Date: Friday, August 13, 1999
Time: 12:41 A.M.
Location: Alley off Avenue C, Alphabet City, Manhattan
The child was not born to this world.
He was discarded into it.
No hospital wristband. No certificate. No waiting arms. Only a black trash liner tied once and not well, a secondhand parka that smelled like gasoline and wet wool, and the hiss of steam rising from a cracked vent.
It was a Friday the 13th. Somewhere, a TV behind a bodega counter played a late‑night horror re‑run. In the alley: a payphone with its cord torn out, milk crates stacked like uneven stairs, a Batman mask face‑down in a puddle.
Inside the bag, the newborn's chest fluttered and stalled, fluttered and stalled. His skin had the cold, waxy blue that scares nurses. His eyes were open—icy pale, unfocused, catching and losing the light. A dusting of blond hair clung to his skull, more color than weight.
A stray dog found him first. Ribs showed through its hide. It circled the bundle, nose working. The knot tasted of rain and blood. The dog tore the bag with careful teeth, nosed back the parka, and lay down—curled tight along the baby's side to share heat. It licked the boy's cheek once, as if marking him. The steam vent did the rest, exhaling just enough warmth that the small lungs kept moving.
Footsteps came later. A woman in a men's overcoat paused at the alley mouth and listened. She was young but used up, with a winter cough in August and a hospital band's tan line fading from her wrist. She had been pregnant three weeks ago. She was not pregnant now. The dog's ears flicked toward her. It didn't growl.
She knelt. The smell of the coat, of the bag, of the baby—old blood and city water—hit her and meant something it wouldn't mean to anyone else. She pressed two fingers to the baby's sternum and felt the papery beat. She didn't go for a phone. Hospitals asked questions. Shelters wanted names. She had neither. Instead, she scooped the bundle under her coat, the dog fell in behind, and the three of them slipped through a propped metal door into the warm undercurrent of the city.
That was how he survived his first night: a vent, a dog, a woman with nothing left to lose.
He did not remember the night. But the cold stayed in him—buried, waiting.
1999–2005
He grew sideways through cracks in the city, underfoot and unseen.
The woman knew where the service doors stuck, which ladders were missing rungs, which maintenance corridors stayed dry. She kept the boy pressed to her chest under the big coat when they climbed past workers. "Shh," she'd breathe into his hair. "My treasure." She never gave a name. She did not take one for herself. Names made you visible.
They slept near warm pipes and woke to the rattle of trains. The dog hunted rats; the woman hunted timing. She ghosted in behind stock deliveries and came out with bread heels and bruised fruit. The boy learned by watching her hands. He mimicked the way she waited for noise to rise before moving—let a passing train swallow the sound of a door, walked when heels clicked loud on a platform above, breathed when the city did.
He got sick often and got better slowly. A gut bug took him to his knees for two days in a tiled restroom no one used; the dog lay against him and kept him warm. A winter chest cold stole his breath for a week; the woman turned his face into her palm and counted the seconds between pulls of air like prayers. She taught him nothing about letters. She taught him how to tuck himself into the space between a wall and a pipe and not be noticed.
After September 2001 the world above tightened. More police. More fences. More questions. The woman took him deeper. She learned the sound of keys on a belt at twenty paces. The boy learned a different city: tunnels that breathed, doors that coughed rust, echoes that told you who was coming by their shoes.
By five he wore a burn scar on his forearm where he slipped against a hot line. By six he watched a man stumble off a service platform and die screaming without sound. He did not cry. Tears were loud. Loud things drew eyes. Eyes brought hands.
He had a face that should have belonged to a different story—fine bones, high cheek lines, glacier‑pale irises, lashes the color of wheat. But malnutrition had a way of fogging beauty. His hair was a dull, matted gold hacked short with a box cutter. His teeth were chipped and yellowed. He was small for his age, quick because he had to be, hunched from habit. He moved on the balls of his feet, shoulders rounded, head down, as if the air itself might swat him.
The woman died first. A sleeping pallet behind a locked door. Too long not moving. The dog lay beside her for a day and then didn't get up either. The boy pulled the big coat over both and left because there was nothing else he could do.
He did not know words for grief. He knew the shape of an empty place.
December 25, 2006 — late night
Service tunnel off the East River line
Cold pressed the city into itself. Breath fogged. Pipes ticked as metal settled. The boy had been shivering for hours in a crouch behind a rusted valve, counting the train vibrations through the concrete to keep his jaw from chattering.
