Face-Slapping21 min read
How I, a Little Zombie, Bought a Whole Base with a Pocket
ButterPicks16 views
I still remember the damp smell of the ditch where my life began: wet earth, old blood, and the hurried, broken steps of two people who decided I was too small a thing to keep. They left me in a ragged bundle and went away like shame on two legs.
"Leave her," the woman said. "There is no place for a babe."
"Better the dead eat her than the living starve," the man answered.
I was not human then—at least, I did not know what words meant—but I knew hands. I knew heat. When a big gray hand bent toward me, I reached for it.
Jonas Otto's fingers were cold and rough like buried roots. He crouched, and for the first time someone—someone who had no pulse at all—looked at me and did not see a snack. He saw a small warm thing with fingers that curled around his with stubborn trust.
"She dares," Jonas breathed in a voice that sounded like stones rolling. "She touches me."
He had been called many names among the dead: soil, lord of fields, the one who felt the creak of earth in his bones. When my sticky little palm pressed to Jonas's knobby cheek, he froze. A crack showed in him then, like frost melting.
"Do not be foolish," Sven Benson—who carried fire inside his ribs—roared. He was always a flame on the edge. "We do not raise prey. We take and eat."
I looked up and laughed. I thought laughter meant the world had room to expand. My mouth made a sound; Jonas's hollow face slotted into something like a smile that belonged to things that used to garden and bury.
Sven snarled, but when I crawled to him and thudded my tiny cheek into his ash-cold palm, his fury toppled like soot in wind. He tried to flare anger—tried to burn me—and his flames skipped like misfiring stars. The smoke around his lips tasted oddly like memory. He could not hurt me. No one could.
"Keep her," Jonas said finally. "We will feed her back fat. We will mark days until she is forgivable."
"Feed… or use?" Oliver Le, the water lord, asked with a voice that slid like riverbeds.
"We will keep," Jonas repeated. "No one will have this one." He looked at my hand and, in that look, decided a new work. "She is our toy."
So I went home with the kings. I slept in hollows of broken concrete while five crowned dead lords argued like farmers over how to feed a chick. Tatum Dawson taught me to move among roots and raised vines so fast my fingers learned to pull up bread from soil that wasn't there before. Oliver humored me with bowls of cold rain, and Zack Larsen—shining like picked coins—gave me a tiny bell that rang in my chest when I was near metal. Sven sang badly and kept me warm; he told me his jokes by blowing tiny sparks up my sleeve. Jonas showed me how to press a hand to a ridge of earth and feel the bones under it hum.
"You are ours," Jonas told me on the nights when stars looked like anxious pebbles. "You are our thing."
"Am I to be eaten?" I asked, because at the beginning I still learned everything by asking aloud.
"No," Sven grumbled. "We will fatten you slowly. Until then, amuse us."
I learned to laugh. I learned to sleep like a soft thing in the jaws of kings. The dead do not laugh much, so my noises were treasures. I learned then that being loved by monsters can be like having entire seasons on your side.
Years are not the same to the dead and to the living. I grew. My hair braided into two little horns. I learned to throw tiny fire that popped like a child's bubble; when my palms opened, a warm dot would skip off and roast a beetle. It felt wrong and right at once. Jonas would say, "She will be fat for winter," and I would imagine winter as a feast.
Then the world grew louder.
One day a group of the living—a small pack who smelled of sweat and hope—found us. They came in a battered van and in them was a man who had sweat in his eyes and reasons in his jaw: Calder Cortez. He was the kind who wore leadership like an old coat.
"Quick, run!" Calder shouted at his team as a high-ranked undead thundered forward. The undead's skin was iron-gray and it spat light like a furnace; Sven snorted and tightened around me.
I should have been afraid. A human voice said my name and the world moved. When I fell off Sven and scuffled on the ground, the living sighed as though someone had dropped a stone into placid water.
"Child!" a man from the pack shouted. "A child fell!"
Calder's eyes were sharp. He saw me and something flickered: pity, hunger for bargaining, the calculation of a world that counts children as both hope and hunger. They pulled me into the van.
"She can't be bitten," a woman called. "Check her."
Nobody checked me properly. They smelled the wrong things on me and guessed the wrong things about me. They tasted the wrong stories.
