There is no angle. There is no escape. Demos has spoken and what Demos says happens, and Lethe can go willingly or he can be dragged and the destination is the same.
"Come on, Lamb," one of the guards says. Not unkindly. He's one of the younger ones, new enough to still look uncomfortable with some of his duties. "Let's go."
Lethe picks up his satchel. Habit. His hands know to reach for it even when the rest of him has gone somewhere far away and cold, and the weight of it on his shoulder is grounding. He follows the guards.
The corridors pass in a blur. Down the stairs. Into the cold. Past the cages, the familiar route to the deep kennels, and every step is a step he's taken hundreds of times before but tonight the corridor feels narrower and the air feels thinner and his legs feel wrong beneath him.
He is trying very hard not to think about Zazyrus's hands.
He fails. He thinks about the clawed fingers that held his sleeve. The grip that caught his wrist. The power in them, the terrifying, contained power that could break every bone in Lethe's body and has chosen, over and over, not to. He has told himself that choice means safety. He has built weeks of trust on the foundation of that choice, brick by careful brick, and now Demos has taken the foundation and poured poison through it because the choice has been removed. Zazyrus has been offered a body as a reward and the body is Lethe's and the beast has been given permission by the man who owns them both.
The dark of his room, alone, when the pits were quiet and Lethe could close his eyes and let his thoughts unspool. Hethought about Zazyrus. He thought about him intimately, in ways that made him flush and made his breath catch and made his hand slide beneath the thin blanket and his fingers close around himself in the dark. He thought about what it would feel like. The weight of Zazyrus's body. The heat of his skin. The careful hands and the low voice and the way Zazyrus looked at him, seeing him, and the way Lethe wanted to be seen.
But this isn't what he wanted.
Not this. Not a body delivered to a cage by guards who won't come back until morning. Not a reward. Not a transaction. Not another man's hands on him because another man decided it would happen and Lethe's opinion on the matter is irrelevant. He wanted to choose. He wanted, desperately and specifically, to walk into that cage because he wanted to, to reach out because he wanted to, to say yes because it was his yes to give.
Demos took that from him. Demos takes everything.
The guards stop at cage seven. The lock turns. The door opens.
"In you go," the guard says. "We'll be back at first bell."
Lethe steps inside. The door clangs shut behind him. The lock turns. The footsteps retreat.
The cage is dark.
The lantern in the corridor throws a thin bar of light through the bars, enough to see outlines and shadows but not enough for detail. Lethe stands just inside the door, his back nearly touching the iron, and his satchel is clutched against his chest and his hands are shaking. Not the fine, controlled tremor he can work through. Shaking. Full-body, visible, his fingers white-knuckled on the leather strap and his breath coming in short, shallow pulls that aren't providing enough air.
He's trembling.
He can see Zazyrus. A shape in the far corner, massive and dark, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. Unchained. Lethe notices that immediately, the absence of theheavy links, the bare wrists. They've unshackled him. Of course they have. You don't chain up a beast for its reward night.
The blood is still drying on Zazyrus's skin. Lethe can smell it, copper and salt, and beneath it the warm, animal scent that he knows, that his body knows, and the familiarity of it makes the panic worse because his body is confused. His body knows that scent as safe and his mind is screaming that nothing is safe, not tonight, not here, not with the door locked and the guards gone and a beast who has been promised his body by the man who owns them both.
He presses his hands against his chest. The satchel is between them, a barrier that he knows is useless and holds anyway. His heart is hammering. His vision is tunneling. He can feel the panic building toward the point where his body will take over, where the flight response will kick in even though there is nowhere to fly, and the result will be the same as it always is when there's nowhere to go: the quiet room. The absence. The place behind his eyes where he isn't his body and the things done to his body don't reach the part of him that matters.
He's about to go there. He can feel the edges of it, the familiar dissociation, the first few steps into the still, numb place that's kept him alive for six years. He's reaching for it.
Zazyrus doesn't approach.
Lethe blinks. The dissociation retreats, fractionally, held at bay by the registering of an unexpected fact. Zazyrus is in the far corner. He hasn't moved. He's sitting on the ground with one wrist propped on his drawn-up knee, the same posture Lethe has seen every day for weeks, and he is making no move to stand, to approach, to cross the cage toward the trembling boy pressed against the door.
He's just sitting there.
And then, for the first time, he speaks.
"The black kitten."
Zazyrus's voice is low and rough and unused. It scrapes out of his throat with the texture of a thing that hasn't been exercised in a long time, catching on consonants, grating over vowels, as though his mouth has forgotten the mechanics of speech and is remembering them grudgingly, one syllable at a time.
Lethe stands at the door and stares.
"The one you named Soot," Zazyrus says. The words come slowly. Deliberately. Each one placed with the same careful precision he uses for everything, the controlled movements, the telegraphed gestures, the agonizing deliberateness that gives Lethe time to adjust. "You said she climbed into a stock pot."
Silence.
Lethe's mouth opens. Closes. His hands are still shaking. His heart is still hammering. But the quiet room is receding, pulled back by the sheer, disorienting impossibility of what is happening. He was prepared for hands. He was prepared for weight and heat and the blunt, terrible efficiency of being used. He was prepared for the thing that happens in the dark, the thing he survives by leaving his body and going somewhere else.
