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The kid was on fire, and now they aren’t, and Jet Star’s favorite jacket is ruined.
All around, ‘Runners are scattering like firework sparks, vanishing into the smoky night as if they’d never been real. The air is thick with that weird tang that comes with zapper fire, that sharp static-and-lemons reek that sticks between your teeth for days after. It was a good party, which was the problem—too much happy tends to attract the wrong kind of attention out here, and the opportunity to take a couple fuck-you potshots into a vulnerable crowd is Drac catnip. Jet never even saw the white masks, didn’t need to.
He doesn’t know this kid, this yellow-haired stick figure in primary colors. This kind of crowd, you get drinks dumped on you from all directions, and Jet supposes that’s what caused the kid’s shoulders to go up with an audible whoosh when a stray zapper spark alighted on their shirt. It hadn’t really been charity that had Jet tackling the kid bodily to the ground and flinging his own jacket over the flames; rather, his lizard-brain had seen fire where it didn’t belong and had taken action to correct the situation.
A forest of knees and boots is flashing in Jet’s peripheral vision, and the kid is wild, disoriented, struggling underneath him, but Jet’s kneeling on the backs of their knees and slapping them all over. The flames are already out. Jet can’t seem to stop slapping the kid, though. His jacket is over the kid’s head, and the denim has gone black in places where the fire ate through.
“—off!” the kid beneath him is screeching. “Get off get off get off— ”
And then there’s heat on the back of Jet’s neck, so hot he wonders for an instant if he’s caught fire too, then he’s being lifted, thrown. His mouth is full of sand and someone is kicking him, pummeling his ribs, his kidneys. Someone is screaming at him, howling with the kind of wild rage that can’t find words. He curls up around his soft places like a pill-bug and the blows keep raining down, until they don’t.
He can’t hear the stampede anymore, just the blood in his ears and the rattle of his breath. Someone is slapping his face with hot, hot hands.
“—okay? You okay?” The slapping is gentle, almost apologetic, and the voice seems to come from far away.
“Please stop hitting me,” Jet manages. His organs feel like they’re leaking out of his abdominal cavity and slithering away.
“I stopped, okay? Look, I stopped. You’re okay. You’re fine. I thought you were hurting him. You’re okay, right?”
It takes an unimaginable effort for Jet to open his eyes, but he manages it. For a moment, he thinks his eyes are bleeding, but then he realizes it’s hair, red hair bracketing an unfamiliar face, soft and strange. “You’re okay,” the face says again, firmly, more an order than a reassurance.
“You killed him.” Another face materializes, accusatory eyes under a thatch of yellow hair. The kid, Jet realizes.
“I didn’t kill him,” says the one with red hair, and their hands are tight around Jet’s face, as if they can squeeze the pain out of him like juice from an orange. “He’s fine.”
The hands on Jet’s face are hot, and the rest of him is cold, and somehow he already knows that he will learn these strangers’ names, can taste the significance of this moment in the blood on his teeth. The night will be long and hazy, and these strangers will gather him up and take him away, and he will never ask to leave.
It’s been two weeks of strange looks and hot-and-cold and a sort of three-way orbital decay. There’s something thrilling about their mutual unease, a sense that they all owe each other something and nobody’s sure what or when the bill will come due.
They’re squatting in a gutted gas station for the night, and there’s a laziness to the desert heat today, as if even the sun can’t be bothered to really put forth an effort. Jet Star is perched atop the rusted-out corpse of an ancient Subaru, one of his boots on his right hand and a tube of glue in the other. The sole of his boot is flopping loose like a dislocated jaw, and he doesn’t need to look up to know that Party Poison is looming over his shoulder. He didn’t hear them approach, but he can feel the ever-present heat of them rolling off their body like a fever.
“Can I see?” Party’s breath stirs the hair near Jet’s ear, and he shivers.
“See what? My shoe?”
But Party’s already pulling at the hem of Jet’s shirt, hiking it up to his armpits without so much as a ‘please.’
Jet is too off-balance to protest, isn’t even sure what he’d say or do if he could gather his composure. They’ve all learned one another’s names by now, but approximately fuckall else, and where the Kobra Kid has been at least sort of friendly in a wry sort of way, Party Poison seems to have more in common with the radiation-touched coyotes that prowl the desert than with a human being. Jet doesn’t turn his back to them, if he can help it. There’s just something too hungry about them, something a little rabid and incomplete.
Now Party’s hot fingertips are on Jet’s back, low, prodding too hard in places that are too soft.
“What—” Jet manages to croak.
