THEY SAY KAZ Brekker rolled straight out of the harbor, the kind of bastard they only manufacture in the Barrel.

Jordan Rietveld didn't roll out of the harbor. He was dragged from it. He woke on a boat, coughing and spluttering, and when he finally oriented himself, he was devoid entirely of the wherewithal to access his memories, to remember so much as who he was. He found himself gasping for air, not just because of the seawater clogging his lungs but also because perhaps one of the most devastating feelings is the realization that you know little to nothing about yourself, that you don't recognize your surroundings and that nothing and no one around you, including your body itself, rings familiar. He sat in a frozen state of shock for a moment or two before rising and stumbling toward an undecided destination, grasping at beams and walls to support himself. The horrific wave of nausea that surfaced when he stood was almost enough to knock him completely off his feet again, but he fought it, dazed and sore in nearly every place possible.

He could barely make out the blurry scene around him, but the head-pounding noise served to identify the fact that wherever he was was filled with people, and squinting and blinking rapidly he guessed that this was something of a ship. 

In his half-blind, confused state, he made his way into a direction he assumed was forward, collapsing to his knees when he hit something that felt wooden. A crate? Regardless, soft hands grabbed him by the shoulders and lifted him again to his feet. He struggled to make out the body of the figure or perhaps a face, but the only thing he registered was a female voice, saying something to him in a language he didn't understand. She said something over and over, in what seemed to be several different languages, until finally he comprehended, "What about Kerch? Do you speak Kerch, son?"

Kerch. He nodded, his head ringing at the seemingly inconsequential action.

"Oh, good. You must be one of the ones we pulled from the Reaper's Barge. You must be feeling awful."

The Reaper's... Barge. He was quite sure he knew what that was, and yet he couldn't picture it in his mind... The memory was so close but so far away.

The woman brought a hand to his face, which burned like he'd come down with some kind of fever. "We'll get you cleaned up. Do you remember your name?"

He fumbled for it. It didn't come with great clarity, but he managed. "Jordie." He didn't recognize his voice⸻raspy and grating, like the breath of a dying man, like stone upon stone. But it was plausible that it had always been like that, and he simply retained no memory of it.

"Anything else?"

His features scrunched up, struggling in a search for something⸻anything⸻in his mental storage. He shook his head, defeated. Now that he had reached his name, at least, his surroundings became more visible, his sight and senses clearing. He opened his mouth to ask all sorts of questions, but broke into a hacking cough instead, one so intense that he doubled over, his throat searing. Thankfully the woman seemed to understand and held him up as she led him across the deck. He was helped onto a stool, still recovering from the sudden bout of coughing. He couldn't remember a time when his throat had hurt more, but then again, maybe that wasn't a viable metric as he hardly remembered anything at all. He managed to right himself and took in deep breaths, in and out. 

"You've been very sick," the woman explained calmly, handing him a cup of water. "Ksenia⸻she's part of our crew⸻brought you back."

"What does that mean?" Jordie said abruptly. "Brought me back. What, was I dead?"

She gestured around them. "There are many other children here, from all sorts of places. They've been rescued. Some of them are recovering from the plague, like you." She jabbed a finger at the cup in his hand. "Drink. I'll get you something to eat, too."

She stared him down until he drank, so he did it. It only made him start to cough again, but it did make his throat feel marginally better. He watched children and women roam the deck, playing or talking or working. One boy was chatting enthusiastically one moment and broke into a devastating cough the next. Jordie swallowed hard. What possibly could have happened to that boy, or to himself for that matter? Ksenia brought you back. Could he truly have died? What kind of monster could bring children back from the dead?

Two glasses of water, half a loaf of bread, and a second impromptu coughing fit later he followed the woman across the deck, supposedly towards somewhere for him to get cleaned up. They were stopped halfway there by another woman in a blue kefta who began speaking rapidly in a language he didn't know to the woman with Jordie, but he was so preoccupied by the fact that he had remembered what a kefta was that he barely paid any attention. His eyes swept across the ship, drinking it all in, forcing himself to comprehend what was going on. Most unsettling in the pit of his stomach was the burning in his throat and the fact that he hadn't a clue where it had come from.

You were dead. And now you're alive.

It couldn't possibly be that simple.

His thoughts were interrupted by another voice, just as unfamiliar as the last.

"Who is this one?"

"Jordie Rietveld," Jordie found himself saying, surprised that he now knew his surname as well. 

"Kerch," she said with a nod. "We've got lots of you."

"Oh, my," the woman with him said anxiously, clutching her hands to her heart. "Ksenia looks worse." He angled himself so that he could peek into the room they stood in front of. He could just barely make out blankets, some storage, and a few people. All the adults here seemed to be women, in a wide range of ages. And there was a girl curled into a ball, an image that would be burned into his mind for the remainder of his life.

So this was she who could bring the dead to life.

Upon seeing her, he believed it. Ksenia didn't look like a person so much as a corpse. It was as if she had given all the life she had to those she saved and absorbed their death. She was clearly young but with grayish paper-thin skin peppered with bruises, and gaunt enough that Jordie could see her ribs through her clothes. Her eyes were horrifically bloodshot, her nails digging into her thigh, huddled in the corner and unmoving, her gaze fixated on something none of them could see.

"The jurda parem is killing her," he heard one of the women murmur. "We aren't even close."