I was taken away. For the first time in a long time, I smelled the sour salt air of other people's fear. I sat small in a new place: a base with tents and barbed hopes. The living called it shelter, but to me it smelled of rules and hunger and hands that measured me by what they could gain.
"Who brought her in?" a guard asked as they filed my paper.
"It was Calder's team," someone said. "We can't leave a child. Base rule."
"Name?" the registrar read out, trying to write what would be useful.
"I am Hadlee," I said—because my kings had given me a name one warm night when Jonas decided that I deserved something soft to hold.
"Hadlee Salazar," the registrar repeated, but no one in that room cared if my middle name would anchor me to them. They smiled like men who had come to a market and found a gem.
Calder watched me as they ran tests. He didn't understand stars inside a pocket. He didn't know that I had a barn in my head—my own room that stored food and warmth and a grown-up idea of mischief. But I already knew enough to be careful.
"She is a fire user," someone said when a tiny flare hopped out of my palm during a test. "And look—space fluctuations."
"Space?" a guard barked. "No child has space."
"Please take her to the testing hall," Calder ordered softly. His voice sounded like a father and like a judge.
I smiled and drank a bowl of water that wasn't drawn by Toto, the water of Jonas's hands. Calder pressed his lips together. That is how humans hide intentions: a pressed line that makes the eyes bright with meanings.
Hudson Kato stuck by me. He had a round face like a dough ball and a nervous wonder in his glance. "You okay?" he whispered to me one evening, sliding me a stale piece of bread.
"I am fine," I told him, because Hudson's hands felt like home on the first night I arrived. He smelled like warm dumplings and pocket sunlight. He decided I was important and made a place inside the base that belonged to me.
"Don't let the grownups take all your things," Hudson said to me like a twin. "You tell them you like me and they'll be nice for a bit."
I was four then. I nodded. I had plans that were older than four years.
A man called Hamza Poulsen sat behind a long table with paper cups and too many polite smiles. He called himself the base leader. The base leader's job was to smile and to ask for things in ways that made people hand them over.
"We need her," Hamza murmured the first time he met me. "A being like her—double-typed, space and the flame—can be a great advantage. Imagine supply runs: one exploded truck, one unguarded warehouse, a quick harvest of materials."
"She is a child," Calder objected. "We protect children."
Hamza's smile thinned. "We protect them and we prepare them. For the future, for the base. She will be safe under our roof."
I watched Hamza like a spider watches a heartbeat. He had a taste for things that gleamed; the guards liked him because he spoke of protection and then asked for proof of loyalty. If someone is polite and asks for the same favor twelve times, they will get used to favor being paid.
Calder told me later—later meaning when I had already learned what eyes could hide—that they had arranged my first test in secret. "They want to see if your space can be used," Calder muttered to his smallest, Hudson. "They'll push you."
They did not know that my finger pockets were full of bread.
I kept a secret big as a chest. My space was a quiet place: a white room where shelves ran for miles and where bread and meat and clothes lived like quiet gods. I could pull out a loaf from the far corner and the base would call it miracle. I could pull out a fish and the cooks would clap. Before the base discovered me, my kings had stuffed the space for me as though they were saving someone for a very slow morning.
I used the space as necessary. I used it to buy friends. I used it to pay men with enough greed to forget scruple.
When Hamza's men came in heavy coats and sad faces to "make sure I was safe," I smiled the way I had been taught among kings: large and soft, and then I sold the whole soul of the place for a bowl of fresh milk.
"How does she have fresh milk?" Calder said. He did not understand how my space hummed with convenience.
"You work," Hudson said, and he looked at me with trust like I was a shrine.
I sold bread and bought small homes. People loved things they had not seen the day before. They loved a thing that solved a problem.
And Hamza loved the idea of taking everything. He put a plan on a paper pad and told men to keep me under watch.
"You will be asked to show your storage," Hamza said once to me. "We will keep it.
"Calder told me to be cautious. He did not look like a man with claws.
I had been raised to be a weapon. The kings had put soft in my pockets, but they had also put clever. When the base came to "test" me, I let them.
I did not understand that they spoke of me like they would speak of a pile of wood until Hamza's men turned their pockets inside out, ready for the harvest.
