Chapter 159: The Ghost Eats Alone

"Three minutes," Aurelix said, curled around my neck like a very smug scarf. "Not three and a half. Not ’just a little more, I’m almost done.’ *Three.*"

"I know the rule."

"You know it the way you know you shouldn’t skip dinner."

"That’s not fair."

"You skipped dinner."

I had. I’d skipped it to stand in the dark outside the Sector B gate with a grey iron mask in my hands, wondering if it was stupid to go back down there tonight.

It was stupid. Gareth had sealed the whole sector. Guards were on every stair. The Tribunal would be told by morning, and by noon a dozen Inspectors would be crawling through the ruins, and every cultist who’d kept those barrels would be gone like smoke.

I didn’t have until noon. Marit had said *seven by the festival,* and I’d learned long ago not to trust a god’s patience.

I pulled the mask down over my blindfold.

It’s a plain thing. Grey iron, smooth as an egg, no eyeholes. When I wear it, I don’t see the world with my eyes anymore. I see it with the shadow, the way a bat hears a cave. Every guard on the gate lit up in my head like a lantern in fog.

*Ghost time,* Aurelix said, and slid off my neck into my pocket as a small gold lizard. *Try not to ruin the mood.*

"I’m the mood."

*You’re the funeral.*

I slipped over the wall.

---

The cultists weren’t in the ruins. That was the first thing I got wrong.

Gareth’s guards had swept the ruins. They were clean, and the salt hall had stood empty. But a granary stood against the old wall, a half-collapsed barn on the sector’s upper edge, and when I put my palm on the stone, the shadow in my chest purred.

*Warm,* it said.

Ovens. Real ones. Hot.

I eased the door open. The room inside was thick with the smell of baking, honest, ordinary, golden baking, and it turned my stomach.

Five of them stood around a long table in robes the color of flour. A sixth man worked a long wooden paddle at the oven mouth, humming. They were kneading dough, but the dough wasn’t dough. It was salt, ash, and a dark red paste I didn’t want to name, folded and shaped into small round loaves, one after another. Every loaf had a thumbprint pressed into the top.

Ash, under the left eye. That was where I’d seen that mark.

"Master Pell says the fifth is nearly ready," a woman at the table murmured. "He took the veins and sent them back clean. The Giver’s pleased. A few more nights and he’ll sit."

I stepped through the door.

"Evening."

They turned together. It was almost funny, six floury faces and six pairs of eyes going wide. One of them reached for the red paste. Another opened his mouth to scream.

I put the shadow into the floor.

I didn’t cut my neck. I never do. The first time I’d tried that in this life, I’d laughed at myself afterward for being so dramatic. All I need is a little blood, and there was going to be plenty. I drew a short blade out of the staff, a plain, wicked thing, and opened the nearest cultist’s throat in one quiet pass.

Red hit the floorboards. The shadow drank.

*Atlas,* I said.

The floor *rose.*

He came up in pieces, armor first, then shoulders, then a huge, helmed head with no face under the visor, a knight carved out of midnight and wet with something that wasn’t water. He towered over the table, a ghost-iron halberd in his hands, and I felt the first notch of the guard grind against my ribs like a fist closing.

*Two minutes fifty,* Aurelix said. *I’m counting.*

The woman screamed. Atlas swung.

It wasn’t a fight. I’d like to say it was, for the sake of the story. It was a lot closer to a harvest. The halberd went through two at once. I took a third who’d gotten close enough to throw the red paste at me. It hit the mask and hissed, and the shadow ate it, and I put the blade through his ribs.

The fourth ran. Atlas threw the halberd. It went through the door frame, through the man, and into the wall behind him, and pinned him there like a moth.

The fifth dropped to her knees with her hands up.

"Please! I have a family! I only bake!"

"Yeah," I said. My voice was flat and low, the Ghost’s voice, the one I only use under the mask. "So did the people in the barrels."

Atlas’s blade came down.

That left the man at the oven.

