They ran out of food the way a song runs out of words—first the easy parts disappear, then the chorus gets thin, and then there's only the beat, and then even that is memory.
For three days they pretended not to notice. Pretending is a tool. Tella kept the count on a strip of copper scored with a nail: one line for each mouth, a cross for each mouth that could chew. She stopped making crosses. Frehn thought he'd found an old snack stash behind a panel; it was silica gel. He spat grit and laughed so hard he nearly fainted; then he apologized to no one and everyone. The smell of the city became food if you stared at it long enough: hot wire, stale coolant, that sweet metallic afterthought when a valve seals true. Sera taught her lips the craft of being a well. She would wet a rag on a pipe that sweated at odd hours and hold it to Lio's mouth and whisper the way mothers do when words are supposed to climb into a child and become sleep.
Lio stopped asking about birds.
The drip above the maintenance bay had gone quiet days ago, as if the pipe had decided to save its patience for some other century. In the long corridor beyond, every surface carried the cool of stone that had learned the idea of water and moved on. Their last sugar had been a memory Tella kept wrapped in cloth. She unwrapped it one evening—the size of a thumbnail, brown as a secret—and broke it with her teeth. She put the smallest piece on Lio's tongue. The girl's mouth made the shape of surprise one last time. Her eyes were almost greedy for it, and that greed made Sera laugh and cry and kiss her greasy hair, and the laugh was the most beautiful thing that had happened in days. That night Lig didn't make a plan out loud. That night Breuk sat with his back against a locker and stared at the seam of the ceiling until it became a line he could hold with his mind. He held it. He held it. He fell asleep still holding it, as if by keeping the line he could keep the day.
Morning has a way of arriving like a debt collector: with a knock you recognize and a voice that says your names as if it owns them.
They woke to stillness that wasn't empty. People had become very good at counting other people with their ears. This morning their ears missed a small rhythm—the soft cough, the rearranging of a blanket, the dream-murmur like a boy learning to pronounce the name of light. Sera was already sitting, the rag in her hand a dried flower. She didn't look at Breuk or Lig. She didn't look at the pot. She looked at Lio the way one reads a note one wrote oneself and had been avoiding.
"Drink," she whispered anyway, bringing the rag to the child's mouth because habit is love's last instrument. She pressed. The rag made no sound. Lio's lips did not part. Sera waited the appropriate interval for a miracle. It did not come. They do, sometimes. Not today.
Breuk was beside her without remembering moving. He had learned a hundred different ways to break things gently. None of them applied to a morning like this. His hand hovered and his mind, which had been a room full of knives for months, became a bowl. He put the back of two fingers under Lio's nose and waited for a ghost of warmth that wasn't there. He had known men who died like arguments and he had known men who died like permission; this was neither. This was absence the size of a hand.
Lig stood two paces away. He had that stillness he uses as a shield. Sometimes it's a mirror. Sometimes it's mercy. Now it did nothing but exist.
Sera made the sound people make when they get stabbed by a thing without edges. It wasn't loud. It was an intake that forgot to outtake. She set the rag down carefully on the crate beside her and smoothed it with a palm, a ritual for a cloth instead of for a body because the body was her child and she would not friend the word ritual to this moment. She kissed Lio's forehead. One, two, three. "You are brave," she told her daughter. "You are brave." Then, quieter: "You were loud with love. It's allowed."
"I can carry—" Breuk began, and his voice was sand.
"No," Sera said, not looking at him. The word was not a wall; it was a room. She touched Lio's hair. She tucked it behind an ear that would not ever turn toward music again. "I'll do it."
Tella had stood up when she understood, eyes gone hard the way steel goes hard when tempered correctly. Frehn cried and hated himself for it; he turned his face to the locker and learned the taste of paint. A man sat down without looking for a place to sit. The old woman with the rope-ankles put her hands on her knees and pressed until the trembling learned to be quiet.
