The Benton Orphanage didn't smell like home. It smelled like bleach, mold, and something always just slightly burning in the kitchen. No one came there by choice. And no one left the same.
Rose didn't speak much when she arrived. She just stood in the hallway with her hands in her coat pockets and her eyes on everyone. Not scared. Not lost. Just... calculating. Like she was already figuring out who was worth her time, and who wasn't going to survive long anyway.
Kurt Sniffler was already there. He kept to himself, always buried in a book he never seemed to finish, always in the corner of the common room like he was waiting for someone to make the first move. But if you looked real close, you'd see it—he was listening. Always. Calculating odds in silence. Learning people the way others learned multiplication tables.
Then there was Greasy King. He wasn't royalty, but he sure acted like it. His hair always slicked back with whatever he could find—pomade, soap, axle grease—didn't matter. He could talk himself out of any punishment and into any locked office. He had a joke for everything, and a knife hidden in his boot just in case the joke didn't land.
The three of them? They weren't friends. They were survivors.
And survival in Benton meant finding your people fast.
They found each other during a fight in the rec room. Not their fight—some other kids going at it over a broken Walkman. When one of them turned a chair into a weapon, Rose stepped in. She didn't yell. She just looked at the kid holding the chair and said, "Don't."
He didn't.
After that, it was like gravity. Rose. Kurt. Greasy. Three names, one orbit.
They started sneaking into the basement after lights-out. At first, it was just to be left alone. Then the fights started.
Light taps turned to bruises. Bruises turned into full-on matches. No gloves. No rules. Just fists and pride and the kind of pain that made you feel alive when the rest of the world acted like you were already dead.
Kids started to watch. Then they started to bet. Then the outsiders came.
By the time they were thirteen, Rose was setting odds, Greasy was running numbers, and Kurt was negotiating with high school dropouts in leather jackets for a cut of the take.
They weren't just fighting anymore. They were building something.
"You think this is it?" Greasy asked one night, flipping a quarter between his fingers as they leaned against the cold brick wall of the orphanage basement. "This... life? This basement? This busted building?"
Rose didn't answer at first. She was watching two of the younger kids circle each other in the ring they'd carved out of milk crates and duct tape.
"No," she finally said.
"This is practice."