The city grew more uneasy by the hour as Skinner made his way back toward the Gutters on foot. An intense calm strangled the streets, that strange stillness before the clangs of thunder sounded. The people were restless. Too much hunger, too much sickness. Peaceful demonstrations were things of the past, found to have no effect on deaf ears above in either the towers or the heavens. The impoverished were made to believe their lives had no meaning and so they behaved accordingly. Bands of wrongdoers full of piss and spit prowled in search of play. Food and poverty and inequality and boredom threatened to combust into bloody havoc. Burn a shop or kill a cop in the name of a cause or none. Rioting felt on the cusp.

"Nice trotboxes, blood." Skinner felt the speaker's presence just before he heard the words. "Nice trotboxes, I spake." Louder now, thirsty for confrontation.

Skinner took the idiot talker in with his eyes. It was the bearded and muscled leader of a pack of fistboys who'd just emerged from a coughing alley to his side. The thickly whiskered man held out a muscled arm and pointed at Skinner's feet. "Could use me a pair like that."

The boots had been splashed with mud and worse during Skinner's jaunts across the city but this beardfaced mugger knew his footwear well and judged the pair as good and was right. Skinner's soul seethed at the notion of letting these cockgoblins take his trusties. He'd just broken the damn foothides in. He turned to flee and found more of the ogrish cunts blocking his way. They circled like jackals. But were lower in fact than any such animal. These were the sort of men the Nation—always in want of able fighters—still did not trust with a sword, even in the lands of others. Too despicable to serve as the most expendable fodder and too unsavory to represent the country's ideals in the eyes of foreigners. Filthy with sickness of the body or character or both. Men with records, crooks and scoundrels best kept from the ranks. Not unlike Skinner himself. It seemed a city of mirrors through which the repeater walked, distorted reflections of him in their twisted panes at every turn. Like those bottles in the Last Leg, everywhere.

"Can tell a man by the leathers he wears," said the bearded frontman. "Might be rags on his back... but if he's got fancy mudpipes, he's got coin."

"Unless he spent it all on the boots," Skinner said. He calculated his odds. Tried to think like a Reaper. These degenerates likely carried out this performance of theft day in and day out, had made a routine of it, picking off an unending string of easy marks of which Skinner was but one small and insignificant bead. The repeater cursed himself. He should've seen the danger coming. There were always signs if one looked for them. It was no wonder he bore that scar on his palm. He deserved that permanent mark of shame. No true Reaper would have let himself fall into this dire predicament. Skinner's mind had been elsewhere in his long trek through these wretched ways. On those vanished kids and not his surroundings. The missing had become like friends to the repeater as he walked in their paths and scrutinized their lives. Though he never had known them in life, the lost ones felt kindred. Loneliness, they shared. All the snatched were in many ways too reflections of his younger self or those he had known. As Skinner walked he'd caught himself whispering promises of deliverance to the children's ghosts in the odd chance they listened. Damn, he'd gotten soft. He needed to harden up fast. Here might be his chance, if this encounter went to fists or worse. But first, the repeater would try to fight his way out with his tongue. "I can tell you where you boys can get your own pair right low. Know the way to the Night Market for the next three nights. Happy to share the cant. Fence had a crateful of beauties to pick from. Even manticore hide, if that's your dance."

The offer fell on deaf ears. The gangboys moved closer, stinking of menace. Skinner turned in slow circles and watched for which man would come at him first. He raised his fists, knowing the knife was sheathed there in one of those prized boots if he needed it. But for now he would not introduce such lethal rules for fear of dying by them. He sketched a mental plan. He would take down the smallest of the bastards and try to create an opening and run like hell. He found his target—not quite the smallest, after all, for that diminutive man looked to be a mean scrapper who moved like a rangy worm. Skinner's chosen prey was instead a young wick that looked to be new blood, uncertain of this hard game. Said so with body and eyes.

