Thinking about Jayeon biting his mother’s hand reminded Kal of his own tumultuous origins. And Sumba’s activities on Reedfall reminded him that he had his own skeletons hidden beneath its dense canopy.
Jackal was moon-born too—couldn’t hide it, Coyote liked to remind him. It was most evident in his densely freckled complexion and grass-green eyes.
Reedfall, the Emerald of Amun, circled their system’s gas giant—along with its other seven moons—but was by far the largest and the most Cradle-like (if not the most hospitable due to all the megafauna). The moon was covered in megaflora that blocked out the sun across 80% of its surface. The other 20% was given to salt and freshwater, both of which crisscrossed over its ellipsoid face like a beaded lapis and jade veil.
It had been his home for a time.
Then his prison.
After his parents were killed, he'd been given over to a man called Burro who took over his guardianship. He'd effectively been sold. His parents' debts to the state had almost been his, but due to a couple clauses in a will Kal never saw, his life was forever tied to the man from Duat.
Burro took his development and enrichment very seriously. From the age of eight, Kal was schooled in many arts.
The least of them had been deception.
“Everyone with a knife on their neck learns to think fast and talk slow,” Burro was fond of saying with a dry, smoke-burned laugh. “Talking slow will keep you alive a little longer, when thinking fast fails to keep you out of trouble.”
Kal wasn't taught to cut; not in the beginning. Fighting was an idiot's gambit. If you did a job right, it would never come down to a fight.
The old man did eventually teach Kal to cut.
Kal was made to practice on himself.
Then he tried it on Burro.
Burro spoke slowly in the end.
And, true to his tenets, he didn't fight.
It wasn't until after he was dead and Kal’d ripped his mind to pieces that the boy knew who and what the man had really been: a syndicate’s man. A business man's man. A fixer. A problem solver.
A Knife in the Dark.
Bladed.
And on the run, apparently.
But by then, it was too late. Kal had already been neck deep in training for wetware work by then and he'd only just hit puberty—had just found out there was puberty for moon-born like him. No one could undo the damage even if they'd wiped him like a disk and reformatted.
(But they wouldn’t try, because Kal was special.)
Most got bladed when they hit majority, at twenty.
Jackal got his at thirteen.
For all that Burro taught him about winning at any cost, the old man never got around to teaching him how to clean winning up.
The Knives seeking Burro found a feral Fallen kid shoving chunks of his foster father into the apartments' incinerator with a vague look on his face. He hadn't even seemed surprised to see he had visitors.
Kal dreamed of having said something cool like, “Either kill me or recruit me, but don't leave me in suspense.”
What he actually “said” was more like an inarticulate wail of unbottled rage. The memory still made him cringe. He’d brandished claw-like hands, and charged at the half-dozen bladed strangers without weapon or plan.
The six cutters laid him out in as many seconds.
But that he'd survived more than a second impressed the powers that be. The Septet’s Khopesh, the masked leader of the Knives, would meet this child for themself.
The Khopesh liked him.
When Kal next came to, he was banded off-moon, on the largest station in the system: Duat. Thankfully, his parents' debt, and Burro’s betrayal, hadn't followed him.
But his own sins had.
So much for thinking fast, talking slow, and avoiding the gambit. Burro would've been disappointed in the little monster he'd made.
He'd had a normal name before that day. Maybe Demitri or Ja’hala or Yenfri or Abud. Something Lunar and strong; something with a legacy; something that deserved—that was entitled to—a future.
But after getting bladed and receiving his namesake knife, his past was stricken from the systems' records. Little good it did him in the end. A complete do-over was never going to be in the cards. He still had green eyes, still spoke in an alien cadence, still burned under UVs before tanning, still caught himself gazing out unblinded porticos, pining… for what?
He still doesn’t know.
Moon-born, destined to be station-owned.
Demitri or Abud—whoever he'd been—died on Reedfall with that Duati bastard who destroyed his childhood on a whim. And maybe, apart from all his yearning and his eventual escape, it was better to be reforged into something new—something sharp.
Anubis the Knife was born in Duat, fully formed.
No legacy.
No future.
Just another angry god, full of lies, fear, and teeth.
[To Be Continued 7AUG25]
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