A hand grabbed Marroo’s sleeve as he left the ring and spun him to the face of the pinched expression of the Dune Tower’s Master. “We had a deal!” The man hissed.

Marroo knocked the hand aside and pushed the master backwards. He responded as any martial instructor should, if far slower even than his student, but he didn’t stagger at Marroo’s gentle shove, just rocked back and then forward again to glower at Marroo. “I warned you we’d make you sorry, and we will. Whoever you are, whatever your organization or your ties to this city, I’ll make sure you regret going back on our deal.”

Someone cleared their throat loudly behind the instructor and he turned to see one of the event officials standing behind him with his arms crossed. He straightened his robe, then glanced down at Marroo one more time. “You’ll regret it.” He hissed and marched off to lead Singh away.

The official watched the instructor go with a sour expression before turning back to Marroo and nodding towards the final match of one of the brackets that hadn’t finished yet. “Adepts will want to speak to you.” He said.

Marroo felt his heart sink as he nodded and followed the official to the table where the adepts waited surrounded by stacks of printed forms.

“So, you won.” The short adept said when the official presented him before them. Other officials came and went from the table, mostly accompanied by adults in uniforms and badges of different schools, occasionally accompanied by the children they’d come representing, having a quiet word with the squinting adept or one of the other officials before departing, sometimes with a slip of paper and sometimes without, often with a look of triumph but sometimes even with a look that might have been regret, or sorrow, regardless of the slip of paper in their hand.

Marroo nodded to the little adept who used the stage the table was set on to match Marroo’s height. He didn’t sit in the chair provided for him the way the squinting adept did behind him. The diminutive adept scanned Marroo up and down with a squint, then shrugged and pulled one of the sheets from a stack in front of him and looked it over. “Well, I tell you to, and you do. No mistake. I’ll send you to the Academy and the Hierarchs can sort out what’s wrong with you. You want to go?”

“What would I be asked to do there?” Marroo asked.

“What do you think they’ll do?” The adept asked with a sneer. “Feed you lollipops and cake? They’ll make you strong. Two, three years typically, take a kid with an open couple of meridians and turn them into an adept. Faster than you’ll get there around here. Provided they know what to do with that broken spirit of yours.” He glared at Marroo’s chest, then shrugged.

“And then?” Marroo asked.

“Then you fight for the empire.” The adept replied as he scanned the paperwork in front of him. “You’ll like the place. Civilized. Nothing like down here.” He cast a scathing glance at the rest of the tournament and pulled a pen from the clipboard. “You want to go?”

Marroo spotted Singh’s teacher arguing with one of the officials across the stadium. He knew nothing about the Dune Tower school, but, he realized, he really didn’t want to learn anything about them.

Marroo met the adept’s beady eyes and nodded once. There was nothing for him here, nothing he cared to fight for anymore. A school where they were supposed to teach him how to be something he already knew might be an easy place to focus on writing the book he’d lost when the familiar he’d written it on was wiped out.

“Alright alright.” The adept said. “You got no school, so who you want this filled out for?”

They left it blank.

“They’ve got an airship in the port.” The official who’d led him to the adepts in the first place told him, after being assigned to Marroo in place of the school he didn’t have. “Something they call a sprint ship meant for moving fast between the heavens. There’s a whole pile of kids like you gonna be getting on it headed to this place of theirs. It leaves the port soon as the core peaks past the new year, so you be there or that card,” he tapped the card worth the pile of money that was his winnings for whoever he gave it to, “won’t be worth the ink stamped on it.”

He gave Marroo some additional instructions, what needed to be done with the card by whoever he passed it on to, and where the money could be collected from. When he was done he gave Marroo a searching look, arms still crossed over his chest while other contestants filtered out of the entrance hall behind them. He nodded towards the card in Marroo’s hand. “Enough on there for someone to live a lifetime.” He said. “Or a couple of people to be comfortably poor, so, don’t lose it, and don’t forget what I told you. Could make a big difference, in the right hands.”