They wrapped Lio in a blanket that had been a curtain and before that had been a shirt and before that had been a sail for a child's game. Sera did it as if making a bed. She did not let anyone help with the knot. Haim's chime lay on the floor where she had put it last night so it wouldn't sing at the wrong hour. She lifted it and it made no sound. "You can ring now," she told it, and brought bone to metal, and the pipes sang a cracked bright note that went into the corridor and came back thinner.
"There's a pocket," Lig said gently, and pointed past the doorway to the side of the hall where the wall folded into a niche and a dent of shadow waited like a decision. "She won't be… touched there. Until we come back."
Sera looked at him for the length of a list she wasn't going to say. She nodded once. She stood. She lifted Lio. For a moment her knees spoke the language of breaking and then remembered strength. She walked into the corridor without ceremony. They followed with their eyes because bodies do what they can. At the niche Sera crouched and laid Lio down and tucked her as if against a draft. She set the chime above the bundle and tied it to a pipe with careful knots. She didn't ring it again. Her hand hovered over the blanket and then she stood and returned and sat and took a breath that belonged to the person she was now.
It did not rain. The city did not bow. The lamps did not flicker. Hunger remained. That was the offense and the comfort.
Breuk's body remembered how to be a weapon at the worst times; now it remembered how to be useless. He knelt because you kneel in rooms like this or else you become one. He made a small movement toward Sera's hand and stopped. She spared him the mercy of noticing and not noticing. "She was happy," Sera said after a while, to the air. "Even here. She laughed better than wind."
"She did," Tella said. Her voice was blunt iron trying to be linen. "She did."
Frehn, with boy's bravery, whispered, "I was going to show her how to fix the latch you have to hit twice."
"You can show me," Sera said, and her mouth made something that wanted to be a smile and refused to become a lie.
Lig's eyes were on Breuk. There was no accusation in them. That made it worse. Breuk touched his breast pocket. The pendant was a stone. He pressed until the skin beneath hurt. He wanted pain to be a language that would answer him back. It didn't.
They did not say funeral. They did not say burial. They said, "We will pass by her again," and "We go on now," and "Drink," and "Up." Words made a net. The holes were too big. They climbed anyway.
Hunger teaches the body how to make deals.
On the first day after Lio died, the older woman with the rope-ankles—her name was Heren, they learned, because in grief you ask people their names and hold them like cups—kept up the pace with a grim elegance. She walked with a child's stick she'd whittled down to less weight. At a long notch where the corridor stepped into a spiral, she stopped. "Here," she said, and sat. That was all. She put her palms on the floor and leaned back against a column as if someone had finally pulled the splinter from her years. "Here I end."
Sera knelt in front of her and took her jaw in both hands as if to issue a command by touch. She didn't speak. Heren smiled with more teeth than anyone expected and raised a hand and patted Sera's wrist. "It is time for me to be useful by not asking you to carry me," she said. "We all have our turn. I carried my mother. I carried my husband. I carried my child until the river took him and asked me why I thought I could change what water does. This is how I carry you: by not making you set me down."
Tella hated everything about that. She has a mind that won't let a bolt rust. "We rest," she said, voice bright with defiance. "We build a sling. We—"
Heren shook her head. "No. If you save me, you unlearn how to save a day. I have had days. Your days are ahead, and also behind; it is like that." She reached up and touched Tella's cheek like a grandmother touches a girl who built a perfect cart. "You'll build a ladder where there isn't one and then you'll be angry that it wobbles. That's your beauty. Let me have mine."
Breuk crouched. The old woman's eyes were liquid with clarity. "There's a chance," he said, and hated the word as it came out. It sounded like a sales pitch in an office with glass walls.
"Of course," Heren agreed. "Chance sits on all our shoulders. Sometimes she whispers, sometimes she spits. But I am tired of the kind of chance that asks me to humiliate my bones. I will hum a song instead." She gestured toward Sera's chime. "May I?"
Sera set the chime near Heren without touching the old woman's hands so she wouldn't feel the smallness of them now. Heren lifted it and let it catch the corridor's faint moving air. The music was not pretty. That made it dear. People lingered. They learned again the art of leaving someone without making it an abandonment. Heren closed her eyes. "Go," she said, and sent them with a nod gentler than any permission they had ever had. They went because she had told them to.
