Chapter 1

I

I sat cross-legged in the darkness, listening to water dripping from the ceiling. The constant plop-plop-plop was hard to tolerate on a normal day. Today, it was an affront to my senses.

I was bored out of my mind, alone, and feeling lonely. My sole source of human contact was absent, summoned by someone as she had been a thousand times before. She had not said anything to me before leaving; I was already in bed trying to sleep when the distinctive sound of the chamber’s main door opening and closing had signalled her departure and driven any thought of sleep from my mind.

I stood up and walked to the living room. Leaving my bedroom would not solve anything, but the ever-burning gas lamps in the other room would at least allow me to read. Reading gave me hope, it helped me tolerate the miasma of despair which was my life. Even though the books I had were not very interesting – the Prince’s library can teach one a lot about the origins of morality and the nature of truth, but there were not many plays or novels lying around – I still turned to reading whenever everything banded together to drive me down the spiral of depression and desperation.

I sat behind my table and resumed reading the book I had left open hours ago. The book was boring, the chapter even worse, the subject mind-numbing. The author, some so-called philosopher who had turned to dust centuries ago, argued that every action of every man was dictated by God, a single omnipotent and omniscient deity that his northern kingdom had worshipped at the time. In the same chapter, the idiot tried to defend punishing criminals.

If the omniscient God knows everything that is going to happen forevermore, then whatever is going to happen has already been written in stone. What would the purpose of punishment be then? What would the purpose of doing anything be?

No wonder the idiots had gone extinct.

Finally, frustration won and I slammed the book closed with a snarl. I was halfway through the damn thing only because the alternatives were worse. Reading an infuriating book for half a day aggravated me far less than thinking about my life for half a minute.

Of course, just because something was aggravating didn’t mean my mind knew enough to stay away from it. Noo ... of course not. The infernal thing had to constantly think about fairness. It had to rage against the circumstances which denied me any semblance of justice, too powerless to do anything about it and too weak to control itself.

I prowled the limits of my cell in rage. Trailing the walls with my hand and striking them with the side of my fist on each step. The walls were coarse stone, rough against the skin. The force of each strike increased as I became angrier, but I did not care about the pain in my hand, nor did I care about the heat of the gas lamps hurting my face as I walked past them. I was used to pain. Pain was power.

Someone opened the chamber’s door. The screeching hinges halted my prowl and I walked to the iron door and single window separating my suite from the rest of the chamber.

“Who is that?” I already knew it was Cathy; the words were meant to let her know I was awake.

“It’s me, Atsa.” She called. “I’m sorry it took so long to get back. Do you want something to eat?”

“No.”

Her return pleased me. My overactive imagination terrorized me whenever I was left alone for too long. Tonight, thoughts of her death and my subsequent starvation in this damp chamber had been particularly prominent.

“Can you tell me where you were Cathy?” I drew out the final vowel of the name; mispronouncing ‘Catherine’ in its various forms annoyed her, and it amused me to do so. I drew a sort of sick pleasure from hurting the only person who cared about me. After all, she was the only one I could hurt.

You see, it’s hard to define power. Some define it as the ability to influence other people’s actions. Others call it the capability to influence the events happening around you. I have a personal definition. Having power is being able to hurt people without being hurt in return. Cathy would never hurt me, she loved me, as a mother or perhaps a friend. But I could hurt her.

“You know I can’t.” Cat stepped into the window’s line of sight. Her red hair clean and straight, as it always was whenever she returned from her forays outside these chambers. Her clothes devoid of their usual stains. She looked tired and sad, avoiding my eyes as she continued. “They don’t allow it.”

We had had this argument a thousand times. I didn’t care for the excuse. “To the abyss with their permission.”

She frowned and walked nearer the window. “Atsa, your hand please.”

I lifted my right hand to the window. Its outer edge scraped raw by the rough stone, blood seeping from the skin, slowly clotting. I didn’t look at her eyes, embarrassed by my predictability.

Her tone was sad when she spoke, throaty, as if she was trying to not cry. “I’ll bring bandages”

Her pity just made me angrier.

II

The next morning, I was not eager to leave my bed.

My residence was a prison. It combined the sick pleasures of solitary confinement with the luxuries of a barracks. It had a living room constantly illuminated by the gas lamps and a damp, insect-ridden bedroom farther back. To make my sleep miserable, my benevolent benefactors had placed a hole in the bedroom floor meant for excrement; the smell suggested that it was filling up. The only pieces of furniture were an old bed too spans short for my height, a table with stacks of books and scrolls scattered across it, and a bare wooden chair close to breaking.

Simply looking at the damned chair made my buttocks hurt.

This luxurious apartment was separated from the world outside by stone walls and a single door. I had never seen it opened in my life. There was a ragged gash in the door, through which my books and food came in. The gash always mocked me. Cathy had told me a story about how my head got stuck in the it when I tried to escape the room as a child; the scars on the back of my head a constant reminder of the costs of escape.

The bedroom was damp, and cramped. Half lit by the light reaching in from the living room, it was a good home for fungi and a rich ecology of crawling insects. I hated the room with a passion. The shadows jumping across the walls; the cockroaches skittering across the floor, their little legs scratching the stone; the nauseating smell of shit; the ceiling weighing down, as if it wanted to choke me; anyone of those by itself was enough to paralyze me with fear. I had slept on the floor of the living room for the first fourteen years of my life, preferring the rough stone to the terrors inside. Going to the shithole was the worst part of each day, dreaded since the moment of waking up.

Great Lady be blessed, the insects avoided light like the plague.

When I was fourteen, I decided to sleep in the bedroom. I didn’t make the decision lightly. But age was changing my understanding of the world, and I’d realized that being afraid was a good way to remain imprisoned forever. I did not want to stay where I was.

It took me fourteen days of shivering in fear, jumping at every sound, before I fell asleep in the room. The experience had been torture, two weeks of not leaving the room, not eating anything, just drinking water and shivering in bed. Cat had begged me to give up, yelled at me for being a stubborn bastard, and cursed me for ignoring her. I had not budged. When I came out of the room after eighteen hours of sleeping, she cried with joy.

The fear didn’t go away, even now the crawling cockroaches made me want to scream and run. But I never slept under the lights again. Fear was power.

My stomach rumbled at the smell of food in the air. I got out of bed and stumbled into the light, yelling, “Morning, Kaytee.”

She yelled her answer from the kitchen, or at least what she called the kitchen, I had never seen it. “Good morning, Atsa.” Irritation tinged her greeting, I congratulated myself on a job well done.