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Ekko was six years old when the scope of his existence changed forever. When it was that the winds blew through him that day, like any other day, carrying the polluted and sickened air of a city brought to its knees so many years before, never given a chance to stand unyielding in the face of prolonged apathy. He was too young to fully understand the plight of his city, then–those weren’t the kinds of things children his age wanted or needed to care for, a finite gift at the time afforded through sacrifice unseen.
That said, even with the naturalistic bliss of childhood naivety, Ekko understood death. He believed he did. Though the winds had been kind to him and his kin for the few short years of his life, he had heard the stories told in whispers intended to be unseen. His parents, late at night, unbeknown of his awakened presence at the other end of their small apartment, his form huddled on an old cot, back facing them. Them sat down at their small, worn-down dining table, discussing the loss of people whose names Ekko had never heard of, people he did not know, faces he could never know. Names he would forget as he drifted and timeless sleep captured him.
Ekko thought he understood death. Thought he understood the influence, the impact loss of life could have, the physical and emotional tolls it placed upon one’s self. Thought so, as much as a six year old could. He understood death as a concept, an arbitrary thing that happened, a likely possibility that everyone faced. He did not know the extent of the weakened state of his city, did not know that death, in another world, needed not be a common focus of whispered-held conversations in the late hour of a night, spoken to and from parents who wanted to shield their child from the dreadfulness of their reality. The only one they’d known, the only they would ever know.
Ekko was a smart child. Brighter than most his age. He survived a simple life with his two parents, Inna and Wyeth, or what was simple by Undercity standards. They resided in a small apartment, on a street with other small apartments, in a block of small apartments much the same as their own. In truth there was nothing significantly appealing about their state of residence, no vivid details that would jump out to anyone who had walked the streets of the Undercity all their life. The atmosphere had a dark consistency, the air thick with pollution. It draped over them in an always present, permeable cloak. The ground was musty and dank, trails of stone and dirt which hadn’t been cleaned in what some would say was generations, with trodden pathways forged in the grime. The raucous sounds of the entertainment district not so far away, a mere few blocks from Ekko’s home, resounded in the distance each night, its noise diluted, a quiet melodic cacophony blended with vibrant lights that flickered just out of reach.
Most people would spend the majority, if not the entirety of their lives trapped in a state of stagnancy–only ever knowing these visions of decay, the rancid smells, and the sounds of endured despair. Families began in one room, and families ended in one room. A cycle repeated for too long a time, judged by the conversations Ekko sometimes overheard–but could not fully contemplate–when one of his parents took him out for treats the few times they could afford to. Most of the time–all of the time–Benzo’s philosophical musings on this sort of topic confused him more than anything.
For Ekko, there was a familiar dirtiness to the Undercity he had swiftly grown accustomed to, but that he dreamt of some day being different. Stories told to him in the few nights his mother or father could afford to stay an extra few minutes before their overnight shifts at the factory began, describing lush, bountiful green and colorful lands with trees that grew sturdy and strong, bodies of water the children could bathe in, play in, and drink from readily. Many a night did his dreams embody these visions of a world so foreign to him, beckoning him with an allure of safety and comfort for all the days and nights that were to come.
He was in the middle of one of those dreams when he felt a tentative hand prod his shoulder. He stirred and groaned, feeling the sensational loss of images and thoughts unbidden in his deeper consciousness as the world of the living welcomed him back. He sat up on an elbow, wiping his eyes with his hand as the stout, wide man now there before him knelt on one leg, arm resting on his bent knee. He offered a small smile.
“Good morning, young Ekko,” Benzo said. “Quite the dream you were having, eh?”
Ekko blinked a few times, his eyesight fuzzy. “Hey Benzo,” he said, accompanied by a yawn at the end.
He stretched his hands up and out over his head. Ekko then slowly dropped them, gazing at the clock hanging on the wall above their little kitchenette. It was early–six a.m., almost on the dot. Ekko wasn’t one to sleep in late, not with early bedtime and his often restless activity during the day, running errands for the Undercity Postmaster General, rummaging through the local junkyard for spare parts to tinker with, and more often than not hanging with Benzo in an (un)official capacity as his apprentice. But six a.m. was early for even his standards.
