"There's Not a Cloud in Sight"
The moons rose over the horizon, and slowly the city came to life. Street lamps glowed more brightly, shop keeps began to open their stalls in the market, and moonometers rang to alert the late risers that it was time to get up,
One such alarm sounded from a window above the doorway Xephos was sleeping in. The sudden loud noise woke him with a start. Only half-awake and absolutely sure that the noise was the resident of the house slamming the door open to shoo him off their stoop, Xephos jumped to his feet, immediately slammed the back of his head into the grey stone door frame, and promptly dropped to the ground.
"So much for a stroke of luck," he muttered, ruefully rubbing the back of his head. It was already swelling up. Great.
"Maybe I'll be able to knick some Juice from the market," he thought as he stood and brushed the black sand from his threadbare clothes. His ribs ached from yesterday, and Xephos knew that if he looked down he'd be able to see light to dark bruises like a nebula mottling the pale skin under his tunic.
He'd really got his ass kicked yesterday. This wasn't anything special, Xephos ended most days by getting his ass kicked. That was how it was for a blue blood on the streets.
"Oy!" The owner of the stoop he'd slept on had finally arrived, and he hadn't left yet. "Beat it, kid! We're not runnin' a bloody in here!" Xephos ducked his head to dodge a blow that may or may not have been coming. Better be safe than sorry. As he scurried off down the cobble streets, he was sure he heard the man mutter something about "Those dast Blues…"
As far as insults went, he'd had worse.
He reached another alley and jogged down it, vaulting over the boxes cluttering it and sliding down curtains to get to the Lower Levels. The air rose in temperature the lower he went. Central City sat in between the zones where it was slightly too cool and slightly too warm. This was where the nobles, the palace, and, more importantly to the orphan, the market was.
Other urchins joined him on his trip down, sliding down railings, leaping down staircases, and trying not to fall down the crystal lined crevasses that littered these less-traveled pathways. The others kept their distance from Xephos. He was a magnet for trouble.
A mistimed jump had him tripping off an airborne walkway and falling the few feet to the ground below. His bruised ribs flared with pain as he landed roughly on the cap of a giant mushroom and tumbled ungracefully into a pile of its smaller brethren below. Xephos stumbled roughly to his feet, holding one speckled hand to his side and fell promptly back to the ground. The green spots on the fungi pulsed with light when he brushed against them.
Okay. Now he really need to stop at the Tower's stand. Preferably before his daily beating. Xephos hoped that today he'd get to fight on his own terms, even if he usually didn't choose them wisely.
"Okay, that's enough of the self-pity, up you get," he muttered as he hauled himself up, his injuries protesting as he did so. It's not like there was much of a time limit, but the later he got there the more picked over it would all be. And he couldn't afford that. Xephos needed to knick as much spare food as he could so he'd have enough spare to take to the Pits.
The other urchins had left him far behind now, and there really wasn't any point in trying to catch up. They didn't want him around anyways, and honestly he couldn't blame them. None of them spoke very often to each other anyways. Short guarded conversations were their way of communicating. The best places to knick food, find clothes, or sleep. Necessities. Nothing personal, even among the Greens and Golds.
As he began trekking again, now at a slower pace, Xephos couldn't help but remember one of the few exchanges he'd had with one of them that had strayed from "professionalism."
"It's not that we don't like ya, Xeph," Aryx had admitted, running her hand through her cropped dark hair, still short from where it had been lopped off to pay for her younger brother's release from the Pits. "You're good a nice guy, and good in a fight." This was a bald-faced lie, but he appreciated her sparing his pride. Any talent he had in a fight was gained purely from the sheer amount of them he'd been in, and not on any natural skill on his own part.
"But…?" he prompted, sensing her hesitation. Silver eyes met blue and then glanced away again. Her ears twitched, betraying the emotions that hid behind the closed off expression on her face. Xephos felt his heart began to sink. He knew where this was going.
