Four years passed, or something like four years—he'd stopped counting after the first because time in the Pit didn't work the way it worked for people with reasons to track it. For Ezra it was just hunger and cold and the slow accumulation of things he'd learned to do without. He was nine years old now, or somewhere near it, and small for his age in the way that came from never having quite enough of anything. His wrist fit between his own two fingers, and he checked sometimes, like checking a fact. His hair had turned silver—genuinely silver, not pale blond—and his eyes were hazel, and that much was ordinary.
He knew the Pit the way a surgeon knows anatomy, which is to say he knew every part of it, what it did, what happened if you got it wrong. He knew which alleys were deep enough to sleep in and which vendors left rinds on Tradesdays and which gutters ran clean after rain and which doorways had guards who'd let a small boy sit if he stayed quiet and left before dawn. He moved through it like something that didn't quite exist, too quiet to threaten and too strange-looking to bother with, and he'd learned to let people's eyes slide off him. It was a useful skill, possibly his only one.
He watched everything because it was the only education available, so he made the most of it. And the more he watched, the more he understood that the Pit had an order to it—not a fair order or a just order but an order nonetheless, the same way a pile of rocks has an order after a landslide, with the biggest on top and the smallest crushed underneath and nothing you could do about it except make sure you weren't at the bottom.
At the top, relatively speaking, were the Arkanian poor—the ones with the right faces, pale skin and light hair, features that matched whatever template the city above had decided was correct. Even hungry, even sleeping in doorways with their ribs showing through threadbare shirts, they belonged to something. They had a claim on the city even if the city had temporarily misplaced them. Guards spoke to them differently, and vendors gave them the better scraps without being asked, and when they died someone usually bothered to move the body. Everyone knew it, including them.
Below them, by a distance that was the entire world, was everyone else. The Sultanates moved through the Pit like they were braced for a blow from any direction, which was reasonable because they usually were. They stayed in clusters and looked out for each other in the small ways that were all they could afford, and their children played in the rubble loud and bright. For a few years those children were just children—they laughed and ran and invented games with stones and broken glass—and then the Pit got to them. It got to everyone eventually. The elves scattered, solitary, trying to take up so little space that the city would forget to notice them. And the wolf-children, half-blood and incomplete, too human for the packs and too other for everyone else, ran in pairs and kept moving.
Ezra fit into none of them. He lived in the space between, which meant he lived alone, and he'd made a kind of peace with this—though peace was the wrong word, implying acceptance, and he hadn't accepted it so much as stopped fighting it, the same way you stop fighting the cold after a while and just let it sit in your bones.
He watched a werewolf boy get beaten once, cornered by Arkanian children in the gap between two buildings. All of them were hungry and cold, all of them one bad week from being on the ground themselves, but they didn't think about that—people rarely did, because the distance between us and them was always shorter than anyone wanted to admit. They shoved the boy against the wall and kicked him and chanted mutt mutt mutt while he curled up with his arms over his head, and something flickered in his face—his jaw lengthening, his teeth growing wrong, something golden surfacing in his eyes—and he tried to fight back. They beat him harder for it, and Ezra stayed in his alley because he'd learned what happened to people who got involved. He'd paid for that lesson once and had no interest in paying for it again. Something had moved in his chest while he watched, something hot and useless and completely irrational, and he pressed it down into the place where he kept such things and kept walking.
The Sultanate family near the old factory had been there as long as he could remember. The father took any work—hauling, lifting, cleaning things no one else would touch—and the mother begged near the market with a baby on her hip, and the three children played in the rubble like they hadn't gotten the news about what the world was yet. Ezra watched them from a distance, never close enough to speak to, and he wasn't sure why he watched them specifically except that there was something about the way the father rested his hand on the oldest child's head when he passed. Small things. He noticed small things.
One night the trucks came. He heard them three alleys over—engines first, deep and growling, then boots, then dogs barking in that sharp excited way that meant they'd found a scent. He pressed himself flat against the wall and didn't breathe until the sound faded. In the morning the building was empty and their things were in the street: a pot still warm, a child's shoe with a broken lace tied and retied so many times it was mostly knots, a torn shawl that the mother had worn when she begged. Nobody said anything, and the Pit closed around the gap and moved on, the same way water closes over a drowning person—not because it was cruel but because it couldn't do anything else.
He walked past the empty building for days afterward, telling himself the same thing each time: They must have done something. Why else would the trucks come? But he held onto that because the alternative—the thought that crept in during the dark hours, low and persistent, the one that sounded like his own voice but felt like something else entirely—was worse. The alternative was that they hadn't done anything at all, that the trucks came for whoever they wanted whenever they wanted, that there was no reason or pattern or way to be safe.
That could be anyone, he thought. That could still be you.
He pushed it down and kept walking.