"You're sniffin' the wrong ditch, fellas," Skinner said, biding his time. "I got nothin' that shines. Nothin' at all but these foothides and the lint in my pockets. You're welcome to the lint. But only way you walk away with these boots... is if they's up your bunghole." On this last word he spun on a heel and threw his fist upward into the jaw of his target. The tenderfoot went hard into the mud and the others went hard at Skinner. He landed a smattering of punches and fought valiantly to escape but the ruffians caught hold of his clothing and kept him from fleeing. The fabric tore and Skinner slipped into the mud. The men were on him. Dirty fingers fought for skin and hair and went into his mouth and eyes. The repeater felt a rain of fists and then something harder. Metal rung against the side of his skull with a sick clang. A great bell in the sky reverberated. His vision split. Skinner tried to shake off the daze and reached down with his fingers and brought out his knife. It was time for it. Fighting to stay conscious, he slashed the closest body to him. One of the attackers snarled and backed away, bleeding. Skinner took the moment to get to his feet. He felt wet blood on his head and neck. The repeater turned in mad circles to fend off the relentless blows from all directions. Keeping them at bay with his blade, he fought through the fog of memory, seeking that grit and edge that ever gave him a shot at Reaperdom however doomed that path was fated to be. He remembered his training, the lessons taught him. Watched his opponents' eyes and their body language. Timed their swings. Looked for vulnerabilities. The one with a pipe favored a leg and so Skinner kicked the man's bad knee in. His opponent went down grimacing and his weapon fell into the mud. Skinner sprang for the pipe but could not get his hand to it. The other muggers piled onto him and wrestled him to the puddled earth. The little worm got his blade from his hand, smiling with malicious intent. The scrapper held the knife to Skinner's face. The repeater froze, the tip right at his eye. His hand on the Worm's wrist, fighting to still the hand.

The bearded street-fighter snarled and furiously yanked Skinner's boots off his feet. Skinner gave the brute a good kick to the face. A bloody tooth caught in the thief's beard and he ordered fierce retaliation. The men gathered around Skinner like jackals and kicked him in impatient turns. In training he and his fellow recruits had taken kicks like that every Hell Night when they got off the wagon. He'd learned how to receive and block blows, helping to lessen the damage his body took. To submit to momentum, to cover his vitals. But he would not last in this deluge of strikes, no matter his conditioning so long ago.

"Diluvians!" one of the cutthroats cried as he pointed down a steaming street. The muggers forgot Skinner in haste and scurried off, gone like roaches in sudden light. Their beaten victim took this chance to slip away and gingerly ducked into a nearby alley. The repeater's boots were lost but he still had his life. Skinner soon found the answer to his salvation. A patrol of Diluvian hardsticks in uniform raced past in pursuit of his attackers. Imagine that, thought the repeater... the shieldsmen actually saving his skin for once. Perhaps they weren't such a bad thing to have around after all. Skinner laughed at the notion and this brought agonizing reminders of his injuries. The rush of the fight ebbed from him and all that remained was pain. Reaper tactics or no, the toll on his body was severe. Ragged breaths, blood from his mouth, a ringing in his ears. He inspected his frame and found nothing too serious. No cuts any deeper than that gash on his palm had been. Nothing broken, either, but perhaps some bruised bones or fractures. The hit to his head had been the worst of it. And it was enough to do the trick.

Skinner sighed. They got his boots, the bastards. In misery but with no choice other than go on, he went back out into the street on his bare feet and pushed through a crowd of beggars milling outside a charity house and recommenced his pilgrimage toward the Guts. Church had better have more information for him when they next met—and more coin, and at least enough for some new good mudpipes—or to the stars with the whole damn affair. He would skip town, live off the land. Or just jump from Beggar Bridge. The repeater's naked feet sloshed through the mud and shit. The sensation was not altogether unpleasant but he knew that in time after the blisters and sores began to appear he was going to miss those foothides. Skinner remembered the faces of the men who had done this to him and stored them in a black vault he kept for such things.

