From the age of ten, Marroo knew who his father wanted him to become.

“There is nothing worse than being weak.” His father spoke the words on a long slow ride in the passenger compartment of an aircab. Around them, night cast its shadow over the city’s towers and streets. Other Aerial traffic blinked with green and red running lights beneath the vast dark rectangle of the night’s bulk as it orbitted the core thousands upon thousands of miles above them. They were at the edge of that night, only a few miles from the lip of the Midnight plains and a few hours into it’s eclipse. Beyond the black line of the structure above them the Bottom was still visible as a shining upward curve of land. It glowed in the umber light of the core, revealing land masses and oceans too distant for Marroo to even guess at their names, while turning the shadow of the Midnight Plains to umber twilight.

From his vantage in the aircar, Marroo could have watched the night’s shadow climb the wall of the Bottom’s curve to turnward while its opposite edge crawled down the other side heralding the approach of a new day. He had not often had the chance to watch the day moving towards them, or to contemplate the vastness of the Bottom they called home. He would have liked to, if his father did not sit opposite him in the aircab, sword in lap, icy silver eyes half lidded as he watched his son.

“No one knows this as well as I do.” His father went on when he was certain of his son’s attention. His voice rasped like a sword being sharpened and he kept it monotone as he closed his eyes.

Marroo did not sneak a peek out of the car window. At ten years old he showed signs of the man he would become. He was thin and gangly, with his mother’s narrow shoulders and long limbs, hidden under the loose fitting black robes he’d worn at his father’s instructions, just as his father wore. There were few other things they had in common. His father was a short compact man who looked, out of his robes, to be composed of nothing but gristle and wire, while Marroo showed all the signs of gaining height with puberty, without girth. Had it not been for the way both their stiff jaws jutted from their faces and their deep set eyes, they might not have looked like relatives at all, except for their eyes. Their eyes were the same. Silver, in any light, instead of the more common browns, blues, and crimsons of the rest of the Dregs. They gleamed like the steel of his father’s sword and flashed when hidden by shadows.

“You are ten years old.” Darro Bolle said. “You have grown up with a home, three meals a day, and a roof over your head. I did not have so much. I slept in shacks and drain pipes, played in sewers. I saw my first dead man before six, and killed the boy that tried to take my shoes when I was younger than you are now.”

Marroo had heard this story many times, enough now, that he could predict the exact words his father would use to tell it. What he could not predict was whether his father would open his eyes to see that he was paying attention or when he might do so. Marroo kept himself still, hands on his lap as he swayed with the cab and watched his father, but Darro Bolle had not pulled his son out of bed in the middle of the night for a lecture, or a retelling, and the expected story cut itself short as he opened his eyes.

“You have it easy boy.” His father grated. “You don’t have to search through trash heaps for your next meal or sleep with a knife under your pillow. You don’t have to because I protect you, you and your mother, but in time you will have to grow up. There will come a day when you will have to protect yourself.” Silver eyes nailed Marroo to his seat. “Do you understand?”

Marroo nodded as their cab pulled out of the street to rise along the wall of a tower. His father spun his finger in a command to say more.

“I will have to become strong.” Marroo said.

His father nodded and the cab came over the lip of the tower to settle on the small landing pad at its peak. “That is right.” his father said as the door opened and a small voice announced the address. “You are old enough.” His father said as they exited to the top of the tower. “Tonight, I am going to show you who you must become.”

Marroo stepped out into the half light of night on the bottom. Wind whispered around them as the cab rose on invisible feet and fell from the side of the tower. His father’s familiar zipped out of a small tab on his cloak in a flash of light to call the elevator while he and Marroo waited on the cement rooftop and watched the slow passage of sky traffic and the Night Plains far above.

His father hesitated, on the verge of something before his expression went hard. “We are going to do something very dangerous tonight.” He told Marro. “I want you to pay close attention, use the things I taught you to watch, and do whatever I tell you. Do you understand?”

“Yes Father.”

Darro eyed his son, and Marroo met his father’s gaze. “Whatever happens.” His father added. “Don’t run away.”

