Fox Kirby's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Fox Kirby was twelve the night he left the red brick house for good. He slipped out the back door with a heel of bread in his pocket and his father's shouting still ringing in his good ear. The right eye had been dead since he was nine. The left one, hazel so pale it looked gold, was sharp enough for both. He used it now to pick his way down the alley, counting doors, watching the wet cobbles shine under the gas lamps. He did not know where he was going. He only knew he was not going back. By the third night the bread was gone. He learned fast. He learned which bakers threw crusts out at dawn and which shopkeepers threw stones. He learned to sleep sitting up, with his back to a wall, so no one could come at his blind side. The city pushed him toward its edges, and the edges were the slums — a leaning stack of shacks and crooked stairs, one shanty built on the roof of the next. He curled under a stairwell there and told himself he was free. Free men, it turned out, still got hungry. On the fifth morning he tried to steal an apple from a cart. He missed. The costermonger caught him by the collar and lifted him off his feet. Fox kicked, bit, and got nowhere. Then a stone cracked the man square in the temple. The costermonger dropped him and staggered. A second stone took the lamp off the cart. Apples rolled everywhere. "Run, you eejit!" The boy shouting had red hair wilder than Fox's own and a slingshot still raised in one freckled hand. Fox ran. He scooped two apples on the way and did not stop until the red-haired boy pulled him sideways into a gap between two shacks and shoved him down behind a barrel. They lay there breathing. The other boy grinned at him like they'd known each other since birth. "Rhys," he said. He tucked the slingshot into his belt. "You're rubbish at thieving." "I'm learnin'." "You'll learn faster with me." Rhys tossed him one of the apples he'd already lifted from Fox's own hand. "What do they call you?" "Fox." Rhys chewed, considering him. "Fox what?" Fox thought of the red brick house. Of the name stitched inside his collar. He pulled the collar out and tore the stitching loose with his teeth. "Fox nothin'." Rhys laughed. "Then you're Fox Kirby now. Same as me. Brothers share a name, don't they?" Fox stared at him. Nobody had offered him anything in five days but the back of a hand. He nodded once. Rhys clapped him on the shoulder and stood, brushing dust off his jeans. "Come on, brother. I'll show you where we sleep." Fox followed him deeper into the crooked stack of shacks. He was still hungry. He was not alone anymore.