A Web of Steam & Puppet Strings (Sevastyan #1)

Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

 

When the others had returned to their cots that night, they went straight back to sleep.

I didn’t.

Hot water from the corroded steel showerhead scalded my body. My skinned palms and elbows and cheek stung, minor scrapes that I had gained from my brief but intimate embrace with the street.

It must have been close to daybreak by now. Most of the boys awoke around the same time in the late morning and showered together. I had trained my body clock to wake up earlier so I could shower alone. The empty space, dark in a room with misty light cast from a single light bulb, did things to me. Too many bodies in too small a space rattled my nerves and covered me in a feverish sweat.

That, and I had very little control over where my eyes wandered.

The mist coiled around me, trapped me, put me in a headlock. I sealed my eyes against the condensation and exhaled slowly, but then the vision of the grimy walls closing in was enough for my heart to leap for my throat.

I stretched the omnipresent muscles outside the skin of my body, dividing my control into the clouds that encased me. With a sharp exhale, I shoved the mist to the cold, grimy concrete floor and walls. The moisture compacted like the mist that clung to warm earth on cold nights, clearing the air so I could open my eyes and breathe normally again.

As a Tangible, my strongest control lay within the solid, physical elements of earth and water, the opposite of fire and air. I was not fleeting, I did not slip through one’s fingers, and I wasn’t antsy like an Intangible.

I killed the flow of the spout. My feet slapped the puddles against the sleek concrete as I crossed the bathroom. We’d need to repair the cracks and smooth out the concrete soon. Settling of the earth over time impacted our floor, and when we weren’t paying attention, quiet and homey neighborhoods of spores and fungus fleshed out within pockets of filth. There was nothing quite like taking a step and feeling my toes sink into a layer of slime.

I extended my control to the water dribbling down my body and peeled every ounce off until I was dry. My palm scrubbed the fog from a small square of polished tin melded to the wall until my reflection stared back. With lather from a hunk of scentless soap, I cautiously scraped a crude blade against the bristle along my jaw and neck.

My towel went into the black hole of the laundry chute, where I’d dropped my tunic. In the cubbies beside the chute, I popped open the latch of ‘202’ and pulled out a fresh tunic, stale and fading and weak at the seams.

Once I had dressed, I left the stagnant air of the shower room. My square wooden crate, big enough to carry a newborn and just as full, awaited me on the floor against the wall where I had left it. I hefted it up, musical clinking resounding from inside as I walked down the otherwise silent corridor of bleak gray walls.

The Chambers had been built like a mini compound, segmented into four quarters, a safe haven homey enough for perhaps quiet neighborhoods of spores and fungus. I never saw anyone here other than my fellow inhabitants, and the solid concrete infrastructure didn’t provide any nooks or crannies for anyone to watch over what we were doing.

But if we broke one of the Rules on the Doors, someone knew. When we were summoned to our missions at night, very rarely did one of us not return in at least mostly reparable condition. If we broke a rule, however, the offender simply disappeared and was never seen again.

I pushed open the door at the end of the corridor and stepped into the Playground, complete with sparse grass, sparser trees, a few rickety benches, a murky pond swarmed with overgrowth, and a pit of blackened logs for fire. Supposedly three sets of walls surrounded the area—the first made of wood, then, somewhere beyond, a second wall stone, then steel—but I wouldn’t know, and neither would anyone here. We knew not to try to escape past the first wall.