Shattered Ladder 1-6

Chapter 6: An Old Face

Moving. The world was rocking back and forth, a gentle steady motion that felt like being in a cradle, something this life had never given him. Being held.

His eyes were heavy, too heavy to open, the world too hazy for him to even think. a dream-thing floating in his head, but it was there. Arms around him, strong and solid but not rough like the angry grabbing hands of the scrappers in the village. No squeezing, no bruising grip born from a life of hard work and casual meanness. 

Just strength. 

A quiet strength that held him secure against a firm chest.

Who?

Something cut through the fog in his head; a smell filling his noise and pushing so much else out. No rot to it, the stench of chems or death from the waste nowhere near it. 

Clean, like Gram’s good herbs. Smells expensive.

The strangest thing, though, was the quiet inside him. The shakes were gone. The gnawing hungry emptiness in his soul, the constant aching void that he fought every second of every day with his breath, wasn’t screaming anymore.

It was just still.

That’s wrong.

A warm stillness where he’d been fighting a freezing cold fight his entire life. It was wrong, unnatural, more frightening than the pain he was used to. Fire wit’ no wood.

The rocking, the smell, it pulled something loose in his head, a memory falling out not in pictures but in feelings. Warmth. The crunch of waste-dirt under smaller feet. The steady tap… tap… tap of a cane.

Gram.

The junk-hills were mountains then, towering cliffs of rust and twisted metal that looked even taller than they were back when he was six. His own hand was in Gram’s, her skin wrinkled and dry like old canvas, but her grip was sure. Her other held her cane, the thing a half-jagged piece of white pipe wrapped in dirty cloth.

The thing made a steady rhythm against the ground, its weight keeping her upright as it sounded off on the dirt. Tap… tap… tap.

Good sound.

Ken remembered trying to use it as a spear once, pretending he was a warrior as he waved the pointy end around. Gram had chased him around with it for a good few minutes when she’d caught him. Heh.

“Dis de one, Kenny-boy.” Her voice was the valley’s voice—flattened, thick and stretching some words odd, but it was the only one that didn’t sound like rocks grinding together. Her finger, bent and knobbled, pointed at something in the dirt. “B’ot-root. Good for breath.” She smiled back at him, mouth yellowed as the sun. “Good for teeth.”

Brown eyes twisted up, Ken squinting down at the little brown lump pushing its way out of the grit. Ugly It looked like a dead thing, all wrinkled and gross. “I… uh… don’ like it.”

“Not for eatin’, Ken-boy. Is medicine.” The old woman poked at the plant with her cane, the plastic bit of pipe sounding off as it thunked against the lumpy root. “Chest get tight, dis make it loose. You remember.”

Ken nodded, the little boy making jerky movements as a hand went up to his chest, already feeling tight from the walk. The air always felt thick here, and every breath was already work, every step cost something. “Gram… uh… tired…” He wheezed out again, almost stumbling on a patch of dirt as he tried to keep up. 

“…Gram…” Ken’s breath puffed out in short gasps, familiar tightness squeezing at his chest like a fist. “…hurts.”

Always hurts.

His Gram made a noise as she stopped walking, the old lady leaning heavy on her cane as she turned to look at him. Bright eyes, brown just like his, stared back at him through a face deep with layered wrinkles, soft and kind just for him. “Come here, Kenshi.”

The six year old shuffled over, feet dragging in the waste-dirt. She reached out as he neared her, hand coming to a rest on his chest right over his heart. The palm was warm, rough from years of digging in the dirt, but still gentle.

“Breathe wit’ me, boy. In… slow. Hold. Out… slower.”

In-out. In-out.

Her hand lowered from his chest and tightened around his small, grasping fingers. “Breathe, Kenny-boy. Slow. Like I show you.” Gram waited, her dark eyes patient, watching him as he stared back at her through the haze. “Good boy. See? Not so hard.” 

She gestured with her cane toward a shimmer of green-gray growing in the shadow of a massive half-buried engine block. “Dat one… gray-fur moss. Good friend. Stops the bleedin’.”

Gram.

The feel of the memory dissolved, Gram’s face and voice going with the warmth of the sun as it all faded, the sound of her cane turning into something else. Shhhh-pop… shhhh-pop. 

What?

Ken’s eyes fluttered open, still heavy, but not so much that he wasn’t used to it. I… The dream-feeling shattered, breath stolen right out of his chest as he felt his lungs tighten up all over again. Where-

Eyes went wide as he stared up, breath gone but now for a different reason completely.

What? The ceiling…

It wasn’t scrap.

No jagged rusted metal anywhere to be seen, not the patched-up grime-stained canvas of the communal shack either. 

Wood. 

The real thing; dark, smooth, polished wood that seemed to glow, surface reflecting soft warm light that came from a lamp he didn’t know. One piece… He’d never seen a ceiling that was all one piece before, a single unbroken surface without gaps or holes or stains.

His nose twitched, distracting him for a second as that herby smell pricked at his nostrils.

It was stronger now, and Ken could pick out a few things he knew; the sharp almost spicy scent of ginger-root, that deep earthy smell of dried moss, but dozens of others were strange and new, weaving together into something that was a world away from the decay he’d breathed his whole life.

The air didn’t even taste like dust and metal. Just air. Clean and warm and still.

How?

