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Mudflats—not that many had cause to trespass there in the best of times, save in search of bones or other natural materials, driftwood and miscellaneous seawrack. The Mudflats produced nothing wholesome by way of foodstuffs.
    But forbidding monster or no, Crutchsump was, day by depressing day, nerving herself up to attempt the shifflet harvest.
    Her expenses and her depleted savings drove her to such a risk.
    Not that her lifestyle was extravagant. Far from it.
    The monthly rent on her three shabby basement rooms amounted to only thirty scintillas. She subsisted contentedly on a simple diet of quorn and livewater. Her clothing consisted of various ragged garments secured from several charities. She boasted only a single caul—an unfashionable model several years old, its formerly rickracked eyeholes all frayed—which she washed daily and mended as needed. As for Pirkle—well, her pet managed quite well on alley scavengings and handouts from local merchants.
    Now, however, Crutchsump had reached the limits of her economy. All the bones she had of late managed to accumulate from the streets of Sidetrack City—haunting abbatoirs, rummaging through mucky waste tips, cadging at back doors of diners—had been cleaned and sold to the wholesalers in the bone trade, the businessmen one level up from freelancers like Crutchsump, those who sorted and classified and packaged the osseous relics for subsequent sale to manufacturers of various stripes: the glue and gelatin factories, the corset- and button- and armor-makers, the producers of oil, char, ash and meal. The room where normally Crutchsump stored her haul was empty now, only greasy floor and walls and a fading redolence left behind to denote its function, while the tools of her trade—wire brushes, delicate picks and awls, a colony of hungry carrion ants—gathered dust.
    So one bright morning with the sun Watermilk climbing the sky, when Crutchsump could no longer tolerate the rumbling and griping of her stomach, nor the unsubtle reminders from her landlord, Vannegar, about a certain approaching day of fiscal responsibility, the bone-scavenger resolved herself to attempt the Shulgin Mudflats.
    Arising from her pallet, she pulled her lone caul off a peg and snugged the tailored sack over her head, pulling tight the drawstring around her neck. The jutting forefront of the caul, stretched tight over her introciptor, threatened vulgarly to split old stitches, and Crutchsump sighed. One more purchase to make. …
    The rags she wore in public served also as nightclothes, so no change of garments was necessary. Crutchsump slid her broad calloused feet into a pair of straw huaraches. She reached to a shelf for a flask of livewater. The shallow argent contents of the flask reacted to the approach of her hand by seething. Crutchsump drained the livewater flask dry, figuring that she would need the sustenance most today, and that if she met with success, she could easily replenish her larder. If not—
    But that alternative did not bear contemplation.
    Meanwhile, Pirkle had uncommonly roused himself. The nocturnal wurzel enjoyed his sleep, and generally spent the daylight hours, while Crutchsump was abroad, at the foot of the pallet, chirring rhythmically, the garish false eyes ringing his circumference mounting a bold bluff against antediluvian predators unseen in Sidetrack City for millennia. Now the lids of his true eyes opened, revealing bright blue orbs. Pirkle used several of his feet to scratch his rugose underbelly, flexing with pleasure the padded toes of the remaining feet as they pressed into the floor. The wurzel’s mandibles clacked ecstatically.
    With a hand on her door leading to a flight of steps streetward, Crutchsump was about to order Pirkle to remain behind. But at the last moment she relented. She would appreciate the companionship of the creature while out on her scary, necessary errand. So, securing a large coarse sack used for collecting, Crutchsump set out,