The air smelled of smoke and rust.
When I pried my eyes open, all I could see was a busted pipe dripping brown water above me and a sky so gray it looked sick. My head spun. My body felt like a scarecrow, dry sticks tied together, ready to snap at the slightest touch.
Then the hunger hit.
It wound around my stomach like a living thing. Sharp, relentless, the kind of hunger that makes your chest ache and your throat tighten. I folded inward, pressing my hands hard against my ribs, feeling every thin inch of this small body. Bones. Skin. Nothing else.
What the hell happened?
The memories came in pieces. Not a name handed down to me, but flashes of another life I could not ignore. The smell of gunpowder. The weight of steel in my hands. The cadence of a fight, the close, silent motions that kill before they are noticed. I was not only a malnourished child in a gutter.
I had been someone who took lives, someone shaped by darkness. Betrayal had ended that life, a firefight that burned bright and then cut to black. And now I was here, waking in a body that could fit in a scavenger's palm.
My fingers felt something hard. I turned my hand and saw a bottle.
It was filthy, its plastic scratched and smeared with grime as if it had been dragged through a hundred piles of refuse. Half filled with a clear liquid, it looked so worthless anyone else would have stepped over it without a second thought.
Right now it felt like the only thing between me and nothing.
My stomach growled loud enough to sting my ears. My throat felt like sandpaper. I twisted the cap with trembling knuckles and brought the bottle to my nose. No scent at all.
Poison? Dirty water? Or something else?
I waited for one breath. The small body did not debate danger. It only knew hunger.
I tipped the bottle and swallowed.
The taste was faintly sweet, like sugar dissolved in lukewarm water. The first swallow slid down and warmth spread through me, slow and steady. My chest eased. The ache in my belly softened. Strength trickled back into my limbs, thin and fragile but real.
I stared at the bottle. Empty now, but the last drops clung to the sides and caught the little light that filtered through the clouds, shimmering like spilled glass.
That was not ordinary water.
My instincts, old and sharp, rose up like a remembered tool. They belonged to someone who once read the smallest twitch in a man's shoulder and knew where to strike. They did not belong to a child. They screamed that this was not random rubbish. This was not luck.
A low rumble rolled through the ground. A transport ship cut across the sky, leaving soot in its wake. Metal scraps rained into the junk heaps, and scavengers surged forward, shouting and clawing. No one looked twice at me. I was just another small body in the dirt.
But I was not just another small body.
I curled my fingers around the empty bottle until my knuckles ached.
I pushed myself up on shaking arms and spat out grit. My voice came out rough and small, but steady.
I do not know who put me here, I said into the smoke choked air, but if whoever did thinks I will die weak in this dump, they are wrong.
I was not going to die here.
Not as the thief the streets might call me. Not as the ghost someone once hired to vanish a life without leaving a name. Not as whatever they wanted me to be.
This bottle, this cracked grimy thing that everyone else would have passed, was the start of something. It had found me for a reason. Whatever the reason, I would live long enough to find out what it meant.
I pressed my palms to my face, tasting the dust and the echo of a life that had ended. The idea of simply accepting a name given by others felt wrong. If I was waking again in this broken world, I would choose the name that fit the person I intended to become.
The world once buried me in shadows, I whispered. If I must start over in this body, I will pick my own name. A name that belongs to me, not to the blood I spilled.
I said it aloud, softer than a vow and harder than hope.
Aurora.
The first light after endless night.