At four, Sid could speak in full sentences.
This should have been a relief. He had spent three years with his thoughts locked behind a vocabulary that couldn't contain them, watching the world through the bars of a toddler's linguistic limitations, and the gradual opening of language felt like windows being unboarded one by one — each new word a small increment of freedom.
What he discovered when the windows opened was that he still couldn't say most of what he thought.
Not because of vocabulary anymore. Because of audience.
There was nobody to say it to. Nina would worry. Danny was four — their internal Danny, the real Danny, two years Sid's junior and already a small warm presence in the bloc's social life, already collecting people the way he collected interesting stones, already the boy everyone in the lane liked without quite knowing why. Danny was not a conversational partner for the things in Sid's head. Zara was one and mostly interested in putting things in her mouth.
So, he spoke when necessary and thought in silence the rest of the time and managed his situation with the practised interiority of someone who had always conducted their most important business behind their own face.
He began going outside alone at four.
Not far — the building's external staircase and the immediate lane, within sight of the curtain-door if Nina was home. But alone, for the first time, without Nina's hand or Danny's small shadow, just Sid in the lane observing.
The Ash in full was louder and more complex than the filtered version he'd seen through windows and on supervised outings. The lanes were constantly occupied — vendors, residents, children navigating the geography they'd grown up memorising, the older boys from the building three doors down who occupied the intersection in the afternoons with the easy authority of those who had claimed it through repetition. The smells were layered: cooking and damp and metal and the mineral edge of the water point and something underneath all of it that had no name but meant survival conducted over a long time in insufficient conditions.
He observed without engaging. He was a small, serious, large-eyed child standing slightly apart from whatever was happening, watching. Adults filtered him out — children below a certain useful threshold were invisible to most adults in the Ash, which meant he could watch without being watched.
He watched Marta hold her morning meetings at the standpipe wall. He watched the information exchange that happened at the market, not just the goods changing hands but the news, the whispers, the carefully calibrated sharing of intelligence between people who trusted each other precisely enough and no further. He watched the Ironback scouts who came through Bloc Seven on irregular schedules, making sure everyone knew they could.
He watched and he mapped and he hated it.
He hated the smallness of the scale. He hated that the most sophisticated operation he could see from where he stood was Marta's bloc governance — admirable in its way, he could see that, could see the competence and the care — but so small. So bounded by the Ash's walls. So entirely contained within a system that existed only because someone above the Gold Gate had decided to build a checkpoint and staff it and call it a border.
He hated that this was his life. That this small, contained, insufficient world was what he'd been given.
He stood in the lane and hated it with the focused, resentful energy of a man who has lost everything and blames the world for the loss, and he watched Danny emerge from their building and begin immediately collecting people — two girls from the floor above, the boy with the wire figures, a smaller child who had been crying alone near the standpipe and was now not crying because Danny had sat next to him — and thought: pointless. Thought: a waste of energy. Thought: none of these matters.
He was wrong.
He was so comprehensively wrong that the wrongness would take a specific event to correct, and the event would cost more than any correction should ever cost.
But that was coming. Not yet. For now, he stood in the lane and was four years old and hateful and waiting, and Danny gathered his small, scattered community around him in the afternoon light, and none of them knew what was coming.
There was a boy called Prem who lived two floors up.
He was six to Sid's four, sharp-faced and quick, with the quality of a child who has learned to be useful as a survival strategy and has discovered, in the process, that being useful is also interesting. He ran small errands for building residents. He knew which stalls in the market were honest and which were' t. He had a mental map of the bloc's movement patterns that was, for a six-year-old, impressively accurate.
He noticed Sid watching from the lane.
He came over one afternoon with the directness of a child who doesn't see the point in approaching obliquely. "You're the one who never plays," he said.
"Yes," Sid said.
"Why?"
"I'm busy."
Prem looked at him. At the lane. At the group of children twenty metres away from whom Sid was conspicuously separate. "You're watching them," he said. "What are you watching for?"
Sid considered whether to answer. Then: "Patterns. How things work. Who talks to whom and why."
Prem was quiet for a moment. Then he sat down on the step next to Sid, looking out at the same lane. "Breslin in the north market," he said after a moment. "He's the one to talk to if you want to know something. He collects information. Trades it."
"I know," Sid said. He had observed Breslin three weeks ago and reached the same conclusion.
"Oh." Prem seemed mildly impressed. "You're strange," he said, in the neutral tone of a child making an accurate observation without editorial intent.
"Yes," Sid agreed.
They sat on the step in companionable non-companionship — neither of them needing the other to be there, neither of them asking the other to leave. Below them the lane went about its business. Danny's small cluster of recovered children was playing some game that seemed to involve a lot of running and no clear winner.
Sid watched and thought and hated everything.
Prem sat beside him and watched the same lane and thought his own thoughts.
It was, in retrospect, the beginning of something. Though neither of them would have described it that way at the time.