"How many crystals? Where's the ledger?" one of them demanded. He was a face that belongs to raw appetite.
I smiled my small smile. The king in my heart said play this long enough. I opened a tiny pocket and fed him milk. He drank and left flattery in my path.
But not all plots are safe.
Hamza and his ring made plans darker than a child's shadow. They decided to use me as a bank and a bomb. If they could pull my storage loose, they could sell houses, pay for ammo, and they would not have to bother with human farmers and barrels. The base would become their house of cards.
I found a piece of paper that said: "If needed, engineer 'accident' that exposes her asset. Let her die. Base recovers gear."
I let the paper fall on the floor. I smelled the meat of the trap.
Calder eventually heard about Hamza's intentions. He looked as if the sky had warned him.
"She is a child," Calder said, his voice a hard stone hitting water. "We can't let them do this."
Hamza smoothed his smile into a razor. "We will do what is best for the base."
The base was a bell now ringing with gossip. People took sides. Some wanted the safe smallness of taking a child's bread and never thinking. Some wanted to ask why a child should carry the base like a coin.
I sat and watched them like a small planet watches a storm's edge. I put a hand in my pocket and felt the smoothness of the things my kings had given me. I decided these people needed to be taught the most basic rule: do not touch what belongs to a child.
So I began to give.
"Ten crystals for a bowl of noodles," Hudson offered to an official who had never seen sauce before. "Twenty to meet the transport captain."
They kept taking and buying. They thought it was obedience. It was a ruse. I had no wish to be tethered like a bell on a harness.
One night Hamza arranged a speech. He summoned the base to the main tent and promised safety. He promised order. He promised, at the end, to open my space to the whole base "for inspection."
"Tonight," Hamza announced, "we will set an example."
I sat on the tent's edge, and my tiny heart listened to the crowd breathe. The living gather for many reasons: food, fear, the chance to watch a man behave like a god. A hundred faces turned like sun flowers.
Hamza smiled with teeth like small artifacts.
"Hadlee," he said, "we will inspect the child's claim. This will show we are just and strong."
"How kind," Calder said, but his eyes were bad with worry. Hudson squeezed my hand. I kissed his wrist like a bribe. He smiled like a child in a storm.
"Open it," Hamza said to the tech man. "Project it."
Tech men love light. They scrolled and fed cameras and smiled like taupe-eyed owls. A projection flared over the canvas of the tent and a long, high shelf of things appeared for everyone to see. A humming, as if the base had been opened to the sky.
On the screen—my screen because my space obeyed me and me alone—rolled the ledger Hamza had wanted: lists of food, crates, and numbers. Men leaned forward. Women clasped at their chests. Children squinted.
Hamza puffed like a man with a plan.
"See?" he said. "We can regulate. We can harvest—"
"Shut it," someone yelled from the back.
There was a murmur. The room was full of shadow and expectation. The projection—my projection—changed then, because I let it.
The ledger on the screen split and recombined and became raw footage: a camera from a far-off street; a private recording; a sleepy man in an office flipping the very page that had the plan.
I had been careful. I had a small place for evidence, too.
The video showed Hamza in the office. He had signed papers. He had said words. He had laughed about "natural mistakes."
Hamza's face did not flinch. "This is a forgery!" he declared.
"Forged by whom?" someone called out.
"By the child's friends!" Hamza shouted, turning eyes to Calder, whose jaw slowly bristled into anger.
The footage kept rolling. It showed the guard who had been rude the night the drifter was tossed out. It showed the guard taking a trunk. It showed the trunk with Hamza's seal. The tent was quiet as burial.
Hamza's faint smile dissolved.
"Who recorded that?" he asked, for the first time looking small.
"Your own men," Calder said low. "Your own ledger in your own office. We found it in a dump truck, the one you paid for. You gave orders to engineer a problem and profit from the loss."
"You're lying," Hamza breathed. He stepped forward. "You dare accuse me—"
"Stand aside," I said. I hardly cleared my throat, but the voice came like a bell. They all turned. I was two steps from his table.
"Why would a child—"
"Because you put price on our bellies," I said. "Because you decided coin mattered more than a child's sleep."
People murmured. Someone laughed like a broken glass.
