Chapter 50 Terms

Chapter 50 Terms
POV: Phoenix Kade
Slyfox turns to me with the expression of a man who has just remembered a piece of administrative business he needs to clear up before the day is fully done.
"Enough, kid." He looks at me with those small dark eyes, not unkind exactly, not cruel exactly, just completely devoid of any illusion about what this arrangement is. "You should be leaping for joy at having been recruited into Tartarus. We have a sterling reputation in this outpost. But lemme make it clear to you right now, you aren't here to just loaf around and enjoy life."
He lets that sit for a moment.
"Starting today, you'll only be given two pieces of bread and one bottle of water each day. In exchange, you do whatever the hell we tell you to do. No whining and no foot-dragging. Can't handle it? Then fuck off. Tartarus ain't charity." He pauses. "Got it?"
I look at him.
Two pieces of bread and one bottle of water. I run the arithmetic without wanting to. In the ruins, two pieces of bread and a bottle of water would have been extraordinary, would have been a week's worth of good fortune compressed into a single day, would have been worth fighting for and possibly dying for.
Here, inside these walls, surrounded by people who have more than that, it is the minimum. The baseline. The exact amount required to keep a body functional for light labor, no more and no less, calibrated by someone who has thought about this with the efficiency of a man who runs an operation and understands that resources spent on the lowest rung of the hierarchy are resources not spent elsewhere.
It is the precise monetary value Slyfox has assigned to my existence in this compound.
I unclench my fists. I didn't notice I'd clenched them.
"Got it," I say.
Slyfox's expression doesn't change. He was never waiting for a different answer. He claps his hands once and turns to the assembled mercenaries with the full wattage of his celebration energy.
"We made out like bandits on this mission. We need to hold a celebration!"
The roar that goes up from the mercenaries is immediate and genuine, the specific enthusiasm of people who have been in dangerous places and come back from them and understand viscerally what coming back means. They are loud and they are many and they fill the compound with the sound of people who have survived and intend to mark the fact.
"Long live the boss!"
I stand in the middle of it and I am not part of it.
The smell hits me before the food is even properly laid out.
It moves through the compound air with the specific cruelty of something that knows exactly what it's doing, reaching past every other input my body is currently processing and going directly to the oldest system, the hunger system, the one that has been running at various intensities since before I could name it. Cooked meat. Real cooked meat, seasoned somehow, prepared with actual attention rather than held over a flame until the outside stopped being raw. Vegetables, which I haven't smelled cooking since the old man managed to find something worth cooking in the ruins, what feels like years ago and was two days.
My stomach responds before I can do anything about it.
The mercenaries have produced tables from somewhere, rough ones, and they're covering them with food in quantities that my mind keeps recalibrating for because each recalibration finds more than the previous one. Platters of mutabeast meat, cut and cooked and smelling like something from the pictures of First World feasts. Vegetables in piles. Cheap wine in bottles that get passed without glasses.
I stand at the edge of it.
Not close enough to be in it. Not far enough away that the smell diminishes. The specific purgatory of someone who can perceive a thing completely and access it not at all.
I try to move toward the food. The first mercenary who notices gives me a look that answers the question before I've fully formed it.
"Hey newbie. None of this is for you."
"Fuggoff, yeah?"
I stop moving.
The hunger is a physical thing now, not the background gnaw I've lived with my entire life but something sharper and more present, activated by the smell and the sight of what's available and the specific distance between available and accessible. My mouth is producing saliva I have nothing to use on. My stomach is making arguments.
I stand there and I breathe through my mouth to reduce the smell input and I watch the mercenaries eat.
They eat the way people eat when they're not worried about where the next meal is coming from, with the particular pleasure of surplus, taking more when their plate empties without calculating whether there will be enough, laughing between bites, talking with their mouths full. They eat like people who have earned this and know it and are not thinking about anything beyond the immediate pleasure of the earning.
Woola, tied to its ring at the wall, receives a giant bowl of raw chopped meat. Bones and all. It eats with the efficiency of something that has never needed to worry about getting enough either, crunching through bone like it's nothing, and even eating it watches me, the dark-red eyes tracking my position with the patient attention of something that is making a plan it hasn't been permitted to execute yet.
Then the women arrive.
Nearly twenty of them, coming in from outside, scantily dressed in the cold with the specific stoicism of people who have made their calculation and committed to it. Mad Max lifts his glass and the mercenaries respond with sounds that are more animal than celebratory, and the women move into the celebration with the practiced efficiency of people doing a job.
I watch it for exactly as long as it takes me to understand that this is another version of the slave market, the same transaction in a different setting, and then I look away because I've been looking at versions of this transaction all day and I have already decided I'm not looking away from things, which means I need to decide what looking at this one actually costs me before I keep doing it.
Slyfox spots me standing at the edge of the celebration and gestures vaguely in my direction without looking away from his wine.
"Hey, you. What's your face. Yeah. Get over here. Find a place for the newbie to stay. The base is full."
A mercenary detaches from the celebration with the mild irritation of someone doing a task below their current enthusiasm level. He hands me two pieces of bread and a bottle of water without looking at me, then jerks his head for me to follow.
I follow.
The bread is in my hands and I eat both pieces before we've cleared the compound, walking and chewing, not tasting it properly, just responding to what my stomach is demanding. It is not enough. It is nowhere near enough. But it is what has been determined that I am worth, and I eat it and I don't let it show on my face.
Behind me, the celebration continues without noticing I've left.