Free dEaDINBURGH by Mark Wilson Page A

theories on why Edinburgh had been abandoned, but most didn’t care and were just trying to survive another day. None of the communities had the resources, organisation or safety of The Gardens, or even The Brotherhood.
    Just thinking of The Brotherhood brought an image of Joey to her mind’s eye. She hadn’t seen him once in the years since she’d walked away and left him and Jock on The Royal Mile mourning the mother he’d never known. However, she’d heard stories about an old minister and a young man with a bow from some other travellers in the inner fence. It seemed that they spent their time travelling the north of the city. The people she’d met said only good things about them. A man she’d encountered in The Meadows, a former supermarket manager with whom she’d shared a fire and a meal, had told her that the padre and the boy had saved him from a group of Ringed, “the fresher ones,” he’d told her. They wouldn’t accept anything in return for their assistance, but had sent him in the direction of some food stashes they kept throughout their routes. According to the supermarket manager, they did this regularly for people in the north.
    She’d met a woman who’d also spoken to them. The woman had been walking towards trouble, something about a maniac with zoo animals, and the pair had turned her onto a different route around where the man made his home. She’d described Joey as handsome, with blond hair, the greenest of eyes and a bow. The woman thought it amazing that someone had taken time to help her. “So few do, love,” she’d said.
    Alys’ heart swelled when she heard that they were safe, that they were the good people she’d taken them for. This was the one instance in which she’d disobeyed her mother and the one instance when her mother had been wrong. Some men could be trusted. Alys sighed, brushed Steph’s hair over her right ear with her finger and told the twelve-year-old to go to sleep again.
    Walking outside onto Chalmers Street, Alys looked up at the clear night sky and wondered if the stars had been so visible back when the city had been alive. Had people even noticed them if they were? Mum said that the people of old Edinburgh were worse than the ones who lived here now. “Self-absorbed,” she’d called them many times. “Always in a rush, always too important to talk.” According to her mum many people were like that in the old days: living, but not really living; focused on shit that didn’t matter. Alys never really understood what she was referring to but had nodded along in agreement to keep the peace.
    After a final check around the front of the building, Alys made her way back inside, barricaded the office door and lay beside her cousin. As she drifted off to sleep, she wondered if Joey looked at the stars. She decided that he did; he’d been underground for so long, he’d appreciate them more than most. Alys had thought back to the night she’d met Joey and Jock many times in the three years since, replaying the events frame by frame in her mind’s eye. No matter how many times she scanned the images, she couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment that she’d chosen to trust the boy with the bow; when she’d stopped resenting his freedom and began to see him for who he was – someone as trapped as she’d been at the time.
      Sometimes, when she thought of him, she wished that she’d taken him to The Gardens, but Jennifer would have sent him packing, or worse. She’d spent hours examining that day, trying to decide why she’d trusted him, and why she still missed someone that she’d only met for the briefest of moments. Finally it had come to her. After spending her whole life training, punishing her body and preparing for being a Ranger, he’d been her first and her only friend.

Chapter 7
     
    Joey
     
    Having spent three days, three sleepless days, tracking Bracha from Murrayfield to the West-End of Edinburgh, Joey was exhausted. But hate pushed him