Pretty waited three nights after Brat disappeared from the gaol. On the fourth, the hunger pains were so bad that they woke her up. She must not have been sleeping long, because there were still tears on her fad in her hair. The rats hadn’t yet smelled the moisture and e to lick it off.

  The child-coffin-sized brick chamber the twins called home was alitch bck—it was so far underground not even the ghostlight could pee—but Pretty could see fi was bright light her eyes had trouble with. She hoped it was night out.

  Pretty didn’t want to go aboveground. The Closes weren’t safe, but they were safer, and they were twice as safe if you were two, Brat always said. There were narrow shafts where you could scamper if bigger, meaner kids rownups came after you, and plenty of pces to pop out onto the street, run around to another hole, then slip bae without being followed. If you had a good spot tucked away from drafts like Pretty and Brat did, then the Closes were a cozy haven in the winter and a cool retreat in the swelteria summers.

  But there wasn’t no food down there. She couldn’t drink rat blood like Brat did, and she didn’t know how to sip medie off people and animals even though her twin had tried over and ain to teach her.

  She had promised to hole up and wait for Brat, and Brat had promised to e back with food. She loved her twin and very nearly worshipped that endless swaggering optimism. But even she knew you couldn’t trust a word Brat said.

  That was why Pretty had been g. Brat wasn’t ing back. The two of them had never been apart so long. Their cramped little home felt empty with only owin in it.

  Pretty took off her headscarf, bed her long bck curls with her fingers, thehe scarf on more ly. It roper headscarf, like the women and girls in the low streets wore. Brat had snatched it for her, supposedly off a mert cart rolling up River Street from the docks, but more likely, given the fine hairs that had been caught in the knht off some girl’s head while her back was turhe fabric was greasy and threadbare, but it stopped the rats from chewing her hair like they did her twin’s, and it had e from Brat trying to make her happy, so that made it beautiful.

  Her dress there wasn’t much she could do about. It was getting short in the skirt, but not short enough yet that she had to find some trousers gings to go beh.

  She crouched and made her way out of the chamber, down the angled shaft to the three-way. The ter oopped in the middle at a cave-in. The righthand shaft went to a chamber like hers and Brat’s, but the boy who had been living in there had coughed himself to death st winter about halfway dowunnel. Probably crawling for the Seep. Cats and close-rats went instinctively for water when they died. Every year, rag-covered bodies had to be drug away from the Seep or a fell miasma would collect there and kill a bunch more close-rats.

  She climbed down the rusty metal staples driven into the Clutch, a round room with an arched doorway half-buried by fallen bricks and washed-in mud from a tury of flood seasons. That was their first line of defense from the adults who used the Closes. Most of them wouldn’t ce crawling through that pinch point on their hands and knees, and if they were crazy enough to try it, bricks could be hurled down on their heads from the shafts above.

  There weren’t a lot of adults in the Closes anyway. By the time they’d grown, most of the lost children calling the Siu al underground home had found something on the surface world that kept them from ing back. Hangman’s nooses, wh houses, and thug work were the most on. You had to be och out for the adults who remained behind. Excepting the skeletal addicts, who could barely be bothered to move except to sniff out their fix, the grownups in the Closes were dangerous.

  Pretty avoided them by avoiding the Windings, the long maze of switchbacks and gap-toothed doorways that used to be the buildings lining the main promenade of Old Siu al. Anyone could hide in those, but most often it was big anyones.

  Brat always took the Windings because they were a more direct route to the market. But Brat could outrun anybody; Pretty couldn’t. She took the longer way around, through a crumbling tunnelway to a big, arched room that the close-rats called the Echoes. A pictures of unknown gods and demons covered the peaked ceilings high overhead, boung back every footstep and word in endless mog voices. The adults in the Closes never went that way, and even most of the kids shu, because of the fearsome creatures depicted on the crumbling pster.

  From the Echoes, it was a long crawl beh a bath house, a b house, and a dead temperer—who only really worked in the month before the ival of the Dead, but whose business stank of corpses that were id by year-round—then through a hole in wood skirting and down an alley.

  Pretty stopped behind a broken, turned-on, watg the market. It was loud out there, and the breeze raised goosebumps on her skin. She shivered. People swarmed everywhere, real folks in real clothing.

  Folks with food. They were buying it from bakers eon sellers gling over produce from farmers e in from outside Siu al. Her mouth watered and her head went giddy for a sed. She caught hold of the broken wagon axle before she fell and rubbed her face hard to try to wake up. Her stomach cramped painfully, punishing her for wanting what she couldn’t have.

  No oiced the dirty fader the dirty headscarf. All night long, she watched and prayed to the orant that somebody passing by would drop a scrap. She’d have to stay alert and ru happened. Lots of close-rats would be watg for the same thing. If only she’d been faster st time, she would’ve gotten to that loaf of brown bread Brat had thrown her way.

  Pretty gulped. She would have to be braver, too. It wasn’t just speed that had lost her their meal that night.

