He didn't speak to her for two days.
It wasn't that he was angry or scared. He just didn't know what to say. He'd spent seven years learning that the safest thing to do with strangers was nothing at all—don't approach them, don't thank them, don't give them anything they could use against you later. But she'd saved him, or distracted the soldier anyway, and that was the same thing down here. He owed her something, and he didn't know what.
She didn't seem to care that he wasn't talking. She sat in her chains and ate her food when it came, slowly and methodically, making it last. She didn't look at him or try to catch his eye. She just existed in her space, quiet and still, like she was waiting for something she didn't expect to arrive anytime soon.
On the second day, the guards came through with more food. Bread, water, an apple each. Ezra ate everything immediately because his body didn't give him a choice. The Pit's old lesson ran too deep: take what you can when you can, because you don't know when the next opportunity will come.
She ate her apple first, core and all, seeds and everything, her teeth working through it with the focused attention of someone who'd learned that waste was a luxury. But she held onto the bread, turning it over in her hands, not eating it. She tossed it from palm to palm a few times, a rhythm she'd built to fill the silence.
Ezra watched her without meaning to. His eyes just kept drifting that way. He told himself it was because she was strange, because he'd never seen anyone with eyes like hers, because he was trying to figure out why she'd helped him. But that wasn't the whole truth, and he knew it.
She caught the bread and held it still. Then she turned her head and looked at him. Just looked. Didn't say anything.
Ezra looked away first. He could feel his face warm, which was stupid because he was twelve and he'd survived the Pit and he wasn't supposed to get embarrassed by eye contact.
"You didn't have to do that," he said. His voice came out rough from two days of silence. "With the soldier."
She didn't answer right away. She looked down at the bread in her hands.
"He was going to hurt you," she said.
"I know."
"So I gave him something else to look at."
Ezra waited for her to say more. She didn't. Her answers were short, flat, like she was giving a report. She didn't seem to know how to fill silence, or maybe she just didn't see the point.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Asli."
"That's it? Just Asli?"
She looked at him. "What else would it be?"
He didn't have an answer for that. He told her his name, and she nodded once, like she was filing it away, and then she looked back down at the bread.
They sat in silence for a while. The ship creaked. Somewhere nearby, a child was crying in their sleep.
"You should eat that," Ezra said, nodding at the bread.
She looked at it. Then she held it out to him.
He stared at her hand. "That's yours."
"I'm not hungry."
He knew that was probably a lie. He'd seen how she ate the apple—slow, careful, making it last. She was hungry. She was always hungry. Everyone on this ship was always hungry. But she was holding out the bread anyway, her arm extended awkwardly, her eyes somewhere on the wall behind his head.
He took it. Broke it in half. Gave one half back to her.
She looked at the half in her hand, then at him. She didn't say thank you. Neither did he. They ate in silence, and the silence felt different after that—not empty, exactly, just shared.
The guards didn't watch the lower holds at night. Asli had mentioned it on the second day, just stated it like a fact, and Ezra had filed it away without comment. But on the third night, after the guards had made their last pass and the hold had settled into the heavy silence of exhausted children pretending to sleep, she got up.
He heard her chains first, the soft scrape of metal against wood, careful and deliberate. Then her shadow, sliding across the floor toward his corner. She sat down beside him, not close, just near, her back against the same wall, her knees drawn up to her chest.
For a while, neither of them said anything. The ship creaked. Water slapped against the hull. Somewhere in the hold, a child murmured in their sleep.
Ezra had noticed something over the past few days. The other children gave them space. Not out of respect—out of fear. He'd seen the way they looked at him, at his silver hair and hollow cheeks, at the way his eyes seemed to catch the light wrong. He'd seen the way they looked at Asli even more, those strange layered eyes that shifted between violet and dark blue, the chains on her wrists, the stillness of her face. Nobody wanted to sit near them. Nobody wanted to risk being associated with them.
When the guards threw food into the hold, the other children scrambled for it, but they always left a few extra scraps near where Ezra and Asli sat, not as a kindness, but as a bribe. A way of saying we're not with them, please don't lump us in with them, we're normal, we're not like those freaks.
Ezra had taken the scraps without comment. He was hungry. He wasn't proud enough to refuse food just because it came with a side of fear.
"Why are you here?" he asked finally.
Asli didn't answer right away. She was looking at the cargo grate above, at the thin strip of gray light that passed for sky on this ship.
"I was born in the Pit," she said. "Same as you, probably."
Ezra waited.
"My mother was Zalari." A pause. "I don't know who my father was. She never told me. Arkanian, probably. Most of them are."
