Marroo ran possible conversations through his head as he approached Aiza’s apartment a week after sending her the letter. With nothing better to do and no money of his own to rent a bike or car Marroo walked to the apartments. He walked part of the way anyways.
When other tenements, cul de sacs, and industrial hives got in his way he clambered to the top of the buildings and leapt rooftop to rooftop towards his destination. His familiar served as a compass and he followed it anti-turnward while huge shapes lumbered through the sky above the wisps of clouds.
Her husband would be there. The possibility indicated by her change of name in the public registry was true, and the letter his familiar returned with from her apartment gushed with Aiza’s familiar energy at the chance to introduce them.
They would all be friends, so she claimed at least, he didn’t know what to feel. He ran through a half dozen different ways to introduce himself to the stranger, and tried to find polite ways to ask why they’d gotten married so young as he leapt across a street that hummed with traffic. He thought of a hundred banal subjects he could use to fill the time and tried to think of what he would say if she, they, asked what he’d been doing for the last three years.
Training seemed like the most politic answer.
Since touching the icon Marroo’s spiritual senses had expanded in ways he still didn’t fully understand. Few adepts took the time to write books about their journey, at least here in the Dregs, but his father had a few books purportedly written by adepts among the heavens describing what happened to a spirit after it touched the icon, and there were other authors and teachers happy to dedicate a few chapters at the end of their cultivation manuals to the changes they’d seen or heard described after ascension to the rank of Adept.
Marroo no longer simply heard the people in the houses as he walked across their rooves but felt them as well. Like candle flames behind walls that did nothing to stop his senses, small licks of breath that flickered in clotted meridians or ran through sluggish channels as they went about their lives. He saw them from a hundred, a thousand yards away, from miles distant, despite the walls and buildings that intervened, emanating a spiritual aura of their own picked up by his spiritual sense, the solidness of brick and mortar, the reek of sewage moving through pipes into the underground, the vitality of potted plants on rooftop terraces.
Everything gave off a spiritual signal until his spirit was blinded by distance and the density of information that he simply couldn’t parse, despite the open meridians in his mind. He felt the world around him as though he had a finger on every object, as though it was part of him, of his skin, or his senses or his mind, as though he’d brought it into being with his imagination and then forgot about it only to rediscover it now that he’d touched one of the thousand Icons that gave it form.
The only thing sharper to his spiritual vision than the people were the knives. They shone like beacons beside the human candle flames, on a rack or in a person’s hand. Every sharp edge, even those that only pretended to be knives, like broken glass or the sharp points of nails driven into wood, every sharp edge, spoke to Marroo through his spiritual senses, forming an outline of the world for hundreds of yards around him in lines and points intended to cut.
So he knew, the moment he stepped into Aiza’s apartment building, that something was wrong.
Marroo didn’t enter through the roof as he might have at a hundred other buildings with stairs that ran up to the utilities humming at their top. He jumped down and followed the street as the numbers his familiar displayed for the remaining distance dialed downwards. Even on the street, before he put his hand on the door, he had some idea f what he would find inside.
The building was shabby and cheap. It was old, with a design that wasn’t meant to age well. Trash bins overflowed with waste in the alley next to the tenement building and a ground car sat outside the entrance in a pool of its own shattered glass.
The halls resonated with her voice when he stepped through the door, they rang with it, at least to a cultivator’s ears. Dozens of other voices mingled with hers as his walk turned into a jog and then into a sprint. They dopplered away as he sprinted past other apartments in the building towards the source of her voice. He heard her scream, and he leapt the final flight of stairs altogether.
The number 47 marked her apartment. The two brass numbers tacked to her door crumpled as Marroo slammed his palm into them. The door frame shattered around the latch and the door flew open as shouts of surprise issued from within.
A man stood over Aiza, face as dark as hers but his knuckles white from the grip he had on the knife in his hand.
Three steps carried Marroo to the man before he could so much as cry out. Marroo’s hand moved in a blur and the man bellowed as he flew through the air. The whole apartment shook as he slammed into the floor and skid until he hit a wall.
Marroo leapt after him as Aiza screamed something from the floor where she’d fallen when Marroo broke the man’s grip. Her assailant tried to stab Marroo but Marroo grabbed his arm and used it to hurl him into a wall. Wood split as the man cried out. Peeling wallpaper accompanied him as he slid to the ground.
Marroo grabbed him by the shirt and lifted him again.
Aiza screamed something again, but the world sharpened as her assailants eye grew wide and he clutched at Marroo’s arms in fear.
“Stop!”
The wall around the man fell apart as a thousand swords manifested in Marroo’s breath.
