It was a crappy game of comparing hurts, but it was true. Life had been hard for Thalia, but she was able-bodied and clever enough to be useful, which let her survive. She kept her head down and did as Nicky said.
Some didn’t have food or a warm place to sleep. Some people didn’t have the little collection of books she scavenged from abandoned houses. Some people weren’t able to go to school at all, and she should be grateful for the days she could attend. Some people didn’t have a guardian—if you could call Nicky a guardian—even if he ranted about the government spying on them and poisoning the water.
Some people had no one.
Then one day, her skinny little kid body vanished, and she looked more adult, even though she so was not an adult, and Nicky thought of other ways she could be useful for the organization.
Thalia attached herself to Old Doc Mitchell, acting as the pair of steady hands and sharp eyes he needed, seeing as how he ruined his own with booze and out-of-control diabetes. Doc lost his medical license long ago, but he was a real doctor. No one cared about qualifications and credentials when he patched them up.
Trauma affected people differently. Basic, right? Some people were resilient, and they bounced back, stronger than ever. Other people had to learn to cope with stress, anxiety, and all those lovely acronyms that fancy doctors flung at you pre-Invasion. Probably still did, but it was a fact that everyone on the damn planet had some sort of trauma. That’s what happened when aliens invaded and blew shit up and millions of people died.
She was traumatized. Nicky was traumatized. Poor Doc was hella traumatized.
Some people coped by staying busy. Others meditated or some shit. Some developed a fanatic devotion to the aliens who allied with Earth, the Mahdfel. And plenty of people medicated themselves with the chemical of their choice. Thalia read old books and watched too many movies. Doc reached for alcohol.
Reeking of beer and sweat, busted capillaries turned his nose red, and his hands shook until he got his morning top-off. He never talked about what happened during the Invasion or who he lost, but that was fine. Thalia didn’t talk about her mom, either. He was a drunk and more likely to be passed out than awake to practice his version of frontier medicine, but he taught her everything he knew, or at least the bits of knowledge that clung to his surviving brain matter despite the years of pickling. He took care of her, in his own way.
When she turned eighteen, Doc told her to run away and volunteer to be an alien bride. She was surprised as hell, needless to say. In moments between maudlin and passing-out drunk, he spoke about the aliens, and not too kindly. Not the invaders, the other ones, the Mahdfel. He never said they ate babies or whatnot, but he hardly sounded like a fan.
Thalia didn’t run away—obviously—despite Doc looking disappointed when she turned up morning after morning, still firmly under Nicky’s thumb. He had been the closest thing Thalia had to a father figure and friend. She couldn’t run away from that.
Which was so fucking sad it wasn’t even worth mentioning.
So that’s how she got by. She learned to dig out bullets, stitch up knife wounds, and watch for infection. She knew her antibiotics from the pain pills and even which pills helped with common chronic ailments like high blood pressure. What she didn’t know she looked up in Doc’s old medical books, but that didn’t come up often. The people who ran with Nicky were more likely to waltz in with a stab wound than develop diabetes or hypertension.
A fist pounded on the door. “Tallie, get dressed. The boss wants you.”
Okay, then.
“It’s the middle of the night!” she shouted through the door, adding a dramatic yawn.
“No rest for the wicked,” the man said. Everyone had to have a maxim. Fuckers.
“Speak for yourself,” she grumbled. Already dressed, she cleaned the lenses of her eyeglasses and took her time getting her kit together. Nicky’s goons didn’t need to know that she heard them coming and had been prepared to fight. It was safer to let them think she had been fast asleep.
Nicky’s paranoia had been growing in recent months, not that she could blame him. His line of work wasn’t the safest of professions, so it was smart to be wary. Maybe if Doc had died from liver failure the way he anticipated instead of being gunned down in a hit, Nicky might have had a bit more chill nowadays.
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Another one of her mother’s sayings.
Turf wars sucked, and not just from the constant vigilance required to keep from being stabbed in the back. The stress wore a person down. It wore Thalia down. Between being dragged out of bed at all hours to stitch together Nicky’s minions and listening to Nicky rant about aliens tracking people through implants, she needed a break. Or at least a few hours of decent sleep.
Thalia ran a brush through her hair for decency’s sake and pulled it back in a ponytail. Whatever Nicky needed, she figured it’d be gross and require her to keep her hair out of her face. She tugged on the ends, disappointed to see the green color already faded. Her normally dishwater blonde held color fairly well, but she tried a new brand the last time she colored her hair.
The pounding on the door resumed. “Get your ass out of bed, Tallie. They’re almost here. Nathan needs you.”
Ugh. That guy.
She swept the scattered supplies back into the bag and flung open the door. “I’m here. You can stop shouting.”
“Downstairs. Now,” the man said, his face pulled into a scowl. If she didn’t know him to be a heartless bastard, she’d say he looked worried.
In the kitchen, Thalia
