In the months that followed his father’s death, Marroo dreamed of violence.

The dreams did not come every night but when they did he tossed and turned in the bed while, in his mind, he walked through a world filled by knives and blood and screaming faces until he jerked awake, his aura filling the closet of a room he rented from the tenements and the Icon of the Sword resonating painfully at the edge of his senses.

He was not himself in his dreams.

He was taller, for one. His voice grated like rusty steel when he spoke, and he killed as though he’d been born doing it. He killed them with knives in the sewers beneath the city and with his manifested spirit in the sunlight streaming from the core at the center of the worlds. He killed strangers and friends, friends that would have been strangers to him in the waking day, but that, in the dream, he knew with an intimacy that made their deaths painful.

Sometimes he saw himself in the dreams, standing beside him as he killed, or behind him, or somewhere deep in his own mind. Sometimes, on the bad nights, he woke to find his very flesh sharpened by the icon so that his blankets were shredded by his own thrashing, or to fluttering pages torn from his books by the blades that manifested in his aura while he dreamed, spinning around him like a storm.

On the good nights, when the nightmares were not so bad, he woke to find his aura wrapped around his father’s sword, even when he shoved it under the bed and covered it in books rich with the spiritual texture of their previous owners.

On the best nights he didn’t dream at all.

During the day, he served as a courier for the Iblanie family.

“You’ll like being a courier.” He’d been told the day he arrived for training with a scrawny boy who didn’t seem to leave the seat nestled amongst the gyroscopes of his bike unless he had to. He grinned as he pedaled the gyros up to speed and Marroo followed his example. “They give us all the cool toys.” The boy said, then dropped off the side of the tower, two or three hundred yards from the street below.

Marroo had never met anyone quite like Podmandu.

On Marroo’s first day as a courier scrawny boy was supposed to show Marroo the ropes. Instead he introduced Marroo to the bike he’d use as a courier, a contraption of whirling gyros and gears bolted to a seat with a handlebar and a few levers as controls, then he led him through the air to a small forest of towers in the center of the city that no family or sect controlled and so no one policed to keep the other boys Marroo saw on bikes like theirs whipping through them as though they were little more than an aerial obstacle course a couple of hundred yards above the ground. He called it “The Playground” on their way there, and flew next to Marroo the entire way, shouting instructions, encouragement and pointers that were entirely too technical for Marroo to follow while he fought with the gyroscopes keeping his bike in the air.

“It’s not like flying!” The boy shouted to Marroo as he slowly flipped inside the hooped seat of his own bike. “It’s more like choosing the direction you fall. Just pay attention to the angle of your gyros and go fast. Forget about where the ground is and you’ll be fine, but whatever else you do, hold onto the bike! The bike can rescue you, but if you fall off, your toast. butter side up!”

Once among the towers Podmandu whooped, “Follow me!” Then performed some maneuver with his handlebars that made him drop like a stone before swooping upwards at close to double his original speed before he entered the obstacles of the Playground.

Marroo squeezed the grips of his bike and followed suit, slowly, safe in the knowledge that he could survive if he actually fell.

“You’re not great.” Pod told Marroo after Marroo landed next to him at the top of one of the towers that served as the bikers’ staging areas. Marroo’s landing might as well have been a crash compared to the other boy’s graceful touchdown, but with zero instruction Marroo was just glad he hadn’t broken the bike, or missed the tower entirely.

“You’ll be fine I think.” The boy added.

On the ground and up close Podmandu couldn’t have been any older than Marroo’s eighteen years. He was black skinned and thin, thin to the point of emaciation with eyes that seemed to pop out of his skull. Voluminous robes, second or third hand from someone far larger than him and an indeterminate gray from age, hid his emaciation beneath its folds. His hair looked like he used a blender instead of a comb and he kept it as close to control as he seemed able by tying a brightly colored bandanna over his head which varied week to week between the green one and the orange one.

He stank enough to for his body odor to actually register on a spiritual level and he swayed, constantly, when he stood, as though time spent on his bike had stripped him of any sense of balance both on his feet and in life. Somehow his huge toothy smile and the way he seemed to apologize constantly with his pale purple eyes made even his colossal stench seem small in comparison, and there was no questioning his skill on a bike. He knew enough about flying one that Marroo would have called him an adept, if his breath didn’t flicker in his flesh like a weak flame in the bed of a dying fire.

Marroo said nothing about how close he’d felt to death as they stood on a rooftop together for the first time, and when the boy pulled two cans from the back of his bike and stabbed one before handing it to Marroo and stabbing the other Marroo accepted and followed him to the edge of the tower. He thought Podmandu was going to plummet off the side when he lurched forward but it was only to sit and put his legs over the edge while he took a sip from his can and sighed.

