New York, December 25, 1996. A night cold enough to turn breath to glass.
Not all of us are born equal. Some arrive fleet of foot, some with beauty, strength, or the soft cushion of privilege. Most do not. Most are pressed into the vast crowd—anonymous, ordinary, meant to lift the few who stand above. And some arrive with nothing: no name, no home, no hands to hold them. Their privilege is concrete.
In an alley off a street that never quite sleeps, a baby lay in a cardboard manger beneath a leaking fire escape. Snow gathered in the corrugations like pale ash. Sirens far off, a taxi horn, a drunk's laugh—the sounds came and went as if the world were turning past him rather than around him.
He opened his eyes for the first time. Ice-blue, the color of winter windows, they found a world that answered with darkness. Cold came first—cold and hunger—two sharp tutors that would teach him more faithfully than any saint.
Then, from nowhere, a voice inside the new silence: low, final, as if it had been waiting in the marrow of the night.
You may have anything—if you're willing to sacrifice everything to get it. But at birth you have nothing. Your birthright is dirt.
No one else heard it. The city didn't pause. Steam kept blooming from the grates. Somewhere, a church bell counted the hour and let it go.
Footsteps scraped at the mouth of the alley. A shape padded in before the person did—an old sheepdog, coat matted, face greyed, moving with a tired purpose. The dog nosed the box, circled, and lay down against the child, ribcage to ribcage, warmth given without negotiation. The baby quieted, pressed to the animal's rough heat.
"Sheepy!" a woman called, voice thinned by hunger. She followed the dog into the dark: a scarecrow in a thrift-store coat, cheekbones too sharp for her face, eyes rimmed red by cold and the city's long, indifferent weeks. She crouched, saw the child, and for a moment her mouth opened like a door she'd forgotten was there.
She did not take him to a hospital. She did not dial anyone. She gathered the box, the dog, and the impossible weight of a choice, and she disappeared into the city's underworld, where the pipes hummed and rattled and the rats lived like rumors.
Beneath the streets, the tunnels breathed—warm, wet, metallic.
Trains swept past like iron weather. She found a pocket of concrete between a maintenance room and a dead conduit and made a life there—because life insists.
She had recently lost a child of her own, swallowed by illness and bad luck—two names for the same thing when you're poor. On that Christmas night she named this one Genesis, because it felt like defiance, and because beginnings sometimes come wearing the clothes of last chances.
She fed him from her body. The dog kept watch, a whiskered sentinel with a soldier's patience.
Time slid forward in the hum of stolen bulbs and dripping pipes. Genesis learned first on his belly, then on his knees, then on his feet—chasing rats that scattered like laughter. He learned the city by vibration: the shudder of rails, the rush of air that came before a train, the way a certain pitch in the pipes meant safety or warning. He learned the difference between the drip that promised water and the one that tasted of rust.
He said his first words to the dog. He called the woman mama and believed the tunnels were the whole of what a world could be—close, loud, and, most importantly, safe.
But the voice that had greeted him at the start never truly left. It waited like a rule beneath all the other rules. When the bulbs flickered, he felt it. When he balanced on the narrow lip of a service curb, he felt it. When hunger returned, it whispered without sound:
Anything, it promised. For everything.
Almost five years later, the promise called in its first price.
The old sheepdog began to shake. His hind legs failed him like a staircase missing steps, and he folded to the concrete with a soft, baffled whine. The woman tried—God, she tried—warming towels over a steam line, wetting her fingers and touching them to his gums, murmuring words that belonged to churches and kitchens and better rooms. The dog's eyes followed her, grateful and already far away.
Genesis didn't understand. He stood just beyond the halo of a flickering bulb, small hands on the cold rail of a maintenance ladder, watching as the dog's ribs lifted and fell, lifted and fell, then rustled like paper in a draft. He had no word for dying. He only knew his world was coming loose.
The woman's hands trembled around a thin rectangle of hope: a lottery ticket, creased and smudged, numbers in tight black ranks. She called it a miracle she didn't deserve. She called it their chance. Genesis only knew it was paper, and paper could burn.
