Chapter 227: THE TABLE
Chapter 227: THE TABLE
[San Corvo — South Sector — 2:00 PM]
The table was too small for ten people.
The food stall owner — a man with hands the size of shovels — looked at the group, looked at the table, looked at the group again, and without a word added two more benches and pushed the neighboring stall’s table against his.
"What do you have?" asked Max.
The owner pointed to a board behind him with twelve dishes written in three different languages.
"All of that."
"Good." Max. "Bring it."
"All of it?"
"Everything that fits on the table."
The owner evaluated the expanded table, evaluated the group, did some mental math, and went to the kitchen.
---
The food arrived in batches.
What arrived at the table was a combination of southern fried fish, rice with central‑zone spices, something no one identified but that smelled good and that Maya documented in her notebook to look up later, hard‑crust bread from the main continent that the owner kept for nostalgic customers, and three sauces whose contents were a mystery but whose flavor solved the mystery in favor of putting them on everything.
The team ate.
Not standing, not on deck, not with the boat moving underfoot. Sitting. At a table. With time.
For the first time in weeks.
---
It was Viktor who started the conversation.
Viktor didn’t deliberately start conversations — he let them arrive when the moment was right, and the moment was when the first dish disappeared and everyone was comfortable enough to talk without hunger urgency competing with words.
"Has anyone thought about what comes after?" said Viktor.
"After what?" said Maya.
"After everything."
The team processed that at varying speeds.
"Emily and I talked about that the other day," said Alex.
"And?" Viktor.
"A cabin in the woods." Alex. "All together. Away from the Temple."
Viktor nodded as if that was exactly what he expected to hear.
"And the rest of you?"
---
Max was the first to answer.
"Back to the sea." Without hesitation. "Not with Heralds, not with anyone. Just with a boat and a route and enough time to go wherever I want." A pause.
"I’ve spent the last twenty years moving according to what the Heralds needed. I’d like to move once according to what I want."
"Where would you go?" asked Emily.
"I don’t know yet." Max. "That’s the best part of the answer."
---
Viktor took a sip of coffee — the one the stall owner had kindly gotten for him from somewhere without anyone asking, because Viktor with coffee was clearly more manageable than Viktor without coffee.
"I’ve already done what I wanted to do," said Viktor. "The Circle. Protecting F3. Raven." A pause.
"What I want now is to see what the rest of you build with what you have."
Raven looked at him from across the table.
Viktor looked back.
Nothing more.
But Emily, who was two seats away from Raven, caught it — the way Raven stopped looking at Viktor and looked at Alex for a second, her hand moving slowly toward her stomach by instinct before Raven noticed and lowered it back to the table.
The gesture lasted less than two seconds.
Emily filed it away silently without changing expression.
---
"Seraph?" said Viktor.
Seraph at the end of the table with her half‑finished plate and her usual expression.
"I haven’t thought about it." Her voice without its usual distance.
"Fifteen years thinking about the next step. I don’t know how to think about the last one."
"The last one?" said Jessica.
"The after." Seraph. "When there’s no next step."
"And if the after also has steps?" said Kira. "Just different steps."
Seraph looked at her.
She didn’t answer immediately.
"Maybe." A pause. "I never considered it from that angle."
Kira returned to her plate.
Seraph did too.
---
"Kira?" said Viktor.
"The island." Kira without pause. "I want to go back to my island. Show someone where I grew up."
"Who?"
Kira looked at the group.
"All of you. And my children. And yours too, Alex’s children."
All the girls looked at Alex — well, mostly Maya and Emily. For some reason, Raven looked toward the window facing outside while rubbing her stomach thoughtfully.
---
"Maya?" said Viktor.
Maya with the map — the Eastern Island one, which she had taken out at some point between the second and third courses because Maya always had a map in hand.
"Map the Eastern Island." She said it with the certainty of someone who had already decided it before the question arrived. "Completely. Every zone, every route, every landmark." A pause.
"No one has a complete map of that continent. I want the first complete map to be mine."
"And after?" said Viktor.
Maya lowered the map for a moment.
"After that, find the next continent that isn’t on any map." A pause.
"There are three unrecorded ocean zones. One to the south, one to the northwest, one beyond the Eastern Island." Akari on her shoulder looking at her with golden eyes. "Akari already knows where to start."
Akari meowed once with the energy of someone confirming a plan already agreed upon between the two.
"And if it’s with Alex... and with all of you too, of course, even better."
Alex looked at her with a smile.
"I’d love to help you with that, though you’ll have to spend hours teaching me how."
---
"Jessica?" said Viktor.
Jessica looked up from her notebook — which had been open throughout the meal, documenting the conversation with the same precision she documented everything else.
