The rain that night didn't fall it dripped, heavy and slow, like the sky had grown tired of crying.
I don't remember the beginning. Only sound. Cloth soaked in water. The distant clang of iron gates shutting. A woman's voice muttering curses, too low to mean comfort.
They say you remember warmth first the skin that held you, the hand that lifted you. But I remember cold. The kind that lives in bones, not air. The kind that waits.
When she found me, I wasn't even worth a glance. Just a lump in a wet basket beside the gutter where the market runoff turned everything into mud and spoiled fruit. The city lights pale, greenish mana lamps shimmered over the puddles, making the filth glow like something holy.
Mira Miller stopped because she almost tripped over me.
"Damn waste of cloth," she said. Her voice was thin, like the edges of a torn blade. I didn't cry. Maybe I'd already done too much of that before she came. Maybe I was listening.
She looked around, as if checking for someone richer someone who might claim me and make it worth the trouble. No one came.
So she sighed, like people do when they pick up something that isn't theirs but might be useful later. She pulled the rag back from my face. Her hands were cracked from cold and soap. Her eyes weren't cruel just tired.
"Zero," she said.
That was my name. Not because it meant anything kind. She called me that because, in her words, 'you came from nothing, you'll start as nothing.'
She didn't hold me like a mother. She lifted me like someone testing the weight of a coin.
I grew up in the smell of rust and smoke. Mira's home wasn't a home more like the space between other people's homes. Two cracked walls, one patched roof, and a floor that coughed dust every time we moved.
The slums of Alctara never slept, but they never woke either. There was noise, yes hammers, dogs, merchants shouting over rotten vegetables but beneath it all, there was something else. Stillness. Like the whole place was waiting for permission to breathe.
Mira ran a laundry stall near the lower docks. I was her errand boy before I could even lift a bucket. She didn't beat me, but she didn't touch me either. Her kindness came in the form of leftovers. A corner of bread. A drop of soup if she wasn't drinking that night.
She had a husband once, they said. Gone to the mines. No one ever came back from there. She had two sons before me one dead, one run away. Maybe that's why she took me in: habit, or loneliness, or the quiet calculation that I might someday bring in more than I cost.
To the other slum kids, I was "the zero boy." They said Mira found me in the gutter and that my name meant cursed luck. I didn't argue. When you have nothing, even a name like Zero is a kind of ownership.
Sometimes, at night, when Mira snored behind the curtain that divided our space, I would crawl to the roof. From there, I could see the upper district where the mana lamps burned pure blue and the streets were paved with light.
I'd stare until my eyes blurred. I didn't know what I wanted from that sight maybe to be seen, even for a second. Maybe to exist where the light was clear.
When you're born with nothing, you learn early that dreaming is expensive.
Every time I asked about the city beyond the walls, Mira would scoff.
"Only nobles need to see the sun," she'd say. "The rest of us have work."
But there were nights when her voice cracked mid-sentence, like she was remembering something she'd buried under all that dirt. Maybe she had dreams once too.
There was one evening I still see when I close my eyes. The market fires had gone out, and the rain had begun again. Mira sat by the window, counting coins by lantern light. I asked her why she kept me.
She didn't answer right away. She kept counting, licking her thumb, sorting each copper piece.
Finally, she said, "Because someone will always need hands. Yours are small now, but they'll grow. When they do, you'll be worth something."
She said it plain, without cruelty. But I remember how her shadow stretched across the floor, swallowing mine whole.
Years later, when I learned what worth meant when the word slave stopped sounding like someone else's fate I understood Mira better. She didn't see a child. She saw survival.
And in a way, she was right.
The world doesn't care if you're loved. It only counts if you're useful.
Still, when I think back to that night in the rain, I like to imagine she hesitated even for a breath before she took me. Maybe she saw something in my eyes. Maybe just her reflection.
The slums had a way of erasing people, but that night, I was noticed. Not saved. Not cherished. Just noticed.
And that was enough to begin.