Yf Split City

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 · 1,540 words

# Chapter 1: The Tannery Orphan

The tannery stank of urine and rot.

Kael worked the scraping knife down the length of a cowhide, his cracked hands pressing the blade flat against the wet skin. The foreman's voice carried across the floor, shouting at someone two stations down. Kael didn't look up. He'd learned young that looking up meant you weren't working, and not working meant you didn't eat.

The hide slid against the wooden frame, heavy with chemical soak. Bark-tannin stung the cuts on his fingers. He didn't flinch. None of them flinched anymore. The old men with their lungs full of dust, the boys his own age with skin gone gray from the fumes — they all just kept working. The tannery took what it wanted. You gave it or you left. There was nowhere to go if you left.

"Boy."

Kael kept scraping. The foreman's shadow fell across his workbench.

"Boy." Louder.

He stopped. Looked up.

The foreman stood with his arms crossed, a thick man with leather-browned skin and eyes that never quite focused on you. He was looking past Kael, at the stack of untreated hides in the corner.

"Those need soaking. Now."

Kael nodded. Set down his knife. Moved to the stack.

He was seventeen, though you wouldn't know it from his size. The other workers had stopped calling him an orphan years ago. It wasn't kindness. It was because the words weren't worth the breath. He was just another body on the floor, doing what bodies did.

The hides were heavy. He carried them one by one to the soaking pits, his boots slipping on the wet stone. The chemical smell made his eyes water, but he'd stopped noticing that too. His mind drifted to a quiet place, the only kind he knew, where nothing expected anything from him.

A hand shoved him from behind.

Kael stumbled, caught himself on the edge of the pit. The hide slid in with a splash that sent chemical water up his arms. He didn't turn around. Behind him, laughter.

"Careful, boy. Wouldn't want you to drown in three inches of piss-water."

He pulled the hide into position. His hands were shaking, but not from fear. From the cold. The pits were always cold.

Something warm flickered in his left hand.

He flexed his fingers. Nothing. Just the usual ache in his joints, the stiffness that came from working the knife all day. He pressed his thumb against his palm. The warmth was gone.

Back to work.

---

The mark came without warning.

Kael was stacking treated hides when the heat bloomed in the back of his left hand. It went deeper than friction or effort. A bone-level warmth spread through his hand until his fingers went numb. He dropped the hide he was carrying.

He looked down.

The skin on the back of his hand was changing. Dark lines appeared beneath the surface, branching outward from his knuckles to his wrist. They moved. They crept outward in visible increments. Something alive was pushing its way through his flesh.

His heart hammered. He looked around.

The foreman was arguing with a merchant near the door. Two workers were hauling a rack of skins to the drying yard. No one was looking at him. No one ever looked at him.

He pressed his left hand against his thigh, hiding the mark. His hands wouldn't stop trembling.

A subsonic hum started behind his eyes. It wasn't a sound. It was a vibration, something felt in the bones rather than heard. Text flashed across his vision — two words, sharp and clear for a single heartbeat: *Colony Consciousness*. Then the text shattered. Letters scrambled, rearranged, dissolved into symbols he'd never seen. He squinted, tried to catch another fragment, tried to hold on to any meaning. Only the impression of words remained, a sense of status, of something trying to communicate in a language his brain couldn't parse.

Then it was gone.

He stood there, breathing hard, his left hand still pressed against his leg. The heat hadn't faded. If anything, it was growing stronger.

He glanced at the nearest worker, a broad-shouldered man stripping a hide three stations over. The man didn't look up. None of them ever looked. Whatever had just happened to him, whatever words had burned across his vision, no one else had seen. The System's text was private. Everyone knew that. But the mark on his hand wasn't private. If anyone saw those lines spreading under his skin, they'd know.

He knew what this was. Everyone knew. The System awakened people, gave them Classes, marked them with the signs of their trade and power. Boys his age had been awakening for years. At sixteen, the standard age, the mark would appear, the text would flash, and you'd know what you were. Farmer. Blacksmith. Guard. Something.

But he was seventeen. This was late. Wrong.

And the text had been garbled. He'd seen *Colony Consciousness*. He was sure of that much. But the rest had dissolved before he could read it. The System itself seemed confused.

"Boy!"

The foreman's voice. Kael's head snapped up.

"Those hides aren't going to stack themselves. Move."

Kael didn't answer. He was staring at his hand, at the dark lines still spreading beneath his skin.

"Boy!" Louder now. Angry.

He forced his legs to move. Forced himself to turn back to the workbench. His heart was beating so hard he could feel it in his teeth.

A target. That's what this was.

---

The waste-pit was behind the tannery, a narrow alley between the main building and the chemical storage shed. The ground was slick with runoff, and the smell of sour chemicals made Kael's eyes water. He didn't care. He needed somewhere quiet.

He leaned against the stone wall, his breath coming in short gasps. The tannery's sounds faded. The scraping, the shouting, the rhythm of labor. Here there was only the drip of chemical water and the distant cry of a gull.

His left hand was still burning.

He held it up in the dim light. The mark was there. Dark, branching, unmistakable. It had stopped spreading, but the lines were thicker now, more defined. He pressed his thumb against it. The warmth pushed back.

Kael closed his eyes. His mind was racing, but something was cutting through the fear. A stubborn, almost angry need to understand. He didn't know what this was. But he refused to be afraid of it without knowing why.

The last time he'd shown someone something different, the foreman had taken his dinner for a week. That was the lesson he'd learned. That was all.

He opened his eyes. The mark was still there.

And now a faint pulse. Rhythmic. Like a heartbeat that wasn't his.

---

Something in the Blood

Kael sat in the waste-pit for a long time.

The pulse grew from his hand into his wrist, his elbow, his shoulder. When he pressed his thumb against it, something pushed back. Alive under the surface. Something trying to get out.

Another flash of text burned across his vision. Briefer this time, but the letters held their shape long enough to read:

*Status: Dormant — First Blood-Link Required.*

Beneath the words, a sensation he couldn't name. A pull. A hunger. As if his blood was reaching for something, straining toward a connection he couldn't see.

His thumb wouldn't stop rubbing the mark raw. His breath came in short pulls that tasted like chemicals. He closed his eyes and saw the text behind his eyelids. Opened them and it was still there, burned into his vision like an afterimage. The words meant nothing to him. He'd never heard of a Class called Colony Consciousness. Never heard of any Class that needed a blood-link.

"What is this?" he whispered.

The words came out louder than he intended. He clamped his mouth shut, looked around. The alley was empty. The tannery continued its work, oblivious.

He looked back at his hand. The lines were thicker now, darker than before.

A blood-link. The late awakening. The garbled text. None of it made sense.

For a moment, he thought about going back. About finding the foreman, or one of the older workers, and showing them his hand. Asking what it meant. The thought was so foreign it almost made him laugh. You didn't show people things like this. You didn't ask. Asking meant admitting you were different, and different meant dangerous.

But something in him had shifted. The numbness that had wrapped around him for years, the careful nothingness that kept him safe, was cracking. What replaced it was terrified curiosity.

He was still afraid. But for the first time in a long time, he wanted to know.

Footsteps sounded from the tannery. Voices. Someone was looking for him.

Kael shoved his left hand into his pocket. The mark burned against the fabric. He stood, his legs stiff from the cold stone.

He walked back toward the tannery, toward the work that waited, toward the foreman who would shout and the workers who would shove. The mark pulsed against his pocket with every step. He kept his hand over it all the way back to the floor.