"Just a moment, baby. I'll be right back—real soon." Pity moved over her face and stayed there. She slid the ticket into her sleeve, kissed his hair, and climbed the iron rungs toward the hatch. Up there the light was a different substance altogether—bright, devouring. When she opened the grate, the glow swallowed her. The cover clanged shut like a sentence.
The dog's breathing slowed. Genesis scooted closer, laid his cheek against the matted fur, and listened to a heart do its last work. He whispered the few words he owned, most of them the dog's name. Hours stretched long and thin. A train roared by and dragged the heat with it. When silence settled again, it wasn't the same silence.
Above, a cashier ran numbers that aligned like planets. Bells rang that had nothing to do with churches. Under fluorescent light, the woman stood inside impossible arithmetic and, for a second, saw the tunnel—the boy's ice-blue eyes, the dog's failing breath, the nest of blankets warmed by stolen bulbs. Then the city unfurled: glass towers like promises, steam curling from street grates, doors that opened if you pressed the right buttons. A cleaner beginning, if she could step into it.
She understood—dimly and then all at once—that she had stolen the boy the way the city had stolen her: not with malice, but with need. If anyone asked where he was, there would be trouble. If she kept him, there would be questions she could not survive. If she left—if she left—there would be money and rooms with doors that locked and mornings with light that didn't hum.
Greed isn't always loud. Sometimes it is only a turning away.
She did not go back.
In the tunnel, the dog's chest stopped moving. Genesis waited for it to start again. He waited until waiting turned into night and night into cold and cold into the ache that lives in bones. Hunger found him the way water finds the lowest place. He curled around what warmth was left, then rose when that, too, became memory.
What now? He didn't have the shape of the question, only the pressure of it. The hatch above might as well have been the sky. The tunnels went on forever, full of rats and rails and the faint trace of her. He listened for footsteps that never came, for a voice that had already chosen silence.
Anything, for everything, the voice said again—no threat, no comfort, only law.
He understood one thing: no one was coming. Not the woman with the soft hands and shaking eyes. Not the dog. Not luck, except the kind you make with your hands and your hunger. He looked once more at the place where the dog had lain, at the ladder with its cold rungs, at the dark that had always been his first inheritance.
Then he moved.
The dog could not stay. Rot made smell. Smell made attention. Attention killed. He dragged the old body to the grate, small hands locked in the matted ruff, heels slipping on damp concrete. His shoulders burned; he grunted and kept going. When the weight tipped, the dog slid into the slow brown water with a hush like someone folding a blanket. Fur sank, rose, and drifted on. Rats watched from the lip, whiskers tasting the new story, then followed.
A tear beaded, caught the light of the swinging bulb, and broke. He wiped it fast with his hoodie's cuff, angry at his own face for leaking. Cold again. Work again.
Home was a pocket between a dead conduit and a locked maintenance door—concrete floor, split foam mat, one milk crate, a blanket that held the dog's ghost. A steam riser hissed along the wall; when trains passed, warmth came and went like weather. The stolen bulb on its wire flickered like a tired star. Beyond the partition, the rails sang and rattled. The world above spoke through the bones of the underground.
He opened the milk crate: a tin with an old label, bread gone to rock, apple skins angry with rot. He could eat that and be sick, or he could be clever the way the woman taught him: make small food into bigger food. He chose clever.
He took the bent pipe—the one the woman had swung at men who looked too long—and padded to the vent where a narrow pipe opened into dark. He set a thumb-sized breadcrumb at the lip and crouched, pipe raised, eyes level with the hole.
Waiting was cold work. Hands cramped. Legs shook. Hunger drew knife-lines under his ribs. He counted to ten because ten was where numbers ended, then started again. He watched the mouth of the pipe until watching became seeing.
Whiskers. A sniff. A slick head, bright eyes. The rat tested the bread three times, practiced doubt like a religion, then committed—neat forepaws on the edge as it chewed. He let it take two chews. The third was his.
He did not hesitate.
Iron met bone. A squeal tore the quiet. It writhed; he struck again. The third blow broke the small thing that kept it moving. It went still, mouth open on the last lesson.
