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The cliff vanishes beneath me.

A crushing memory detonates behind my eyes.

Rain. A boy. You will be my knight.

I am falling.

Down into the cold.

Down into the dark.

Little Knight

I don’t like this city. It has nothing except tall gray boxes that swallow the sky.

Be a good boy, my mother whispers.

I am a good boy. They are the ones who are mean.

My spine hurts. I shouldn’t have run, but I did. They hurt me so much. They keep calling it training, but what is this teaching me? I want to go home. My real home. I want to go to Rei.

I slip the side gate while the two guards argue over a dice game in the alley. I know they let me. They like the hunt better than the cage. They want an excuse to use the worse methods when they drag me back by the hair.

My stomach makes a noise. I guess I’m hungry. They didn’t feed me. Part of their training, they say.

I kick a loose piece of concrete. It skitters across the curb, bounces twice, and vanishes down a storm drain.

Thud.

Something solid hits me directly in the center of my ribs.

A mess of pale gold hair, two ridiculously round cheeks flushed bright pink from the cold, and enormous green eyes.

“OW!”

The kid bounces off my stomach, stumbles back onto the seat of his denim shorts, and immediately clutches his forehead with both hands. He is chewing frantically on something hard and loud. Crunch, crunch, crunch. The sound makes me even more hungry.

“Hey!” he yells, scowling up from the pavement. “You broke my head! Why were you standing there like a tree?”

He seems like a menace. He is probably my brother’s age. Maybe eight or nine.

“You ran into me,” I say. My throat is dry as sand. “Look where you’re going.”

The kid scrambles up onto his knees, plants his sneakers against the concrete, and stomps one foot with a lot of force for something so small.

“I was looking! I was looking at the bakery! And then BAM—a giant wall appeared out of nowhere! You’re too big! How old are you!?”

“I’m twelve.”

“That’s ancient!” he snaps, crossing his arms over his chest. “You’re basically a grandpa. Grandpas are supposed to move out of the way for very fast people.”

I stare at him.

His cheeks are stuffed full of whatever red confection he is destroying, making him look like an angry squirrel. His socks are pulled up to two entirely different heights, and there is a streak of blue chalk across his chin.

Rei used to puff his chest out like that whenever I took the wooden sword away during practice. Exactly the same ridiculous posture.

I feel my eyes burn at the memory of him.