The screen appeared the same year he turned nine, bolted to the side of the old factory behind a cage of electrified mesh that hummed and flickered day and night. Thick cables ran to a generator that coughed smoke around the clock, and soldiers surrounded it in helmets that hid their faces, carrying rifles of a kind Ezra hadn't seen before—sleek and black, the kind designed to make distance irrelevant, the kind that meant you were dead before you heard the shot. The crowd gathered because that was what you did when soldiers stood somewhere: you watched, you learned what shape the danger was taking this time, you figured out whether you needed to run or hide or just keep your head down and wait for it to pass.
Ezra watched from his usual alley, the one with the deep shadows and the clear sightlines, the one he'd claimed years ago and never surrendered. Knees pulled to chest. Chin on arms. Invisible, except for the constant growling of his stomach, which he couldn't silence, couldn't control, couldn't do anything about.
The screen crackled. Light flared, white and blinding, making the crowd gasp and step back. An image formed—a man in crisp uniform, his face severe and handsome, his hair pale and perfect, his voice smooth as poisoned steel.
"Citizens of Arkanis. Today, we bring you truth."
The crowd murmured. Even the vendors paused, their hands frozen over their goods. A woman stopped mid-stride, a bundle of stolen cloth under her arm, her eyes fixed on the screen. An old man lowered his cup, the water spilling unheeded down his chin. Children stopped chasing each other and stared, their games forgotten, their mouths open.
Ezra stared too. He couldn't help it. The light, the voice, the image—they demanded attention, demanded belief, demanded something from everyone who saw.
"Our glorious nation fights for peace. For order. For civilization. But there are those who oppose us. Those who hide among us. Those who pretend to be our neighbors while plotting our destruction."
The screen changed.
Images flashed—brown-skinned men with guns, their faces contorted with rage. Women with dark eyes and headscarves, their hands raised in what might have been prayer or might have been threat. Pointed-eared figures lurking in shadows, knives glinting. Wolf-shaped things with bloody muzzles, eyes glowing yellow in the dark. Faces twisted in snarls. Hands dripping blood. Children holding rocks, holding sticks, holding things that could kill.
Just like the posters. But moving. Breathing. Alive. Real in a way the posters had never been.
"They live among you. They walk your streets. They take your jobs. They corrupt your children. And they wait. Always wait. For the moment when Arkanis is weak. When they can strike."
Ezra watched the crowd more than the screen, because something moved through them—shoulders tightening, jaws setting, eyes sliding sideways toward the dark-skinned woman at the bread stall, toward the hooded man hurrying past with his collar up. It was like a ripple in water, like something spreading from person to person, a sickness with no cure, a fever that turned neighbors into enemies and strangers into threats. And he felt it too, which was the worst part: something in his chest went tight, and a voice in his head—his own voice, that was the scary part—whispered that maybe they were right, maybe those people were dangerous, maybe he should keep his distance. He didn't want to feel that, but the whisper didn't stop. It wanted to stay.
"But we are Arkanis. We do not bow. We do not break. We do not forgive."
The cheering started, at first just a few voices—the ones who always cheered, the ones who needed something to believe in the way other people needed food or water—and then more, and then almost everyone, because not cheering was dangerous when everyone else was cheering. The sound pressed against Ezra's chest like something solid, like a wall of hands pushing him backward, and he understood why they cheered even though he hated that he understood. When you're hungry and cold and scared all the time, it feels good to have someone to blame. He'd done it himself, blamed the Arkanian children for having darker hair and the soldiers for having guns and the city for being a stomach. But the screen was telling him who to blame now, and everyone was listening.
"And now—a message for the cowards who hide among us."
The screen shifted.
Then the picture changed. The man disappeared, and in his place was a platform with a man kneeling on it and a soldier behind him holding a long curved blade. Ezra recognized the kneeling man. It was the father from the factory building, the one who used to rest his hand on his oldest child's head, the one whose wife had begged near the market, the one whose children had played in the rubble. He was thinner now, much thinner, with gray at his temples and his hands bound behind his back with something that looked like wire. His shirt was torn, and underneath, his skin was purple and yellow and green with bruises, old and new layered on top of each other like the rings of a tree. He looked straight into the camera, and his eyes weren't full of hate—Ezra had seen hate before, in the faces of the men who'd taken the girl who wasn't his mother, in the faces of the children who'd beaten the werewolf boy, and this wasn't that. This was something quieter and worse: the look of a man who'd known for a long time that this was coming, who'd felt it creeping toward him for months or years, who'd seen the trucks and heard the boots and understood that the city didn't forget. He'd kept working and providing anyway, kept putting food in his children's mouths and his hand on their heads, because what else was there to do.