“Stop! Marroo! Stop!” A hand grabbed his arm and pulled as the wood chips and lacerated paper pattered across the man’s shoulder.
He let go and the man crumpled to the floor as Marroo allowed himself to be pulled away. His chest heaved and his blood thundered in his ears.
Aiza stepped between him and his victim and he jerked away, forced the Icon out of his breath as the world lost a bit of its edge.
“Out.” She said, and pushed him.
“If he hurts you…” He said.
Aiza just shook her head with a scowl. “Go. Out now.” She pushed again. “Out on the balcony. I’ll deal with you when I’m done here.”
He saw a door leading out of her kitchen onto a small balcony that looked over the rooftop of a nearby building and let her push him onto it before she slammed the door and returned to her injured… husband… he had to assume, now that he saw her help him into the bedroom.
He was not really a man, he realized as he watched them through the wall with his spiritual senses. He couldn’t be more than nineteen or twenty.
Marroo did his best not to listen to the words they said while he waited out on the balcony. It was mostly cursing anyways, as she checked over the boy who, Marroo realized, must be her husband, and told him that she was going to “deal with him”.
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He found a loose bolt in the railing of the balcony and spun it until she stepped out and slid the door shut behind her.
Neither said a word.
“Well, how are you?” She asked after a while.
He looked at her, and she looked at the balcony floor.
A bruise decorated her face just beneath one eye and he felt the world sharpening again before he looked away. He thought of the day she kissed him when they were kids, called him her hero and told him to protect her.
Aiza sighed and leaned on the railing next to Marroo. “Can you believe I ran away from home for him?” She asked.
Marroo gave the bolt a spin then looked up and out at the world laid out before them. Her apartment was very high, though not the highest. The highest was always the most expensive, but that equation reversed itself in old tenement buildings like this one, ones where the only way up was to use the stairs. As a result the view they had from the balcony was like being at ground level, if the machinery and landing pads on the tops of the nearby factories and apartment complexes were set in the cement instead of on the rooves of neighboring buildings. He could see his birth formation in the sky shrinking into the umber fog on its journey turnward around the core.
“Why?” He finally asked. He glanced at the bruise under her eye, then back at the view. “Why marry trash like that?”
Aiza sighed. “He’s not smart, but he is… fun. Maybe they go together.” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t say bad things about him. He’s not that bad really.”
Marroo looked pointedly at the bruise under her eye. When she felt him looking she glanced in his direction, then put one hand on the bruise and looked away. She dropped her hand and fidgeted with her dress instead. “I started it.”she said, “I threw a knife at him. A big one.” She giggled, but she didn’t smile.
Marroo could still feel the knife behind them on the floor where he’d dropped her husband. “He shouldn’t have hit you.”
“You wouldn’t have?” Aiza asked. She raised an eyebrow at him. “You wouldn’t hurt me if I threw a knife at you?”
Marroo looked down at his shoes and scuffed the balcony floor. “Never.” He replied.
“No.” Aiza said after a long silence. “No, you’d have done worse. Just look what you did to him.” She looked behind them, then away, out at the rooftops, running machines, and drifting airtraffic. A highway in the sky looped and spun around a tower in the near distance, like a river suspended in the air above the city.
“I shouldn’t have invited you.” She said at last. “I thought it would make Dazzid jealous, but that was stupid. Now he’ll be too scared to touch me, and that wasn’t the point.” She looked at Marroo. “It’s been a long time.” She said. “A long time.”
He didn’t meet her eyes.
“What have you been doing with yourself?”
He scowled and flicked the bolt in the rail again. “Training.” He said.
“That where you learned how to break down doors?” She asked.
“Something like that.” He muttered. “I’m…” He looked up at her and found her staring at him and changed his mind. “I’m not sorry.” He looked away and clenched his hands around the railing. “He shouldn’t have hurt you.”
“Hmm.” She looked out at the city, lost in thought. Eventually she shook her head. “I have to stop acting like my mother.” She said. “I thought, maybe, we could still be friends. We had fun when we were kids, but…” She sighed. “He’s not as bad as you’d think. One of us has to be an adult about our relationship.”
“You’re only seventeen.” Marroo replied.
“And?” She asked.
They looked at one another, and he remembered her look when she asked him to dance with her, remembered her with too much makeup on and a silly grin, not this staid serious expression or the bruise under one eye.
“It’s been a long time.” She said, again, the accusation clear in her tone of voice this time. She was the one who broke the stare to look away. “I don’t think we should see each other again.”
He followed her out, a mix of emotions churning inside him as broken and disjointed as the door she held for him before he left.
“Things change.” She told him as he stepped across the shattered remnants of the door. She glanced back towards the room where her husband lay convalescing in their bed and added, in a murmur, “not always for the better.”
