Two days after Galius's execution, the room had become a different kind of place.
Carolit hadn't eaten since that morning. She sat in the corner she'd claimed as her own and stared at the spot where Galius used to sleep — not occasionally, not in passing, but with the fixed, unblinking attention of something that has stopped pretending to do anything else. She left the corner for work and returned to it immediately after. The dark circles under her eyes had deepened. She looked thinner than she had before, though only slightly — as though her body was beginning a process it hadn't finished yet.
Emilia was worse, in a different way.
She had gone quiet. Not the quiet of someone thinking, or resting, or choosing not to speak — the quiet of someone who had turned something off. The boy had grown used to her voice filling whatever space they were in, the constant stream of terrible name suggestions and observations and questions that made the silence impossible. Now the silence was all there was. It was like a switch had been thrown somewhere, and the light that had been on in the room since he arrived had simply stopped.
She refused to eat. Refused to sleep. Refused to speak.
Hover had woken a few hours earlier. When he was told about Galius, he didn't look surprised — he looked like a man watching an outcome arrive that he had already calculated. He said nothing, sat with it for a moment, and moved on. He was the kind of person who had walked beside death long enough that its visits no longer required the same adjustment they asked of everyone else.
As for the boy — he hadn't known Galius well enough to grieve him the way the others did. But he had stood in the yard and watched it happen, and that was its own thing entirely. Back in the room afterward he had cried and shaken in a way he couldn't control, and had been sick several times when the image returned unbidden — the moment the light in Galius's eyes had simply stopped being there.
He was sitting beside Emilia now. She had become something like a sister to him in the few days since he'd arrived — a fixed point, a presence that made the room feel less impossible. And it seemed, from the way her breathing changed when he was nearby, that his presence did something similar for her.
Neither of them spoke. They didn't need to.
.....
The door creaked open — louder than usual, somehow, as though it too had decided to make its displeasure known.
Otub stepped in.
He looked at them the way he always looked at them, then turned his head and spat deliberately on the floor. He smiled the smile that never quite resolved into something a human face would produce naturally — the smile of something that had learned the shape of the expression without learning the reason for it.
"Time to work. Move." A pause for effect. "And before you leave — clean that up."
He left.
No one moved for a moment.
Then they did.
.....
The factory assignment brought them to the weapons floor, where the air was thick with heat and the sound of metal finding its shape.
One of the smiths caught the boy's attention — a man who moved in a way that didn't match the body doing the moving, too fluid, too certain, like something else was directing the hands from slightly behind the eyes.
"Grandpa — why does that man move like that?"
Hover followed the boy's gaze.
"He's a legend. His is tied to Hephaestus — the Greek god of the forge." He paused. "For reference — most legends don't originate from our world. Finding someone whose legend comes from here is actually somewhat rare."
The boy watched the smith for a moment longer, then nodded and went back to work.
In the middle of the shift, Emilia collapsed.
It wasn't dramatic — no warning, no sound, just a step and then nothing, her body having quietly decided it had been running on empty long enough and was done negotiating. She was carried out. Carolit, who had been looking unsteady for the better part of an hour, followed shortly after. Both were given green healing pills before they were taken back to the room.
Hover watched the servant administer the pills, then turned away and kept his voice low.
"They use those things too freely."
The boy looked at him. "Is that bad?"
"Every pill takes something from your lifespan. The higher the quality, the more it takes."
The boy looked at where Emilia had been standing a few minutes earlier, and didn't say anything.
.....
The rest of the shift fell to the two of them — a nine-year-old and a sixty-year-old, covering the work of at least three people, compensating for Emilia, Carolit, and the absence of Galius. They didn't finish until two in the morning.
They walked back to the room without speaking. The boy dropped onto his hard bed and was asleep before he finished the motion.
The next day was the same. The boy came close to dying at least four times — not dramatically, just the quiet, almost administrative near-misses of a dangerous place that doesn't particularly care who it takes.
The day after that, the work moved outside the factory. No molten metal. No falling equipment. Nothing trying to kill anyone.
Emilia started talking again — not much, and not with the same ease as before, but the silence had cracked, and occasionally words came through it. She ate too, though she seemed to be making herself do it, treating each meal like a decision she had to consciously reach.
Carolit remained a statue. She moved for work and returned to her corner. She still wouldn't eat. The healing pills kept her body from showing it too severely, which meant the only evidence was in her eyes — and she kept those pointed elsewhere.
.....
Then they were given a day off.
Emilia brightened the moment she heard it — genuinely, for the first time in days.
"Do you know — a day off for us is like a holiday?"
The boy hadn't been here long enough to know that yet, but he believed her.
The weather had turned overnight. The courtyard was covered in snow, and before any agreement had been reached, the boy and Emilia were outside in it. They attempted a snowman. They had nothing to put on its face, so they carved the features directly into the snow with their fingers, and the result was terrible enough to be funny, and they laughed at it, and for a while that was enough.
Whether Emilia was healing or simply not looking at the wound — the boy couldn't tell. It didn't feel like the right question for the day.
Hover had acquired a cigar from somewhere — bought it, requested it, the method was unclear — and had found a quiet corner of the courtyard to smoke it in. He sat with his eyes closed and his face turned slightly upward, and looked more at peace than the boy had seen him since his return.
.....
Carolit stayed in the dark room until midday.
Then she came outside.
She sat in one of the courtyard chairs and tilted her face up toward the sky, and snow fell on it, and she didn't move. She kept looking up, with the fixed attention of someone who has decided that if they look long enough, hard enough, something up there might look back.
"Are you alright up there..."
She said it under her breath, in a voice emptied of everything.
"You know — I loved you for a long time. I didn't want to say it. I was afraid it would be one more thing for you to carry." She stopped. Let a moment pass. When she continued, the flatness in her voice had begun to come apart at the edges, something underneath it pushing through. "I'd felt for a while that you were tired of being alive. I wanted to stop you. But it didn't feel like my place — not after what I caused. Not after you lost your eye because of what we tried to do together."
She paused. Took a slow breath.
"When you took the blame for me — I think that was the moment."
She bit down on her lip until it bled, and didn't notice. Her hand came up and covered her face, and behind it, quietly, she began to cry.
"Did I make the right choice, saying nothing? Tell me." Her voice had broken entirely now, though it was still barely audible. "Are you free up there?"
The snow was picking up.
It covered the sound of a muffled, solitary grief in one corner of the courtyard.
From the other side came the sound of two children laughing at a snowman with a terrible face.