‘Blossoming, aren’t you girl!’ He’d said it like it was a compliment. So, the tender lumps on her chest, the regular cramps and leaking blood, were personal achievements, milestones to celebrate? But then, it was true, she was still alive—the oldest kid she knew in Cofantreo City.
Flora was lost in her thoughts but remembered to duck under the concrete parapet and its jagged maw of protruding rebar at the entrance to the den. She’d grazed her head on it twice in as many days, miscalculating her height. Each time the blood matted her waist-long hair, staining the blond curls and making them crisp when it dried. Her legs ached at night. Growing pains—that’s what they called them. At this rate she’d soon need to go on all fours to enter.
‘What’s up?’ she called into the gloom, neither expecting, nor receiving, much of a response. A shuffle from Spider Girl’s corner disturbed the rhythm of water drops falling from the ceiling, resounding in the drinking pots. A constant reminder to keep living; the heartbeat of a city where the stinging rain never ceased.
An outsider once told her she’d heard of a Spider Girl from Before, one that could climb and swing from buildings using magic rope she kept under her arms. Flora had told them that their Spider Girl couldn’t do that. Ratter had given her the name when she started keeping a spider in a little box, tucked inside her coat, next to her blade. The outsider had ruffled Flora’s hair and laughed, but she hadn’t thought it was funny. Not then. Especially not now.
Flora stepped forward confidently, avoiding the first of the pots on the ground as her eyes adjusted to the dimly-lit cavern, though she didn’t need to see to know where she was in the den. ‘Spider, you there girl?’
She was exactly where Flora had left her, propped up against a beam, her coats, hair and skin the same dust-grey as her surroundings. Wings was with her, holding her hand, looking anxious and exhausted. Flora reached out and squeezed the little girl’s arm. ‘She’ll come round,’ she reassured Wings in a whisper she almost believed herself.
Spider Girl’s eyelids opened, startling white among the grey, blinking once. A flicker of recognition registered before her eyes closed again. Tears began to run down Spider’s cheeks, rivulets of precious moisture washing away the dust.
Flora bent down to touch her forehead. It was burning hot. These pills she’d risked her own life for had better work. They couldn’t get anyone to examine her, not here, not in the den. No-one from outside was allowed to know about the den.
