South Shogun. The Ghettos. Years Before.
The convoy came on the first Thursday of every third month like clockwork, which was the only thing about the south district that ran on a reliable schedule.
Butter stood at the edge of the crowd and watched the long cars roll in from the north with their windows up. She was 13 and had been watching these convoys since she was old enough to understand what they were, which was not what they were presented as. What they were presented as was charity. What they were was performance.
The food was real and the hunger was real but the distance the northern boys maintained while handing out the plates, the careful angle of the body, the smile that didn't reach the eyes, the way they said things like bless you and the Empress provides without looking at the person they were saying it to, that was performance. Butter had been reading the frequencies of people since childhood and the frequency of genuine care sounded different from this.
She took her plate anyway.
Hunger didn't have the luxury of political consistency.
The man boy dropped his plate when the crowd shifted behind him, knocked from his hands by the press of bodies, the food scattering across the south market ground in a way that was clearly an accident to everyone present.
The soldier nearest him didn't process it as an accident "Hey don't waste your blessing."
The flat of his palm caught the man across the face before the plate finished settling. Not a dramatic strike. A casual one. The strike of someone for whom this was an available response and who saw no reason not to use it.
The man went down.
He looked up from the ground with an expression that had been worn many times, the expression of someone who had learned to absorb things without letting the absorbing show.
"It's okay," he said. His voice was steady and warm and completely genuine. "The Empress has blessed us."
The soldier straightened his uniform.
Butter was already moving.
"That's wrong," she said.
The soldier turned. He was taller than her by a significant margin and armored and carrying the specific confidence of someone who had never experienced a consequence.
"Mind your business, peasant," he said.
"He dropped a plate," Butter said. "You hit him for dropping a plate."
"Last warning girl—"
He raised his hand.
The Echo Scythe activated.
Not summoned, activated, her Scytherian biology responding to incoming threat before her mind finished processing, the blade materializing between his hand and her face with the specific sound of something that had no interest in negotiation.
The soldier looked at the scythe.
At Butter.
At the scythe again.
His confidence left without saying goodbye.
He stepped back. Then again. Then he was sitting on the ground and then he was crawling and then he was gone, his retreat leaving a silence in the crowd that held for a moment before the market's ambient sound rushed back in to fill it.
The man she'd defended looked at her from the ground.
"You didn't have to do that," he said gently.
"He hit you," Butter said.
"Yes." He accepted the hand she offered and stood. "But the Empress blesses us."
"Why does everyone say that," Butter said. Not to him specifically. To the air. To the south district and its patience and the specific exhaustion of watching people absorb what they shouldn't have to absorb and call it blessing. "It's okay to grieve. It's okay to say something is wrong."
The man smiled at her. Warm. Tired. Real.
"I know, child," he said. "But we are just proud to be alive."
From one of the luxury vehicles a boy had been watching.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Her age. Maybe a year older. Northern clothes new with the casual confidence of someone who had never had to think about what he was wearing. A Hammerian, she read it in the build, in the faint shimmer of abi that ran in the bloodline, in the way he stood like a person who had never once wondered whether the space he was occupying was his to occupy.
He was looking at her like she was something he had not expected to find.
She looked away.
The well was four hours of work.
The dry season had dropped the water table again and the district's supply was showing the consequences of two weeks of insufficient drawing. Butter spent the afternoon at the well, back and forth, the physical labor of it unremarkable, the kind of work that doesn't produce anything visible except the result. Twenty-three households. Every trip feeding into the one after it. Her arms ached in the specific way of someone who had used them past comfort into necessity and kept going.
She thought about the man on the ground and his steady voice.
She thought about the word blessed.
She thought about what it cost to say that word and mean it in the conditions the south district lived inside and whether the meaning made it stronger or whether the conditions made it heartbreaking or whether it was both and whether both could be true simultaneously.
She delivered the last water as the sun finished its descent.
"We are just proud to be alive," the woman at the last house said.
Butter stood in the street afterward and held that sentence and didn't know what to do with it.
She thought she might cry.
She didn't.
She went home.
The banquet arrived the next morning.
Long tables in the south market street. Food she hadn't seen the south produce on its regular budget. Sealed water jars being distributed by young men in northern clothes moving through the crowd with easy unhurried manner.
A citizen walked past her carrying two jars.
"Where did you get those?" Butter asked.
"Jeriko." The citizen smiled. "He's among the wealthy. The Empress has blessed us once again."
