ve heard some things about you,” Lorenzo says, smiling. He’s always smiling. Gentle and kind and lying, always lying. There’s blood on his cheek, but Keg doesn’t ask. Keg doesn’t ask a lot of things.
(She’ll regret that, one day).
“Things?” Keg says, wiping dirt off her nose and baring her teeth. Her voice only recently stopped cracking from high to low, and she’s not taking any chances under extreme stress – and from what she’s heard of Lorenzo and the Iron Shepherds, Keg counts this instance as one of extreme fucking stress.
“Bad things,” Lorenzo promises, and then grabs her by the scruff of her neck and hauls her to her feet. “Come with me.”
The options in Shady Creek Run are these: work for a family, or die.
Keg doesn’t intend to die.
“Hey, hey, hey,” a creepy little halfling says, arms crossed and sneer wide. “Who the fuck is the new kid?”
Keg jerks forward, instinct taking over reason (as per usual), but Lorenzo has a firm hand on her shirt, and she doesn’t go two steps before she’s choking herself.
“Be nice,” Lorenzo says. Keg isn’t sure which of them he’s talking to, but she doesn’t really want to take any chances.
“I thought we weren’t taking on any new hires,” a human female says, leaning against the wall. She’s taller than – well, basically everyone is taller than Keg, but she’s twice as broad, forearms thick with ropey muscle. Keg runs her eyes along the thick slope of her shoulders, the brightness of her eyes.
“We weren’t,” Lorenzo says.
“Let’s get this straight,” Keg starts to say, “I’m not an – ngh –”
Lorenzo doesn’t even glance her way as he once again casually pulls back on her shirt, hard enough to cut the air circulation to her lungs. Keg backs up so that she bumps into his leg. It’s degrading, but at least she can breathe. That seems to be her motto, these days: stay alive, stay alive, do whatever you can to stay alive.
(Keg has lived with the chill of Shady Creek Run in the winter burrowed into her bones; she’s spent so long looking at corpses that she’s wondered if she’s dead herself. Frozen things – frozen places, frozen faces.
This is the story Keg likes to tell people: I emerged, fully formed, from the mud.
It’s kind of true).
The human female grins, sharp and bright and gorgeous. Keg smirks back at her, because when it comes to beautiful people, Keg has no sense of self preservation.
“I kind of like her.”
“You would, Wohn.”
“This is Protto, and Wohn,” Lorenzo says. “You’ll meet the others later. Wohn, you’re in charge of making sure she doesn’t get herself killed.”
Protto lets out a wild cackle, but Wohn only looks quietly amused. And Keg isn’t in the business of making promises she can’t keep, but she makes this one to herself: if she can get this to work, she’s staying.
There’s blood on the wall, and on the ground, and on Keg’s clothing and skin and everywhere, there’s blood everywhere and it’s never coming out.
“Here,” Wohn says, crouching in front of Keg and giving her a damp cloth. Keg stares at it, unblinking. Wohn gives an annoyed sign before grabbing the cloth and roughly scraping it over Keg’s battered forehead. It stings, but it’s a hollow thing. So far away. Keg can’t – Keg just can’t.
“What was that?” she whispers.
They’re in a dark place, tucker away in the far corner – if Keg has learned anything, it’s that corners lend a weight to your back and walls to your sides. Pinned and desperate is where Keg shines, and it means there’s no way for someone to come up behind her. The other Shepherds aren’t in the immediate vicinity – Keg doesn’t know where they are (out, getting more people, getting more people for –) and Keg needs to get herself under control, or she won’t like the consequences.
(Dwelna is there. Dwelna is down there in the dark, suffocating heat, and Keg is never going to look at people the same way again).
“’That’ is what you signed up for,” Wohn says, finished with Keg’s forehead and moving onto her cheeks. “You know what we do.”
Keg hadn’t known they had done…this.
(She hadn’t known, she hadn’t known, she hadn’t known –)
“Those are people,” Keg sounds out, because this is Wohn and because the others aren’t here to flay her open. “Those are –”
Wohn takes her by the chin and looks her dead in the eyes. Her voice is firm when she says, “No, Keg. Those are sheep.”
“Sheep,” Keg repeats dumbly.
Wohn shrugs, sitting back on her haunches and settling her elbows on her knees. She looks unbearable hot in this light, but Keg is too out of it to really appreciate the view. “We’re Shepherds, Keg. They stop being people the moment we get them,” she says. “Before that, even. We’re in the business of trafficking slaves.”
