Jyoti stared at the slab of meat in her hand. It wobbled slightly, slick with a dark, viscous sheen that caught the dim light like spilled oil.
She squeezed her eyes shut, counted to three, and shoved it into her mouth before her brain could stop her hand.
It didn't crunch.
She had braced for the tough, fibrous pull of raw muscle. Instead, her teeth sheared through the slab with sickening ease. It was cold and gelatinous, collapsing against her tongue like congealed rot.
She chewed once. A mistake.
The flavor flooded her palate. It was an aggressive, pungent mix of sulfur and rusted iron, underscored by a vile sweetness that coated the roof of her mouth. It didn't taste like an animal; it tasted like stale, heavy air trapped in a sealed crypt.
Her throat constricted. Her stomach lurched, heaving upwards to reject the alien protein before it even hit the acid.
Don't vomit, she ordered herself, tears pricking her eyes as she clamped a hand over her mouth. If you vomit, you lose the calories. You die.
She forced the lump down. It slid down her throat like a living slug, leaving a burning trail of copper behind it. She gasped, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, shuddering as the aftertaste bloomed.
Suddenly, the grey, rubbery blocks of processed Synthemeat from the Pits didn't seem so bad. She used to curse the cooks for that flavorless, tire-tough sludge, but compared to this, it was a luxury. It was sterile.
She took another bite. Nausea rolled over her in a heavy wave, making the dark cavern spin. Her body screamed that this flesh was poison, something fundamentally wrong to consume.
She looked over at the boy.
He sat on a crushed crate, back straight, eating his share. He wasn't tearing into it like a starved animal anymore. He worked through it methodically—tear, chew, swallow, repeat.
But he wasn't immune.
Jyoti squinted through the gloom. There, on his pale, dirt-streaked forehead—a furrow. His jaw tightened. He paused mid-chew, his eyes narrowing just a fraction, and a faint, involuntary shudder rippled through his shoulders before he forced himself to swallow.
A grim, exhausted satisfaction curled in Jyoti's chest. He has taste buds after all, she thought. The boy who dissected monsters without blinking was struggling with a bad meal.
She swallowed another chunk and shuddered violently, her face twisting into a grotesque mask of revulsion. She gagged, sticking her tongue out to scrape it against her teeth, letting out a strangled noise. She knew she looked ridiculous—a starved, dirty mess contorting her face—but she didn't care.
She glanced at the hanging strips of meat on the rebar. There was enough to keep two people alive for a few days, even with the rapid spoilage rate down here. The unspoken question hung heavy in the damp air: Are we sharing this? He had handed her the first piece. But asking for the next would show desperation, and right now, pride was the only thing she had left that wasn't covered in slime.
She finished the piece in her hand. The immediate, cramping hunger subsided, replaced by a heavy, leaden ache in her gut. But she was full.
"I think we're safe," Jyoti rasped, wiping her hands on her trousers to get the sticky residue off. "For now, at least. That big one took the bait, and the others followed."
She waited, expecting him to ignore her.
"I think so too," he said.
Jyoti blinked.
He turned his head, his dark eyes fixing on her. "How long have you been here?"
"Here?" Jyoti hesitated, rubbing her neck. "In this alley? Or down in the dark?"
"In this place. Do you know where 'here' is?"
Jyoti's guard went up. Did he think she knew a way out?
"A few days," she lied, keeping her tone casual to hide how completely lost she was. "Maybe a week. It's hard to tell. You kind of lose track of time when you can't hear the Faith Cathedral bells ringing every hour."
The boy stopped chewing.
His hand, holding a strip of meat half an inch from his mouth, froze. He turned fully toward her. The blank, calculating stare vanished.
Faith Cathedral. He looked at her, and the sudden, razor-sharp focus in his dark eyes felt like a physical weight pressing against her chest. He didn't say a word.
Jyoti felt a cold prickle at the base of her neck. She didn't understand the shift. Why would a sarcastic joke about a church bell make an unfeeling killer stare at her like she'd just pulled a knife on him? Unnerved, she broke eye contact and forced a casual yawn, stretching her aching arms.
The stare stretched, heavy and dangerous, until the boy finally blinked. The void returned to his eyes, swallowing whatever spark of recognition had been there.
"Water," he demanded, his tone flat, completely dismissing the suffocating tension he'd just built. "I need water."
Jyoti let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding, eager to break the moment. "Yeah. Right." She stepped away from the crate, pointing up the towering slope of scrap. "Then we climb. We can't stay on this ledge anyway."
He tilted his head, a silent question.
"Unless you want to be dessert," she added, nodding down at the butchered beast. "Once that blood actually starts to rot, the smell is going to ring the dinner bell for every freak in this pit. Follow me, or stay and get eaten. Your call."
