CHAPTER 6: Grayport

TAKING OUT THE GENERAL

The rat had been eating Nathan's dinner for three nights, so on the fourth night, Nathan ate the rat.

He made no speech about it as Jace watched from the mattress, his mouth hanging open. Milo, who rarely wasted words, simply turned his face toward the wall.

"Say something," Jace muttered at last.

Nathan swallowed another bite. "It's meat."

That was Grayport. Three years earlier, he had cried when his mother burned the rice. Now he could eat a rat and feel nothing at all.

Grayport was a city in the same way a rotting fish was still a fish.

Poverty was not an unfortunate condition in Grayport. It was a sentence handed down at birth.

Rent was due every Friday. The landlord arrived on Thursday to remind you.

Nathan was twenty years old. He shared a single room with his two cousins, one stove, and one window patched with cardboard. Their possessions amounted to little more than a few battered utensils, threadbare blankets, and a debt that grew faster than they could repay it.

Jace, twenty-two, was loud, impatient, and quick to swing his fists. Milo, twenty-one, was quiet and methodical, the sort of man who counted everything twice because experience had taught him that the world always found a way to take something extra.

Between the three of them, they owned three spoons.

At four every morning, Nathan went down to the docks to carry other people's wealth on his back. He hauled sacks of grain he would never taste, crates of fruit he could not afford, and boxes of manufactured goods destined for shops whose doors he would never enter.

A foreman named Brock paid him in coins and insults.

Brock docked his wages for being late, for arriving too early, and once for supposedly looking at him the wrong way. There was always a reason to take something from a man who had nothing.

Nathan's palms were split by rope. His shoulders had grown thick with muscle, and his spine carried the constant ache of a man twice his age.

When Brock shoved him in front of the other workers and called him "Ash boy," Nathan lowered his eyes.

"Yes, sir."

The men around them returned to their work. Nobody intervened. Nobody wanted to become the next target.

But nobody saw what Nathan's other hand was doing.

Beneath his sleeve, his thumb pressed into the old scar on his palm, a ring of teeth marks he had bitten into his own skin while hiding in a well so he would not scream.

He pressed harder until the pain sharpened.

It reminded him that he was still alive. More importantly, it kept him from killing Brock.

For now.

On Thursday, the landlord arrived, exactly as promised.

Mr. Pike wore a clean coat, which in Grayport was an insult in itself. He did not knock. He kicked the door open and surveyed the room as though measuring how quickly he could empty it.

"Eleven days late," he announced. "Pay or pack."

Jace sprang to his feet.

"We'll have it Friday."

"You said that last Friday."

Pike stepped farther inside and jabbed a finger into Nathan's chest.

"And you, big boy? You've got a face like a funeral. Say something."

Nathan stared at the finger, then slowly lifted his gaze to the man's face.

For a moment, the room fell silent except for the rain tapping against the cardboard-covered window.

He thought of another man in a clean uniform. Another doorway. Another voice ordering him to move before he was thrown out.

He remembered the helplessness. The humiliation. The terrible certainty that nobody would come to save him.

"Friday," Nathan said quietly. "You'll have it Friday."

Something in his expression made Pike hesitate.

The landlord took half a step backward before disguising his reaction with a contemptuous laugh.

"Friday, then. Or the street."

He slammed the door behind him.

Nathan remained motionless until Pike's footsteps faded down the corridor. Then he turned and drove his fist into the wall.

Plaster cracked.

He struck it again. Wood splintered beneath his knuckles, and pain shot through his hand. He barely noticed. He kept hitting until the skin broke and blood streaked the wall.

Milo caught his wrist.

"Enough," he said firmly. "It's only a wall."

"It's his wall!" Nathan's voice shook with rage. "Everything here belongs to somebody else. The rooms, the food, the streets we walk on. We don't even own the floor we sleep on!"

Jace's eyes brightened with a dangerous excitement.

"Then let's deal with Pike tonight. Nobody in this city would miss him."

"And then what?" Milo asked. "We kill a landlord, and the police hang us before the General ever hears our names."

"The General." Jace spat on the floor. "You say that name like it's a promise."

"It is," Nathan replied.

Both cousins turned toward him.

Nathan examined his bleeding hand. Blood slipped between his fingers and dripped onto the floor, forming small, dark spots.

"Not Pike. Not Brock. They're nothing. They're the same dirt as us, only they've found a way to stand on our necks." He raised his head. "I'm saving this for the ones who lit the match."

Neither cousin answered.

They understood what he meant. They had lived with the consequences of that night, even if Nathan carried the worst of its memories.

His hatred had a name.

General Kael Varric.

And Nathan had no intention of dying before he made the man answer for what he had done.

The real work began after midnight, when Grayport finally surrendered to silence.

Nathan climbed to the roof with a rusted knife and a length of rope. The tiles were uneven, slick with rain, and dangerous beneath his bare feet. He balanced a brick on his back and performed push-ups until his arms trembled and his muscles threatened to give out.

When he could no longer lift himself, he rested for a few seconds and started again.

Then he ran.

Jace sparred with him.

During the first month, Nathan lost every fight. Jace had laughed at his clumsy movements and told him that rage alone would not keep him alive.

Now, Jace was the one limping after their sessions, grinning through a split lip.

"All right, all right," he gasped one night, raising both hands. "You're getting scary."

Nathan said nothing. He simply waited for him to lower his guard.

Milo handled the timing. With a cracked pocket watch in his palm, he measured every drill, every pause, and every mistake.

"Again," he instructed. "Slower. Quieter. A ghost doesn't breathe."

Nathan obeyed.

Again and again, until exhaustion blurred the edges of the world.

He finished every night the same way.

He lay on the cold rooftop while ash drifted through the air like gray snow, staring at the dark sky above Grayport. Then he recited the names.

Varric.

The officer who had dragged his mother out by her hair.

The soldier who had laughed.

The others whose faces had been burned into his memory.

He had no wall covered in photographs, no written list hidden beneath his mattress. He needed neither. He remembered every face, every voice, every act of cruelty.

He memorized them the way a condemned man memorized the road to his own grave.

"Three years," he whispered to the sky. "I'm still here."

The sky offered no answer.

Grayport never did.

But at dawn, when Nathan descended the stairs with his knuckles wrapped in rags and his body aching in a hundred places, something white lay just inside the door.

An envelope.

There was no stamp and no return address. Someone had slipped it beneath the door during the night.

Nathan stopped.

For several seconds, he merely stared at it, his instincts warning him that anything unexpected in Grayport could be dangerous.

Then he crouched and picked it up.

His name was written across the front in soft, looping letters. The N leaned slightly to one side, exactly as it always had.

He knew that handwriting.

He would have recognized it in the dark. He would have recognized it in his sleep.

His fingers tightened around the envelope.

For three years, he had trained himself not to hope. Hope made a man careless. It made him believe that the dead might return, that the past could be undone, and that the world might one day give back what it had stolen.

Nathan had buried those thoughts alongside everything else he had lost.

Yet now, standing in a cramped room that smelled of wet wood, old smoke, and blood, he felt something stir beneath the layers of anger he had spent three years building.

His heart, which he had believed was dead, kicked once against his ribs.