“This isn’t trafficking,” Keg says. “This is – why do we –?”
Lorenzo prides himself on selling – uh, malleable workers,” Wohn says. “Best to keep it all in-house.”
In-house, Keg thinks. She sleeps upstairs.
She doesn’t know how she’s ever going to sleep again.
“Well, hello, there,” Ruzza says.
Well, Keg hadn’t known her name then, but she does now. The memory is awash with rain and muffled screams as they unload the back of the cart, cages hauled out of impossible, hidden spaces. Keg pauses in her work, Wohn beside her as they pull them out, one by one, and stack them on the ground. The things (people, the people) stare at her with wide eyes, panicked eyes, pleading eyes. Keg looks away to the half-elvan woman with short hair and red lips.
“I’m Keg,” she says, and then gets back to work. There are a lot of cages.
Ruzza ducks around playfully, so that Keg is facing her once again. She makes no move to help with the unpacking of cargo. “It’s very nice to meet you, Keg,” she says, and okay, so like. Keg is traumatised, not dead. And Ruzza is gorgeous. Maybe it’s not Wohn’s muscular attractiveness, but Ruzza is tall and slender and fine-boned and hot. Keg could better stop the sun from shining than interest sparking low in her stomach.
“You as well,” Keg says, trying to keep her syllables even. Her voice has finally stopped giving her problems, but the instances of occurrence always seem to exponentially increase the longer she’s around good-looking people. (In the back of her mind, a little twit with glasses and large ears says, “Can you even spell ‘exponentially’?”). Smooth, Keg. Be smooth.
“I’m Ruzza,” she says, folding her arms across her chest and smiling wide.
Beside her, Wohn snorts. “Keep going,” she says. “We’ve got another cart after this. You can – ah, get to know each other, later.”
Keg keeps her eyes forward and gets back to work, but there’s a small grin to the corner of her eye, now. All she has to do is not look down. (That’s not a human, that’s not a halfling, that’s not a half-elf…). With Ruzza standing there, tall and graceful and gorgeous, it’s not that hard.
They leave.
Keg walks away. Money talks, and Keg is out of Shady Creek Run, and there’s no one to stop her. It’s not raining. It’s not anything. The sun is so far away, but it’s burning through the cloud cover and it’s visible, holy shit, it’s visible. Keg is moving forward and she doesn’t recognise anything. She’s going to have a heart attack, soon.
“Like what you see?” Ruzza says. She’s sitting next to Keg on the cart, long legs swinging back and forth. It’s empty, and feels light in a way that Keg doesn’t usually associate with the creaking wood.
Keg turns to her, rolling her eyes. “I don’t see what the big deal is,” she says, because being cool is a priority around Ruzza. “It’s not that different.”
Ruzza laughs. “Wait till you see the rest, then.”
(This is what the rest is:
Silence.
Creeping, cold.
Keg waits in the still air, waits for Ruzza and Protto and Dwelma to come back, waits for her blood to start flowing again and her joints to unfreeze. Lorenzo is next to her, leaning against the cart and staring up at the stars.
It’s their first hit on the run, but it won’t be their last. Twenty cages stand, stacked, in the cart – hidden under a thick spell that leaves Keg dizzy every time she pokes her head through.
She wants to say something, but nothing will come up through her teeth. If she opens her mouth, she’s going to throw up. No matter what, Keg is not allowed to throw up.
Lorenzo glances at her, amused. Always, endlessly amused. There’s blood flecking the corner of her his cheek, but Keg doesn’t ask. Keg can’t ask, because if she doesn’t know, she doesn’t have to do anything about it.
“Don’t worry, Keg,” he says. “They’ll be back.”
And it’s funny, it’s hilarious, but Keg doesn’t know if she wants them to or not).
Ruzza laughs, when they fuck, when they tangle into each other with rain on the windows and blood on their hands.
“You’re on the next run,” she says, kissing her way up Keg’s collarbone. “All yours, next time. I’m sure you’ll have lots of fun.”
“Can we not,” Keg says, shrugging off her shirt and grappling for Ruzza’s. “It this really the time –”
“You’re fun when you scream,” Ruzza says, and there’s something cold about the way she says it. Keg can’t help but shiver, but it’s too late, the warning’s too late, she’s in too deep. Ruzza just laughs, and keeps laughing, well into the night.
Keg is born with ice in her veins and mud in her hair.
She clawed herself up and out, up and out. She’s got a trail of bodies and hearts behind her (less hearts than bodies, unfortunately), and there’s no point in looking back, not now.
