Free Needle Rain by Cari Silverwood Page A

couldn’t bear to leave them. He needed to find out what had happened to Leonie then they’d head north and somehow survive.
    Go north far enough and you hit Bloodmen Territory, where somm came from. It wasn’t just that though, he told himself. It was one of the least patrolled borders. The Bloodmen’s territory had been a protectorate for many years.
    He wouldn’t leave the city until he found out about Leonie, but finding out anything was almost impossible. He was an outcast, a traitor, and a man with no trustworthy connections to anyone who might know anything. He watched his ex-assistant’s house for half a day, to make sure his daughter wasn’t there. Of course, she wasn’t. Then the addiction began to take its toll.
    How could he think logically when the need coursed through his blood?
    Taking his coin wallet out of his pocket to check the number of grints he possessed, left him staring at his shaking hands. The shaking brought on some sort of fugue state and an indeterminate amount of time washed past. When he recovered from the episode, he found himself squatting with a wall at his back. The wallet was missing. Someone had stolen the coins.
    He’d make do. He had to. He’d steal if he had to, to survive.
    Where was Leonie?
    The second night, the cravings reached a crescendo. He needed somm. He needed somm so bad. The twitching took over his body. But he never forgot Leonie. The second night, he lost the backpack, luckily the needles were in his pocket, next to his skin. He needed to feel the box. The needles were him, his identity. Without them he would evaporate into the void. He took to staring upward at the sky. Beautiful things were there.
    It took a week for him to discover the most important fact.
    He’d wandered close to his clinic and found two enforcers patrolling.
    In a lucid moment, he heard one of them tell his partner about the night all hell descended on the clinic. The Night of the Debt Collectors, he called it. When ten people had died and an Immolator met his match. It sounded grand and Thom leaned against something-or-other chuckling and twitching – the twitches were becoming most inconvenient. And then the guard added one to the dead.
    “Oh, and a girl died, the daughter of the clinic owner.”
    They both deplored the loss of young life and moved on. Thom found his mouth was open. He closed it. The daughter of the clinic owner? Who was that? Distantly he knew it was important. A tear trickled down his cheek. He lifted a begrimed hand, whose he wasn’t sure, and tasted the tear. Salty. Like fish.
    The face of a young woman floated into his mind. She was talking without sound, sneering at him, babbling on and on. Red anger prickled under his skin and inside his head. He wanted to hit her. She was to blame! Her!
    Leonie was dead.
    Dead.
    Staggering, half-blind with fury, he bumped a wall with his elbow and turned to pummel it over and over with his fists. When he forgot why he was doing it, he stopped hitting the wall, put a knuckle into his mouth, and sucked away the blood. Yes, salty. Fish.
    It must be ten o’clock, he decided, when the fish shop threw out the scalings and guttings. Free food. He ambled in a zigzag fashion up the street. Somewhere that way was the fish shop.

C H A P T E R   E I G H T

     
    Samos sat huddled underneath Tunamen’s Pier with a rotting stump for a seat and the hood of his stolen cloak pulled up. High tide had been and gone and the mud layer on the sand was sticky but bearable. Only some blue-back crabs and a few of the neighborhood children ventured under here with him. Though the children gave him a wide berth to start with, once the cheekiest of them came over to say “hello” and he grinned back at the boy, they lost their fear of him. He ended up being the “ogre on the rock” in one game.
    If he watched the ships, he might gather clues about where the Sungese ship had gone.
    The first thing he’d done was to remove the metal struts from his