“How do you think things got this bad in the first place?” he’d growl.

“Somebody had the time and money to build it.”

“Well, it wouldn’t have been you!”

“That’s not the point!”

But maybe it was. Why was I so drawn to the mews house? What if it held a clue to my past? Rubio wouldn’t hear of it, and I’d stalk off, furious that he’d made me weep.

Later, he’d swear it was for my own good. “Got to nip those delusions in the bud.”

I got it soon enough. This house, old way before I was born, could only have belonged to the seriously rich. Whatever my status before Abel, Rube would point out, it was dicey enough to get me, and likely my family, left behind.

“Only the rich got evac’d?”

“Not early on, but later, you had to have . . . means.”

‘Means’ meant more than cash. It meant connections to power. Uptown connections.

I didn’t care. The house was mine in my heart. I’d walked its rooms, filling them with expectation. But these days, all you could really expect was loss. No special find stayed secret, everything was vulnerable. If it wasn’t the weather destroying things, it was stupid human nature. I was lucky to have a den to go home to and a dry bed to sleep in.

But I wasn’t counting my blessings then. As I lingered in the narrow air shaft, gritty runoff sluicing down my neck and my feet ankle-deep in mud, I felt a hole in my hopes where the mews house had been. Wouldn’t you know, the lure of the girl’s pack was right there to fill in? I resisted, but not for long. A simmer of misdirected outrage nudged it along—like, if this is how life’s going to treat me, fuck ’em all! Soon I was headed for the next dry hide-hole on my list.

You see, by my den’s rules, a picker could claim one object from each night’s take, so long as there was more than one and it wasn’t a firearm. But this pack was full. Had to be lots of stuff in there. What if I wanted more than one?

Yes, that would be grabby. A betrayal of share and share alike. “In Unity is Survival,” went the den motto. You heard it all the time. If one person starts putting their own needs first, then everyone’s going to want to.

Scary. Hadn’t even opened the pack and here I was, plotting to keep more of its contents. Best see what was in there before getting too carried away.