CHAPTER 2

Dreams from the Underground

A Grievar needs neither tools nor technologies to enhance their physical prowess. One that resorts to shortcuts on the path to mastery will find themselves weakened. When such an individual faces true adversity, their trappings of strength will falter.

Passage One, Twelfth Precept of the Combat Codes

Just a few minutes more.

The sun peeked over the window frame and cast a shard of light at the boy.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

He half expected to hear the old master’s gruff voice from outside the loft, yelling at them to get up and begin another day of training. Though the boy was curled up on his pallet, he could already feel his muscles aching in anticipation of the arduous day ahead: sprinting across the black sand beach, carrying boulders beneath the waves, climbing to the top of the seaside cliffs.

Arry licked his face with her wet tongue, trying to wake him.

The salty breeze wafted through the window, bringing with it the pungent smell of fish drying on the stone slab outside. The sigil sparrows began their morning chatter, and as usual, Arry tried to join the birds’ chorus, yelping in his ear.

He rolled over, grabbing Arry to silence her, burying his face in her warm fur. She smelled like a tuft of washed-up seagrass.

Just a few minutes more.

The sun crested the window, the light pulsing against the boy’s clenched eyelids. He wanted to hold on to the peaceful darkness. He wanted to let the tide lull him back to sleep. He wanted to lie still while the world around him moved on.

He opened his eyes.

The boy sat in the dim cell, watching the little wisp dance. He stared at the floating ball of light until it filled his field of vision with a white shroud. He concentrated on his breath, focusing on deep inhales and slow exhales.

He could only stare at the wisp for so long. Eventually, the boy flinched in pain and pulled his eyes from the light.

When he looked away, the deep shadows of his cell returned, curtains of darkness that hung around him. He stretched out his arms and touched the cold stone walls, tracing his hands along every familiar fissure.

The boy didn’t mind the darkness of his cell. He felt at home in the shadows. It was the light that had taken time to get used to.

When he had first stumbled into the Underground, the light had burned his eyes. The white beams had rained down on him from the arrays above. He’d clamped his eyes shut, clawed at his face, screamed in agony.

Despite being dressed only in dried blood, he hadn’t garnered more than a passing glance on the Underground’s streets. No one had stopped to offer him help when he’d curled up in the shadows of some looming building, desperately trying to escape the light. They’d assumed he was just another Grievar kid, used up in the slave Circles and tossed out on the streets. Eventually, he’d get swept up by the mechs like any other piece of garbage. Someone must have been convinced that the boy still had some life in him, though, some worth that could be wrung out of his frail body. Maybe they’d been convinced by his screams as they attempted to pull him from the shadows.

He’d woken up in this cell. The little wisp of light had appeared on his first day here, hovering in the corner amid the cobwebs.

Today, he’d kept his eyes on the wisp for one hundred breaths before flinching away.

Every day in the cell, he’d trained himself to stare at the light. Slowly and agonizingly, the burning effects had faded. The explosions of white had become smaller and the blasts of brightness softer.

It was a momentous feat for the boy, considering he’d kept his eyes wired shut for weeks to avoid the light. Even when his captors dragged him out to fight, he kept his eyes shut, much to their dismay.

Not that being blind had mattered during the boy’s fights so far. The opponents they put him up against were slow. He could hear them lumbering toward him, their labored breath betraying their movements. Though the boy was hardly an effective striker without his vision, his grappling was unhindered. Once he got ahold of his opponent, he didn’t need to see.

He heard footsteps coming from outside his cell door, and on cue, the wisp disappeared, leaving him in the familiar darkness.

“Get yerself eatin’, you lacklight twig!”

The boy had been called many names down here so far, derogatory terms in a variety of languages he didn’t understand and every manner of insult he could imagine. Lacklight, scumslagger, scrapdog, blindbrood. But the boy remembered his real name. He hadn’t lost that, like so much else. Cego.

A slot opened at the base of the door and a metal plate covered in green slop slid through. His captors called the food fighting greens.

The slot stayed open for a moment longer and Cego could feel the familiar eyes of the guard peering in at him, waiting for him to spoon the slop into his mouth.

