It was obvious to Dalton the second they shifted the planks that made up Grimmy's door, and stepped into his claustrophobic ten foot by ten foot apartment, that Grimmy was dead. It wasn't the black little insects that he stomped on as he took another step into the dim space, and it wasn't the smell. It was minute flickers of movement in the deepest of the shadows farthest back in the corner, the itch at the back of his neck, and he could simply smell and and taste something in the air. Grimmy had been alive yesterday, snapping together springs and plates into firing mechanisms at his typical teeth-on-edge speed, eyes practically bulging from their sockets, dark skin slick with sweat and grease and patched with dust. Sharpleaf wasn't cutting it for him anymore; Grimmy had started using Tilt, expensive stuff from Dheathain cooked up from some swamp viper that got one so hyped up they wouldn't sleep for a week. It earned its name from the penchant of users to sit on the edge of their seats, tilted forward, always ready to explode forward. The crash was hellacious, but Grimmy had always been about going fast.
Dalton said nothing, and neither did Klent; instead, they simply sat down at Grimmy's prized table at either side of his elbows on wood stumps pulled from the green edge of Concordia. He'd gotten it as a drug trade, and his fried little brain fixated on it. It was most likely the most well cared for piece of furniture in the Blok. Glossy and obsessively polished, Grimmy's dead fingers were still clutching the edges of the dark blue wood. Dalton picked at a finger, feeling unsurprised when the stiff digit slowly eased back to the wood.
"I don't know. Looks like last night, I guess." Klent let out a soft sigh and hunched over, running his hands over his smooth scalp. Most likely, not wanting the high to end, and feeling the crash coming like a fish hook deep in the guts, pulling hard, Grimmy had went ahead and did an extra little 'bump' as they called it. Just a pinch more of whatever you're smoking, snorting, whatever, to bring you back up. Or down, whatever direction one prefers. Whatever snake they made the tilt out of was a nightmare Dalton never wanted to come face to face with. Leaning over and pushing snarls of Grimmy's wild black hair out of his face, he could see the dry, clotted blood. Thick crusts of it on his nostrils, his eyelids, his lips. His still eyes were a dark red from dozens of burst blood vessels. Sitting up, Dalton put a hand on his knife and looked around. Aside from the table, the rest of the home was as one would expect; ashes ground between floor planks, a lumpy straw mattress a step from the table, a few scattered dice, and very little in the way of decoration. Very few people in the Blok decorated their homes. After all, the Blok was simply hundreds of interconnecting shanties and huts with dozens of badly maintained, poorly built walkways and staircases built onto a few simple brick buildings. There wasn't really anything to work with, so they preferred to decorate themselves. Giving up the search, Dalton let his eyes fall back on Grimmy. It had to have been terrifying, dying alone.
"Wonder if he did all the tilt?" Dalton looked up, his face a mixture of confusion, grief, and a small bit of disgust. It took him several breaths to understand, the words as strange to him as a dark elf, of which he'd only read about. For a moment, the fantasy that Grimmy had been a friend, a sliver of sentiment burned out of neighbors and coworkers ten years their senior, not to be defiled, shown like a sunbeam for a second, before it was buried by the itching reality of their situation. He blinked slowly as the words finally sunk their teeth in, and he understood his friend's hunger. Felt his own hunger.
Klent's eyes began to look around for hiding places, while Dalton reluctantly pulled his knife, laid it in his hand, and folded his palm over it, making a shallow cut in the skin. Dark droplets of blood dribbled onto the crusted, rusty leavings of the overdose. Dalton mixed it together into a runny paste, then began drawing a trio of vertically stacked triangles on the dead man's right cheek. His fingers were a bit clumsy from the sharpleaf and the long day, but memory lent itself well to him. After he'd read as much of the Yellow Book as he could understand, he'd collected every dead rat, cat, and dog, anything small without the gift of the gab, and had begun practicing the sigil until he'd raised a gibbering, howling, and hissing rotted chorus. Pulling in a breath as he made the last dot, he sat up, staring down at Grimmy's dead eye. Faint fingers of frost had spread out on his bloody fingertips, and the sunlight coming from the door frame seemed to lose some of its brilliance, for a heartbeat.
"Mare'alok, vishidus cholme."
Grimmy jerked, and the lightless eye spun in its socket. It jerked again, as though trying to sit up, then began to babble in a frightened panicked stutter until Dalton put his palm on the back of its neck. "Grimmy...buddy...did you do all of your tilt?"
"I, the river, it's all cold, all the way in, I don't want to be here, it...it...no. No. There's still tilt left. It's under the table. I used a candle to seal it to the bottom." Klent bent over, letting out a little groan as he pressed down on his round belly, then popped up a second later, grinning ear to ear as he held up a glass vial of amber colored syrup, wax flaking off his hands.
"That all you had?" Grimmy tried to lick his lips, but to Dalton, the thing that popped out of his mouth looked like a cockroach peeking out of a base board, before he shook his head. Dalton dipped his finger into his grisly red paint, and turned Grimmy's head towards him, so their eyes were meeting as he drew the sigil on the left cheek.
"Sorry it happened to you so early Grimmy, but hell, I may only got about a good five years, I think. It ain't no walk on the Blok." Dalton hesitated as he repeated one of their old childhood rhymes, transported briefly to days of scratchy burlap, days of innocent fights and innocent laughter, days before the dope days. He snapped back, meeting Grimmy's eyes again, and finished the sigil. He could feel his eyes stinging. He would not cry in front of Klent. The man knew about his odd hobbies, but he didn't know there was a part of Dalton that wasn't a purebred, brawling thug. "Cholme, karnuis."
"So, how about Styme? We give him a drop of this tilt, he'll do the job for free." Dalton glanced at Klent as he pushed the corpse up into its chair, stood, and grabbed the edges of the blue table.
"But...Styme is a sociopath with a bad speed addiction. Grimmy would have been a lot better." When he didn't get an answer, he sighed, shaking his head as he caressed the glass-smooith top of the liviol table.
"Fine. I'm taking this table though. It's a good fucking table." Without another word, he started dragging it towards the door frame, staring at Grimmy as he went. His mind, working still under the haze of sharpleaf, vaguely considered how true the words that left it a few moments ago really were. How many more sweating nights, digging through floor boards for just one more hit could he take? How many more years breaking his hands could they take before he was as strung out as Grimmy had been?
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