Hamza's face tightened as if the skin were made too small for his teeth. He tried the old trick: deny and then accuse. "You are a thief. You hide assets. You have stolen from the base!"
"Watch the footage then," Calder said. "And stay calm."
Hamza's color bled out. He began to protest in long, breathless sentences until the proofs seemed to piece together like a trap closing on his own head. His men looked at him like a wolf that had found its own paw in a snare.
"These are lies," he cried. "I—"
"Look," I told the tent. I had the footage spliced to show an exchange: a transport log where Hamza's name was used to order a truck that never returned full; a ledger with his handwriting; a receipt from a hidden account.
Hamza's mouth opened and closed like a fish. His swagger dissolved into a desperate shiver.
"You're the one who lied!" he said, but his voice cracked into a child's whine. "You can't—"
People began to pick up their phones. The base has always loved devices that could make a thing public. Someone filmed Hamza. Someone else uploaded. Within moments the pockets of the tent filled with the scratch of cameras and the glow of their screens; a hundred small witnesses with the ability to throw a man's contradicting explanation into light.
Hamza's bravado became a tremor. "I didn't—" he tried again, but his words had no purchase.
"Here," Hudson said quietly, and someone pushed a recording that had been taken months ago: a conversation between Hamza and a supply captain, where the base leader laughed about "insurance" and "removing liabilities." The captain's voice on the recording pledges to "handle a minor problem" and "take the risk off the books."
The tent inhaled like a great organ. I watched faces crumble. There were people with mothers in the crowd whose hands shook. There were greedy men who had loved certain deals, and their collars suddenly felt small. There were the ordinary, the hungry, the hurting; they all found the same kind of satisfaction in a story where the man with rich words was revealed to be a thief.
Hamza stopped moving. His eyes flicked across the room searching for an escape route. There was no route. A hundred phones showed him at his worst. A hundred mouths whispered their own stories of being slighted. Someone from the audience stood.
"You knew," that woman said. She had been quiet before. "You had men plant ideas. You planned to 'lose' assets and then profit." Her voice sliced the tent. "You would have killed a child like me for a ledger!"
Hamza's fingers knocked on the wood beside him. "You are mistaken," he stammered.
"Do you deny signing this?" Calder asked slowly. He held a paper now that had been slid from inside Hamza's inner pocket, folded like a secret. It was a copy of the notes about "accident" and "exposure."
Hamza's hands trembled so much the page looked like it might flutter away. His face went from full to hollow.
"No—no, it's a frame! A set-up!" he blurted. The tent shuddered with laughter and the sound like a small number of stones being pitched at a window.
He tried other ways: to buy the crowd with promises, to call for a private meeting, to blame the tech. Every method was a clumsy fail. He looked at the cameras and his eyes seemed to shrink.
"You're asking us to treat you like a man of honor," someone said softly near the front. "We have proof you preferred profit to a child's life."
Hamza's hands searched for height, for something to hold. "Please! You must believe me! I worked for the base—"
"No one believes a knife when it cries," a voice answered. "Not anymore."
I watched him fall. He had moved from smile to command to sweat to pleading in the space of minutes. The crowd's reaction rippled from shocked silence to a chorus of phone flashes and rising anger.
"Lock him," someone shouted.
Guards moved. Hamza made the weakest attempt to stand up and argue, and then he sank into a chair. He began to cry like a child screaming for a toy pried from a hand.
"Please," he begged in fragments. "I didn't mean—please don't—"
Phones rolled like small suns toward his face. People filmed him. Some sneered. Some patted their pockets. A woman in the front row sobbed and then stood and said, "You thought you could trade us for your vote. Watch him now."
The guard's hands were on his shoulders. Hamza's knees buckled and the fabric of his coat wrinkled. He tried to bargain in breathless tones, then slurred into silence.
Someone began to clap. Not a polite clap. It was sharp like breaking bread. People recorded, laughed, gossiped. A man took a photo of Hamza's face and posted it. The cameras shone.
He went from confident to shocked, from denial to collapse. He crackled with excuses until he had none. He begged for mercy. He placed his palms together like a child praying and said, "Please—please—"
The crowd began to chant—first in the text of disbelief, then with the rough, blunt sound of a community building its verdict. People were yelling, "Shame!" "No more!" "Away!"