"Write the records." Without hesitation. "Everything the Circle, the Temple, and the Red Bones have about the Fragments is incomplete or incorrect in important parts. Someone needs to compile what we actually know and put it somewhere the next person who needs it can find it." A pause.
"I’d prefer it to be me, because at least I’ll do it with precision."
Viktor nodded.
"And you?" said Viktor, looking at Alex.
---
Alex looked at the table.
The dishes among them. The stall owner’s cheap wine that no one had ordered but that had appeared anyway. Max with his elbow propped and the expression of someone who for the first time in weeks isn’t calculating anything. Viktor with his coffee. Seraph with her almost‑finished plate. Raven with her new jacket and her hair still loose from the fitting room. Emily beside him. Kira and Maya across. Jessica with her notebook. Grim on his shoulder with his crimson flames looking at the food he couldn’t taste.
"This," said Alex.
"This?" Viktor.
"What’s happening right now." Alex.
"Everyone sitting at a table. Eating something no one knows exactly what it is. Talking about things that don’t require anyone to activate any Fragment." A pause.
"When all of this is over, I want us to be able to do this again. Without urgency. Without the next objective on the horizon. Just sitting and eating and laughing about things that don’t matter."
The group looked at him.
"Is that what you want?" said Emily.
"It’s the first thing I want." Alex. "Everything else after."
---
Silence at the table.
Not uncomfortable — the kind of silence that happens when someone says something simple that turns out to be exactly what everyone was thinking without having found the words.
Max was the first to speak.
"I can get the table." He said it with complete seriousness. "From the boat. I’ll bring it to the forest wherever the cabin is."
"The boat’s table has three legs and is crooked," said Emily.
"And yet we ate better on it than anywhere else in weeks." Max. "It has sentimental value."
"It has sentimental value and a broken leg," said Kira.
"Both can be true."
Maya already had her notebook out — not to document the conversation, but to sketch something.
"If the cabin is in the forest," said Maya, "it needs a basic floor plan. At least to know how many rooms and where the crooked three‑legged table goes."
"Four rooms minimum," said Emily.
"Five," said Raven.
"Who’s the fifth for?" asked Jessica.
"For the library," Raven answered hastily. "Where you’ll keep the records."
Jessica looked at her for a moment.
"That’s considerate."
"It was logical."
Max raised the stall owner’s cheap glass:
"To the cabin."
The team raised what they had in hand — glasses, cups, Jessica’s notebook, which was the closest thing she had to a liftable object at that moment.
"To the cabin," they said.
---
Grim looking at Alex.
The crimson flames on the group — the table, the food, the laughter that started when Max tried to describe exactly what sauce number two tasted like and couldn’t find the right words in any of the languages he knew.
*Will that be possible for me?*
He didn’t say it aloud.
Alex was laughing — a real laugh, without the weight of the Fragments or the corruption or the Reset or any of what the last months had brought. Just the laughter of someone who at this moment is exactly where he wants to be.
Grim looked at Alex.
Then he looked at the table.
Then he looked at the ocean visible between the market stalls — the eastern horizon, the direction of the Eastern Island, the four Fragments still missing.
*When all seven come together,* Grim thought, *Alex might stop being what he is now.*
*And I would become what I always was.*
*The complete Grim Reaper. Without a shell. Without a bearer.*
*Without this.*
The crimson flames returned to Alex.
Alex, who at that moment was saying something to Emily that made her laugh and cover her mouth with her hand.
*Will this be possible for me after?* Grim thought.
*Will it be possible for him?* he looked at Alex.
He didn’t find an answer.
But he didn’t stop looking at the table either.
---
The meal ended two hours after it started.
Not because hunger had run out — because the stall owner ran out of food to bring and looked at the group with the expression of someone who needs to say something but doesn’t know exactly how to say it.
"Do you have more?" asked Max.
"No." The owner. "You ate everything I had."
Max evaluated that.
"Can we order more for tomorrow?"
"I can prepare something specifically for the group." The owner. "But I need to know early tomorrow."
Max looked at the team.
"Here again tomorrow?"
"Yes," said the team with varying speeds but the same result.
The owner nodded.
"At one."
"At one," Max confirmed.
---
Leaving the food sector toward the dock, the team dispersing toward their various afternoon destinations — Kira toward the perimeter, Raven toward materials, Emily toward plants, Maya toward maps.
Emily passing by Raven for a moment — just long enough to speak quietly without the rest hearing.
"Are you okay?" said Emily.
Raven looked at her.
"Yes. Why?"
Emily looked at her for another second.
"Nothing." She smiled slightly. "See you on the boat."
Raven watched Emily walk away.
Then she looked at the hand she had unconsciously brought to her stomach during the conversation about the future.
She lowered it.
*It’s not time yet,* Raven thought.
She kept walking.