He was four years old and he was starting over.
Not from the Ash. From himself.
The first change was the simplest and the hardest: he stopped waiting. He had been waiting for four years — waiting for the body to grow, waiting for the situation to become useful, waiting for the life to become what he wanted it to be. He stopped waiting and started being where he was, which sounds like a small thing and was not a small thing at all. It required the daily dismantling of a habit built over twenty-three years and reinforced by four more. It required him to be present, here, in this insufficient world, and to treat that presence as the real thing rather than a waiting room.
The second change followed from the first: he started paying different attention.
He had been watching the Ash as a system. Inputs and outputs, resources and leverage. He kept watching it that way — he couldn't turn off that part of his mind and didn't want to, it was genuinely useful — but he added a second layer. He started watching people.
Not as variables. As people.
He watched how the woman who ran the bread stall gave slightly larger portions to the families she knew were struggling and did it in a way that didn't make them feel diminished. He watched how Marta, who was hard in every negotiation, always made sure that the families whose children had died that year received double allocation from the emergency food stores without being asked. He watched Prem, who was now seven, use his network of small useful services to quietly connect people who needed each other in ways neither of them had articulated yet.
He watched and he thought about Danny, about a boy who had understood all of this instinctively at four years old, who had put a stone in someone's hand because giving was the natural thing to do.
He thought: if Danny had been given the years I've been given, what would he have built?
He started building it.
His relationship with Nina changed in ways he couldn't have predicted and she couldn't have explained.
He started helping. Not because helping was strategically useful — in most immediate senses it wasn't. He helped because she was tired and there were things he could do. He filled the water bucket before she had to ask. He managed Zara in the mornings while Nina slept the extra hour, she never took but needed. He learned to cook, badly at first — the small repertoire of things that could be done with what they had — and made food on the evenings when Nina came home with the grey exhaustion that meant she'd been pushing past her limit.
She received all of this without comment, but he could see what it meant to her. Not in the dramatic way of tears or declarations. In the small way — the breath she let out when she came home and found the water done. The fractional unclenching in her shoulders when she found Zara already settled and the food already started. The way she sometimes looked at him across the room with an expression he was only beginning to have the language to read.
She had been doing everything alone for a long time. She was not alone anymore.
He didn't have the word for what this felt like. He tried several internal words on it and none of them were right — satisfaction was too small, pride was the wrong direction, love was too large and too frightening a word to try on, yet when he was this uncertain of his own capacity for it.
He settled on: right. It felt right. Like a thing that had been pointing the wrong direction had been turned around.
He went to Vera's stand every few days.
They talked. She taught him things — not formally, not as lessons, but as the natural overspill of a person who had been paying attention for forty years and found in Sid a listener worth talking to. She told him how the Ash had been thirty years ago, before the Gold Gate regulations tightened, when the movement between zones had been more fluid and the class walls less absolute. She told him about the infrastructure fund that had built the first water system, and how it had been designed for a population half the current size, and how nobody had ever allocated the budget to update it.
"Danny would have fixed that," Sid said once, not quite meaning to say it aloud.
Vera looked at him steadily. "Then you should fix it," she said.
He was five. He filed it.
He started at Hollis's classes when he turned five.
Hollis was a retired teacher from Zone 2 who had come to Ashbourne under circumstances he described vaguely as 'a change of circumstances' and who had been running informal morning classes for the Ash's children for six years in the main room of his building in Bloc Seven. He charged nothing. He taught literacy, basic numeracy, and — when the mood took him and he thought the children could handle it — fragments of history and science and geography that he couldn't quite stop himself from sharing.
Sid sat in the front.
This was unusual — most children preferred the back, where the teaching was easier to escape into daydreaming. Sid sat in the front because he was done with waiting and done with treating things as less important than they were and every piece of real information was worth having.
Hollis noticed him in the second week. He posed a question about how water moved through a pipe — a fragment of physics, tossed out almost as an aside — and Sid answered it correctly and, in more detail, than Hollis had been expecting. Hollis looked at him with the specific attention of a teacher encountering something that doesn't fit the expected category.
"How did you know that?" Hollis asked.
"I observed the water system," Sid said. "And thought about why the pressure drops on Tuesdays."
Hollis taught the rest of the class and then kept Sid back for twenty minutes after and asked him questions, the way teachers ask questions when they are trying to locate the outer edge of a student's knowledge. He couldn't find the outer edge.
After that, Hollis left a small stack of books on the bench nearest the door on mornings when Sid arrived early. He said nothing about them. Sid took them, read them, returned them, and took the next stack.
This was how Sid Cole began, at five, to properly educate himself. With a retired teacher's quiet generosity and a stack of books left without comment on a bench, in a makeshift classroom in a slum, in a world that had given him nothing and was now, slowly and through the specific generosity of specific people, beginning to give him something after all.
He thought about Danny every day. He kept the stone in his pocket. He was learning how to be alive in the right way, and it was slower and harder than he had expected, and he did it anyway.