Where We Weeps

“Got it?”

The voice was sharp, cutting through the low moan of the wind. Lawrence flinched, his hand tightening on the cylinder of batteries inside his coat pocket. The metal was so cold it felt wet against his knuckles.

“Yeah,” he said, his own voice sounding thin. “You?”

The girl, Freya, didn't answer. She just watched him. Her eyes were the colour of the winter sky, flat and unforgiving. She was maybe a year older than him, fifteen or sixteen. Her face was thin, all sharp angles, with a smudge of grease high on one cheekbone. He hated these meets. Hated the quiet, the exposure. The park offered no real cover, just the skeletal remains of swings and a climbing frame that looked like the ribcage of some long-dead animal.

He took a slow step forward, his worn boots crunching on a patch of icy gravel. “Freya?”

She nodded once, a curt, bird-like motion. She reached into her own oversized parka and pulled out a tin. No label. Dented. It could be anything. Dog food. Beans. He’d once traded a perfectly good flint-and-steel for a tin of what turned out to be water chestnuts. He still remembered the watery crunch of disappointment.

“It’s peaches,” she said, as if reading his mind. Her voice was a low rasp. “In syrup.”

Peaches. The word itself felt like a luxury, something from another time. He could almost taste the impossible sweetness. His stomach gave a tight, painful clench. He pulled the batteries from his pocket. Four D-cells, heavy and solid. He’d pulled them from a busted emergency light in the old transit station. Tested them himself with the little voltmeter his dad had left behind. Full charge.

“Tested,” he said, mimicking her brevity. It was safer that way. Less to give away.

They closed the last few feet of distance. The trade was always the worst part. The moment of vulnerability. He held out the batteries. She held out the tin. Her fingers were raw and red, the nails bitten down to the quick. His weren't much better. For a second, their hands almost touched. He pulled his back as soon as she had the batteries, shoving the cold weight of the tin deep into his pocket.

The deal was done. They should separate. That was the smart thing. Lingering was how you got noticed.

But Freya didn’t move. She was staring past him, toward the skeletal high-rises that formed the city’s broken spine. “Saw a weird thing,” she said, her breath a ghost in the air. “Yesterday.”

Lawrence’s skin prickled. Weird things were usually bad things. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t go looking.”

“Wasn’t looking. Was checking the pharma-centre on Fourth. The one with the green cross.”

Lawrence knew it. A death trap. The whole ground floor was glassless, a wind tunnel of debris and old files. People said the scav-gangs from the east used it as a waypoint.

“Stupid,” he muttered, glancing around. The park was still empty, but it felt like they were on a stage.

“Needed antibiotics,” she said, shrugging. It was a complete answer. Need trumped stupid every time. “Found nothing. But on the way back… I cut through the Meridian Building.”

His blood went cold. “No. Freya, nobody goes in there. The floors…”

“I know. I was careful. Kept to the edges.” She finally looked at him, her grey eyes narrowed. “You ever see a music box?”

The question was so out of place it felt like a punch. “What?”

“A music box. Little thing. You open the lid, it plays a tune.”

“I’ve seen pictures.” He had a vague memory, maybe from before. A tiny ballerina spinning on a mirror. His mum’s. He shoved the thought away. It was useless.

The Ballerina in the Dust

“Found one,” Freya said. She was turning one of the batteries over and over in her raw fingers. “On the seventh floor. In what used to be a corner office. Big desk, chair tipped over. Everything covered in this thick, grey dust. Like fine cement. But this box… it was on the windowsill. No dust on it. Wiped clean.”

Lawrence’s heart was starting to beat a little too fast. “Someone else was there.”

“That’s what I thought. I hid. For an hour, maybe more. In a supply closet. Smelled like bleach and mould. Nothing. No sounds. Just the wind rattling a loose panel somewhere. So I went back. The box was still there.”

He imagined her, small and fierce, alone in that concrete tomb. He wouldn't have gone back. He would have run.

“It was wood,” she continued, her voice dropping lower, pulling him in. “Dark wood. No dust. I picked it up.”

“Freya…” It was a warning. Don’t touch things. Don’t take things that don’t make sense.

“I opened it.” A faint smile touched her lips, a tiny, cracked thing. “It worked. After all this time. It just… worked. A little silver key on the bottom. I wound it up. And it played.”