"You're a Blue," Aryx said frankly, finally meeting his eyes, and it felt like his heart dropped right out of his chest. "And that makes you a liability." Then it looked like the moonlight folded in midair where she was standing, becoming somehow solid. He blinked, and when he reopened his eyes the passage was empty save for a fox scrounging for scraps. Aryx had 'ported away.
That was the last time he, or anyone else, ever saw her.
Whispers followed him in the streets over the next few days. Rumors that he'd turned her in for bribing the guards, that she was being tortured in the Pits, and still darker things passed among the outcasts. Some even said that the Prince had her, but none dared to speak that out loud within earshot of the king's guard. All any of them knew was that Xephos had been the last one to see her, and that now she;d seemingly vanished without a trace.
They gave him a wide berth after that. He avoided them in kind, more for their sake than his.
"Blues are bad luck," Xephos murmured, more out of habit than anything else as he reached the market. He'd heard the phrase enough that he could recite it in his sleep. With their too-light skin and too-bright eyes, Blues stood out against the dark desert sand. He shuddered remember the red eyes that stalked his dreams. It wasn't good to stand out.
When he was younger he used to protest, arguing that it was just a dumb superstition, but it was no use. Everyone was already stuck in their beliefs, and it didn't help his case that he was clearly down on his luck.
The market was in full swing by now, with the wares becoming more exotic the further in he went. Squinting up through the gloom, he could nearly see the top of the Tower shining like a beacon in the center of the market. Ships buzzed through the air, transporting people and objects to the Higher and Lower Levels and making use of the hollow area the market required. Smaller crafts, more like lanterns than anything else, drifted aimlessly above the crowd. They bounced off each other and would spin slowly away, casting a warm pleasant light over the market.
People brushed past him, and Xephos had to work not to get swept away in the crowd. Spotting his destination, he wove deftly between a pair of people squabbling over prices, squeezed down the narrow gap between a clothing and jewelry stand, and made sure to avoid eye contact with the guards. As long as he kept his head dwb, they tended to leave him alone. He just wasn't big enough to be worth bothering with yet.
"Hey there, Miss Phara," he chirped brightly, slipping behind the counter of her stand and trying to act like he'd been there for a while.
"Stars, Xephos," the woman startled, putting a wrinkled hand to her chest. "You can't sneak up on me like that anymore, my poor heart can't take it!" She sounded scolding, but she was already smiling again. Miss Phara had taken Xephos in after a particularly bad fight and had been looking after him on a fairly regular basis. He might have even said she was like a grandmother to him, if he knew what it was like to have a grandmother.
Although she was one of the oldest people left in the Capitol and her age had tempered her wit, it had done nothing to soften the iron in her core. Golden eyes, like a hawks, sat behind her green crystal spectacles, and nothing ever escaped her notice. They were as hard as stone, but any cold in them had been tempered by the numerous smile lines around them. Miss Phara had pale golden hair to match her eyes, a mark of her age.
As one of the few people he knew who was alive before the Purge, she had always been more tolerant of him than the other shop keeps were. She was kind to the other urchins as well, and even the most distrusting of them had placed a kind of fragile faith in the kind old lady.
After a long rough and tumble day of working over the market, as the moons began to set Xephos returned to her tent to huddle with her in the back of her stand, his brighter blue eyes cloaked from the path by the cloth she sold hanging like curtains from the ceiling of her tent. Often times at least two or three other street children would join him in huddling in the back of her tent, and tonight was no different. They got comfortable on the thick rugs and pillows she made, she turned up the wick in her lantern, and the shadows danced across the sloped walls.
Miss Phara regaled him and the rest of her audience with stories of her younger years before the Purge. Before the Prince, when King Thalion was still ruling. She spooned them out portions stew and tried to keep it more lighthearted, but the topic turned as always to less pleasant things. Her bright eyes dimmed slightly, and the glow of the lantern cast shadows across her careworn face, making her seem somehow older in an instant.
