Chapter Nine: A Plan Forms

Ynkeri makes a plan to find Lukas, Heli, and Pik

            Finding Lukas was much harder than Ynkeri originally thought. First, keeping herself fed took up a lot of her time. The bakery had been a treasure trove in the beginning, but the baker caught her going through his trash a few weeks ago and she was too afraid to return. What if he’d told someone? She couldn’t risk it.

She named the dark hole under the stairs Catacombs in a fit of boredom one day as she waited for night to fall. Ynkeri read in a history book once about how people used to bury their families under their houses so they could visit them. She’d never seen one before, but she imagined it would be like her new hiding place.

She couldn’t see the scanners as well in the dark, but with so little going on as everyone else slept, she could hear them coming from a long way off. Like Lukas showed her, she spent a lot of her time moving from place to place from the higher vantage point of the roofs and though she still feared falling, it wasn’t as paralyzing as it had been at first. When she found a ladder on the opposite side of the bakery one night, Ynkeri shimmied down the drain-pipe instead, just to prove she could do it. After that, climbing wasn’t so bad anymore.

            Scavenging was safest at night since there weren’t as many people to see her digging around in their trash or wonder where she was taking the unwanted stuff. She found all sorts of things in trash heaps like musty smelling blankets and candle nubs- things no one wanted that still had lots of use left in them. When she finally found a book of matches, she’d used one of the candle nubs to set up her room. The other she used on especially hard days when she felt lonely or sad. The candle gave off almost no warmth, but just being able to see her own hands was a nice reassurance that she still existed.

            Second, she spent several months looking for Lukas’ messages before she found one. The methodically slow pace she took kept her safe, but it was hard to go to bed each morning with nothing to show for her work. When she’d finally found the first series of hashes, slashes and dots, she’d cried in joy and relief, but it was easily two or three miles away from where the basement where Lukas and she used to live. She tried memorizing the message to work on it when she got back to Catacombs, but working in the dark was difficult and she wasn’t convinced she’d remembered it correctly. All the slashes and dots left her feeling frustrated and the night of her first discovery she cried herself to sleep in despair, her sobs muffled into her jacket sleeve so the people who lived above her could not hear.

            The next evening, she awoke feeling ashamed of her tears and more determined to beat Heli at her game. Now, when she found a message, she’d sit on the roof and stare at it for several minutes then draw the alphabet into the snow with her spoon. All words had vowels, she reasoned, so she started by trying to guess which marks stood for vowels and which for consonants, but after two months of that, she’d gotten nowhere, the messages still a mystery.

            As the weather got warmer and she neared the day of her breakthrough with Heli’s code, she started using her jacket as a pillow. The pretty blue sweater and pants Hair Brain gave her- which seemed like ages ago- had their own home folded neatly in the corner. When she was feeling particularly sad, she would put them on and light a stubby candle for a few minutes to enjoy how pretty the blue threads were against her pale skin.

∞

On the night of her realization about what Heli’s code really was, Ynkeri was feeling particularly hungry and the smell of bread was unbearably strong as the wind turned. It was nearly day break, but she decided it had been long enough that the danger of being caught was low.

            She was halfway down the drainage pipe when she heard the baker yelling at his son about how late he was. Ynkeri sometimes spotted him pushing a cartful of bread for deliveries. She never tried to steal from the cart- she only took what was going already in the trash. It wasn’t stealing if no one wanted it. And anyway, the boy looked much older than her, probably seventeen. Even though she was fast, she didn’t think she could outpace him with his longer stride.

The light was still too low to see much, so she didn’t think they would spot her unless she moved. She clung to the pipe and remained as still as she could, barely breathing.

            “Today is Mrs. Brenson and Mr. Hilk two doors down.”

            “Where?” the son asked with a yawn.  

            “43.882075 by -1.230469. Now make sure you plug it in right this time or you’ll be giving my bread away for free again and this time it will come out of your pocket...”

            The baker’s son grunted assent, but Ynkeri couldn’t hear the rest as the two men walked back into the bakery. She scampered back up the pipe and sat on the roof, feeling a mixture of excitement and irritation. Why hadn’t she realized the marks could be numbers instead of letters? No wonder Heli’s code felt unbreakable!

She was still hungry, so she waited for the sound of the bread cart to go faint before she ventured down the pipe again. The bread that hadn’t been bought the day before was right where it always was and she grabbed the least hard loaves of the bunch. It had been a fairly dry night, so she didn’t have to dig too deeply to get past the soggy ones. Two days’ worth of food in hand, Ynkeri made her slow way back home on the street, her ears attuned to the familiar hum of danger.

As she sat in Catacombs nibbling on some bread, Ynkeri decided she wouldn’t sleep that day. Instead, she’d take what she could from her little nest and find a new place to stay closer to where the messages were being written. If she wasn’t lucky enough to run into Lukas writing the messages at least now she could decipher the location.

            Turning her jacket into a make-shift bag, she put all the bread inside along with her treasured blue sweater. She packed some candle nubs she had been saving and rolled up the best of her blankets tightly so that it would fit in the arm of her jacket. There was nothing else of any value she could carry with her so she said a tiny goodbye to the shelter Lukas showed her all those months ago, slung her jacket filled with all her belongings over her shoulder and tried not to cry as she left the home she’d made for herself.

Author's Note

Firstly, please note this is a middle chapter and the reader may not be able to follow everything that is going on unless you've started reading the story from the beginning. While this is not required to read the entire book, please do read the entirety of the chapter to provide the best review.

Things I'm interested in hearing about are:
Grammar
Dialogue (does it flow or is it choppy)
Character development
Any other perspectives on the story, style, and flow