For a long time after the door slammed shut behind the debtors, Drea didn't move. She sat on the rough wooden floor, stone-still, her arms wrapped around the warm, trembling bundle that was her baby brother. Kai's soft breaths fluttered against her collarbone, the only sign that life still existed in this hollow shell of a home.
Her eyes were bloodshot, burning from the tears she no longer felt herself crying. She couldn't think. Couldn't speak. Her mind was a blank, white noise of shock. Her father gone. Her mother taken. The house too quiet. Too empty. Too haunted.
The baby whimpered, and something inside her snapped back into place.
Not grief.
Not fear.
Adrenaline.
It surged through her like fire, waking every nerve in her body. Her gaze sharpened, not toward anything specific, but into the cold emptiness before her, as though she could see through walls, through the darkness, through the future that now pressed down on them.
They will come back.
They always came back. Debt didn't end when the person paying it disappeared. The Syndicate would return, searching for scraps to collect. Searching for the girl who might grow into a problem. Searching for the infant they had deemed "worthless."
She could not be here when they did.
She stood abruptly, nearly swaying on her feet, her heartbeat pounding so hard she felt it in her fingertips. With trembling hands, she gathered scraps of cloth, the softest she had, wrapping her brother securely against her chest. The baby fussed but quieted when she held him close.
"It's alright," she whispered, though her voice cracked. "I've got you. I won't let them hurt you."
The decision wasn't really a decision. It was instinct, raw and urgent. Stay, and they die. Run, and there might be a sliver of hope.
She lifted her mother's cloak from its peg. It still held the faint scent of herbs and smoke. Pulling it over her head, she shielded her brother beneath its heavy folds. She paused only once, standing in the doorway, looking back at the home that had held every memory she had ever known.
Her father's hands repairing the roof.
Her mother humming softly while stitching clothes.
The sound of laughter before debts stole their joy.
Now it was nothing but a graveyard of moments she could never return to.
Drea swallowed hard. "Goodbye."
Then she stepped into the night.
The outskirts were dark and silent, the moon hiding behind thick clouds. Drea moved like a shadow, her feet silent against the sand. She followed narrow paths between shacks, avoiding roads where Syndicate patrols might pass.
The first shelter she found was an abandoned grain shed two kilometers from the city limits. She stayed only a day. The next night, she ran again. And again. And again.
Running became her life.
Sleeping in corners beneath broken roofs, eating whatever she could scavenge, fighting off hunger and cold. Some days she wondered if she had aged years in hours. Some nights she cried silently, afraid her sobs would give them away.
But she never let her brother hear her despair.
He grew quickly, too quickly, it seemed. His tiny fingers curled around hers for warmth, his soft breaths settling her in ways nothing else could. He became her anchor. Her reason to endure.
They moved from one forgotten place to another, abandoned storage units, freight yards, alley shelters where other runaways gathered. Drea stayed distant from most people. Trust was a luxury she could not afford.
Sometimes an old woman would take pity and offer bread. Sometimes a kind worker would give scraps of cloth for blankets. But Drea never stayed long. The Syndicate network stretched far; their reach was long, their memory unforgiving.
Every time she felt even a flicker of safety, she forced herself to move.
"Keep sleeping," she would whisper to him as she hoisted him onto her back. "We can't stop yet."
The world was wide and strange, filled with people who didn't know her, didn't care, didn't ask questions. She learned how to blend in, how to walk with her head low but her eyes alert.
Years passed like this.
And somehow, impossibly, they survived.
By the time Ace turned two, Drea had found temporary refuge in a remote salvage settlement near the mountains. It was a place of rust and broken parts, where traders bought metal for cheap and sold it for profit. The people lived rough lives, but they were too busy scraping by to care about one teenage girl and her toddler shadow.
It was here Drea found the metal.
Scrap walls stacked to the sky. Piles of bent rebar. Discarded gears and twisted steel sheets.
And something stirred inside her.
Memories she had long buried, the sound of her father's hammer striking metal, sparks flying like orange fireflies, the warmth of the forge as he shaped impossible strength into delicate craft.
Her father had been a metalcrafman, one of the last honest ones.
And now she could be too.
