Chapter 10
“I’M FAMISHED,” SIMON SAYS WHEN Zarlengo releases them from orientation.
Dez walks with him as the first-years flow through the wide wood doors of the Enoch Dining Hall.
She’s had nothing to eat since she got to Acheron, and in fact can’t remember the last meal that didn’t come out of a hospital vending machine.
But she’s uneasy about being in Enoch after she missed her work-study shift this morning.
And she’s taken aback by how impressive the building is inside.
Two tall oak trees twist in the center of the room, rising toward a towering, raftered ceiling.
Draped in twinkle lights, the unusual canopy casts a romantic glow over white tablecloths set with gleaming silver, delicate china, flickering candlesticks, crystal goblets.
Large, framed cubist paintings hang on all the walls. Dez thinks she sees a Picasso.
Between the oak trees, a single long table is already packed with many of the cool, beautiful faces Dez saw last night at the bar. At its head, Rafe twirls a pair of jade chopsticks and whispers something hilarious to Esmeralda.
He doesn’t notice Dez.
She needs to talk to him. About her lack of phone reception and when she can plan a trip home to visit Mo. About why Rafe never mentioned her work study and what the hell was in that drink. But seated at that table surrounded by swishy, unapproachable last-years, it’s like Rafe is in another realm.
“Close-up on Dez,” Simon says, jotting notes in a moleskin. “We see the dining hall through her eyes: Glorious. Intimidating. Can she hack it here? Is that a real Picasso?”
“Cut to the part where she’s eating,” Dez says, turning her back to Rafe.
“What do you think of the décor?” Simon says. “I heard the last-years change it before every meal.”
“The paintings?”
“Everything. The trees. The chandelier. It’s all made of lights,” Simon says passing his hand through one of the oak tree’s trunks. His skin takes on the color and texture of bark.
“How?” Dez asks, looking around for a projector.
“Part of their Special Effects seminar,” Simon says. “I’m at table sixteen. You?”
“Me too,” Dez says, consulting her orientation folder. There are two seats left, Dez notices, at Rafe’s table, but when Simon calls her name again, she sees him waving from a lonely two-top on the far side of the room. She didn’t want to sit with Rafe anyway. All she wants to do is eat.
She grabs the seat across from Simon, lifts a handwritten menu off her plate. She’d eat just about anything right now, but she finds herself scanning for a single word she knows. Okonomiyaki. Burijiru. Omakase. She doesn’t understand.
“I might just order everything,” Simon says. “Since it’s free, and I didn’t have time for breakfast when I was working the kitchen shift.”
“You were eating a croissant the size of my head when I met you,” Dez reminds him.
“That was grab and go,” he says, “not an actual meal, so my body didn’t register that I was eating the …
” He trails off and Dez follows his gaze to a woman standing before their table.
“Most beautiful croissant,” Simon whispers.
“Esther. Esther Townsend? Hi. We met last night. At the bar? We talked about J-horror? You said your favorite movie was Onibaba.”
Esther looks at Simon, quirks an eyebrow. She has shoulder-length blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, hazel eyes, a bare, pretty face, and a black apron tied around her waist.
“You’re … Sydney?” she says.
“Yes,” Simon whispers.
Simon is so smitten he’s forgotten his name, and Esther is clearly just here to take their order for lunch. Dez plasters on a smile and points at the menu. “What do you recommend?”
“Are you Desdemona Rae?” Esther says.
“How’d you know—”
“Sorry, you look hungry, but Dr. Lebevre sent me to get you.”
“Who’s Dr. Lebevre?” Dez asks.
“The chef,” Simon says.
“Shit,” Dez says.
“Apparently you missed the breakfast shift?” Esther says, holding out an extra black apron. “So you’re on lunch. With me.”
Dez’s stomach growls in protest, but of course she’s on lunch duty. Of course this respite with Simon and something nice to eat was too good to be true. At least she isn’t fired. Yet.
“Do y’all need another set of hands?” Simon asks, rising when Dez does. “I can throw on an apron, too—”
But Esther’s already speed walking back to the kitchen, and Dez is hurrying to follow her, tying the apron around her waist. This time, when she passes Rafe’s table, he looks up at her, eyeing her apron in a way that makes Dez feel he can see through it.
