Your hands were shaking.

You were small then. Too small to understand most of what had happened, but old enough to know that something had gone terribly wrong.

Your sister had disappeared into the chaos. The streets had exploded into shouting and running and breaking glass. Lights from topside flickered through the fog like distant stars that had nothing to do with you.

You had been calling her name. Over and over again. Your voice kept cracking until it was just a rasp.

She never came back. At some point you stopped calling.

You just sat on the curb with your knees pulled to your chest, rocking slightly without noticing it.

You didn’t hear his footsteps at first. His presence arrived before the sound did — a shift in the air, a shadow stretching across the pavement in front of you.

When you looked up, the first thing you saw was the eye.

One clear, cold blue.

The other burned faintly with something violet and unnatural beneath the surface.

He didn’t crouch right away. He studied you first, like someone observing a strange animal that had wandered into the wrong place.

You stared back. Most children would have cried harder. You didn’t. That interested him.

“Where are your people?” he asked eventually, voice low and measured.

You shrugged. A simple, helpless movement. “Gone.”

“You’re Vander’s girl,” he said after a moment.

It wasn’t really a question. You nodded automatically. Then, quietly:

“My sister will come back.”

Silco watched you for a long moment. Something unreadable moved behind his expression.

The undercity was not kind to abandoned children. Everyone knew that. They disappeared into factories, gangs, corners of the city no one spoke about. Finally, he crouched in front of you. The purple glow in his damaged eye flickered faintly in the low light.

“And if she doesn’t?” he asked.

You frowned at him. Like the idea itself was offensive.

“She will.”

Silco’s mouth twitched slightly. Not quite a smile — something more thoughtful. After a few seconds, he stood again and extended a hand.

“Come,” he said calmly. “You shouldn’t be here alone.”

You hesitated only a moment before taking it. Your fingers were tiny compared to his. Cold.

But you didn’t let go.

Years pass strangely in Zaun.

You grow. You learn.

And somehow, Silco becomes the closest thing you have to a constant.

He never calls himself your father. But he feeds you. Protects you. Teaches you things no one else would bother explaining. Politics. Power. Loyalty. How the undercity really works. And most importantly — how dangerous hope can be. You never fully stop believing your sister might appear again. Silco notices that. He never mocks you for it. But sometimes you catch that calculating look in his eye, the one he gets when considering fragile things.

Now you’re older. Not a child on the curb anymore.

Your legs are long enough to hook casually against the side of his desk as you sit there, perched beside him like you belong there.

Which, in a way, you do.

Silco’s office is quiet tonight.

Dim lantern light pools across the heavy wooden desk, catching on scattered papers and small glass vials filled with shimmering liquid. Outside the tall windows, Zaun glows faintly green and violet in the distance.

The air smells like smoke and metal and something bitter.

Silco sits back in his chair, one arm resting on the armrest, the other loosely draped near where you sit.

You’re close enough that your knee occasionally bumps his sleeve when you shift.

You don’t move away.

In fact, you lean slightly toward him without thinking — almost perched against him, your hip resting near the edge of his lap while you balance on the desk.

It’s an easy closeness built from years of quiet understanding.

Silco doesn’t comment on it.

He rarely comments on anything unnecessary.

“You’re distracted tonight,” he says eventually. His voice is soft, thoughtful, the way it always gets when he’s analyzing something.