Cego kept his eyes shut, pretending to grope at the stone floor for his food. He let his captors think he was blind.

A perceived weakness is strength, and a flaunted strength is weakness. The old master’s baritone voice echoed in Cego’s head.

“Darkin’ blindbrood. Eat, don’t eat, see if I care.”

The slot rattled shut and Cego heard the guard spit on the floor outside his cell.

“Think yer doin’ good so far, eh, boy?”

Cego didn’t respond. They’d heard his screams when they took him off the streets, but he hadn’t given them anything since.

“Seen yer type before. Boss probably thinks you’ll bring in the bits,” the guard said from outside the door. “Like when we had that one-legged kid; patrons liked that too. Freak would hop around the Circle pretty fast, actually won a fight throwin’ jabs. Then boss matched him up with a good kicker with sharpened shins. Snapped his good leg clean right at the knee. No-leg is what we called him after that.” The guard chuckled as he walked away.

Cego waited until he was sure the man was gone before he opened his eyes and stared at the rusted metal plate in front of him. He reached forward and pawed some of the watery green mush into his mouth, chewing and swallowing it lifelessly. Cego hadn’t eaten his first few days down here and he’d paid for it, nearly blacking out during his first bout. Now he forced himself to eat, as disgusting as the greens looked.

Making sure he was eating regularly was just one of many things that Cego was getting used to.

He pulled a tattered blanket tight to his shoulders as he tossed the metal plate aside. Though Cego was more than familiar with pain, the cold here was different from pain. The cold lingered; it crept into his bones and made his nose run. Cego longed to stand beneath the warm sun, feeling the sand between his toes.

Here in the Underground, Cego had realized he could wither away. He’d been helpless on the streets for days, unable even to push himself off the ground. If not for his captors hauling him off the pavement, he’d have likely starved to death.

Cego threw the blanket off his shoulders and dropped to the floor. He started with push-ups, sit-ups, and planks. He reached up and grasped the edge of the doorframe for a set of pull-ups, ignoring the splinters that dug into his fingers. He bloodied his knees on the cold stone floor as he shot for takedowns—crouching low, stepping deep, and driving forward with his hips. He thrashed back and forth in the tiny cell like a tanked shark.

Cego shadowboxed imaginary opponents until his arms shivered with weariness. He threw round kicks, the tight stone walls tearing the skin from his feet as he spun around. Sweat and blood pooled in the cobbled crevices of his cell.

He would not wither away.

Though many things were alien to Cego in this Underground world—the light, the cold, the food, the folk, their languages—combat was not one of them.

Combat’s familiar scent was fragrant here, wafting down the dark stone hallways and blooming in the raucous dens. Combat blared on the boards hanging from the walls and echoed in the conversations of every guard, patron, drunk reveler, and bit-rich hawker. Combat glimmered in the eyes of the Grievar, men and women like Cego, some barrel-chested and visibly scarred from battle, some hidden beneath their cloaks, lurking in the shadows.

Combat was alive here in the Underground, and Cego was born to fight.

Though it hurt to stare at the wisp for too long, Cego was fond of the little thing. It appeared on routine in the corner of his cell, hovering and pulsing as if trying to communicate with him.

“There are many more of you, aren’t there?”

Cego had gotten in the habit of talking to the wisp. Though it never replied, it felt good to use his voice after keeping silent for so long. He made sure the guard was out of earshot before he started up his one-sided conversations.

“I saw more of your kind out there. Floating around the giant machines, heading up top where the lights are. It hurt to look at,” Cego admitted. The memory of the blinding light shining down on the Underground streets was seared into Cego’s mind.

“Why aren’t you flying around with the rest?” Cego asked.

Only now could he start to remember what he’d seen when he stumbled into the Underground. Vast ceilings so far up that they looked like craggy grey skies. Buildings towering above him and strange mechs whirring past him. Thousands of folk strolling by and ignoring Cego’s bloody, crumpled body on the pavement.

Perhaps this little wisp was his only friend down here. Though the guard took a particular interest in swearing at Cego from outside the cell door, he didn’t think that was a likely sign of friendship.

“If I were you, I’d go back to my family,” Cego said, sweeping his hand at the wisp as if trying to shoo it away.