  She trembled from head to toe whehought about running out there with all those grown above folks. An above kid might push you in the mud and spit on you or throw a rock at your head, but above-adults were worse. Much, much worse.

  Folks came ahroughout the night, but most of them kept their eyes and hands securely on their food.

  Near dawn, a drunken dockworker tripped and dropped the roasted pigeon carcass he’d been gnawing on. Finally, her ce had e!

  But Pretty couldn’t move. She shook, and her heart raced. Her fingers cramped around the broken wagon lever, though she wasn’t sure whether she was trying to pull herself out into the street, hold herself where she was, or just stay standing upright.

  A stray dog sprinted out into the street and snatched the carcass. Immediately, a howling chorus of close-rats burst from an unseen bolt hole across the street and chased after the mutt, flinging stones and stabbing it with sticks. They were going to get the bird or they were going to get the dog, but one way or ahey would eat.

  Shivering and sweating, Pretty dropped back against the wagon. She erversely gd she hadn’t made it out there, but now what was she going to do? She had to eat. Her whole body felt like a hollow bone she was so hungry.

  Tears of frustration welled up in her eyes. Why was she always so scared? Why couldn’t Brat have kept this oh in their whole lives and e back? Why didn’t the orant ever send Pretty some invisible medie, like he sent Brat?

  Pretty hugged her empty, ag middle, blinking hard and trying not to cry like she would in their safe little home chamber. She was so exhausted that if she fell to sobbing, she might end up dozing right where she was, and you never wao doze on the low streets.

  The ghost city and its ghost river were getting thin, fading as the bck sky caught the early rays from the rising sun. Soon she’d have to take off bato the Closes et terrible burned.

  The st stragglers and teers were making their way through the carts and stalls—riverboat hands just finished unloading cargo, buskers looking for a drink after a long night of pying for the promenades uphill.

  A fsh of magenta caught Pretty’s eye. A beautiful, flowing overskirt, draped like a su over the ruffled burning-sky e of the underskirt beh. A tall, graceful dy wearing rich uphill finery was leaving the grocer’s cart with her purchase, a single heart-red apple in hand, as if she were too happy with it to put it in the basket over her arm.

  Pretty couldn’t look away. She’d never seen anything that beautiful on the low streets. It was like watg a blue moon moth crash into a mud puddle and fp around ‘til it drowned.

  Didn’t that dy know she ought to get out of there?

  As if she had screamed that st thought, the dy stopped suddenly and looked straight at Pretty.

  The dy smiled. Not the sort of predatory smile Pretty had seen on rich lords and dies before. This smile was as graceful as the dy herself. Sad, too.

  The dy held up her red, red apple. Jiggled it a little. Then she held it out as if it to someone. With her empty hand, she beed.

  At me, Pretty realized. She’s talking at me.

  All awe and hunger and frustration disappeared in a thunderbolt of pure terror. Pretty ran for her life.

  ***

  The night, Pretty was even hungrier and more desperate. She couldn’t stay in, even if that uphill dy had tried talking to her. Pretty slipped out and hid in the recesses of the alley, promising herself this time if somebody dropped something, she’d be on it. She had to. She had to get something inside her guts.

  The dy was there again, swathed in finery of vender and pearl. She was much earlier this time, meandering down Market Street, just her and her basket, talking to sellers and scrutinizing wares. She never did get bothered or accosted, which hardly made any sense.

  When the dy passed in front of her alley, Pretty hid in the ruins of the broke-down wagon, her heart thundering like a flood season storm. Blood rushed in her ears and pounded in her head so hard that Pretty almost fell over, but the fine dy didn’t look her way.

  As she passed by, however, a red, red apple dropped from her basket and rolled over to bump against a broken spoke of the wagon.

  Pretty didn’t move.

  The dy didn’t look back. She strolled on, vender skirts swishing in the ghostlight.

  A shout and the sp of bare feet on mud. Some other hungry eyes had seen the apple fall.

  Pretty’s hand shot out like lightning and snatched the fruit into the hiding spot with her. Cries of treachery went up outside the wagon, and somebody started shoving broken pieces aside to find her.

  Cradling the apple close, Pretty scrambled out on her belly and crawled into the Closes, skinning up her knee and banging her head in her haste. She didn’t stop to breathe until she was safe in her and Brat’s little chamber.

  ***

  The apple was gone from stem to blossom end in seds, but Pretty spent the whole day dealing with the flux and stomach cramps that came from eating after so long without.

  In spite of that, the food replenished something inside her, something she’d been sure would die without her twin. She had needed food, and she’d gotten it all on her own, and she hadn’t been caught by anybody.

  ing back to the market night after night, that was all she’d had to do. Brat hadn’t always succeeded, either, but try enough nights in a row, and food was bound to find you. Maybe that was Brat’s secret.

  When she was sure she could make it as far as the market without droppiomach, Pretty was going back again.