His lips moved, though Ezra couldn't hear what he said—a name or a prayer or a word that meant something in a language the soldiers didn't speak—and then the blade fell and the crowd cheered louder.
Ezra sat frozen with his hands cold and his chest cold, and he told himself the automatic thought, the safe one: He must have done something. He must have. Why else would they— But he couldn't finish the sentence. He said it again in his head, and the words felt like stones in his mouth. He said it a third time, and they didn't feel like anything at all.
He sat there until the soldiers left and the screen went dark and the people scattered back to their alleys and doorways, their faces flushed with something that looked like satisfaction. Someone swept the ground where the crowd had been, brooms and dust and the careful erasure of anything that might remind you of what you'd done. Then he got up and went looking for food, because that was always the next thing to do, because the Pit didn't stop, because the dead were dead and the living had to keep moving and that was the only rule that had ever mattered.
---
Ezra had been checking his usual spots, working his way through the familiar circuit of alleys and doorways and gutters, looking for anything edible, anything usable, anything that might keep him alive another day—when he smelled it.
He smelled him first—cheap spirits and old sweat and the particular sourness of someone who'd stopped maintaining themselves, the smell of a body giving up, the smell of a person who'd already died and just hadn't stopped breathing yet. The soldier was propped against the wall in a dead-end alley three turns off the main road, the kind of place you went when you didn't want to be found. He still wore his uniform, but it was dirty and torn, and his eyes were red-rimmed and didn't focus quite right. His hands shook constantly, the kind of tremor that came from too much drink or too much memory or both
His face was hard, lined with wrinkles that spoke of years in the sun, years of squinting at horizons, years of something that had worn him down to this. His mouth hung open slightly, as if he'd been doing manual labor all his life and had forgotten how to close it. His teeth were crooked, stained yellow, gaps where some had fallen out. He smelled of tobacco, of old piss, of something rotten that might have been his clothes or might have been him.
.Ezra almost left. Soldiers were danger. Even broken ones. Especially broken ones—they were unpredictable, liable to lash out, liable to see a small boy and decide he was the reason for everything that had gone wrong.
But the man looked up and saw him, and something moved in those red-rimmed eyes—not quite recognition, not quite interest, just the acknowledgement of one piece of rubble for another.
"Hey there, little rat," the man said with a smile that showed his yellowed teeth. "Come to rob me?"
Ezra stayed at the edge of the alley and said nothing, keeping his weight forward and ready to run while he scanned the man's hands—one holding a bottle, the other empty—and his waist for any visible weapon. Nothing left anyway, he realized. War had taken everything else. The man raised the bottle and drank and coughed hard and spat without looking at what came up, something dark and thick, and then he gestured toward the walls with the bottle.
The man laughed. It turned into a cough, then wheezing, then spitting—blood mixed with mucus and something thicker, something that might have been part of a lung. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and grinned again, blood on his teeth now.
"Don't worry. Nothing left to take. They took it all already." He gestured vaguely at nothing, at the air, at the walls of the alley. "The war. The army. My mind. All gone. All taken. Nothing left but this." He raised the bottle. "And this won't last much longer."
He didn't.
The man patted the ground beside him, his eyes gleaming with an emotion Ezra couldn't describe—but he recognized it, recognized it in his bones, in the dark place where he kept the things he couldn't feel. It was the same look the men had given his mother's corpse after they found her. The same look. The same hunger, maybe, or the same loneliness, or the same need to touch something warm.
"Sit. Sit. I won't bite."
Ezra didn't sit. But he didn't run either. He stood at the edge of the alley, in the shadow where the light didn't reach, and he watched.
The man drank. Wiped his mouth again. Leaned back against the wall, exhaled with a few coughs and rattles that shook his whole chest. Looked at Ezra with eyes that had seen too much, too many things, too many years of things no one should see. Eyes that were unfocused, swimming, not quite seeing what was in front of them.
"You know what's out there, little rat? Beyond the Pit? Beyond the capital? Beyond the walls that keep us contained here?" He paused, took another drink. "Have you ever seen the ocean?"
The word ocean was foreign. Ezra tasted it on his tongue, rolled it around, tried to find meaning in it. The walls were always there, surrounding the Pit, visible from any high point, gray and endless and impassable. He'd never thought about what lay beyond. Never had reason to.
Sometimes, when he climbed high enough—onto the factory roof, onto the highest piles of rubble—he could see them. The walls. Gray stone, seamless, stretching in both directions until they disappeared into haze. He'd never touched them—they were too far, too guarded, too well-patrolled. But he knew they were there. Everyone knew.
The walls were as much a part of the Pit as the hunger, as the cold, as the constant fear.
The world ended at the walls. Everything beyond was rumor. Stories. Things the soldiers talked about when they thought no one was listening.
