Interlude Two - The Seamstress

Interlude Two - The Seamstress

Interlude Two - The Seamstress

The Seamstress

Debra hadnt been on the streets for long. Long enough to know that people just didnt live on the streets for long, period. City Nineteen wasnt a kind place, not to the best of people; and to those who were at the bottom, it was even worse.

She... didnt know why she was on the streets some days.

One day shed been a happy little worker bee. She got up with the sun, worked until it set. Day in, day out. She was cautious and careful, never put off doing her part. Shed learn the cost of having to rush work early on. That was always a price paid in blood, and she didnt want to pay it.

Then the factory changed hands.

It had done that before, but this time they brought in new machines, they made things faster, needed less seamstresses. They were more dangerous.

She saw a girl, a woman shed worked beside for two years without really learning much about her, get her brains spilled across the floor when something broke.

She didnt come into work after that. She just... couldnt.New novel chapters are published on

Maybe something had broken in Debra too.

This child was strange.

Three, maybe four years old, if Debra had to guess. She would barely come up to Debras thigh if she were standing up. Debra couldnt guess if they were a boy or a girl. She leaned towards girl, but... it was hard to tell at that age.

Then the toddler spoke. Sure, they slurred their words, and they had the worse gutter accent Debra had heard, but the choice of words, the... intelligence behind them.

Something was deeply bizarre about the child.

Its not a pretty way to go. Im going to install some traps. Tell anyone that tries to break in that if they do it again, they might get a face-full of spores. And then their livers will rot inside of them. Its not a nice way to die.

Those werent the kinds of words a child barely above a baby should have been speaking. And the eyes.

Debra could still taste the mushroom, hours later. The child had left, waddling off to gods knew where.

She wasnt sure what to do about it, so she settled on nothing.

Nothing was always an easy choice.

***