It was probably somewhere around midnight when I came back. I hadn't been told to, but I had a feeling that I had more or less been forgotten about on that rooftop.

Nothing had changed much with the clinic. The cart left empty meaning they were keeping the food somewhere inside. All but 2 Fire Nation soldiers left, returning to what I assumed was the inner military district.

I was allowed back into the Hive the second Meeks, the only guard tonight, had seen me. We didn't have the weapons we used to. When the Hornets still had a deal going on with the Fire Nation, we were provided with some food and some weapons. The same weapons that got me into this gang, but when we bit off more than we could chew, we lost all of our food, our weapons, and 3 of our friends' lives. Now, guards just held sharpened sticks with glass shards tied around the end. Danev and I would practice with the same tools now lacking proper training equipment.

Danev hadn't stopped teaching me how to fight although it was getting more and more rare as finding food became the primary issue. At least now I knew how to somewhat hold my own in a brawl, score a few cheap moves, and get an upper hand in a bad situation. I was nowhere near skilled as it had been only around 2 and a half months that I had been a part of the Hornets.

I wondered sometimes if the Hornets was the best place for me to be. Before I was "recruited", I had thought about Miro's gang. Reek would give me the same pitch every other day I saw him. Reek was one of the few people in Miro's gang that actually had a high opinion of me. When I was still selling information between sides, neither group liked me very much.

Before, I had only met Riu on one occasion. Danev introduced me to him as the person telling them how to win, but the enemy as well. Gang war was still going on then. Great for business. As for Miro, I had never met the man. I heard good things about him though. Some of them conflicting though. Then I had joined the Hornets and the war ended just as soon as the food shortage began. It was more or less every man for himself now.

The slums were in a worse shape than ever. Everybody was starving. Some of the younger kids and the elderly had already dropped dead on the street or in the alleys from lack of food. It would be considered a miracle if you could step outside the hive and not see a skeletal corpse of a starved man on the street.

People were eating their pets, rats, birds too if they could catch them. I even heard about somebody on the streets that was eating dead bodies of other street urchins. Made me wonder how long it would take before he went after the living.

I saw Danev sitting on a bench in the main courtyard of the Hive, twiddling his thumbs without anything to do. When he saw me, he asked "Who told you to come back?"

"The sun." I answered. "Thought you guys forgot about me."

"It's fine. I'm just fucking with you. What did you see?"

I told him what I saw. The empty cart coming out with the Fire Nation convoy short 2 guards, the fact that the food was being kept inside the clinic, all of it. "You tell Riu?" I asked.

"I told him. He tells us to keep an eye on it and see if anybody comes for this supposed 'relief aid.' If so, he says that we'll find a way to take advantage of it so we can keep ourselves alive."

I sighed. It was a chance for food in the future, but no the present that worried me. "Trap catch anything?"

"Caught a mouse. Aden beat him to the trap and grabbed the thing right out of the trap, snapping its neck to give it to Ladle right away. Trap wouldn't shut up about it the entire time we were eating supper."

The word 'supper' alone made my stomach audibly grumble. "Is there any left?" I asked, holding onto a tad bit of hope.

"No. Sorry. It was a small one."

"It's fine. I'm used to it."

I was used to it. I had grown accustomed to the feeling of hatred my stomach gave me each and every time I lied down in bed. The smell of sewage water in my breath as it bounced against the wall and back against my face every time I exhaled on my sleeping bad and the rumbling of my stomach as it very loudly disagreed with my life choices. "Not for long." I told myself. I remembered the free food sign. Only 2 guards. We could handle that. The men in the white robes. Pushover. We could take what we needed. We wouldn't have to ask for it or die for it, but just take it.

I fell asleep with images of hot soup and juicy fruit in my dreams.