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Silco's life begins in one of the many dubious clinics of the Entresol, the midlevel of Zaun. His mother survives labor, his father is not listed on the registry. She pays in laundered coins and takes him home the next day, back to the slums.
His first memory is of a shiny bauble, handed to him to keep him entertained against his mother's bosom while she works. Igni runs a stall in the Black Lanes. Life is as vibrant in that market as it ever gets this far down in the slums, in spitting distance of the Sump and the deep currents of the Pilt. Business is lively, for the topsiders keep getting richer and their wealth trickles down through many adroit fingers, down and down, to end on Igni's stand and rise up again through the heavy chemical fog in a new owner's pocket.
Silco grows small, wiry. His mother teaches him the value of everything, down to the smallest of broken scraps. She teaches him to work mechanisms in silence, to twirl a knife or pincers between small fingers. She teaches him to listen and to memorise. From an early age she hands him small donations and pushes him to go to the local Temple of the Gray Lady, where the priests run a free school. As free as anything, down in the slums, meaning as good as you pay for.
Often he runs out instead with Tia, his neighbour and the best crab catcher he knows. They'll play under stalls, join the orphans of the Hope foundling house for games of ball, or go down to the quays with Pell and Metrik, fishermen's kids. There they can find odd jobs and eavesdrop on rumours, or both. Dredging the stinky mud for black clams, mending nets, brushing coats of resin on dry-docked boats to help them resist the corrosive waters, gutting fish or chasing away rats and gulls, stripping the odd corpse floating down the current... There's always something for children to do by the Pilt, things to overhear and new tricks to learn.
Sometimes a sleek ship comes to moor, all angry metal, clamps and harpoons, and Silco knows that a tall, lanky man will be staying at his home, for a few hours or a few days.
'He's a pirate,' Tia says.
Metrik believes he's the captain of the ship, while Pell claims he's a foreign assassin, working as a mercenary. Silco thinks he might be his father, if only because they have the exact same eyes, that teal colour of contaminated waters, too toxic to wade into.
The one time he asks, his mother shrugs the question off. They don't talk about it. All he knows for certain is the man's name—Oclaw—and how large his hand looms when he musses his hair, and how interesting the little gifts he brings back each visit are.
An interrogation always comes first. Silco is sat down, asked how old he is, how far he can count, how well he can write or read, and what's the going price of copper by the gram. He's asked to recount rumours, and finally some of his own tales. What he gets up to with his friends, what he dreams of, for the future. No matter his progress or his stories, the long fingers heavy with rings always come to ruffle his hair, and present him with a new thing. A carved bone, a colourful marble, a gearwork toy...
Sometimes after he leaves Igni takes it away, kissing apologies on his forehead.
'I'm sorry Sil, it's too valuable.'
He doesn't mind.
Although she teaches him the value of all things, Igni's lessons always end with the reminder that nothing truly valuable can belong to them. They are just a channel. A stopping point, between two pairs of hands.
'We just clean the product till it shines, and make a profit on elbow grease,' she'd say with a smile as she did some of that polishing.
In the Black Lanes everything sparkles and shimmers, despite the name, and nothing belongs to them. If it's precious it's sold for food, for potable water, for clean air, for luxuries of a different sort: crayons, paper, clean fabric and thread, seeds, dry fruits... Those are the rare treats extra money turns into. The rest goes back to the "business", this third member of their household, who seems to eat more than both of them combined.
Silco never minds any of it—until that day, when Igni finally uses the money from one of Oclaw's gifts to bring him up the cliff.
'To see uppside, get some light and spit at Pilties,' she says. 'It's about time you saw it all.'
They climb by themselves through stairs and ramps and gangways until their legs feel like wet rags. They've barely made it out of the slums before they need to ride a lift to go any further and money starts changing hands. They stop in the middle of the Entresol, and Silco is so impressed already by the bright neon signs of shops and the massive greenhouses, he thinks it's where his mother meant to take him.
'Almost there,' she says with a laugh. 'We're only stopping for food.'
For that they go to Bridgewaltz, and Silco ends up more baffled than awed. It's a Zaun market, it shares a lot of similarities with his own home of the Black Lanes. There are stalls with merchandise, food, raw materials... Yet everything is different. There's a lot more chemtech. Foods he doesn't recognise. Better quality products. And the people... Some of them shine and glimmer like they carry all their wealth on their own person. They fashion weeks' worth of meals into cravates, months of clean air into coats, years of work into cufflinks.
Such tempting marks walk among people like him and his mother, yet no one seems to mind much, even if countless eyes follow their every move. No one bothers them as they browse the market's stalls. There are people like Oclaw, exotic, dressed in foreign clothes, people decked with chemtech and augments, and then travellers from far away lands. Silco is used to those, with the Pilt so close, but there's a lot of them here.
