AKI:

The rattle of metal on metal.

Instinct took over. I scrambled back and tucked myself into a dark corner. My heart hammered against my chest as if to escape and leave me to my doom. Fear locked and shook my limbs at once. I huddled there, blanketed by darkness and self-loathing; it’s cowardice that allows fear to become instinct. That very thought steeled my nerves because, for me, shame is a potent elixir for courage.

The window’s shutters, an assembly of ill-fitted planks much like the rest of the hovel I called home, afforded me gaps to spy through. I peered through the lowest of them, my back against the adjacent wall.

Darkness ruled much of the sky, its conquest abated by the emerald glow springing from the royal spires. The green lights, filtered through the city, were but shadows of murky green when they reached and pooled about our modest porch. In its muted radiance, Kalin stood hunched before the door. Odd, I thought, he looks different. It took me a breath to realize he stood without the precarious sway of drunkenness. It took another to see the tall man who approached him unawares.

Large a Mud but too raw-boned to be a Root, the stranger was on the fairer side of dark and likely a mutt of southern breeding. They said Southerners of pure descent can blend with the night as easily as fire burns. From the way he emerged as if birthed by shadows, I believed them.

The stranger’s long fingers snatched the scruff of Kalin’s threadbare tunic and pulled. Kalin's collar dug into his neck like a tight noose, and his strangled shriek was cut short. He landed hard, and despite his delicate weight, the planks of our rotten porch creaked in protest.

“Please, Rees!” Kalin prostrated before his assailant. “I’m sor—”

The heel of Rees's tattered boot dug into the back of Kalin’s hand. My keeper’s cry for mercy mutated into a squeal of pain.

“Shut it, Likkle, and hand it over,” Rees said.

The stranger was largely bald. A few anomalous clumps of wiry hair clung to the sides of his head in patches. His skin, as smeared with mud as his boots, deepened his already dark complexion and further emphasized the yellow rot of his wicked grin.

Kalin raised his head, the pleading in his eyes aided by budding tears. “Of course, Rees, of course. I was coming to find y—”

A vicious kick to his jaw rocked Kalin sideways, and his groans of pain embraced me with arms of pleasure and shame.

“Didn’t I tell ya to shut it, Likkle?” Rees said. “Now, spare me ya lies and hand it over.”

Kalin labored to his knees. “Please—”

“Look here,” Rees said, voice dripping with lazy malice. “If ya dare,”—he crouched down and touched his cracked lips to the back of Kalin’s ear—“I’ll break ya all ova’ again. I’ll break ya till ya don’t care to waste my time, and then again for the fun of it. Ya remember, don’t ya? Ya can’t have forgotten. Not when it was oh-so memorable.”

Kalin’s head slumped to his chest. He reached into his dirtied sleeve, pulled out a small object hidden from me by his scrawny frame, and handed it to the man.

Reese’s lips stretched to reveal a grotesque display of crooked teeth, each glinting with the myriad shades of rot. “Good choice, Likkle.” He straightened, looming over Kalin like dark clouds of a brooding storm loom over horizons. “But remember, I ain't gonna be so nice as to threaten ya next time.” With that, he turned and walked away.

All the books in the libraries sang praises for the capital. ‘The City of Gods,’ they called it. Lies. Sure, some parts of the city might’ve deserved the honor to some extent or another, but none ought to have been spared for the fetid place I called home. Lowest of the city’s plateaus, The Muds was not akin to the idyllic scenes described by minstrels, bards, and poets, nor like the height of prosperity espoused in all the free books. No, The Muds was a harsh and dirty and dangerous place, a profusion of shacks so dense that even the air was restrictive, a place where greed regressed men to animals, freedom was bought with strength, and weakness was exchanged for sorrow. Kalin had trouble seeing the truth of that. Why not struggle with purpose? Why allow them to struggle less for theirs? Why—

The door scraped open. Hinges creaked. I scurried back from the shutter and towards the furthest corner of the room. Violence was both Kalin’s affliction and solace; I did not care to salve his suffering with my own.

“Where ya going, Runt?” he asked, calm and without the anger that portended his strikes. He’d come just as I was ready to leave, early, less drunk than he usually was, and, excusing his pathetic encounter with Rees, more composed than I’d ever seen him. So much so that I could barely see the hate and…

“I was gonna fetch some water, sir,” I lied.

“Sit,” he commanded. I made to sit where I stood. Kalin pointed at his feet. “Here, Runt.”

Our floorboards were old. Old enough that splinters jutted out and lay in wait for soft flesh. I threaded around them with a slow and careful trod.

“Now,” Kalin growled.

