“Sleep tight my darling.” He whispered to Banya, his youngest, when his wife had retreated from the tiny lean to they used as a kitchen so the girls could give their ritual good-night in peace.

Banya wrapped pale arms around his shoulders from behind and pressed her cheek to his. “Sleep tight Papa.” She whispered back.

She didn’t move though, after she replied. She stood behind him and held him and he could feel, in the warmth of her cheek and the way she hung from him, some question that made him give her elbow a comforting squeeze.

“There.” He said quietly, quiet enough that his voice wouldn’t carry through the shed’s thin walls to the other two women. “What’s the matter?”

She held him a little closer and snuggled into his neck as she’d once done when she was a child no taller than his knees lifting her arms up to him to bury herself in his hug.

“There was shooting outside the fence tonight.” She whispered. “It was very close.”

Marroo dwelt on the stolen memories as he stood among the ranks of those assembled for the competition.

It seemed ridiculous to be there while his meridians still ached from the effort of killing an adept only hours before, but after he escaped the mansion through a gap in the red-squad perimeter, he’d found himself at the top of a tenement building in a new pair of stolen robes watching the approaching shadow of night with nowhere else to go.

“Stay back.” He croaked again, but didn’t look at the woman standing in the door to his cell, blonde hair glowing in the pale light of the hall behind her, tremulous smile dying as she looked at him.

Not a babe. Not anymore.

He blinked more blood from his eyes as he pressed his forehead into corrupted stone. “You shouldn’t have come.” The blood crumbled away like clay when he swiped his fingers through it.

When he’d turned back to look, Marroo had seen Dhruv standing among the Iblanie leadership bunched up around the front of the ruined Manor. He’d survived, despite the spiritual fallout of the battle… which meant Marroo could never go back. Not without risking a repetition of the battle he’d just fought, if not this year, then next year. If not for this executive, then for some other part of the family his… ex… belonged to.

“Do you like it?” He’d asked her as they toured their new home.

“It’s like, something from the surface.” She said. She looked up at the lights strung across the ceiling like hundreds of familiars seen moving through the cistern at a distance. “It’s like something from a story.”

“Our story now.” Thakur agreed. He hobbled into the room but he didn’t survey it the way she had. He studied her, memorized her look of joy while it lasted. “It may, be a shorter story, than I would like.”

Marroo followed the drifting airtraffic moving through twilight streets to the indoor stadium where the event would be taking place.

“Marroo Bolle?” The woman behind the registration counter said when he presented himself for registration in the bustling hall that fronted the stadium’s entrances.

“Bollay.” He said. “B.O.L.L.E.” The voices of the other entrants moving in lines up to the counters echoed in the confined space so that he had to raise his voice to be heard.

The woman flicked a dark finger through a couple of screens on her familiar until she found what she was looking for. “Here it is.” She said, and sent the sprite spiraling out into a long ribbon extended towards him. When he just stared at it she peered at him over her glasses. “You don’t have a familiar?” She asked.

Marroo shook his head. The familiar itself was gone, wiped out by the same blast of poison that had triggered the half dozen weaponized familiar’s who’d followed him. He’d discarded the clip along with the rags it was pinned too while he was still inside.

The woman made a clicking noise with her tongue barely audible over the shouting of a team of martial artists dressed in matching uniforms and with sparring swords strapped to their backs. “Your school should have provided you with one before you arrived.” She told him. “It’s pretty standard practice at a thing like this.”

Marroo tore his eyes away from the obvious school back to the woman in front of him. “I don’t have a school.” He told her.

She looked him up and down, took off her glasses and polished them with a sigh as she glanced at the gaggle of black skinned boys synching their familiars at the table next to hers. “Just what do you expect to accomplish here?” She asked as she pushed her glasses back on and peered up at him.

Marroo didn’t know how to respond for a moment. “I heard, there was a prize.” He said.

The woman nodded. “Money, yes, lots of money, but who do you expect to collect the prize money?”

Marroo pointed uncertainly at his own chest.

She shook her head. “If you win, and that’s if, mind you, there are a lot of schools here, the prize money isn’t just being handed out. They’re giving away a receipt which schools, or any individual or organization I suppose, can turn in after the people putting on this event have left with all of the contest’s winners. If you win, you won’t be around to collect on the receipt.”

