Shattered Ladder 1-2

Chapter 2: Some Kind Scraps

 That Wall. Always the Wall.

Ken kept staring at the impossible black line cutting his world in half, a silent judgment sitting on the horizon. Wind picked up with that low mournful sound it always made when it moved through the scrap-fields, kicking up dust that wasn’t really dust at all. Fine glittering powder of rust and glass and metal shavings worn down over who knows how long, the stuff managed to get into everything.

Everything.

It stung his eyes, and settled on his skin so thick that almost no amount of washing ever got it all off. Not that we got much water for washing anyway.

Cold seeped through the thin fabric of his oversized green shirt, some dead person’s cast-off that’d lived a whole other life before ending up on his back. Too big in the shoulders, too long in the arms, it went all the way down to his knees too; more robe than shirt.

Even still, clothes were clothes.

His hand rose up to the side of his head, fingers brushing the stiff patch of dried blood above his eye. It still pulsed, throbbing steady as a heartbeat, the dull ache of it giving him something to focus on. Pain you knew was better than pain you didn’t.

I hate this place.

The thought came back cold and flat. No heat in it, the anger of when Gram was still around to hear him complain gone with her. It was a fact now, simple and solid as the waste-dirt under his feet.

I hate this life.

More than that, he hated the look of it.

The endless gray and brown and copper-red of rust, nothing bright or clean or alive outside the Valley, just an endless landscape of junk. He hated the feel of it too; a constant hunger in his belly and the deeper gnawing hunger that lived in his chest just above that, the one that always got worse just before the shakes would start up and leave him… useless.

He spat on the ground, saliva flecked with blood as his tongue scraped at his raw gums.

Weak.

The smell of it was worse though, a permanent near-solid stink that clung to everything and he did mean everything. At least hundreds of years of death, decay and damp metal that crept up on you like rust-rats, a sick fog that got into your clothes, your hair, your breath.

It lived in his gut, more often than not, and he could only be happy he rarely had anything else in there. If he had more to eat… well, he might have thrown up more often than he already did.

His head pulsed harder, the whole world tilting sideways for a second as everything went dizzy and blurry and…

Ken blinked slow, fingers tracing the cut on his head again. Head wounds always looked worse than they were… right?

Maybe, but it didn’t explain why he could smell fresh-cut grass.

The same fresh-cut grass on his last hot summer day, the smell so clean and fresh it hurt to remember. The feel of his chest clamping shut came next, throat raw, and a fist of panic squeezing his lungs till they felt like burning paper.

The taste of iron and fear flooded his mouth as he fought for one useless breath.

He remembered the last thoughts in his head, the same last thoughts that did nothing but tell him what he already knew.

Can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t—

Then nothing. Fifteen years of a different life, a different world, just gone.

Wiped clean in suffocating darkness.

Waaaah!

Light so bright it was a physical blow, air so cold it burned, screaming from a throat he didn’t know, lungs from a different smaller throat; a brand-new baby, helpless and crying in a world he didn’t know and didn’t want to know.

Ken’s focus snapped back hard, breath catching in his throat as he forced out a gasp. Hand on his chest, gripping tight, he pulled in a quick breath. S-stop it. He scoffed on the inside, shaking his head slow.

Did it make sense?

‘Course not.

But twelve years of waking up every day in this garbage-heap of a world made him look stupid for thinking of this as a dream, or fake, or anything else but what it was.

Real.

A brief cold spike of gratitude hit him hard, Ken thankful that the rest of his old life stayed blurry and almost impossible to remember, nothing much to drag back with him to this hell. Knowing what he’d lost? Remembering it clearly, down to names and faces and feelings?

That would have made all this, every single terrible second of it, so much worse. Almost as bad as knowing this new body, his twelve-year-old one, was weaker than what he’d lost.

Bad meat gets worse meat.

Ken pushed the memories down, buried them under the cold hard weight of now. Thinking about it was a waste of energy, a waste of breath.

Just like thinking about his parents.

Gram had told him about them once, her voice quiet and sad as she stitched patches onto his pants by lamplight. Mother died giving birth to him, body too weak for the strain.

