The ratman apothecary picked its nose in front of Silas, gazing at him with disinterest through the shop window. “How bad?”

“Very bad. I need help walking,” Silas croaked back, thankful for the ratman’s disinterest. If he had decided to inspect Silas, he would have quickly realised that all the wounds were superficial.

The apothecary grunted, disappearing under the counter before reappearing with a finger-sized flask. “300 credits. It’ll get you fixed up in a few minutes.”

“Hey!” Tawny shouted out, giving pause to Silas. “You’re overcharging him. I know for a fact that it’s only 100 credits, I do.”

The ratman snorted, whiskers quivering from the breath of air. “Gimme the money, or I ain’t giving you this.”

“You.” Tawny pointed a finger at him and snarled. “You don’t know who you’re messing with. This is—”

Silas covered her mouth with his hand then, muffling her next words. “It’s fine. I’ll pay.” 300 System credits were nothing to him, and it was easy to transfer the funds through his screen. Fortunately, he knew from prior experiences that it wouldn’t show the merchant a log of their customers, so his real identity stayed hidden too.

Taking the potion, he gulped it down and chucked the flask back to the apothecary, hitting him bang on the head. The ratman yelped and fell back, while Tawny chortled gleefully, following Silas out. “I thought you had lost your claws there for a second,” she said, wrapping her arms around his again and leaning into him.

“Just wasn’t worth arguing over,” Silas replied, trying to decouple himself from her but quickly giving up after her insistence. He still had use for her, and since she was reluctant to leave him, he figured he might as well have her around for a while longer. “By the way, I just realised that I’ve never really had a good look around Ratterinks,” he mused aloud.

“What?!” She softly tugged at his arm, aware he was still injured. Her beady eyes glittered. “Come on, I’ll show you around then. It’ll be great fun. How come you’ve never looked around, though? We’ve been here for ages.”

“Oh, you know,” he waved dismissively, straightening his posture somewhat now that he no longer had to act like he was injured. “Always on patrol duties, and my grandfather’s always got me slaving away at chores when I’m back.”

She giggled and led on, first exiting the street that the apothecary’s was on into the high street, stores of all kinds lining its sides from square-cut armouries to lively hairdressers to colourful clothing stores and mouthwatering restaurants. It certainly wasn’t what Silas had expected from the military base, and he was equally gobsmacked by the mischiefs of ratkin drifting through the streets wearing fashionable casual clothes and donning frilly hairdos. It appeared that while all the other races had been struggling for survival, the ratkin had cruised through the Apocalypse without a worry on their mind.

He wanted to question Tawny about this but couldn’t think of a sneaky enough way to make her spill the beans without outing himself as a foreigner. In fact, he was already pushing it by asking her for a tour given that they were both meant to have been in Ratterinks for the same duration. Luckily, she saw his request from a rose-tinted perspective. She stopped in front of a nearby cosy tea house, her sweet smile puffing up her cheeks. “They do ferilfruit green tea here, my favourite.”

Silas rubbed his belly and gazed at her uneasily. “Sorry, I think the potion’s upset my stomach. Probably best I keep clear of adding anything else to the mix right now.”

“Oh,” she said, recovering quickly. “Well, I guess we can return after walking around, anyway.”

She took off again, towing him along with her arm through his. They left the high street for the north of Ratterinks, and although the crowds largely stayed the same splash of colours, their surroundings became muted with the typical System buildings that were common across all settlements. Silas’s eyes wandered towards the guilds, and he stopped to point them out. “Who uses those?”

Tawny offered him a strange look, pausing to see if he was joking. “What?”

“That damned human must have whacked my head hard when he knocked me out,” Silas added quickly, “My memories are a bit fuzzy.”

“That human.” A cold glint flashed through her eyes, though warming back at once. “That’s the Blacksmiths guild, although they only make simple stuff there because of the System restrictions. That’s the Skitterstaffs temple, and that one over there is an archery range but you can’t see that from here.”

“What about the ma—” he caught himself, “ —sorcerers?”

Pursing her lips, she urged him along once more, walking up a slope for near two minutes before they came to a sufficient vantage. She waved her hairy hand over the entire west end of Ratterinks. “That’s the sorcerers’. That giant temple there is where they meet, and those manors ahead of it are where their families live.” It was hard to miss the tone of desire in her voice. “But you remember that at least, right?”

He nodded, smiling for her and causing her to bloom one too. “Yep, that’s where I live,” he said, pointing in their general direction.

“Should we go then? Your family would be happy to see you.”

His nods turned to shakes at once, “No, not yet. I’m not ready to face my grandfather.”

