"Every empire leaves orphans." ... Napoleon
Five of Pentacles – Left behind in the snow, they learned to walk with nothing.
Judgment – The past always rises, wearing a new face.
Knight of Swords – When no one else will fight for them, he does.
The Children of Broken Promises
By John Rebell
The rain came sideways in Phnom Penh, thick as guilt. Blackwater spilled from the corrugated roofs like the city itself was purging what it couldn’t contain. Cobalt stood in the alley, soaked to the bone, Beretta jammed tight under his jacket, watching the man he was going to kill try to unlock the rusted gate behind a brothel.
The target’s name was Dara Vann, a mid-level trafficker for a syndicate that called itself the Blue Lotus. Nothing noble about them. They sold girls the way bankers sold mortgages—bundled, laundered, discarded. And somewhere inside that compound was a seven-year-old girl named Kaiya, taken from a refugee train out of Battambang three weeks ago.
They’d sold her mother on a lie. The kind of lie that flows from NGO pamphlets and United Nations smiles. “Education. Safety. A better future.” But the world doesn’t keep promises to the poor.
Cobalt moved when Dara finally clicked the gate open, slipped behind him like a ghost in the storm. One arm around the neck, the other jamming the pistol deep into his lower back.
“Not a sound.”
Dara pissed himself immediately. The warm trickle mingled with the flood beneath their feet. Cobalt dragged him backward into the alley.
“You got thirty seconds to live. The girl—where is she?”
“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
The Beretta kissed his kneecap and shattered it with a muted pop. Dara screamed, buckled.
“I don’t need you alive. I need her alive.”
“She’s upstairs,” he sobbed, crumpling like a rotten sack. “Second floor, west wing. Room 207. Please—I didn’t know how young—”
Cobalt left him there in the gutter, no mercy, no warning shot. Just one clean round behind the ear. Not for justice. Not for rage. Just to keep the silence intact.
Inside, the brothel smelled of sweat, cigarette ash, and surrender. He moved fast, past drugged-out guards who barely lifted their heads from card games. No alarms. No eyes. When you dress like a shadow and walk like you belong, people don’t look twice.
Second floor. West wing. Room 207.
He opened the door quiet. Inside: a twin mattress on a concrete floor. One dim bulb. A girl too small for the room, sitting on the edge of the bed, eyes open, but not alive.
“Kaiya?” he said, voice low.
She didn’t flinch. Just stared, like she’d already left her body and didn’t plan on coming back. That was the real crime. They don’t just sell the body. They buy the soul and burn the receipt.
Cobalt stepped in slowly, dropped to one knee. No sudden moves.
“I’m not here to hurt you.”
Still no response.
He offered his hand. “I’m here to take you home.”
After a long beat, her eyes flicked to his. Not trust. Just calculation. She took the hand.
The hard part wasn’t extraction. The hard part was what came after.
Back at the safehouse, a run-down Catholic church turned shelter for trafficked kids, Cobalt watched her sleep on a cot beside two others. Three girls in one night. All broken in different ways. All cradling pieces of themselves like they were precious but fading.
Father Miguel, the ex-CIA priest who ran the place, poured two fingers of cheap scotch into a cracked mug and passed it over. “You’re not sleeping either, huh?”
Cobalt shook his head.
The priest stared out at the storm through the stained glass. “You can’t save them all.”
“I’m not trying to,” Cobalt said. “Just trying to kill the ones who think no one will stop them.”
Miguel studied him. “That’s a lonely kind of justice.”
“Yeah. Well. So is dying in a locked room because some diplomat got paid not to care.”
The priest didn’t argue.
Three days later, the Blue Lotus retaliated.
They firebombed the safehouse just after dusk. Two kids burned alive. Miguel took a round to the chest dragging a girl out of the flames. Cobalt killed six of them in the alley before his clip went dry. The seventh he strangled with his bare hands.
After the smoke cleared, he stood in the rubble, coughing blood, holding Kaiya under his coat as she clung to him like driftwood. She didn’t cry. Didn’t blink. But this time, she was looking at him. Seeing him. Whatever wall they’d built inside her cracked in the fire.
Later, at a makeshift camp run by an underground orphan network, he handed her off to a woman named Lin, who promised she’d get her papers and a real home across the border. He almost believed her.
Kaiya stopped at the edge of the truck, turned, and said one word: “Promise?”
Cobalt nodded. “You have my word.”
It tasted like ash in his mouth. He’d made too many promises in this life. Too many broken by bullets, betrayals, and bureaucrats. But this one—this one mattered.
She disappeared into the dust, the engine rattling away like a heartbeat in retreat.
That night, Cobalt sat alone by the river, bleeding from a cut he hadn’t noticed, watching Phnom Penh glisten like a mirage across the water. He lit a cigarette. Let the smoke curl around him like a prayer he no longer believed in.
He remembered what the Monk had told him, years ago, in a cave above Chiang Mai:
“When the world breaks a child, a warrior may lift them. But only love can rebuild them.”
He hadn’t believed it then. Still didn’t, not completely. But maybe that was the point. You don’t have to believe in the light. You just have to keep walking toward it.
[Author Note]
There are thousands of Kaiyas. Most don’t get a story. This one did. The rest are still waiting.
And someone has to answer.
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