Shattered Ladder 1-33 (Patreon)

Mmmm! Spice hit his tongue, then his throat; the bite of too much seasoning sharp and strong all at the same time. Ken swallowed, chest expanding as the broth steamed down into the bottom of his stomach.

A second later, his mouth opened wide in a sigh, something tense in his muscles unspooling as air pooled into his lungs. “Oh, that’s goooood.”“Told ya, ain’t I?” A laugh from his left had him look over to the half-laughing, half-slurping overstuffed face that belonged to Don. “Best noodles up and down Four-Four. Ain’t no better than this.”

Ken couldn’t deny that much, even as he looked around the place.The noodle stall didn’t look like much, sure; the place barely a stall with just a rusted metal roof bolted weakly to the side of a crumbling concrete stack. The place was walled off from the main artery of Four-Four, thick fat grease-splattered flaps of heavy plastic doing their part in trapping the heat and little else.

Little else happened to include the heavy scent of spices, boiling pig fat, and whatever aggressively salty shoyu the old man with three missing fingers was busy stirring in the big iron vat behind the counter.

Despite odd looks from Zee and him, Don had led them all the way here, swearing this place was ‘clean salvage’ by the time he was already tossing gray chits at the vendor.

For once, the redhead wasn't lying. 

The noodles were actually noodles, a bit chewy as they pushed back against the teeth instead of just dissolving into a mush of gray sadness like some of the others Ken had tried. I gotta trust Don more. He might not have been much use in a fight, but the guy knew his way around the city.

Ken wrapped both hands around the plastic bowl, palms warming up as he leaned forward on the cracked stool. His knees bumped up against the scarred metal counter, head bowed low as he guided more noodles into his mouth with the twin sticks.

"…so we up there, see?" Don waved his own sticks through the thinning rising from his own half-empty bowl. "Me an' Lee, stuck on this roof with a big-big bag of…” Don sucked his teeth, looking over at Ken and Zee for a second with a suddenly awkward smile. “Not important, but it’s looking like a score of the set, yeah? Except we get caught by some hired walls and you know those guys gotta justify their pay, yeah? So, they chase us down and we’re just cuttin’ down the lanes when I get the idea to lighten the load so I light up the load and toss the whole bag at them and sparklers go up like crazy and half the stack almost goes up, y’feel?"

Donny took in a greedy bite of noodles, barely chewing before swallowing and starting right up again without even missing a beat.

"And right then, right when the smell hits us and the guys are screaming, our buyer starts coming down the way, big guy, with three of his biggest, dumbest friends, all carrying scrap thick as my leg…"

Lee. Chopsticks hung loose from his fingers as thoughts snagged, attention hanging on a single, casual syllable. Isn’t his name Lee?

"…you got a brother?" Ken stared sideways at the bigger boy as Don snorted, hacked and almost choked up his noodles. The redhead thumped a closed fist against his chest for a few seconds before words finally left him, only two of them. "A brother?" Don wiped his mouth with the back of a grease-slicked wrist, eyes going wide as a slippery grin stretched at his face so hard it looked like it hurt. "Nah, not one. Four. We quins, bro. One of five."

Five. 

Five of them. 

To Ken’s right, the steady slurping came to a dead stop as Zee lowered her own bowl, a streak of bright red oil on the corner of her lip completely forgotten. The cool-girl boredom she wore like so much armor vanished as she glared over Ken’s shoulder, golden amber gaze locked onto Don. “There are more of you?”

"Yeah, wild, right?” Don’s grin somehow stretched even wider as he caught the look, words speeding up until they almost bled into each other. “Whole crew from the same drop, yeah? I’m technically the oldest, out first by like a good minute, but the boys always treat me like I’m the youngest. Don't even ask, it’s stupid." Don swung the chopsticks wide, pointing straight up toward the rusted ceiling of the stall and jabbing them even higher than that. "All four of ‘em moved onup."

Don’s shoulders dropped a little, hands going still.

"We hit sixteen this set. At one-five… well, you’re an adult, yeah? You take your chances and they all took theirs. We’re all hustlers and their hustle got them sponsored up in the high floors for real clean work. I’m the only one left down here in the dirt."

A thump pressed up against his own chest, Don tapping at a stained spot on his shirt. "All together, we're Dǒng – Le – Bié – Zài – Shuō."

The silence hung there for a second, heavy with the smell of pork fat, before Don rolled his eyes and a manic grin pulled at his cheeks. "Dad was a real jokester with that one. Five kids, and he names 'em after what he told my mom after she had all of us at the same time. Whole neighborhood thought it was a real ha-ha. Even my mom did too."

Zee blinked, her lips twitching. She tried to fight it for a good second or two, long enough that Ken could see the muscles fighting on her face.

The laugh won anyway. 

A bark of amusement tore free from her chest as she threw her head back, messy blonde spikes caught sputtering neon light.

Ken felt the corner of his own mouth pull up, a small thing pressing against the edges of his cheeks. "Five of you.” He looked down at the dark broth in his bowl, Zee’s laughter enough to ripple the oily surface. “City's lucky the floor didn't cave in."