The wisp didn’t budge—it pulsed in the corner stubbornly.

Cego halted his conversation as he heard footsteps echoing down the corridor outside his cell. The wisp blinked away.

There were several footfalls this time: two men. He listened to the dull thud of their boots on the stone. One of them was large, probably near two hundred fifty pounds.

Cego squeezed his eyes shut and sat up on the wooden plank as he heard the door rattle.

“Lacklight scumslagger, yer time’s come!”

The door opened and rough hands grabbed his shoulders. Cego’s muscles tensed.

They pulled him up and dragged him out of the cell. “Kid smells like a Deep rat nest.”

“All asses can’t be as clean as yours, Aldo,” the other replied as they pulled Cego down a long hallway.

“I’m tellin’ you, shower spouts is the good stuff. None of that cold bucket of water o’er the head Deep-native shit for me anymore.”

“Who says I put any water on my head?” the other man said. “Soap-eaters got you talkin’ like them, smellin’ like them, even. Clean. All the girls smell like soap and flowers now. Rather my woman smelled like dirt and blood. Natural, like a real Grievar.”

The one called Aldo snorted. “Whatever. Boss wants us to clean this blindbrood up, whether you like it or not. Gotta get ’em processed.”

They continued until Cego felt the guards’ grips tighten on his shoulders. They shoved him through a doorframe, and the stone floor under his feet was replaced with a cold metallic surface.

“Let’s get you clean,” Aldo said menacingly.

They pushed Cego onto a metal table. He didn’t struggle. Cego heard a buzzing noise getting closer to his head.

Something cold cut into him and he felt a chunk of his hair drop to the ground. They were shaving him.

“This is gonna hurt a bit.” One of the men chuckled after Cego’s head was shaved clean. They held him down tightly. He clenched his teeth as something seared into his scalp. He could smell his burning flesh, but he didn’t cry out.

They made Cego strip his dirty clothes off and step into a large vat of cold water. They laughed as they forced his head beneath the water, his raw scalp stinging as he went under. After Cego came out of the vat, dripping wet, the guards weighed him and measured his height. They scrubbed a layer of skin off his body with a wire brush. They provided him with a pair of pants with a drawstring to keep them up before pulling him out of the room.

The guards were quiet as they pulled Cego into an adjacent room. The two were suddenly bereft of their routine cackles.

Cego felt a bulbous hand grab his face, lifting his chin to the air.

“He’s not blind, you idiots,” a toadlike voice croaked. Cego felt someone’s rotten breath close to his face.

“What? Boss—he can’t even piss straight in his cell pot, we’re sure he’s—”

“He’s not blind.” The one called boss interrupted the guard.

“But—but how about his fights? Why’d he…?”

“That’s what I’m wondering too,” the boss said. “See the movement under his lids? He’s shut his eyes but they’re still trying to see. The eyes of a real blindbrood would have given up long ago.”

“The little shitstain, foolin’ us like that,” one of the guards murmured.

“Open your eyes,” the boss commanded Cego flatly.

Cego didn’t respond. His feigned blindness was the only advantage he had over his captors right now. The only technique he had hidden in his back pocket.

“Open your eyes or I’ll have Aldo here stick a knife in them to see if you care that they’re really gone.”

The tone of the boss’s voice made Cego believe the threat. The old master’s voice echoed in Cego’s head. Know when to hold on to your position tightly and when to let go. Grasp for too long and you’ll end up in an inferior position.

Cego opened his eyes.

The man in front of him was enormous. His girth seemed to strain against the chair’s sides. He looked at Cego like a piece of meat on display, smacking his lips.

“Hmmm. Golden eyes. Haven’t seen that one before. He’s Grievar brood for sure, but I can’t tell what sort,” the boss said. He examined Cego and spoke to him condescendingly. “Who’s your mammy, little gold-eyes? What sort of line are you from? Got some Grunt in you, maybe?”

Cego stared at him blankly.

“Just another street boy, then.” The man turned to Aldo. “You said you found him down by Lampai? Are you sure he isn’t one of ours, or maybe escaped from Saulo’s Circle across town?”

