Chapter 2 Meat

The footsteps come fast and wrong.

I'm on my feet before I even think about it, metal shard in my hand, every nerve in my body screaming. Out here you learn the sound of danger the same way you learn the sound of your own heartbeat. It gets into your bones. You stop thinking and start moving, and the ones who can't do that are already dead.

Three scavengers come running around a pile of rubble. They're not looking at me like predators. They're looking behind them like prey, their faces twisted with pure animal terror. The kind of terror you can't fake.

Something's chasing them.

The black shapes pour over the rubble like a flood of shadows. Ten of them, maybe more, moving low and fast across the broken ground. They're the size of wild dogs, but their eyes glow red in the fading light, and I know what they are even before my mind catches up to what I'm seeing.

Mutabeasts. The things that hunt us, feed on us, remind us every single day that we're at the bottom of the food chain out here.

I run.

My legs are already shaking from hunger, already half-dead before this even started. Every stride sends fire up through my shins and knees. My lungs are burning, dragging in hot, gritty air that tastes like ash and old blood. The ruins blur past me, crumbling walls and jutting rebar and sand that shifts and sucks at my feet like it's trying to swallow me whole.

Behind me, screaming.

The woman goes first. She's too slow, too worn down, and the beasts are on her before she can do more than shriek twice. The wet sound that follows is one I've heard before and never stop hearing afterward. The second scavenger goes down somewhere to my left. Then the third. Their voices cut off one after another like lights being snuffed, and I don't look back because looking back gets you killed.

I round a corner and my heart drops straight through the ground.

Dead end.

Rubble piled high, solid and impassable, cutting off every direction but the one I came from. My legs nearly buckle. For one terrible second the hunger and the exhaustion and the grief from this morning all hit me at once, and I think: this is it. This is where Phoenix Kade ends, in a dead end in the ruins, without anyone to bury him.

Then I see the gap.

An opening in the rubble, low and narrow and dark. Too small for an adult. Barely big enough for someone as starved and hollowed out as me.

I throw myself at it.

Stone tears at my shoulders as I squeeze through, scraping skin off both arms. Behind me I hear claws on rock, fast and close, and then hot breath hits the back of my neck and I scramble deeper, dragging myself forward on my elbows through the dark.

One of the beasts squeezes in after me.

I can hear it snarling, that low, wet growl that means it has you and it knows it. Its red eyes glow in the darkness, two burning coals getting closer. I can smell it, blood and rot and something chemical underneath, the wrong smell that all mutabeasts carry.

There's nowhere left to go. My shoulders hit solid stone.

The beast lunges.

I twist onto my back and drive my metal shard upward with everything I have. Pure luck, pure stupid desperate luck, puts the point directly into its eye. The beast screams, a sound like metal tearing, and crashes down onto me. Its claws rake across my chest and arms and the pain is white and blinding, but the gap is so narrow it can't pull back, can't get leverage, can't finish what it started.

I grab its head with my free hand and stab again.

And again.

The third stab, my arm is shaking so badly I nearly drop the shard. The fourth, I'm screaming, not from pain, from something else, something that lives underneath the pain, fury and desperation and every rotten hungry day of my life pouring out of me at once.

"Die," I snarl through my teeth. "Die, die, die!"

The fifth stab. The sixth. Blood sprays hot across my face and I keep going because it's still moving, still snarling, still trying to kill me even with both eyes ruined and the shard buried half its length in its skull.

Seven. Eight.

On the ninth stab my whole body is shaking and I can barely lift my arm.

On the tenth, the beast goes still.

I lie there in the dark with a dead mutabeast on top of me, gasping. My chest is slick with blood, mine and the beast's mixed together so I can't tell where one ends and the other starts. Every muscle I own is screaming. My vision pulses black at the edges.

But I'm alive.

Outside, the other beasts circle, making that low clicking sound they make when they're deciding. Then, when the packmate's death cries fade into silence, they leave. I hear their claws receding across stone and I don't move until the sound is completely gone.

Then I start laughing. Soft and a little broken, but laughing.

The beast weighs at least five kilograms. That's days of food. Maybe a week if I'm careful. I use my shard to cut into its tough hide, the blade slipping on the thick outer layer before catching, and I tear off a chunk of fatty meat and shove it into my mouth before I'm even fully out of the gap.

It's sour and foul and it tastes like the finest feast in the First World.

I haven't eaten meat in months. Maybe longer. I eat until the cramps come back, but different this time, the good kind, the full kind. Then I drag the carcass out and hoist it over my shoulders and turn back toward my burrow.

The old man's voice rises up in the back of my head, the way it does sometimes. Don't let them make an animal of you.

I look down at my blood-soaked hands, at the dead beast slung over my back, and I think: not yet. Not yet.

"Put the meat down."

I stop.

Five scavengers block the path ahead. They're arranged in a loose half-circle, the kind of casual formation that means they've done this before and they know how it ends. The one in front has a face full of scars and arms thick with muscle and the flat, patient eyes of a man who hurts people professionally.

He takes one slow step forward.

"Put it down, boy." A thin smile pulls at the scarred mouth. "Look at you. You're half dead already and still bleeding. You really want to make this harder than it needs to be? We'll take it anyway. Only question is whether you walk away after."

The man to his left snickers.

"Brave little rat, though," another one says. "Came out of that gap covered in beast blood. Gotta respect that."

"I'll respect it while I'm eating his kill," the scarred man says, and they all laugh.

I stare at him.

Something wild and fierce rises in my chest, hot and absolute. I nearly died for this meat. I stabbed a mutabeast ten times in the dark with a shaking arm and my own blood running into my eyes and I dragged it out on my back across a ruin field. I buried the only person who ever gave a damn about me this morning with my bare bleeding hands.

I am not giving up this meat.

I throw myself at him, landing one good punch before they beat me down.