Chapter 105: Meat and Soup

Following the crowd, we made our way down to the hall.

It was already packed when we arrived. Hundreds of people stood shoulder to shoulder beneath the lightless chandelier, but there was no pushing, no shouting, no scramble for the front.

They had formed a proper line, long and patient, snaking from the serving tables to the foot of the stairs. It was the kind of order that is never born from kindness. Somebody had taught these people what happens to those who forget it.

‘So even their hunger has manners here.’

My eyes slid across the hall and found them.

Three captains stood near the serving tables, spaced out like pillars, with ten soldiers arranged behind them in two tidy rows.

Each captain bore a tattoo beside one eye, black ink on pale skin, of a dragon coiled tightly around a fang. It was a small mark, but it made their stares feel heavier, as though the fang were already waiting for a throat.

I joined the line.

The order sorted itself out without discussion. Theodore went first, stiff as a statue, and Charolette stood in front of me. Camila took her place behind me, and Hazel behind her. Four women and two boys, strung together like beads on the same thread.

‘Do not look…’

I fixed my gaze on the back of Theodore’s head and kept it there with the discipline of a monk. It was harder than any fight I had fought that day.

The line crept forward.

Five minutes later. When my turn came, a man with a ladle and a flat expression dropped a portion into a steel box and shoved it toward me.

Chunks of meat from some Unorthodox creature, dark and fibrous, sat swimming in a thin, steaming soup.

It would fill a stomach. It would not delight one. It was nothing like the meals I had known at home, at No. 9 Ashwell Row.

A quiet ache pressed against my ribs.

‘I kinda miss them.’

I swallowed it down. A frightened boy named Peter had no time for homesickness this deep.

A fork and a spoon were pressed into my hand, and the man grunted a warning in broken Minkz.

‘The box has to be returned after eating. Meals are taken in the rooms.’

I nodded obediently, bowing my head a little, and stepped aside.

That was when I saw the rest of the hall properly.

Many of the men in the line were not looking at their food.

Their eyes had found Charolette’s legs, and they were not gentle about it.

Some glanced and looked away. Others stared with a slow, hungry shamelessness that made my skin crawl. Camila and Hazel wore careful, modest clothes, long sleeves and plain trousers, and nobody gave them a second look. Charolette, in her scandalous little shorts, walked through the hall like a flame through dry grass, and yet the stares kept breaking against her and falling away.

I noticed that, and then I noticed why.

My senses stretched outward, a trick I had never needed to learn, only to own. Whenever someone stronger than me stood nearby, I could feel it in my bones, like a faint pressure against the skin. And now, passing through that crowded hall, I counted.

Out of the hundred and fifty men and women who served Culex out of fear, a hundred and ten were Fighters, the rank that comes before the Inferior Awakened.

I almost laughed.

It was the soldiers, too. The ten standing in their rows were Fighters, nothing more.

The captains were the only ones in the entire hall who stood at the Inferior Awakened level. And Charolette was also an inferior awakened.

That explained everything. She was not safe because she was clothed, or kind, or lucky. She was safe because she was an Inferior Awakened, and the whole line knew it, and they were all pretending not to look at someone who could snap them like twigs.

I could not sense Tony this way, of course. As a Saint he could conceal his spiritual power from anyone.

But these people were not Saints. They were ordinary, unlucky souls with a collar they had never asked for.

Still, it was a problem, and a real one. I was an Inferior Awakened myself. By every natural instinct, the Fighters would assume I was stronger than them, and a boy named Peter who trembled at loud noises could not afford to be the strongest in a room. The persona could crack in a day.

I touched the locket under my shirt.

‘Serpent of Luck. Do your work.’

I believed in luck, to some extent. And I had thought of praying to Ouroboros, so the old serpent could conceal my spiritual power, if he wanted to do that, I doubted if anyone in the two realms could’ve sensed it. Besides, Fighters had dull perception, blunt as a wooden spoon. They could not read a spiritual aura properly if it stood on their chest.

And they were the ones I needed.

The hundred and ten. The frightened majority. They were the whole reason I had climbed this mountain, and as long as they stayed afraid and ignorant of me, I could work.

Behind me, Camila nudged my shoulder.

“You are blocking the line,” she whispered, in Euniscopian.

“Sorry,” I muttered, and hurried after the others.

We carried our steel boxes up the spiral stairs and back to the room, where Camila kicked the door shut with her heel. The five of us sat on the beds with the boxes balanced on our knees. Nobody spoke at first.

I took a mouthful of the soup.

The taste was not good. It was thin and smoky, with a gamey bitterness in the meat. But there was salt in it, and a faint peppery spice, and something sharp and clean, a tang I could not place.

“What is this?” I asked, poking at a pale slice in the broth.

“White tomato,” Hazel said softly. It was the first full sentence she had spoken to me. “Purified, of course. They only grow in this realm, the Realm of the Evil. Raw, they are poison.”

“Poison?”

“Purified, they are fine.”

I looked at the white slice again, and the slice looked back at me, and I ate it anyway. It was surprisingly sweet.

Halfway through the meal, I set my spoon down and let my voice drop to a timid whisper.

“Is the King merciful?” I asked Charolette. “What happens if we cannot kill a beast?”

She had been chewing lazily, one leg tucked beneath her. She looked up, studied me for a moment with those sharp blue eyes, and smiled.

“He will hang you.”

“…”

I flinched, as Peter would.

But beneath my fear, I felt something prickle at the back of my neck. Her gaze had lingered a heartbeat too long, and I saw something flicker behind it, something knowing.

She had felt it. She knew I stood on her level. And yet she only gave a small shrug, as though the thought had passed through her mind and been dismissed.

‘She sees me. And she does not care.’

Silence settled over the room, thick and warm and smelling of soup. Camila had stopped eating. Hazel’s spoon hung halfway to her mouth. Even Theodore was staring into his box, though his shoulders had gone tight, waiting.

I set my box down carefully on the side table and leaned forward, lowering my voice until it was almost a breath.

“Can I share a secret with you all?”

My tone shook with excitement, bright and eager.

Beside me, Theodore’s shoulders dropped, just a fraction. He knew what that sentence meant.

The room leaned closer.

And beneath the harmless, trembling face of Peter, I felt the first thread of the plan begin to pull tight.