Marroo sat next to him and took a sip as well then examined the can. It contained something like a sweet tea that foamed in Marroo’s mouth and burned in his stomach and hid behind the blank exterior of a machined aluminum container with no other markings.

“You’re over pedaling and losing momentum when you balance,” Podmandu said as he watched the other bikes moving in the Playground beneath them, “but those are habits you’ll get out of. I don’t think you’ll die if they give you easy runs yet.”

Podmandu ran a hand through the tangled nest of black hair that protruded from the back of his head and they both watched as other boys with bikes like theirs attempted to match the hi-jinks Marroo had just watched Podmandu accomplish as easy as breathing.

“What am I going to do, as a courier?” Marroo asked.

“Oh, it’s nothing special.” Pod said distractedly as he followed a team of fliers beneath him. He pointed at one near the back and said with some confidence. “He’s going to win.”

Marroo looked. “How do you know?”

“Oh I know him.” The boy replied. “He’s a courier for the Tepets. Kind of a dick, but pretty good on a bike.”

Marroo watched them swoop around a tower. He hadn’t even realized they’d been racing until the boy next to him pointed it out but now that he watched he could see the way they jockeyed for position in the air and went around the turns so close to the towers that they could have reached out of the whirling ball of gyroscopes and touched the windows if they’d wanted to, or killed themselves by twitching just a little in the wrong direction.

Pod pointed out the defects of all three riders as they flew, the way they angled their gyros and leaned with the turns, and Marroo soaked it all in while his drink hissed in the can between his hands and his breath stirred in agitation from the fire from the drugs he’d imbibed.

“But yeah.” Podmandu said as the race continued. “He’s a bit of a dick.”

“How do you know that?”

“He takes his job too seriously.” Podmandu replied and waved his can. “Being a courier, all we do is take stuff from one place to another. Sometimes it’s a message, or a parcel needs picking up, whatever little things the family doesn’t want to pay for a cab to get. We’re cheaper, I guess, and more expendable too, than anyone they’d put into a cab anyways. Dick there thinks it’s about family loyalty.”

“And it’s not?” Marroo asked.

“Of course not.” Podmandu said and grinned at Marroo. When Marroo didn’t grin back Podmandu gestured at the world around them, at the heavens and the shapes moving through the umber haze that lay between them and the burning light of the core. “It’s about freedom man,” he said, as though it were a religion, “It’s about being in the air.”

That attitude would not be universal among the other couriers he met in and around the family headquarters.

“A troglodyte.” One of them said when Podmandu finally introduced Marroo to the group on his first day. Marroo was the only pale skinned character in the room, and the girl who said it gave him a grin that the drink Podmandu apparently considered sufficient nourishment for lunch had Marroo’s spirit outlining as images of the sword icon in miniature. “How’s the light and air?”

“He’s no trog Cathay.” Podmandu told her. “He’s a drake. Like us.”

The dark skinned girl pouted and tugged at the ponytail that stood from the top of her head like a spike. “Well he looks like a trog.”

Every one of the couriers employed by the Iblanie family looked like Podmandu, they were black skinned and ill kempt, but Marroo didn’t get the feeling that they dressed like him for anything like the same reasons. For one, their clothing looked new, and while their hair was clearly unwashed beneath their bandannas, the rest of them had certainly been cleaned more frequently, and none of the others had his emaciation or the flicker in their spirit, or the rank stink of body odor that followed him everywhere. Only one diverged from the makeshift uniform, a boy six years Marroo’s senior who wore a clean dark robe that fit tightly across his chest and a silver chain that flashed in contrast to the exposed skin of his chest.

“Betmo is serious,” Cathay whispered loudly to Marroo as the boy was introduced, “He has a girlfriend.”

“I have ambitions.” Betmo said with a glower. “More than the lot of you can say.”

Cathay rolled her eyes and the youngest in the courier’s lounge perked up.

“I have plenty of ambitions.” The boy piped up.

“Following in Pod’s footsteps is hardly ambition.” Betmo told. “It’s more like suicide.”

Podmandu shrugged from his place by the coldbox where he held another of the cans he’d shared with Marroo on the rooftop. “Not dead yet.” He said, to which the other boys in bandannas and baggy robes laughed.

“What brings you here?” Betmo asked Marroo, and the seven pairs of purple or brown eyes present at the time turned towards him.

Marroo shrugged, and when that didn’t seem enough, unlimbered his tongue enough to add; “Rent. Food. Just needed a job.”

Podmandu put a hand on his shoulder as Betmo’s compressed his lips at the answer.

“You’ll do fine.” Pod said. “You’ll see.”

For the first two months Marroo did just that. Mostly he just followed Podmandu, for the first few weeks anyways, then Betmo, or Cathay, or Tetha, or Ajap until he’d learned how to navigate the city from the air and handle his bike without making himself a joke or a corpse, and the layout of the family’s organization on the ground.

Then he was ready to start taking orders on his own.