He understood that the rich lived above—that life was different there—but the raucous music, the colourful street lights, the way everything looks newer, better cared for, like someone made a genuine attempt at fixing it... He wasn't really prepared for it. Igni gives him sad smiles as he gushes, and he doesn't get why. Not until they squeeze into a public hydrolift up to a spire, a word Silco's never heard before.
He pears through the grimy glass and iron lattice of the lift and watches the Gray smog thin and the sky grow blue.
He's seven, and it's the first time he sees the sun.
He yelps, surprised by the glare. The lift doors open and the crowd empties out. His mother tugs on his arm and guides him across the thin bridge that links the spire to what she calls the Promenade.
Silco is struck by vertigo, the infinite expanse of sky over him completely overwhelming his confused senses. The air is so crisp it stings his nose. He cowers, hands grasping for the reassuring metal of the railing. Igni drags him back to his feet and pulls him close, murmuring in his ear to breathe, and that he's fine, and to take his time. She keeps walking, a grim smile set in her sharp face. She takes him all the way to viewing decks, to see the Sun Gates glimmer in the sunlight far below by the estuary, and then to the massive suspension bridge that vaults over the trench of Zaun. She talks, she explains, and he listens as best he can, trying to take it in without reeling. She points out enforcers in shining uniforms, and them too she has to explain. They rarely venture down to the slums, and if they do they're dressed very differently.
Silco is all agog, staring at everything, struggling to comprehend. He was told about the wealth but always in grandiose or abstract terms, nothing the mind of a child could map out. No one had warned him the Pilties lived in houses made of shining white stones and polished metal. No one told him a spire was a building that shoots up to the edge of the cliff, and that topsiders build their own even higher, to split the sky in half. No one had explained gardens to him.
It's perverse, in a way, how close to breaking surface tension they are, on this little balcony off the Promenade's main concourse. Like if only it were one floor higher, standing on the tip of his toes and leaning over the railing, Silco could reach out and his fingers would brush the burnished copper of their lowest home.
But it's all lies, of course. A trick of the light. Piltover isn't one floor up and an extended arm away. It's in another dimension altogether, a bubble universe, not for the likes of him to touch and mar. He doesn't quite know that yet but senses it, like a nauseating unease, the disorientation of a world thrown out of kilter by a daunting new perspective.
When they're done spitting on Pilties walking the lower concourses and Igni has spent the last of their budget on sweets and a book as souvenir (another new word for his vocabulary) they go find seats to watch the sun set. Igni pulls Silco into her lap as lights come on around them, resting her cheek on his head and wrapping him close for warmth.
'Just a little longer,' she says, 'so we can see the stars.'
Stars. Another thing he's learned about at the feet of a Gray priestess, and never thought he'd witness. The sailors who'll talk to kids often speak of them too, explaining how they can guide you when everything else fails. He watches the faint pinpricks of light come up in the sky like bioluminescent shrimps in a deep pond.
They would be more impressive if Piltover wasn't outshining them so badly.
'My father took me here too, when I was your age,' Igni says. 'A little older maybe. He was a scrapper, so I don't know how he saved enough money to afford the trip and the day off...' A pause, and her arms tighten around Silco's shoulders. 'I was angry with him for a long time afterwards. I told him he shouldn't have shown me.'
'Why?'
'Because if he hadn't shown me, I wouldn't know about it at all, right? I wouldn't know how to imagine it. Suddenly I knew the sky was out here and I never got to see it, down below.'
Silco thinks for a moment before making up his mind. 'I don't care.'
'Oh? You don't like it up here?'
'It's okay,' he says. 'But I'm not angry.'
He's not sure what he is. He readily mistakes the pang in his side with hunger. But he knows he doesn't want to upset his mother.
'I was grateful in the end, for the perspective, but it took me years,' she says, and with a wry smile down at her perplexed son, 'you'll get it one day, when you're older, both what he was trying to show me, and how he was wrong. You'll prove him wrong.'
'I don't understand,' he whines. 'What did he get wrong? What do I have to do?'
'You'll understand later.'
'Tonight?'
'Later later.'
'Tomorrow then?' he asks, pleading.
'Many more nights.'
Silco squirms, trying to twist around to impress on her how serious he is. 'How many more?'
'I'll show you—'
She kisses his brow and his cheek, counting each kiss, and peppers them down his neck until he's crying through his laughter and screaming surrender.
They make their way back to the lift after that, Silco clutching his book and Igni clutching him. They both look up as the lift slowly clambers down and the Lanes swallow them up again, taking them back where they belong, down to the edge of the Sump. The lift's glass and wrought iron feel more like a cage now, and yet it's almost appeasing when the Gray fog reclaims its hold, billowing thick and hiding that other world from view, like it never existed at all.