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“Take your bruises, Brother Baylen. There are many worse things in this world than a few ruffian boys.”

That was what Father Cullard told Bay that evening as he watched one of the vowagers tighten a bandage around Bay’s skinny torso. Cullard had his arms crossed over his robe, a severe expression on his face as he studied Baylen’s bruised body.

I didn’t eat that night because we were late getting home. No exception was made for me by Mother Eola, whom I didn’t care for. The old woman with hair like a gray crow’s nest simply told me not to take shortcuts next time.

An exception was made for Baylen, only because he had been injured and needed sustenance to recuperate.

That evening, I snuck into his recovery room with my stomach growling. I didn’t care about being hungry; I just wanted to make sure my friend was all right.

He pulled back the sheets from his cot and gave me a weak smile, presenting me with a stale muffin under the covers. “Here,” he said, handing the crumbly food to me. “I got this for you at dinner.”

My eyes widened as my stomach rampaged. I put a hand to my concave belly. “You . . . stole it? For me?”

“When will you learn, Seph? Sometimes you have to take what you want. I’m trying to help you. Do you want it or—”

I snatched the food like a greedy sinner, wolfing it down in seconds. He chuckled as he watched, and then oddly petted my head. “That’s what I thought,” he said smugly.

He fell into a deep sleep after that. I retreated to my sleeping quarters and found my pillow missing. One of the other four children in the room had taken it.

I saw who it was yet didn’t have the energy to fight him.

Like Jeffrith and the older boys, desperate bullies were rampant here.

The House of the Broken was raising orphans to exist within humanity’s subdued bounds.

It would be years until I learned why we were given so little and told to make do and not complain about our lot in life.

It centered around Olhav—that beautiful skyline in the heavens.

A few weeks after the alleyway incident, once Baylen was good to collect alms again, he told me what he’d overheard Father Cullard say to one of the older girls leaving the House on her sixteenth birthday.

She was being “graduated” from the House to stake out on her own, given only three copper coins, the clothes on her back, a begging bowl, and an old loaf of bread.

“Father said ‘Stay submissive and silent, Sister Lueci. Do not incur the wrath of the bloodies in Olhav, or our human neighbors.’ Can you believe it?”

I stared askance at Baylen. “Seems smart.”

“Seems weak,” he snapped. The boy had a penchant for being against any type of authority. I knew it would get him in trouble sooner rather than later. I didn’t know how to articulate that or tell him my thoughts.

“What are the bloodies?” I asked.

Baylen shrugged. “Mother Eola said they’re similar to those gray-skinned folk we see every once in a while in town. But worse.”

The grayskins were not actually gray, though they couldn’t stay out in the sunlight for long, which gave them a sickly pallor.

Many alley-dwellers and shadowwalkers in Nuhav were grayskins.

Some people said they were related to the Olhavians —the Buvers, which was what we called people living “in the Above.”

Years later, I would become much more acquainted with the grayskins and learn more about them than I ever wanted to know.

At that point in my young life, my whole existence was being around Baylen Sallow. I went everywhere he went because I enjoyed his company and thought I was a good influence on him. I didn’t understand at the time that I was infatuated with Baylen. Didn’t know any better.

Whenever I could, I tried to get myself on the same alms-collection teams and household duties he did.

There was a sense of self-preservation there, too, because Baylen was the only boy who had ever stood up for me.

I didn’t trust most of the others at the House.

They were oftentimes just as bad as the older children living on the streets.

Even though Baylen could be curt and mean sometimes, I much preferred his company to anyone else’s. The feeling was mutual, I figured, because he never told me to scram or leave him alone.

Years passed in a monotonous blur. I slowly began to come into myself. I started as a malnourished, skinny youth, like everyone else at the House.

That changed after my tenth year. I remember the first time I recognized the shift in my worldview, after an alms-collecting shift with Baylen. I was prettier now, better at conversing with passersby. Baylen told me I had to “milk it,” which I did.

That afternoon was a scorching one in mid-summer. We’d stationed ourselves near the southeast bazaar, where tradesmen set up in a bustling town square. Countless patrons perused the stalls. Their coin-purses were fat, close at hand, hanging off belts, which gave Baylen his idea.