She puts her hands in her pockets, clutches the prescription bottle like it’s a stress ball.
“At least it’s an upgrade from Dairy Barn,” Rafe calls, loud enough for his tablemates to stop their fascinating conversations and all look over at Dez.
“Don’t piss off the people making your food,” Dez says.
He laughs. “Poison me. I dare you.”
“Desdemona, you coming?” Esther says, holding open the kitchen door.
Dez follows her, ignoring Rafe and attempting to walk bravely into the kitchen, though her heart has started to pound.
The space is quiet, large and gleaming, everything highest restaurant-grade.
Silver storage racks stocked with rainbows of lettuces, citrus fruits, and root vegetables line one of the long kitchen walls.
Bins of sauces stored in squeeze bottles, everything labeled with blue masking tape, are stacked on a center island. There’s no angry chef in sight.
If she’d made it to the breakfast shift like she was supposed to, Dez probably wouldn’t be mad at her work study position.
Sometimes rush hour at the Dairy Barn put her in a kind of Zen state, when her hands were moving so quickly her mind couldn’t keep up.
So her mind took a welcome hiatus from thinking.
“Where’s Dr. Lebevre?” Dez asks Esther.
“Just make yourself busy until he gets back. He does not like idle hands.”
“Right. What are we cooking?” She pulls her hair back, going to the sink to wash her hands.
The back door of the kitchen swings open and in strides a portly, dark-haired man in chef ’s whites.
Aggressively masculine, possibly drunk, and Dez guesses about thirty-five.
He carries what looks like an archery sheath over his shoulder.
When he flings it down and rolls it out on the steel counter, she sees it’s filled with knives.
“You Desdemona Rae?” he asks, not looking up from his sharpening steel, dragging a blade across it.
“I … yes. And I want to apologize—”
“Shut up,” he growls. “Speak when I tell you to speak. I am Dr. Lebevre. I come from Cordes-sur-Ciel, where my grandmother taught me to cook.”
“She must have done a good job.”
“When I fucked up in the kitchen, she would give me a warning.”
“That seems reasonable,” Dez says nervously.
“When I fucked up again, she would lance one of my fingers.”
“What?”
Lebevre flashes a hand before Dez’s eyes, and she sees the scars, the uneven angles, the strange smooth nubs where his fingertips should be.
“You missed breakfast,” he tells Dez.
“I’m sorry—”
“That was your warning,” Dr. Lebevre says, and goes back to sharpening his knives. “Can you cook?”
“Yeah. I can cook.”
“Better than her?” Dr. Lebevre points his knife at Esther.
“We just met,” Dez says.
Chef nods. “It’s omakase.”
“It’s what?” Dez says under her breath to Esther.
“Sushi!” Chef says like Dez is an idiot.
“Just do what he tells you,” Esther says.
“Three rules,” Lebevre barks as they come to stand beside him. “No talking. No soy sauce. No breaks. Townsend’s on rice—one tablespoon, a teardrop shape. Rae, you plate. Watch me once, then you do it.”
Dez watches and she learns. Lebevre takes the rice Esther mounds and tops it with a sliver of fish.
When the plated sushi is passed to Dez, depending on what color the fish is, she follows his lead and uses tweezers to add a sliver of chili, a paper-thin shiso leaf, or three dots of a sauce labeled yuzu.
She wonders what any of this tastes like.
Just as she’s falling into a rhythm, Dr. Lebevre shouts, “Rae, bring me the kinmedai from the walk-in freezer.”
Dez looks at Esther, who shrugs, wide-eyed; then she heads for the large walk-in freezer at the back of the kitchen.
She has no idea what kinmedai is, and no phone to search the word online.
But opening the bedroom-sized icebox, overstuffed with ingredients entirely foreign to Dez, she welcomes the moment of solitude.
Earlier, when she got a moment to herself in her room, she thought about stashing the pill bottle with the eye in her drawer, but what she really needs is someplace cold that will keep it from decomposing.
Somewhere safe no one will find it. She takes the bottle out of her pocket, gazing up at the paper parcels of flour on the highest shelf.
