Chapter Three — Small Mercies

For six days, Laila Thorne came to Cell 7-Ω at exactly 7:40 every morning, and the whole of Hollowgrace held its breath.

The routine never changed. She'd sign in at the control desk, ignore the commander's daily lecture about the proper distance at which to regard a doom-in-progress, and walk through the three barriers with no more ceremony than a woman going grocery shopping. She'd check his vitals. She'd record his psychic fluctuations. She'd water the plant, talk to it like it was a person, and then she'd read to Kaelen.

Not medical literature. A Tale of Two Cities. She'd picked the battered paperback out of the institute library, and on the third day she'd looked up from a page and said, "You've read this before."

Kaelen, who had spent the entire reading session pretending to be absorbed in his cube, said, "No."

"You have. You mouth the words."

"I don't."

"You do. You're a terrible liar, Mr. Vesso. It's adorable."

"…Don't call me adorable."

"Mhm."

The guards had taken to betting on how long she'd last. Two weeks, said the control room. Three, said the kitchen. Commander Reyes, who'd lost four good years of sleep to Kaelen Vesso, refused to bet at all on the grounds that hope was a dangerous substance.

The plant, meanwhile, was thriving. That was the part that unnerved everyone most. It had gone from a drooping gray-green tragedy to something with actual leaves, and Laila credited it. Kaelen credited nothing. He'd just noticed, on the fourth morning, that he'd stopped turning the cube while she read, and was simply listening to her voice instead.

On the second day, she brought a bag of potting soil and a new clay pot, and announced that his plant was being promoted. "It's earned a bigger home," she said, and Kaelen, who had never once in his life been consulted about anything, watched her repot it with the dazed expression of a man witnessing a miracle.

"Just so you know," she added, dusting her hands, "this counts as occupational therapy. It's medically mandated. You can't refuse."

"I'm not refusing."

"Good. Because the plant told me you've been sulking."

"The plant did not —"

"Plants are very perceptive, Mr. Vesso. They know when they're being watered by someone who'd rather be anywhere else."

The betting pool, meanwhile, had evolved. The kitchen had started calling Laila "the Prophet Whisperer." The junior analyst had begun keeping a small chart, color-coded by "days survived." The senior guard had stopped crossing herself every time the 7-Ω door opened, which Reyes noted with deep suspicion.

"It's a honeymoon phase," Reyes informed the control room, darkly. "Give it a week. The monster will do what monsters do, and she'll be gone like the rest."

He said this on a Thursday.

On Friday morning, Kaelen Vesso asked Laila, with visible effort, whether the plant's new pot needed a saucer.

Reyes stared at the monitor for a long time. "We're doomed," he said, with the finality of a man watching the world end in slow motion. "She's made him domesticated."

The junior analyst updated the chart.

On the morning of the seventh day, a bird landed on his windowsill.

Kaelen was mid-watering. The plant had tipped toward the glass, and a small, gray, entirely unremarkable sparrow had settled on the ledge, ten inches from his hand, and begun inspecting the breadcrumbs he'd been leaving for seventeen years.

He stopped breathing. The bird looked at him. He looked at the bird.

Behind him, through the glass partition, Reyes's coffee cup hit the floor. A junior guard screamed something about a distraction op. The control room went berserk, because the Dark-Eyed Child had achieved, through force of will or sorcery or sheer demonic charisma, the absolute devastation of one (1) sparrow.

Laila, arriving with her clipboard, took in the scene — the shrieking alarms, the panicking guards, the frozen Kaelen, the unimpressed sparrow — and said, mildly, "Congratulations, Mr. Vesso. You've been accused of befriending wildlife."

"I didn't—" Kaelen's voice cracked. "It just—"

"He came for the breadcrumbs you leave for him, didn't he."

Kaelen went very still. "I don't leave breadcrumbs."

"You've been leaving breadcrumbs for seventeen years, Kaelen. The file's in the archives. 'Subject feeds local aviary, recommends termination of breadcrumb protocol.' Reyes wrote a memo about it."

"…I leave them for the birds."

"Yes." Laila smiled, soft, devastating. "You do."

The sparrow, indifferent to high drama, ate a crumb and flew away.

Kaelen watched it go, and didn't say anything at all.

That night, he lay awake in the dark of his cell, listening to the cameras hum their hourly maintenance. The breadcrumbs had been there since he was seven — the only thing he'd ever been allowed to do for anything. He'd never once told anyone the truth: that he left them because he liked the idea of a thing choosing, freely, to come near him.

Even a sparrow knows better than to stay.

At 4:07 the next morning, the Chapel Row precinct of District Nine got its first supernatural murder in forty years.

And by six a.m., every screen in Eria carried the same headline:

THE DARK-EYED CHILD STRIKES. COURT DEACON SLAIN IN DISTRICT NINE.