"But a Healer on parem is an extraordinary thing, and we shouldn't let go of the possibility," one of the others argued. "If the world knew⸻"

"It won't," the first said harshly.

Jordie arched his neck to get a better look at Ksenia, but the woman who had brought him with her noticed, and led him away. "What's going to happen to her?" he asked, unable to clear the image of the dying girl from his mind.

He was met with only a worried frown. "Nothing of your concern," she said gently, but it felt like a dismissal. She gestured to a girl who looked about Jordie's age, maybe a bit older, with honey-brown hair and dark eyes. "Here, this is Nadia. Her Kerch is very good; she'll stick by your side and help you to get adjusted."

Nadia smiled so brightly that Jordie found himself mustering a grin as well. She stuck out her hand to shake. "Hi there. I'm a rescue, like you," she said eagerly. "We live in a massive place with tons of kids. You're going to like it."

That sounded like an orphanage to Jordie, and he had a million questions, but he concluded from what he'd seen thus far that it was best not to ask them. Either he would get unsatisfying half-answers or he would only be confused further. Nadia didn't seem very sick, so perhaps rescue didn't necessarily mean from the Reaper's Barge. He still couldn't place what or where the Reaper's Barge was, so he settled for observing and listening to Nadia's mindless chatter as he was toured about the ship. They made their way downstairs and he was shown where the kids were sleeping during the trip and where the kitchens were, until he nearly collapsed from choking on his own cough again, Nadia the only reason he didn't fall over.

She insisted that he come and get fixed up, and the walk was a blur but they came to a room filled to the brim with what looked to be medical supplies. There was another woman, and fleetingly he thought that he had seen more Ravkan women today than he'd ever seen in his life as he was instructed to plop down on a stool and given water again. His throat was on fire, his head pounding, and his tongue felt numb. That one word echoed in his mind, fire fire fire fire fire, and he felt like he should recognize its significance but didn't. Fire. Fire... something. There had been fire. Or maybe there hadn't. But he remembered the word fire, and he remembered everything going black.

Jordie snapped to attention as the woman in the medical room⸻tall, hair swept into a coil across her head⸻approached him. Behind her was Nadia and someone else he'd seen earlier. He forced himself to focus. There was something in her hand. Something sharp. Syringe.

He grabbed her arm. "What is that?" he said rather aggressively, because Jordie Rietveld rarely said things quietly when he could announce his presence instead.

The woman smiled at him comfortingly, and it felt like it should be enough to settle his stomach, but it didn't. "It's just a bit of parem, son."

His grip on her forearm tightened. "I saw what that stuff did to the girl. The girl earlier."

She shook her head, her smile slipping slightly but never disappearing completely. Still, he noticed the difference. "You aren't Grisha." A fresh wave of memories⸻vague ones, just telling him how the world worked again and enough to recall what a Grisha was⸻was set off by this statement, and Jordie relaxed slightly at the reassurance that he, in fact, wasn't one, but he quickly stiffened again.

"What does it do to non-Grisha?"

"Not much of anything at all," she said gently, prying her arm from his death-grip, "except to help you get back on your feet. It'll get your energy up again, maybe clear up your memories a bit."

Something was off about her expression, and Jordie realized with a start that she was lying⸻about what part, he didn't know. He had no idea where he had learned to recognize such a thing, but he figured it was best to trust his gut. Unfortunately before he could decide precisely what to do with this information, the syringe jabbed into his arm. He drew in a sharp breath, and tried to yank away, but someone new came up from behind him and held him in his place.

Jordie felt a shock shoot through his blood, electrifying his entire nervous system. He gasped sharply. He brought a hand to his nose, and it came back bloody. Everything started going in and out again, but it was different, it was worse. His system was overwhelmed, and began to short-circuit, the world becoming only splotches of indiscernible color, his hands shaking violently. His senses were assaulted from all sides⸻with sights, smells, sounds; bright, searing lights and ringing in his ears and his olfactory nerve positively burning. He couldn't tell left from right, and his brain felt like it had been chewed up and mashed.

His eyes fluttered, and just as he began to lose consciousness he made out bits of conversation.

"He'll recover. They all will."

"You think the plague survivors will make it through the year?"

"At the home? I don't know." Jordie's head knocked back, slipping into dreamless sleep. "I don't know."

The ship would dock at Ravka. Something close to five years would pass, and so would the amnesia. Slowly but surely he would remember who he was, grasping at fleeting details of where he'd come from. One day he would wake up and the boy whose face he saw repeatedly in his dreams would become his brother, the one he'd left for a fate worse than death when he'd left Ketterdam on that ship. Furious at what he'd done, albeit unknowingly, he would demand to be put on the next boat to Kerch. He would not participate in the rescue. He would stay.

And on his first day back in Ketterdam, he would venture into the blood-soaked depths of the Barrel armed with nothing but a switchblade. He would wander into an apartment building in the East Staves, knock on the door of someone's room on the third floor. A woman would emerge, young and thin and tattooed, and he would give her no time to scream, later dumping her body off the balcony. And that night he would scrub the blood off his hands in the bathroom of his new place, staring back at himself in the mirror. He would decide then that he himself was worthy of all the hatred he had to give, and that only one thing mattered anymore.

He would toy with the switchblade, turning it over in his hand, and bring it to his stomach. With a small, stinging slash, his first tally mark. One.

And thus, Jayar Kade is born.