Another weak one.

And his father; a decent warrior, and a better hunter according to Gram, took one look at his newborn son and walked away. Not a word left his lips as he turned his back on the village and disappeared into the endless mountains of scrap.

Even good meat couldn’t stand bad meat.

Sparkless,

Gram had said about his father. Not one of the ones blessed with the power that made Chief chief, but still strong anyway.

Good man. Good meat.

Ken figured that was the only reason the village still bothered feeding him, that thin thread of debt to a dead hunter’s memory.

Fragile thread, though.

He didn’t want to think about that, about what it meant that the man who’d helped make him in this new life hadn’t wanted to stick around to see what came out. Gram told him he looked just like him, though, dark skin and curly hair, eyes almost as big, not like Gram. Not like most of the clan either.

He wasn’t pale and his hair wasn’t straight either. He didn’t like thinking about that though. He already had plenty of reasons to feel like an outsider, no need to dig for new ones.

The sky started shifting, that weak smear of light they called sun in this gray sky finally dipping behind the Wall’s impossible bulk. The world didn’t go dark, just a deeper gray, a color like old ash falling from the sky. Junk-hills turned into monsters when the light changed, long grasping shadows making everything look hungry.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

The distant sound of metal on metal came far from the village, carried by the wind. Someone doing the heavy-work, prolly fixing tools or weapons.

Bare feet pressed into the ground, the ancient trash ground down to powder, mixed with real dirt till you couldn’t tell which was which anymore. Ken started the walk back, head down, trying to make the fresh cut on his forehead less obvious. He didn’t have to worry about checking his way. The path may have wound through the worst parts of the waste-field, treacherous and narrow but he knew every step by heart.

The sludge river moved slow and thick, nothing growing beside the purple-pink poison because what even could? There was a reason the village was built here and why so many other villages tried to take the same lands. The layered goop of the iridescent surface that ran around the village did more than just shimmer.

It promised a slow death if you were stupid enough to touch it, any beasts big enough to cause trouble also smart enough to stay well enough away from it. Bubbles broke the surface every few seconds, popping up with gas that made your eyes water even a good distance away.

Pretty colors, though.

To his right, the metal forest rustled in the wind, wire-trees dancing back and forth.

They weren’t real trees, just old power towers stripped down to skeleton frames, their branches heavy with plastic bags that whispered when air moved through them.

Not like anybody knows what power lines are.

And he definitely couldn’t explain it to anyone either.

Can’t explain how I know, and it’s not like they’d believe me in the first place.

He didn’t even really get how nobody knew what cars or electricity or power lines were if all the old stuff was still…

around

, but something had to have gone wrong, some crazy disaster or mess that brought the world to being like this.

Maybe I’m in the future.

Gram always did use to say the wire-trees were the ghosts of the old world, trying to tell stories nobody remembered how to understand anymore.

A stupid superstition, but he still didn’t like walking past them at night.

Village sounds got louder as he got closer. A clang-clang-clang of hammers, murmur of voices mixing together, sharp greasy smell of roasted rat-meat cutting through the ever-present stink of smoke and human waste. Eight hundred people, maybe less, tiny island of life floating in an ocean of decay.

Everything scavenged. Everything salvaged. Everything used.

The outer wall looked like a puzzle made by someone who’d lost half the pieces, then tried to fill the gaps with whatever they could find. Rusted car frames, dented shipping containers, sheets of corrugated metal all lashed together with thick cable. Ten feet high in some places, barely six in others where they’d run out of good materials.

The inside wasn’t much to look at either, no matter how hard some in the village tried. Shacks built from aircraft fuselage, homes with walls of stacked tires packed with dirt, roofs made from overlapping polymer sheets or airplane wings. Clotheslines strung between bent pipes, flapping with garments stitched together from truck tarps and whatever durable fabric turned up in the scrap-piles.

His own green shirt and ratty shorts came from the same source, a long dead world’s hand-me-downs.