I hurried to follow his command and sat propped on my knees and toes. Smaller areas, less skin, less flesh, less pain. Splinters scratched against my knees. One particularly thick specimen pierced deep into the large toe of my right foot as my weight settled. I choked off a breath and soothed the scream of pain into an inaudible groan. The man enjoyed my pain; I would not give him the satisfaction.

“You have ya ma’s tongue, ya know.” Kalin leaned back on the door. “If I didn’t know ya betta, ya lies would sound like truths.” He spoke without the bark of his anger, the growl of his lust. That terrified me. I knew what to expect from his rage-filled passions, the simmer of his violence. This strange calm, however…

“No, Sir. No lies.” The pain and fear were an unwelcome distraction. Were they absent, I’d have stayed silent.

“Ya see. Rolls off ya tongue.” Kalin sighed and rubbed at his tired eyes. “I loved ya ma, ya know. Once. I hated her all the same. Hated her for a great many reasons. Still do. More than ever, to be honest. But once, long ago, when I was young enough to believe her lies, I loved her too.”

“Why?” I asked, despite my fear. He flinched at the question, his eyes blank, haunted, like his mind was trapped in a prison of memories. And as he stewed on ages past and the silence stretched, I stared at the man who’d raised me.

Selfish, willfully ignorant, and utterly devoid of kindness, Kalin was even smaller than his slight frame revealed. None of this I reviled him for. Yes, I’d hated him, but it wasn’t why I loathed him with a passion unmatched. It wasn't even the tiresome way he lived or the submissive cowardice he cultivated for survival. It was all of that, and—

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“I loved her for the same reason I hate her,” Kalin said. “She was my hope.”

I hated this man, and when he revealed the heights of his hypocrisy, I hated him most. He must’ve seen my rage, for his flickered in retaliation, the familiarity of his scowl comforting me in ways that only served to make me angrier. But then, contrary to all I knew him to be, he closed his eyes, released a slow breath, and relaxed back into a calm so foreign to him as to make him seem a different man. He slid down the door, head hung low between bent knees, his worn-out robe bunching into folds around his feet. This was not the Kalin I knew. This was a man unfamiliar, the guilt and sadness etched onto his face with lines of exhaustion a far cry from the befuddled anger and violence he’d raised me on.

“Ya so much like her,” he said, his voice soft.

“I wouldn’t know, sir.” He forbade my calling him ‘father’ back when my childish thirst for affection meant I still wanted to. Now, even calling him ‘sir’ felt dirty in my mouth.

“Well, ya are, and I hate ya for it,” he said. “I know it ain’t fair, Runt.” He looked up then, and our eyes met. Most times, I did my best to avoid the smoldering mix of emotions his gaze burned with at the sight of me. Not this time. Not when, at last, he spoke truths I had always known but had never heard. “But life ain't fair, and I hate ya.”

My hands made fists. Long, dirty, jagged fingernails dug into my palms. I’ll end him, I thought. No excuses could save him from my wrath. No repentance could quench my need for his death. But I was not so impetuous as to act upon my wishes without forethought. That part of me had died with my innocence. And so I held back. I ached for his death, but I held back.

“Ya look like her,” he said, “talk like her, look at me like I’m dirt like her.” Each word thundered into me, chipping away at my self-control. “Ya never laugh, never cry, never thank me, never loved me. Ya just… so much like her.”

I jumped at him. I felt the splinter gouge the flesh of my toe. I pushed on. The pain was but a whisper. My rage screamed, and for the first time I could remember, I screamed with it. I swung my fist like a hammer. He blocked the blow with his forearm. It hurt to see how easily he bested my strength. I was too weak, too young, too hungry, the sensus trickling from my soul too slow, too meager, too unruly. I swung again. He blocked again. I kept screaming. In frustration. In anger. In hate. In a sea of emotions I’d kept locked away behind a stoic determination.

His cackle cut through my screams. “I knew there was something of me in ya.”

“If there was, I’d have begged!” My arms kept swinging. “I’d have sniveled and pleaded like a coward!”

My vision went white. A ringing shrieked in my ears. The world staggered. A weight slammed against my right side. It took me a moment to realize it was my own weight meeting the floor. The ringing continued, but the world grew darker. Finer. More stable. I looked up. Kalin stood over me.

“Truly a tongue as sharp as the one your cunt of a mother keeps sheathed behind her pretty, whore lips,” he spat. “But unlike her, ya weak enough to be taught a lesson.”

It took a quarter turn for him to tire and leave me. My anger raged at my weakness. At his. I lay there, bruised and beaten. My foot bled. There were new cuts and splinters on my right side from where I fell. Bile clung to my chin from when he struck my stomach, and I’d hurled and heaved the little I’d stowed away from the academy and eaten for breakfast. My head throbbed. Slap or punch, his strikes were heavier than I’d known. I thought I knew his strength. I didn’t. Not yet. There will be a day, I told myself.