Cold blue-white letters climbed the dark behind his eyes. A voice came with them—dry, clipped, certain—as if it had been waiting five years in the quiet parts of him.
> FIRST BLOOD.
SOUL SYSTEM: ACTIVATED.
Congratulations—upgraded from prey.
PAYOUT: +5 SP | Target: Rat (wild) — direct. Transaction complete.
CLASS ANALYSIS: small frame; stealth bias; tool use under stress.
CLASS: ROGUE — Level 1 confirmed.
ATTRIBUTES ONLINE: Strength · Toughness · Dexterity · Perception.
INTEGRATION: begin. Side effects: warmth; repair; hunger damped; motor control sharpened.
Welcome to the economy of death.
Heat unfurled through him, as if someone had opened a hidden door inside his bones. Muscles drew tight and clean beneath the rags; tendons found their grooves; joints locked true. Skin prickled, then steadied. Cold pressed against him and slid off. The bulb's flicker became timing; the drip in the corner, a count; the draft under the door, a map.
Pain stepped back. Exhaustion loosened its grip. The pipe felt lighter—not because it was, but because his hands had become better tools.
He touched his ribs through the hoodie and felt cords where there had been wires, a low armor waking under the skin. Toughness whispered behind the breastbone: less breaking, quicker mending, longer before sleep.
Perception widened; there were four different notes in the rail-song and now he could separate them. Dexterity hummed in his fingers; they wanted to move like they already knew the trick. Strength sat in his shoulders like something he could stand on.
He didn't have words for any of it. He had a body for it.
Work again. Food.
He skinned the rat with a shard of bottle glass, peeled what he could, laid meat on the steam riser, and turned it with the shard and a bent fork from the crate. The sizzling was thin and wrong, but it pushed the tunnel's chill out of the flesh. Fire would have eaten his bed or choked the room; the pipe would be his stove. He ate—quick, careful—but it was hardly enough, hardly satisfying. Eating the rat was like iron touching his tongue; warmth settled low like a coal.
Soon he stood and went hunting again—hoping the warmth would come back, hoping to understand the voice and what it wanted.
Movement flashed at the baseboard seam: a cockroach jittering toward crumbs from the rat kill, its armor clicking as it moved. Another chance. He slipped closer, lifted the pipe, and tapped once—exact, too hard. Pain rang up his arms. The roach's legs quit instantly. His new strength was real.
> CONFIRMED.
Target: cockroach. +0.01 SP. Transaction complete.
Nothing changed this time. No heat, no easing of aches—only the dry whisper and a mark he couldn't read. He didn't know numbers, not really, but he knew small when he felt it. This was small.
Hunger told him to move. He slid along the wall, checked seams under pipes, the damp shelf by the valve, the paper nests behind the crate. Tap. Tap. Tap. Roaches bucked under the bent pipe and went still. More messages came.
> +0.10 SP.
> +0.02 SP.
> +0.03 SP.
Still small. Numbers that didn't change anything he could feel. He didn't know what SP meant, only that more seemed better—and that he needed bigger numbers than this.
He tried to eat a few roaches anyway, to quiet the gnawing. The taste was a dare gone wrong—burnt shell and old sink. His stomach rolled. He spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Not this. He needed food, not punishment.
Rats again, then. Down here, there wasn't much else he could catch.
He went back to where he had killed the first one, cleaned the vent's lip with his sleeve, pinched off the last decent crumb, and waited—breath tracking the train above, eyes leveled with the black circle. When whiskers tested air, his hands didn't tremble. He let the head come farther this time, watched the paws commit, and brought the pipe down like a door deciding to close. One clean hit.
> CONFIRMED.
Target: Rat (wild) — +3 SP. Size: small. Status: solitary. Transaction complete.
The number felt wrong. He stared at his fingers and counted the only way he knew: one, two, three. Earlier the voice had felt bigger—more than three. He spread his hand wider. Four, five. The first rat had been that many. This one was less. Even without numbers, the logic was simple as a bruise: bigger lives pay more; smaller lives pay less.