"Hey, we were good kids!" Don threw a free hand up, grin stil twitching as hard as Zee’s shoulders shook. "Mostly. Le had a thing for taking apart live power conduits, but, you know what it’s like. Character building and such."

The warmth from the broth, the sharp spice still-half burning on his tongue, and the unfamiliar background noise of Zee’s wild laughter, it picked at something inside Ken the longer he stared at Don. The more the boy spoke of his family, the more the lock edged itself open.

"I didn't have brothers.”

The sentence just fell out of Ken’s mouth, eyes still on a piece of green onion floating at the edge of his bowl. Two sets of eyes focused on him as Don paused mid-bite and Zee’s laughter tapered off into a soft snort.

"Just Gram and me. In the Outer Wastes."

"Wastes?" Don swallowed. "Oh, you mean the Outside?”

"Yeah." Ken nodded once, the motion simple but stiff. "Village in the junk valley called… well, it didn't really have a name. Just the village."

He could see it, the gray endless smear that spread out onto a horizon of rusted metal, tall junk-hills and compressed garbage. "I was sick. Lungs wouldn't really pull air right. Legs turned to water. Gram fixed me up with roots when she could find them, but she was all I had out there."

"Wait, wait, waaaait," His boss waved around a chopstick as she frowned his way, pink jacket rustling as she leaned up on the counter. "How many people out there again?"

"Nine hundred," Ken’s mouth turned down in a frown of his own, trying to remember what he’d left behind three years back. "Maybe a little less after the winter."

“Nine hundred.” Zee managed to wear confusion like anger, looking right at Ken like he just spit in her food. "Total? That's your whole world? That doesn't make any sense. How do you even survive if that's all the people there are?"

What? Ken scoffed as he looked up to meet Zee’s eyes, bright amber-gold catching the low light as she raised an eyebrow at him. "No, what? That wasn't all the people, just my village.” “Oh.” Pink dusted her cheeks for a split second as Zee’s frown deepened. “Well, say that then.”

“Yeah, I was getting to it.” Ken shook his head, fighting the urge to roll his eyes. “There were others, y’know. Over the hills and out past the glass-grass.. We traded with some, went to war with others.” 

Purple eyes narrowed, Ken staring off at nothing. “Don’t really know for what, though.” Seriously, it wasn’t like they had much to be fighting over at all. Maybe hunting territory?

“Wow.” Her mouth hung open just a little, looking Ken up and down as she leaned back on her stool. "You’re a real dirt-scratcher. Can’t believe you can handle the real world. Figured you'd be hiding under a table from the lights."

"The lights just look like fires," Ken just shrugged. I’ve seen lights before. Just not this time around. "Same thing, just a lil’ different."

Don leaned over his bowl, his own eyes wide. "But the sky, friend. What about the sky? Endless up, like they say, right? Just… endless up?"

The question was one of Don’s favorites he liked to pester Zee with, right behind a hundred questions about rain — acid and regular. “Yeah, but it ain’t that pretty. Real gray most of the time."

Ken tapped his chopsticks against the edge of the bowl. "And the sun would always vanish way too early. Half the day, it was just gone."

"Because of the night, yeah?" Don nodded confidently.

"No, because of the Wall… I mean, the City." He shook his head, staring off at nothing as he remembered exactly what the outside looked like. “You guys don’t get it, but from outside… It's so huge. Too huge. It just cuts a whole part of the world off and it goes up forever."

The stall went quiet again as Zee shifted her weight on the stool. She let out a breath, pink puffer making a bit more noise than she made with her moit as it rustled loud. “Don’t think I missed you skip over your parents, ghost.” The words were quick and bright, a verbal stab with nothing soft or careful behind them.

Ken’s grip on his sticks tightened. When does Zee do soft or careful? 

 "You had 'em, right? Didn't just pop out of the dirt.” The girl smacked her lips. “Or did ya?"

"My mom died day I was born.” Wood groaned under his fingers. “Bad bleeding or somethin’."

"Rough.” Don muttered, Zee wincing almost as soon as the words left Ken’s lips.

"And my dad… he left the same day. Pretty…” He licked suddenly-dry lips, the words escaping him despite being right there. “Yeah, pretty sure he’s not alive anymore."

Purple eyes stayed locked on his soup as shame burned fast up his neck, heat climbing his face that had nothing to do with the spicy oil or the steaming broth. 

The silence hung for longer than usual this time, Ken all too aware of it and wishing he wasn’t.

It wasn’t hard to notice when Don wasn’t filling it with three dozen sentences a minute or Zee didn’t have a snarky little bite of a joke to throw at you.  said a word or took another bite of their noodles. All that filled the space was the sounds of the stall-owner cooking a few feet away and the same usual never-ending roar of the city as a backdrop.

Shouldn’t have said that. He'd opened the door. He'd let the weakness show to the two most cynical people he'd met in this entire nightmare of a city. Stupid. Shoulders hitched up high, Ken already bracing for the jab from Zee or pretend sympathy from Don hiding a laugh. Stupid. You gave them a knife to cut you with.

"Yeah."

