Last Train to Jubilee Bay by Kali Wallace

 
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    Lucy stood at the window and watched the sun set dull and red behind the clouds west of the city. Seven stories below, sweet smoke from burning garbage and cooking fires settled over the streets of Morningtown. The window glass had been broken out and traded away long ago and there was a cold, damp bite in the air, but Lucy didn’t close the shutters.
    She lifted Esther’s old coat from a hook and slipped it on. It was too big for her, the sleeves long enough to cover her hands, but the red wool was sturdy and warm. Lucy buttoned up the coat and wrapped a scarf around her neck. The scarf smelled like the city, bitter and stale, like old smoke and rotting wood.
    On the other side of the curtain, Olaf coughed, an ugly, wracking sound. “You still here?” he said. He stomped his feet in frustration. “You’re going to be late.”
    Metal clanged; he was knocking at the potbellied stove with the iron poker, trying to surprise another hour of embers from the coals. Esther was out, bartering a meal of leathery meat and tasteless roots from the family who lived on the roof, and Olaf had started grumbling the moment she left. There was no food in the apartment, no fuel except the smoking chunks in the stove. Lucy had spent the day scavenging for firewood, prying apart empty buildings like a filthy, fishbelly-pale picker, breaking through plaster to pull moldy studs from the walls.
    Lucy reached beneath the cot for her knife and tucked it in her sleeve. The walk from Morningtown to the station was a long one, and dangerous. The poachers usually left her alone on the way out, even in the dead zone past the fallen quarantine fences, but there might be someone willing to take the risk. The return trip was the greater danger, after she had made the trade and had the serum in hand. Lucy had been crossing the city from Morningtown to the station for fifteen years. She knew how to keep the serum safe.
    â€œYou listening to me, girl?” Olaf cleared his throat and coughed again. “Pig was here earlier. She said Riverton’s runner took off, didn’t bring any serum back.” Pig ran the trade in Helterville, the neighborhood that bordered Morningtown to the west. She stopped by every few days to gossip with Olaf and share the news from across the city.
    Lucy pushed the curtain aside. Olaf had dropped the iron poker just out of reach; he was grasping for it, gnarled fingers scraping along the floorboards, his mouth twisted in a scowl. She nudged it away with the tip of her boot.
    â€œDid you hear me?” Olaf said. He sat back with a frustrated grunt. “You’re not a kid anymore. If you come back without—”
    â€œI know,” Lucy said.
    She didn’t snap, didn’t raise her voice. She was taller than Olaf now, stronger and quicker. He had been an imposing man once, but that was a long time ago, and Lucy wasn’t a starving new orphan anymore. Olaf’s hands shook so badly he couldn’t wash himself, and his legs were so weak he could barely stand. He smelled of sweat and vomit, and his white hair was yellow with grime. He had been blind for three years.
    â€œI’m not a drifter kid from Helterville,” Lucy said, her voice mild. “You don’t have to tell me what to do.”
    â€œPig says the mud rats are angry,” Olaf said. He coughed into his fist. “Five days now and nobody’s got a drop.”
    â€œYou shouldn’t believe everything Pig tells you,” Lucy said.
    The last feeble sunlight drained from the room. Lucy went to the shelf behind the stove, where Esther kept the papers for trade wrapped up in grubby lace and tucked into a tea tin. When Olaf’s eyes had turned milky white and his joints had stiffened, and word got around that he’d finally started using the serum, everybody in Morningtown had assumed there would be a new dealer stepping into his place. But Esther, quiet, unsmiling Esther with