Marroo said nothing as the elevator doors opened, but he followed his father in. The little glowing familiar danced over the control panel of the elevator and doors scythed shut. Then they dropped.

His father kept his hand on his sword, his back straight, and breathing steady while Marroo attempted to imitate him. He kept his hands behind his back and his eyes locked on the elevator doors except for the occasional twitch to look up at his father and make sure he was imitating him properly.

Floors passed, nearly a hundred of them, before they reached their destination. Thanks to his opened sensorium meridian each floor they passed spoke to Marroo in a moan through the steel of the elevator doors. People’s voices, the whine of machinery, and gurgle of liquids through pipes, all howled as they passed, floor by floor, the sounds of a thousand lives, and over it all, he heard the steady scrape of the elevator’s sides as they dropped on guide wires through the tower’s heart and his father’s even breathing.

The elevator slowed. Stopped.

The doors opened.

“Stay behind me.” His father said, and Marroo fell in behind as he marched out of the elevator into the hallway.

Now they passed many doorways. Doors on doors in a mildly affluent part of the tower apartments. Cheap paint colored the cement floor a pale beige with a stripe of dark green along each wall, all of it chipped and worn by the passage of thousands of feet, though still polished and free from the trash that littered the floors of impoverished towers like these. Each doorway echoed with the sounds of occupants within, faint but discernible, the noise of an entertainment feed, voices raised in argument, or lowered in conversation. It was night, so many of the doors were silent, but even these spoke of their occupants in little hand marks at knee height, in heel marks against their base, and the decorations pinned to the outside. Welcome to our home.

His father looked behind him only once to see that Marroo was following. They stopped shortly after at a door that was silent. A pin hung from the door handle with some sort of crest, and there were chips in the wall where an old door must have been broken into with a crowbar. Marroo’s father knocked, instead of sending his familiar to announce their arrival, and when there was no answer he pounded on the door, one hand still on his sword. There were muttered words, a man, and a woman’s voice that answered it. Marroo’s father pounded again and footsteps approached. “Coming, coming.” The man’s voice said.

Marroo’s father looked at him. “Step back.”

Marroo complied and his father looked back at the door just as a hand touched the doorknob’s opposite side and the footsteps stopped.

For a moment nothing happened, then the feet leapt back from the door and Marroo had less than a second to register the moving air around his father before the door exploded.

A black man lay in the short hallway leading towards the door wearing nothing but a thin kilt and scrambling backwards as Marroo’s father stomped inside. A woman’s voice called a question from the back room but before the man could answer the air sharpened around Marroo’s father and the man screamed as blood fountained from a line slashed across his right collar bone. Marroo felt his own breath falter as shockingly bright blood splattered the walls and floor and the man clamped a hand over the bleeding line beside his neck.

Marroo’s father leaned down and grabbed the injured man by the upper part of his arm. He straightened and tossed him into the room beyond then stomped after him, one hand still on the hilt of his sword. There was a sound of another door exploding, but Marroo hesitated on the doorstep. There was a bang, followed by a woman’s cry, then more shattering wood. A breeze touched Marroo’s cheek as more spiritual blades lashed through the air inside.

Belatedly, Marroo remembered his father’s orders and fought for control of his cultivation. His breath was wobbly in his chest. The heightened senses of his open meridians dialed in and out as his spirit tangled up inside. He regained control, just enough to still hear the sounds of people in the neighboring apartments stirring to wakefulness at the noise and he remembered his father’s order. “Stay close.”

Marroo stepped cautiously into the hallway. His feet crunched on what remained of the door. When he came to the blood he wanted to close his eyes and not see it. He’d seen blood before, when he’d given other children bloody noses, or when he’d scraped his knuckles, but there was something very different when it sprayed from a man the way this had, when the wound was deep, and intentional, and probably fatal. Marroo knew he’d be beaten if his father caught him with his eyes closed, but even so, he skirted around the blood and averted his gaze until he entered the central room of the apartment.