Aldo shook his head. “Neither, boss. We scanned him, checked the archives—nothing in there. Real strange. Usually got some light trail on these kids.”

“Where did you come from, boy?” The man continued to eye Cego.

Cego met his gaze silently.

“Always such anger from some of these boys.” Spittle flew from the man’s lips as he spoke. “You don’t realize that Pappy Thaloo here is helping you, little gold-eyes. I could throw you back on the streets. Let you end up sweeping the floors or serving food on a platter for some bit-rich Daimyo. You’d go through life with a hole in your heart, always feeling the pull of the light, not knowing why you felt so empty.”

The man called Thaloo paused, licking his lips. “You can fulfill your lightpath here, your destiny. Fighting is what you were born to do, little gold-eyes. I’m helping you; can’t you see it? If you do well, you’ll be treated well. Maybe even end up getting bought by a patron, serving a family or business with honor. Doing some good in this world! Don’t you understand?”

Cego’s gut told him to stay silent.

“They never see.” Thaloo sighed, a horrid croak of a noise. “You’ll thank me someday, little gold-eyes.” Thaloo swiveled his chair and started to thumb through images on a handheld screen. “Put him on a crew. Let’s see how he does with Tasker Ozark, shall we?”

Thaloo turned back to Cego as the guards began to pull him out of the room. “Keep your eyes open this time, boy. You’ll need them.”

The yard had tall stone walls with high grated windows that opened to the Underground’s street level. Trails of faintly glowing moss ran along some of the walls, and the yard’s ground was made of compacted red dirt.

Eight boys with shaved heads were running in a circle around the perimeter of the yard. They were tied together with a knotted rope looped around their waists.

When one boy at the end of the line tripped, he was dragged along the dirt floor by the other boys who kept moving, unknowing or uncaring of the fallen. The boy running in front looked like an ox, his leg muscles bulging and a vein in his forehead pulsing as he yanked the rest of the line forward.

A man stood in the center of the circle. He yelled in a gravelly voice at the boys to move faster, to pull harder, and to get up off the floor. He did not seem like a pleasant man.

The guard brought Cego over to him. “Tasker Ozark. Got a new recruit here for your crew.”

“My crew is already full; must be a mistake,” Ozark replied without taking his eyes off the runners. Cego could see Ozark had a strange audio device implanted in his throat from which his grating voice vibrated.

The guard pushed further. “Boss’s orders, Ozark; he says this boy here is to be placed in your crew for acclimation and training.”

“If the boss says so, fine. That means these boys will be splitting their food for nine instead of eight.” Ozark turned his faded yellow eyes on Cego. The man’s face appeared to be locked in a permanent frown. “Other boys won’t be happy about it, though.”

The guard nodded and left Cego standing in the yard with Ozark.

“Whoever you think you are, or think you were, forget it now, boy. What you now are is the property of Thaloo, and as his property, you are now my property. I’m your Tasker, meaning my word is your task. When I say crawl, you crawl. If I say swing, you swing.”

Ozark stopped to yell at the boy at the end of the line. “Get out of the dirt and start moving again, you little maggot! Move or you’ll end up doing sloth carries until blackshift!” The little boy looked like he was about to pass out. He had tears running down his dirt-streaked face as he was dragged behind the line. He barely managed to pull himself up with the rope before beginning to move again.

Ozark continued, “I have one task, and that is to make you strong enough to win in the Circle. You winning means I did my job. You winning means you are worth more for Thaloo-loo-loo-loo-loo-loo—” Ozark’s voice box was stuck in some sort of loop. He slapped the back of his neck and it stopped repeating. Cego couldn’t help but crack a smile at the strange occurrence.

Ozark’s frown cut even deeper, which Cego hadn’t thought possible until he saw it. “Halt!” the Tasker called out robotically, and the eight boys came to a sudden stop, panting with relief. Some keeled over and others fell to the ground in exhaustion.

“Circle Crew Nine! You have a new member. I’d like to introduce him to you. His name is…” Ozark waited.

Cego hesitated to meet the eyes of the eight fatigued boys. “Cego.”