Hamza fell to his knees on that wet tent ground. He croaked, "Please! I will return the goods! I will—" He begged for his life and for his dignity and for the browsers not to forward the tapes. Phones recorded his whimper like an invasive species taking hold.
"No," Calder said very quietly, and the tent shivered.
The guards did their duty. They cuffed him. He tried to scream but the sound came out thin. He was driven out by a mob that clicked like teeth. Hamza shouted and begged and reached out a hand that no one took. One of the women spat on the ground by his boot. Someone took a photo of him on his knees and held it up like a trophy.
When he was pulled away, half the crowd followed. Some filmed. Some clapped. People took pictures of his boots. Others shouted condemnations and posted them.
Hamza's fall did not unmake the world; it made an example. Everyone who had planned to quietly exploit an odd child now understood what it meant to be exposed under a hundred small cameras. Hamza's men scattered like beetles under heel. Men moved faster in the street to dispose of the evidence. The base began to breathe like a town after rain.
"That is the end of him," Hudson said, sitting on a crate. He looked like he had swallowed a small comet.
"People will say he suffered," Calder added, quiet and tired. "But the law will decide. We cannot be judge and executioner."
Hamza's reaction had been exactly as I expected: triumph to panic, then denial into begging. The crowd's reaction had been exactly as I planned: shock, then laughter, then cathartic rage.
After Hamza was hauled away, the crowd dispersed, some clapping each other's backs, some trading whispers about how they could not have believed this place would turn. Cameras stopped whirring and the tent fell back to night.
I sat on a low crate and opened a small bag of rice I pulled from my sleeve. Hudson leaned forward and offered me the best seat he owned: a half-smile.
"It was a good show," he whispered.
"It was needed," I said. "Do not mistake mercy for weakness."
Calder watched me with a new hand on his chin. He moved like someone learning the weight of their own decisions. "Hadlee," he said, "you are more than we thought."
I smiled and thought: more like a child with a ledger and a heart.
The base changed after that. People began to argue less in public and instead to protect what they had—some more fiercely than before. Hamza was taken away and the men who had done his dark work cleaned their nails in the river until their hands shrank.
We moved on. I continued to sell noodles for favors. I rained out food for little ones. I taught Hudson to bake bread with a flick of flame and to hide tiny pockets in each loaf. I continued to be both a child and a tiny, secret danger.
The base still called me their asset sometimes, but not in the same greedy way. Calder avoided looking like a man who had been fooled into thinking all bargains were clean.
"You're changing the base for better," Hudson said once. He held my hand like a promise.
"You mean you got me to change them," I teased, because children give credit in odd ways.
"Maybe," he said. "Maybe you just made them afraid to be simple thieves."
Then the rain came and for ten days it did not stop.
The rain brought other things with it: a creeping brood of black insects that crawled like nightmares in the thin dark of the base. They bit the sleeping and they stung the living into gray. People who were bitten rose with glassy eyes and then they walked into the night and turned. For once, our home trembled not around words but around the itch of a creeping hunger.
"Go pack the city," Calder shouted. "We must—"
"Stay out," Jonas had hissed into the space between worlds. His voice was far. The dead had been listening to rain all these years and had learned to hold judgments.
I did not sleep for three nights. My hands had to be used, because the insects flooded tents and made new undead out of old flesh. I could have saved the base by not giving them the garden; why would I do that? Because sometimes a child grows feelings like vines.
The insect tide rose and bit further. The base split into panic. People grabbed knives and made fires and tried to hold the line. Fires crackled and gutters smoked.
I ran out to the north tents and saw my old friends being bitten. I wanted to make them into trophies of justice. Instead I did a childish thing: I panicked.
"Stop!" I screamed and let the panic turn my hands into furnaces. Fire popped like grapes out of me. A small ball rose and flew like a comet. It hit a knot of beetles and evaporated them like steam on a metal roof.
"Don't!" others cried as they saw flame leap. Fire is dangerous. People can be burned.
But the beetles were made of rain soft and dark. The little flames ate them like a child eats candy. More and more of my fires leapt, and then others saw and joined because people will always chase a light.
