Farmers, pioneers, and settlers, who earn honest livings by labour and trade, are often the first and most accessible victims of thieves and tyrants alike. On a moon like Luxum, where there was no law to insure either an absence or a monopoly of either, outlaws were more dangerous than the wild. Honest folk, who labour themselves to exhaustion and spend their nights recovering from it, are often the first casualty of such a reality, and even the well prepared often loose something precious in order to drive off such opportunists.

Perhaps the only thing in overabundance in the larger towns of Laxum are orphans.

Death was all too common, and between earnest parents hiding their children from the guns of invaders, and the fickle sympathies of bandits, it was hardly unusual to see small gangs of children in the streets, rooting through trash or begging for food.

Charity, the indulgence of opulence, was in short supply in Laxum, and survival was no one's problem but their own. Those that could, would find farmers or tradesmen, and for dinner scraps and a corner to sleep in, would spend their days at work. Such work was harsh, demanding, and hard to find.

But survival had no specific demands, besides success. There was always potential for the lucky, the swift, the resourceful, the cunning or even the noble, to forge some measure of success for themselves.

There were two, in the city of Vos Ma'ar, who were successful enough to be charitable.

For certain, these two were hardly richer than the streets they scavenged from. Their successes were hardly more than enough to scrape them away from the fear of starvation and hunger. But they were capable enough to be able to give, and freely fed as many of their comrades as they could.

These two were brothers, born worlds apart and genetically as distant as any two planets in the galaxy. Orphaned, abandoned to the most fickle of fates, they had readily radiated to each other as if the entire galaxy couldn't keep them apart.

Too young by far for romantic complications, their bond was at once the fierce and bold friendship of youth, and the deep, resilient camaraderie of shared suffering.

One carried the name of Marius Altaire. His parents, some of the earliest settlers of Laxum, were the victims of opportunistic raiders. Shoved into a shelter, and given enough food for three weeks, he was told to stay inside until he had no more to eat.

He had climbed out of that hole, almost a month later, weak and starved, to find his family long dead and his home in ashes. Bereft of help and ignorant of any skills to survive in the wild with, he made his way to the city for food and anonymity.

The other, Beriven Vaime, had arrived on Laxum in his third year of life, his already slim prospects as a slave made worse as his parents died on the voyage. His inattentive masters, already overtaxed and with little market for weak and malnourished mouths to feed, turned them all to the streets to cut their own losses. As his companions found impovershed freedom too trying a task to struggle for, he slipped into the underworld of Vos Ma'ar to fight for the scraps left over from indulgent prosperity.

It is still said, six years after, that the moment the two boys found each other for the first time, that they embraced without a word and cried together for hours. Some thought it was their understanding of each other's suffering, and others thought it was a recognition of someone they each could trust as more than a brother, as a missing part of their own flesh.

The day they met was a bad morning for a large grocer, put under sudden bankruptcy by debt collectors with a sudden fear for money they would never recollect. Hard men, enforcers of gang bosses and criminal syndicates, had already brought most of the owners to meet their debtors, and those that survived did not go back whole. The rest had fled, and the stores were left untended.

Stories of untended food brought much of Vos Ma'ar's poor, and the insuring riots left ample opportunity for ambitious children to seize more food than they might normally see in half a year.

Marius was almost first on the scene, slipping inside from a narrow catwalk across the roof. His own information was better than most, as he had watched from a hiding hole as one of the owners was dragged from their own front doors. Having put the idea of missing owners with the rumors of an untended grocery store together faster than most, he was inside well before dawn, where an absence of competition and an overabundance of food left him as safe as he had ever been in life.

First, he gleefully did what every hungry child would do in his place. He gorged himself on fruit and pastries, trying everything his little hands could reach and caring little for finishing anything except what his starving tongue demanded more of.

It wasn't until his stomach ached, and he lay sprawled on the floor, beside a half-eaten cake, that he heard other voices.

"We have to figure out a place to store as much as we can." came a child's plaintive insistence.

"We have'ta stuff ourselves, first." Another voice responded, insistently.

"Well, yeah, but there's enough food to live off of for years, forever even. We've gotta find a place to stash some of it." that first voice said, and the footsteps of a number of children could be heard between the voices.

"Why bother moving any of it, if we can just stay here and eat it all?" a third voice asked, and the footsteps stopped.

Intrigued, the boy struggled to his feet and tip-toed around the corner, hiding as best he could to listen.

"Cuz'," The first voice insisted again, and Marius was close enough to see the faces those voices belonged to. "If we found this place, other people can. It's not safe enough to hide the food."

"And who's gonna hide all the food, huh?" Another, unfamiliar voiced asked accusingly. "You think we can trust it all to you?"

"No, dumb-ass. We're all gonna hide it, cuz we're all gonna need to carry it." The first child said.

"Don't call me a dumb-ass, squirt." One of the kids said. Marius could tell that this boy looked quite a bit larger than the boy trying to get this group to cooperate.

"Well, if you're just going to pig out on all this stuff until someone takes it away from you, and go hungry again, then you are a dumb-ass." The offending boy said again. He turned around as he said it, and was just in time to watch a large fist strike him in the face.

