Location:Imperial City — Outer Rings, Borderlands, Seven Peaks
Date/Time:TC1854.03.01-03
The baby needed milk, and Kael didn't have any.
This was the problem that nearly broke him — not the Sanctum operatives hunting him through the Second Ring's formation-lit streets, not the cracked rib that turned every breath into a negotiation with pain, not the formation burn on his left arm that wept fluid through the torn sleeve of an Imperial shirt that had cost more than most families earned in a month. The milk. The absolute, non-negotiable biological requirement of a three-month-old human being who'd been screaming for forty minutes and was not going to stop until someone addressed the fundamental injustice of being hungry.
Kael stood in an alley between two Second Ring townhouses, blood drying on his knuckles, his son howling against his chest, and realized that he had no idea how to feed a baby.