She said it flatly, like it didn't matter, but the way she paused before she said it made Ezra think it probably did. He'd learned to notice things like that—the small hesitations, the words people almost said before they said something else.
"The city found out about us when I was small," she continued. "Someone saw my eyes. After that, we moved a lot. Kept changing where we slept. My mother worked when she could, but it was hard. People don't want to hire Zalari."
She stopped. Ezra thought she might be done.
"My mother died when I was eleven," she said. "Sickness. There wasn't anyone to help her. After that, I was on my own."
She said it the way you said something you'd said so many times that the words didn't hurt anymore. Ezra recognized that. He had his own words like that. He wondered how many times she'd had to tell this story—to soldiers, to guards, to people who looked at her like she was a thing instead of a person.
"How long were you on your own?" he asked.
"A year. Maybe a little more." She shrugged. Her chains shifted with the movement. "I don't know. I stopped counting."
"The soldiers found you."
"Yes. They came to the Pit. Someone must have told them about me." She looked down at her chains. "They put these on and said I was going to the Spire. Said I should be grateful they weren't killing me."
Ezra thought about the father on the screen, the blade falling, the crowd cheering. He thought about the men who'd taken his mother's body from the room when he was five. He thought about all the ways the city found to destroy the people it didn't want.
"Maybe they should have," he said quietly.
Asli looked at him. Those strange eyes, unreadable in the dim light from the grate.
"Maybe," she said. "But they didn't. So now we're here."
She leaned her head back against the wall.
Ezra considered whether to tell her his own story. He wasn't used to talking about himself. He'd spent years learning that the less people knew about you, the safer you were. But she'd told him about her mother, about the soldiers, about being alone. She'd given him bread. She'd pulled the soldier's attention away. And there was something else, something he couldn't quite name—a feeling he'd never had before, the sense that he was talking to someone who might actually understand.
He noticed that her sentences were short. She didn't elaborate. She didn't fill the silence with extra words. She said what she meant and then stopped. It was like watching someone who'd learned that talking too much was dangerous, or useless, or both. He understood that. He did the same thing.
"What about you?" she asked, before he'd decided whether to speak. "How did you end up here?"
She wasn't looking at him. Her eyes were on the cargo grate again, or maybe on nothing at all. She wasn't pushing. She was just asking, and she'd take whatever answer he gave, or none at all.
He took a breath.
"I was born in the Pit too," he said. "I don't know who my parents were. A girl found me when I was a baby—she wasn't my mother, but she raised me. She died when I was five."
Asli nodded. She didn't say she was sorry. He was glad. Sorry never helped anyone.
"After that, I just survived," he said. "I learned the rules. Stay small. Stay quiet. Don't let anyone notice you. I did that for years. And then the winter came, and it was bad. Worse than usual. I was going to die anyway, so when I found the recruitment paper, I went."
"The Spire," she said.
"The Spire," he agreed. "They feed you there. That was enough."
She nodded again. They sat in silence for a while. It wasn't uncomfortable. It was just quiet. Around them, the other children shifted in their sleep or pretended to sleep, careful not to get too close, careful not to make eye contact. Ezra could feel their attention even in the dark—the weight of fifty-something pairs of eyes, watching, waiting, keeping their distance.
He wondered if Asli could feel it too. He wondered if she'd always felt it, the way people looked at her like she was something other than human.
"Do you know anything about the Spire?" he asked. "Besides what they put on the posters?"
Asli shook her head. "Only what people say. That they train you. That they use you. That most people don't come back the same."
"That's not very encouraging."
"No," she said. "It's not."
Another silence. But this one felt different. Softer, somehow. Like something had shifted between them.
"The guards don't watch the lower holds at night," she said after a while. "We can talk. If you want. Figure out what to do when we get there."
"You want to plan."
"I want to survive." She turned her head and looked at him. "Same as you."
Ezra thought about it. He'd survived this long by not trusting anyone, by not relying on anyone, by being alone. But he wasn't sure he could do that anymore. The Pit had been one thing. The Spire would be something else.
He looked at her—at the chains on her wrists, at the dark hair falling over her face, at those impossible eyes that shifted in the faint light. She was strange. He was strange. They were the two strangest people on this ship, and everyone knew it, and that was why everyone left them alone.
Maybe that meant something. Maybe it didn't. Either way, she was here, and she was asking, and he was tired of being alone.
"Okay," he said.
Asli nodded. She didn't smile. She didn't offer her hand. She just sat there beside him in the dark, her shoulder close enough to touch if he wanted to, her breathing slow and steady.
They stayed like that for a long time, two freaks in a corner of a ship full of children who were afraid of them. And for the first time in years, Ezra didn't feel quite so alone.