Ken blinked again as he realized he was lying on something soft. Impossibly soft. A blanket, thick and heavy and warm, he ran his hand (his steady, shaking-free hand) over the surface, woven texture foreign under his fingertips. Soft. Not rough. No patches. Underneath was a mattress that didn’t have lumps or sharp bits of forgotten scrap poking through.

Bare toes curled atop the blanket and another shock went through him. Clean. They were clean, no dirt, no blood. Even the black chemical goo from the valley was gone; his feet, his legs, his hands scrubbed clean, skin a shade lighter than he was used to seeing it.

Who cleaned me?

Even the clothes were different. Rough, sure, but in a new way. Unworn. It may have just been a siimple dark shirt, but it actually fit, instead of hanging off him like a tent.

Shhhh-pop… shhhh-pop.

A quiet peaceful bubbling came from somewhere around him, the sound clearly of something cooking. Sound of life.

Where am I?

All of his thoughts were just confusion back-to-back, until a spike of fear shot right through his gut pushing that to second-place. Did they catch me? He sat up fast, his whole body protesting with deep ache from the chase, muscles screaming at him for moving too quick. Is this the chief’s shack?

But that made no sense for a hundred reasons, at least. The biggest one was that the chief’s shack was all rough salvage and patched metal, like the rest of the village. The only difference was it was a lot bigger, and had more things inside it with the head’s family having first right to all salvage. 

Not the village.

His heart slammed in his chest again, that familiar thump-thump-thump loud enough he could hear it clear as day. The breathing exercises, he had to do the breathing exercises. In-out. In-out. But his chest wasn’t tight, it wasn’t fighting him for every gulp of air.

Th-that’s wrong.

The shakes weren’t there either. Hands were too steady, his legs not vibrating with exhaustion and fear. The hungry empty thing that lived in his chest, always gnawing, always eating at him from the inside…

It was quiet.

Fire wit’ no wood.

But where was the fire? Where was the hunger? The thing that Gram taught him to feed slow or it would eat him?

What did they do to me?

Ken’s head turned, wide eyes scanning the room as he tried to understand, trying to piece together what could have happened to him after the dark scrap-cave in the wastes.

Looking around didn’t seem to help much, the entire place looking like nothing he had ever seen before. For one, the walls were lined with shelves, all the same dark polished wood as the ceiling. 

Not a single piece of scrap metal or salvage anywhere, which was… weird.

On the shelves were hundreds of jars, his eyes going even wider as he realized they were actual jars. Glass… how? Nobody had glass, not anything still together. It was all just shards and sand and dust, all of it broken down over who knows how many years in the wastes.

But this was the real thing, glass jars all sealed and labeled in a different language, one he couldn’t read. Each of the jars were packed full of different things; some dried leaves, strange-colored powders, twisted roots floating in clear liquids that caught the light and threw it back.

So many.

Bundles of dried herbs hung from the ceiling beams, far more than he’d ever seen in one place, even in Gram’s shack when she was still around to collect them. This was like her little healing corner but bigger. Way bigger.

He turned his head again and realized the bubbling sound was coming from a simple black kettle over a small fire on top of what looked like a stone stove. But none of that was important.

No, what was important was what was in front of the stove.

Standing over the kettle, his back turned, was a man.

Small. A small man.

Not big and scary like the chief or Jax, no strength to announce and brag over with thick muscle and heavy hands, this man wasn’t much taller than him for one.

From the back, his shoulders were round over a broad back, weight to the man’s body hidden under a simple brown tunic. He was humming something quiet and strange, a melody Ken didn’t know as he adjusted the kettle and moved over to another pot, stirring that slowly with a wooden spoon, movements slow and careful. 

“Who…” The word slipped out of his lips before he could stop it.

Just like that, the old man stopped humming as both he and Ken froze. 

The silence in the room lasted a few seconds with only the steaming puffs of the kettle breaking it, until the man at the stove started moving again. Wiping his hands with a cloth, he set the spoon down on the edge of the stove and turned around, finally facing Ken.

His face was round. Friendly. That was the word that jumped into Ken’s head before he could stop it, even though friendly was dangerous, even though friendly people usually wanted something. Long white hair fell past his shoulders, an even longer white beard reaching past his chest, it was clear the man was up there in years. Old as Gram was.

Maybe older, even.

Still, just like Gram, the man had a gentle face layered deep and heavy with wrinkles crinkling it at the corners, like he smiled a lot.

But his eyes…

His eyes were what made Ken sit up.

They weren’t brown or black or any color he knew. 

No, these were purple. 

A bright impossible color that seemed to glow with its own light the longer Ken stared at the man. Is that real? He’d never seen a color like that on a person, not even in the strange faded picture-books he’d sometimes found in the wastes.

…how does he have purple eyes?

The man smiled, and Ken almost forgot the color of the eyes as he found himself looking at a real smile, kind and clean with a mouthful of white teeth. It was something unimaginably different than the mean yellowed jagged-toothed grins he was used to. This was warm and real, reaching all the way to those impossible eyes.

Too good to be true.

Foreign.

“Hello boy, I am Wei.” His voice was smooth, not the flat clipped guttural junk-talk of the valley, with a weird gentle rhythm, up and down like a song. He gave a small nod of his head as he spoke, like Ken was somebody worth being polite to. 

“You sleep well, yes?”