Chapter 1: The Rain and the Blood
The heavens above Bangkok did not mourn for Ananda. They merely unleashed a torrent, heavy and uncaring, saturating the slick, dark pavement of the narrow passage.
He was but twenty-two cycles old, yet tonight, his form felt as aged and fractured as the decaying brick surrounding him. He rested on his side, his left cheek pressed against the damp concrete. The water streaming down the drain in the cut was tinged a faint, murky crimson. It took him a considerable span to grasp that the hue originated from him.
With each shallow inhalation, a searing, sharp agony plunged into his lower belly. He laid his hand over his tunic. The garment was ripped, saturated with a blend of chilly downpour and warm, thick gore. He had been stabbed. Less than two inches beneath his ribs. The blade had entered cleanly, but the exit had been ragged, ripped during the frantic scuffle when the opposing group forced them into the dead-end lane.
"Karn?" Ananda murmured. His voice was scarcely more than a sodden click in his windpipe."Lex? Where are you?"
No reply came. The only sounds were the constant, overwhelming deluge of the monsoon rain striking plastic sheets above and the far-off, measured drone of traffic from the primary Sukhumvit thoroughfare.
He anticipated the sound of hurried footfalls. He awaited Karn, his crew chief, the man who vowed upon a chain of sacred charms that they were comrades for existence, to reach down and lift him up. He looked forward to Lex throwing his heavy arm across his shoulder and conveying him toward the illumination of the main avenue.
But the lane stayed dim. The shadows were vacant.
A frigid, weighty sensation settled deep within Ananda’s core, far colder than the rain. They were not returning. They had witnessed his fall. They had heard his cry. And they had simply kept fleeing. In the underbelly of the Bangkok evening, a hurt comrade ceased to be kin; he morphed into a piece of evidence. He became cargo that burdened too heavily.
They had deserted him to perish.
The coldness of the ground appeared to ascend through his cheekbone, unlocking recollections he had laboured for years to drown in cheap Thai spirits and street brawls.
As his sight grew hazy, the dim, saturated walls of the passage seemed to undulate. The downpour’s roar transmuted into a different kind of clamour—the sound of his stepfather’s voice bellowing within a small, airless shack with a corrugated iron roof in the slums of Khlong Toei.
He recalled the deprivation first. It was a permanent inhabitant of his youth. His mother laboured for eighteen hours daily shelling shrimp at the docks, her hands perpetually pale and marked by the brine. Still, there was seldom adequate rice in the cooking pot. Ananda remembered sitting on the buckled wood flooring as a boy of ten, his gut bunching into painful spasms, watching his stepfather squander the day's earnings on drink.
When Ananda requested nourishment, his stepfather provided not rice. He offered the heavy leather belt. Or the thick wooden limb of a shattered stool.
"You are a detriment," his stepfather would rasp, his breath carrying the stench of sour fermented drink and rot."You consume my provisions. You reside under my protection. You return nothing. You are an insignificant spectre."
The inflictions were not merely savage; they were deliberate. His stepfather derived pleasure from his mastery. He would smirk—a vast, frightening baring of teeth that contorted a countenance meant to signify security into a horror—before landing the initial strike. He would assure Ananda that he cared for him, that this was the method a boy learned to mature, twisting the very notion of kinship into something obscure, perilous, and agonizing. For numerous years, Ananda accepted that affection and suffering were precisely the same thing. To be noticed meant to be afflicted.
Ananda recalled the precise eve he absconded. He was fourteen. The rain that night had been as severe as it was this evening. His stepfather had cornered him in the kitchen recess, wielding a rusted metal pipe. Ananda squeezed through the slight gap in the wooden partition, shredding his shirt and his skin, and plunged into