Before I understood, the base had turned into a theater of flame. Men and women who would have gladly sold us for a ledger now ran in the same circle of light. They rolled themselves across the ground to smash beetles and choked and coughed and then cursed, and then began to applaud each other. When we finally stopped, the beetles lay like a black tide gone back to sea. Houses were singed but standing.
Calder looked at me with something like a new respect. Jonas listened from the edges like a proud father watching. Hudson hugged me until I felt like I might be pressed into a new shape.
I had made a mistake, yes: I had burned floors and sky and the tender belief that I would never change anyone. But the base had been saved—sort of—by the fire I did not mean to fully control. People called me a hero for days after. News spread beyond tents and across cables.
Somewhere in the frame where Hamza's face had once been, a line of texts read that I had been a "savior." It is strange: one who goes to destroy often learns to live.
Later, there was talk of moving. Hamza's ruin had left the place weak. The insect incident had left the ground loose. Some argued for moving to new land. The base was full of people who never had much courage and suddenly had more; they needed a head to nod toward.
Hamza had been dragged away. The base needed a lieutenancy that meant business but not cruelty. The leaders whispered and they picked names like stones in a hat.
"Hadlee," Hamza wasn't here to argue. "You should be our face."
"Hold on," Calder said.
"Let me be the base head," I said as though it was a simple choice. Children will say the boldest things, and sometimes they are the ones to make the most honest choices.
People cheered: here was a small, bright figure who had almost burned the beetles and had also kept food inside a pocket. I could be a bridge between the hungry and the clever. The base wanted me. I said yes because I saw a way to finish the slow plan I'd begun years ago among kings: to make humans rely on me enough so they grew blind to their own vices.
But being "base head" meant responsibilities I had not read in storybooks. It meant speeches and walks and the face toward the world that people would trust to save their children. I liked having people trust me; they were so easy to arrange into little patterns.
We set out for the plant development zone, which someone said was dangerous with mutated things. I had said it would be fine; I had not told them the truth that I had chosen it because the place was a trap where people could be softened and used and then neatly harvested by friends who attended the dark.
Stone after stone we passed. The convoy moved heavy with hopes and supplies I had salted into pockets. Men tacked banners onto cars. I sat on the roof of the truck and felt loud with pride.
When we reached the plant zone, I had intended to stand aside and watch the wheel turn. Instead, the base fell into the sort of daily terror only humans can call "work." Mutated vines slithered and people were pulled. As the convoy bucked into the heart of the zone, I decided to help—only because no person should be stuck without a hand.
I started to throw small fire orbs and the vines shrieked. For the first time, the base found something to rally around not because of a ledger but for a tiny child's courage. The people who had been greedy and ready to steal for Hamza now were shouting and swinging and saving each other with a vigor I had only seen in markets.
It was terrible because my plan to harm them failed again. They were stronger with me than without. I had wanted them to be brittle. Instead the bright thing of me made them stubborn like grass pushing up through concrete. They moved and called each other "brother," "sister," and I felt my plans melt like ice.
When the convoy finally broke into the old development compound, the gates yawned. The compound was empty but scorched like someone had slaughtered a festival there. I ran through the broken rooms and peered into corners. Then, under a splintered beam, I found him.
He had black hair, a face like a map of storms. He moaned and bled and something like electricity danced around him. Ari Nakamura.
"Little child," I said, because that is what my heart always registered when it met squished things like him. Ari looked like he had been waiting for someone who could pull him from the wreckage.
"I will save you," I told him. He flashed electrical light in annoyance and then cooled and let me. He fell into sleep like colliding drums.
For a week he lay under someone else's roof at our base. I fed him rice from my pocket. He muttered and sometimes shifted, angry like a trapped animal. But slowly his storm dimmed.
"Why did you save me?" Ari asked one afternoon when he could lift his head.
"Because you might help me later," I said and then laughed at my own plan. Children are always honest even when lying.
He smiled then, a small thing, and let himself be cared for. I taught him to smile, and he made a face as if learning it was a mechanical trick. He called me "child" and I called him "little brother." It was enough.
We built a new life in a place full of old hurts. I wore the face of base head and sometimes the coat tugged at my shoulders. I kept my space secret and my ledger quiet and my kings' memory soft like a lullaby. I kept friends and kept my war inside.
