Nice wouldn’t have been Susan’s choice of words. As they moved along, the houses grew slightly bigger, and some were made of brick, but they were still pocked and soot stained. The smell of burning drifted over from several blocks ahead. She squinted between the houses and caught sight of what looked like smoke.
“Something’s on fire,” she said.
Liyla barely turned her head.
“It’s wash day — I told you,” she said. “The machines are out. That’s where everyone’s gathered.”
They could hear activity in the distance, the occasional shout or bark of a dog. They had come from the back alleys into the street again, and here the road was wider. A series of empty sheds, gray collections of boards with doors hanging half off hinges, peppered the side of the road. Susan thought they probably held more garbage, but when she peeked inside one, she discovered it was full of huddled shapes. The air in the shed was worse than the outhouses. For a second she thought this must be where people dumped the waste out, along with old clothes and the rest of what they didn’t need. Then something moved.
She jumped. The shapes were men and women.
The others had seen it, too. As Liyla marched on ahead, the children stood staring into the shadowy space. An emaciated woman lay on her back, arms flung over her head. A man with a patchy beard coughed and snorted, curled into a ball nearby. Three, four, five people lay there, limp on the hard ground. Susan peered in and saw more mounds in the corners. How many were in there?
“I don’t think they’re conscious,” Max said. “But they’re definitely breathing.”
Something moved again in the shadows, and a child crawled over the pile and out into the light. He might have been Nell’s age, by the size of him. Like Liyla’s, his nose sloped out low in his face, and his cheeks were wide and dusted with a film of hair. But he was dirty, so filthy, that his hair, slicked back from his forehead, looked streaked with gray. And despite the unnatural width of his face, his cheeks sank inward; his eyes sat in hollow sockets. He gawked at them.
“You real?” he asked in a surprisingly clear voice.
Susan nodded.
He accepted that without comment.
After a second he said, “Got any food?”
She reached inside a pocket and handed him a peach.
“Here.”
Liyla came jogging back to them.
“What are you stopping for? Shoo, you!” she said to the boy. He retreated into the shed.
“Hey!” Max said. “Don’t be like that!”
Nell looked stricken. “He wasn’t doing anything.”
Inside the shed, the boy dug among the unconscious figures until he retrieved a ragged sack. He untied it, dropped the peach inside, then buried it behind a woman’s head. He glanced back at them warily.
“Sleeper’s boy,” Liyla spat, watching him.
The children stared at her.
“Sleeper? You mean those people in there?” Jean asked. Inside the shed, one of the women groaned and turned. The boy laid a hand on her arm and bent to whisper something in her ear. He kept his eyes on Liyla, though.
She curled her lip at him. “I’d hardly call them people,” Liyla said. “They’re useless, all of them. Leeching change-bringers, that’s what they are. It’s against the law to feed them.”
The boy receded farther into the shed.
“Against the law?” Susan echoed. “How can it be?”
“I said they’re useless, didn’t I?” Liyla stuck her tongue out and licked her lips, then flashed her teeth again, as if the thought of people sleeping touched some nerve in her.
The boy watched them from the shadows. With Liyla’s mention of the law, he had gotten halfway up again, unburied his sack, and clutched it in one fist. He looked ready to run.
“Change-bringers?” Max said. “What’s that?”
Liyla waved toward her own face distractedly. “Change-bringers! They’re the reason you had to go to the workshops to begin with, or don’t you remember that? Seems like if there’s one thing the lot of you would keep in mind, it’d be what you’re here for. How do you expect those faces to stay if you feed the useless?”
She leaned in toward the boy, grimacing at the stench of the shed. “Or maybe you’d like to give yourself over, huh? Look what the workshops did for these discards. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
The boy said nothing, but he curled in on himself and blinked rapidly in the shadows.
“Leave him alone,” Susan said. “Like Nell said, he’s not doing anything.”
Liyla gave a triumphant laugh. “Exactly! Nothing but spreading his filth and dragging the rest of us down.” She shook her head in disgust. “Come on. Farther from him we get, the better.”
She turned to begin walking again, motioning for them to follow. But Susan didn’t go. She looked back at the boy, crouched there between the sleepers, still watching them. After a second, she slipped the second peach from her pocket and tossed it his way. He pounced on it, and Susan heard Liyla suck air sharply through her teeth. The girl looked up and down the block, shook her head, and blew out.
“Don’t you know what they say about feeding the useless?” she scolded, shaking her head at Susan. “What were you thinking?”
At the moment, Susan was thinking that she’d get a certain amount of pleasure from giving Liyla a swift kick. She pressed her lips shut and tried to think good thoughts.
“What?” Nell asked the girl. “What do they say?”
“Give them a gift, they’ll pay you double, in the only coin they know — that’s trouble.”
Susan stared at her sourly, wondering if Liyla’s entire education consisted of memorizing ugly rhymes. It seemed like it.
For a moment, Liyla looked as if she expected them to clap for her. When they didn’t, she sagged a little.
“Well,” she said, “I guess I can’t expect you to know it. Probably don’t teach you much in the ruins, do they?”
She shook her head and turned, heading back up the street. “Let’s go,”
