Challenge #01558-D097: New Start

For a star to be born, there is one thing that must happen: a gaseous nebula must collapse. So collapse. Crumble. This is not your destruction. This is your birth. -- RecklessPrudence

There's a saying in the streets, It's easy to fall, harder to rise. The streets are hard, and hot, and freezing cold at the same time. It makes people that are hard, who have hot tempers and cold hearts. They grasp for anything that will get them ahead. Even if it means killing their own. It's a broiling forge in which the toughest and the hardest make a living, and the cleverest find a way out of as soon as possible.

Assuming they survive that long.

All of this, of course, was mere philosophy now that Cass was slowly bleeding to death in the gutters following a Back-Street Handshake. Or, as the rare police knew it, a quick shiv to the kidneys. At least she'd got him in the goolies before he smashed her face and took what little she had to steal. Rage burned inside her as she watched the retreating back as her thief limped away through her remaining, useful eye. Die in a fire, she thought, and was more than shocked to see the cutpurse burst into flames.

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