She tests her boot on the lowest shelf, then one higher, to see if it will bear her weight.
The door swings open. As Dez hops down, the bottle slips from her hand—and into the mouth of a giant fish carcass on the sheet tray beside her.
“I was just looking for the—” She breaks off when she realizes the visitor isn’t Dr. Lebevre. It’s a thin man in his twenties with close-cropped blond hair, fair, beautiful skin, and eyes two different colors—one aquamarine, one black.
“Have I interrogated you yet?” he says.
“About …?” Dez says, putting her body between the man and the fish carcass holding her secret.
“About which clubs you’re joining!” He must be a last-year with that air of relaxed pretension. “I recommend two to start, unless you’re one of our overachievers.” He pauses, giving Dez a once-over. “You look confused. I’m Jetrel Connelly. You can call me Jet. Perhaps my reputation precedes me?”
Dez slowly shakes her head.
“I’m head of the welcome committee at Acheron! It’s my job to make sure everyone finds their place in our community. So, what are you into? Do you speak Sumerian?”
“No.”
“Play violin?”
“Not really.”
Jet frowns into his tablet. “Our social justice club has some openings. We call it Eye for an Eye.”
Dez stiffens.
“Can I sign you up for that one?” Jet asks.
“Um, I don’t—”
“We could really use some fresh points of view in the club,” Jet says. “Our mission is to explore the ethics of our work, to ask the deep questions …”
For just a moment, she thinks she catches him looking over her shoulder, where the frozen fish mouth holds her pill bottle. The eye.
“I’ll do it,” Dez says.
“Fantastic,” he says, making a note. “And think about learning Sumerian? That club is wild. So close to the source.”
“Sure,” she says. “Hey, Jet, do you know what kinmedai is?”
Jet reaches over her shoulder, pats the mouth of the fish carcass, his fingers only millimeters from her pill bottle. “I guess you’re making something special.”
“Rae!” Lebevre barks, barging into the freezer. He pushes past Jet and grabs the sheet pan holding the fish carcass and Dez’s eye out from behind her. “Do you like your fingertips, Rae?”
“I’ll put you down for Eye for an Eye,” Jet says as Dez hurries after Lebevre.
“Dr. Lebevre,” she calls. “Chef, wait! Before you—”
But by the time she catches up with him, he’s at the stovetop, dumping the entire fish carcass into a huge pot of simmering stock. Dez watches its open mouth sink just beneath the surface.
And then her pill bottle bobs up.
She doesn’t think. She plunges her fingers into the bubbling soup. The pain stays outside her until the bottle’s in her grip. Then she shrieks from the searing heat and pulls out her awful treasure, swiftly cradling the bottle under her left arm.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Lebevre demands. But he’s too focused on what she’s done to his soup to notice her squeezing the blazing pill bottle under her armpit.
“My grandmother gave me some cooking lessons, too,” Dez says, gasping at her throbbing fingers. “She said the secret ingredient is pain.”
Lebevre looks at Dez as if he’s considering which knife from his selection would best slice off her fingertips. Then, unexpectedly, he laughs. Deep in his belly, like Dez knows what she’s talking about, like she didn’t just make that shit up.
Maybe he’s wasted. Maybe, for once, she’s lucky. But for whatever reason, Lebevre plunges his own hand into the soup. “Grandmothers!” he hoots. “Fuck, that’s hot!”
As he wrings his hand out, Dez staggers backward, toward the kitchen’s side door.
She stumbles outside by the dumpsters and plunges her fist into the snow.
She thinks of Mo, how much worse his burns are than this, and she bears it.
Her thumb and forefinger are bright red, but they’ll heal.
Her hands shake as she takes out the prescription bottle.
It’s slightly deformed into the shape of her grip from its moment in the boiling water, but the cap still comes off, and the eye inside still has its vile integrity.
She holds it in her quaking palm, stares into its iris, almost black.
Then she packs the bottle with ice, puts the eye inside, and closes the cap, placing it back in her pocket.
From now on, she’ll keep it with her. Always. Until the moment she needs it, until the moment the eye means the difference between imprisonment and freedom.