Butter looked at the tables. At the food. At twenty-three households she'd drawn water for yesterday now receiving it from sealed jars that someone had paid for.
Several cars pulled up at the market's north entrance.
Men stepped out and crossed toward her carrying flowers. Not one bunch, many, an armful each, the kind of flowers that didn't grow in the south district because the south district's soil had other priorities.
She took them automatically.
She brought them to her face.
They were beautiful. Actually beautiful. The real kind grown somewhere with actual resources and actual care. She breathed them in and felt something uncomplicated for one moment.
"Yes," a voice said. "The finest on the island."
The boy from the convoy line stepped out of the last car.
Up close he was, she had not prepared herself for the specific way he looked at her, which was not the way northern boys usually looked at anything in the south district. He looked at her like he had been looking for something for a long time and had just found it in an unexpected place.
"You're....." she started.
"Jeriko, im 15 years old" he said. "Jeriko Hammerian of the Hammerian class. Son of Pyraz." He held her gaze. "And you are?"
"My name is Butter, I'm 13."
"Butter." He said it carefully, like he was deciding whether it fit. "You're a Scytherian."
"Yes."
"Do you know the history?" he said. "Between Scytherians and Hammerians?"
She shook her head.
Something moved in his expression, satisfaction, the specific kind that belongs to someone who has been given the opportunity to say something they've wanted to say.
"We are meant for each other," he said. "Our ancestors were inseparable. Yin and yang. The sound and the strike. Two forces that cannot be complete without the other."
Butter looked at him.
He smiled. Flicked his hair.
She looked away before whatever was happening in her face became visible.
"Really," she said. "So if you have all the finest things, you can fix the sewage system? And the water situation? We run dry every season."
Jeriko blinked.
Then he laughed, genuine, surprised, the laugh of someone who had expected one kind of conversation and received a completely different one and found he liked it.
"Of course," he said. "I can do anything you desire my chocolate sundae."
He reached into his jacket and produced a contact bug. Gold. Small. Worth more than anything in the south district's weekly budget. He held it out.
"Call me anytime," he said. "We can discuss the matter." He paused. "I hope to see you again, chocolate sundae."
He took her hand and kissed it.
He got back in the car.
The cars left.
Butter stood in the south market street with expensive flowers in one hand and a gold contact bug in the other and the district's rhythm moving around her like it always did.
She looked at the contact bug for a long time.
She put it in her pocket.
The Hammerian Mansion. That Evening.
Jeriko found his father in the study.
Pyraz was the kind of man who occupied rooms the way the Hammerian class occupied everything, completely, with the assumption that the space had been waiting for him. He looked up from his papers when Jeriko entered and read his son's expression with the practiced efficiency of a man who had been reading people for a long time.
"You look like someone hit you," Pyraz said.
"I'm in love father" Jeriko said.
Pyraz set his papers down.
"Tell me."
"A Scytherian," Jeriko said. "Brown skinned. From the south district. She defended a man in the crowd from one of our soldiers and her scythe activated before she'd even decided to call it." He sat down across from his father. "I've never seen anything like her."
Pyraz was quiet for a moment. Then: "I'll have soldiers sent for her tomorrow. She can be groomed within..."
PYRAZ HAMMERIAN
"No," Jeriko said.
Pyraz looked at him.
"I want to ask her," Jeriko said. "Properly. I want her to choose."
Pyraz leaned back in his chair with the patient expression of a man revisiting a conversation he had expected to have.
"I've told you already, son," he said. "Women are like children. They want what they want even when what they want is bad for them. They require guidance. Direction. A firm hand that knows better than their impulse."
"Father..."
"It is not cruelty. It is care. The Hammerian way has always been...."
"I don't see it that way," Jeriko said. "They just need to know they're safe. They need to know they're protected." He leaned forward. "Let me try. She grew up in the south district, she knows nothing about power or wealth or what a man of my position can offer. Let me show her. Let me ask her properly."
Pyraz looked at his son for a long moment.
Then he smiled, the smile of a man who has made his assessment and is willing to let the process confirm it.
"Go," he said. "Do as your heart desires." He picked up his papers again. "But remember, son, the future of the Hammerian is conquest. As our ancestors before us. It is what we are built for."
Jeriko nodded and stood.
"Thank you, father."
He left.
Pyraz looked at the door after it closed.
"You'll learn," he said quietly. To himself. To the room.
He went back to his papers.