Book One – Chapter 19

This quiet was the rarest sound Yu had ever known. No voices bled in from the common room, no boots dragged across the floor, no bodies shifted in the rooms above. Even the mountain storms, which scraped day and night across the stone, seemed absent. The thing that had circled him in the hallway had also left; the low hum that had flickered in and out of reach. The world outside had drowned. Just like him. It became more and more difficult to hear himself. There was neither the scrape of his own talons against the flagstones, nor the faint rustle of his feathers as he pressed his wings against his chest. His breath should be loud and fast and raw, but if he did not feel his chest rise and fall through his wings, he would not know that he was still alive.

Yu knew well that fina were no swimmers and no divers. He had nearly drowned once, as a child. His memory of the incident was nothing but a full on thrashing, with his wings and claws cleaving and kicking the water for dear life, while his pulse had filled his ears and hammered against his skull.

This drowning deafness now was not that. This was not the struggle, but the after. It was what he imagined came once the body gave up, when the lungs and ears were long flooded, with pressure on the skull but no more resistance, and all sound sealed off. He was all the way down at the bottom. Only one thing reached him here. It was the fleeting reminder of the dying flames in front of him, not fire proper, but its last phantom echo clinging to the hearth. Yu was not sure if it was real, or if he imagined it. It drew him toward the pot, and from there toward the metal door behind the hearth. It irritated Yu that he had not noticed it before. Then again, his first visit to the kitchen had been brief, and the door, though tall, sat flush at the back wall, dull and stone-coloured, betrayed only by a narrow slit of glass. He recognised it as an observation window, a twin to the one in the sickbay, and then he understood that he the surgery lay boxed in between the two rooms. Like that, any procedures could be observed from both sides.