The boy didn't argue, but he didn't immediately follow her either. He turned back to the makeshift drying rack. He wasn't about to leave his harvest behind. Scavenging a length of insulated copper wire from a crushed console nearby, he swiftly threaded it through the thickest slabs of the reddish-black meat. He slung the grotesque, heavy bandolier over his shoulder. The dark blood immediately began to weep onto his already ruined clothes.
He tossed a smaller bundle tied with cable toward Jyoti. She caught it against her chest, grimacing as the cold, slimy weight soaked instantly through her thin shirt.
"We need it," he said, reading her expression.
She didn't complain. She just hitched the foul-smelling package higher under her arm and turned to the slope.
They began to climb.
They didn't scramble this time; they slogged. The climb up the scrap mountain's razor-edged ridge was brutal, a slow, agonizing struggle, and the burden they bore only made it worse. The meat, a foul, swinging mass, constantly threatened to topple Jyoti, pulling her off balance and threatening to send her tumbling backward with each desperate reach for a better grip. The stench was overwhelming, a noxious cloud clinging to her face, forcing her to choke back bile with every inhalation.
Every step was a negotiation with the wreckage, the metal groaning and shifting dangerously beneath their weight. Jyoti took the lead, kicking at rusted pipes and half-crushed chassis to test their holds before committing her weight. The boy shadowed her a few meters below, silently mirroring her path, the heavy coil of flesh slapping wetly against his side with every movement.
"Do you know why you're down here?" she asked, her voice echoing faintly against the iron walls. "You don't exactly have the look of a pit-dweller."
He didn't answer.
Seconds ticked by, marked only by the scrape of boots on metal and the harsh rasp of their breathing. Jyoti gritted her teeth, stabbing her foot into a gap between two beams. Right. Back to the silent treatment.
"I don't remember," he finally said.
His voice floated up from below, surprisingly quiet.
Jyoti paused, looking down over her shoulder. "You don't remember?"
"No." He hauled himself up over a crushed ventilation duct, his movements fluid despite the precarious footing. "I was captured. But my memory of who did it, or how..."
Jyoti frowned, gripping a rusted strut. It sounded like a convenient lie, the kind people used in the Pits to hide bounties or past betrayals. But his tone lacked the usual defensive edge. He stated it like a physical injury—a missing limb he was just acknowledging.
They climbed for another ten minutes until the slope leveled out into a sheltered alcove formed by three interlocking shipping containers. It was a solid, defensible spot, shielded from the worst of the cavern's drafts.
They collapsed.
Jyoti leaned her head against the cold steel, gasping. Her lungs burned, and the bad meat sat like a rock in her stomach.
She glanced at the boy. He sat opposite her, legs sprawled. In his right hand, resting casually on his knee, he still held the jagged metal splinter. He hadn't dropped it.
She shifted, adjusting her posture so her legs were free. She knew he wouldn't attack—not yet. He needed a guide to this subterranean hellscape just as much as she needed his raw physical capability. It was a transaction.
"Water," she grunted, pushing herself off the wall.
"Lead," he replied.
She moved out of the alcove, descending diagonally across a steep, slanting glacier of hollow scrap boxes and compressed trash. The boy shadowed her, his silent footsteps unnerving.
"Look at the rust streaks," Jyoti muttered over her shoulder, pointing at the discolored metal. "Water filters down from the upper levels, seeping through the rock and slag. If it sits stagnant in these boxes, it turns into acid. You have to find where it's actively flowing."
She scanned the wreckage, looking for the tell-tale shimmer in the gloom.
About twenty meters down, a jagged fault line ran through a massive slab of concrete wedged in the junk. From the darkness of the crack, a thin, steady trickle of clear water ran over the moss-slicked stone before disappearing into the refuse below.
"There," Jyoti said.
She scrambled down, cupping her hands to catch the flow. It was freezing. She sniffed it—no sulfur, no copper. Just wet stone and cold.
She drank deeply. It washed the vile taste of the beast out of her mouth, soothing her raw throat.
She stepped back, wiping her chin with the back of her sleeve. "It's clean."
The boy moved past her. He didn't bother cupping his hands; he leaned down and drank directly from the fissure, taking long, steady gulps.
When he finally pulled back, water dripping from his chin, he looked at the stream, then slowly turned his head to look up at her.
Jyoti stood with her hands on her hips, a wide, exhausted, but undeniably smug smirk plastered across her dirt-caked face.
The boy looked at her proud, ridiculous expression. He looked at the smear of black blood on her cheek.
The tension around his eyes loosened. The corner of his mouth twitched upwards. For a split second, looking at her standing there like she'd just invented water, he looked like he might actually laugh.
He caught himself, smoothing his expression back into his neutral expression. He stood up, wiping his mouth with his forearm. He didn't say thank you, but he gave a single, slow nod.
For now, that was enough.