The fragments of the door crunched under Marroo’s feet before the door swung shut behind him.
He took to the rooftops the moment he reached the street, sprinted away, building to building without really seeing where he was or what direction his leaps took him, so long as it was away, away from the girl and the door, and the memories of another apartment just like it where he’d felt his father’s spirit spread another husband’s life across the floor in a red stain.
“I’m not my father.” He told himself as he sailed through the air between a warehouse and industrial hive while security guards shouted at him from below. He felt the blades of some kind of mechanical press pumping away beneath him as he ran across the rooftop, each one manned by the little flickering candle of some poor soul stuck chopping and chopping and chopping away at whatever lay before them in the jaws of their machine.
“I’m not.” He thought as they disappeared behind him, replaced by other blades, a thousand other blades that twinkled in his spiritual sense like a constellation intended to cut.
“I’ll never be like him.”
But he felt the door shatter beneath his hands again, saw the red of another man’s blood as he threw Aiza’s husband across the hall and felt the world sharpen as a woman, a girl, screamed and grabbed at him to try and make him stop.
---
It was anger that betrayed him the day he touched the icon. The same anger he’d used to resist his father since the day his mother died. The anger he’d nursed as he watched his father eradicate every trace of his mother’s presence in their house and attempted to do the same to every mark she’d ever made in his life.
He took Marroo on other “jobs” he did for the family that employed him. He watched his father kill a wealthy man in the middle of the night. Stood in the door while his father painted a saloon red with the blood of the hundred armed men that occupied it when they arrived. He attended his father while he played guard for the strangers who’d attended his mother’s funeral and spoken of sabotage and watched him butcher the guards of a man who’d come to negotiate with them just to make a point about which side negotiating from a place of strength. He watched his father kill as though it meant nothing to take a life, as though life meant nothing.
“What does the blade do?”
“It cuts.”
Marroo remembered his father’s spirit cutting lines in the wall and floor and ceiling when he lost his temper with his mother, shredding her books while she stood by, wrapped in the silence that took her life in the end.
“What does the blade do?”
“It cuts.”
He watched his father split an aircab open with his breath from a distance of a hundred yards, saw a body plummet to the cement in a red splash, remembered the stain next to his mother’s purse amidst the wreckage of another aircab. Saw his father’s unmoving face as they said goodbye.
“What does the blade do?”
“It cuts.”
He smelled the blood as he held an old man’s hand and felt the life go out of him in one last weazing breath, felt the stone burning against his palms as a child, and saw the sword of the half-breed flying towards him in a glittering arch.
“It cuts.”
The blade fell into his spiritual hands like a knife plunged into his soul. Pain swept through his channels from his core to his limbs, to his eyes, ears, mouth and nose, his mind, and finally out, out into the aura of his external meridians where his breath churned like boiling water under the influence of the Icon. The world outlined itself in knives as his spiritual sense of the world expanded a thousand fold and picked out every blade within a mile of his training mat. He pushed, and the icon manifested itself as a blizzard of flailing razor blades all flying through his aura towards the man who’d forced him onto this path sitting hunched on the other side of the training room.
His father laughed as the wild technique lashed out at him. He met it with a wisp of his own spirit and Marroo’s breath dissipated into a riot of sharp edged shadows as Marroo panted from the agony of his ascension.
His father continued to laugh as he stood, a sound like stone grating on stone.
Marroo closed his eyes and fought to see through his new vision of the world.
“You’re hold is weak, but against someone who has not touched the icon that won’t matter.” His father said. “It will strengthen with time.”
Two tears leaked from Marroo’s eyes and he felt the Icon dig deeper, like an actual knife buried in his spine. His eyes snapped open when he felt his father’s hand on his shoulder.
“Painful isn’t it.” His father’s face was close to Marroo’s, so close Marroo could have bitten out his throat if his expression hadn’t been softer than Marroo could ever remember seeing it. “All strength is won through pain.” His father rasped as he straightened. “But you are strong now. Stronger than almost anyone else in this city.”
Marroo gulped as he fought the knife pushing itself into his spirit.
“Relax.” His father said. “Don’t force it. Let it come to you. You’ll be safe now, once it meshes with your spirit. Then we won’t have to worry about you anymore.”
Marroo found himself at the top of a tower weeks later, watching the Midnight Plains roll towards him through the sky after his meeting with Aiza, blinded to it’s dark majesty by the realization of who he had become.
“I won’t be my father.” He told himself as thunder lightning cracked from clouds along the plain’s leading edge.
He thought of the blood and the fear in the eyes of Aiza’s husband as Marroo lifted him and almost, almost, cut him limb from limb with his breath.
“Never. Never again.”