Limitless Evolution As a Snake

Better. Naked scales, dignity intact, mostly.

The pipe network under Twawi Market is a maze I know better than I know my own body at this point, all rust and drip and echo, but I’ve run this route enough times that my body just remembers the turns without me thinking about them. Up through the vertical shaft, along the seam where two pipes never quite lined up right, out onto the exposed beam that runs along the underside of the market’s roofline. Down below, the stalls are already loud with morning noise, fish guys shouting prices, some cat-eared kid screaming about knockoff phone cases, the whole beautiful chaos of Ami doing its thing without any idea an apex predator the size of a chopstick is currently commando-crawling across their ceiling.

I slide along the beam, drop onto the drainpipe, ride it down in a controlled slither-slide that’s honestly kind of fun if I let myself enjoy it, out past the last stall, past the noise, until the market thins out into quiet backstreet, brick walls.

The cop poster, her poster.

I pour myself down the wall, tongue flicking, and there it is, the telltale gap behind the corner where the paper’s peeled just enough to hide a hand-sized tin box wedged into the bricks.

I nose it, wriggle behind, and hook the edge of the tin with the underside of my jaw, dragging it out into the light.

It feels heavy in my grip.

The tin is right where I left it, tucked behind the poster like some kind of budget vending machine. I nudge it open with my nose and slither in for a look.

Dried noodles, a little pack of crackers and a note, folded up small, sitting right on top like she knew I’d come sniffing around eventually.

I nose it open.

Thank you for taking care of that creep. I don’t know how you did it, but I’m grateful, and please stay safe.

— Lyra <3

There’s a heart an actual heart- right next to her name, drawn in the same careful handwriting as the rest.

I stare at the little heart drawn next to her name. My tongue flicks out, tracing the ink; I do it again and again. The paper smells like her, the ink and market dust and something salty, maybe the salt from the crackers. I can’t stop looking at it. The curve of it, how careful it is, like she really meant it. I press my head against the note, coil a little tighter around it. It’s just a shape on paper, but suddenly it’s all I can think about.

[System: Fuck me dead, mate. A real bloody hero, you are. Bet you’re chuffed as a butcher’s dog right now.]

I ignore him and keep chewing through a noodle, trying not to think about the heart too hard.

[System: speaking of heroics, remember them golems.]

Don’t.

[System: the toes though, mate, and you went straight for the toes. Bit them on the toes to pump in the blood venom. That was fucking weird, not gonna lie.]

Shut up. I was dying. That was the closest thing to a pulse point I could find, and I panicked, okay, and also I like women, not men, so drop it.

[System: how would u know.]

I don’t dignify that with a response. I drag the empty tin back into place behind the poster, noodles gone, note tucked safe against my coils, and slide out to take a look at the alley beyond.

That’s when I see them.

Posters. Everywhere, taped to lampposts, stapled to stalls, flapping loose off the side of a fruit cart like they’ve been there for days. Each one has the same badly drawn crayon sketch of a holographic red snake with enormous, tragic eyes, and underneath in block letters:

HAVE YOU SEEN MY SON?

There’s a phone number, there’s even a reward.

[System: mate.]

I don’t say anything.

[System: mate, he’s really out here doing that whole wallaby way shit.]

I sigh as loud as I can.

[System: P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney, except it’s "have you seen this snake" and honestly the drawing’s worse than what I think Nemo’s dad could have drawn.]

I peel one off the wall just to look at it properly, and my scaled dad’s managed to give me a moustache in one version, for some reason, like he panicked halfway through the sketch and decided it needed personality. I don’t know if I want to laugh or coil up somewhere dark and never come out.

I go with neither. I take the note, I take myself back up the fire escape pipe, back through the gap in the brick, back to my dog bed in the dark corner of the pipes, and I coil up tight around the little folded paper like it’s something worth protecting.

[System: you right mate?]

Yeah.

[System: you sure, cause you’ve gone quiet and normally you’ve got something smart to say about the golem thing.]

I’m fine. I’m just thinking.

And I am. Thinking about London, about the flat above the shop that always smelled like epoxy and burnt coffee, about working every evening after school because Dad needed the extra hands and Mum needed someone to tell her it was fine, it was all fine, everything was fine. Thinking about Dad’s voice, too loud for any room, the kind of loud that used to make the neighbours bang on the wall, and how that same loud voice would crack down the middle when the cancer took another inch of him, and he refused, absolutely refused, to admit it was winning.

He was never soft with me. He yelled plenty, and there were nights I flinched before he even raised his hand, and I spent half my life bracing for whatever mood walked through the door. But he was there. Every single day, loud and difficult and impossible, he was there, which is more than I can say for anyone else with the last name Vane.

His family, the real Vanes, the ones with the crest and the country house and the trust fund big enough to swallow a small nation, never once let my mother sit at their table. Twenty years younger than my father, and to them that made her a gold-digger, a mistake, a woman not fit to carry their name forward.