Outcaste

  “Things you shouldn’t know about. Things people go to the fifth level of the Pit for—if they’re caught. That’s why they go after outcastes, because outcastes can be hurt or even killed and nobody notices. Even if you survive three cycles on your own, there’s no guarantee you’d succeed in your caste challenge. You could sacrifice yourself for nothing and still end up a merchant.”

  I’ll succeed, she thought. There was no alternative.

  “No matter how hard it seems at home right now, you have parents who protect you. You have a home and regular meals, and no one is hurting you. You have a whole future in front of you. Go home. Be safe.”

  He really seemed to care. She wished her parents cared half as much.

  It sounded frightening, what he was saying. But when she thought about going home, she saw those great ships, chained to the docks and groaning as they strained against their bonds.

  Ships that could sail . . . Sometimes they sank, but at least they sank without chains.

  “Freedom isn’t safe,” she said.

  He exhaled, seeming to deflate right in front of her. Then he shook his head and rose. Resting a hand on her shoulder, he said, “May Fahla protect you.”

  When he walked out, the room felt colder.

  6

  OUTCASTE

  The library had always been Rahel’s friend, so that was where she went first. As with everything in Whitesun, it bore the same resemblance to what she knew from home as a molwyn tree did to a blade of grass. She spent the first half hantick wandering through with a slack jaw, admiring the curving lines of the architecture and the way the building was full of natural light without ever seeming too bright.

  When she discovered that each caste had an entire floor devoted to it, she nearly cried. A whole floor, just about warriors—and there were more books on this floor than in the entire library collection of her village.

  But she would have to come back for these. Her first priority was to speak to a librarian. If they were like the ones back home, they knew everything—not just about their library, but about the city as well.

  The first one she spoke to was a middle-aged man with a soft chin and a kind smile. He sent her downstairs to the offices, where she found the person in charge.

  Whitesun’s Head Librarian was about the age of Rahel’s mother, with skin as dark as night and a tall, lean body that she held in perfect posture even while taking a seat behind her desk. Her hair was up in a formal twist, and she spoke with the crisp diction of a no-nonsense instructor. Rahel stood straighter from sheer instinct and addressed her as “Deme,” the honorific for secular scholars.

  She was not corrected. Deme Isanelle was as impossible to sense as the warrior in the caste house, and she did not show her emotions on her face. But she knew her city and quickly understood what Rahel was asking.

  Armed with the information she had sought, Rahel went back to the warrior caste house and made the most of every hantick she had. It would be three cycles before she could come back, and she wanted to memorize every handspan. She tried all of the practice weapons, explored the archives, ate evenmeal in the tavern, and spent more than a hantick in the centering room. That night, in her plain but comfortable bed, she listened to the unfamiliar sounds of a strange building and thought she would never go to sleep.

  The sun was already high in the sky by the time she woke. Not only had she fallen asleep, she had missed half the morning.

  The short warrior was not in the lobby when she checked out. Part of her was relieved, but another part wished she had been able to say good-bye.

  A quick magtran ride took her from the central park to the social assistance agency near the center of town. Deme Isanelle had said there were two agencies, and this was by far the more desirable.

  She spent a tentick making up lies for the admission form and then moved into a room with six stack beds, two each on three of the walls. Five of them were already taken, so she set her bag on the top bed to the right of the door.

  Though the agency offered nothing like the privacy or comfort of the warrior caste house, it did give her a clean bed, one meal per day, and a roof over her head. That was enough while she looked for work at the docks. The warrior had probably not meant for his warning to be used as advice, but it was the best lead she had.

  Work was not difficult to find. It amused her to learn that merchants were the ones hiring underage and outcaste workers, to whom they offered less than half the normal wage. But it was in cash, no questions asked and no caste ID necessary.

  She exhausted herself loading cargo ships from dawn to dusk, went back to the agency for a hot meal and shower, and crashed in bed for a few precious hanticks of sleep before rolling out to do it all again. Getting up was the hardest part, and lifting the first crate of the day hurt so much that she felt as if she could not possibly lift a second. But she learned that if she powered through the pain, her body would eventually give up and adapt. After a hantick of labor, it almost didn’t hurt anymore.

  Until the next morning.

  On the fourteenth day, she came back to find that someone had stolen her wooden daggers. She had hidden them beneath her mattress, but as the skinny boy in the bunk below hers said, that was the first place anyone would look.

  In a rage, she demanded that all five of her roommates let her search their beds and belongings.

  “Search mine and I’ll break your face,” the boy drawled. “Anyway, I didn’t take them. She did.” He pointed to the girl lying on the top bunk across the room, reading a tattered book. She was twice Rahel’s size and ignoring the commotion.

  Rahel did not stop to think about control. She did not think about making her mind a still pool or anything Brasdo had taught her. She simply strode across the room, yanked the surprised girl out by an arm and leg, and let her drop to the floor.

