Grigor Ash stood in the clearing of dead Sacks, his cadaveric body swaying like a sapling in a storm. He waited for the voice that did not come. His pulse throbbed in his throat. One hundred twelve beats per minute. But the space behind his ribs where the chorus had lived was hollow. Empty. A cathedral with no congregation.
'Say something,' Grigor challenged the void. 'Scream at me. Tell me to clean something. Anything.'
Nothing.
The General's hand was still raised. Not a weapon. Not a command. An invitation that hung in the chemical air like a question mark made of flesh.
"Interesting," the man said.
The word was soft. Almost gentle. The kind of gentle that preceded autopsies.
Behind him, his squad stirred. Craw shifted his weight, heat-haze rippled from his shoulders. Suture, the medic with the cleavers, was already cataloguing Grigor with professional detachment. Twitch hadn't stopped trembling.
'One-armed.' Fresh wound. Bandages still seeping. Amputation within the last forty-eight hours. Infection risk. Compromised immune system.
The cleaner's instinct never stopped. Even when the cleaner was the one being cleaned.
"Oh dear, General." Suture smoothed her blood-slicked apron. Her voice was clinical, sweet, the tone of a mother discussing a bruised knee. "I'm afraid we have a small supply situation to address."
The General, Desmond, lowered his hand. Not quickly. The motion was deliberate, measured, the gesture of a man who had never needed to rush in his existence. His amber-gold eyes anchored on Grigor's face.
"Continue."
"Craw's thermal discharge during the engagement destroyed eighty percent of our ration reserves." No accusation in her tone. Just data. "The remaining twenty percent is insufficient for the return journey."
The Lieutenant, Craw, bristled. The heat-haze around him intensified, turning the air wavy and distorted. "It was a combat situation. The hounds were—"
"Oh, they were engaged, certainly." Suture didn't raise her voice. She didn't need to. "The rations, however, were not."
"Jinx was dying. I was trying to—"
"Jinx is dead regardless, dear." Suture turned to the General, dismissing Craw with a polite tilt of her head. "Twitch's amputation has accelerated his metabolic needs. Without protein intake within seventy-two hours, his body will begin cannibalizing muscle tissue to fuel the healing response. Septic shock follows. Then death. It would be a waste of a perfectly good scout."
"He'll respawn," Craw muttered.
"Four men can't haul our cargo, General," Suture said, her voice as smooth as a fresh bandage. "And we wouldn't want to disappoint the Kennel Master, would we? He does so hate losing a set of hands."
Silence.
Twitch said nothing. He simply stood there, his remaining hand clutching his rifle strap, his body vibrating with the suppressed tremors of shock and exhaustion. His eyes met Grigor's for one brief moment.
Shame. Twitch looked away. His eyes betrayed him; his stump pulsed with the rhythm of his panic.
The General's gaze swept across his squad. Boiler stood impassive in his steam-rig, pistons hissing softly. Varris, the iron-skinned sergeant, positioned himself at the General's shoulder, waiting. Craw's hands wrung together, leather squeaking, heat bleeding from his palms like fever sweat.
"Protein," Desmond said. The word was a statement, not a question.
"Protein," Suture confirmed. "Fresh. Uncontaminated. Sufficient mass to sustain Twitch through the transit window."
The General turned back to Grigor.
'Ah,' the practical mind in him observed. 'There it is.'
---
The questions came first.
Not threats. Not violence. Just questions, delivered in that soft, measured voice that seemed to require no effort. Desmond Price stood three meters away, close enough to observe but far enough to assess, and studied Grigor like a butcher examining a cut of meat.
'He is meat.' That was what the dog's head meant. They sold meat. He was meat.
"You survived the Hatcheries alone." Not a question. An observation. "For how long?"
Grigor forced his mind to engage. The absence of the Voice was disorienting, a phantom limb that had finally stopped hurting, leaving only emptiness in its wake. But the cleaner in him was still there. Still cataloguing. Still useful.
"Ten days," he said. His voice was a ruin: cracked lips, dry throat, the rasp of someone who had been screaming at nothing. "Approximately. Time is difficult to track."
"Ten days without eating."
"Correct."
Desmond's head tilted. A fraction of a degree. The same gesture Grigor had seen before: the assessment tilt, the acquisition consideration. "You should be dead."
"I've been dead." The words came automatically. The truth, stripped of pretense. "Several times. This body is new. The starvation is... recent."
A pause. Something flickered behind those amber-gold eyes. Not surprise, exactly, but a recalibration. The General was adjusting his assumptions.
"You speak like an educated man."
"I was a forensic cleaner." 'I am still a cleaner,' the voice in his head whispered. It wasn't that Voice, just his own thoughts filling the cathedral where the screaming had lived. "Crime scenes. Biological contamination. I cleaned up what people left behind."
"A hygienist." Desmond's mouth curved. Not quite a smile. "In Hell."
"The irony is not lost on me."
More silence. The squad watched from their positions. Craw with barely contained impatience. Suture with clinical patience. Twitch with the hollow eyes of a man watching his own death being negotiated. Varris stood like a statue. Boiler hadn't moved at all.
Something about Desmond's bearing nagged at Grigor. The confidence. The opulence of it: not physical, but attitudinal. The absolute certainty that the world would arrange itself to his specifications. He'd seen it before. Recently.
"You remind me of someone," Grigor said. The words felt like grinding glass in his throat.
Desmond's expression shifted; a microscopic tightening of the skin around his eyes. "Oh?"
'Don't do this,' the rational part of him warned. 'He's assessing your value. You're already meat. Don't give him a reason to—'
"An Arab man. Wears clothing made from human skin. Opulent. Tailored. Looks like something a king would wear." Grigor's mouth kept moving, the words spilling out with the compulsive honesty of the starving. "Very theatrical. You have the same... presence."