“Cego. Your new friend here, Cego, thinks what you’re doing is funny. He was over here laughing at you, telling me that you looked like a bunch of half-wits running around in circles. Says he could do twice the job of any one of you.”

The boys glared back at Cego. The big, heavily muscled one in front of the line flexed his shoulders and stomped the dirt like a bull ready to charge.

“How do you think we should welcome Cego to Circle Crew Nine? After all, he’ll be spending every minute with you now, training alongside you, eating your food, pissing in your pot. He deserves a fair welcome, no?”

Ozark tugged at the scruff on his chin, made up of several long, wiry hairs. “Ah, I know. In honor of Cego’s welcome, we’ll continue your training for an extra two hours. You’ll probably miss your duskshift meal and go to bed hungry, but I think we should put Cego’s interest in catching up first.”

A visible slumping of shoulders shuddered through the crew. They already looked worn as it was.

“Let’s get our friend Cego right onto task. Back to rope runs,” Ozark barked.

Cego was tied in toward the middle of the pack. The rope had small metal hooks that latched directly into the loops on Cego’s pants. Ozark tightened the rope to decrease the slack between each boy.

The boy in front of Cego, who had a scar running across his jaw, turned around and whispered, “You be slaggin’ us bad. Crew’s gonna make you pay.”

The big ox at the front of the line eyed Cego before surging forward with a jerk, causing a chain reaction of boys bouncing into each other. One boy at the front of the line stumbled forward, and Cego saw a boy behind him fall to the ground and immediately get dragged in the dirt without any chance to get back to his feet, which created more work for the entire group.

Ozark sat back with a dirty grin, watching the entire ordeal, yelling at the crew to pick up their pace.

After Ozark was sufficiently pleased with the crew’s fatigue from rope runs—most were barely able to stand—he screamed, “Sloth carries!”

Each of the crew was to lift and carry another boy around the room until he fell to his knees.

Cego was paired with the scar-faced boy, who glared at him and refused to cooperate. When it was time to pick him up and run, the boy made it extremely difficult for Cego to get under him, shifting his weight and falling like a sack of turnips.

Cego breathed out, frustrated, while the boy stood back up with a smug grin on his face. Just as the scar-faced boy turned away, Cego shot toward his legs quickly and threw him onto his shoulders—a classic entry into the kata guruma shoulder throw.

The boy let out a grunt of surprise. He settled in to let Cego jog around the room with the rest of the crew. As he ran, Cego had a vivid memory of the old master making him drill kata guruma over and over for hours.

These boys were using a variety of inefficient methods to carry their partners. The ox was sweating profusely as he carried one of the smaller boys under his arm.

Ozark’s final task was called last boy hanging. There were a series of ropes draped from the ceiling around the perimeter of the room. The boys were to climb to the top of a rope and hang there for as long as possible.

“The boy who falls first has piss pot duty for the next week,” Ozark threatened.

Cego didn’t exactly know what piss pot duty was, but he knew he didn’t want it.

He scaled his rope within seconds, using his hands and feet in unison to crawl up it like an island ferrcat. From the top of the rope he could see the street’s light filtering through the window grates. It cast crimson shadows on Circle Crew Nine, each boy hanging from his rope, muscles shuddering from hours of hard work.

Why shouldn’t he beat them? Cego knew he could hang there for longer than the rest of the crew, perhaps well into the night. He could show them he was strong. Perhaps then they wouldn’t turn on him.

Cego looked to his right at the small boy hanging next to him, the same one who had been dragged at the back of the rope line. The little boy’s body shivered with strain and Cego saw tears streaming from the corners of his eyes.

Another of the boys, one with haughty yellow jackal eyes, taunted the crying boy. “Weep! Weep! You might as well drop now; you know you’ll be the first anyway. You lacklights were made to clean piss pots.”

Cego saw the little boy’s arms trembling. He wouldn’t last more than a few moments longer.

The old master’s voice echoed in Cego’s head again, this time louder than he’d ever heard it before, as if he were standing in the yard. We fight so the rest shall not have to.

Cego dropped to the ground, landing nimbly on his feet. He had been the first boy to fall.

He met Ozark’s stare.

