The first rays of dawn cast zebra stripes of light and shadow through the metal slats of a tiny window set high above Handsome's bed. He stretched his toes onto the concrete floor, already warm to the touch even at this early hour.

Pulling himself out of the thin sleeping mat he shared with his sister, he ran his tongue along the roof of his mouth and over the dry crest of his lips. No doubt about it: the day tasted like stale cereal. Not the best he could hope for, but not the worst either. Stale cereal meant an average day. Overcast skies, despondent but nonthreatening parents, probably even a little food at some point.

His parents' bed was on the opposite side of the room; two unmoving lumps under a tattered wool blanket. He approached them on tippy toes and crouched near where their heads lay, tilting his own down towards theirs. He waited.

A low, ragged intake of air from his father, a slow wheezy exhale from his mom.

Still alive, then. He knew they would be, of course, because a stale cereal day did not foretell of impending doom on any large scale. It was the sour milk days that he feared. Those took away pieces of his life, like when the baby had died in her sleep last spring, or when his father had come home with a blood-caked face, beaten by one of Boss's underlings for missing a payment.

Today was no sour milk day. Today would bring a normal struggle for survival—the sort of day Handsome was used to. In his eleven years, and especially the last few, stale cereal days far outnumbered any other kind. He could live with that. He had yet to experience what a day for giving up would taste like.

"Egret." He shook his sister gently. "Egret, it's time."

His sister moaned and turned towards the wall, hugging her dolly, Gemma, to her chest. Gemma's one remaining button eye glared up at Handsome, admonishing him for waking her mistress.

"Egret." He kept his voice muffled. Mama and Da hated to be woken. It was always best that he and Egret escape the house and let them sleep. "Come on now."

Finally relenting, Egret turned back to him, rubbing her eyes. "I was dreaming about a house made of food, but you woke me before I could eat any of it."

Handsome laughed. "I promise if we find an actual house made of food, I'll let you eat as much as you wish."

"Do you think there's anything to this one? The dream, I mean."

"Shhhh. Don't talk about it." He barely dared to whisper the words. "And anyways, I doubt it."

Egret sighed as she let her brother pull her out of bed. "What did you taste, Handsome? I'm hungry."

"Me too. Lucky for us, it's a stale cereal day."

Egret scowled. "I was hoping for broccoli."

He nodded in agreement. Broccoli days were the best, but they came so infrequently, Handsome had trouble recalling the taste. He remembered what that taste meant, though. Broccoli days were whole meal days supplied by parents who had made a score, the particulars of which they wouldn't share with their children. Broccoli days could last two, even three days in a row, but then they were gone. And who knows when they'd come again.

He put his arm around Egret's shoulders. "It's not so bad. We'll be okay."

Egret melted into his side. "That's what you always say."

A grey morning greeted the siblings as they poked their heads outside their cinderblock home. The narrow footpath zigzagging through the Maze between rows of mismatched shanties coughed up clouds of dust as wind forced its way through narrow alleys.

"Will it rain today, Handsome?" Egret took his hand as they turned down the lane. She scuffed her toes in the dirt, kicking up even more dust around them.

"Stop that, will you?" He stuck his tongue out into the air. Rain tasted like watermelon, but there was no trace of that today. There'd been nothing of the sort for months now. "And no. No rain, not today."

"That's not what Miss Ashlea says." Egret pouted, pulling her hand from Handsome and crossing her arms in front of her in protest. Egret spent nearly every evening over at the community house watching Miss Ashlea's fake eyelashes flutter on the television as she made her bogus forecasts. One time, she had predicted that the stock market would collapse and the next day, it did. Now everyone believed everything she said. When something she'd foretold failed to come true, she'd have another compelling prediction to announce and everyone would forget about the last one.

Egret was a true believer. "Miss Ashlea says it's in the stars. The drought will end. You can feel it in the wind. Can't you feel it, Handsome?"

He shrugged. "I feel it, sure. Sometimes feelings don't amount to much."

"Do too!" She ran off ahead of him, long braided ponytail swinging behind her.

He sighed and picked up his pace. Few people were up and about this time of morning, especially the types of people he had to worry about Egret running into. Still, it wouldn't do to lose track of her. Even on an empty stomach, Egret could run fast and the Maze had gotten its name for a reason; it had no shortage of twists and turns and dead ends. It wanted you to get lost in it, to wander until you finally had your "give-up" day. It would be easy to get separated, even though they both knew where they were headed.

