I closed the door on the infirmary after my second day as a clay carrier. I deduced that the food distributor always started at the infirmary before moving on to the general barracks. Had Overseer Borin released me late intentionally so I would miss it?
The rough tunic was glued to my back with a stiff crust of dried sweat, pus, and blood. I had to grit my teeth and peel it away slowly, the fabric pulling at the inflamed edges of the cuts. A few thin, yellow scabs tore away, revealing raw flesh underneath. The pain was a constant, deep ache now, I was learning to live with it.
An elderly prisoner I remembered from my first day was present in addition to the standard infirmary residents, Elias, Mara, and Kael. He was talking to the lot of them, "His wife sent a package. A new waterskin, dried figs, a blanket. He was overjoyed this morning." He nodded toward the door. "Tarik delivered it. The 'Tarik Tax' left him with the blanket."
My fists clenched. I had seen Head Guard Tarik strutting with a brand-new waterskin at his belt not an hour ago.
"His kit is non-regulation." Kael commented. "A supply chain anomaly."
"That's Kayden," Mara said, nodding toward the elderly man Elias was tending to. "Shovel injury."
"Anger is a fire that consumes the angry," Elias said as he applied a poultice to a festering gash on Kayden's leg.
He then looked away, talking to no one in particular. "Justice requires a foundation. Do you know the official regulations for prisoner deliveries? The prison code contains a long ignored rule that all deliveries must be logged and witnessed by two parties."
Kayden said nothing for a moment. Then nodded to me and pushed a small, bruised piece of fruit across the table. "You taught us to stand straighter yesterday," he whispered. "Maybe if I'd known that last week, I wouldn't be in this state."
I stared at the fruit. An ache rose from my stomach to my throat. I hadn't tasted anything sweet in weeks. The skin was torn, the flesh bruised, but it was still fruit. Still precious.
My fingers hovered over it, and for a moment, I imagined biting into it. Just once. Just a taste.
My hand moved sideways instead, offering it to Elias without a word.
It wasn't a decision, not really. It was muscle memory, like tucking the blanket tighter around Dalia when she shivered, or breaking a crust of bread in half before she even asked. Hunger had taught me many things, but it had never taught me to hoard.
Elias accepted the fruit with scarcely a glance, no surprise, no thanks. As if he'd expected me to do exactly that. He cut it into five uneven pieces with a sliver of bone, setting the largest in front of Kayden and sliding the rest around the table. No one questioned the division. No one hesitated.
Then Elias reached into his own satchel and pulled out his untouched loaf of gritty prison bread. He placed it in front of me.
"A body needs fuel," he said, "but a mind needs focus." He gestured for me to lie down so he could apply a fresh poultice on my back.
As Elias gently cleaned the weeping cuts on my back, Mara came over. She looked me up and down, her eyes lingering for a moment on my swollen eye socket before she smirked. "Keep walking like that and you'll end up facing backwards. You're lucky you only have one good eye, you can't see how ridiculous you look." She handed me a cup of warm, tea-like soup. "Here. It'll help with the grit from the bread. Or at least change the flavor of the mud you're swallowing."
"Stop that," she tsked. I must have been squinting. "One more minute of that look and I'll start charging admission to your personal drama." She tossed me a softer scrap of cloth. "Tuck this under your tunic. It won't stop the pain, nothing will, but it might keep the filth from throwing a party in those cuts."
There were terribly bitter leaves at the bottom. Elias must have seen me wince when I got to them. "The bitterness is a plant's defense. But what defends it can also cleanse us. Many poisons, in the right measure, become medicine. The principle of dosage is the foundation of healing."
The conversation drifted back to the day's misery. Kayden grumbled, "It's always the same thing, isn't it? Tarik's theft, the bricks that crumble if you look at them wrong. And the shovels... the one that got my leg is the third one to splinter this month. The wood is rotten, the metal is pitted. It's as if everything they give us is designed to fail."
Elias sighed, his fingers pausing their work on my back. "It was not always so," he murmured, almost to himself. He picked up a piece of charcoal. "The Overseer uses simple river clay. It is easy, but it is weak. We know that in the First Empire, the builders understood that true strength comes from a proper mix." On a flat stone, he sketched a diagram. "They took the river clay, yes, but they added crushed volcanic stone—pumice, basalt, whatever they could find—and sifted it fine. It didn't just strengthen the brick—it let it breathe, let it hold the heat of the kiln without cracking. They called it 'aggregate.' It gave the bricks a heart of stone, allowing them to hold the heat of the kiln without shattering."
Mara snorted. "Heat. Reminds me of the patch on the kiln door. Made with that gritty, pale junk. My grandmother, may she rest somewhere cooler than this, swore by it. Useless for pots, she said, but she used to line her forge with it. Claimed it held a grudge better than it held heat."
As Elias worked on my back, Kayden shifted with a wince, coughing into his sleeve. The sound was dry, rasping, like stone on stone. Just like the cough Elias had.
Mara glanced over. "You've been on the grinding mill again, haven't you?"
Kayden gave a bitter chuckle. "They say it's 'light duty' for a bad leg. But the wheel's off-balance. Every turn sends a jolt up my spine. And the dust, gods, the dust. Gets in your lungs, your eyes. I can't see straight by midday."
Elias's hands paused. "Off-balance?" he asked quietly.
Kayden nodded. "The stone's chipped. Wobbles like a drunkard. And the grooves are wrong—too shallow near the center, too deep at the edge. It grinds uneven. Eats the tools crooked."
Elias exhaled through his nose. "They've dressed it wrong," he muttered, sketching a cross-section of a millstone in the dust. "A proper wheel has a pattern, grooves that spiral outward, like a fan. They draw the grain toward the edge, evenly. If the grooves are straight or uneven, the pressure builds wrong. You get chatter. Heat. Fractures."
Kayden shifted with a wince. "Speaking of grit," he rasped, "my friend Basim was moved to the smithy. Says the floor is covered in a coarse black sand. The smiths use it to pack around their forgings to cool them slow. They sweep it up and dump it behind the forge every night. A waste of a good man, sweeping sand."
The words connected in my mind: the crumbling bricks, the useless clay, the discarded black sand. The missing ingredient. "Black sand?" I asked, my voice tight with sudden focus. "From the mountain stone?"
Kayden shrugged. "I suppose. It's heavy. Dark. Comes from the same rock they use to build the forge hearth."
Basalt. It had to be. The waste from the smithy was the very treasure Elias had described. It was already crushed. Already discarded. Already waiting.
Kael spoke, his voice cutting through my thoughts. "You have an idea. An idea is not a plan. A plan is not an action. What is your objective?"
I met his gaze, the pain in my back forgotten. I had an objective now. And thanks to Elias, I had more than one.