The first book of the “Alpha-Zero” cycle.
I am the one who must not exist. People like me are born dead, or at best die in infancy. It’s simple: if you can’t develop, you must die. None of the Void children has ever made it to a year. I managed thirteen.
Those long thirteen years of a miserable existence, during which all I could do was move with difficulty. And not even all the time. For every minute of my life, my clan had to pay a considerable sum. And here, at the edge of civilized lands, earning money is far from easy.
Maybe I could have lived like this for longer—crippled in mind but not in body. But one night, uninvited guests arrived at the estate, and everything changed. That’s when I had to learn how to survive for real.