He set the bait again and waited. The next strike missed. Iron met concrete, ringing his arms. The rat screamed and vanished. Another came soon. Too soon. He swung and hit nothing but dust. The tunnel was teaching him, refusing him in the same breath.
He ate the small rat he'd caught. Steam-coiled meat, turned with a glass shard. It warmed him, but not enough. The undercooked tang made his gut mutter and clench. He felt sick as he crawled onto his mat, dog's blanket over his knees. The pipes hissed; distant trains rattled. That was his good-night's lullaby. Hunger stayed—a stone where his stomach should be.
He drifted into a restless sleep. In his dreams: food, warmth, and the voice that spoke more than anyone ever had.
If he remembered correctly, it was called the Soul System. Thinking the words made a menu breathe awake—not in the air, but behind his eyes. Blue squares snapped into place: status, abilities, store, and under the store, many more. He couldn't read, but the System set little pictures beside the marks, and pictures he understood. When he imagined bread, the store pulsed; when he imagined meat, it bloomed.
Images arranged themselves: an apple, a chocolate bar, a sandwich, an egg, a steaming tray icon—enough to make his mouth water even asleep. Most were grayed out, heavy with marks he did not have.
Then he saw it: pizza. A hot circle with pale moons of cheese. Marks sat beside each picture—different kinds, different sizes—most of them gray. He hadn't known there were so many kinds of pizza. He only knew the kinds people threw away, the crusts from the curb, the paper-cold slices. Once, mama had brought something good from above, but most times she ate first and he got what was left when it went cold. He still remembered the slightly burnt fries from McDonald's—burnt, yes, and cold, but to him they were treasure. He thought more and the menu slid to other foods.
> BASIC GOODS → FOOD
Chocolate bar — 1 SP
Deli sandwich (basic) — 5–6 SP
Hot food tray (single portion) — 5–8 SP
Cheese slice (hot) — 2 SP
Small cheese pie (8 slices) — 7 SP — PROMO.
He didn't know what to pick. There were too many options. He only knew the feeling—the shorter mark meant possible, and the gray ones were too high, too far. His balance showed eight of something. He couldn't understand the rest of the numbers after eight, but the weight of enough sat there.
> Confirm purchase? SMALL CHEESE PIE — 7 SP.
SAFETY LOCK: ON. Require assent (say/think "yes").
"...yes," he breathed, half-asleep.
The air hiccuped—ghost-white flash—and weight thumped onto his hoodie.
Heat hit first, then smell. It was the richest thing he had ever known—cheese, bread, oil, all at once, thick enough to break him open. The thing he had only seen through glass and distance now sat on his stomach, boxless, hot, fragrant in a way no rat or roach could ever be. Grease mapped his ribs through the cloth. He stared, not daring to blink, then sat up fully awake, mouth already wet.
He didn't bless it. He didn't question it. He ate.
The first bite was heat and salt and the polite sweetness of cheap sauce—five-star perfection to him. The second bite came in a flash. The third loosened something deep inside that had been clenched forever. For the first time he could remember, real food—warm, seasoned, alive—filled his stomach.
He didn't read the math of what he'd spent or how much was left. He only knew a truth simple enough to carve into bone: he killed, he ate. Points became food. Food became warmth. Warmth meant life.
Kill → Points → Food.
He didn't need to chew roaches anymore. He didn't need to worship grease lines under dumpsters. He could hunt, choose, and live.
When the pizza was gone, he licked his fingers, then pressed them to his hoodie, inhaling the leftover smell as if it might stay. For the first time he could remember, a small, real smile came to his face. He felt full.
He slept with the scent still clinging to him and dreamed of endless pizza—guarded like treasure by a dog that wasn't there anymore.
The System said nothing more. It didn't praise. It didn't comfort. It simply recorded—value in, value out—and waited to see what he would do next.
Above, in a taxi headed for the airport, a young woman looked back at the city. She had cared for the boy almost five years. Tears touched her brown eyes as she flipped her dark hair back and whispered a goodbye to the skyline of New York, bound for Paris and her clean beginning.
Below, the boy slept. He dreamed of food, of warmth, of the new word the voice had given him—First Blood—and wondered, in his child's way, what it truly meant.