Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
The bowl sat almost full, a brown skin covering the cold stew, and Amy’s first thought was that the prisoner had decided to starve himself.
She crouched down to collect it and set the fresh bowl in its place, and that was when she noticed the marks on the floor.
Old scrapes, the kind a metal bowl made when someone dragged it towards himself an inch at a time.
He’d reached for it and hauled it as far as the restraints allowed, and the restraints hadn’t allowed much.
She looked at his wrists again, and her stomach turned.
The cuffs were bolted low and short, forcing his enormous arms down and out at an angle that would have wrenched a smaller body apart.
He could bend forward. He could stretch his fingers out.
But to actually lift a bowl to his mouth and eat like a person and not an animal lapping from the floor, he’d have had to fold himself in half and put his face down into it.
The bruised skin under the metal told her he’d fought the geometry of it and lost.
Nobody had thought to move the bowl closer until she’d automatically placed it there the day before. Nobody had cared whether he ate at all.
“They really don’t want you around long, do they?
” she muttered before she could think better of it, then shot a quick glance back over her shoulder.
The guard, a different one today, was concentrating on his smoke-stick with the unhurried air of a male who had nowhere better to be and ignoring her.
She dragged the old bowl away and pushed the fresh one in until it nudged his fingers. His eyes tracked every motion. She felt the weight of that silver stare the whole time, patient and unblinking, and it made the back of her neck prickle.
“Not that it’s my business.” She wiped her hands on her trousers. “It’s not. I just bring the food. What happens after that is—”
She stopped. He hadn’t moved. He hadn’t made a sound. But she was beginning to understand that his silence wasn’t empty—it was packed to the brim with something she couldn’t name, and something about that silence made her want to fill it with noise.
“You don’t talk. That’s fine.” She rocked back on her heels. “I don’t blame you. Half the people around here aren’t worth the breath. The other half you’re better off not talking to at all.”
Something changed in his face. Not much. The corner of that hard mouth barely shifted, and a light came up behind the silver of his eyes, quick and warm and gone again just as fast. Amusement. He’d understood every word.
The realization landed low in her chest and stayed there, uncomfortable and thrilling at once.
She’d told herself that she’d mistaken that flash of awareness the previous day.
She’d told herself that the enormous battered male chained to the floor was exactly who the guards said he was.
A beast. A slab of muscle. A creature that growled because growling was all he had.
She’d talked at him just to fill the silence, but the whole time he’d been listening and apparently he found her amusing.
She glanced down at the old bowl in her hands, trying to decide what he’d eaten. The only thing she was sure of was that the bread round was gone, not even crumbs remaining. Because it was the only thing he wanted? Or because it was the only thing he could eat?
She stood, and her hand went to her pocket before her brain had finished arguing with itself.
She’d tucked a second round of flatbread in there that morning out of pure habit, because she always got hungry on the long walk back.
Now she pulled it out and set it on top of the other one on his bowl, close enough for him to reach easily.
His silver gaze dropped to it, then returned to her.
“Don’t make a thing of it,” she said quietly.
“Look at that.” The guard filled the doorway, leaning on the frame with a grin that made her feel ill. “The kitchen boy’s feeding the beast. Careful it doesn’t take your fingers with it.”
A growl rolled up out of the prisoner’s chest, deep enough that she felt it through the soles of her feet.
The guard flinched, then laughed to cover the flinch.
She went still, the tray clutched to her middle.
The growl had come the instant the guard spoke, but that didn’t mean it was meant for him, even though he deserved it.
Perhaps the prisoner resented her pity. Perhaps she’d been a fool to imagine that flicker of amusement meant she understood him at all.
She didn’t wait to find out. She ducked past the guard with her chin down and her shoulders rounded, small and grey and forgettable, and let the dark of the corridor swallow her.
The walk back to the restaurant took half an hour, and she spent every step of it arguing with herself about whether she’d been compassionate or simply foolish.
A snarl of prefab housing and salvage yards and market stalls that smelled of frying grease and machine oil sprawled between the landing fields and the old town that had been there before Port Rusk became Port Rusk.
She kept to the routes she knew, the alleys where the light never quite reached and nobody looked twice at a slight laborer pulling an empty cart.
A pair of Ordanian dockhands shouldered past her without a glance.
A child selling dried fish singsonged its price into the noise.
She passed the fabricator’s shop with its steady mechanical chunk-chunk-chunk, and the shuttered front of the medic who took payment in salvage, and turned at last down the narrow way behind Pelloq’s small restaurant, where the back door stood propped with a chipped ceramic pot the way it always did.
