Dead
"I couldn't save anyone. Again."
Luccos stood to the side, voice barely above a whisper, watching what he couldn't stop.
Jhed was on his knees.
Spears had gone through him everywhere — chest, arms, back, skull. The floor around him was dark and wet. Blood ran in thin, branching lines between the cracks in the stone, finding its way outward the way water always does.
He didn't scream. He didn't cry.
He just knelt there, still as something already dead.
I can't even run properly, he thought, somewhere underneath the pain. How useless am I. How completely, utterly useless.
The thought wasn't new. It had lived in him for a long time — across two lives now — and it knew exactly where to settle.
"Mite." Miruth waved a hand like he was dismissing a servant. "Throw him with the other corpses."
Throw him away.
Everyone always says that.
Does my existence really mean nothing to anyone?
Jhed heard his mother's voice for a moment — not Linea's, but the other one. The first one. You're good for nothing. And then Miruth's voice layered over it, almost identical in tone.
Mite walked toward him.
Jhed didn't move. Didn't flinch. He was quiet in the way people go quiet when they've stopped expecting things to get better.
And yet.
I haven't died.
He turned his neck — slowly, deliberately — toward Mite.
Mite stopped.
Just for a moment. Just half a step back.
"How is he still alive." Mite said it under his breath, more to himself than anyone. His eyes moved over the spears still lodged in Jhed's body, counting them, checking his own work. "After all of that."
He drove another spear into Jhed's back.
"That hurts," Jhed said.
Not a scream. Not a plea. Just a statement of fact, delivered the same way someone might note that it was raining.
"What's taking so long, Mite?" Miruth's voice had lost some of its amusement.
Jhed looked up at Mite. His eyes were steady.
"Tell me something." His voice came out quiet, unhurried, like a man with nowhere to be. "What do you actually gain from killing me? I'm no threat to you. I'm nobody. I'm no one."
Mite stared at him.
"You're still alive," he said finally. As if that were reason enough.
"Mite." Miruth's tone sharpened.
Across the room, Luccos had lifted his head. He was staring at Jhed with an expression that had moved past confusion into something else entirely.
Alive. How is he still alive. That much blood—
Mite drove a spear through Jhed's skull.
Jhed dropped.
The room went quiet.
"Done, my king." Mite began pulling the spears free, one by one, methodical and efficient. He hoisted Jhed's body over his shoulder — blood soaked through his clothes immediately, warm and heavy. "I'll dispose of him."
He carried him out without looking back.
A corridor. A staircase. A door.
The lock turned.
Mite threw him in and didn't watch where he landed.
"Stay here."
The door shut. The lock turned again. Footsteps moved away down the corridor and disappeared.
Silence.
Jhed lay on the stone floor.
Darkness. Cold. The smell hit him before anything else — thick and wrong and sweet in the way rot is sweet, the kind of smell that gets into your throat and stays there.
His wounds had already begun closing. He could feel it — the slow knitting sensation he'd grown used to over fifteen years, flesh repairing itself without his permission or effort. He lay still and let it happen, staring up at a ceiling he couldn't see.
When the last wound closed, he stayed on the floor a little longer anyway.
Then he pushed himself upright.
He pressed a hand over his nose and looked around.
The room was large. Larger than he'd expected. And it was full.
Bodies.
Children's bodies.
Some recent. Some not. In the far corners, only bones remained, small and pale in the faint light that crept under the door. Others were newer — faces still visible, expressions frozen in whatever the last moment had been. Boys, most of them. All of them small.
Jhed stood in the middle of the room and didn't move for a long time.
So this is where they bring them.
This is what happens to the ones they find.
He thought about the village in the jungle. The tents. The women and girls, all of them — because the men had been taken, or killed, or both. He thought about Rayo, sent to kill a six-year-old boy because someone had ordered it. He thought about the mine, the man who had collapsed mid-swing and been dragged away like furniture.
He hadn't understood it then. The full shape of it.
He was starting to understand it now.
This is a world that kills its boys before they can become men. And the ones who survive — they work until they die anyway. Either way, they don't last.
Except me.
He looked down at his own hands. No wounds. No scars. Already clean, as if nothing had happened.
Why me. What makes me different. What is it that keeps bringing me back.
He didn't have an answer.
He looked up.
At the far end of the room, half-buried in the shadows against the wall, something was different from the rest.
A shape. Knees drawn up to chest. Head down.
Too still to be comfortable. Not still enough to be dead.
Jhed crossed the room slowly, stepping carefully around what lay on the floor, and crouched down in front of the shape.
A girl. Her arms were wrapped tight around her knees, her face hidden against them, her breathing shallow and careful, like someone trying to take up as little space as possible.
Is she alive.
He leaned closer.
She's breathing.
He stayed crouched there, looking at her, not sure what to do next.
One survivor. In a room full of the dead.