Party cuts him off with a quiet whistle. “Fuck me, that’s ugly,” they murmur. The bruises, Jet realizes. They’re looking at the bruises they left on him after their first encounter. The tenderness has mostly gone by now, but Jet’s still startled whenever he manages to catch sight of the yellowing remains of the bruises in a mirror. For a moment, the poking morphs into something like petting, little ghostly touches feathering across the topography of Jet’s back. Then Party is pulling Jet’s shirt back down, adjusting it carefully as if they’re dressing a child.
For the first time since they crept up on him, Jet turns to face Party. They’re still too close, but they don’t step back. “You know, you never apologized to me,” Jet says, riding a sudden wave of boldness. “For kicking the shit out of me for no reason.”
“No,” Party says. One corner of their mouth ticks upward. “I didn’t.” And then they’re walking away, long lazy strides like something accustomed to hunting in tall grass.
When it comes to sleep, Kobra’s always kept a cat’s schedule—he grabs naps when he damn well pleases, sees little difference between day and night, has a talent for getting comfortable just about anywhere. He’s happy to doze off in the passenger’s seat for hours, or fold himself into any weird little corner for a furtive ten-minute snooze while nobody’s looking. Party calls him a contortionist.
There’s something about prowling the night alone that he’s always liked, something sweet and undemanding about the dark and quiet. Maybe it’s just that everything is simpler and softer when Party’s asleep.
It’s one of those nights when they’re between squats, no option but to make themselves as comfortable as possible in the car seats. Nights like this, Party likes to arrange themself across both front seats, back against the driver’s side door and dusty boots against the opposite door. They know Kobra won’t sleep much anyway. Kobra doesn’t dislike these nights. He likes to sit on the hood of the car to watch the junk constellations of satellite corpses whirling overhead, all green and orange and toxic pink through the pollution. They’re always falling, those make-believe stars, so it’s something different every night.
By the time Kobra’s extricated himself from the sprawl of Party’s limbs and staggered out into the night, his usual spot atop the hood of the Trans Am is already occupied.
He still forgets about Jet Star sometimes, though it’s probably been the better part of a month since he started running with them. Kobra doesn’t even remember Jet leaving the car in the night. But there he is, sat atop the hood with his boots on the front bumper, the wild halo of his hair gone purple against the weird night sky.
“Beep beep,” Kobra murmurs, and pushes at Jet’s shoulder until he shuffles over to make room. Jet doesn’t seem especially surprised. Nothing much seems to surprise Jet. That’s maybe why it’s easy to forget him, sometimes. He’s too solid, too watchful, too absorbent—his presence has its own gravity, its own atmosphere. He’s forgettable in the way that you might forget a mountain when you’re standing on it.
The sky's the color of an infection tonight, and Jet’s elbow is sharp in Kobra’s ribs. Kobra doesn’t know when he started leaning into Jet’s side, but Jet doesn’t seem to mind, or even to notice. Kobra allows himself to slouch into Jet a little bit more. There’s a stillness to Jet that doesn’t seem like it should be possible in a living human. Next to him, Kobra feels weirdly small. He’s struck by a strange urge to grab for Jet’s wrist, see if he has a pulse at all.
“Gotta get a new jacket,” says Jet, out of nowhere.
Kobra jumps, just a little. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, this one’s got burn holes in it now. Thanks to you.”
“And it stinks,” Kobra adds. He bends his face towards Jet’s shoulder and sniffs. “Like burnt hair.”
“Sorry.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty rough being trapped in the car with it.” Kobra’s temple is resting on the bony ridge of Jet’s shoulder. His neck is too tired to lift his head back up. The jacket really does stink, but the shoulder beneath it is solid and warm and Kobra can’t bring himself to care.
The world is bright and beautiful. There are spirals in the sun, and they sing holy burning songs, and the boy in the chair would sing back if he knew the words. His palms are up and open to the sky and the boy in the chair knows that he is seen and loved. The sun is scalding him clean and someday he will be bones, white and luminous and perfect. It’s all good, so fucking good.
The eclipse comes on fast, like a heart attack, and it leaves the boy gasping. He’s out of his chair before he can even blink, and the thing blocking out his loving sun has terrible long fingers and a mouth full of sharp little teeth. It’s a dark and whispering monster and it’s tumbling him out of his chair, rolling him in the dust and shucking his flesh from his body like a glove. He screams, cries, begs for the thing to let him go, to give him back his sun, but there are more of the monsters and they have many hands and many terrible mouths and they drag him away, into the darkest coldest place imaginable.