Ekko’s parents needed to sleep during the day due to their night shifts at the factory, so he was often left to his own devices in that time without them. Some days he spent cooped up inside tinkering with some old and worn toy he’d picked up at the junkyard, or something Benzo lent him from the pawn shop to fidget with. Just recently for his sixth birthday the kindly man gifted him a small sketchbook with some charcoal pencils, which Ekko had since been putting to good use, the pages slowly filled with images of firebugs, decayed flora, and knick-knacks he found most visually interesting at the shop. He spent other days passing the time reading, in his moments of freedom from what little work the postmaster or Benzo were gracious enough to give him. He chewed through books that his parents informed him were supposed to be too complicated for six year olds–to which Ekko told them in response, with a tone of joviality, how they may be right, but he was no ordinary six year old.
Ekko gazed back towards Benzo. “What brings you here so early? Ma and Pop aren’t even home yet.”
Benzo’s expression faltered for the briefest of moments. Ekko thought he imagined it, but that same warm and welcoming smile was there where he usually found it.
“I thought you and I could get started earlier than usual today,” Benzo said.
Ekko’s brow furrowed. “But your shop doesn’t open until eight.”
Benzo chuckled. “That is correct. But the real work often begins before the official work does. The doors can only open once everything is settled and in tip-top shape, as I expect you know by now. That’s something you’ll be helping me with today.”
The older man stood up, although not without some minor difficulty.
“Come, come,” he said as he turned and walked the few steps over to the side-wall. Ekko’s shoddy, brown backpack lay against it, some books stacked in a pile to its right and a few metal trinkets of no true importance off to the left. “No time to waste, now.”
Ekko stood up, straightening out his white shirt which was just a tad too big on his small, slender frame. He watched as Benzo gathered up his few things and placed them into the backpack. Something tickled at the back of his neck, a feeling whose origin he did not yet know.
“What’s going on, Benzo?”
Benzo finished packing Ekko’s possessions, standing unusually tall over the short boy. Benzo was not a tall man himself, not by societal standards, but he towered over Ekko. The warmth of his expression, the convivial look in his eyes again faltered, a little prolonged now, and this time Ekko knew that it was not the musings of his sleep-ridden brain playing tricks on him.
“Nothing’s the matter, lad,” Benzo said with a wave of a hand. He adjusted his round-lens spectacles which looked much too small for his demeanor. “But we must get going.”
Something about the way he said that made the simmering unease in Ekko’s stomach grow stronger. “Something did happen.”
“What?”
“You never come get me this early. Most of the time you don’t even need to come get me at all. I’m always there on days you want me, right on schedule.” He paused, his young mind drawing the shapes of possibilities within. “How’d you even get in here?”
Benzo’s eyes widened subtly, a small frown forming.
Ekko lifted a hand to his chin, looking downwards in thought. “Unless… Ma or Pop gave you a key… but they didn’t. You don’t have a key. If you had a key you wouldn’t need me to unlock the door each time you visit.”
“Or… perhaps it is that I don’t want to scare my young apprentice by walking into his living space, a little ways away from my own, unbidden,” Benzo mused.
Ekko looked up, dropping his hand. He frowned. “Why? We trust you. I trust you. You’re, like, one of the few people I know Ma and Pa trust outside of work.”
“Sophisticated propriety, young Ekko,” Benzo said. “We live in a society of savages who operate in a manner lacking morals, no consideration for their fellow man and woman. It is the small behaviors which distinct us, that remind us of the aspirations we strive for, the dreams we hold onto in lieu for a brighter day.”
Ekko stood there in place. He blinked a few times.
Benzo rolled his eyes. “You’ll understand that when you’re older. Now, come. I’m serious in my words, there’s no time to waste.” He pulled the backpack over his shoulder, its size appearing starkly different on the older man’s body from that of Ekko’s own frame.