Marroo stared at her. “Where do they go?” He asked.

“The heavens.” The woman replied. “Some place in the heavens where they’ll teach you how to be an adept. I don’t know more.” She drew her familiar back in and flicked it back into its display mode. “Still interested in competing?” She asked.

Marroo looked around at the dozens of other boys his age, if not his skin tone, crowding into the hall to join the competition, then he looked back to the woman and nodded.

She sighed and pulled the finger she’d hovered over his name on the display away from the familiar in order to pull a marker and a pad of paper towards her. “Pin this to your shirt.” She told him. “You’ll have to use one of the boards to tell where you’re matches are. Miss one,” she said as she handed it to him with a pin, “and you’ll forfeit the round, do you understand?”

Marroo nodded. “I’ll need a practice sword too, if there is one.”

An hour later he stood amidst the ranks of other contestants after a voice boomed the order for them to arrange themselves by number in order to greet the adepts. Many of the boys stood with their hands clasped behind their backs, feet planted a couple of feet apart, eyes forward and backs straight. Marroo followed their example, practice sword at his hip and his spirit drawn tightly behind his veil. He could feel the adepts descending beyond the roof of the stadium as the midnight plains cut off what little of the core’s light filtered down through windows set along the stadium’s roof.

It felt natural, now, to hold his breath within his flesh, as though it, and not the aching meridians throughout and beyond his body, were the proper place to hold his spirit. The adepts on descent beyond the doors did nothing to veil their own spirits, and he sensed them through the veil as a distant knot of something dense and hard, and a flickering spiritual light something like the light of a flame.

His son cried and ran from him the first time they tried to spar. He hid from the pain, hid behind his mother’s skirts as she hid from Darro behind her books, and didn’t understand that the pain would make him strong. He put the training stone into his hands when they began again and clasped the smooth stone between Marroo’s palms while tears leaked from the boy’s eyes. “I will not allow you to be weak.”

He held those hands, again, as he gave him his sword, the power draining from him into his old blade while colors bled from the world and a pride towered inside of him at who his son had become, pride so strong it felt more like rage.

“I will always be with you.” He told the boy. “Wherever you carry her.”

The stout official in martial robes at the front of the stadium barked for the competitors to salute as the two adepts entered through one of the double doors that opened onto the stadium floor.

The two men who emerged at the salute could not have looked less like they belonged. One was a compact yellow skinned man who frowned as he examined the two or three hundred competitors while the one with the flickering aura had a nut brown complexion and eyes that seemed to be stuck in a perpetual squint.

The boys around Marroo shouted at the official’s command to salute, and Marroo let just a trickle of his breath run into the meridians near his core, just in case either of the adept’s scanned them with their spiritual senses. He had no desire to share the true extent of his powers, or to appear abnormal in the eyes of these men.

They were divided up, some three hundred boys no older than twenty one, into three groups of close to a hundred each, set to match one another in seven ten minute bouts. The competition he’d been in as a boy had been longer, but the boys Marroo faced this time weren’t just whoever chose to attend. They were cultivators, each with at least one, sometimes two or even three meridians open, and they moved like they’d trained in it. Those matches Marroo watched while he waited between his own bouts were violent high speed affairs, projected breath rocking constructs set up to deflect it away from other competitors in nearby rings while rubberized swords, staves, and even boxing gloves, moved in a blur.

It obviously impressed most of the adults in attendance, many of whom watched with equal parts awe and envy, their own spirits tangled knots of breathing techniques followed too rigidly for far too long or incorrectly so that their meridians were a tangled mess that would never progress beyond the channels of their sensorium.

In the ring, Marroo felt like he was fighting children. He never even had to pull out his sword. He just nudged his opponents as they flew at him, or whacked them in between poorly timed swings with his palms in order to drive them through the hovering ribbon of light that marked the boundaries.

He turned from his fourth victory using this strategy to find the compact adept watching him from across the room. Marroo’s instincts kicked in as he caught the man’s eyes and he reached momentarily for his sword before he paused, then bowed marginally in the adept’s direction. The man snorted and turned away, then, after Marroo wound his way through the other rings to the big display board that showed their next match along one side, the adept walked over to join him.