The apartment was large, at least as large as the one Marroo shared with his family, if not a little larger. Its central room was split between a kitchen that gleamed with knives and living room. Pink and green plastic cups sat on the low counter between kitchen and living room while potted vines draped green arms down its side. Cheap mottled white carpeting covered the living room floor where a plush couch and chair occupied one wall facing a bank of windows. From this height in the tower the walls of the Bottom, still in day, were visible sloping up towards the sky between the other towers of the city. Their faint light shone in the blood that led from the shattered door down a dark hallway. He heard someone scream and his mind went blank.

While Marroo stood in the living room looking at the blood trying to remember why he should follow it towards the screaming, there was a scuffle behind him and Marroo jerked around to see a shadow flash from the opposite hallway to the kitchen. There was a clatter, then two beady eyes looked out at him from the shadows, a big carving knife clutched in a girl’s hands.

For a moment Marroo just looked at the girl, then he turned and numbly followed the blood into the master bedroom where more blood waited for him, staining the sheets, the walls, even the ceiling.

“Call her.” A flat voice said, like flint sliding over steel, and two hard silver eyes pinned a woman to the wall. The man who’d answered the door lay crumpled on the floor in a quivering bloody heap beside the woman. There was something wrong with his feet. They stretched farther than they should have at the ankles. A sword was planted through the wall above him with the woman, as dark skinned as he was and naked from the waist up, pinned to the wall by one shoulder. The sword’s position forced her to crouch, her long black hair dangling to gather the blood from her shoulder like the bristles of a paintbrush. They slathered its color across the wall and her chest when she shook her head, eyes wide and bright with the pain as the blood ran from her like a stream.

“Call her, and it will be quick.” Marroo’s father told the woman.

“No.” she said.

The world sharpened, and the wall to either side of the woman grew grooves as plaster and paint flew away from it. A chunk of flesh liberated itself from the shoulder of the man on the floor who gurgled and jerked away as more blood poured from him and the woman closed her eyes.

“I can skin him alive.” The grating even voice said. “I do not have to let him die quickly, nor your daughter, but I can, if you call her.”

Tears squeezed from the woman’s eyes as she closed them. “Just kill me.” She said. When she raised a hand to her face to cover her tears, Marroo saw that she was missing several fingers.

“Call her.” The voice said again, and the man on the ground gurgled then spat out blood as well as what looked like a chunk of his tongue.

Marroo’s hands shook.

“She’s in the kitchen.” A voice said, and it took a moment for Marroo to realize it was his own voice. The woman looked at him, but Marroo barely noticed. He could not tear his eyes away from the bit of tongue the injured man had spat out onto the carpet. He could feel the breath he’d learned to cultivate quivering as it passed through his open meridians, Core, extremis, sensorium, power shaking him from the very roots.

His father stepped out of the room.

“Bastard.” The woman hissed.

Marroo flinched and looked away.

There was a commotion behind Marroo and a girl’s scream, then the weight of a man’s footsteps approached the room, and a young girl was tossed onto the bed. She was perhaps Marroo’s own age, with almost violet eyes and the dark black skin of most people who lived in the city of Dregs. Her black hair puffed from her head in tight curls and there was a bruise under one eye. When she saw the man and woman her eyes went very wide, and she became very quiet and still. The man who’d brought her in threw the knife she’d been holding a moment before down on the bed in front of her and turned to the woman. She closed her eyes and turned her face to the wall.

“I have been paid to make you watch.” The grating voice told her.

The woman shook her head.

“You made your choice when you sold the password to the vaults.” The voice said. “You will watch, or I will make this painful.”

The woman’s hand shook as she pulled it away from her face and looked at her daughter.

The air sharpened, and the bloody pile on the floor beneath her fell apart.

“I’m sorry.” The woman rasped to the girl.

The world sharpened, and the girl on the bed fell still as red liquid spread across the sheets. The woman sagged on the sword and her mouth fell open in a loud wail cut short when the world sharpened again and her head fell away from her body as a line scored itself across the wall behind her.

