Page 55 of Reaper Said Mine

“And if Rikka smiles at you, check whether the dish is still alive.”

“That feels important.”

“It is.”

We start down the corridor toward the lifts. The station lights seem warmer tonight, or maybe I am noticing them differently because I know where they lead. Two Reaper warriors pass us heading the opposite way, both dressed in ceremonial armor. One gives me a quick assessing look, then says something to Vesk in Reaper dialect that my translator renders as small scholar and walks to the sharp table.

Vesk answers without looking back, Sharp table may learn manners.

I glance up at him. “Did your translator just make you sound poetic?”

“No.”

“So you chose that?”

“Do not become smug before dinner. It attracts punishment.”

The lift doors open, and heat rolls faintly from somewhere below, carrying smoke, spice, metal, and the copper warning of blood.

I step inside anyway.

As the lift descends toward the Blood Hall, I review every note, every correction, every insult, every story I gathered across the station. I think of Professor Lorr telling me not to perform courage. I think of Mara’s maps, Salla’s son in school, Hakk’s hungry ship, and the children learning feast songs with the worst verses removed. I think of all the people who told me Gnash was dangerous without ever suggesting he was simple.

The doors open to a corridor lined with banners.

Sound spills toward us: deep voices, laughter, clattering dishes, chains moving overhead, and the rising roar of a room filling with people who expect outsiders to misunderstand them.

Vesk steps out first, then turns to look down at me.

“Last chance to invent a medical condition,” he says.

I look past him toward the Blood Hall entrance, where firelight flickers across black metal and shadows move like something alive.

“No,” I say. “I came here to learn the language.”

His eyes hold mine for a moment, and then he nods once.

Together, we walk toward the feast.

CHAPTER 8

GNASH

The Blood Hall glows like the inside of a forge when the first drums begin.

Fire baskets hang from chains high above the feast tables, throwing orange light across black girders, armored walls, and banners painted with the names of dead ships. Smoke coils beneath the ceiling in slow ribbons before the ventilation system catches it and drags it toward the grates. Along the far wall, the burned Helios Combine seal hangs beside my father’s home-ship banner, one symbol of the enemy that took too much and one symbol of the people they failed to erase. The long tables stretch beneath them in a hard geometric order, each bench reinforced for Reaper bodies and each setting arranged to remind our guests that comfort is a courtesy, not a right. Blades gleam beside the trenchers. Bone cups wait beside bowls of dark salt. Sealed basins twitch under heavy lids where the live courses test their restraints.

The room smells of blood, spice smoke, hot iron, charred fat, and the damp brine of creatures dragged from deep Badlands holding tanks. Heat rolls across my skin from the cooking pits and gathers beneath my formal armor. The plates across my shoulders are old, etched with the names of ships I have taken, leaders I have outlived, and the home-ship whose loss made a child into something harder than grief ever should have required. Around me, Reaper voices rise and fall in rough laughter, ritual phrases, and the low humming notes of the opening song. The sound vibrates through the deck and into my bones until the whole station seems to sing beneath us.

Good.

Let the diplomats feel it.

Let them understand that they are not entering a banquet hall designed to flatter their manners. They are entering memory. They are entering appetite. They are entering a room where my people do not apologize for having survived.

Skahar stands at my left, wearing ceremonial harness over dark robes, his cane replaced by an old captain’s staff capped with a blade. The staff gives him a dangerous dignity, though I suspect he chose it mainly because he can still hit people with it.

“You look pleased with yourself,” he says.