An hour later, they heard the chime once more, farther back, smaller. They did not turn. No one turned. It was a new commandment they had not asked for and could not refuse: do not look back.
On the second day a man named Crest—big shoulders, mendicant's beard, the sort of voice that makes teams start pulling a rope all at once—sat down by a fan that had stopped when the city had. He put his hand on the metal lip and smiled like this was a bench in sun. "I'll tend this," he said. "In case it wakes. Someone should greet it if it turns. A machine likes that. I know machines." He had been the one to say to Lio, "This is how a hinge forgives you." The hinge did not forgive him; his body remained. He kissed Tella on the forehead like a brother. He told Frehn to keep the pike straight, not brave. He told Sera he knew her husband's laugh because all laughter in the Grund becomes one thing and he had heard it in the night. Then he faced the fan and set his palms on it and breathed with it, in case breath could teach it. They went on because they had learned what to do with that decision. The fan did not start. It might have, though. Chance sat there too.
Breuk tried to hate Lig for not fighting these surrenders and found only himself. Lig walked one step ahead, a rope looped around his shoulder like a careless halo. He spoke when he had to. He pointed when it saved steps. He made a floor with his voice when the corridor failed that task. He did not reach for Breuk. He didn't offer the word sorry to Sera because he knew it spends like water. When Sera stumbled, he put his hand out and then took it back when she caught herself because pride is muscle and you must not cut it.
At night—not real night, the mutual agreement version of it—they learned to ignore wool-gray spots in their vision. The body does pretty little fireworks when it's starving; it thinks celebration is medicine. Breuk saw shapes under his eyelids: Lig in a schoolroom, chalk hard as bone, that same mild smile holding a knife by the flat; Sef laughing, machine-gun arm rattling, then turning into a pipe, into a spine, into the handle of a door he could not open; Kane emptying a map like a pocket. He kept his eyes open and the shapes stood in the room anyway, polite enough to stay in corners.
Tella built a still from shame and science. She stripped insulation from a coil of copper, bent it around a can she found dented into an opinion, sealed gaps with old bread and new hope because flour glues if you bully it. She made a cradle over a warm duct and draped the coil through a bucket full of wet rags and put a cup at the end of the world. They watched the cup as if it were an oracle. It rewarded them with a slow three mouthfuls of water that tasted like penny and prayer. They divided it with a kind of joy that should have been illegal. Sera let the first drop sit on her tongue until it became story. She gave the second to a boy who had stopped blinking. She pushed the third at Breuk and he tried to refuse and failed and swallowed and cried afterward so quietly even the city did not hear. "Tomorrow," Tella said, patting the coil, "there will be more." She lied and nobody punished her for it because the lie was a bridge.
They found an emergency locker sealed with a red latch and the promise of calories painted on it in a century's old icon—a hand holding a wheat stalk that looked like an antenna. Breuk and Frehn broke it with the righteous leisure of a good theft. Inside: gauze, one mask, a booklet in a plastic sleeve that had been read by water, a sachet of salt that had fused into a brick, wrappers for bars that had once existed and had fed air instead. Tella took the salt brick and shaved it with a file; the shavings made a taste. She rationed them by touching the knife to a fingertip and then putting that finger in someone's mouth. People cried again because salt can be love if you're careful.
Sera began speaking to Lio in the plural. "We are tired," she would say. "We are going to sit. We are going to look at that light until it behaves." The first time she did it, Tella flinched as if something had struck her; the second time, Lig closed his eyes; the third time, Breuk learned to listen without trying to pry his heart out through his ribs. He had pried other things out of other things: nails from boards, secrets from men, gas from tanks. This would not be pried. He put a hand flat on the floor when the urge became a tremor. He put the other hand on his pocket. He had the sudden insane certainty that if he threw the pendant away the city would reach out an invisible hand and give it back to him with a shrug. He kept it.
"We need to choose where to fail," Lig said on the fourth day of no food, when people had forgotten what numbers were for. It was at a junction that acted like a question. "Left is shorter and angrier. Right is longer and meaner. Both go up. The short one costs more bodies; the long one costs more hours."
