Wake up!

“Huh?”

I sat bolt-straight in my bed.

You’re going on a job with Jack today. You have to be ready. Do your pushups and squats.

I pulled the PID off the counter and looked at the time.

“It’s four in the fucking morning.” I groaned.

You’re leaving at six. Hurry up.

It took me nearly an hour to do my sets, and by the time I was finished, I was huffing on the floor.

Good. When you get back,; we’ll start your next set of exercises.

“N-next set?”

Yes. You’re going to get Basic Swordsmanship today.

“Are you kidding me?”

No. You have a sword, so you must learn how to use it.

Fuck.

I throw on the clothes I wore yesterday and a new pair of socks. The tears weren’t too bad compared to the clothes I used to wear, so I didn’t mind. More worrying were the brownish stains of my blood. Not from the looks: my clothes were always stained, but bloodstains tended to harden and get itchy over time. I suppose I should look for new clothes. I sighed, more money spent.

Once dressed, I looked through the jobs available in the scrapyard.

“Find 10 Medium gears,” was one available. I took it.

“Kill 10 creatures tagged as mutated or monster in the Scrapyard,” was another.

While on the way there, I’ll gather herbs to sell and to test with. I packed the same thing that I did yesterday, filled the bottle with potion, and filled the canteen they gave us with water before getting my weapons ready. Jack was up and about at around 5:45, and he approached me while I was coming back from the restroom.

“Hey, I’m sorry for the comment last night.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him.

I had mostly forgotten about it, though thinking back on it...there might have been some truth to it. Did I love my family? I don’t know, but I knew for a fact now, that I didn’t hate them.

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“I’m almost done getting ready.” He said, “Meet me in front of the city past the gate?”

“Sure.”

I head for the front gate. Sunrise tinted the Eastern skies, and the moons were gone from the skies.

“Name?” The man is the same as yesterday.

“Lyle Kyle,” I told him with a yawn.

“Lyle...alright, going back to the Scrapyard?”

“Yeah.”

He scrawled the information down on his sheet of paper.

“Good luck.”

As I walked out and down the path a little, where the gate was no longer in view, I heard the clicking of a tongue behind me. I turned my head slightly before something cold and hard was pressed against my temple.

“Don’t move, ese.”

Daniel clicked his tongue and one of his crew members patted me down until he found my PID tucked in the front of my coat. He pulled it out of my front pocket and carried it away. Once the man was a good distance up the road, he flipped his pistol over in his hand and hit me over the head with it. I collapsed to the ground as blood poured from my head and stung my eyes.

“Fucking bitch, this is how you gave me the scar, right?” He slammed his foot into my ribs, “You told all the fucking people in the block how much of a pussy I was? Fuck you.”

He kicked me again.

“Now what, bitch? I heard you was the weakest one they ever hired here. Think I wouldn’t hear that, huh?” He kicked me to punctuate each sentence. “Think I wasn’t gonna get back at you for this.” He rubbed his thumb over the scar above his eyebrow, “Fuck you.”

He stomped on my head before squatting down and pressing the gun to my temple.

“Now. From today onward you’re going to pay me and the boys here.” He motioned to his group of six former inmates, “500 dollars each, or…” He pressed the barrel of the pistol to the earth right by my head and pulled the trigger. The earth exploded into my face as the bullet bore its way down into the dirt. “Got it?”

I nodded my head.

“Good, now…” He motioned for the guy holding my PID with a sharp whistle.

The man came back and handed me my PID. Five minutes they were heading back into town and my account was drained of 3000 dollars.

“If you tell anyone….” Daniel mimicked the gun going off.

Fuck. I sat up and took a deep drink of the healing potion. The wounds healed, but the shame remained.

“Hey, there you are.” Jack called, “Just saw Daniel and his group go in. Haven’t seen them out for a while.”

He wore a new set of clothes: a heavy black coat that went down to right above his knees, and was lined with black fur; a black beanie that was a little too big for his head, a pair of black riding gloves, and a pair of shiny black boots. He wore his rifle slung over one shoulder, and the two-handed mace he used as a walking stick; battering the bottom against the gravel as he grabbed hold of the head of the mace like it was the head of a cane. He also carried a new backpack, as black as the rest of his

“Is that so?” I put the potion back into the mesh and flung my bag back on my shoulder. “Got your jobs all lined up?”

I swallowed my anger.

“Yep. Have to bring 100 pounds of scrap back to a blacksmith, find 10, ‘rare materials,’ and kill 20 things there.”

“Let’s go, then.”

The walk to the Scrapyard was uneventful. We talked here and there about childhood memories and dreams. He decided to start writing again and bought several notebooks yesterday, and had the goal of using the money he got here to finance his dreams and coming back once in a while after he got a book published.

“So what kind of story are you writing right now?” I asked as I glanced around the path for something to forage.

Earlier in the walk I had been lucky and grabbed a few Golden Bells: tulip-like flowers with a brilliant yellow downward-facing bulb that seemed to glimmer in the sun. If eaten raw it was said to taste like honey. Surely it must have alchemical properties so I could sell it to the alchemist back in town.

“It’s about a failed musician in New York.” He said.

“That’s it?

“No, he moved to New York with the aspiration of being a musician with his music playing on Broadway, but couldn’t find any success. Eventually, he winds up walking around Central Park when he hears a beautiful voice coming from somewhere in the park. He tracks it down to a woman sitting on a bench singing to no one in particular.”

“Yeah? What then?”

“Then he has her sing his music, and he begins to make it big. Some things happen, and she ends up dying from an OD. Going to call it, ‘The Siren of Central Park.’”

“That’s depressing.”

“I think I can do the story justice. It’ll move people.”

“Uh-huh.”

He asked me about my family. I told him as much as I could without digging too deep into those wounds. For some reason, it was easy to speak to Jack. He had a disarming air around him. It reminded me of when I used to talk to my brothers when I was younger. It wasn't long until I forgot the injustice done to me, and found myself slipping into natural conversation. I told him about how my younger sister won several awards in painting when she was younger and told him about how intelligent both of my brothers were...I told him of the dreams that I knew that I would never achieve; becoming an explorer who documented new lands, and discovering lost artifacts. Contacting lost tribes, and exploring ruins long lost to time.

“Ha! Isn’t that what you’re doing now?” He said.

I had never really thought of it like that. Perhaps once my contract period was done, I’d go explore these Lands Beyond.

I would approve of that choice. The Ego said.

Then maybe I won’t.