She crept along the passage on bent knees and finally drew close to the window. She kept her head down, as though she were unaware of him.

A piece of meat was pinned under the edge of his shoe.

“Could you move your foot for a moment……”

She asked despite the humiliation, but he didn’t move. Lisa crouched flat before his long legs, unable to go forward or back. Had he not heard? She was about to speak again when the dark shadow shifted.

Her head cloth was pulled off. A sharp cold rushed over the top of her head.

She jerked her head up in surprise. A few strands of her own hair drifted across her vision, silver as ice crystals.

The black eyes looking down at her were dank, like a cave bored to an unknowable depth. When those deep-set eyes narrowed slightly, Lisa felt a chill run over her as though she had been cut by a thin razor.

It wasn’t that she had been deliberately hiding her hair. There was no reason to conceal it from the people she saw every day in the manor. She had only worn the cloth because she was working in the cold, but with this stranger, it had inadvertently become something like a secret exposed.

He tilted his jaw slightly and widened his eyes as though examining a rare specimen. The corners of his mouth lifted mechanically, neither a smile nor anything close to warmth.

What on earth does he want from me.

“But……”

The man let the pause linger before finishing the thought.

“Why are you still here instead of at the orphanage?”

The bowl slipped from Lisa’s cold hands. Understanding struck her like a bolt of lightning.

This man had watched her pick up a carrot, and then produced the orphanage with exquisite timing. There was no way it was meant kindly. Having been on the receiving end of malicious torment from the people around her for so long, she could only read his intentions in one direction.

Did he know the orphanage plan had been cancelled? He couldn’t have paid that much attention to a passing servant. He had simply heard a few words in the hall and wanted to prod at her with them.

The way one naturally steps on something that looks easy to crush.

Lisa knew it in her bones, from long experience. Someone like this only backed off once they had extracted as much submission as they wanted. If she gave in too easily, she would never escape the escalating torment. But the man was only a guest staying for a short while, so if she could just get through this one time and avoid him carefully afterward, wouldn’t that be enough?

She studied him to see if her guess was right. As she searched carefully through the darkness of his eyes, his cold smile scattered like moonlight.

“Your meal?”

The single offhand question sent her white lashes, which had been raised high, fluttering down like a bird shot from the sky.

This man is entirely different.

He’s nothing like anyone I’ve known.

Lisa’s breathing came hard, as though someone had a hand around her throat. Her shoulders rose and fell in a way that was not at all dignified, heaving like an asthmatic’s. The more she understood what she was being made to do, the more savagely the wind outside, carrying the cold front with it, seemed to claw at her chest.

It was the middle of the night, and yet his trouser crease was sharp as a blade and his shoe cap gleamed like glass. Before them, her tattered apron swayed. The world he lived in and the world she lived in were exactly that far apart.

She should have run without stopping to think. If her insolence caused problems, being scolded by the head maid later would have been the better outcome. But it was already too late. Lisa was as unable to move as a small animal with its leg caught in a sharp trap.

He tilted his head slightly. The prompting gesture made Lisa’s bloodless fingertips move against her will.

She couldn’t tell whether she was moving of her own accord or whether she had become a wooden puppet on a string. She reached out slowly, and his foot shifted back a little. The small piece of meat came into view.

With trembling hands, she put the meat in her mouth.

The man smiled.

Not the mechanical lifting of a corner of his mouth, but an actual change of expression. Something keen and full of interest lit up in the curve of his narrowed eyes.

Lisa tasted nothing in her rigid mouth. There was only the wretchedness of her body shrinking smaller and smaller inside the cruel shadow that surrounded her.

“……”

He murmured something, but his voice was too low to catch.

The old window frame rattled, and the man straightened up. His figure dissolved into the darkness like a ghost with no substance.

Alone now, Lisa retched immediately. She pressed her hands and knees to the floor and curled in on herself, enduring the spasms as her stomach contracted. Nothing came up but thin, watery bile.

Tears ran down her cheeks. She hadn’t cried when the orphanage was decided, hadn’t broken down while packing, but the shock she hadn’t seen coming overwhelmed her, and the corners of her eyes went red and swollen.

This is just a physical reaction. It’s from the retching.

She bit down on her lip hard enough to draw blood.

* * *

An insect with a hard, glossy shell moved its legs with diligent purpose.

A larva clung to its side. When the mother regurgitated food, the small black thing like a tumor worked its pointed mouth and consumed every bit of it.

The insect raised its young with devoted care. It repeated the same motion over and over, and it was almost remarkable how much food could be stored in such a small body.

Renato wanted the prettily gleaming shell. Why he had developed such a pointless desire, he couldn’t say. This was a dream, after all.

Fully aware that none of it was real, he reached out his hand, and the creature thrashed. It resisted fiercely, shielding its young, as though it were prepared to surrender a few legs if that was what escape required.

Struggle all you like. Renato sneered and tightened his grip.

The creature, which he had expected to be solid, burst apart.

His thumb punched through the shell. The rest of his fingers sank into the abdomen. The insect’s thin legs twitched against his palm, then went still.

The body was hollow inside.

What it had been feeding its young was its own organs.

The larva methodically consumed whatever nutrition remained in the empty husk. The eyes that looked up after devouring its own mother were glossy and innocent as a demon’s.

The unpleasant residue of crushed insect dirtied Renato’s hand. He shook it off hard, but the sensation of something collapsing emptily under his fingers lingered as an afterimage.

He turned over in bed, wrapped in the sheets. Right, this was a bedroom. The school dormitory? The manor in his home country? Somewhere else entirely? His consciousness seemed to be surfacing from sleep, then sank back into a featureless darkness.

It was a terrible darkness he couldn’t escape. Everything around him was black, as though hinting that his entire life was destined to be a world without light.

He felt the vibrations of an unpaved road beneath him, and then the loud noise of a vehicle engine. A pitch-black night in a jungle that went on without end, and at the point where he could go no further, Renato was kicked out and tumbled to the ground.

He screamed at the exhaust of the departing vehicle. Please, he screamed. Don’t leave me here. His voice, not yet broken, shook the night sky above the dense tropical forest.

This happened a long time ago.

He remembered it clearly. Being abandoned in a jungle teeming with predators and venomous creatures.

Returning safely to camp was the mission he had been given. It was cruelty dressed up as training, but insubordination was not a concept that existed for an underage boy soldier.

He shouldered his pack and took a machete in hand. He used the constellations visible through the canopy to find his direction and pressed forward. He fought a snake with a girth as thick as his own thigh until he collapsed from exhaustion. He opened a tin from his pack to fill his empty stomach.

The food was rotten.

Every tin in the pack was long past its expiration date.

“Ha……”

Renato sat up in bed and exhaled a long, weary breath. He pulled himself out of sleep that had given him no rest and stretched his stiff body.

Taking his time in the shower, he noticed the scars scattered across his shoulder blades like a constellation, and they bothered him more than usual today. They were old burn marks from cigarettes. His thighs and sides were similarly covered in an assortment of scars, a comprehensive collection of them.

He chose his usual black instead of yesterday’s navy suit, wanting to make a favorable first impression for the new day. He combed his hair back without leaving a single strand out of place. He straightened himself with obsessive thoroughness, stopping just short of letting it show.