"You're putting it like a ledger," Tella snapped, energy returning for anger's sake. "These are people. We're not toggles."
"I know," Lig said, and didn't defend himself because the defense would have used calories.
Sera looked at both paths. She put a hand on the wall to keep from tipping into a sermon. "Left," she said. "Because if I die, I'd rather die before I run out of words." She caught their looks and barked a laugh that was not a laugh. "You want honesty. There." She pointed. "Left. Give me a reason to keep remembering how to climb."
They went left. It was angrier. It had a way of falling away from under their feet just to test a point. Three times the rope yanked hard enough to leave a message in skin. Once Breuk leaped without permission and caught a sleeve and learned with sick horror that it was Sera's sleeve and he had nearly taken her down. She hit his shoulder with her fist from hatred at physics and then patted his cheek with the same hand because that is what the world is: the same hand doing both. "Don't do that again," she told him. "Or do. Decide."
Later, in a pocket of air that had tricked itself into believing in trees, the old man who had been counting bolts on his fingers sat down and said the name of his wife as if ordering a drink and stayed there. He had a coin he'd kept in his boot for twenty years. He gave it to Frehn. "To make your pockets heavy when you want to run," he said. "It helps." Frehn took it because taking is a sacrament when it is the last thing you can do. They left the old man by a window that was in fact a hole where the wall had given up. He looked out at nothing and smiled like a thief remembering a story where he won.
Sera started moving like a woman who had invited a blade into her belly and was negotiating the terms. No blood, all bracing. Sometimes she leaned her head against the wall, left a smear of sweat, and said Lio's name in the tone the Grund reserves for rain: half command, half question. Breuk kept trying to bring water where there was none. He'd find a brown bead on a valve threads and her mouth would find it and it would not be enough and the cruelty of the number no would bury itself a little deeper in his teeth. Lig watched him and didn't say the thing Breuk feared and hoped to hear: this isn't your fault. Lig has never been a liar in the easy ways.
They slept one night (not night) in a shaft where the air had the taste of stone that had been heated and cooled by hands. It was warmer by two degrees. They counted those degrees like coins. People made themselves smaller to fit into rest. Breuk dreamed of Jeremiah's hands on the table in the prison, the way he folded them and unfolded them as if building a bridge and changing his mind. He dreamed of Sef's loud arm rattling a laugh so big it became a rail. He dreamed of the pendant as a mouth with no words. He woke to Sera watching him.
"You were smiling," she said, without malice.
"I was remembering someone who thought he'd never die," he answered, and she accepted that as a kind of prayer.
On the sixth day without food, Frehn found a handrail that had long ago learned to be a pipe and then a bone and then a rope. He put his arm around it and cried into his elbow where nobody would have to carry the sound. When he was done, he wiped his face with the part of his sleeve that was least like a rag and resumed being fierce because boys learn to dance with shame, and some of them make it art.
Tella nearly hit Lig once. She stopped herself. She was not sure if she had meant to hit him or if she had meant to hit the plan. "You think in lines," she accused, "and people are circles. We don't move the way you draw us."
"I know," he said again, and put his hand on the wall and listened, not to the pipes, to the people breathing. He adjusted the rope by a hand's-breadth. It helped in a way that felt like coincidence because no one can afford gratitude when the world is this stingy.
On the seventh day, a child who wasn't Lio tried to hand Sera a bead of rust. Sera took it and thanked her and put it in her pocket and later threw it away and then went and found it and put it back in her pocket because pockets need purpose or they begin to lie.
They found water the way all pilgrimages find water: by accident that someone could pretend was cunning. A cooling fin above a dead converter had been sweating into a lip for years. The lip had made a bowl of itself. The bowl had collected a mouthful at a time. Tella kissed the fin like a sinner at a saint's knee and then held the cup and let everyone sip once. It was not enough. It was everything. Sera smiled and then her face broke without sound. Breuk thought of Lio at the niche and the chime that did not ring unless someone told it to. He considered going back and ringing it until his knuckles bled and then he realized he was thinking like a man who can eat his thoughts. He swallowed them instead.