Within a few minutes, he'd caught up to her, mainly because she'd come to a stand-still in front of the market. Half a dozen dirty grey tents sat in a small square, under which even dirtier merchants sold a mixture of wilting vegetables and wormy apples at prices the children could never afford.

"Pastor Gregory says it's best not to covet what you can't have." He took her hand again and she let him, her anger replaced by gnawing hunger. "It just makes the cramps worse than they are. Come on. You never know what we might find. Remember, it's a stale cereal day."

"I'd give anything for stale cereal." She let him lead her away from the market and the suspicious eyes of the merchants, guarding their wares from the grabby hands of the Maze's street urchins.

"I know." They walked in silence the rest of the way, through another neighborhood of crumbling block houses and tarp-covered roofs. Dogs with ribs sticking out under matted fur barked at them through open doorways. A starchy, rich smell of cooked grains wafted up from the luckier of homes.

The siblings walked until they reached the shadow of Treasure Mountain, a looming pile of rubbish dumped on their side of the wall by the people who lived on its other side in Green Terra. Handsome had never been to the other side so he couldn't say what it was like to be there, but when he climbed to the very top of Treasure Mountain, he could peer over the huge wall and see for himself how different things were there. Less crowded, more organized. Green lawns even in the drought. Pools filled with water you weren't supposed to drink for some reason. Children swimming, laughing. Not working. One day, he would scale the wall and ask one of the kids there if he and his sister could use their pool. He didn't know how to swim, but he could learn and his sister could too. They would spend all afternoon in the pool tossing beach balls to each other.

That would be a broccoli day, for sure.

Today was not a broccoli day, however, and they had a job to do right here on this side of the wall. Early though it was, other scavengers had already positioned themselves on the mountain, each staking a claim to it. Handsome surveyed the mound until his eyes fell on a shiny piece of metal jutting out from black garbage bags halfway up the left side.

"There." His sister pointed. She'd spotted it too.

"Okay, remember, you only stay on the mound as long as you're able to float. I don't want to have to carry you home with bloody feet."

"I've been doing this as long as you!" The pout was back, but she didn't try to argue any further. There was no use. She knew he was right. Egret could hover a few inches off the ground, but it took energy to float, and even Egret only had so much of that, what with meals being as scarce as they were. When she was a toddler, she'd hardly walked at all. Why would you if you could fly? Their mother had had to tie her leg to the front stoop to keep her from drifting away.

That had been before sour milk days. Before lots of things.

Now Egret only floated when she had to and she only had to when they were on Treasure Mountain, searching for valuables hidden under cat feces and glass shards. Hovering kept her feet safe for as long as she had the energy for it. The last time she'd stayed on the Mountain too long, she'd come down right onto a broken bottle and hadn't been able to scavenge for two weeks. Handsome grimaced, remembering the fever that had accompanied the infection, and the infectious anger of their parents at the loss of income. She'd recovered, but it had been close. He didn't want to go through that again, not ever. Even though it annoyed her, he reminded her every single time they reached the mound.

Only stay for as long as you can hover. No exceptions.

Handsome handed her a sack and watched as her tiny face lost its annoyed countenance. Her lips went slack, eyes drooped, cheeks reddened. She rose into the air until she was the same height as he was and then she glided up the mound in the direction of the shiny object.

Keeping an eye on her as best he could, Handsome crouched to the ground, tying plastic bags around both feet. He was a day-taster, not a hoverer. His feet would have to be protected the old-fashioned way. Several children nodded to him as he made his way towards Egret. So long as no one tried to take from another's stash, relations amongst the young scavengers were detached but polite. That was as good as it would get. No one wished anyone ill, but everyone was there to fill their own sack first and foremost. Everyone was hungry.

It was the poachers you had to watch out for, teenagers mainly, getting in with the gangs by proving they were tough enough to beat up children on their way home from the Mountain, taking everything the kids had spent the day searching for. Handsome had been poached from half a dozen times. The only thing they'd left him with was blackened eyes.

Handsome counted three, four... at least five other hoverers working Treasure Mountain besides Egret. It was a common profession given to those with her skill for the same reason her parents had chosen it for her. Fewer injuries, fast moving, able to dodge poachers—all equaled more return on the parents' investments. Handsome was only there because he refused to do anything that would separate him from Egret. Da had indicated that situation wouldn't last forever, though. His son would join him in his business soon. There was more money to be made from drugs than from trash.