Hunger had a sound: a hollow grind under the ribs. It had a smell too, if you'd gone long enough—everything smoky and distant, as if food were always two rooms away.
He found a wrapper before he found anything else. Grease‑spotted. The last smear of hot dog clung to the waxed paper. Three rats were arguing over it in the half‑dark, slick‑furred and healthy on other people's waste. The largest had a torn ear and the calm arrogance of a thing that wins.
He had watched people roast rats on coat hangers. He had told himself that was for other people. He had decided rats were like him: clever, quick, living their hard lives in the dark, deserving of a little peace.
Hunger ended the conversation.
He didn't have a knife. He had a length of iron pipe he'd carried since someone dragged a man behind a vending cage and took his jacket off him with a box cutter while the man was still moving. The pipe was heavy for his hands. He could make it go where he wanted.
Noise covered him. He waited for a train to take the curve and roar the air out of the tunnel. He measured the step. He moved when the sound rose.
The big rat lifted its head at the scuff of his shoe.
He brought the pipe down.
CRACK.
The body spasmed once, went slack. The other two vanished in a spray of claws and tail.
The iron rang in his hands. Blood smelled metallic and warm and too close.
Then something else happened.
Not in the air. Inside.
A faint click, as if a switch threw behind his eyes.
[SYSTEM]: Lifeform terminated.
XP +0.25. Soul +1.
[Balance: 1 Soul]
He froze, fingers knotted in the wet fur. The tunnel's chill kept breathing. The train noise faded. But a new stillness lay under things, like a thin plate of glass you suddenly notice you've been standing on your whole life.
Me?
The reply wasn't a voice so much as a shape in the silence—a warmth curling into words. Female in cadence, smoke‑soft at the ends, not quite human and not trying to be.
Hello, little shadow.
Hunger has teeth. So do you.
A pale green rectangle overlaid the world. No sound effects. No music. Just the efficient geometry of a menu that had been waiting for him to understand it. He didn't read. He didn't need to. Icons bloomed where text should be: a figure in dark fabric hugging a wall; another in heavy plates; another crowned with light.
Rules. He understood rules. He'd been living by them since he could stand: move when the noise is loudest; breathe with the wind; never be the only still thing in a room. This was that, in a shape he could touch.
His eyes went to the shadow.
[CLASS ASSIGNED: ROGUE — Level 1]
Skills: Stealth (Passive), Evasion (Active), Backstab (Active)
The change was not fireworks. It was a key sliding home. Breath steadying. Balance finding center. His shoulders settled lower without thinking about it. The weight of his feet halved. A bottlecap rolled somewhere down‑slope twenty feet behind him and he knew where it would come to rest without turning.
Another pane opened—heavier, a pressure against the skin of his thoughts.
[Bloodlines Available — Tier 0]
GREENSKIN — FREE
Minor mutation likely. Behavioral drift possible.
He didn't know the words. He knew the color green and the promise free. He accepted.
Heat, then—no pain—like a hand warming the length of his spine. His pupils took more dark. The darkness retreated by a step. Smell unraveled into strands he could follow: the copper of blood on the concrete, bleach bitterness from a pipe seam, old bread and sleeping fur and the cold clean knife of outside air far above.
Small, precise changes: his jaw ached faintly as if a muscle he'd never used learned its job; his knees wanted to bend more; his fingers knew the pipe without looking. Animals felt it first. The remaining rats fled with panicked squeaks. A pigeon launched blind from a crossbeam and battered out toward a grate.
He looked at the rat he'd killed—still warm, still ugly—and did not look away. He had a lighter. He had an old soup can. He had a space behind the valve where the draw would carry smoke upward. He had one Soul somewhere he could not touch yet and a new word that felt like skin:
Rogue.
It wasn't power. Not yet.
It was competence.
The kind that told him: you can live through this. You can hide. You can move. You can strike. And you can be gone before anyone thinks to turn their head.
The warmth in his thoughts uncurled once more, nearly a purr.
[SOUL STORE: UNLOCKED]
Balance: 1
Literacy: insufficient. Icon mode enabled.
He did not spend. Not yet. He set the pipe down. He wiped his nose on his sleeve. He got to work.
Above him, the city kept breathing. Below, something else had begun to.