The boy didn't know when he'd finally fallen asleep.
He woke to the sound of Emilia crying — loud, unguarded, the kind of crying that had given up trying to be quiet. Carolit was awake too, sitting with an expression that didn't have a name but didn't need one.
Hover had made it back.
He was leaning in the doorway, and the state of him was difficult to look at directly. His body was covered in wounds that were still bleeding — fresh, open, ugly. His right elbow sat at an angle that made something clench in the boy's stomach just from seeing it, the bone having decided at some point during the night to leave its proper place. On his right hand, where the index finger and middle finger had been, there was nothing. A scar running close to his eye had missed where it mattered by a distance that felt almost personal.
Every wound came from a blade.
"Stay back... all of you. You'll get my blood on you."
He was breathing in shallow, labored pulls, and his skin had gone a pale blue at the edges — the color a body turns when it's been running on less than it should have for too long.
.....
The boy reached the doorway and saw him properly.
His stomach turned before he could stop it, and he had to look away — then didn't. Something held him there. Some instinct that told him this was a thing he was supposed to witness, not flee from. He made himself look back, and began to move toward the old man slowly, one heavy step at a time.
Before he got there, the door groaned open again.
A different servant this time. He was carrying a pill that resembled the green ones the boy had seen before, except this one had lost the clean green entirely — threaded through with red, like something bleeding from the inside.
The servant crossed to Hover without a word and placed it in his mouth.
A moment passed.
Then Hover screamed.
It came out sharp and sudden and seized everyone in the room — and then it stopped, cut off abruptly, as though Hover had reached into himself and physically removed it. The muscles in his neck stood out with the effort of keeping the rest inside. His good hand found the edge of the nearest surface and held it until his knuckles went white.
The pain was visible on his face. He simply refused to let it out.
His body was repairing itself at a rate that was wrong to watch. Surface wounds sealed over with a silence that felt unnatural. The bone that had abandoned the elbow began to migrate back, slowly, with a sound the boy decided immediately he would spend the rest of his life trying to forget.
The fingers did not grow back.
The gaps stayed gaps.
When it was over, the wounds had been replaced by scars — deep, ugly, permanent — and Hover closed his eyes and went still. Not dead. Exhausted past the point where the body bothers to stay conscious.
Everyone breathed.
.....
They didn't have time to feel anything about it.
The servant who had administered the pill was already turning toward them, wearing the expression of someone who has decided that competence and contempt are the same thing.
"It's eight o'clock. Hover won't be working today, so you'll start early to compensate. Move. You filthy animals."
He said it with a small, satisfied smile, as though he had done something worth being proud of.
No one looked at him directly. The air in the room changed anyway — something tightening in everyone at once, building without a sound.
Galius was the one who moved.
He crossed the room slowly, and there was something in the stillness of it that was worse than rushing would have been. The servant opened his mouth.
Galius's fist closed it.
The punch landed on the jaw and the jaw made a sound that didn't belong in a room with people in it, and the servant dropped. His neck settled at an angle that wasn't right. Galius didn't stop.
He kept hitting, in silence, without expression — the kind of silence that isn't absence but accumulation, everything that had been stored and compressed and given nowhere to go finally finding a direction. The boy and Emilia were crying without deciding to. Carolit grabbed Galius's arm and was shoved away without him looking at her, and he kept going.
By the time the guards arrived, the servant who had walked into the room that morning was no longer recognizable.
The guards took Galius. He didn't resist.
Otub appeared, collected the remaining slaves, and took them to work.
.....
The day's assignment was the palace library.
It was a small room, and nothing like the rest of the building — wooden floors instead of the polished ceramic everywhere else, simpler ornamentation on the walls, older somehow, like a place that had been left alone while everything around it was rebuilt.
The boy settled beside Emilia and looked around.
"Why is the library different from the rest of the palace?"
Emilia glanced at him — at the boy who still had no name — then back to the shelves she was sorting.
"Because it wasn't originally part of the palace. This used to be a residential neighborhood. Lord Kart bought the whole area and built his palace and the weapons factory over it. He kept the library. I don't know why."
A silence settled between them.
"Do you remember anything? From before the accident?"