Drea began to watch the smiths who worked in the settlement. Older men with soot-stained aprons, young apprentices pounding steel clumsily. They yelled at her to go away at first, but she always returned, sitting nearby with Kai in her lap, watching every movement, memorizing every tool, every technique.
One night, after the smiths had closed up, Drea snuck into the yard and picked up a small piece of scrap metal. It was cold, jagged, useless. But she held it the way she remembered her father holding his pieces, almost tenderly.
She whispered to it.
"Please become something better."
And she began to work.
The first time she hammered, she struck wrong and hit her own thumb. The second time, the metal cracked. The third time, she dropped it entirely.
But she kept going.
Night after night, mistake after mistake, injury after injury, she kept going.
Until finally, one crisp night under the moon, she made something whole.
A simple hook.
Crooked. Uneven. Rough. But a hook.
When she showed it to one of the smiths the next morning, he snorted. "You made that?" he asked, skeptical.
She nodded.
He examined it, turning it over in his blackened hands. "Ugly," he muttered. "But functional."
That was the closest thing to praise she had ever heard.
By the time she reached fifteen, she had surpassed every apprentice in the settlement. She crafted things most smiths considered impossible, latches with intricate curves, blades balanced so precisely they seemed to float, and metal ornaments that caught the light like stars.
Her favorite pieces, though, were the weapons. Not because she wanted to hurt anyone, but because they represented power, the kind she had never possessed as a child.
She learned to shape iron into long, slender knives that could slide into her boots. She forged curved sickles and double-bladed axes. She even attempted a collapsible spear, though it took her dozens of tries to get it right.
Her hands grew calloused. Her arms strengthened. Her mind sharpened.
She was no longer merely running.
She was preparing.
Ace grew up among anvils and fire. By five years old, he could identify different metals by sound alone—tapping them gently with small stones and announcing, "Copper," or "Steel," or "That one's dead metal." He often sat beside her while she worked, humming to himself, drawing shapes in the dirt.
He was bright, gentle, and endlessly curious. And he was the reason Drea woke each day with determination.
Their hut was small, a corner of an abandoned storage container she had repaired with metal plating, but it was theirs. Drea traded her creations for food and fabrics, saving every coin she could. She never let anyone know her full name. She never said where she came from. She never let her guard down.
Whenever she felt the world growing too safe, she packed everything in silence.
Ace," she would whisper, "we're moving."
And he would nod, small but brave, gathering his little bag of toys.
They crossed settlements, mountain passes, forest edges, each year drifting farther from the massacre place. Farther from the shadows that had once destroyed their lives.
Yet the nightmares never left Drea. She still woke some nights with sweat running down her back, her father's final moment replaying behind her eyelids. She still saw her mother's hand reaching for her, disappearing into the grasp of the debtors.
Sometimes she could almost hear her mother's voice:
Run, Drea. Protect him. Don't let them take him too.
And she obeyed.
Every single day.
It was late autumn when their lives finally settled into something like rhythm. Drea worked under a tin awning where she kept her makeshift forge blazing from sunrise to sunset. Ace played nearby, chasing beetles or building towers from scrap pieces.
The people in this settlement respected her. Some feared her, in a good way. A seventeen-year-old girl crafting weapons more advanced than blacksmiths twice her age was unusual, but not unwelcome. Her craft made her valuable. Her quiet strength made others hesitant to cross her.
One evening, as the harvest winds blew dust across the camp, Drea sat beside her forge, wiping soot from her hands. Ace crawled into her lap, cuddling into her side.
"Drea," he whispered, "when I get big, can I make metal things like you?"
She smiled softly, brushing his dark hair from his eyes. "You can make anything you want, Ace."
He thought about that, then nodded seriously. "Then I want to make something strong. Something that protects you."
Her chest tightened. She could feel the warm wind pierced through her heart.
She kissed the top of his head. "You already protect me."
The fire crackled. Night settled around them.
For the first time in years, Drea felt a flicker of peace.
But somewhere, deep down, she knew peace didn't last forever.
The Syndicate never forgot a debt.
And no amount of running could hide them forever.
Not from the world she had been born into.
Not from the world that wanted to own them.
"You're wasted out here," Work like yours belongs in the inner provinces. In the capital, even." The words of one of the customers ranged in her ears
Tomorrow, she would forge something new.
Tomorrow, she would shape their future, just as she reshaped metal beneath her hands.