Ezra shook his head.
"The Sultanates." The man spat the word like poison, like it burned his mouth to say it. "Sand and blood and sand walkers. That's what's out there. Endless sand. Endless sun. Endless people who want nothing but to see us dead."
He drank again, long and deep, emptying half the bottle in one go.
"Savages," he muttered. The word came out thick, slurred. "The whole lot of them. They live in filth. Worship dirt. Kill each other for fun." His voice was sharp despite the slurring, the words practiced, repeated, drilled into him until they were as natural as breathing. "They don't value life like we do. Don't value anything. Just their sand and their false gods and their hatred of everything decent."
Ezra listened. The words were familiar. The posters. The screens. The soldiers on rotation, saying the same things in the same ways. The crowd's cheers when the blade fell. The woman with dark skin buying bread, walking away, not running, just walking.
But the man's hands were shaking. His eyes were wet—not just from the drink, but wet in a way that meant something else, something deeper. Tears, maybe. Or the memory of tears.
"I killed so many of them," he whispered. His voice cracked on the words, broke apart and came back together. "So many. And you know what? They kept coming. Kept fighting. Kept dying. Like animals. Like they didn't even care." He looked at his hands, those shaking hands, and his face twisted. "They weren't even human. They wouldn't die like normal men. You'd shoot them and they'd keep coming, keep fighting, keep trying to kill you. It was as if they were supernatural. Monsters, I tell you. Monsters."
He looked at Ezra. His face twisted again—agony, rage, something in between, something that was both and neither.
"They enjoy it, you know. The fighting. The dying. They raise their children to hate us. To kill us. To sacrifice themselves up for their god." He laughed, bitter and broken, a sound that was more sob than laugh. "We're doing them a favour. Putting them down. Putting them out of their misery. That's what they tell us. That's what I told myself. Every time. Every single time."
Ezra's heart beat faster. He didn't know what to believe. The man's words were the same as the posters, the same as the screens, the same as everything Ezra had ever been told.
But his eyes—his eyes were full of something else. Pain. Fear. Something broken that couldn't be fixed.
"How do you know?" Ezra whispered. The words came out before he could stop them, before he could push them back down into the dark place where they belonged.
The man stared at him. Blinked. For a moment, his eyes focused—really focused, really saw Ezra, really registered the small boy in the shadows.
"How do I know what?"
"How do you know they're like that? That they enjoy it? That they're monsters?"
The man was quiet for a long moment. His face did something complicated—confusion, memory, something that might have been doubt, might have been the first stirring of an old thought he'd buried long ago. Then he laughed again—a horrible sound, half-sob, half-hysteric, a sound that belonged in a place even darker than the Pit.
"Because that's what they told me." His voice was different now—quieter, more present, less slurred. "That's what they always tell us. Before they send us there. Before they put guns in our hands and point us at the enemy." He held up his shaking hands, stared at them like they belonged to someone else. "They tell us they're savages. Animals. Less than human. So it's easier to pull the trigger."
He lowered his hands. Stared at them.
"But I saw their faces, little rat." His voice was very quiet now. "And they looked like people. They looked like my neighbors, my friends, my—" He stopped. Swallowed. "They looked like people. And they kept coming. No matter how many I shot. They kept coming."
He shook his head, hard, like he was trying to throw something off.
"I don't know what I saw anymore. I don't know anything. I just know I can't stop seeing them. Even now. Even here. They're everywhere."
He raised the bottle. Drank until it was empty. Then he let it fall, glass shattering on stone, pieces scattering in the dim light.
"Doesn't matter," he slurred, the moment of clarity gone, swallowed by the drink or by something else. "Savages or not. Animals or not. Dead is dead. And I'm the one who has to live with it."
His eyes closed and his breathing slowed and his head tilted back against the wall, and for a moment Ezra thought he was dead before his chest rose again. Just asleep, or passed out. Same thing down here.
Ezra waited, but the question was still there—how do you know—and no answer was coming. Not from the man, not from the screen, not from anyone. He understood now that maybe that was the point: some questions weren't there to be answered. They were just there to make you uncomfortable enough to stop accepting the comfortable answer, the one they gave you, the one that made pulling the trigger easier.
He turned and walked out of the alley. Above him, through gaps in the rooftops, the walls were visible, gray and endless, the same as always. He'd looked at them his whole life without wondering what was on the other side—they were just the shape of the world, the edge of everything, the place beyond which nothing he knew about existed. But he looked at them now and wondered for the first time what was out there and whether the man on the screen was lying and whether the soldier in the alley was lying too, to himself mostly, and who had told him what to believe and when and whether he'd ever had a choice.
Then he went looking for food, because priorities were priorities.