Book One – Chapter 19

And it did. Twice.

Then the mask took him back onto the suicidal stunting stool, where he filled more bowls with his two-stools-one-ladle scooping system. It was fucking hard; the constant up and down to change bowls, and the balancing act with every reach. Each bowl took three scoops, and each scoop a near-death negotiation with heat and gravity. Yu almost-died at least twice per bowl. And for what? For the amusement of Harrow and her pack of greedy criminals. They ate. They lay around and lazed about. They laughed. Nion and Kal had started to play music. As it turned out, the long thing Nion had been refining was a flute. Kal, meanwhile, plucking at a small hand-held instrument with a row of flexible slivers of metal that sung when pressed. They looked so normal, unbothered and unbroken.

Yu tried to be, also. But every bowl crossing from the kitchen to the common room, past the door of the sick bay, felt like crossing a ridge on the Snowtrail. On the far side, the wind of her voice waited; an echo threading through the dullness in his ears. Each trip made the wanting part stir.

But the mask told him to keep ladling stew. So he did. The bowls filled and passed from wings to hands and claws. The rhythm of the serving became its own arithmetic. As dangerous as it was, and as horrible as it felt, the guard-mask took hold of the sequence. It filled and served one bowl at a time, and in between counted his steps, when he was walking, and his scoops, when he was pouring, and the number of bowls, as he was passing them out. The mask fixated on that, it led and it endured. Until the moment the borman came down.