“Why?” His downcast look was enough to answer her. “Oh, right.”

He shifted his gaze to the east and thought of changing topics. While the north housed general System buildings, and the south held the military structures, and the west lodged the massive Sorcerers Temple, and the centre housed most of the commerce, the biggest sector by far was the east which sat at odds with the rest of the city. The fort was a stark reminder to Silas that no matter how many humane elements he discovered in the ratkin, at the end of the day they were still slavers who had hunted and shackled humans. Who knew, perhaps if things had been different it could have been him in there now instead of the poor souls who had been captured, or even worse, it could have been Ethan in there. “Do you know how to get in there?”

Tawny groaned. “Not this again - I don’t what your obsession with the fort is.” But seeing that he didn’t react, she answered him anyway. “You have to go through the gatehouse, you do, but I don’t know any more than that.”

“You’ve never been in there?” he asked, looking at her with surprise.

“What? No. Only Talis, his retinue, and his guards are allowed in there; the rest of us would need to be granted entry, but I don’t see why they would do that.”

He stared at the fort for a long moment, unblinking, before she spun him around and pulled him with her again. “Come on, this is getting boring. Let’s go somewhere fun.”

Still stewing thoughts in his mind, he let her take him, only opening his mouth some minutes later. “Why did you come to Ratterinks, Tawny? Do you have a reason?”

Contrary to his expectations, she didn’t pause or even appear miffed by his question. “I want to buy a farmhouse by the Witely Delta but you know how prices are nowadays. Still, if I perform well here, I should easily be able to afford it, hopefully, and everything else is a bonus. What about you? I’m guessing your grandfather made you come here.”

“Yeah, that’s it” he mumbled, not surprised but regardless saddened to hear she was a career soldier, effectively a mercenary. She wasn’t here because she hated humans or believed in the ratkin cause; she was simply here to make money, no doubt a common reason among the ratkin population. All the suffering humanity had gone through was just a byproduct of their business, everything boiling down to profits and raw materials.

They arrived back at the cosy tea house, and Tawny looked at him expectantly. She was trying to salvage what she could of their time together. However, he felt the opposite and caught her gaze straight on. “Hey, I’m feeling tired. Do you mind if we go back to yours for a bit?”

The look of disappointment on her face was quickly erased by a saucy smile as she caught onto his meaning. “Okay,” she said, her gait regaining its spring as she led him through the maze-like streets and brought him to a small apartment. She let him through, stretching her arms wide and striding in.

He closed the door behind him and caught her by the shoulder. Rather than looking back, she brushed her head against his hand. “Oh, let me wash first,” she said huskily.

His other hand followed swiftly, cracking against her head and causing her to stumble. She barely managed to turn and see his stony expression when the next blow came and knocked her out cold, her body thudding down to the floorboards.

Silas sighed at the sight, feeling the last of his warmth flee from his body at the treacherous act. All the same, he had needed to do it with how resistant Tawny was becoming to his scouting plans. He could have cleanly ended it here by killing her, but he couldn’t do that, not after how well she had treated him, or at least the Retil’s bodysuit that he was wearing. For this reason, he searched her apartment and quickly found a length of cord which he used to tie her tightly to her bed. He ripped a weirdly designed dress of hers from her wardrobe and used the strip of cloth to gag her, tying that into her skin too. Although he expected her to free herself minutes after waking, he hoped that would be long enough for him to disappear back into streets and escape Ratterinks.

He left without a word or message, moving at a brisk but unhurried pace as he made for the Sorcerers Temple. Even attempting to enter the fort would be a fool’s task, so he instead elected to scout out the second most important section of Ratterinks before leaving entirely. Retil was one of hundreds on the streets, and so no one granted his plain appearance a second glance when he walked out of the commercial district into the streets of the sorcerers’ manors. He had made it half-way through when disaster struck and a whip-thin ratman recognised him, pointing with a gaping mouth and hanging incisors.

“Retil!” the ratman shouted, and Silas immediately turned and fled, making back through the path he had taken, heart thundering. There was no sign the other ratman had followed when suddenly he appeared from a sidestreet that Silas had not even known to be there, tackling the human down. Or at least trying and failing, but still hooking a weak hand onto his clothes. “Retil, wait, it’s not bad at all.”

Silas frowned and kicked their hand away. All the same, his attention had been hooked. “What do you mean?”

“Grandpa’s not angry, you don’t have to worry. Actually, he’s thrilled, and he thinks you’ve got real talent managing to escape and all, he does.”

“What?”

“Do you not understand?” the ratman said, sitting up but not making any motions towards him now. “This is your chance, cousin. He’s going to register you as an initiate to the temple!”