Ken looked up to see Zee staring straight ahead, golden eyes fixed dead on the plastic flaps of the stall, the shadows of people moving through the alley outside flickering back on her face through the neon bleeding past. The single syllable came out a faint rasp but the mocking bubble-gum bounce Ken expected from here was nowhere to be heard in it, her voice almost dead flat. “Always like that, huh…”

Her hands fell off the counter as a muscle twitched under her jaw, white-knuckled fists resting heavily on her thighs. "Dads are scrap.”

She picked up her chopsticks again, the synthetic material held tight between her fingers as she kept her eyes off anything else but her food. chopsticks. She stabbed the sticks into the tangled mass of noodles in her bowl, driving them down with enough force to force a shriek from the bottom.

"Total, absolute scrap.” She spoke to no one but ther noodles as she tore a chunk of the food loose and shoved it into her mouth. 

A stuttering breath, slow but uncontrolled, set itself free from Ken’s nostrils, shame receding back to where he’d locked it up. The suffocating weight in his chest eased back enough that he could breath deep again, just a fraction of an inch.

But it was enough.

I… His eyes flicked over to Zee as she kept eating, nothing to say to that.

At least, nothing he could say that he wasn’t sure would be met by five hard knuckles to the side of his face. And that’s if he was lucky, because for someone light enough to throw, Zee was pretty heavy-handed. 

Still, though… I really gotta ask about her own ghosts one of these days. Maybe after more than just a month of hanging around her. Yeah, because she’ll be easier to talk to in another thirty days. 

Ken tilted his head to the side — careful to avoid looking too close at the girl in her neon pink armor — surprised that his thoughts sounded a lot less sarcastic than he expected. 

Shaking his head, Ken turned his head the complete other direction away from Zee, only to freeze and blink at the sight right next to him. What’s with him?

Don was sitting perfectly still, rigid to the point of being a statue, the redhead holding his sticks halfway to his mouth. A single piece of something that might have been grown to look like pork dangled from the utensils, dripping dark broth back into the bowl as a pair of wide dark eyes darted back and forth between Ken and Zee. 

The silence stretched out again. Five seconds. Ten.

Zee stopped chewing, the gaze on her too obvious to ignore. Eyes narrowed to slits, she swallowed hard, and turned her predator-worthy glare directly on Don.

"What?" Hostility sparked like a freshly-bough lighter, the girl almost spitting mad. "Got a problem, monkey? Something smart to add? C’mon, do it. Make me laugh."

Don blinked fast enough that Ken almost missed it. The bigger boy slowly lowered his chopsticks back into the bowl, the fake pig meat falling with it. "Uhhhh…" 

He cleared his throat. "Well, I mean…"

"Spit it out.” Zee leaned forward with a growl, eyes narrowed to slits.

"I…” Don rubbed the back of his neck, face flushed patchy red that clashed horribly with his bright hair. He looked down at the scarred counter, then up at the rusted ceiling, clearly going out of his way to avoid eye contact with either of them. “I had a… loving family, I guess." 

The words came out in a rush, apologetic and much more quiet than Ken expected from the loud scammer he called a crewmate.

Zee stared at him, mouth parted slightly.

"Like," Don kept talking, voice getting smaller and faster by the second. "Mom, dad. All the five. A bunch of other family fit tight in our place. We had big dinners, every Sunday, yeah? Single room was tight, practically slept on top of each other, but… it was nice. Dad told jokes. Bad ones, I guess?"

He looked up and then down again one more time, face red as the spicy oil on the corner of his mouth. "So...yeah. Don't really know what to say here. Think I missed a step."

Ken stared at the redhead, blinking as Zee made a sound to his left.

It started out rough and hacking, something that sounded exactly like Zee’s throat was fighting against a piece of pork as she clamped a hand over her mouth, shoulders already shaking.

Don leaned back on his stool, palms thrown up with a sigh. "Hey, c'mon, I didn't choose to be well-adjuste-"

Zee lost the battle.

The laugh exploded out of her, louder, harder, and ragged as she doubled over completely. Her forehead hit the greasy metal counter enough to make it jump, the owner of the stall staring her way as she pounded her fists against it. "Sunday dinners!" 

She gasped out both words, each one a struggle, Zee fighting desperately for breath between bursts of hysterical laughter. "Sunday—freaking—dinners!"

Ken felt the pressure in his own chest crack wide open as he leaned back on the stool, head shaking from side to side as he let out a long sigh. His eyes roled skyward toward the rusted ceiling of the noodle stall, corners of his mouth pulled up into a smirk he knew better than to even try fighting.

"You're a glitch, Don." Ken picked up his sticks again, tapping them against his bowl as the worlds drawled their way out. "An actual, walking glitch."

Don puffed his broad chest out, red flush fading away from his face as the grin crept back in to cover it up. "Hey, somebody's gotta be the stable foundation in this crew, yeah?" Don picked up his bowl, pointing his chopsticks at them both. "Can't all be brooding and broken. Need a rock to build on."

“Shut up.” Zee wheezed over at him, face still red as she wiped a tear from the corner of one eye. "Shut up and eat your noodles, stable foundation.”