(Days later, when the wavehead is rattling apart and sobbing through withdrawal, the monsters resolve into faces, three strange faces. One of them has hair the color of blinking into the sun, and when they dab aloe on his fried skin their hands are almost hot enough to feel like home.)
They’ve moved into the skeleton of an old diner, the four of them, and it’s strange to have so much room to spread out, even stranger to have some kind of permanence. They’re starting to carve out their own little places, starting to call things their own.
In one little corner of the kitchen, in a space where maybe an industrial refrigerator used to sit, there’s a nest of discarded clothes and old newspapers, arranged in a sort of C-shape around a soft place where a body might lie. There are things tacked to the surrounding walls—magazine clippings featuring dogs and jewelry and green things, the dried husks of cicadas, feathers in unimaginable colors.
One of the cracked vinyl booths has been uprooted from its moorings and relocated behind the counter, wedged up against the wall to create a nook where someone smallish and flexible enough might curl up. There are shelves behind the counter, mostly empty, but in one little easy-to-overlook corner there is a small but growing collection of rocks, arranged neatly by shape and color.
A row of seats poached from the back of an abandoned car sits inside one of the storage closets, dressed up in the tattered remains of old blankets. Amid thickets of disused brooms and mops, bits of bright cloth hang like streamers. It’s a surprisingly quiet space.
The tiny back office has become a riot of paint and marker, floor-to-ceiling hieroglyphics and faces and words splashed like shouts. There’s a real mattress in here, an honest-to-god filthy twin size covered in sinister stains and leaking stuffing in moldy clumps. It was here when they got here, and it went without saying who would claim it.
He’s called Fun Ghoul now, the boy they found in the chair, and the vinyl of the booth squeaks as he tries to curl tighter into himself.
Even now that the waveburn is just silvery spiderwebs hidden beneath new and fading ink and he’s growing into a name that’s just starting to fit, he’s always cold, down to his bones, day and night. It’s not a teeth-chattering sort of cold, not the kind of cold you can describe. It’s an absence, a hunger, a phantom limb. It makes his skin feel too loose, too big, like he’s just sliding around inside of it. Even now, he’s sweating and still freezing.
He’s up and out of the booth before he can stop himself, clambering over the counter and dropping down onto the linoleum with a slap of bare feet.
The office has no door, but there’s still an echo of one there, somehow, a sense that you shouldn’t just walk right in even though you can. Ghoul lingers in the doorframe, waiting. He doesn’t have to knock or even say anything, never does.
“Again?” Party’s voice is a dreamy rasp. They’re more than halfway asleep, but somehow they always know he’s there. Ghoul shrugs, knowing they probably can’t see him. “Well don’t just fuckin’ stand there. Creepy.” Party’s doesn’t seem annoyed. If anything, they sound amused. There’s a rustle in the dark, and Ghoul knows they’ve pulled up a corner of the grubby tarp they curl up under each night, just enough for him to wriggle under.
It’s not always Party that Ghoul climbs into bed with on nights like this. More often, it’s Jet, sometimes Kobra (when he’s in bed at all). Ghoul saves Party’s bed for the worst nights, the very coldest. Party runs hottest of all of them, and it would be too easy to get used to this, to get comfortable in dangerous ways.
Party sleeps with their face smashed into the wall next to their mattress, hands tucked up under their chin like a rodent. They’ve fallen back asleep by the time Ghoul squeezes in next to them, and they don’t react when he tucks his face into the back of their neck and wraps himself around them like a creeping vine. His knees fit in the hollows behind their knees, his hands against their ribs. It’s not comfortable. They’re both too full of edges and angles. Not to mention that for someone so vain, Party is weirdly resistant to even the meager hygiene practices the rest of them maintain, and Ghoul has to make an effort to breathe through his mouth.
But it’s almost enough to warm him all the way through. Almost.
Most times, when it starts to look like rain in the Zones, everything living goes to ground. It’s those green clouds you gotta watch out for, the ones the color of cartoon lizards. Limeade, the radio calls them, but even real limeade isn’t that violently green. The acid rain won’t eat through your skin right away or anything, but it’ll leave you with yellow oozing sores for days and the sulphur stink of it tends to linger.
These, though—these are different. They’re properly gray, bruised with purple, with none of the rotten egg smell that precedes limeade. In his three years in the desert, Jet’s only seen clouds like these one or two other times. These are the real deal. They’re all outside now, and so is every possible receptacle they could find that might hold water. There’s an army of buckets, cups, empty cans, bottles, even plastic bags arranged just so in front of the diner, yawning expectantly up at the darkening sky.