She hummed a few notes, a simple, tinny melody that was completely alien in the frozen park. It was a fragile, hopeful sound.

“What was inside?” Lawrence asked, his caution warring with a sudden, sharp curiosity.

“Nothing. Just red velvet lining. And a little plaque. Gold-coloured. It said ‘Clara’.”

The simple story should have ended there. A strange, lucky find. A relic of the old world. But Freya’s expression had changed. The brief flicker of wonder was gone, replaced by something hard and cold. She stopped fiddling with the battery and shoved it into her pocket.

“I took it,” she said. “Stupid. It’s heavy. Useless. But I took it.”

She fell silent. The wind picked up, whistling through the hollow rungs of the climbing frame. It was a lonely, desolate sound.

“So what’s the weird part?” Lawrence finally asked. “It works. That’s weird enough.”

Freya looked down at her boots, at the frozen dirt. “When I got back to my place—the old laundromat by the canal—I cleaned it up. Polished the plaque. It wasn't ‘Clara’.”

Lawrence waited. He felt a knot tightening in his gut.

“The C was a G. Scratched. Looked like a C from a distance. And the L was a V. The rest was right.” Her eyes lifted to meet his. They were dark now, all pupil.

“Grava,” Lawrence breathed, the name tasting like ash in his mouth.

Everyone knew the name. Grava. He wasn’t a person, not really. He was a story whispered by scavengers, a bogeyman for the new world. The Collector. They said he took things. Not useful things. Not food or medicine. He took mementos. A child’s shoe. A photograph from a wallet. A single earring. And he left his mark, his name, scratched onto something nearby.

But the other part of the story, the part that made your throat close up, was what he did to the people he took the mementos from.

“And the ballerina,” Freya said, her voice barely audible over the wind. “The little spinning figure inside.”

“What about it?”

“It wasn’t a ballerina.”

A shiver, sharp and violent, traced its way down Lawrence’s spine. He didn’t want to ask. He had to.

“Then what was it?”

“It was a tiny, perfect sculpture of a little boy,” Freya said, her voice flat and dead. “He was missing his left hand.”

Echoes on the Ice

Lawrence felt the blood drain from his face. Finnick. The boy from the greenhouse settlement who’d vanished two weeks ago. His family had been looking for him. They said he’d just wandered off. But the patrols had found his mitten near the canal. His left one.

“You need to get rid of it,” Lawrence said, his voice urgent, a harsh whisper. “Freya, throw it in the canal. Now.”

“I can’t,” she said simply.

“What do you mean you can’t? He knows where you live! He left it for you to find!” The pieces were clicking into place, each one colder and sharper than the last. It wasn't her find. It was a message. The clean box, the tune, the name. He was watching her. He knew her route. He’d been in her home.

“The box is gone,” she said, looking past him again. “When I woke up this morning, it was gone from my table. But he left something else.”

“What?” Lawrence demanded, his head swiveling, scanning the empty, derelict buildings that surrounded the park.

Freya reached into her collar and pulled out a small, crudely carved object on a piece of twine. It was a bird. Made of wood. Dark wood. The same wood, he knew instinctively, as the music box.

“He was in my room,” she whispered, and for the first time, her voice trembled. “While I was sleeping.”

Panic, cold and absolute, seized Lawrence. This was wrong. This wasn't a trade. It was an infection. She’d brought this story here, and now he was part of it.

“We have to go,” he said, grabbing her arm. Her coat was stiff with cold. “Now. We have to go.”

She didn't resist. She seemed to shrink, the hardness around her crumbling away to reveal the terrified kid underneath. “Where?”

“Anywhere. Not here.”

He started pulling her toward the broken fence that marked the edge of the park. Every shadow seemed to lengthen, to twist into a watching figure. The wind wasn’t just wind anymore; it was a voice, whispering a name. Grava.

They scrambled through a gap in the fence, catching their clothes on the rusted wire. The street beyond was a canyon of shattered windows and frozen heaps of rubbish. It offered more cover, but it also offered more places for someone to hide.

Suddenly, a sound cut through the air. It wasn't the wind.

It was a clear, impossibly loud, tinny melody.

Lawrence froze, his hand still clamped on Freya’s arm. She had gone rigid beside him. He recognised the tune instantly from the few notes she had hummed.

It was the sound of the music box. And it was coming from somewhere very, very close.