— • —

Dimia's custodians made their way westward on a well-traveled road that yarned through the wilderness from town to identical town. Those worn stretches were often marked by the crucified bodies and grisly severed heads of hobgoblin fighters and human bandits and deserters alike. It seemed war had touched every shingle and puddle and soul. The road they were on was shared by refugees who fled deeper into the Nation's interior in order to escape the escalating conflict at the mountainous border. This muddy exodus was mostly comprised of women and children and many of their faces resembled to Dimia the ill-fated people of lost Marrow but condemned perhaps to a less spectacular and slower form of doom. Those migrants were to the little girl succinct but bitter reminders of fading visages. Dimia had begun to forget the faces of her loved ones but tragically not a detail of the hogheads that Skelen had replaced them with. And there were also the quilted countenances that sandman wore on his back. She only had seen a glimpse of those dead masks but they were now as surely stitched into her memories as they were into that morbid robe itself.

Dimia heard solemn singing in a passing church. Mourners, prayers, those asking the constellations for an end to this suffering. Other houses of the star the caravan passed had seen worse, having been torched to the ground. One could tell the state of this war by the churches. Which of them housed refugees. Which held bodies. Which still stood at all. Of course Dimia's mind went back again to that house of the star in which she herself had been committed. She dwelt on the sick happenings within and her sole liberation—thanks not to the Reapers but to the actions of their enemies who hunted them.

Dimia shuddered and broke herself from those grim woolgatherings. She stroked Scratch's fur and took comfort in the sensation and the rocking of the wagon and the pattering rain. The beasts snorted and the soldiers chatted and it was a relatively peaceful trek. Regardless of the desperation of the land and its people and the bleak weather, these were the fleeting moments to be thankful for. In time the forests and treebound villages and forts gave way to wild fields and farmland. There was more of it along the straight roads that cut through this countryside. The refugees, the legions of troops headed for war. Moving in the opposite direction of Dimia's caravan was the might of the Nation that had claimed her as among its subjects by some form of unwitting birthright. The rackety wagons had great ballistas and blade-throwers on their backs and were clad in hammered sheets of blackened metal plating. They were things of the future. The oxen and woebeasts that pulled the engines wore barding to protect their bodies so that they could continue to haul this war machinery toward oblivion while under heavy enemy fire and the crack of their masters' whips. The fields and roads alike were thick with mud and so the wheels of these war-wagons were spoked and some had ropes and chains hooked round them to gain further traction on the wet earth. Dimia watched a group of soldiers extract one man's body from those wheel-spikes as they passed, a quiet casualty in the Nation's grind toward a far more calamitous reckoning. Perhaps the poor soul had passed out drunk or fatigued in its lethal and unflinching path.

Dimia looked away from the sight. She longed for distraction. Her fingers itched to play her lute but the instrument had been taken from her by the Nation's men. The girl wondered if it would be returned to the travelers Bramble had stolen it from or if the soldiers would simply keep it for themselves. She imagined the mob had come for them more out of fear of the golem and its sorcery than to return the lute to its rightful owners. Her hands absently played the configurations and patterns she could remember from Bramble's skin upon her knees as she quietly hummed their melodies. Scratch rolled and purred and dozed to those unusual and hypnotic songs as Dimia's mind went to the burning that poor Bramble had suffered which had snuffed many of those runes. The golem had been so afraid of flame and seemed as sensitive as any child. In some ways Dimia hoped his mind was already gone. Perhaps it would spare him much despair. It broke the girl's heart to think what those Nation men might do to him. What they could be doing that very moment, and her too helpless to act. Perhaps the man Shroomer mentioned before she left Fort Stowerling might know something about the fates of Bramble and Skelen. The medic had given her one additional 'mission,' asking that she (with Mulia's help) check in on the Reaper Jinx. Dimia had actually met the 'rune man' along with Halo in that Marrow church. He had known how to read and alter Skelen's runery, stirring a wonder in Dimia's heart that would lead her down the road of curiosity about the sorcerous arts. Shroomer seemed concerned for his friend Jinx, afraid he might be slipping into solitude and dangerous obsessions thanks to those same temptations Dimia herself felt and had best beware. Dimia closed her eyes and her mind went again to Halo. She feared in her heart he would be dead before they were ever reunited. Whatever mission he was now on, whatever battle the Reaper fought, she sent a wish to the stars for him.

— • —