---

He hadn’t moved. He stood with the paddle in both hands, a soft round man with a soft round face, flour in his eyebrows, as calm as a priest. Behind the mask, the shadow whispered his name to me.

*Pell. The pastry master from the Academy kitchens. He’s served me breakfast for six months.*

I don’t know why that stung. It shouldn’t have. I’d killed worse and liked them less.

"You’re him," Pell said, almost kindly. "The grey one. The one that kills us. I’d hoped I’d get to meet you."

"One minute thirty," Aurelix whispered.

"Talk fast," I told him.

"There’s nothing to *say.*" He smiled. "The Giver feeds. We make the bread. A man who’s never been hungry can’t understand, and you’ve never been hungry, have you? Not really."

Atlas’s halberd slid under his chin. Pell kept smiling.

"Seven seats," I said. "Who sits?"

"Four are filled." He said it like a grocer reading an order. "Three left. The fifth..." His eyes slid, glinting, to the loaves on the table. "The fifth was marked an hour ago. The Giver is *very* pleased with him. He’s been fed by your own fire, did you know? Fed and cleaned and sealed. We couldn’t have asked for a better host."

Cold went through me.

*Valerian,* Aurelix said, very small.

"The thumbprint," I said.

"A good boy. A friend, I think? He’ll sit very well." Pell’s smile widened. "And the sixth already carries her bread. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s carrying us home."

I didn’t even feel myself move. I had him by the collar, and the blade was at his eye.

"Who’s the seventh?"

"You *know* who the seventh is." Pell’s voice dropped to a gentle whisper. "He’s holding me by the collar."

"Thirty seconds!"

I let go of him.

I think it surprised us both. I stood there with my heart pounding under the mask and the guard grinding, and I looked at a round man who had made my toast and then fed children to a god, and I didn’t have the heart to finish it.

I didn’t have to.

"Oh," Pell said, glancing down. A black blade of shadow stuck out through his stomach. Atlas had been behind him the whole time. "Oh. How rude."

He sat down on the floor very carefully, still smiling.

"It’s all right," he said. "Seats aren’t taken. They’re *given.* You’ll see, little ghost. The Ninth promised. He always keeps his promises."

Then he stopped breathing.

*Time,* Aurelix snapped. *Time, time, time, Valerian, close it, close it NOW—*

I slammed the notch shut. Atlas folded into smoke. My ribs screamed, and for a second the whole room tilted, and I put a hand on the table to keep from falling into the oven.

I’d lasted two minutes fifty-eight seconds.

*Show-off,* Aurelix said, trembling.

"Casper," I said.

*I know.*

"Mirain."

*I know, darling. I know.*

I tore off the mask and stood there in the dark, in a room that smelled like warm bread and blood, with five dead cultists and one dead pastry cook and a table full of little loaves that all had the same thumbprint pressed into them.

---

I made it back to the dorms at dawn.

I didn’t go to my room. I went to the infirmary instead, past a dozing healer, through a curtain, and stopped beside a narrow bed.

Casper was asleep. His arm was bandaged. Pollux slept in the chair beside him, one hand tucked under Casper’s, snoring like a sawmill. In the grey light, Casper looked like a boy who’d had a very long day and hadn’t finished being scared yet.

I stood at the foot of the bed for a long time.

The ash smudge under his left eye hadn’t faded. If anything it looked darker. It had a faint shine, like something wet.

And as I watched, very slowly, it *blinked.*

"Valen?" Casper mumbled, half asleep. "That you?"

"Yeah," I said. My voice shook. I steadied it. "Go back to sleep."

"’M hungry."

"I’ll get you something in the morning."

"No," he said, and smiled dreamily at the ceiling. "Not that kind."

His eyes closed.

I stood there, and I did not scream, and I did not draw a blade, and I did not do the thing my first life taught me to do to anything that smelled like a god.

I just promised, quietly, to a boy who couldn’t hear me:

*I’m not letting it have you.*

The smudge under his eye went still.

It didn’t believe me.