He woke to the same river he always woke to — black, slow, unbothered by the fact that a night had passed over it — sitting in the same spot against the stone, except this time a blanket lay draped over him that hadn't been there when he'd sat down. He didn't remember taking it. He remembered, distantly, a shape asleep against a wall three streets over some nights back, and a blanket that shape hadn't been using properly, and beyond that the memory thinned out into nothing worth holding onto. It didn't matter now. It was his blanket the way most things became his — because he'd needed it and nobody had stopped him taking it.
The gutter's stench reached him the moment he was fully awake, thick and familiar, and he pushed the blanket off and rose without ceremony, his body announcing itself in a long low ache through every muscle that had spent the night clenched around a wound that, waking, he found wasn't there at all. His side was whole. The blood had been a dream's blood, spent on a night that had already happened years ago, but his legs didn't seem to have received that information, and he climbed the stairs beside him with the same laboured care a man might use on a body that actually carried a fresh injury, each step drawing a small grinding protest out of muscle that had no real reason to protest at all.
The sky had started going pale by the time he reached the top, the sharp orange edge of sunrise cutting along the rooftops in a thin bright line, and he set off through the alleys and byways of the city with that light chasing him from behind, his stomach announcing its own complaint now, loud and insistent in a way his legs, at least, could understand.
He found his way eventually to a squat building with a sign above the door reading RISING HOPE CENTER in plain block letters, no flourish to it, no attempt at the kind of design that cost money it clearly didn't have. A line had already formed outside it, long and unhurried, the same collection of coats and blankets and hollowed faces that gathered outside it every morning at this hour, waiting on whatever the centre had to give out before the day properly started demanding things of them. His grey eyes tracked the line from where it started near the door to where it thinned out and finally ended, and he walked the length of it to take his place at the back, his own dirty-grey hair, unwashed and matted at the ends into something closer to a stormcloud than hair, shifting slightly with the movement, the oversized khaki coat hanging off his tall frame the way it hung off him most mornings, loose enough to make his height look almost accidental.
He joined the line the way he joined most things — without greeting, without expecting to be greeted, simply another body added to a row of bodies already too tired to notice one more.
Two men stood ahead of him, close enough that their conversation reached him whether he wanted it or not, one of them short and wiry with a coat two sizes too big, the other taller, a length of dirty bandage wound around half his face like something had happened to him recently enough that it hadn't fully decided how to heal.
"You hear," the short one was saying, voice pitched low but not low enough, the particular register of a man who wanted to gossip and be careful about it at the same time and hadn't quite managed either. "Wolfgang's dead."
The bandaged one stopped walking for half a second, just long enough to throw the words a proper look. "The hell you mean dead. Liu Teng's grandson? That Wolfgang?"
"That Wolfgang." The short one nodded, grim, satisfied in the particular way people get satisfied delivering news bad enough to matter. "Word is he went to that brothel — the big one, the one with the red lanterns — and someone slipped something into his drink. Went home, guards and all, and by morning he wasn't breathing. Guards found him stiff in his own bed."
"Bastard." The bandaged one said it with real feeling, more fear in it than mourning. "You know what happens now. You remember what happened last time."
"I remember." The short one's jaw worked once, tight. "Marianne's people didn't care who did it last time either. Their young lord dies in some stupid accident, falls down a set of stairs drunk off his own wine, and who gets butchered for it? Us. Homeless nobody, nothing to do with any of it, and they came through the district like a plague anyway. Made an example out of half a street just to feel like they'd done something about it."
"So we go into hiding." The bandaged one said it flatly, already resigned to it, the way you resign yourself to weather you've lived through before and know better than to argue with.
"Yeah." The short one exhaled, long and slow, the sound of a man doing math he already knew the answer to. "I know. Damn the bastards." He spat the word out again under his breath, quieter this time, more to himself than to the man beside him, and the two of them fell into a heavier silence after that, shuffling forward with the rest of the line as it inched, slow and unbothered, toward the door.
The boy listened to all of it without his face once suggesting he was listening at all, his eyes fixed somewhere past the two men's shoulders, on nothing in particular, taking in a story about murder and mafias and last time's dead the same way he took in most things — present in him for exactly as long as the hearing of it lasted, and no further, the words settling somewhere behind his eyes without finding anywhere in him left to land.
