Chapter 22 Blood work

The Undercity gave him room now.

Kaizen noticed it the way he noticed everything, without letting it show. A few months ago men twice his size had stepped into his path on instinct, the way you step toward a dropped coin. Now they drifted aside. Nothing you could point at.

He hadn't gotten taller. He'd gotten harder.

The starving had come off him over the cold months, a little at a time, the same way it had gone on. He ate most days now. He trained every one of them, and the work had laid real muscle over a frame that used to be all angles and hunger. His shoulders had filled out. His arms had gone lean and corded where they'd been thin. The hollows were gone from his cheeks, and the face that looked back at him out of puddles and dirty glass wasn't a beggar's face anymore. It was harder to read and harder to push, dark hair shoved back off a sharper jaw, dark eyes set in it that still missed nothing and gave nothing away.

People who used to look at him and see something easy now looked and saw a question they didn't want to answer. That suited him fine. He'd spent his whole life being the easy thing. He had decided, the night his blood turned black, that he was finished with it.

He took the long way up to the roof. Old habit.
Ronny was already there, sat against the chimney with a heel of bread and a wooden practice sword across his knees, looking like a man who'd been waiting exactly long enough to be annoyed about it.

"You're late."

"I'm careful," Kaizen said. "There's a difference."

"There's a difference when you're good enough to be careless and you choose not to be. You're not there yet." Ronny tossed him the bread. "Eat. Then bleed for me."

Kaizen ate first, because Ronny would wait, and because a body that ran on its own blood did better fed than empty. He'd learned that one the hard way.

He channelled his aura and started cuirculatimg it though his aspect core and suddenly in his hand

The blood came up dark and answered him before it had finished welling. That was the part that still put a cold thrill through him every single time. He thought, and it moved. A thread of it lifted off his hand and hung in the air, and at a second thought it drew thin and went hard, and a black needle sat there waiting on nothing but his will.

A few months ago that one needle had taken everything he had.

Now he pulled four.

They rose off his hand in a slow fan, turning, points out. Ronny came up off the chimney, rolled his shoulders, and lifted the wooden sword, and that was all the warning either of them needed.

Kaizen sent the needles.

Ronny's blade moved in short economical arcs, batting them out of the air one after another, and Kaizen was already dragging the spent blood back, calling it home before it could hit the roof and go to waste. It came sluggish, but it came. Reusing it was the whole game. He had only so much to spend, and every drop he couldn't recall was a drop gone for good.

"Closer," Ronny grunted, and closed the distance himself.

Kaizen let the recalled blood pool across his right palm and harden flat and long, a short black blade, rough at the edge but solid. He met Ronny's next cut on it. Wood cracked against hardened blood and held, and the shock ran up his arm, and he felt the new strength in his own body take it, the Stage One fire under his skin that let him stand where the old Kaizen would have been knocked flat on his back.

He turned the blade off, stepped in, fast, faster than he'd ever moved before the Ember caught in him. For half a breath he was inside Ronny's guard.

Then the old guard's boot hooked his ankle and put him down on the stone anyway.

"Speed's nothing without your feet under it," Ronny said, not unkindly, and held out a hand.

Kaizen ignored the hand and rolled up on his own, the way he always did.

They went again, and again. He was better than the awakening night by a long way, and they both knew it, and neither of them said it, which was how the two of them handled most things that mattered.

He tried the shield once.

He pulled a wide sheet of blood up flat between himself and Ronny's overhead swing and willed it hard. It set, and it held for exactly as long as it took the blow to land, and then it cracked clean through the middle and burst apart, and he felt every drop of it leave him at once.

The roof tilted.

He caught himself on one knee. His head had gone light, the edges of his sight gone grey, a cold sweat standing out on him that had nothing to do with the work. He'd spent too much. The shield had eaten more blood in one second than an hour of needles, and his body was already sending him the bill.

Ronny lowered the sword. "And there it is."

"I had it." His voice came out thin.

"You had it for half a heartbeat, and it cost you a pint and your legs." Ronny crouched down so they were eye to eye. "That power runs on you. Forget that once, in a real fight, and you'll win the exchange and then bleed out standing over the body. Tell me you understand."

"I understand it."

"Say it like you believe it."

Kaizen looked up at him, grey in the face, angry in the quiet way that was the only way he ever got. "I bleed out standing over the body," he said. "I understand."

Ronny held his eyes a moment longer, then nodded, stood, and went back to the chimney. He dug a strip of dried meat out of his coat and threw it without a word. Kaizen caught it. Ate it. Felt the floor of the world come back up under him by degrees.

Neither of them said anything about the fact that Ronny carried extra food now, on training days, and had ever since the night the boy nearly killed him and chose not to.

When the dizziness had passed Kaizen stood at the roof's edge and looked out over City B while his body made the blood back.

There was a window across the gap, dead glass in a dead building, and his own shape stood in it. He looked at the boy in the glass for a while. Wider in the shoulder than he remembered agreeing to be. Standing straight, where the old him had walked folded around his own hunger like he was guarding it. A hard kid. The kind of kid the younger Kaizen would have watched from a doorway and waited to let pass.

He'd spent eight years being watched that way. He found he liked the trade.

He wasn't strong yet. He knew exactly how far from strong he was, better than anyone, because he counted it the way he'd once counted his coins, over and over, never trusting the number. Stage One. Beginner. A power he had to keep hidden and a body still a few good meals short of where he wanted it. He held no illusions about any of it.

But he wasn't the thing in the street anymore. He had stopped being prey, and for a boy who had only ever been prey, that was the whole world turning over.

"You're getting noticed," Ronny said behind him.

Kaizen didn't turn. "Noticed how."

"The fights. Six in a row down the pit lanes, clean, no blood tricks, just the kid who used to be easy money making fools out of men who bet against him." Ronny's voice had gone careful. "People are asking who taught you. Where you came from. Marcus Valker's men collect names like that. A strong boy with no house and no one to answer for him is a thing they know how to use."

Kaizen watched the lights of the upper city and said nothing for a moment.

This was the trouble he'd seen coming and let come anyway, because he'd wanted to win more than he'd wanted to stay small. Getting strong and staying invisible pulled in opposite directions, and sooner or later he was going to have to decide which one he could afford to lose.

"Then I stop winning where they're watching," he said.

"Simple as that."

"No." He finally looked back at the old guard, and his face had gone to the flat cold place it went when he was counting moves. "But it holds until I work out the rest."