I nod and turn to see Malachite already jogging toward the massive arena door, raised and waiting. I start to follow after him when I feel claws nip at my hand. Yorl holds me back, the pupils of his green eyes slit by the bright lamplight. There’s something soft in his features, a new and strange thing coming from the cold polymath.

“Please,” he pleads. “Don’t let anyone else die.”

I see myself in him, standing there, pale and reflected in his orb-like eyes. I see the girl who can’t bear to think of fourteen men, or any more dead because of her. The guilt has him. But it’s not his fault—how could wanting to make his beloved grandfather’s name known be his fault? How could he be expected to keep perfect control over one of the most ruthless, powerful beasts in the world?

I squeeze his paw and smile reassuringly at him. “I’ll be only a sec, honey. Get my tea ready.”

I sprint to catch up to Malachite, seeing the arena with clear vision for the first time: deep scratch marks littering the floor, old bloodstains and decaying animal carcasses scattered around and piled high. Dull, chipped teeth long shed and great clumps of stringy ivory fur. The localized quake Yorl talked about is clear on the walls—little fissures pulling the iron apart, insinuating themselves between the carved words of familiar beneather runes and rendering them inert. There are impact craters in the walls of the arena from the valkerax’s thrashing, so deep I can see where the very earth of the ceiling strained to stay together.

How could I be expected to keep perfect control over a relentless, bloodthirsty hunger that preyed on my every weakness? That knew me better than I knew myself?

you are only human, after all, the hunger taunts, an odd edge of pity to its voice.

“Only human, after all,” I whisper.

The breach yawns open before me—bent metal rimming a crevice sundering deeply and darkly into the earth. I hold my lantern high and press into it. It’s absurd, to only realize certain things much later than they need to be realized. I thought I had half a brain. I thought I knew things, the important things. But there are bits and pieces of thought that fall from life, and we scoop them up and desperately try to make a whole picture of them, sometimes long before we’re ready to see what that picture is.

Pushing into the dark tunnel, I slide the last piece into its slot. Yorl is not the valkerax. And now, for the very first time in my Heartless life, I start to think, solidly and wholly and clearly:

I am not the hunger.

18

18

The Wyrm
and the
Bene’thar