Ethan didn't sleep so much as wait out the dark.
Sometime near dawn, he stopped pretending and sat up.
The thing beneath his ribs shifted with him—not painfully, just present, the way a held breath is present.
He pressed his palm flat against his sternum and thought deliberately, the way you'd knock on a door:
Are you there?
Nothing answered in words.
But something on the other side of that door turned toward the sound of the knock.
The food Alistair had promised arrived with a girl who couldn't have been older than fifteen. She carried a tray and refused to meet Ethan's eyes the entire time she set it down.
When she left, she didn't walk so much as leave quickly.
Ethan understood.
He'd seen what he must have looked like from the outside—three days a corpse-to-be, walking away from his own execution with green light behind his eyes.
If someone else had done that in front of him, he wouldn't have wanted to look at them either.
He filed her fear away too, not unkindly.
Just another fact about how the world was going to treat him now. Something worth knowing before it caught him off guard somewhere it mattered more.
Alistair returned an hour later, coat and all, like he owned no other clothes.
"You look terrible," he said, sitting down.
"I feel like I swallowed a lit coal."
"That's because you did."
Ethan raised an eyebrow.
"Metaphorically," Alistair added. "And possibly not so metaphorically."
He held out his hand.
"Show me."
Ethan extended it.
Alistair took his wrist without ceremony and pressed two fingers against it like a physician checking a pulse.
His eyes lost focus for a moment, the way a man's do when he's listening to something instead of looking at it.
"Your heartbeat has a second rhythm underneath it," Alistair said finally.
He released Ethan's wrist.
"Faint. Green, if a rhythm can have a color. Which, around you, apparently it can."
He sighed.
"Congratulations. You are now, medically speaking, haunted."
"That's not funny."
"It wasn't meant to be."
Alistair pulled the notebook from his coat and flipped it open to a page already half-filled with handwriting too neat to belong to a man who talked this quickly.
"Here is what I need from you. And I need you to actually try. Don't flinch away the moment it gets uncomfortable."
He tapped the page with his pen.
"Close your eyes. Find the coal."
Ethan hesitated.
"And ask it a question."
"What question?"
"Its name."
Ethan closed his eyes.
Finding the coal wasn't difficult.
It had never really left his attention, the way a wound doesn't leave your attention even when you're not looking at it.
He reached toward it the way he'd reach toward a held breath.
Then he asked silently:
What are you?
The answer came not as words, but as a taste.
Copper.
Rot.
And something vast folding itself down small enough to fit inside a human ribcage, unwillingly and furiously small.
Mine.
Not a name.
A claim.
Mine. Mine. Mine. You don't get to—
Ethan opened his eyes.
He was breathing hard.
For a moment, he let himself simply be a boy who'd nearly died three days ago rather than the version of himself that was already calculating what to do with what he'd just learned.
It didn't last long.
It never seemed to anymore.
"It's not dead," he said.
Alistair's pen stopped moving.
"What?"
"It's not dead. It's just stuck."
Alistair stared at him.
"Say that again."
"It didn't die. I didn't kill it."
Ethan swallowed.
"I ate it, and it's still in there. Still angry. Still trying to—"
He stopped.
"It's not going to stop trying, is it?"
"No."
Alistair's answer came quietly.
For once, there was no performance in his voice.
"It isn't."
He closed the notebook.
"Which means, Ethan, that you haven't survived a Taking."
His eyes met Ethan's.
"You've adopted one."
The room seemed smaller after that.
"And a Cthu that hates its cage doesn't simply sulk in the corner of it."
Alistair gave him a tired look.
"Good luck handling it."