The slums had their own clock.
Not the kind that ticks, but the kind that repeats: dawn smoke, midday shouting, evening silence. I didn't know what day it was most of the time. In the slums, the sun wasn't a promise it was a rumor that slipped through cracks in the roofs.
Mira woke before the noise began. She'd shake my shoulder, half asleep, muttering, "Up, Zero. We've got dirt to scrub before dirt wins."
We washed clothes that weren't ours, for people who never looked at us. Her hands were already swollen from soap burns; mine were just small enough to reach where she couldn't. The buckets smelled of iron and rain. The water was never clean when it started, and black when it ended.
Mira said the rich liked the scent of lilac soap. I didn't know what a lilac was, but I knew that when she mixed the powder in, her eyes softened a little. "Smells like what I used to dream of," she once said. Then she shut her mouth, as if the words had slipped out wrong.
By the time I turned four, I could carry a bucket half my size without spilling. People in the alleys would laugh. "Look at the zero boy, earning his numbers," they'd say. Mira never corrected them. She didn't defend me, but she didn't let me rest either.
"You're small," she said, "but small things last longer. Rats, roaches, weeds they survive what bigger things can't."
I didn't know whether that was comfort or warning.
At the edge of the market, there was a wall the color of dried blood, smooth as bone. On the other side began the merchant district, where clean boots walked and gold mana lamps shone even at noon.
I liked to stand there when Mira wasn't looking, staring through the iron gaps. I could see reflections of light, soft and steady, like another world breathing just beyond reach. Sometimes I saw nobles riding past in lacquered carriages, faces hidden behind glass.
They looked unreal, like painted figures moving inside dreams. Even the air around them seemed clearer.
One day, a boy my age on the noble side dropped a small, round fruit through the gap. It bounced near my feet. Red skin, smooth and shining like a jewel. I didn't move to pick it up.
He stared at me for a heartbeat curiosity, pity, or maybe just amusement then ran off when a maid called his name.
I left the fruit there. Mira later stepped on it, crushed it into the mud, and said, "Don't stare too long at what isn't yours. Makes you forget where you belong."
Her tone wasn't angry. It was tired. Like she'd learned that truth too many times already.
Nights were quieter when the wind blew from the harbor. I'd lie awake, listening to the distant hum of mana engines the sound of ships that never docked near our kind.
Mira sometimes hummed, too. Not songs, exactly, just sounds that drifted between words. I used to think they were lullabies. Later, I realized they were the kind of sounds people make when they're too tired to hope and too proud to beg.
Once, when the rain came early, I asked her, "Why don't we leave here?"
She laughed, not cruelly, but hollow. "Leave to where? Every place has a gutter. We just happen to live in ours."
Then she tossed me an old blanket and turned her back. That was the closest thing I had to a goodnight.
When I was five, I started wandering. Not far just along the alleys where the ground stayed wet and the air smelled of metal. I watched older kids steal, traders cheat, drunks fight. I didn't understand the reasons, but I understood the rhythm. Everyone here was chasing something invisible: food, coin, breath.
One afternoon, I followed a stray cat into a workshop ruin near the canal. Inside, someone had carved strange lines on the walls circles within circles, faded symbols that shimmered faintly when light touched them.
I reached out, tracing one with my finger. The stone was warm. For a moment, the mark glowed faint gold.
Then it went dark again.
I didn't tell Mira. I didn't have words for it yet. But sometimes, when I lay down afterward, I'd feel a faint buzz beneath my skin like a whisper of warmth that didn't belong to the slums.
Market days bled into one another. The same noise, the same sky. But I started noticing things: the way coins sang when dropped, how mana lights flickered when rain hit them, how Mira's hands trembled only when she thought no one was watching.
I watched everything. That was my first talent. Not strength, not speed just watching.
Maybe that's why I still remember one particular morning. Mira was arguing with a merchant, her voice sharp. He threw a copper coin at her feet and spat. She picked it up anyway.
When she saw me looking, she said, "Don't stare at pride when you can eat instead."
Then she handed me half a loaf of stale bread. It was hard as stone, but it was ours.
That night, I ate slowly, trying to remember the taste.
It didn't taste like mercy.
It tasted like surviving another day.
Sometimes I wonder if Mira ever saw me as more than her future investment. Maybe she did, for a heartbeat, before burying the thought. The slums didn't allow softness. It rotted faster than fruit.
Still, on certain nights, when I woke to the sound of her breathing, steady and close, I thought: this must be what belonging almost feels like.
It wasn't love.
But it was something that could fool a child into thinking he mattered.