There’s nothing coy about this rain. Between one breath and the next, the sky seems to shatter, and the sheer force of the downpour leaves them all stunned and stupid for a moment. This is rain, real deal rain . It’s more water than any of them have seen in years.
Jet’s face is tipped up, eyes and mouth open, arms out. Somewhere beyond the roar of the rain, he can hear the other three shrieking, howling to the sky. He hears himself howling right along with them. He feels raw and strange, too big for himself, like some kind of wonderful newborn monster.
They’re jumping, all of them, dancing, spinning. They’re unlacing boots, throwing off shirts, falling into the mud and slithering and shrieking.
Jet hauls one of the mud monsters in close, and he can tell by the oil slick black hair plastered to its neck that it’s Ghoul. There’s mud in all the spaces between Ghoul’s crooked teeth when he smiles, and Jet knows that they’re all the same kind of monster right now, maybe they always have been. He slaps two handfuls of mud onto Ghoul’s cheeks and uses one of his fingers to trace something beautiful onto Ghoul’s face, some kind of magic spell, maybe, something for healing. Ghoul lets him do it. He’s all goosebumped, shivering, laughing. Jet’s never heard him laugh like this before.
Rain in the desert is its own kind of madness. Jet wrestles Party to the squelching ground and they shriek with wild coyote laughter as he paints a mud spell right in the center of them, in that dip above their diaphragm—something for soothing, for summoning, something to keep them pinned to this planet.
Kobra is stretched out in the mud like a starfish, limbs windmilling, eyes closed, and Jet paints his forearms, his shins. It’s night magic, desert magic, a spell for soft secret animals that creep around in the dark unseen. It’s for protection, from teeth and fire and the kind of involuntary leg twitch that kicks you awake in the night.
They paint Jet’s back, the three of them, quiet with concentration the whole time. He never gets to see what they paint, but he knows there’s power in it.
You could probably take the paint off a car with it, the hooch they brew at the radio station. They keep it in 5-gallon buckets in a locked cabinet under the sink and periodically feed it yeast and strawberry jelly, as if it’s an animal they’re worried might escape and attack somebody.
It’s a once-in-a-green-moon thing, drinking with the radio station crew. Party just says they go way back with the Doc, but they never elaborate on what way back means. The Doc calls them Fabulous and it makes the four of them feel seen and important and welcome. He never comes out of his booth to hang with them, but he plays their favorite songs, sometimes twice in a row if they really beg. He tells stories about them to the airwaves, big and fantastic stories that are sometimes even true.
Show Pony and Cherri are company enough, anyway. Pony’s a one-person riot in and of themself as it is. They like to play bartender and pace-keeper, ladling the station’s special brew into chipped china mugs and tipping people’s chins up with one polished fingernail if they aren’t going drink-for-drink with everyone else.
Cherri doesn’t partake. Nobody ever asks him to.
Pony floats around the room in bright stockings and calls everyone baby , pets their cheeks and traces their collarbones. It’s hard to tell if they’re drunk—they’re like that sober, too. On these occasions, Ghoul often sits up on the back of the sofa with his feet on the cushions below. Even drinking, there’s only so much touching he can handle. Pony just winks at him from afar and never tries to reach for him.
“You’re short without your skates,” Party is giggling. They’ve got their hands low on Pony’s hips and the two of them are swaying together to Roxy Music.
Ghoul knows for a fact that Party hates Roxy Music, but from the way they’re dancing, you’d never be able to tell.
One of Pony’s hands is in Party’s hair, twisting it around their fingers. “Baby, you gotta wash this once in a while, I’m beggin’ you,” they tut, but they’re leaning forward anyway, pressing their lips to the juncture of Party’s jaw and their neck. Party turns their head and pecks the end of Pony’s nose, and they both dissolve into hysterical laughter.
This is how these nights always go. Maybe it’s something about the low light in the little station, the sick-sweet homemade hooch, the hazy sense that, at least for the moment, they’re all safe. It makes Party warm and strange, softens the worst of their edges and turns them into an octopus. One moment, they’re hanging around Cherri’s neck, calling him sugar , pushing their nose into his ear. Then they’re in Jet’s lap, petting his eyebrows with their thumbs, kissing his chin. They even swoop down to drop a sloppy smooch onto Kobra’s forehead at one point. No one seems to find this especially off-putting—Cherri just smiles bashfully under the attention; Jet huffs one of his rare laughs and pushes his forehead gently into Party’s for just a second; Kobra reaches up and squishes Party’s face in his hands so they look like a fish.