“I can carry that for you,” Ekko said. He took a few steps forward.
Benzo waved him off. “No, no, let me carry this for you ,” he said, his voice softening. “Do you have anything else you want to bring? Clothes, necessities you think you may need?”
Ekko contemplated that for a few seconds. He walked over to a dresser at the side of the room, opening the bottom drawer and grabbing at the very few clothes he owned. There weren’t many, a few basic tunics and overalls that each got him through a few days at worst. He held onto these in a pile that felt huge to his arms as he straightened.
“Oh, yes, yes,” Benzo said behind him. Just as Ekko turned, he saw his friend bring over a larger, slightly more refined backpack. He knelt back on one knee before Ekko, opening the buckles of its single top compartment. “Put those in here. And grab any undergarments you may have, too.”
Benzo nodded at the side of the drawer where Ekko’s few undergarments laid folded neatly. “I have other clothes as well that may fit you quite well. You’re a growing boy, after all, you’ll need new ones before any of us even know it.”
Ekko obeyed without thinking, doing as the older man asked.
Once Ekko’s garments were all stashed securely in Benzo’s backpack, buckled up and good and hefted over the man’s shoulder, and both of them stood straight, Benzo let out a soft sigh. Ekko gazed up at him, wondering about what it was the pawn-broker was thinking. It looked like Benzo was thinking deep about something. And then Ekko’s eyes widened in remembrance.
“Hold on,” he breathed, brow furrowing. “Why do I need to bring my clothes? And… you never answered my question, either. Which means that something did happen.” He took in the light of Benzo’s backpack, now filled with his clothes, and then looked at his empty single drawer.
Benzo swallowed thickly, his voice a little rougher when it came out. “There’s no use in scooting from the truth, is there,” he whispered to himself. Ekko’s keen sense of hearing captured the words clearly, and a subdued nauseous feeling began to slowly swell in the depths of his stomach.
“Benzo,” he said, his tone a little pleading. “Answer me, please. What’s happened? Why are you here?”
Benzo gazed down at him with an expression of now unmistakable sadness, and Ekko’s heart dropped, all the way down to that flood of nausea winding up within him. For reasons he could not understand, tears began to well in Ekko’s eyes, their burn permeating him in a soothing agony, the world of his apartment suddenly feeling all too small for even such a little man as he.
To understand something–a feeling, a moment, an experience–often requires one to encounter it closely, to brush against the fibers of its raw, unfiltered web of intricacies laid bare. Ekko was six years old when the scope of his existence changed forever, when the message of death arrived at his door for the first time–woke him from a dream of lands of beauty and grace, of butterflies tinted powder blue and firebugs tinged electrified green–with big bold arms opened and welcoming, all as a shared meaning washed over him in an unsettling intimacy. He did not know what it meant when someone died, did not know that death was an end and also a beginning. The end of what was, and the start of a new permanence.
“I’m sorry, Ekko,” Benzo said, kneeling down once again, but now on both knees. He dropped the backpack. Tears welled in his own eyes–not because death was a stranger to him, but it was for the experience of witnessing another young and innocent soul introduced to its discomforting embrace, a life disrupted by its unwanted entry, a world forever altered, broken in ways it could not be put back together the same.
Ekko was six years old when the scope of his existence changed forever, when his father died in an accident at the factory. He was six years old when the undercity was lit ablaze that very same night in defiance and protest, and when the slaughter commenced on a bridge forged by Progress, a bridge built to unify two peoples, and there were two girls–two faces and two names he did not know, but would yet soon know–whose lives would change all the same as he and his and so many other nameless and faceless beings to his mind. There were two girls, one a year his elder, another five years his elder, who stood alone and scared on that bridge as Ekko’s new world welcomed them into its frigid, mournful embrace.
“It will be alright, Ekko,” Benzo said, as the young boy cried in his embrace. “We will get through this. You will get through this.”
And a brighter day will follow, in time, Benzo thought.