Their little group made sure to keep their voices down, just talking about life from Before was tantamount to treason. An unspoken, but heavily enforced, taboo on speaking about the Purge and the events leading up to it powered their caution. Miss Phara's cloth and wares were of high quality, the best in the market, and she had gained a level of respect from most due to her fair practices. None of that would stop the guards from dragging her off to the Pits, backlash be damned.
Xephos was in only the second generation or so since the Blues had been all but wiped out by the monarchy. "The King would have never approved of somethin' like this," Miss Phara reassured them repeatedly, "This is the Prince's doing, this is."
"But what about the Pits?" one bright eyed young urchin by the name of Wrin asked. At his question any of them that had been dozing were suddenly alert, gazing at Miss Phara with rapt attention.
Her gaze hardened. "There weren't nothin' like that back then, dearie," she replied after a long time. "The King weren't like that." Xephos and a few of the older ones glanced at each other at this, skepticism obvious in their eyes. They were too young to know the exact details of what the Prince had done, but they all knew that the path that had led to them all living on the streets could be traced directly back to him.
"And all of the Blues are gone then?" asked a stocky Green girl with a rough scar tracing down the curve of her face by the name of Tai. Xephos tensed when she amended her statement with, "Well, except Xeph here."
"No they ain't! I heard they got some Blues holed up in the Pits still!" interjected Rax, a wiry Gold whose long dark hair was tied up in a cord to hang down his heavily speckled back. These two were always bickering, and nobody was sure if the pair actually hated each other or liked each other. Rax followed Tai around like a puppy, but if pressed he would always say it was to bother her.
"Oh, shut it, everyone knows that's a load of bollocks."
"Nah, it's true! I've seen 'em I has!"
"'Twouldn't matter anyways, they'll all be dead, too before long."
"The thing is, you're both right," Xephos interjected quietly. The bickering pair fell silent, staring at him apprehensively. "There's some Blues in the Pits, I visit 'em sometimes, but none of them'll last much longer." He ducked his eyes, pointing his bright gaze at the rough floor. "They'll all be mad soon enough."
"I would be so scared," Wrin mumbled, his silver eyes widening in fear at the mere thought of it. "It's real dark down there…" He shuddered and nestled deeper into the pillows. The other kids couldn't help agreeing with him. Two truths like the two moons: darkness was death, and to wander in the desert was to invite disaster. Xephos knew it to be true. Knew it like every child on the planet. Like the planet itself knew, somehow, deep in its core.
"That's enough of all that, you all get some shut eye now," Miss Phara cut them off before the conversation could continue. If they kept going soon Tai and Rax would bring the conversation around to the Red-Eyed Ones, and poor Wrin was having bad enough nightmares as it was. These four were regulars in her tent, with Xephos coming the most and Tai and Rax the least. Those two went everywhere together.
"Sleep tight, dearies," she said as she put more fuel in the lantern to keep it burning all night and turned to leave. Glancing back from the entrance she saw that young Wrin was already asleep, and the other three were quickly on their way to follow him. Faint blue light still issued from behind Xephos' closed eyelids. As a Blue his skin wasn't dark enough to block it out.
Not all of the Blues were gone, she knew that, Xephos was proof enough of that fact, but he was one of only two or three left in the Capital. Miss Phara's sister from the next dome over tells her that the number of Blues in her city were depleting rapidly as well. All of them were urchins, all were orphans, and all of them were fifteen cycles or younger.
Miss Phara knew that Xephos' days were numbered since he was reaching the sixteen cycle cut off. She'd been able to keep him safe from the guards for this long, saying that he was too young and not worth the trouble of arresting, but as he reached maturity, that wouldn't last much longer. Not that it would matter at this rate with the amount of fights he'd jumped into in the past week alone.
She sighed. "That boy is goin' to be the death of me," she murmured with a soft chuckle, and exited.