The temperature in the clearing dropped. Not physically. The Hatcheries were still warm, still humid, but something in the air tightened. Craw's hands stopped wringing. Varris's iron skin flickered.
Desmond's eyes narrowed.
"The al-Rashid." Not a question. A name drawn from recognition. "You've seen him."
"I watched him make a man eat himself." The memory surfaced unbidden. The silk tent, the crowd, the man called the Suitor sobbing as his own fingers brought flesh to his mouth. "The Suitor, they called him. He ate his own... well. You can imagine."
The General did not react. His face was an unreadable slab of charred bedrock. But when he spoke again, his voice carried something new. Interest. Genuine, analytical interest.
"You witnessed that. And you're still thinking."
"Thinking is all I have left."
"Rare." Desmond's weight shifted. The ground groaned beneath him, physics wrong, density abnormal. This man could kill him without effort. He could crush Grigor's skull like a grape and feel nothing.
"Useful," the General continued. The word anchored itself in the silence. Useful. Value. Worth.
Something loosened in Grigor's chest. Not hope. Hope was for people with options. But something adjacent. The chance to bargain. The chance to convert himself from cargo to asset.
"I can help," he said. "I can—"
"Useful." Desmond repeated the word, tasting it. And then: "Unfortunately."
The loosening in Grigor's chest clenched tight.
"Twitch needs to eat."
---
Six words. A death sentence delivered like a logistics report.
Grigor's mind raced through possibilities. Bargaining, threats, appeals to self-interest. Each calculation collapsed. The General had a wounded soldier. The soldier needed protein. Grigor was protein.
"I can find you other meat." The words tumbled out, desperate now. "I know the Hatcheries. I know where the Farmers cache their—"
"Contaminated." Suture's voice cut through. "Anything stored in the Hatcheries is saturated with amniotic bacteria. Consumption would accelerate septic response, not prevent it."
"Then I'll hunt. I'll—"
"With what weapon?" She gestured at his cadaveric frame. "You can barely stand. You are not a hunter. You are not a soldier."
"I am a survivor." Heat crept into Grigor's voice. Not rage; he didn't have the calories for it. But something sharper. Defiance. "Ten days. Alone. Without eating. I am still here."
"Yes." Desmond's voice was quiet. Thoughtful. For a long moment, he simply looked at Grigor, taking the full measure of what stood before him. Then he sighed.
The sound was soft. Almost regretful. A man making a decision he did not enjoy.
"Useful," he said again. "Genuinely useful. Under other circumstances..." He paused. The words came heavy. "Under other circumstances, I would be interested in acquiring someone with your... perspective."
'But not today,' Grigor finished silently. 'Today, I'm just meat.'
The General didn't raise his voice. He had never found a reason to. "Craw. Prepare him."
The Lieutenant's face split into a grin. Too wide. Too eager. He had been waiting for this; waiting for something to hurt that wasn't going to hurt back.
"With pleasure, General."
Grigor's hand moved before his brain caught up.
The sulfur crystals. Still with him. A handful of yellow powder from the vents near the Birthing Sacks, days ago. His fingers found the improvised pouch at his hip, yanked the drawstring open, and hurled the contents at Craw's face.
The powder was pathetic: a thin cloud of yellow that puffed through the air and caught Craw across the forearm and chest. Not acidic. Not corrosive. Just sulfur.
But Craw's hands were hot.
The ignition was instantaneous. Sulfur burned at seven hundred fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and Craw's perpetually heating palms provided the spark. The powder flared blue-white on contact, engulfed his forearm in a tongue of chemical fire, and released a cloud of sulfur dioxide that hit Craw's lungs like inhaling broken glass.
Craw screamed. The sound was high, surprised, outraged. He staggered backward, clawing at his burning sleeve, the flames licking up toward his shoulder while the toxic fumes invaded his respiratory system. His own power had become the ignition source for his agony.
"YOU FUCK—"
The heat came.
Craw's hands ignited white-hot. The temperature spike was immediate, instinctive, a reflexive blast of thermal fury that washed over Grigor like standing in front of an open furnace. His skin blistered. His lungs seized as the air itself became fire.
But the sulfur was already burning. Already in Craw. The Lieutenant's eyes streamed tears from the dioxide, his breath coming in ragged wheezes, his burned arm trembling with rage. His eyes held murder.
"You just made this personal, princess."
Desmond watched. He didn't intervene.
'He wanted to see how I'd react,' Grigor realized, even as his blistered skin screamed. 'He wanted to know if there was fight left in the meat.'
There was. There always was. But fight without resources was just delayed surrender.
Craw's hand closed around his wrist, and the skin immediately began to redden.
"I've been wanting to do this since you opened your mouth," Craw whispered. His breath steamed in the warm air. His eyes danced with something worse than cruelty: anticipation. "The thinking ones are always the most fun. They understand what's happening to them."
"And now you've given me an excuse to make it hurt."
Grigor looked past Craw. Past the Reavers. Past the General's impassive face.
Twitch was staring at the ground. His one remaining hand had gone white around the rifle strap. His body shook with something that might have been cold, might have been shame, might have been the simple biological reality of a man watching someone else die so that he could live.
'He didn't ask for this. He's just hungry.'
'I understand.'
'I've been hungry too.'
Craw yanked him forward. The cargo hold of the transport waited, dark and warm and hungry. The smell of exhaust and old blood drifted from its depths.
The phantom sensation in his palm pulsed once. Cold silver. The weight of a statue he hadn't held since Earth.
And somewhere in the cathedral of his chest, in the hollow where the Voice had screamed, something stirred.
Not words.
Not yet.
Just a presence. Watching. Waiting.
'Don't worry. I'll give you something to clean soon.'
The cargo hold swallowed him whole.