TITANS ASCENT

The ledger was his compass.

At St. Mercy's Orphanage, Ethan Coal navigated life through numbers. He counted the cracks in the dormitory walls (234), the number of times the matron's rosary beads clicked each evening (108), and the seconds it took for the smell of burnt cabbage to seep into his bones (4 minutes, 17 seconds). Numbers were control. Numbers were safe.

But numbers couldn't scrub the smell of smoke from his dreams.

He was eight when the pharmacy burned. His father's voice, sharp with panic: "Take the ledger!" His mother's hands, thrusting the book into his arms, her wedding ring catching on the binding. The heat. The roar. The way the flames turned the night sky the color of dried blood.

Now, four years later, Ethan woke each dawn to the ache in his palms where the ledger's charred edges had branded him. The other boys called him "Crow" for his habit of hoarding scraps-a button, a bent nail, a half-melted candle-but they didn't know the real reason he watched the shadows. They didn't see the man who sometimes stood at the edge of the orphanage yard, a figure in a black coat, watching.

"Ledger-Lungs is mooning again, " sneered Tommy, a broad-shouldered bully with a missing front tooth. Ethan ignored him, focusing on the arithmetic problem scrawled on the slate. If Tommy's weekly bread ration is 3 loaves, and he steals 1 from the kitchen each night, how many days until the matron notices?

But the numbers blurred. That morning, another boy had been found dead in the river. Billy, age ten. Throat slit. The constable called it "gang business," but Ethan had seen the blackened silver coin clutched in Billy's fist-the same coin his mother had pressed into his palm the night of the fire.