“And my locket.” I clutch the gold heart around my neck. “I’m guessing valkerax live way more than a mile and a half down, huh? Varia wouldn’t want to risk her death going very far.”

Yorl blinks at me with his huge green eyes. “I must be rubbing off on you. You almost sounded intelligent just then.”

I can’t see my own rude gesture, but he can. We’re quiet as we walk the rest of the way up the stairs, and Yorl leaves me at the top.

“Tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll feed it well and sedate it as much as I can. We can try again tomorrow.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

Yorl stares at me steadily. “There are other Old Vetrisian methods I can try. But they are…brutal. I’d prefer not to resort to such things.”

“Brutal how?” I swallow nervously.

“It involves taking off parts of the valkerax’s body.”

as always, the hunger sneers at Yorl. we are forever expendable to them.

“Is there any way to not dismember a living thing for what we want?” I ask lightly.

“I will do it if I must,” he says, resolute, his tail swishing. “I will become a polymath, no matter what must be done. And you? Will you do it, for your heart?”

The taunting gap where the memories of my heart were inside me widens, yawning open. To never eat raw things, to never have to kill again. To never have to take orders, and to remember everything I once was, at the cost of a creature’s pain.

“These methods won’t kill it?” I narrow my eyes at Yorl.

He shakes his head. “No. It would temporarily inflict great pain, and the valkerax may never regrow them back.”

I have to try everything I possibly can to make the valkerax talk cohesively, to teach it, to make sure it doesn’t come to that. But if it does…

if it does, you would, the hunger insists with rock-hard truth. you desire your weak humanity as a moth desires flame, and it will be your undoing.

I stare into the darkness of the doorway behind him and think of the majestic creature that sits there at the bottom, alone, in pain, half dead and all mad. If I was a good person, I would say no. If I was a dishonest person, I would say no.

But I am done with lies.

“Yes,” I start. “If that’s what it comes to.”