  “Hoi! That shekking hurt, you shekking dokker, I’ll mess you—”

  Rahel broke the girl’s nose. A cycle of training had not prepared her to fight like a real warrior, but it had taught her how to make a proper fist and where to strike to cause the most pain and shock. A swift kick to the crotch reduced the large girl to a crying mess curled in on herself, and Rahel promptly pulled the mattress down on top of her. When that did not reveal her daggers, she grabbed the girl’s bag and upended it on the floor.

  There they were, still wrapped in Rahel’s softest old shirt. She let out a relieved breath and had just replaced the daggers in her own bag when the room’s door burst open.

  The agency, it turned out, had a no-fighting policy and zero interest in the fact that Rahel had been the victim of theft. She could not believe it when she was tossed out on the street while that sniveling, thieving blindworm was protected for the night.

  The other assistance agency was across town. It was farther from the docks and not as clean, but it was better than sleeping outdoors.

  She lasted almost a moon there, until one of her roommates accused her of theft. Her laughter at the very idea of it enraged the boy, and he flung himself at her with murderous intent.

  The agency staff did not believe her when she protested that she had not started the fight. How was that possible, they asked, when she was hardly scratched while the boy looked like he had been through the kitchen’s meat processor? Her claim of self-defense met a stone wall, as did her explanation that she’d had a cycle of training in the warrior’s arts.

  “If you’re trained,” said the elderly woman in charge, “then you should have been the one to put a stop to it.”

  “That’s what I did!”

  “Before you beat him to a paste.”

  With nowhere left to go, she took the magtran to the docks, slipped aboard the cargo ship she was currently loading, and slept belowdecks atop a stack of crates. It would probably not be a viable option come winter, but on these summer nights she did not even need her coat.

  What her new lodgings lacked in comfort they made up for in convenience. She saved half a hantick of tr
avel time by sleeping at work, and there was no line for the bathroom. Nor did she have to worry about roommates stealing her few belongings or accusing her of theft. All she had to do was make sure she wasn’t seen at the wrong time. She didn’t even mind spending more of her precious income on food, because the offerings here at the docks tasted better than anything she had eaten at the agencies.

  But not having a safe place to store her daggers worried her. She had long ago realized, upon seeing the low wages her work would earn, that those two daggers were worth an entire cycle of income. They represented her future.

  Every evening for a nineday, she wandered the bayfront looking for a more permanent hiding place for them. She found one in the wall of an old warehouse with crumbling stonework. The building was abandoned, so it was unlikely that the stonework would be repaired anytime soon. She counted thirty-four bricks from the back corner and two bricks up from the ground—her day and moon of birth—and wiggled out the brick from her chosen spot. It did not come easily, which was good, and she had to excavate the space behind it. When there was sufficient room, she slid in the daggers, now wrapped in plastipaper and sealed in a waterproof envelope, and replaced the brick. It fit perfectly.

  She kicked away the bits of mortar, brick dust, and dirt that had piled up, making certain that no sign existed of her work. Backing up several paces, she checked again, then nodded in satisfaction and walked away.

  Strolling around the dock area after dark was probably something her warrior friend back at the caste house would have advised against, but Rahel had worked here for nearly two moons and lived here for the last nineday. It was beginning to feel more like home than her parents’ house. Consequently, when she came across two figures beating up a much smaller third, her first instinct was not fear but curiosity.

  “Hoi,” she said. “He do something to yank you off?”

  The bent figures stepped back in surprise, revealing a boy on the ground who could not have been more than twelve. The two aggressors looked to be nearer twenty.

  “Yeah,” one of them snarled. “He’s breathing.”

  “Kind of hard not to, isn’t it?”

  “What are you, stupid? Go take that nose and stick it somewhere else.”

  It was slightly suicidal, but she could not walk away from such an unfair fight. “I can’t,” she said, almost apologetically. “Because I can’t believe I’m seeing two grown men beating a child for breathing. Don’t you have anything better to do?”

  She hadn’t expected both of them to come at her together.

  In her training with Brasdo, they had only just begun to cover the principles of sparring with multiple attackers when her scholarship ran out. But the primary rule was the same as with a single attacker: disable as soon as possible.

  The element of surprise was always a good first weapon. She didn’t wait for them to reach her before rushing up to the first, grabbing his outstretched wrist, twisting around and throwing him over her hip.

  In her training, they were careful about their holds on wrists and elbows, because it was so easy to cause harm by twisting too hard or not letting go in time. She twisted hard now, and felt a snap at the same time that the man screamed. Immediately releasing his wrist, she spun in place with her right hand in the palm strike position: palm up and out, hand rigid, fingers held back, leading with the heel of her hand. She had not known the location of the second man but assumed he would be coming at her unprotected back.

  She assumed correctly. He ran straight into the heel of her hand as she continued her spin, the speed and force of the combined impact snapping his head so far back that his feet left the ground. He landed heavily in the street, groaning, then stilled when she kicked him in the temple.

  Certain that the other man would be upright and coming back for more, she spun again, arms up in a defensive block. She was startled to find him halfway down the block and still running.

  The boy on the ground snuffled a wet-sounding laugh. “Oh, that was good. Almost worth getting my face smashed for. Who are you, Fahla’s third lover?”