The boy frowned and tried, the way you try to read something in a language you don't speak.
"No. Just fog."
"I'm an orphan too, in a way."
She said it simply, the brightness in her face dimmed by something that didn't fully belong there — something older than her expression usually carried.
"When I was around your age, my father died. He got caught in someone else's fall memory." A pause. "They said it was a terrible death. No one told me the details."
The boy listened.
"After that I lived with my mother and my sister. My mother changed after he died. She became someone I didn't know." Emilia's hand moved slowly to her throat, and her fingers rested there, trembling slightly. "One day she tried to—"
She stopped.
Closed her eyes.
"—to strangle me. They told me later she succeeded with my sister." She said it in a level voice that frightened the boy more than tears would have. "I was put in an orphanage. I wasn't there long before they sold me to a slave trader for twenty sir. Lord Kart bought me about a year ago." A faint smile crossed her face, one the boy couldn't quite interpret. "And here I am."
The silence returned and stayed for a while.
"Can I call you Emi?" the boy said finally. "You told me about all of that, and I can't tell you anything in return. I don't have anything to give back."
"Oh." She looked at him. "I just thought — having no past and no name seemed lonely."
She stood up abruptly.
"What if I named you?"
The boy stared at her.
He'd been in this place for nearly two days, and not having a name had started to make everything harder — conversations, work, simple things. The idea hadn't occurred to him until now.
"Yes. I agree."
He said it with more enthusiasm than he'd felt about anything since waking up in this room. His expectations were high.
"What about... Dove?"
The enthusiasm left his face completely.
"No. That's terrible."
"Okay, what about Rock — no, Rain — no, Saad — no—"
She kept going as they worked, a steady stream of names that managed to be worse than the last, and the morning passed that way — badly named but uninjured, which Emilia noted was unusual.
.....
The work finished at midday, which Emilia said almost never happened.
The boy found Carolit sitting alone in one of the courtyard chairs, looking at nothing in particular.
"Hello, Carolit. How is Grandpa Hover?"
"Fine. Leave me alone."
The boy stood where he was and didn't move.
After a few seconds, Carolit became aware of the fact that he was still there.
"Miss Carolit — why do I feel like you hate me?"
She closed her eyes for a moment.
"I don't hate you. But I have reasons for not wanting to get close to you. So please leave me alone."
He nodded and turned to go.
Then Otub's voice cut across the courtyard, and the boy stopped.
.....
Galius was standing in the center of the yard, beside Otub, whose jaw was wrapped in white bandaging.
He had been beaten badly — swollen from the head down to the shoulders, his pale gold hair shaved to the scalp, the skin beneath it showing the evidence of what had replaced it. But he was standing. His back was straight.
Carolit, Emilia, and the boy were pulled to the center.
"As you're all aware—"
Otub's fist came down on Galius's face mid-sentence.
"—this slave killed one of Lord Kart's servants this morning—"
Another blow.
Galius didn't move.
"—in addition to two previous escape attempts, for which he was punished on multiple occasions—" a third blow— "it has therefore been determined that he is a defective slave. Lord Kart has sentenced him to execution."
No one breathed.
Then one of the servants began walking toward Otub with a sword in his hand.
Carolit shouted at the children to cover their eyes.
The boy didn't.
The sword came down.
One clean cut.
Galius's head hit the ground, and the spark the boy had noticed in his eyes that very morning — present even then, even through everything — went out.
Emilia's scream tore open the quiet and she began to cry, and Carolit turned away and pressed her eyes shut and said nothing except, very quietly, in a voice aimed at no one:
"Fool."
There was something behind the word that took the boy a moment to identify.
Regret.
The boy was the only one still looking.
He stood with his eyes on the body and searched himself for whatever expression was supposed to come, but found nothing. His feelings hadn't gone anywhere — they were still there, exactly where they'd been — but they had stopped, as though they didn't know which direction to move in.
He noticed that the blood on the ground was a brighter red than he'd always imagined it would be.
"Consider what happened today a warning. You are not people. You are a collection of filthy slaves. Do not forget your place."
They were pulled back to the room.
.....
The room felt larger than it had yesterday.