"You ever notice how the rust tastes like blood?"
The boy—'Yev'—didn't answer. He never did. His fingers curled tighter around the swing's frayed ropes, knuckles bone-white against the grime. Colony Park wasn't a colony, wasn't a park either, just a fenced-in patch of dirt where the city dumped its forgotten things. Like him. Like the swing set sighing under his weight, one rusted chain shorter than the other, tilting him perpetually sideways.
Across the dust, the pack moved. No parents, no names, just a blur of elbows and knees scaling the monkey bars like feral cats. One girl— 'Lir'—hung upside down, her shirt riding up to expose a constellation of scars. "Bet you can't do it," she spat at a smaller kid, voice raw as the pavement. Yev watched the kid's face twist, watched him leap and miss, watched the pack dissolve into laughter sharp as shattered glass.
His uncle exhaled smoke through his nose, thumb scrolling past something that made his jaw tighten. "Gonna sit there all day, or what?" The question wasn't really a question. Yev dug his sneakers into the dirt, twisting the swing in slow, crooked circles. Above them, a crow nailed itself to the sky.
The pack had rules. Rules whispered in alleys, sealed with spit-handshakes and stolen candy. Yev knew them by osmosis, "Don't cry. Don't snitch. Don't be slow." He'd broken all three before breakfast. Now his ribs ached where Lir's palm had pushed yesterday, a souvenir for dawdling near their claimed slide. The swing creaked under him—loyal, at least.
"Christ." His uncle's phone screen lit up blue, casting his stubble in corpse-light. A woman's voice, tinny through the speaker, "—three days, Rustom, I swear to god—" The man thumbed it silent, flicked his cigarette at a wilted dandelion. "Get up. We're leaving."
Yev didn't ask where. Places were temporary—motels with sticky carpets, backseats that smelled of old fries. He let the swing still, the world tilting back to level as his feet touched ground. Behind him, Lir crowed victory as the small kid finally made it across the bars. The sound curled in Yev's gut, hot and sour.
The crow overhead cawed once, a rusty hinge of a sound, and Yev wondered if birds ever landed wrong. If their bones snapped mid-air, if they plummeted like dirty rags. His uncle was already walking, the back of his neck slick with sweat. Yev followed, stepping over the cigarette smoldering in the grass.
The pack had names for each other—not real ones, but sharp little barbs that stuck. Lir, the girl with the upside-down grin, was "Rustmouth" when she laughed. The boy who couldn't climb was "Sticklegs." They moved like a single creature, all elbows and teeth, sharing stolen gum and shoving each other into puddles. Yev had watched them yesterday from behind the slide, his shadow too long, his breathing too loud. Belonging curled somewhere deep in their pockets, warm as a gum wrapper, and he didn't know how to ask for it.
The sky above Colony Park was the color of old newspaper, a dull gray smeared with fingerprints. Clouds hung low, lazy, like they couldn't be bothered to move. The air smelled of wet concrete and the ghost of someone's burnt toast. A single oak stood sentinel by the fence, its leaves curled tight, whispering secrets to no one. The swing chains groaned when the wind pushed through, a sound like bones settling.
Yev's uncle was halfway to the rusted gate when the crow dropped. Not plummeted—"dropped", deliberate as a penny down a well. It landed in the dust between Yev's sneakers, wings splayed like a broken umbrella. Black eyes glittered. A beetle twitched in its beak.
He crouched, slow, until his knees popped. The crow tipped its head, considering him. Behind them, Lir whooped—someone had fallen off the monkey bars again—but the sound felt distant, underwater. Yev reached out, one finger extended. The crow hopped back, fluffed its feathers. A single black feather drifted loose, landing on Yev's shoelace.
"Pizdets," his uncle spat, finally noticing. He kicked at the bird, but it dodged, effortless. "Fucking rats with wings."
The crow cawed once—a sound like a nail dragged across metal—and took off. The beetle fell from its beak, landing in the dirt by Yev's knee. Six legs wriggled. Still alive.
Lir's voice cut through the haze, "Oi, Sticklegs! Again?" Laughter, sharp as broken glass. Yev glanced up. The pack had formed a loose circle around the fallen boy, their shadows long and lean. The boy—Sticklegs—pushed himself up, dust clinging to his palms. His knees were scraped raw, the color of old bubblegum.
"You're slow," Lir said, not unkindly. She tossed him a half-melted candy from her pocket. Sticklegs caught it, grinned. The pack moved on, a single creature with many limbs.
Yev stood. The beetle stopped twitching.
"Yevgeny." His uncle's voice was a warning.
He followed.
Meanwhile, in a memory-laced flashback—
Ira counted the ceiling tiles for the seventeenth time. "Twenty-seven, twenty-eight—" The fluorescents hummed like a swarm of dying bees. A doctor's voice bled through the curtain, "—complications, monitor closely—" She dug her nails into the paper sheet, the kind that ripped if you breathed wrong. Her belly rose, alien and taut. The ultrasound gel had dried sticky between her thighs.
"Thirty-three, thirty-four—"
Three months ago, she'd been the girl who turned heads in lecture halls, the one with the laugh like shattered champagne flutes. Now her hair hung lank with sweat, and the nurses avoided her eyes. The father could've been the bartender with the snake tattoo, or the TA who quoted Dostoevsky between her legs, or—"Stop it." She swallowed bile. Outside, a janitor's mop squeaked against linoleum, a sound like a small animal suffocating.
Back in Colony Park,
The crow's feather still clung to Yev's shoelace as the gate clanged shut behind them. His uncle's car smelled of stale fries and something older, something sour. The dashboard crackled with missed calls, all from the same number. Yev pressed his forehead to the window, watching Colony Park shrink in the rearview. Lir was a speck now, upside-down on the bars, her laughter lost under the engine's growl.
"Seatbelt," his uncle muttered, lighting another cigarette with the car's dying lighter.
Yev tugged at the frayed strap. It came away in his hand, limp as a dead snake. His uncle exhaled smoke through his nose. "Pizdets."
The car lurched forward. On the curb, a stray dog lifted its leg on a fire hydrant painted with "FUCK THE POLICE" in wobbly letters. Yev wondered if dogs ever missed their owners. If their bones ached when it rained.
The feather came loose, fluttering to the floor mat like a tiny surrender.
Somewhere far away, Ira screamed into a hospital pillow. Somewhere closer, Lir stole a lighter from a sleeping junkie and set a candy wrapper on fire just to watch it curl.
The world kept moving.