Chapter 1: In The Gutter

Chapter 1: In The Gutter

The worm demon pulling the carriages always roared in outrage when it was forced into the sun, and the screams of the steel wheels on the rails, falsetto to the worm’s bass, made a hellish harmony. The subway crossed the canal right over Truth’s favorite scavenging spot, so he was used to the noise. The slumrats in the dozens of brown and pollution-smudged white apartment buildings lining the canals, forty stories of indifference and passive cruelty, apparently didn’t even hear it anymore. They didn’t smell the chemical, swampy stink in the afternoon sun. You could get used to anything in the Harban slums.

In the slums, you learned to despise your neighbors. You tried to kill your soul pain with booze, drugs, and what joys of the flesh you could still tolerate. Watching people get mugged was great fun. No trouble looking down at suffering. But you never looked at the glistening city across the canal. The rich Harbin, with its fancy shops, flying carpets, and beautiful mages on custom spellbeasts or demon-driven carriages. You didn’t look, didn’t dream, and could only pray that one day, you would win the lottery and get out of the slums. Then you got up in the morning and joined the teeming vermin swarm of people off to work in the factories or serve that beautiful city's beautiful people. That is life. Only a child thought differently. Truth was seventeen. The burnt-out tweaker in front of him wouldn’t live to see twenty.

“I just need a twenny. Twenny ween. You got money. I know you got the money!” The base fiend slurred his words. He started shifting around like his tendons were tightening every second into agonizing wires cutting through his muscle. Truth knew that look. The withdrawal was past hungry now. It was pain.

“I got no money! No Money! Fuck off!” He waved a length of rebar over his head, hoping to look big, scare the freak off. Wasn’t like he could run away, trapped between the canal and the retainer wall. He tried to guard his little pile of fished-up scrap. The tweaker probably thought it was trash.

The junkie was a sickly yellow color. His nails were either chewed down to the quick or long and torn and bloody. His eyes had gone red, almost black in the yellow, smog-filtered daylight, filling with blood as his body gave out. He didn’t want a fix; he needed it.

He lunged in, screaming, clawing at Truth’s face. Truth slashed the rebar down, chopping directly at the freak’s head. The tweaker got his arm up in time. Truth felt it snap before he heard the crack. The base fiend was so far gone he didn’t miss a step. The ragged nails came right for Truth’s eyes.

He tried to step back and get the rebar up to block. He only got a half step before the freak was on him, pushing him down. The junkie had never been more than Level One. Drugs had burnt away even that. Still, the body remembered.

His foot, a swollen mass of weeping sores and yellow, curling nails, smashed the side of Truth’s knee. Truth buckled. The junkie pressed down, trying to go over the rebar with his good arm. Tried to get the throat.

Truth slid to the side, pushing the fiend past him. Got both his feet under him. Smashed down again with the rebar. Caught the freak across the back. He went down screaming. Not because the junkie could feel his back break but because he had missed. Because the fix was further away.

Truth swung the rebar again. Caught the back of his head. The screaming stopped. Maybe he was dead. It didn’t matter. That poor bastard was dead after the first hit of cut base. Everything since then was just corpse spasms.

Truth looked up from the path between the retainer wall and the canal. A billboard hung off the subway bridge, a staggering beauty with ruby red lips having her Golden Bat cigarette lit by a spell-wielding, idol-handsome man. The man on the billboard wore an incredible double-breasted cream overcoat, his hair immaculately styled, and even his nails shone with health and polish. He was everything Truth wished he was. In beautiful, shimmering script- “A Starbrite Man Is Always Ready.”

Truth looked at the little pile of garbage he fished out of the canal. Maybe ten wen worth of scrap. Maybe not. He was sure other seventeen-year-olds didn’t have to do this shit. He was so fucking ready to be out of this dump. So ready to be a Starbrite Man.

“Singing with Meeta?”

“Yeah.” Dad snorted at something invisible to Truth and took a drag off a bottle. “None of these assholes sing anything good. It’s all girly bullshit.” Dad’s drink of choice was Beefheart, which he said was schnapps, and maybe it was. Made by Sanchez Intl. Bev., part of the Starbrite family of companies.

What Truth knew about Beefheart was that it was fifteen wen a 75 cl bottle at the shops, and Dad would start hitting him or the sibs if he didn’t have it handy. Truth knew how to take a hit, to sway back and make it look like the old man smashed him to the ground without getting hurt. The sibs didn’t. Despite everything, Dad somehow was still Level One, and Level Zero’s like Truth and the sibs had no chance of winning a straight-up fight.

The old man was a Provisional Denizen of Haben City, Subcategory: Criminal. Two full tiers below an actual citizen, and boy, were his kids living that truth. They were Provisional Denizens of Haben City Subcategory: Dependants. Entitled to housing so long as they lived with their parents. Entitled to education in the slum technical schools... so long as they lived with their parents. Food, clothing, a teddy bear? Your loving parents will doubtless provide. Not that you would be so ungrateful, unfilial, and unwise as to ask.

“Where is Mom?” Truth asked, making his daily prayer that Dad would say “Dead.”

“She got a new job, some mushroom thing. She’s out.” Once again, the gods failed Truth.

“Great. You heading out tonight?”

“Somebody’s got to bring in some money around here, and it ain’t going to be you useless mouths. I’m off to the Red and Black. Clean up in here before I get back. Place is a mess. BUT DON'T TOUCH MY SHIT!” Dad broke the spell and looked away from the Scryball.

“One month. One month. One Month.” Truth silently chanted over and over again. One month until the Starbrite Aptitude Test was held. The Starbrite Corporation always needed new workers, and skilled labor got company housing. One month for him to break through to Level One. One month until he was standing with everyone else in the courtyard of Call to Glory Temple, hearing his results and getting that job offer from Starbrite. One month until he could leave this shithole and give his sibs the life they deserved. Away from the gangs and the pimps and the dealers and his evil fucking parents.

“You ain’t in school anymore. ‘Bout time you found a job.” Dad growled as he slipped on his shoes. “Kids today, I swear to god, you got no idea how to live in the real world.”

A Starbrite Man Is Always Ready. “You’re right, Dad. I’m going to do just that.”

“Good. Cause I know the Red and Black is always looking for talent that can work on their back.” And with a rasping laugh, the Old Man stomped out the door.