“Four days,” he mused. Four days without sap. It was the longest he’d been sober in ages, and he wanted some now, but not with the same god-awful fervor as before. It felt more like a routine he wanted to indulge, or a habit he merely missed. It didn’t feel like a gaping hole that ate his chest and his brain like a flame chewing through paper. Rector wasn’t the very picture of health, that was for damn sure, but he had to admit there was a certain feeble glimmer of clarity—a candle’s worth of awareness—that was catching hold, and his thoughts were lining up more easily, more cleanly.

By the light of this new and unfamiliar awareness, he recalled something else that made him shudder. He blurted out another question. “When I fell down the chuckhole, I was running away from something, wasn’t I? Something was chasing me.”

Houjin carefully masked his emotions so that Rector could barely see his uncertainty while he thought about his response. He sure did a lot of that: thinking before talking. Given how much talking he did, it made you wonder how fast his brain worked.

“You were running, yes. And I saw … something.”

“Oh, don’t give me that. You saw it, plain as I did,” Rector asserted, despite the fact that he hadn’t seen anything plainly. He’d heard it, and sensed it, and even smelled it—or he fancied he did, despite the gas mask. When that foul, dank breath had come so close to his skin he thought he’d die from fright, the odor had oozed like wet dog and moldering pine needles. Like dirty feet and sour water.

Houjin hemmed and hawed. “Well, you have to understand … there are many dangers inside the wall. Many things that will chase you, and try to hurt you.”

“Rotters. I’ve heard about them, and I heard some scraping around. Never actually saw any. But this wasn’t a rotter, what I was running from.”

“No, it must’ve been a rotter.”

“Couldn’t have been,” Rector argued. “Rotters were people once, weren’t they? And they don’t grow, after they’ve gone all dead and rotty.” Or so he assumed.

“No, they don’t grow. And yes, they were people first.”

“That thing that chased me was bigger than a person.”

This gave Houjin an idea. He brightened. “Not necessarily. Captain Cly, he’s much bigger than a regular man.”

“You think your Captain Cly chased me and tried to kill me? Because I don’t, and I haven’t even met the guy. Whatever it was, it wasn’t human. And it wasn’t ever human,” he said with certainty. “You saw it, too. You already admitted you did, so don’t go taking it back, now.”