  “Third and last.” It was a joke she would never have understood before starting her work at the docks. “Are you all right?”

  He pushed himself into a sitting position. “I’ve had worse.”

  “That’s not what I asked. Why were they beating you?”

  “Because I was breathing.” He sighed at her disbelieving expression and pointed to his forehead. “Because of this.”

  She crouched down for a better look.

  He only had two forehead ridges. The side ridges were normal, making graceful curves from the bridge of his nose to either temple, but the vertical ridge that should have bisected his forehead was absent. A smooth expanse of skin marked the place instead.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Nothing. I was born this way. Some people don’t like it.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  His smile was bloody, but blinding nonetheless. “I think so, too.” He stood shakily and dusted himself off. “We should go before musclehead there wakes up.”

  They walked in the opposite direction from the man who had run away. Not until they turned a corner did Rahel’s body realize what she had done. She clenched her hands into fists in an effort to stop the trembling. She could have been seriously hurt back there. What had she been thinking?

  “My name is Mouse,” the boy said.

  “Rahel,” she answered. “Well met, Mouse. What kind of name is that?”

  “Well met, Rahel, third and last lover of Fahla. And people say I look like one.”

  They were passing beneath a streetlamp as he looked up at her. He had short brown hair, very long eyelashes framing large brown eyes, and a slight overbite.

  She laughed. “You do.”

  “I know. I haven’t seen you around here before.”

  “I’ve been working the docks for almost two moons. But I didn’t move here until a nineday ago.”

  “Where are you sleeping?”

  “On the cargo ship I’m loading.”

  He stopped. “Are you yanking me? That’s dokshin. Do you know what they’ll do if they catch you?”

  “Um . . . no?”

  “Beat your face in and throw you overboard. If it’s one of the bigger cargo ships, you might not survive the hit to the water. And they don’t always care if you’re conscious when you go over. You need to get out of there.”

  “I’d love to, but I’ve already been thrown out of both assistance agencies. I don’t have anywhere to go.”

  He took her hand, gratitude and simple acceptance flowing through his skin. “You do now. Come home with me. I owe you for that save.”

  “Where are you sleeping?”

  “In a better place than you.”

  Two moons ago, she would never have believed that she could follow a small boy through the Whitesun bayfront without asking questions, but here she was, trusting. His intentions were good, she knew that much through their palm touch, but she had no idea where he was taking her or whether it would be any improvement over her crates.

  When he led her to the alley entrance of a shabby-looking building, her defenses rose. This place looked dangerous.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks, I promise.” He fit a key chip to the lock and shoved his shoulder against the door. It scraped open, the bottom edge rubbing against the floor. “Door sticks, though. And the lift doesn’t work.”

  She stepped into the small, grimy lobby and looked around in distaste. Trash lay on the floor in two of the corners, while a third held a potted plant that had seen much better days. Across the lobby was an open lift with chains stretched across it.

  Mouse kicked the door shut and walked past her. “Stairs are over here.”

  The stairwell looked as if it had last been cleaned before she was born, and she wrinkled her nose at the smell of vomit. “You sure this is better than my cargo ship?”

  “Can’t do much about the lobby or stair
s. But I keep my own space clean.”

  On the third floor, he walked down a hall with chipped tiling and unlocked a surprisingly solid door. “Please enter, my savior,” he said with an exaggerated sweep of the hand.

  She walked inside and raised her eyebrows. “You weren’t joking.”

  The room was small but spotless. Even the walls had been recently painted. Straight across from the entry was a doorless arch with a tidily made bed visible through it, while the remainder of the wall held a bookshelf made of three wooden boards suspended between stacked bricks. On her right, a shabby couch took up the entire wall beneath a narrow window, and the left side of the room held a small but serviceable kitchen area. It was empty of dishes, and the food prep space was wiped clean.

  “You’re welcome to sleep on the couch,” Mouse said. “The bathroom is through the bedroom; no getting around that. But I sleep like a tree stump, so you won’t bother me.”

  She turned to face him. “I don’t understand. Why would you bring me here?” Why would you trust me? was the real question, though she couldn’t bring herself to ask it.

  He seemed to hear her anyway. “You walked into a fight that wasn’t yours, just because it wasn’t fair. Last time I saw something like that, I was reading a story about noble warriors saving helpless villagers and imagining what it would be like to live in that world.”

  “I’m not a warrior.”

  “But you want to be.”

  She studied him. “Are you a high empath?”

  When he laughed, his bottom lip split and oozed fresh blood. “Shek, shek, that hurt. Wait a tick.” He vanished into the bedroom.

  As the sound of running water filled the space, Rahel wandered to the window and looked out. Despite the dreary location and worse building, Mouse had a spectacular view of the docks and Wildwind Bay stretching to the horizon.

  She had just located her own cargo ship when he reappeared at her elbow, face scrubbed clean of blood, with skin sealers closing one cut on his chin and two more beneath his eye.

  “Sorry for the wait. Took a little longer to stop the bleeding. Great view, isn’t it? And no, I’m not a high empath. If I were, I wouldn’t be living in this toilet hole.”