A Song of Shadows and Starlight

CHAPTER 1- ANDER

A SONG OF SHADOWS AND STARLIGHT

ARC 1

The Boy Who Walks In The Dark

Chapter 1- Ander's POV

This city turns honest men into monsters. That's what my sister had always told me. And I guess she was right. She thinks I'm dead. My family think I'm dead. Everyone thinks I'm dead. At times, I think of just dropping down to the house where my sister and younger brother lie in a dilapidated, tiny apartment squeezed in between a boarded-up shop with red paint spelling out "Do Not Enter" sprayed across it's shattered front windows, and an old banker's mansion which has fallen into disuse. Once the plague hit the financial district, everyone who was anyone in the area was quickly relocated. Except us, of course. The poor, the underprivileged, the parasites eating into the city's riches. The area was quarantined, and everyone not wealthy enough to leave was simply left to adapt and survive. The only reason Sam and twelve-year-old Daniel are still alive is me. I drop money and whatever I can scrounge up on the streets at their back-door and made sure the various gangs fighting over the destroyed district know they're the brothers of Ander Bridger, the Knife of the Narrows. Everyone knows my reputation.

Which is the main reason I haven't knocked on my sister's door yet. I don't want to see her face when she sees I'm alive. I'm ashamed they'd see me for I really am, for what I've become. I'm no longer their care-free brother always sneaking out of the house to watch the horses trot by or standing by our cracked, dusty mirror twirling the battered deck of cards we owned around again and again. I'm an assassin-for-hire, a rogue. A thief and a criminal.

I've done things I don't like thinking about. I'm exactly the same as the men who killed our family, except worse, because I was brought up different to those animals in the Black School.

They'd see it immediately, they'd see it in my eyes, in my face.

Or maybe they wouldn't even recognize me. Hell, some-days when I stop to think, I barely recognize myself either. I still look like them. I have that inky-black hair that runs down to my chin, and skin so pale I look like a ghost that runs in the family. My mother used to say I had her eyes, bright and striking and blue. I may look like my family, but the Delegation, the ring of Congressmen who run this city, has no idea what any of us look like. The wanted posters strung up around the murky city change almost street to street. Sometimes I have black eyes and black hair down to my shoulders. Sometimes I'm bald with bright green eyes, or wearing glasses with a head full of copper curls. Sometimes I'm white, or black, or Native, or Red or Yellow or whatever the Delegation can think of. In short, they have no idea what I look like.

I'm a ghost. The only thing that doesn't change on those posters is the amount written above my face.

50,000 coins, pocket change to the Aristocrats, but enough to change a street-beggars life. That's why I'm so careful.

That's why they're terrified of me. They don't know anything about me, or what I'm capable of, or what I'll do next. They only know my reputation and the way my name is bounced around the streets of Surcon as someone who'll do anything to get the job done. It makes me a threat.

And that's exactly why I'm here tonight, crouched in an abandoned squatting-hole overlooking the Court, Surcon's Central Square. My family sit just opposite, the tall, trading offices separating the Court from the rest of the ruined, quarantined Financial District. The hole sits atop an abandoned office, half of the roof and wall has been torn away, probably by scavengers desperate for the wood to use, exposing itself to the Court. The only thing shielding me from the howling wind and rain that seems to eternally blow in Surcon are a series of rusted steel beams that criss-cross the roof. They aren't enough to stop it stinging my eyes and mussing my messily-tied bun. My leg is stretched out in front of me, and I jerk it back as a rat scurries across it. My eyes track it across into the darkness disinterestedly. I wonder if it's carrying the plague that has decimated the city. That's eating into my brother's life every second I spend sitting here staring. A loud, whirring siren snaps me out of my stupor. That's the plague patrol, right on time as the City Watch guard told me. My mind flashes back to him. He'd been stubborn, stupidly loyal and refused to tell me when and where the next plague shipment was coming in. My brother's life depended on this though, and I was desperate. He'd gotten sick. Not just sick, infected. He'd got bloodpox. That's what everyone calls the Council Lady's plague. Named because of a councilman's mistress that'd brought back the plague-ridden rats from a pleasure-vessel somewhere outside the Isles, it had quickly began travelling through Surcon, infecting and decimating and destroying, just like it had done when it first arrived almost six years earlier. The City had managed to contain it, but only after it had almost decimated us. The areas worst affected had been left to rebuild themselves, and eventually became known as the Narrows. Now, the plague was back, and it seemed to be even worse than before.