I was eight years old when I learned what I was worth.

  Three copper coins.

  That's what the Arena Master paid for me. My mother took the money, looked at me once, and walked out the gate. I watched her go. Kept watching the empty doorway for a while after that.

  Stupid, I know. But I was eight.

  The cell they put me in had eleven other children. Most of them were crying. A few prayed to gods I'd never heard of. One boy screamed and screamed until a guard broke his nose.

  I sat in the corner and counted stones. Thirty-seven across. Twenty-two high. You can check my math if you want. I've counted them enough times to be sure.

  Math was easier than thinking about other things.

  Next morning they shoved me into the pit.

  The sand burned my feet. I remember that more than anything else from that day. Not the crowd roaring overhead. Not the way my heart tried to escape through my throat. Just the sand, cooking the skin on my soles, and thinking this must be what punishment feels like.

  The man they sent to kill me was full-grown. Scarred everywhere. He had a real sword and probably twenty years of experience using it.

  I had fifty pounds of bone and terror.

  "Fight or die, boy," the Master called down. "Entertain them."

  The man smiled at me and took his time walking over. Why would he rush? I was a child. This wasn't a fight to him. It was a chore.

  I grabbed sand and threw it in his eyes.

  He stumbled, cursed, started swinging blind. I ran to the other side of the pit where I'd spotted broken glass half-buried in the ground. Cut my palm grabbing it. I hardly noticed.

  He was still rubbing his eyes when I circled behind him. I'd watched my father butcher goats before everything went wrong. I knew where the tendons lived.

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  I shoved the glass into the back of his knee.

  He went down screaming. Couldn't stand anymore. Couldn't do much of anything except bleed and curse and stare at me with that look on his face. Like he couldn't understand how this had happened. Like he was trying to solve a problem and the numbers weren't adding up.

  I stood over him with the glass dripping. His blood and mine had mixed together in the sand. Looked almost black in the sunlight.

  The crowd went quiet. First time I'd heard that many people be silent at once.

  The Master leaned forward in his box.

  "Finish it."

  And I thought about it. I really did.

  But here's the thing.

  If I killed him, they'd make me fight again tomorrow. And the day after. Until eventually someone bigger or faster or just luckier put me in the sand instead.

  But if I refused to give them what they wanted? Maybe they'd get bored of me. Sell me off. Send me somewhere else.

  Anywhere else had to be better than this.

  I dropped the glass. Walked over to the edge of the pit. Sat down in the sand with my arms wrapped around my knees.

  "No," I said.

  They booed. Threw garbage at me. Someone's wine cup hit me in the shoulder and left a bruise that lasted two weeks. The Master's face went a color I'd never seen on a person before.

  But I was alive.

  Guards dragged me out and beat me until I couldn't see straight. Then they threw me back in the cell with the other children. They all stared at me like I was crazy.

  Maybe I was.

  "You didn't finish him," one of them whispered. "Why not?"

  I didn't answer. Just went back to counting stones.

  Thirty-seven across.

  The Master visited my cell the next day.

  He grabbed my face hard enough to leave fingerprints. "You know what they're calling you now? The Cursed Boy. The child who ruins entertainment just by existing."

  He meant it as an insult.

  I heard something else entirely.

  Cursed meant I wasn't just another dead kid in the sand. Cursed meant they'd remember me.

  "Good," I said.

  He laughed at that. "You're broken, boy. That's fine. Broken things can still be useful."

  Turned out he was right.

  For the next eleven years, I was useful.

  I fought people. I survived. I bored crowds half to death and still walked out of the pit at the end. Over and over and over. I learned that everything has a price. Your body. Your skills. Your humanity, if someone's willing to pay for it.

  And if you're smart about it, if you pay attention, you can negotiate better terms than most.

  But that's not really what this story is about.

  This is the story of how I stopped being the Cursed Boy and became something worse. How I traded pieces of myself for power, then more pieces for survival, then everything I had left for one impossible job.

  This is how I ended up standing in a throne room covered in other people's blood.

  People say I saved the empire.

  They're wrong.

  I just solved a problem. Everything else was what happened after.

  My name is Yozi.

  Some debts can't be paid with coin. That's the lesson I learned, eventually. Took me longer than it should have.

  The ones that matter get paid in blood.