And more money to be squandered, thought Handsome as he maneuvered over a moldy couch with springs sticking out at odd angles from its ruined upholstery.

"Handsome, come look!"

Twenty feet away, Egret waved something in one of her hands. He shielded his eyes, but the glare from the rising sun made it impossible for him to see what she was holding. He scowled and hurried to scramble up the rest of the way. Whatever it was, she should know better than to shout her discover out to the world. Just because most of the scavengers were cool didn't mean all of them were.

Egret, still hovering, met him halfway down from the ledge she'd been working. "It's an apple! Barely eaten, too. Share it with me?"

Handsome lifted it from her outstretched hand. Sure enough, it had been bitten into only once. The inside was brown were teeth had gouged it, but other than that, the rest of its waxy surface was unblemished. "Rich folks got ways to keep worms out, I guess." He rubbed it against his shirt, though why he thought that would clean away the grime of Treasure Mountain was beyond him.

"You were right, Handsome, it is a stale cereal day." She took the apple back from him and bit into it, eyes rolling back into her head. "Maybe whoever threw this away didn't like how tart it is."

Handsome took the next bite, cheeks sucking inward as the juice hit his taste buds. "It's so fresh. Must've belonged to a garbage collector this morning. Where'd you find it?"

"Up there." Egret led him to a tiny outcropping formed amidst trash bags from the rusting bed of an old truck. Sure enough, hidden on the other side of it was a new refuse deposit. The shiny metal object they'd spied from the base of the mound had been the truck's rear bumper, pushed in and twisted upright, probably when the morning's load was shoved out onto the mound.

"Jackpot." Handsome scrambled over the truck and carefully poked around in the new trash. "Get your sack ready, Egret. There's stuff here."

He wasn't wrong. Scrunching up his nose as he threw aside a pile of soiled teal-green garments streaked with crusty red, he discovered several plastic soda bottles and what looked to be a jug of orange juice. He screwed off the lid and sniffed inside, letting the smell coat his tongue. Nothing screamed food poisoning to him, so he handed it to his sister. "There's a mouthful or two left. Drink up."

With a frown, Egret took the tiniest of sips and then passed it back to him. "There were two mouthfuls. You get the rest."

He tilted his head back and let the pulp hit his throat. Why anyone would let such a thing go to waste was beyond him. The bottle emptied, he slipped it into his sack with the others and then looked to see what his sister was doing. His eyes widened. "Careful with that!"

Egret held a plastic bag with three nearly perfect rings intersecting on top of a unifying circle. He knew what that symbol meant.

"Whatever's in there could be dangerous."

She gave him another one of her ingratiating looks. "I'm not a little kid! I'm not stupid!"

"I know that." Gently, he coaxed the bag away from her and peeked inside. Several dozen hypodermic needles. And something else. He shook the bag. A rattle sounded at the bottom of it. Carefully feeling for it from outside the sack, his fingers eventually grasped onto what he thought must be a pill bottle with enough pills inside to shift around and make noise. "This all must have come from a hospital."

"They shouldn't dump those here."

Even a child Egret's age knew biohazardous materials weren't supposed to be deposited on Treasure Mountain. There must have been a mix-up. Or the hospital stopped paying the right people. However it happened, this was a major score. Da would be pleased.

"Get your sack, Egret. We're going home."

"Already? But we just got here. There's probably lots more stuff in this load."

Handsome carefully placed the bag of needles into his sack, covering them with the orange juice container and cinching it up tight. "We can't risk the poachers. Not with this." Better to walk away with something than with nothing. And this something was definitely worth walking away for.

Egret nodded. "Give me it then."

Reluctantly, Handsome handed her the sack and he took her lighter one, nothing but a couple of plastic sporks and the core from the apple they'd shared in it. He hated making her carry the bag the poachers would want, but it had to be that way.

With her free hand, she reached out to him, helping pull him back up and over the truck bed. He smiled as they made their way down the side of the Mountain, turning into the tangle of avenues leading back to their home.

Tomorrow was going to be a broccoli day. He could almost taste it.

Author's Note: Thank you for reading the first chapter of Handsome & Egret. This is a novelette, about 15K words, that will be posted in roughly five parts during the month of June 2019. H&E is a quirky little re-imagined fairy-tale that I hope you will enjoy.

What do you think of our siblings abilities? Handsome's power intrigues me, in particular. What do you imagine he'll be able to use it for as their story progresses?

I'll have another update for you by next Friday. Stay tuned!