The news didn't stay with just the two of them. It moved down the line the way bad news always moved through a place like this, passed hand to hand almost, one pair of mouths feeding it to the next pair of ears until the whole length of the queue had caught some version of it, each retelling shedding a detail and picking up another to replace it.
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Further up, an old woman wrapped in three coats layered one over the other turned to the man behind her, her voice cracked and dry. "They're saying it was the girls," she said, certain of it in the way old women get certain of things they have no evidence for. "One of the girls in there did it. Poisoned him herself. Wanted him dead for something he did to her."
"Wasn't a girl." The man behind her, younger, missing most of two fingers on his left hand, shook his head hard enough to dislodge the hood he'd pulled up against the cold. "Wasn't nobody inside that place at all. Rival family did it. You don't poison a man like that over some girl's grudge. That's business. That's somebody wanting Liu Teng's line thinned out before the succession fights get worse."
"Rival family, huh." A third voice joined in from a few places further along, a man missing most of his teeth, grinning without much humour in it. "Don't matter whose fault it is. Matters whose neck gets wrung for it. And it ain't gonna be some rival family's neck. It's gonna be ours, same as always."
"They'll say it was one of us that let something slip in there." The toothless man's voice dropped, conspiratorial now, drawing a few more heads in his direction along the line. "Say someone from the district got hired to do it. Easier to hang the blame on people nobody's gonna miss."
"We should move on from this district." A woman further back, younger than the rest, a child asleep against her shoulder wrapped in something too thin for the cold, said it quietly, more to herself than anyone else, though the words carried anyway in the particular hush that had settled over the whole line by now. "Before they come looking. I don't want my boy caught up in whatever's coming."
Nobody answered her directly, but a ripple of low agreement passed along several mouths near her, the kind of silent consensus that forms in a crowd without anyone needing to call a vote on it. Further ahead, someone else muttered something about packing up before nightfall. Someone else said it wouldn't matter, that if the mafia wanted blood they'd find it wherever the district scattered to. The line kept shuffling forward the whole time this passed through it, slow and patient, hunger outweighing fear by exactly enough to keep every one of them standing there instead of running.
The boy took in each version as it reached him — the girl who did it, the rival family, the hired hand from the district, the woman with her child already planning where to go — and let each one pass through him the same way, unremarked, unweighed against the others, no more his to judge than the weather was his to argue with. Whatever truth sat underneath all the versions, it wasn't going to change how far forward the line moved before the doors opened, and that, this morning, was the only thing that mattered enough to hold his attention at all.
Behind him, two younger voices had drifted onto a different subject entirely, the murder already old news to them, already spent. "Trials open again next month," one of them said, a boy who couldn't have been older than fifteen himself, voice cracking somewhere in the middle of the sentence in the way voices did at that age. "Academy trials. My cousin tried two years back."
"He get in?" The second boy, shorter, sounded half-interested, half-distracted by the smell of whatever the centre was cooking behind its doors.
"Nah. Didn't make it past the second week. Said it near killed him just getting that far." The first boy said it almost admiringly, the way you talk about something terrible you still secretly want for yourself. "Has to be under eighteen to even sit the trial. After that they don't want you, doesn't matter how strong you test."
The line ahead of them, still murmuring over the murder, caught the new thread the way dry grass catches a spark it wasn't looking for. The short one who'd started the morning's gossip turned half around, grinning through the tail end of his fear. "Trials, is it. My nephew tried for it once. Came back looking like something had chewed him up and spat him back out, and that was just the qualifying round."
"Heard they break your arm on purpose in the second week," the bandaged one added, not quite believing it himself but enjoying the shape of the rumour anyway. "Just to see if you keep standing."
Further up the line, loud enough that heads turned all along its length, a boy no older than the two behind the tall ashen had lad threw his arms wide and announced, to nobody and everybody at once, "I'm going. I'm sitting the trials this year and I'm getting in, watch me." His voice cracked on *watch me* the same way the first boy's had, too big for the body producing it, and for a moment the whole queue's attention swung toward him — some of it amused, some of it pitying, a few older faces simply tired, having heard some version of that same declaration out of some other loud young mouth every year the trials came back around.
Nobody told him he was wrong. Nobody told him he was right either. The line just kept moving, slow and patient, swallowing the boy's declaration the same way it swallowed everything else that morning, one more thing said out loud in a place that had long since learned not to promise anybody an answer.