The little boy spun halfway around in the air before he collapsed on the ground, his hands on his cheek and a fiery expression on his face. The other boys crowded around, a few of them trying to hold the larger boy from following up.

"I told you not to call me a dumb-ass!" He shouted, trying to push his way past three other children.

"I know a place to hide some food!" Marius shouted, surprising everyone in the room.

The other boys began to shout and point. "Hey, who's that?" was the most common question before the children quickly surrounded him. It wasn't long after that before the questions became violent.

"What should we do with him?"

"What if he tells someone?"

"Should we throw him off the roof?"

"We can't let him eat our food!"

"What if he screams as he falls? Other people will know we're here."

The boy who had been punched stood up, and stepped over to the group.

"He's an orphan, like us." He said, and a few of the smaller children stepped aside for him.

"So what? That just means he's gonna eat more of our food!" One of the boys said, and a few others shouted in agreement.

"He can't. A hundred people could eat at this food and we'd never notice." The large boy said, in agreement. He looked sheepishly at the smaller boy he had punched, and the smaller boy shrugged, and smiled.

"You say you know a place where we could hide some food?" The small boy asked. He crossed his arms and stepped out of the group, frowning a little. "Where?"

"Nuh-uh, you're not getting that for free." Marian insisted, feeling a little bold.

"Oh, really? What makes ya think we can pay ya for it?" the small boy asked in response.

"Cuz with lookouts, a scout on the roof, and people to carry it, we can get a lot more food stashed than I can by myself." Marius said defiantly.

"He thinks like you do, Berry." The large boy said, smiling.

"Stuff it, Thug." the boy named Berry spat out. "So you want a stake in the food if you offer us a place." the small boy said. "That's fine, if you tell us a good place."

"Why should I trust you?" Marius asked.

"Because it's a lot harder for us to trust you if you don't." Berry replied.

The two boys stared at each other, eye to eye, for almost an entire minute. Neither one of them blinked, fidgeted, or looked away for too many moments. The other children gaped at them, and whispered to themselves.

All of a sudden, both boys laughed. The kind of laugh that comes from more than humour, a laughter you could imagine hearing from faeries in the trees, or from a mother who just gave birth.

The stomachs gave out and both of them fell to the floor, still laughing as if nothing in the world had ever been funny before.

"The third abandoned warehouse on the moon-side of the space port." Marius said, heaving air into his overtaxed lungs. "The whole area isn't used by anyone, and the solar generator on warehouse two still works. Best of all, there's even a freezer unit."

"A freezer, really?" Some of the other children whispered to themselves, their own suspicions of this new boy forgotten.

"We might even have to steal a stove." The boy nicknamed Thug said, with a breathless note of wonder in his voice.

"I'm not carrying it, Thug." Berry shot out, breathing hard to catch up to all of his laughing, as he forced himself to his feet.

"I guess we should make you a part of our group." Berry said, holding a hand out to Marian, who was still sitting on the floor, taking in deep breaths.

"Marius Altaire." Marius said, as he took Berry's hand and stood up.

"You remember your last name, huh?" Berry asked. "Anyway, I'm Beriven Vaime, but everyone here calls me Berry. You can too."

Berry turned to the group behind him, and began pointing at people. "The big guy that hits people to make him feel smarter is Thug. He's actually Thursen Bartimus, but Thug is closer to what he really is."

Berry scanned the other few people in group, five in all, and said "Ah, heck. I'll tell you who the rest of them are later. We've gotta get this food moved."

Everyone else began shouting in protest. A few of them rushed past Berry to Marius, and the smallest girl in the group, fully a head shorter than Thursen, angrily kicked Berry in the shins.

"You gotta introduce us!" she shouted, with enough force that everyone else stopped to look at her. "He can't be part of our group if he doesn't know our names."

"Yeah!" came a few intermittent cheers, and Berry held his hands up in surrender.

"Alright, alright. The shin-kicker is Thema." Berry started.

"The tall girl over there," and as he spoke, Berry pointed to a girl nearly half a hand taller than himself, who still hadn't said a word. "is Anita. She doesn't say much at all, half the time we wonder if she knows how."

Anita held up her hand, giving Berry a nasty gesture, and sneered.

"The boy beside her is Mystery." He pointed at the shortest boy in the group. "He doesn't talk about himself much, he doesn't even want to tell us his name. So we just call him Mystery."

The boy called Mystery nodded in greeting.

"The alien kid here," and saying this, Berry pointed at a child with sallow green skin, and two large tentacles extending from her head. "is Tha'varr. Did I say that right?"

Tha'varr nodded. "You know you did, Berry."

"And the runt of the crowd is Bug." Here, he pointed at a child hardly more than four years, who stood nearly a head shorter than even Thema. As Berry pointed at him, he hid behind thug.

"I thought up his name myself." Berry added.

Thema stepped past the group, and carefully walked up to Marius, as if afraid of making too much noise. As soon as she was in arms reach, she extended her arm, poked him in the gut, and said "Merry."

"Marius is too long. Merry works better." Thema added, with a shrug, back to the group. Berry opened his mouth as if to object, but Thug roared in approval, and the group rushed around Merry.

They clapped him on the back, hugged him, and cheered as if nothing happier had ever happened before.

For the life of an orphan on the street, it might have been true.