Marroo nodded. He tucked it into one of the pockets of his stolen robes, then unstrapped the practice sword and offered it to the man. “This belongs to, someone.” He said. “I got it with my name tag.” The official grunted and took the sword, and Marroo turned to go, then stopped, and looked back. The official stood as he had, waiting for Marroo.

“Is there, a place that I can stay, until the ship leaves?” He asked, and looked away. “I don’t really have anywhere.”

The official mulled it over for a moment before he nodded. “We’ll find you someplace.”

Someplace wound up being one of the barracks around the port. He’d never been to the port. It was the heart of the city, or it was supposed to be, and Marroo pressed his face to the window of the aircab filled with officials he was allowed to ride as it taxi’d in to land at one of a thousand plaza’s that surrounded the vast strip of cement dotted with the far larger vehicles meant for transit between the bottom and the sky. Besides the port itself, and the higher than average number of huge pipes snaking through the dense forest of towers around it, the city looked much the same here as it had around the Iblanie headquarters, city, as far as the eye could see, packed with people in slums and towers and tenement buildings, dotted by parks, and the grates and gaps that led down into the Dregs, the true dregs, as his father called them, where hundreds of thousands of others fought to be the ones delivering water to the surface.

The officials he’d rode with disembarked into the port facility with an air of people returning to their homes. It might have been their homes, for all he knew. The structure was a vast hive looking thing stacked in layers of floors that even his third eye couldn’t encompass as he followed one of them down long halls floored with moving belts and took an elevator up to an undecorated warehouse filled with cots and the men that occupied them.

“Three days won’t hurt you here.” The official told him. “And with the new year, most of the duty here are off station, which means fewer men to harass you, but, all the same.” He glanced meaningfully at Marroo’s pocket. “I wouldn’t leave anything precious lying around.”

Marroo nodded. He only spent an hour there his first night. Sitting on the cot he’d been issued and thinking before he got up.

The midnight plains howled overhead as Marroo took to the roof of the barracks facility. The sound warbled distantly with the shifting wind around the Port, and it took Marroo longer than normal to orient himself to the four stars that formed his map of the city. The aura of the Hammer adept was much closer here at the port than Marroo was used to, and he could feel the two new adepts moving over the city somewhere in the direction from which he’d come. There was no sense of venom in the city anymore, not even of fuming remains the adept had left behind in Dhruv’s mansion. Not at this distance, not even when he let his spirit crawl free of its veil to fill the meridians scoured so recently by poison. It was hard to say whether the city felt less, or more, for the disappearance of that aura. Less, certainly, for the disappearance of the man who’d made the aura, but perhaps more for an end to the poison which he’d brought unwillingly wherever he’d gone.

When he slept he didn’t dream at all, but he woke to thoughts from a life he’d never led, and poisons he’d never pulled from a lake beyond the light.

Three days later a foreign official collected Marroo from the barracks when it was time for him to go. He was a young man, maybe five years Marroo’s senior, mustached and brown skinned like the squinting adept but without Athesh’s purple eyes.

“They’ll have swords where you’re going.” He told Marroo when he saw the only piece of Marroo’s luggage. He shrugged when Marroo told him it was an heirloom and gestured for Marroo to follow him as he smoothed out one of his mustachios and adjusted a small bag slung from one shoulder. “Night passing. Time to go if the ship’s going to catch the gravitational tide on the way out. Long ride waiting for us.”

It was not a long walk. A narrow vehicle, larger than an airbus but too small to be called a proper ship or barge, hummed as it waited for them on the bare cement beneath the eyes of the port’s encircling towers. Other aircraft, many much larger than this one, roared as motors churned to life within their guts behind the little vessel as core-light fell on them from the retreating edge of night and the young official led Marroo up the vessel’s boarding ramp to a double row of seats arranged along its edge facing one another in the narrow interior.

