Prologue II

Kai sat on a rickety stool with bowl of beef stew in hand beside his mother as she lay in bed. He drew the bowl of hot stew close to her gaunt face, taking out a spoonful of it and reaching it to her dry, withered lips.

She shook her head, and Kai sighed, putting the bowl by a scratch worn nightstand by the bed.

"You have to eat, mom," said Kai as he looked at his mother.

One time, many years ago, when he was small and she took care of everything he could have ever wanted for, when she was his entire world, she had seemed so large, so strong. And now, she looked uncomfortably tiny, her bony, disease worn body swallowed up by her blankets.

Kai watched her stare straight ahead, her breathing shallow. Weak. It reminded him of when he was little, and he saw a chick that had fallen out of a nest its mother had preciously built up atop one of Southside's notoriously rickety streetlamps.

How its broken little body breathed so quickly and so lightly on the cold, hard pavement, the life ever so slowly oozing out of it with each slow rise and descent of its chest. He sighed, clearing his head of the image as he reached down and put his laptop on his knees.

"Okay then, maybe later," said Kai. "Just…let me know, okay? I'll be here."

"Studying going well?" said his mother as she noticed the laptop.

Kai paused for several seconds. He nodded once. "Yep."

He did not tell her that he had basically dropped out of his third year of college.

She smiled. Her smile was wide and bright, far brighter than it had any right to be considering her health. "Good," she said simply. "Good."

Kai did not meet her smile. He had not dropped out of college for no good reason. He did so because he needed to make money. All throughout his secondary schooling, when others around him vied for sports scholarships or started to get used to gangs, he sat at a desk and studied to try and make something of himself.

Played a game when his head really needed.

Champion's Rift, it was called. Multiplayer online battle arena game with a five versus five format and millions upon millions of people playing it trying way too hard and getting way too angry.

Though, if he really had to admit it, he was not much better at the tryharding part. Maybe the angry part, too, but it was a lot harder for him to admit that one.

All in all, though, he was thankful he had exhausted so much mental and emotional energy on the damned game because now he was on an amateur team for competitive Champion's Rift – and that was an industry that made millions at the top end.

Key word being top end.

As an amateur, he made close to diddly squat until he won enough with his team to get noticed by a real pro team. But still enough to scrape by. Enough to make sure he could take care of his mother, but not enough where he could actually take her to the hospital. American healthcare at its finest.

Maybe in a year, when the North American Amateur Cup started, he could get his big chance. No, he knew he would get it. He had worked far too hard for far too long, and he knew better than anyone that he was good. If he won the cup, his team would snag a spot on a pro team, maybe not a starting one, but still a spot, and that would give him enough money.

Money to give his mother a chance. Not only to get better, but to move out of this shithole and into something better.

A nice Northside apartment, maybe, where all the bankers and lawyers and whatever suited up white collar crooks went, where she could enjoy a lakeside view and eat good food and not worry about cockroaches and rent and, most importantly, Kai.

He looked at his mother. How underneath the bundle of blankets, she was probably just a thin, wrinkled film of skin covering worn bones and broken lungs. She would never live that long. But that did not mean he would not try.

"You are very smart," she said simply and proudly as she wrapped her thin fingers together and rested her hands on her stomach. "Not like me. You are smart and work hard. You can live free."

Her eyes looked ahead, not at the tiny walls of her room with the wallpaper cracked and crumbling where she had lived the vast majority of her life, but beyond that, to a future where she saw Kai successful and happy, living beyond the squalor of the southside.

It hurt, it really did, to lie to her that he was in college because his mother would never have accepted his life path, but Kai was not the type to regret his decisions. Not to mention that in the end, the dream she wanted for him, one of being free to live his own life unburdened by poverty's chains, would still work out in the end.

She just would not be here to see it. He looked at her hands so wrinkled and worn, creased with the twin fangs of age and years and years of labor. She had been denied so much. Those hands had worked so very hard for so many years, scrubbing and cleaning and carrying, and all for what?

For this rundown apartment in the southside projects. One room out of many in complexes the New Haven city government had made thirty years ago for the city's poor and then, when their temporary generosity dried up, had left to rot.

Here, Kai grew up where wearing the wrong color might mean ending up with a bullet in the back, where desperate addicts with yellowed and missing teeth would take your wallet at knifepoint for their next rushes, all the while running on whatever fumes they had left before they themselves would drop dead in an alley a month or two later.

Where there was no hope, where the roads crumbled, and the school system lay in shambles. But even through all of that, Kai managed to get into a college. Everybody ridiculed him. The only way out of the Southsides was to get a sports scholarship – that was common knowledge.

But he had no natural talent for sports, he knew that, but he was not about to give up.

He clenched his fist as his blurry, slow laptop screen loaded up.

No way in hell was he going to let himself be happy squatting in the southside streets peddling drugs or making blood money in some smalltime gang. No, he was going to rise above the lot life had thrown at him, and he would make sure to give his mother some of the happiness and comfort she deserved.

So he studied. That was all he did, really. Never made many friends, never had the time to, and the few he did have broke off from him as their life paths split, but at the least, he got into college. He proved everyone wrong.

His fist unclenched. That was what he had thought before, when it looked like his mother was going to live long enough.

And now, none of that mattered. His mother was dying. Terminal lung cancer, apparently, from the one diagnosis they had been able to afford a year back. She never did get to see outside the broken-down streets of the southside, and that was something he could not change anymore.

But at the very least, he could let her find some peace in the afterlife, if a place like that even existed, in the hope that Kai's future was set.

"Something wrong?"

Kai looked up to see his mother looking at him, the curves of her wispy eyebrows angled in worry. He shook his head and put on a smile. "No, nothing. Don't worry about me, mom."

She began to cough, her body violently retching as the cough seemingly seized complete control over her. Her cough was deep. Raspy. Uncomfortably reminiscent of a death rattle.

Kai closed his computer and stood up, going to her nightstand to open a tiny plastic bottle marked with Chinese characters. It was empty.

"I'll go get more medicine," said Kai promptly.

His mother grabbed his hand. It felt cold to the touch. She shook her head several times. "No. No need. Stay."

Kai knelt by the bed and put both his hands over hers. "It's okay, mom. I'll only be gone like what, half an hour? Just the store a couple of blocks down. You know the one, right? Mr. Chen's store. His medicine always makes you feel better, and it comes cheap, so you don't have to worry about money."

He let go of her hands, and she made a motion to reach back for his, but a coughing bout took ahold of her. He stood up and watched to make sure she settled back down, and when she did, her breathing growing even and shallow again in its usual rhythm, he nodded.

"I'll be back soon." As he left the room, slinging his jacket around him, he paused and turned around, taking a look at his mother as she stared ahead again.

People usually described him as the prickly type, and he had always had a hard type expressing any kind of affection, even to his mother, but for some reason, today, he could get it out.

"See you soon, ma. Love you."