“No,” he said, eyes glinting in the torchlight. “Not an apprenticeship. Chef Sakamoto is dead. You killed him.” His finger lifted, pointing straight at me.
I swallowed hard. I wasn’t about to argue the details, that the fire and smoke had done the killing, not me. To survivors like Sora, I was the one who had brought the whole house of cards down.
“So what is it then?” I asked.
“Something different,” he murmured, his tone shifting, “but just as dangerous.”
Jiro’s warning echoed in me.
“You mean we’ll compete against each other?”
Sora’s head tilted slightly. He glanced around the Nikubeya, as if checking whether the others were asleep—though there was no way to be sure. When he leaned closer to the bars, his voice was barely a whisper.
“No fighting,” he said. “We are not enemies.”
The certainty in his eyes unsettled me more than his smile had. My mind jumped straight to the Leftovers. They were bitter and vengeful. It made sense they’d pit us against one another, force us into some twisted reenactment of the apprenticeship. But Sora spoke as if he knew. As if he’d already seen what was waiting.
“Sora,” I whispered into the dark. “During your apprenticeship, which challenge did you lose? First one? Third? The last?”
His head tilted, and for a moment he just stared at me, rocking slowly against the bars. “I didn’t lose,” he said at last. “I survived every single one.”
My breath caught. “What do you mean? Explain.”
“In my year we had points.” His voice flattened. “They tracked us like scores on a board. Survive a challenge, get points. Me and another made it to the end. Everyone else was dead.”
I frowned. “We were told we’d get points based on how well we did, but that never happened. After each challenge they always found reasons not to give us any.”
His eyes narrowed. “They changed it for you because points don’t fully eliminate.”
I swallowed. “So in the end, the other person had more points than you?”
Sora’s smile died. “No, I won. I had more points. Everyone knew it. But Reina… she lied. Said the other one had beaten me. That I’d lost.” His hands clenched around the bars, knuckles white. “They cheated. They always cheat.”
Sora was like me. He wasn’t picked to win. He was never supposed to make it to the end.
“What happened then? Did they just let you go home empty handed?”
He shook his head. “Because I made it to the end, Reina said she had a special prize for me.”
“What was it?”
“She said I could be like the others.”
“You mean like us here?”
His head lifted, eyes meeting mine through the bars. His mouth opened, the answer perched on the tip of his tongue. His lips trembled, and then he buried his face in his hands.
A broken sob escaped him. Soon he was rocking again, weeping, that same low mumble returning, the same phrase repeating over and over.
The sound of his voice crawled under my skin. Whatever Reina had done to him, it seemed far worse than the fallout around me. Would I have shared the same fate if Jiro and I hadn’t fought back? Would I be broken like Sora, unable to hold myself together for more than ten minutes at a time?
Reina’s evil hadn’t died. It was still here, torturing us from the grave. How did you beat that? How could I put an end to someone who didn’t exist anymore?
I lay back on the wooden platform, wondering what lay ahead. Wondering if Jiro would return. He wasn’t locked in a cell, but he didn’t look like a free man either. Could he deliver on his promise to help me?
Reina had said I was never meant to win. I was starting to believe she was right.
35