After the water, the very old man whose name no one had trusted themselves to learn because names make the world permanent, he sat and patted Frehn's hand. "I can't count the bolts anymore," he confessed softly, pleased to have discovered a limit. "Go on. I'll sit and remember for you." He had once been a singer in a time when men sang about pipes because pipes were new. He hummed two notes. They were enough to push them up three flights.
That night Sera brought the chime out and set it by her shoulder and did not strike it. "Haim wanted it to sing," she said to Breuk, "and it did. And now I want it to be quiet, and it is. Maybe that's all there ever was to being alive."
"I wanted to die and didn't," Breuk said, attempting to match honesty to honesty. "I wanted to save everyone and didn't. I want you to live. I want that so much it feels like a kind of theft."
"It is," she said, but with love. "Steal it. If there's a chance, take it. Don't turn my daughter into a proof you can't have it."
He put his hand over his mouth because words had become teeth.
Lig came then, not into the center of their moment, but near enough to be acknowledged by their silence. He lowered himself with care so his joints wouldn't inform on his weakness. "We're close," he said. "Everything feels like edges when you're close." It was either promise or warning. With Lig it is always both.
Sera looked at him a long time. "You care like a wire carries current," she told him. "All heat and light, and if someone touches the wrong part they learn not to again."
"I'm learning," he said, and he was. That was the trouble and the hope.
Breuk dreamed that night without sleeping. He watched himself from the corner of the room bending over a plan he hated for its necessity. He saw Lig above him and Jeremiah behind him and Sef to the side and Mara's doorway and the servant's broken face and Kane's map and the pendant, always the pendant, warm the way a lie can be warm if you hold it near your throat. He heard Lig's old classroom whisper: What do you want? He tried to answer with something that wasn't a negation. He got as far as: I want them alive, and the room refused the grammar. He woke before the sentence could make itself cruel.
They lost two more elders over two more days—by choice, by a step that didn't quite happen, by a sitting down that became a sitting still that became a moment when breath decided it had done enough. Each time the leaving person found a way to make the ones who remained feel sent rather than abandoned. Each time Tella stood too straight and then built a thing and hated it for not being resurrection. Each time Lig looked at Breuk and Breuk looked away and they both kept their hands at their sides.
Hunger stops being a condition and becomes an architecture. Their faces learned to be planes without fat. The tendons in their necks told their own time. People stopped talking in paragraphs and found the elemental uses of words: "step," "hold," "drink," "lift," "stop," "go." Sera said "we" less and "I" more. It wasn't a cure. It was a recalibration.
On a morning that might have been a miracle if they had had any left to spend, they came upon a ladder whose rungs were not the kind that break your faith. Someone had recently, in the last decade, maintained it. The bolts were snug. The rust had been beaten back with paint that still had a little optimism in it. The ladder went up into a hatch with a seal. Next to the seal, stenciled in angry black, someone had written:
NO ENTRY
SUN FEED—DO NOT OBSTRUCT
NO RAIN TESTS IN SERVICE HOURS
Lig pressed his palm to the hatch as if asking a door to tell him a story. It hummed faintly. The line behind swayed, the way people do when standing becomes a strategy rather than a default. "Up," he said, not loudly, and for once the word felt like kindness.
Sera set a hand to Breuk's arm and squeezed so hard he had to look. "I am going to live," she told him, half-knowing it was a contract with a god neither of them recognized. "Say 'yes' back."
"Yes," he said, and for a moment he believed it. That was either memory or a miracle.
They went up into more light than their eyes liked. Behind them, the corridor released their shadows without reluctance. Before them, the world kept its promise: more stairs, more metal, more breath, more work—an unkindness that at least did not lie.
No one spoke of the Schlund. No one looked back. Hunger held their hands and led them higher. Hope, which had been expensive, did not get cheaper. It simply moved its shop to the next level and waited for them to knock.
They knocked. And knocked. And climbed. And counted. And did not count. And held. And let go. And lived, which is a verb you don't really understand until the world makes you use it like a tool.