He chose a seat near the loading ramp where he could watch as other boys arrived accompanied by teachers or families, each one carrying all their worldly possessions in the small bags that was all they were permitted.

Marroo watched them say their goodbyes and remembered the only goodbye he’d said in the three days of darkness after he collected his father’s sword from the tower where he’d left it before the tournament.

She’d found him waiting in her room. He didn’t say anything when she stepped in, but she saw him in the pool of light cast by the lamp he’d turned on to make sure she would see him. He met her eyes, at first, but found that he couldn’t look at her when her eyes moved down to the sword strapped to his hip, and the memories that were not his own tumbled and churned in him at the sight of her.

“Your father is dead.” Marroo said to break the silence.

Banya looked up at him at that, but still wore the frozen look of terror he should have expected upon finding an armed man waiting for her in the guest bedroom she’d been allotted in her sister’s new manor.

Marroo spun the pen in his hand while he avoided her gaze, then set it down carefully next to the note he’d made out for her. “I wasn’t sure if they’d let you know… yet.” They hadn’t, he’d listened to her talking with Vasickni in a room below this one, their voices drawing memories in his mind of little girls he’d never truly known running through the shadows of a city beyond the light, laughing as their father chased after them with a grin.

He stood after another moment of silence and reached for his pocket. She jerked and backed away, but he removed the ticket he’d received from the competition and held it up to show her.

“He loved you.” Marroo said as he met her eyes. “Both of you.” He set the ticket down on the table and left his hand there, next to the last gift he could give to anyone before he left the Dregs behind. “There are instructions here, on how to use it.” He looked up at her. “He’d have wanted you to have it. It should help, with a dowry,” he looked away, “or just, to make your own life, somewhere no one will have to… die… to keep you safe.” He met the girl’s eyes, but she didn’t know him, and for all of the memories he’d stolen of her, there was nothing between them that made him anything more than her father’s killer. “I…” He paused, and looked back down at the note again before pulling his hand away. “He loved you.” He said again. “He’d have wanted you to know.” He turned to the open balcony beside him. “I’m sorry.”

Then he was gone.

Marroo heard the official who’d led him to the aircraft conferring with one of the pilots in another language while Marroo watched the crowd of wellwishers sending their children on board.

“Motors are wound up.” One of them said in the Dreg’s language. “Better get them on board.”

Boys began to filter up the loading ramp as the official circulated amidst the small crowd to inform them it was time to go. The last to board was a boy Marroo’s own age, one who clung to the old woman that brought him and wept into her shoulder. Marroo recognized the pinched face of the elder from the Dune-Tower school that finally separated them and led the boy to the ramp, and, with a shock, recognized the dark face of Singh as he wiped tears from his eyes and followed the mustachioed official up the ramp to throw himslef into the seat just opposite Marroo. He turned away from the other boys as his tears ran uncontrollably from his eyes and he stared through the slowly closing loading ramp until it locked into the ceiling with a bang.

“Plains got a twelve year orbit where most of you be headed.” The pilot told them over loudspeakers in the ceiling as more locks thumped and banged across the bay. Two slits served as the only windows in the loading ramp, giving Marroo and Singh a narrow view of the world outside.

“Gonna be a long time before you come back, but a long flight. Fifteen hours from here to the top.” Singh put a hand to the door across the narrow aisle from Marroo as he wept and motors throughout the air-craft spun up with a whine. “You get a long time to say good bye.”

The aircraft’s nose tilted skyward as engines roared. The captain said something in his own language over the speakers, then shut them down before they lurched and lifted into the sky.

Marroo didn’t watch the city recede from view behind them. He watched Singh weep in front of him and remembered his own goodbyes. When the boy turned to glare at him, Marroo put offered him his hand. The boy just stared at it for a moment before he took it and clutched it as they both turned to watch the city that had been their home fall away and eventually disappear from their lives forever.

The End