Chapter 20 The New Table

Chapter 20 The New Table

He got to breakfast early.

Not because he was hungry. Because he had told Zael my table, tomorrow and he wanted to be there first. He wanted it to be a choice Zael walked toward not something he stumbled into.

He picked up his tray. Sat at the window table. Grey paste. Half portions. The Null allocation the kitchen still issued automatically because the system that decided meal portions ran three days behind the system that decided everything else.

He ate it anyway.

Soren arrived first. Dropped into his seat. Looked at the empty places Kael had not set but had not filled. Looked at Kael.

"How many," he said.

"At least one," Kael said.

Soren nodded and said nothing else because nothing else needed saying.

Mira came in at seven-fifteen. Saw the table. Read the situation immediately. Sat beside Kael and looked at the door and waited with him the way she always waited present, steady, the person who had decided showing up was the whole job and was very good at it.

Lira followed. Scanned the room. Found the table. Sat without announcing it choosing, quietly, to enter anyway.

Seven-twenty-seven.

Zael walked in.

He stood at the entrance for three full seconds. The cafeteria noticed heads turning, that specific ripple of a room adjusting to something unexpected. A Rank-B Warrior with a dimmed Crystal standing at the entrance looking at a table full of people he had spent fifteen days on the wrong side of.

Kael met his eyes across the room.

Nodded once.

Zael walked over.

He didn't perform it. Didn't make it casual or confident or anything except what it was a person crossing a floor because they had decided to and were not going to pretend the deciding had been easy.

He sat.

Looked at his tray. Full portions. Protein supplement. The Rank-B allocation the kitchen had issued him automatically since day one.

He pushed it to the center of the table.

"Split it," he said.

Nobody spoke.

Then Soren reached forward and took the protein supplement with the quiet efficiency of someone who had been running on half nutrition for two semesters and had decided today was not the day to be polite about it.

Lira took the fruit.

Mira divided the rest without being asked.

Kael looked at his grey paste.

Then at the table.

Five people eating breakfast together above an abyss in a building made of a dead god's bones people who had arrived from completely different directions and found each other through corridors and combat halls and dark rooms and one boy who had followed someone with broken fingers because of a locket.

He felt it warm against his chest.

Thought about his mother.

About what she would have said looking at this table. At the Rank-B boy pushing food to the center. At the healer eating properly for the first time in two semesters. At the spy who chose a side. At the hunter who sat beside instead of across.

She would have laughed.

That specific laugh she saved for things she loved too much to be serious about.

He almost heard it.

"You're smiling," Mira said quietly. Just to him.

"I know," he said.

She looked at the table. At all of them. At the grey morning light through the cafeteria windows.

She smiled too.

And for exactly four minutes and thirty seconds

Everything was enough.

\---

Then Kael's data-slate buzzed.

He almost ignored it.

Almost.

He turned it over.

One message. No name. A sender ID he didn't recognize not a student account, not a faculty address, not anything the Academy's internal system used.

External.

He opened it.

Four words.

We found your mother.

The table kept talking around him. Soren saying something about the Aldis Protocol. Zael listening with his hands flat and his expression careful. Mira laughing at something Lira said.

All of it continuing.

All of it normal.

Kael sat completely still with the data-slate in his hand and read the four words again and felt something cold move through his chest that was not Devour and was not hunger and was not anything he had felt in fifteen days of corridors and combat halls and rooms above the abyss.

We found your mother.

His mother was dead.

He had held her hand. He had taken the locket. He had stood over a casket and not let go for four hours.

He knew what dead meant.

So what did this mean.

His hand was not shaking.

He made sure of that.

He put the data-slate face down on the table.

Pressed the locket flat against his chest.

And felt it.

Cold.

The paper inside.

You are not alone.

He had written that.

He had been certain of it.

Now staring at the back of a data-slate with four words burning through it like something on fire

He had never been less certain of anything in his life.