Cego’s plan didn’t work out as he had envisioned. By showing weakness, he thought to make the crew forget the extra hours of training and shared food rationing. Instead, like a pack of wolves that smelled blood, they went after him.

After the grueling training session, Tasker Ozark held Cego back to drag all the equipment from the yard into storage for the night. Cego’s stomach rumbled as he finished the work. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday.

Cego finally returned to the Crew Nine bunks and found himself without any place to rest.

Although there was an extra cot for him, a strange assortment of metal cans lay strung together on top of the bed. The scar-faced boy popped his head out from the bunk above. Using his finger, he spooned a glop of green sludge out of a can and let out a loud burp. “That there be Modek’s bed.”

“Modek?” Cego asked.

“Right there, that be Modek,” the scar-faced boy replied, nodding at the pile of tin cans on the bed. The boy had an accent that Cego couldn’t place. “Crew decided he gets your greens tonight.”

The ox from the front of the rope line chimed in from the bunk across from them. His voice sounded like Cego thought it would, like a hollowed-out log. “Modek probably could’ve held on to that rope longer than you, weakling. That’s why he’s got your bed and you’ve gotta sleep on the floor,” he said matter-of-factly.

Another one of the boys slowly walked over to Cego with his arms crossed and his lips pursed. Cego recognized him as the jackal-eyed boy who had taunted the crying little one in the yard.

“Ah, now, Dozer, Knees, let’s see that our new crew member has a better welcome than this, as Tasker Ozark instructed,” the boy hissed. “No need for childish games. After all, we all will be tasking with… Cego, here, for who knows how long.”

The ox named Dozer interjected, hooting, “Till I get a patron!”

The jackal boy stared Dozer down. “Shut up, Dozer. Don’t interrupt me. And you won’t be getting a patron anytime soon.”

Dozer looked down at the floor. “But Shiar…”

“As I was saying, we need to welcome Cego to our crew, especially because he’s been so kind as to volunteer his piss pot skills for us,” Shiar said. “Why don’t we further our welcome to Cego and let him take on his new task tonight? After all, I am especially stuffed after polishing off all those cans of greens.” Shiar licked his lips. “Dozer, why don’t you start off with that famed stench of yours and get over to the pot?”

Dozer clapped his hands together and headed for the adjacent bathroom, glaring at Cego as he lumbered past. Shiar moved closer to Cego and whispered in his ear, “Don’t think I couldn’t see you let go of that rope on purpose. You won’t find any pity here, lacklight.”

A few other boys made their moves to the chamber pot after Dozer. The scar-faced boy, Knees, smirked as he brushed past Cego. “You be deepshittin’ it now.”

Shiar was the last to go and returned with a small wire brush, which he offered to Cego. “The pot is almost overflowing out there. I think more than half of it is Dozer’s. You’ll need to make sure it gets emptied out in the drain and then made sparkling clean with that brush. The dawnshift guard is quite the stickler, so make sure you get every spot in there.”

Several of the crew laughed in glee. Dozer thudded his hands against the metal bunk post.

Cego didn’t take the brush. He kept his hands down by his sides.

Cego knew fighting techniques, ways of movement, breathing, and energy conservation, but never had he been taught how to deal with other boys like this.

As if on cue, the old master’s voice spoke to Cego. You may need to give up position to gain position. Don’t be afraid to retreat, give in, let your opponent dictate your pace for a moment. Then, when they think they are in control, use momentum to your advantage.

Cego looked Shiar in the eye for a moment and then, with lightning speed, snatched the little brush from his hand. Shiar flinched but laughed it off. Cego took on the task, emptying and cleaning the pot with the tiny brush. He was surprised at how difficult it was to hold his breath while trying to scrub out every stain on the chamber pot. By the time he was done, his arms felt weak and he saw white spots from the lack of air.

Cego returned to the bunk. The rest of the boys appeared to be sleeping soundly.

He found a spot in the corner of the room and curled up on the cold stone floor, adjacent to the littlest boy’s cot. He quickly found out why the rest of the crew called the boy Weep—he was shuddering with sobs, trying to be silent, with a tattered sheet pulled over his face.

Cego forced his eyes shut, attempting to fall asleep as he listened to the boy cry.