At the edge of the base, when dusk fell and people lit fires and told the same stories again, I would sit with Ari and Hudson and sometimes Calder at the little table and watch the night.
"You're not just a child was," Calder once said, tasting the strange confidence of a place that had almost broken an empire to prove its greed. "You taught us something."
"Did I?" I asked. "Or did we teach ourselves?"
We went on like this for a long while—rebuilding, helping, patching—and then the world took a breath and made new plans. I made new plans too, this time smarter and kinder. I learned that you can unmake a thing only if you are able to rebuild something else in its place.
The kings were still in my memory like rivers behind stone. Once in a while I would climb to a hilltop and press my palm into the earth and imagine Jonas smiling like a gardener. I would think of Sven and his sparks and I would smile.
People called me "miracle child" sometimes, and news came from afar. I took what I had and handed out bowls and bandages and old songs. I made the base better than it had been when Hamza walked in reddening for his ledger.
When the trial came, Hamza was carted through the square. He stood before all the tents. Cameras flashed like bright angry beetles. He tried to stand tall but a hundred eyes cut him down to size.
"Watch him," I thought, and his face dissolved into small supplication. He begged for his coat, his dignity, for anything at all. People recorded and told the story and moved on because human crowds are like a weather. The punishment was a public ritual and the city learned its bones that day.
When the cameras left and the tent quieted, I kept my space shut and small. I began to teach Ari the way a king teaches a child how to plant a seed and not to watch it with greed. I taught Hudson how to make bread without selling the recipe, and Calder how to keep a promise without writing it in theft.
Once in a while, I would take a slow breath and press the small bell Zack had given me. It would ring in the empty, and I would think of the kings waiting for me in the dust. I would think of their simple, rough laughter and, in my silent way, I would give thanks.
We lived that way for a while—sometimes foolish, sometimes gentle—like a base that had learned to braid its own wounds.
The world kept giving us storms. There were other men like Hamza later, hungry for ledger and quick profit. We would always catch them with the light. The base learned a rhythm: fear, anger, exposure, safety. People would record and speak and the world would tilt toward justice for a while.
And when night fell and the fires burned low, I would walk to the tent and open my palm and let a little warm spark hop up and circle like a moth. Hudson would come up behind me and plant his hand on my shoulder.
"You are not what you were when you climbed out of a ditch," he would say softly.
"No," I would answer. "But I also am. I keep both."
I keep the kings like seeds in my heart, and the base like a garden where sometimes you must plant a fruit tree to cover what you once planted as a trap. There are things I cannot unlearn; there are things I cannot un-remember. But I have made a small law for myself: do not let greed eat a child, not in my base. If someone tries, let their own plans be shown like a stolen ledger, and let the crowd decide.
This is how I live now: with a pocket that holds a thousand small things and a hand that can burn and warm. I run between hungry men and small children, keeping both fed and cautious. I like to think the kings would be amused.
"Are you proud?" Ari asked me once, his fingers dull and warm against mine.
"I am careful," I said. "Pride is for the living and the dead, too. Sometimes it makes men like Hamza try to swallow the moon. Then the moon gets fed to the crowd."
Hudson laughed and passed me a bowl of noodles. The tent around us smelled of spice and the memory of rain. The world is a noisy place and yet sometimes, under my palms, everything makes a pattern.
When the last camera flickers and tents fold like paper, I climb to a little rise and press my palm into the earth. It hums and answers because Jonas taught me the language of the ground. I close my eyes and imagine a small creature—a baby in a ditch—growing into a child who knows how to choose who to keep and who to let go.
I keep a tiny bell in my pocket. It rings when I need to remind myself that monsters can have fatherliness, and that sometimes mercy must be mixed with calculation. The bell rings in a funny, tinny voice.
When I hear it, I think of being kissed by a bedtime zombie and of the tent where Hamza went from king to beggar. I think of all the times I have used my space to feed the hungry and of all the times I have hidden the ledger in a place no greedy eye will find.
I have a pocket that holds a whole world. Sometimes I use it to pay for bread. Sometimes I use it to punish thieves. Sometimes I keep it closed and carry the quiet and the smell of Jonas's hand on my cheek.
And that pocket—that pocket is mine.
The End
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