Ghoul sits up on the back of the couch and watches, scarred palms itching.
When Show Pony stoops to collect Ghoul’s mug for a refill, he finds himself seizing them by the collar of their stained T-shirt and dragging them in. Before he can think better of it, he brushes his lips to the corner of their mouth before releasing them. They blink at him.
“Thanks,” he says. “For the booze.”
Then Pony is grinning broadly, reaching out to just barely brush the rough skin of Ghoul’s forearm with their fingertips. “Anytime, baby, you know that.” They dance away to refill Ghoul’s cup.
Ghoul glances at Party. They’re on the other side of the room, flipping through a milk crate of records and bopping their head to the music. Ghoul stuffs his hands into his jeans pockets.
(That night, just before they all stagger back to the diner, Cherri takes Ghoul’s hand, just for a moment, as if to shake it. But he just holds it, loosely, thumb playing along Ghoul’s mangled knuckles like a xylophone. In the moonlight, their hands both glitter with the same silvery atlas of scars.)
Party Poison didn’t bring much from the city with them when they ran, just the baby brother they barely knew and the scream that they’d kept locked behind their teeth for twelve years. Somewhere in Battery City, there might be a pale room in a pale house where maybe the things they left behind are still waiting: every shhh, every quick-fix, a name that itched like a cheap sweater. But they’re never going back for any of it.
In the City, to be too anything makes you a pimple on the face of perfection, and there are certain types of people who are just too everything. These days, Party wears all their toos like medals—too loud, too strange, too close, too wild, too much.
Their brother has his own toos, ones he keeps hidden in quiet secret places. It’s taken them years to learn the language of each other, the two of them, and sometimes things still get fucked in translation.
The husk of a long-empty paper towel dispenser is spinning wildly on the floor, and Kobra’s scrunched himself into a ball under the bathroom sink. “Don’t,” he’s muttering, shaking his head, over and over. His hands are in his hair and he’s pulling too hard, as if he’s trying to tug the top of his head right off. “Don’t. Don’t.”
Party is down there on the filthy tile with him, sitting back on their heels with their hands sandwiched between their calves and thighs so they won’t reach out. Their hip aches like a sonuvabitch where it impacted the paper towel dispenser, but they shove the pain away, put it in a box for later. “I won’t,” they assure Kobra. “Look, no hands. I won’t touch.” They want to touch. They want to grab Kobra’s face in their two hot hands and stare at him until one of them blinks first. They want to hold his hands. They want to clutch him close, squeeze the shakes out of him, turn him back into the Kobra they know. They want to hit him for shoving them into the wall when they tried.
They’re never sure what precipitates moments like this one, what causes Kobra to crumble into a weird frantic animal they don’t recognize. Kobra says he doesn’t know, either. It just happens. He told them once that it’s like he’s driving a million miles an hour and the brake is too far away.
Kobra’s going don’t , and sorry sorry sorry, and Party keeps going it’s okay it’s okay but it isn’t, not really.
They’ve never seen anything so terribly delicate, any of them.
The kid is dead-asleep on the sofa in the radio station, swaddled in a T-shirt that, judging from the size, likely belongs to Cherri. They’ve got enormous hair and the tiniest little fingers, curled into impossibly small fists.
“How, uh. How old is it?” Ghoul asks, sliding Pony a dubious look. They’re all standing in a clump, the four of them, as far from the sofa as they can get.
Pony, leaning against the doorframe, gives him a whack on the shoulder with the magazine they’ve been perusing. “The kid’s not an it, they’re a—mmm, well, not sure actually. They don’t do a lot of words yet, I don’t think. Too little.” They shrug. “Anyway, I don’t know shit about kids so I have no idea how old. They aren’t in diapers, so there’s that.”
“Just for a week. ‘Til the heat on me dies down. Bring the kid back here when it’s safe.” The Doc is halfway out of his booth, wheelchair filling the doorway. He’s left a long track on—“Shine on You Crazy Diamond”—and there’s something inescapable and too real about his presence in the room.
“‘When it’s safe,’” Kobra snorts. “When the fuck is it ever safe?”
But Party’s breaking away from the huddle, creeping toward the couch with twitching fingers and stiff shoulders. It’s the same posture they assume when watching Drac patrols pass by. They bend down low over the couch, face inches from the kid’s, and they’re silent for a long, long time.
One of their hands comes up, and they brush their index finger gently down the length of the kid’s little nose. The kid snuffles in their sleep, but doesn’t move.
“Soft,” Party murmurs, and though they’re whispering, the word seems loud enough to hear from outer space.