Marroo suddenly felt his stomach heave, and he fell to his knees as his guts turned themselves inside out to dump its contents on the floor. A spot of blood on the carpet near his hand caused him to heave again while the smell of his vomit and the gore mingled in the room and Marroo shook and dry heaved at his own mess while the world sharpened and tore apart around him.

When he looked up, the man with silver eyes was looking at him. Three lumps were arranged on the bed with hair neatly arranged around them and words written in red on the sheets. The room was torn apart, lines gouged in the walls, the ceiling, the floor, furniture carved to splinters. There was a long stain on the blanket where his father had cleaned his sword and it was back in his sheath. Those two terrible silver eyes were locked on Marroo. They were cold, colder than any steel they could resemble, so cold that Marroo wondered that the world did not freeze over at their touch. He shivered, pushed himself onto his knees, then to his feet, one hand on the wall for balance while invisible blades churned over the carpet where he’d been standing, chopping the pool of vomit and flooring into lines and destruction while his father gazed at him.

Without a word, his father walked out of the shredded room, back into the hallway where neighbors hid behind doors and familiars peeked through walls to relay the sight to their owners. For most of the hallway, one of his father’s shoes left a bloody footprint as he walked. It petered out before they reached the elevator.

A new cab waited for them at the top of the tower, and this one fell off the opposite side of the building once they were inside then made its way through the forest of towers and swarms of air traffic that always occupied the sky above this city’s streets, towards the harbor district and the much smaller apartment building that they called home. For much of the ride they said nothing and Marroo would not meet the cold silver eyes that studied him.

Eventually his father glanced out the window at the falling shadow of the night along the bottom to anti-turnward and he broke the silence. “I killed a man before I was even your age.” He said. “I went for his eyes with a piece of glass and drove it into his brain. It wasn’t pretty. Do you know what he would have done if I’d missed?”

Marroo said nothing. He wanted to close his eyes, but kept seeing the way the man fell apart when his father’s spirit cut through him. He watched the traffic instead, and tried to imagine the lives of other people flying around in the city at night. Not like his, surely. Not like this.

“He would probably have taken everything from me.” Darro said. “What little I had. Maybe worse. I’ve seen people do worse to the boys they find sleeping in the tunnels, even when their family is just around the bend.”

They were quiet again and Marroo watched a bike bob between the lower buildings far below. Eventually it passed beneath them and out of sight.

“Your mother talks about good and evil, right and wrong, but there is only one crime you can ever be punished for. Do you know what that is boy?”

Marroo shook his head and tried to ignore his father even as he hung on every word, anything to keep the bloody vision from playing over in his head.

“Being weak.” The ice cold voice sounded as though it were scraping over steel as he said it. “With enough strength, there is no such thing as crime. Without strength, there is only mercy. Those two were weak, alone or together. They couldn’t stop me, so I killed them.”

“What did they do?” Marroo asked. His voice felt raw after his vomiting, and it cracked as he asked the question.

“They were weak.” His father said again. “And someone wanted them dead.” His eyes swiveled back to pin Marroo to the side of the cab as he considered him before looking away again. “It doesn’t much matter after that.”

“But you killed them.” Marroo said. Even the little girl, he didn’t add.

His father grunted. “I was paid to.”. He said.

Marroo thought of the little girl, close to his own age. She could have been in playgroup with him, if they’d been from the same part of the city. It made his stomach turn, and he wanted to be sick again.

“If someone wanted to kill you, or your mother while I was not there,” his father asked, “what would there be to stop them?”

Marroo felt his eyes begin to water and the back of his throat to burn.

“Right now, you are weak, but I will teach you what it is to be strong.”

Marrroo finally closed his eyes and began to sob. When his father tried to put a hand on his shoulder, Marroo twisted away, and threw himself to the opposite side of the cab then turned his face to the window.

“I won’t let you grow up weak.” His father promised as he settled back in his chair. “Once you are strong, you will never have to fear anyone ever again.”

The voice he used was gentle, even loving, but in the weeks and years that followed, Marroo wouldn’t be able to escape the memory of the little girl, or that feeling that it was his fault she’d been found, and killed, at all.