The outskirts smelled like rot and engine grease, which was nothing unusual. What was unusual was the vehicle idling at the mouth of the alley, sleek and dark and expensive in a way that made it look alien against the crumbling concrete. Sunny had been watching it for eleven minutes from his perch on the fire escape, counting the seconds between each sweep of the driver's head.
He was eight years old. He weighed what a healthy five-year-old should weigh.
The car didn't belong to anyone from the outskirts, and it didn't belong to the government either, because government vehicles had insignias and government drivers didn't wear tailored suits. That left exactly two possibilities. It was either a wealthy citizen who had gotten very lost, or it was someone who had come here looking for something specific.
Sunny hoped it was the first kind, because the second kind was usually worse.
He'd been trailing the car for three blocks, ever since it had turned off the main road and descended into the tangle of half-collapsed buildings and improvised shelters that made up the eastern margin of the city. There was nothing down here worth visiting. The filtration plants were further north, the recycling yards further south, and the only thing the eastern outskirts had in abundance was people nobody cared about.
People like Sunny.
The driver's head turned again, scanning the street in a slow arc. Sunny pressed himself flat against the rusted metal of the fire escape and held his breath, even though he knew the man couldn't see him at this distance. He was small and dirty and the color of the walls, which was one of the few advantages of being small and dirty: you became part of the scenery. The outskirts were full of small, dirty children, and adults had trained themselves not to look at them, the same way you stopped noticing the hum of a filtration unit after a while.
The rear door of the vehicle opened.
The man who stepped out was tall in a way that had nothing to do with height. He stood as though the air around him was denser, as though gravity treated him differently than it treated other people. He wore dark clothes and a long coat the color of dried blood, and when his eyes swept the alley, Sunny felt a jolt of something cold travel down his spine and settle in his stomach.
Those eyes were grey. Not the soft grey of overcast sky or old concrete, but the hard, flat grey of a blade's edge, and they moved with the same deliberate precision.
The man looked at the fire escape. Looked directly at the place where Sunny was hiding, as though the shadows and the distance and the grime meant nothing at all.
Sunny's heart slammed against his ribs.
He ran.
Or tried to. His bare feet had barely touched the first rung of the ladder when a sound stopped him, a single word spoken at a conversational volume that somehow reached him as clearly as if the man were standing beside him.
"Sit."
It wasn't loud. It wasn't threatening. But Sunny's legs stopped moving, and he found himself lowering back onto the fire escape platform with a docility that frightened him more than the man's eyes had. His body had responded before his mind could object, because something deep and animal in his brain had recognized the voice as belonging to a predator so far above him on the food chain that resistance was not even a category worth considering.
The man watched him for a long moment. Then he turned to the driver and said something Sunny couldn't hear.
Minutes passed. Sunny sat very still, because sitting still was something he was good at. When you lived in the outskirts, you learned early which situations called for running and which ones called for stillness, and the distinction was simple: you ran from things that were slower than you, and you stayed perfectly still for everything else.
This man was not slower than him.
Eventually, the man crossed the alley and stopped at the base of the fire escape. Up close, he was even more imposing. His shoulders were broad enough to block the narrow corridor of light between the buildings, and the coat he wore was not fabric but something heavier, something that caught the weak sunlight and held it rather than reflecting it back. The vermilion color was so deep it looked almost black in the shadows.
"What is your name?" the man asked.
Sunny considered lying. Lying was his primary survival skill, refined through years of practice into something approaching art. He could become anyone when he needed to. A lost child looking for his mother. An errand boy for a local shop. A deaf-mute who couldn't answer questions. He had a dozen identities stored in his head like tools in a belt, each one designed for a specific type of danger.
But the man's grey eyes were watching him with an expression that Sunny couldn't read, and the weight of that gaze made every fabricated identity feel flimsy and transparent.
"Sunless," he said. "People call me Sunny."
The man didn't react to the name. He studied Sunny the way someone might study a piece of raw metal, turning it over in their mind, evaluating density and grain and tensile strength.
"You followed my car for three blocks," the man said. It was not a question.
Sunny swallowed. "I was curious."
"You maintained visual contact from a parallel street for the first two blocks, then cut through a building and repositioned on this fire escape for a better vantage point. You've been counting the intervals of my driver's patrol pattern."
The cold feeling in Sunny's stomach deepened. He had been so careful.
"I train soldiers," the man said, and the flatness of his tone made the words sound less like a boast and more like a geological fact. "People who have spent years learning how to move without being seen. Most of them would not have thought to change their angle of observation. You did it instinctively."
Sunny didn't know what to say to that, so he said nothing.
The man reached into his coat and produced something small and metallic. He held it up between two fingers, letting it catch the light. It was a coin, real metal, not the plastic credit chips that circulated in the outskirts. Sunny had never seen one before, but he'd heard they existed, relics from before the resource wars that some collectors kept as curiosities.
"Catch," the man said, and flicked it upward.
Sunny's hand shot out and snagged the coin from the air. He didn't think about it. He just did it.
The man watched his hand close around the metal.
"Your parents," he said. "Where are they?"
Sunny's jaw tightened. "My mother died two years ago. My father died before that. I have a sister, but she was taken by the welfare bureau. I don't know where she is."
It came out flat and practiced, because he'd said it so many times that the words had lost their edges. He'd learned early that there was no advantage in letting people hear grief in your voice. Grief made you a target for sympathy, and sympathy was just pity wearing a nicer coat, and pity made people feel better about themselves without actually helping you.
The man nodded once, as though Sunny had confirmed something he already knew.
"I'm going to ask you a question," he said. "Think carefully before you answer, because what you say will determine the course of the rest of your life."
Sunny stared at him. The coin was warm in his fist, which was strange, because metal should have been cold.
The man's grey eyes held no warmth, no cruelty, no particular interest. They were the eyes of someone who had long ago stopped seeing people as people and had started seeing them as problems to be solved or materials to be shaped.
"Would you like to eat three meals a day?"
Sunny blinked. Of all the questions he had expected, this was not one of them.
"Who do I have to kill?" he asked.
He meant it as a joke. Mostly.
The man's expression didn't change, but something shifted behind those grey eyes. A flicker of something that might have been approval, or might have been recognition, the way a smith might notice a particular quality in an unworked piece of steel.
"No one," the man said. "Not yet."
He turned and walked back toward the car. After a few steps, he paused without looking back.
"My name is Anvil. I am the patriarch of Clan Valor. If you come with me, you will never be hungry again. You will never be cold. You will never be helpless."
He opened the car door.
"But you will also never be free."
Sunny sat on the fire escape and looked at the coin in his hand. He thought about the two lines carved into the old tree at the edge of the outskirts, one for his mother and one for his father. He thought about the third line he'd been planning to carve for himself someday, because he'd always assumed he would die here, in the grime and the rot, and no one would bother to mark his passing unless he did it in advance.
He thought about three meals a day.
Then he climbed down the fire escape and got into the car.