His stomach complained, low and hungry. At least they had nature for food, ugly and weird as it was. Four-winged stringy birds and oversized rats with two heads were better than trying to eat the trash itself.

Ken slipped through a narrow gap in the wall, the world becoming smaller, louder, more crowded. The weight of dozens of eyes hit him the moment he stepped inside, a physical pressure on his skin that made his shoulders hunch.

There he is.

Poor boy.

Open mouth to feed.

He didn’t need to hear the words to know what they were thinking. Their faces told it all, from the way their eyes moved over him and past him all at once. Pity from the older women, soft sad looks that made him feel smaller. Annoyance from the hunters and scrappers, hard stares that reminded him of what he was and who he was.

Ken did as he always did and kept his eyes on the ground, walking his way through the narrow pathways between shacks, mud from the cleared ground after heavy rains sticking to his bare feet.

He walked until something hit his ears, the sound he was looking for.

Click-clack-click-clack-click.

Sora’s fingers moved through the stripped cables, weaving them into something useful. Always making something from nothing, the old woman was, and she was good at it too. She sat on her three-legged stool outside her hut, back bent from years of close work but hands still steady.

Steadier than mine.

Her face was a roadmap of deep wrinkles, deeper than Gram’s had been but her eyes stayed sharp. Sharp enough to spot the fresh cut on his head the moment she looked up.

“I… I c-couldn’t find any blotroot, S-Sora,” the words caught in his throat, each one stumbling over each other trying to get out.

Stupid voice.

By the time Ken could even describe the way he hated how it made him sound weaker than he was, he’d already be coughing for air again.

She didn’t answer right away, lips pressed tight into that thin line they always made when she was thinking hard thoughts. The old lady just stared at his wound with those bright eyes that saw too much.

“Joric’s work?” Her voice wasn’t as weary or old-sounding as she looked, more scratchy and rough, like she was gasping for air too. Sora was fine, though, or as fine as somebody who’d been breathing in tin-dust her whole life could be. Wasn’t really a question, though.

No, he knew Sora’s questions.

Ken nodded, small movement, barely there. Eyes stayed on the waste-dirt at his feet. “…yes, ma’am.”

“Tsk.” A sound of disapproval coughed out from the back of her throat, sharp and disgusted. “Thin metal, that one. All noise, no edge.” Her weathered hand reached into the leather pouch at her belt, fingers finding what they were looking for without looking. With a grunt, Old Sora pulled out a lumpy root, the dark orange thing still warm from her cook-fire. “Clean the cut. Don’t want rust-rot.”

Thank god for—

A shadow fell over them both, Ken freezing up on the inside and the outside. A big shadow, as thick and dark as the man it belonged to was wiry and pale.

“Jax-boy, move out my sun.”

The scrapper stood there with a face blank as stone; no spark in him, but strong enough to hoist a good six or seven sheets of dented metal all balanced on once shoulder. He didn’t bother to move, barely even acting lik he heard the words as his eyes flicked between Sora and Ken and back again.

“Still feedin’ that ghost, Sora-baa?” Jax’s voice was a rock. More specifically, it was gravel grinding against gravel, a low rumble that carried threat like it was his own body weight. The words might have been aimed at her, but they all knew the insult was meant for Ken, another rock thrown his way with only his words. “Boy eats. Don’t work. Bad math. Bad meat.”

Ken flinched hard, whole body jerking back before he could stop it. He couldn’t help it, even as his hand hesitated halfway to the root in Sora’s palm.

True, though.

Gritting his teeth, Ken reached out and took the root anyway, fingers shaking just enough to make it obvious. “…thank you.”

“Ain’t no need to thank old Sora, boy,” her voice went softer, just a fraction, but her eyes stayed hard on Jax, open disapproval written all over her weathered face.

“You see plants like your gram did. Good eye.” The old woman paused, a sigh leaving her that carried years of watching things go wrong. “Pity your hands shake too much to do the work.”

Another fresh sting to his gut, sharp as the cut on his forehead. Not one he could deny thougj, not as he nodded again, head bobbing up and down with no more words to add.

Time to go.