The kitchen closed around her the moment she stepped inside, warm and steamy and smelling of the broth she’d set to simmer before dawn. Home, near enough. The only version of it she had.
“There you are.” Pelloq’s heavy-lidded green eyes swept over her, top to bottom, the way a merchant checked a delivery for damage. “You took your time.”
“They had me carry a tray down to the cells again.” She pushed the empty cart behind the counter and reached for her apron. “That’s all.”
“The cells.” His four-fingered hands went still on the chopping block. “Which cells, girl?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters when Krebb’s holding someone.”
“It’s done. I’m back.” She tied the apron and turned to the pot, giving it a stir it didn’t need. “I’m fine, Pell.”
He watched her a moment longer. Shrewdness sharpened his gaze, the quick working of a mind that had survived a long time in an ugly place by knowing exactly when to push and when to leave a thing alone.
“You go down there again,” he said gruffly in the voice that sounded harsh but didn’t hide his concern, “you keep that hood up and your mouth shut. You hear me. Those aren’t the kind that forget a face.”
“I always keep my mouth shut.”
He snorted, which from Pelloq was as close to a laugh as she ever got, and went back to his chopping.
She threw herself into the lunch shift after that, and the cooking took her the way it always did, satisfying the part of her that was still the girl who’d worked her way through college cooking and enjoyed every minute of it.
This was the food she was proud of, not the pressed slop they packed off to Krebb’s compound but the real thing, broth pulled from actual bones, roots she’d bartered for at the market, and spices she hoarded like treasure.
She built each plate carefully. She read the orders the way she’d once read a dining room full of strangers, a lifetime and a galaxy ago, and she knew which regular wanted extra heat and which one lingered because the shop was warmer than wherever he slept.
And each time she saw a quiet smile or heard a satisfied sigh through the narrow pass-through, something inside her eased.
By mid-afternoon the rush had bled out and her feet ached and the front had gone quiet, and Pelloq waved her off with a grunt and a jerk of his chin towards the stairs.
Her room sat under the eaves, small enough that she could touch two walls at once, but it was hers and so was everything in it.
The narrow cot had a quilt sewn from the colorful scraps of cloth she’d salvaged.
A crate she’d stood on end for a table held a candle she’d made out of leftover wax and fragrant herbs.
The shelf beneath the tiny window kept the few things she’d found worth keeping from a collection of polished rocks to a crystal in a blue that reminded her of a sky she’d probably never see again.
And most importantly, a door with a bolt on the inside. Four years, and that bolt still felt like the greatest luxury she owned.
She sat on the edge of the cot and pulled the covering off her hair.
She let the tight braid loose, and rubbed at her scalp until it stopped aching as she thought about the ones who’d taken her.
How they’d looked at her at the end, when the fever had her and she couldn’t even keep water down and her skin had gone grey and thin.
She was damaged goods, not worth the cargo space.
They’d cut the price to move her fast and cut their losses, and by every reasonable measure she should have died in that market with the rest of the merchandise nobody wanted.
Pelloq had bought her anyway. He’d told her once, a year later and half-drunk on festival wine, that he’d expected her to die too.
He claimed he’d paid the scrap price mostly to keep from watching them dump a sick girl in the gutter, and figured he’d get a week of kitchen scrubbing out of her before she went.
But she’d surprised them both by living, and then by being useful, and then by being good.
Somewhere in there the gruff old Ordanian had stopped counting what she cost him.
He’d been the one to teach her how to disappear. How to bind her breasts and smudge her skin and drop her voice and fold herself down into something the eye slid right over. A female alone in Port Rusk will get taken, he’d said, not unkindly. So don’t be one.
Not that a young male couldn’t be a victim, but she was a less obvious one, and he’d taught her how to avoid the most dangerous places.
She’d become so good at it for so long that most days she forgot there was anything underneath the disguise at all.
The braid and the binding and the loose grey clothes had stopped being a costume and started being simply her.
She’d let it happen because it was safer, and because a woman who forgot she was a woman didn’t lie awake grieving the one she used to be.
And then a chained giant had lifted his head in a cramped cell and looked at her with impossible silver eyes, and known who she was.
She was sure of it now, sitting in the quiet with her hair down around her shoulders.
He hadn’t looked at the disguise. He’d looked through it, and something in the way he’d gone still had told her he saw a woman where the whole rest of this world saw a forgettable boy.
She pressed her cold hands to her warm cheeks and stared at the wall, and for the first time in longer than she cared to count, she remembered the woman under the grey clothes and did not entirely know what to do with her.