"Lamb." He falls into step beside Lethe, which is unusual. "Demos is in a mood tonight."
Lethe's stride doesn't falter. His face doesn't change. Inside, something cold settles in the pit of his stomach and stays there.
"How bad?" he asks.
"Lost money on the fourth bout. Two of his favorites went down. He's been drinking since." Devlin doesn't look at him. He watches the corridor ahead. "Thought you'd want to know."
"Thank you."
Devlin peels off at the next junction without another word. He is not kind. He is not Lethe's friend. He is a man who works a distasteful job and occasionally dispenses information that might, on a good night, allow Lethe to make himself scarce before the pit lord's attention finds him.
Tonight is not a good night.
Lethe adjusts his route. He takes the long way back to his room, through the supply corridor, past the cistern entrance, keeping to the parts of the kennels where the lanterns aredimmest and the foot traffic is lightest. He makes himself small. He's good at that. Six years of practice.
It doesn't work.
The knock on his door comes an hour after the late bell. Three sharp raps and then silence, because Demos doesn't wait for an answer and Demos doesn't need to knock at all. The knock is ceremony. The knock is a reminder that the door doesn't lock and the door doesn't need to lock because everything down here belongs to the pit lord, including Lethe, including whatever Lethe might try to keep for himself.
Lethe sits on the edge of his cot. He stares at the wall. He breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth and he goes somewhere far away inside his own head, the way he taught himself years ago. A quiet place. A still place. A place where none of this is happening and his body is just a body and the things done to it don't reach the part of him that matters.
He opens the door.
***
Later. He doesn't track how much later.
He stands at the basin in his room and washes his skin until it's raw. The water is cold and he scrubs until his hands shake and then he scrubs more. There are marks on his throat. On his wrists. On places he can't see but can feel, throbbing and hot, and he cleans each one with mechanical precision because this is what he does. This is the after. The during is a locked room in his head and the after is soap and cold water and the slow, deliberate process of putting himself back together so that he can function tomorrow.
His hands still. He grips the edge of the basin and stands there, dripping, and his jaw works and his eyes burn and he doesn't make a sound.
He doesn't cry. He stopped crying a long time ago. Not because the tears dried up but because the tears changed nothing and Lethe is, above all else, practical. Tears don't heal wounds. Tears don't feed the creatures in the cages. Tears don't keep his hands steady when he's three inches from the jaws of something that could take his arm off at the shoulder.
He dries himself. Puts on a clean shirt that covers the marks on his throat. Lies down.
The ceiling is the same as it was this morning. The bells ring the same. The pits breathe and groan and settle around him the way they always do. Nothing has changed. Nothing ever changes.
He thinks about the new beast arriving tomorrow. Zazyrus. Horns and claws that don't retract. Two dead handlers. An unbroken record in the ring.
He wonders if this new beast will give him a chance before he tears him apart.
And there it is: the thing that keeps Lethe alive. Not hope, exactly. Not faith. Something stubborner than both. The part of him that walks into cages every morning knowing any one of them could be his last, and walks in anyway, because the creatures inside are hurting and he can help and the risk is worth the work. The part of him that stood between Harsk and a downed fighter and saidmoveand meant it. The part that Demos has been trying to reach for six years and hasn't found yet, because it doesn't live where Demos looks.
Everyone calls him Lamb, because they think they know how his story ends.
Lethe closes his eyes. His hands, finally, are still.
He sleeps.
Chapter two
Chapter 2
Two weeks is long enough.
Long enough to learn the rhythms. The bells that mark the shifts, the feeding times that come at irregular intervals because the guards can't be bothered with consistency, the fight schedules that follow a pattern only if you watch closely enough to catch it. Zazyrus watches. He has nothing else to do in this cage except watch and catalog and remember, and he is very, very good at remembering.
The first bell rings at dawn. Shift change. The night guards are lazier than the day guards but more predictable. They patrol in pairs, always the same route, always the same pace, and they talk too loudly about things that don't matter. The day guards are more varied. Some are cruel for sport, the ones who rattle cage bars with their cudgels and spit at the fighters through the gaps. Some are simply doing a job that happens to be distasteful, and those ones keep their heads down and their eyes forward and don't linger.