Thoughts of my envisioned future stirred me into action. I needed to get up and fight the pain so that, one day, I could rid myself of its source. I got my hands beneath me and pushed. My stomach threatened to retch. I asked it what it had left. It answered with more bile. Somehow, I got my knees under me. My head swam. The world refused to stay still.

Kalin’s resounding snores came through the locked door of his room. He had started locking it half a season ago when I first fought back. A regrettable decision on my part. Maybe he’d have felt safe enough to leave it open if I'd not rebelled. Then I could’ve slit his throat as he slept and have been done with it.

No! I would not kill him so easily. Or, at the very least, he would not die so easily.

The world settled into place. I put a hand to my temple in an empty gesture to ease my thumping headache and recoiled at the sensitive lump growing there. I ripped off a strip of coarse cotton from my sleeve. My bruised ribs protested. I wrapped the dirty cloth around my injured toe to staunch the bleeding. Agony shot a hot knife of pain up my leg when I tried to roll my foot into a step. I kept my weight on my heel from then on.

The long walk to the academy was one I struggled with on my better days. The walk that day was the worst of them. I remember nothing of crossing the gate into The Roots or slogging up the endless stairs leading to the first plateau. Much of the way to The Bark’s gate was a haze of pain, too. I do, however, remember the guards there being less obtrusive. They liked to make a game of letting me in—a close inspection of my mark, an aggressive search of my person, insults scarcely hidden behind pointless questions. Not this time. This time, they let me in with a cursory look and a few offhand comments. Even in my state, I was surprised by the rare show of… whatever it was; I knew better than to accuse them of pity.

The second bell rang as I entered The Bark. I was late. Not a surprise. I knew I’d be late the moment I saw Kalin, for as erratic as his conduct was that morning, it was not so unpredictable as to save me from his abuse.

Traffic was sparse here in the military quarter. Many of the city’s denizens, those Roots who found their trade in providing services to the soldiers and their families, had already arrived at their posts. Those few who shared my temporal predicament scurried, eager to lessen whatever consequence awaited them, be it the whip of a superior or the loss of profit. The military personnel, I knew, were not among their number. Promptitude was one of the first lessons beaten into them. That and obedience. A group of young Barks too young to have been taught those lessons ran past and threw stones, pointing fingers and insults at me. I shielded my injured side with my other and trudged on.

By the time I’d gotten to the academy’s steps, my vision was blurry, my chest ablaze, and my foot a splendor of pain. My tunic clung to my right arm and ribs, sticky with blood. A deep red trickled from the makeshift bandage around my foot. I labored up the steps, turned, and put my back against the academy door so my weight, feeble as it was, could do some of the work of opening it. As I leaned back, my gaze rose, and I glimpsed Merkus—my friend, the better of only two—standing across the courtyard. My first thought was that he was late. My second deduced it to be by design. My third registered the creak of the door and my imminent fall.

Too tired to halt my descent, I angled to my less injured side to mitigate the coming surge of pain. The ceiling came into view. I clenched my eyes and braced myself for the agony.

It never came.

Bony hands grabbed my sides. Old Roche’s head poked out from under my arm. A few stray wisps of his bristling hair tickled my neck and cheek. He smiled his kind smile and shook his head in kindhearted reproach. Relief convinced me I loved the man.

“You’re lighter than you ought to be,” he said. “Even my ancient self ain't bothered by your weight. Many a lass would kill you for your secret, me boy.” He laughed then. At his joke or for levity’s sake, I did not know.

“A hard diet and the occasional bloodletting,” I said. “But shh, it’s a trade secret.” I tried to put a finger to my lips. I failed. Pain and weakness are a dreadful combination.

Roche laughed once more. At my joke or for pity’s sake, I did not know.

Carrying the better part of my weight, the academy’s caretaker walked me to my class. Though more bone than muscle, he felt stable, like bearing my weight took him no effort. But then again, the power of sensus did not often translate to a powerful physique.

Old Roche leaned me on the wall beside the classroom door. “Furthest I can take you, son.”

“I don't think it matters,” I said. Silence responded. My head rose to watch Roche’s face. I found none of the pity I expected; if anyone understood my struggle, it was he.

“You better not disappoint my master, son.” His expression was stern. Hard. Unforgiving.

Master? The headmaster, Pakur? I tried to ask. All I managed was a slow blink and a vacant look.

Without another word, Roche left, humming an oddly familiar tune.

I stumbled into the classroom. Mistress Leahne eyed me but did not pause from her lecture on the finer details of sensus control. The last of my will dragged me across the room and into my seat in the back of the room, a faint trail of blood drops marking my passage. One or two of the students offered me a glance. The majority kept their attention elsewhere.

A Mud, injured or otherwise, was undeserving of attention.