The world returned with a violent jolt, accompanied by the stinging reek of ammonia and a sharp, rhythmic agony in his cheekbone.
Kira opened his eyes. He wasn't lying in the golden tomb of his home, but on hard wooden slats. Above him was the jagged, weeping stone of a low ceiling, damp with rot.
Every attempt to draw a breath made his ribs grind together like shards of broken glass. Something deep inside had shifted, and his body was screaming in protest. His jaw was bound so tightly with coarse linen that his teeth dug into his gums. His left arm was strapped firmly to his chest, a dead weight he could no longer feel, save for the pulsing heat in his shoulder that radiated through his entire body with every heartbeat.
"I'm alive," he noted. There was no joy in the thought, only a dull, hollow surprise.
The last thing left in his memory was a grey fog. He had stepped toward Halden's raised fist. It had been a suicidal gesture; he had simply wanted it all to end.
"But what happened next?"
The flash of pain in his jaw provided the answer: the blow had found its mark. But why was he here? Had he simply collapsed into the darkness the moment they collided?
"Interesting..." The voice was calm, too quiet for a place like this.
Kira turned his head with difficulty. In the corner of the cell, shrouded in thick shadow, sat a man. He wore a clean coat of grey wool, and a book rested on his knees. Kira tensed. The flash of pain from his broken ribs receded for a moment, displaced by a strange numbness.
"Do not try to speak," the man said, turning a page. "Your jaw is held together by a prayer, three of your ribs are shattered, and your left shoulder... let's just say the master had to piece the bone back together. For a 'Zero,' you are proving to be quite expensive."
Zero.
Kira frowned. The roar of the crowd... the mocking laughter...
"Was that... what they called me?" The image of a herald in scarlet surfaced for a second and immediately drowned in pain.
Questions surged inside him. Who was this man? Why was he here? And most importantly—what had happened in the arena?
Kira watched him with dark green eyes. Despite the tremors in his body and the slick sweat, there was no slave-like submission in his gaze.
"Listen carefully," the man said, flipping a page. "Do you understand where you are?"
Kira remained silent. He wanted to know the answer himself, but his thoughts scattered before they could take shape.
"Do you remember what you did to Halden?"
Silence.
Kira squeezed his eyes shut until it hurt. Before his eyes stood only fear and the concrete floor of the arena. The man in grey stood up and approached the bars. The torchlight from the corridor fell across his face—thin lips, cold calculation in his eyes.
"Your eyes..." he narrowed them, studying Kira's pupils. "I have seen eyes like those in only one place."
The silence stretched.
"Are you connected to the Association?"
Kira didn't process the word immediately. One second. Two.
And then, something short-circuited in his brain.
His body was seized by a chill, the kind that comes with a deadly fever. He cast his eyes down, terrified that the stranger would see something in them that Kira himself had not yet realized. His chest tightened; his heart hammered in a wild, broken rhythm.
He tried to suppress the trembling, to command his muscles to go still, but his body no longer obeyed him. His flesh recognized the name even if his mind remained blind. When he tried to answer, only a pathetic rasp escaped his throat.
"I see," the stranger said, snapping the book shut.
"Who..." Kira forced his lips apart with agonizing effort. "Who are you?"
"The one who decides whether to throw you to the dogs for ruining the bets of half the city, or to turn you into something worth having."
He paused, studying Kira's face. Kira felt something stir deep inside. This was worse than the fear he had felt before Halden. The stranger turned to leave, but Kira rasped after him:
"Halden..." Kira choked out, dreading the answer. "Is he alive?"
The man in grey stopped at the bars without looking back.
"Worse. He no longer has a name."
The footsteps faded in the corridor. Silence returned slowly. Kira tried to inhale, but his lungs felt like dry paper. Every scrap of strength had been spent on those four words. He gasped for air.
One word hammered in his head: Association.
A white building with high towers flashed before his eyes, its doors marked with strange seals. That man in the expensive cloak... his face was blurred, but Kira felt a coldness that lingered even in memory.
"No..." a rasp escaped his throat along with a painful cough.
Kira shut his eyes so tightly that crimson spots swam in the darkness. As long as he could remember, his world had been the dirt beneath his feet. The marketplace, stealing stale bread, the endless flight from guards through narrow alleys. Cold nights on heaps of rags. This was his life.
Sometimes, very rarely, he dreamed of strange things: clean hands, silk sheets, quiet talk of politics and power. But upon waking, he always spat and forgot it. What else could a hungry street rat imagine?
Now, a void covered him. The "Rat"—the one who stole food and feared the dark—seemed to have ducked cowardly deep into his skull. And in his place sat something else. Something that had broken Halden without even blinking.
"Was that really me? I couldn't have..."
He felt sick. He suddenly feared touching his own face, terrified that these hands might have a life of their own and tighten around his throat while he slept.
This thought was scarier than any pain. Kira was afraid to close his eyes. He was afraid to wake up again and find that his body had "performed" something else while his mind was checked out.
He curled into a ball on the straw, clutching his bandaged arm. He wanted to scream, to tear the cursed bandage from his jaw, but he didn't even have the strength for a groan. Kira lay and listened to his heart beat—in that very rhythm he now hated more than anything in the world.