Sunny stared at Caster with a grim expression. Despite the amiable smile and reassuring voice, he knew what the handsome Legacy was doing.
He grew up in the outskirts, after all.
Caster had said “I will help you.”
But what he actually meant was “I will own you.”
Because there was no better leverage than a gruesome secret. This help of his was going to come at a price.
But what choice did Sunny have, really? Unless he was ready to fight and kill Caster right there and then, thus silencing the only witness of his crime forever, he couldn’t refuse.
Plus… what Caster thought was going to happen and what would really happen was not as set in stone as it seemed. As long as Sunny was alive, there was hope of turning things around, somehow.
He just had to get through this, one step at a time.
Sunny forced out a smile.
“Thank you, Caster. I won’t… won’t forget it.”
Then, he glanced at the dead body lying at his feet and took a step back, escaping the quickly growing puddle of blood. His face remained calm, but a small, almost imperceptible shiver ran through his body.
“So… what do we do now?”
The proud Legacy lingered, then said in a solemn tone:
“First things first, we can’t let anyone see you like this. Wait here for a while. I’ll bring something for you to clean yourself.”
Sunny sighed. He didn’t really want to stay anywhere near Harper, but Caster was right. Walking around covered in blood was a bad idea.
“And then what?”
Caster hesitated.
“Then we will need to get rid of the body. But… it won’t be easy to do without being noticed, if not by slum rats, than by Guards. Don’t worry, though… I’ll think of something. Just wait for me to return.”
Sunny hesitated, wondering if he could trust the Legacy. What was going to stop him from returning with a crowd of people? But no. Having Sunny in his pocket would benefit Caster more than getting rid of him completely.
Still, he sent the shadow to keep an eye on things after the handsome young man went away.
Left alone with the corpse, Sunny sighed and sat on the floor, resting his back against the flimsy wall of the hut. He was so tired.
The night was slowly descending on the ruins, drowning everything in comforting darkness. Of course, he could still see the bloodied body lying motionless on the stones beside him. For the first time, Sunny wished that his eyes weren’t able to pierce through the shadows.
Harper’s eyes were still open, staring at him accusingly.
‘I am… I am stuck with you forever, aren’t I?’
Without even looking into the Soul Sea, Sunny knew that a new shadow had joined the silent ranks of every creature he had ever killed.
All he could do was wait.
Time slowly crawled.
It was taking Caster a long time to gather everything needed without raising any suspicion. He had to avoid prying eyes and waste a lot of time conversing with people who constantly wanted to win his attention. At some point, even Cassie talked to him:
“Hey, Caster. Have you seen Sunny?”
Away from their lodge, sitting on the floor near the corpse of a young man he had killed, Sunny smiled darkly and listened to what kind of excuse the Legacy would come up with to account for his absence.
After a while, his thoughts began to wander. He listened to the sound of rain falling on the stones outside and scowled. Rain always put him in a bad mood.
Because of it, Sunny was always reminded of the past.
Unlike Nephis, whose past was clouded in mystery and screamed of tragedy, he came from a simple background. His story was more mundane than tragic. A trivial story of unfortunate people living hard and bitterly in a dying world.
Sunny’s parents were both menial workers. They were poor, but not destitute. His dad was employed by one of the numerous maintenance crews that took care of the city’s outer barriers. His mom worked in an underground factory that produced air filtration systems. Together, their income was barely enough to afford a small cell in one of the human hives in the outskirts.
Several months after his sister, Rain, was born, when Sunny was around four, his father was killed in a work accident, which was not a rare occurrence among the city maintenance workers. Three years after that, his mother got sick and eventually passed away. Factory workers like her often got sick and died due to the harsh conditions, so it wasn’t a rare outcome, either.
Sunny and Rain were sent to a government child care facility. His sister was young and cute, so she was eventually adopted. Sunny, however, was older and had “behavioral problems”, which made him pretty much completely undesirable. After enduring a few years in a series of increasingly vile foster homes, he finally managed to run away and learned how to survive on the streets of the outskirts.
Out there on the streets, there were a lot of kids just like him, who had to do all sorts of distasteful things every day just to live to see another sunrise. However, even then, most of them didn’t last long. It took a very special kind of creature to survive there.
Sunny was one such creature.
A part of this was pure luck, a part of it was that he was smart. But mostly, it was because he had a goal. Sunny refused to die before finding his sister.
Somehow, he had convinced himself that she was waiting for him to find and save her. One day, they were going live happily again, like a family, together. This misguided goal kept him alive more than anything else.
…Of course, it didn’t end well.
Nothing ever did in this damn world.
Sitting just a few centimeters away from a puddle of human blood, Sunny chuckled and rubbed his face.
Was there even such a thing as a happy ending?
‘What is taking that bastard so long?’
Granted, he knew exactly where Caster was, and what he was doing.
Currently, he was raising his hand to open the door of Harper’s hut.
Sunny tiredly picked himself up from the floor and shook off the weight of reminiscence.
What was the point of remembering the past? He had to survive the future…
