Ashiro Taki has been back in Base City for over a year now, though he couldn’t say exactly how long. The days don’t have much shape at street level. He sleeps in a capsule hotel when he can afford one and on the sidewalk when he can’t, eats at the noodle stands, and keeps one pill in an inside pocket that he hasn’t taken and tells himself he won’t.
He used to be somebody else. He had a farm outside the city, and a family, and a name, and he lost all of it on the Moon. His father is dead. His mother is in an abbey and doesn’t speak anymore. His brother is still up there, doing well for himself in a line of work Ashiro wants nothing to do with. The name he goes by now was his brother’s idea. It was supposed to keep him safe.
It does, more or less, until a job goes wrong and he walks away from a man named Kenzo, who doesn’t take that kind of thing well.
So he enlists. It’s a bed and three meals and a place nobody will think to look for him, and right now that’s enough.
The Core has a place it takes recruits. There’s a part of Base City older and poorer than the rest, built down in the shadows where the megastructures block out what’s left of the sky. The people there have been left alone for a long time, and they’ve made things in that dark they’d rather the rest of the city never saw. Recruits call it the Scrape. It’s where the Core sends them to see who washes out.
Ashiro figures he’s handled worse. Kenzo, meanwhile, hasn’t forgotten him.