I was sweaty and hungry. Thick, choking dust kicked into the air from the stampede of hundreds of people in the square. As I approached a kindly looking trio of women in dirty dresses, I caught Baylen sneaking off behind a stall, making himself small behind the trio.

“Oh, you poor thing,” one of the ladies said to me, cradling my chin. “Do the Truehearts not wash you? You’re filthy, child.”

I bowed my head, shaking it sadly. It wasn’t a lie: We were lucky to get a single bath a month. I smelled ripe and looked the same practically all the time.

One of the girls gave me a copper before the threesome wandered off to a stall to look for something fun to buy. The lady who had given me the copper wore a bright yellow bow in her hair, which trailed down her back like a tail.

I stared longingly after the girl when Baylen sidled up next to me with a smile on his face. He followed my eyes, snorting. “‘Frivolous items are not for the True of heart,’ Sister Sephania.”

A passage from our Book of Truths. I wasn’t sure Baylen had ever quoted the Book to me.

I rolled my eyes. “A girl can look, can’t she?”

Over the past couple years, as I grew closer to Baylen and started to see him as a brother more than anything, I also started to snap back more.

“That was easy as sin,” he said, reaching under his tunic as we wandered away. He pulled out a small bag that jangled with coins. “You make a good distraction.”

Guilt and shame filled me when I stared down at the small satchel.

My heart hurt knowing Baylen had just thieved from women who had been nothing but kind, and had even given me a copper before departing.

They had probably worked for weeks to procure that small bag of coins, with the express intent on purchasing something from the trading bazaar.

Baylen had snatched away their dreams just like that.

I scowled at him before we disappeared into an empty alley, climbed atop a trash barrel, and heaved ourselves up onto a shop roof. From the slanted roof, we watched the adjoining street below, which fed into the bazaar.

My feet dangled over the lip of the roof. I quoted my own passage from the Book, saying, “‘Those True of heart do not steal.’ Remember that one?”

He tucked the coin purse into his ragged, holey tunic. “You’re right, they don’t . . . if they want to be sorry sacks all their life.”

I clamped my jaw and shook my head.

I considered myself a good influence on Baylen’s wicked tendencies, but that didn’t mean I could stop him from executing them. More often than not I even partook in his schemes, chastising him for it afterward.

“Don’t you want to leave the House of the Broken some day, Seph?” He scooted closer to me. “This is a way to do that sooner rather than later.”

I was well aware how his bony shoulder brushed against mine. I fought back a not-unpleasant shiver. I wasn’t sure where the sensation came from or what it meant.

“The House is all we’ve ever known,” I said. “Yet we break their rules day in and day out. You’ll get flogged for that, if anyone finds out, you know.”

“Oh, I know. Mother Eola gets a twisted kick out of punishing us sinners. Which is why you aren’t going to tell her, are you?”

I shook my head curtly. “No. But someone might if you start buying things with money you’ve stolen.”

“Then I won’t buy things people can see.”

My brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

He angled his head away from the street, toward the bazaar. Through the thinning cloud of dust, he nodded at a fruit-seller’s crate filled with brown-skinned melons. “No one needs to know if we treat ourselves.”

I tried to hide my smile, turning away.

His grin was dashing, his eyebrows bobbing expectantly. “Whatever we don’t spend, I’ll hide safely away in a hole somewhere.”

That evening, sitting atop the cobbled rooftop at sundown, with our legs dangling over the edge, we ate like kings for the first time in our lives.

It didn’t take long for my skinniness and bony gait to vanish. The more Baylen stole, the better foodstuffs we bought. I started to gain a healthy appetite.

The other children made nothing of my growing size, or Baylen’s, though I noticed a few dangerous stares from the vowagers and Mother Eola at our burgeoning height and stature.

Eola had warned me I was on the cusp of becoming a woman, and with that would come changes . She didn’t specify what sort of changes, yet I started to see it in the way my body grew in various ways. Baylen wasn’t too far from reaching the start of manhood, either.

Starting to eat right could not have come at a better time. Malnourishment would have permanently stunted our growth like so many other Brothers and Sisters of the House.

We feasted on food we could never afford, and we didn’t share it with any of the other Housemates. That, of course, would have been the quickest way for our secret to get out and get back to Mother Eola or Father Cullard.