Ken moved away quick before Jax could add more rocks to the pile, retreating toward the dim crowded space of the communal shack. His corner waited, a worn lumpy mattress that was his only piece of property in the whole world. Home sweet home.

Ken collapsed onto it, springs creaking under his weight, as the village sounds became a dull meaningless roar outside the thin walls. Cooking fires, voices, babies crying, metal clanging on metal. Always something breaking. Always something needed fixing.

Barely (and rarely) cleaned teeth gnawed on the root Sora had given him, a starchy, bitter taste filling his mouth familiar as hunger.

Better than nothing.

Always better than nothing.

Ghost.

The word just kept echoing in his head, bouncing around like broken glass in a tin can.

Prolly true, though.

Ghosts didn’t do real work. Ghosts just floated around, taking up space, eating food meant for the living.

Bad meat.

That one hurt worse.

The root was knobby, smelling thick and heavy and damp. Like sour earth mixed with something else. Same smell as Gram’s poultices, the ones she always used to mash up for his scrapes and cuts.

Good medicine.

Ken grit his teeth and smeared the wet stringy flesh over the cut above his eye, careful not to press too hard.

Sssss.

Hard or not, it didn’t matter much as a grunt spilled out of him anyway.

Clean sharp fire spread across the wound, sting pulling another sound from him; a tight hiss from between his teeth. But underneath the pain, angry heat started fading. Familiar cooling spread under his skin, just like when Gram used to tend his hurts.

She knew things, the same things she’d help him understand.

He didn’t understand these people, though. He saw them use the Spark every day, sure. He watched hunters make rebar-made spear-tips glow dull red just by staring at them hard enough. He’d even seen the chief lift fallen support beams that shoulda crushed him flat.

Old man’s got more strength than three good workers.

The power was real, as real as anything else. Something that lived inside some people who were just better than the rest, a fire on the inside made them more than just meat and bone.

It was impressive, no doubt, every time he saw them use that Spark. But their stories, the way they explained it all, felt so… weird. So

small

.

Ken looked through the crack in the shack’s wall, one eye pulled to that impossible perfect line of black cutting the horizon in half. A wall that stretched forever, smooth as still water but solid as stone. Edge of the world, villagers called it. Divine Hand holding them safe.

Bullshit.

It didn’t make sense. None of it made any sense and he wasn’t gonna try to lie to himself about that.

His mind flashed to last week, that t-shirt half-buried in a trash heap near the sludge river. Bright blue, faded but still cheerful, cartoon bird on the front with words he could read perfect:

Froot Loops.

How could a world with Froot Loops have a magic wall at the edge of everything? How could a place with scavenged tech, scraps that could only be made with science and factories and television, also have men who made metal glow with their minds?

Oil and water.

It just didn’t mix, couldn’t mix, but here they were anyway. Everything mashed together in this garbage-heap world that made no damn sense.

Unless…

Something wrong twisted in his stomach, another old fear popping back up, another thought he didn’t like forcing its way in.

What if they’re right?

What if after twelve years of living in this impossible place, he was the one going crazy? What if walls that blotted out the gray sky were just…

walls

? What if the

Spark

was just how things worked, and he was the broken one for questioning it?

What if I’m wrong?

The idea that this insane, contradictory place was the only truth, and his memories of blue skies and normal physics were just… bad meat thinking bad thoughts.

That was scarier than anything.

The doubt felt heavy, real, like another weight pressing down on his chest. After twelve years, impossible was starting to feel normal. The logic of his old world was fading, worn down by daily grinding reality of this one.

Stop it.

He pushed the thought away, doing his best to fight the shakes, the shudders, jaws working on the root in the silent, lonely dark. The waste-dirt floor was cold under him, springs in the mattress poking through thin fabric as the sounds of the village; the crying, the clanging, the combat forced its way in through the thin-metal walls.

Don’t think about it.

Thinking about it was a waste of energy, a waste of breath. Just like thinking about a dad who didn’t want him, or Gram who was gone like his mom, or any of the other holes inside that never stopped hurting.

Still here, though.

Still breathing. Still alive.

That had to be enough.