"Well," she said, her voice dry, cracking under the weight of the reality check. "What do you make of that?"
She waited.
She expected a flinch. A nod. A curse. Anything human. A normal person would have at least looked at the corpse, maybe shivered at the sight of the thing that had just chased them up a chimney of razor blades.
The boy did none of those things.
He didn't even look at the dead beast. He didn't look at Jyoti. It was as if she had ceased to exist the moment the immediate threat of death had passed. He turned his back to her, his movements sharp and precise, and walked to the edge of the plateau.
He scanned the treacherous slope of the rubble mountain—not the way they had come up, but a steeper, darker descent on the far side. His eyes, those pitch-black voids that absorbed the gloom, tracked invisible lines in the wreckage. He was analyzing angles, testing friction, calculating the drop.
Variable assessment: Path found.
Without a word, without a glance back, he dropped over the edge.
Jyoti stood there, her mouth slightly open. The wind whipped her hair across her face, stinging her eyes.
She blinked.
"Hey!" she called out.
Nothing. Just the scuff of bare feet on metal and the rattle of loose shale.
He was gone. Just like that. No 'goodbye,' no 'thanks for the save,' no 'let's stick together.' Just a cold, silent dismissal that felt more insulting than a slap to the face.
Jyoti stood alone on the jagged peak of the trash pile. The silence he left behind wasn't peaceful; it was heavy with disrespect.
"Unbelievable," she whispered.
Then, she snapped.
Her patience, already frayed by starvation and terror, evaporated like water on a hot skillet. The fear that had kept her polite dissolved into a hot, bright neurotic rage.
She stomped to the edge and looked down. He was ten feet below, moving with that infuriating, fluid grace, sliding down a rusted beam like it was a playground slide.
"Hey!" Jyoti yelled, scrambling over the lip of the plateau. She didn't glide. She slid, her feet scraping violently against the iron. "I'm talking to you! You deaf? Is that it? Did the explosion blow your eardrums out?"
The boy didn't pause. He vaulted a gap between two crushed shipping containers.
Jyoti scrambled after him, her limbs flailing as she fought for balance. "Oh, sure. Just ignore me. Ignore the person who literally just dropped a mountain on a monster for you. That's fine. That's totally normal social behavior."
She slipped on a patch of oil, nearly taking a header into a pile of rebar. She caught herself, her heart hammering, her face flushing red not from the cold, but from the sheer indignity of it.
"Are you stupid?" she shouted at his retreating back. "I'm asking a serious question! You think you can just walk away? We're in the middle of... wherever the hell this is!"
He kept moving. A machine calibrated for descent.
"Answer me!" Jyoti shrieked, her voice cracking. She picked up a loose bolt and threw it. It clattered uselessly against a steel plate yards away from him. "Answer me or I will... I will kick you back down this mountain! I swear to the gods, I will find a way!"
She was ranting now, her internal filter completely gone. "You robotic little freak! You think you're so cool with your glowing veins and your 'I don't feel pain' act? You're just rude! You're a rude, ungrateful, broken little—"
The boy stopped.
He didn't slow down; he stopped dead. One moment he was moving, the next he was a statue frozen on a narrow ledge of concrete.
Jyoti skid to a halt behind him, breathing hard, her chest heaving. "Oh, now you stop? Now you have ears?"
He didn't turn around. He didn't offer an apology. He didn't ask if she was okay.
"Food," he said.
The word was a stone dropped in a pond. Dry. Brutally practical. Savage.
Jyoti's mouth snapped shut. Her anger stalled, the engine cutting out mid-rev. She blinked, the red heat in her face draining away to be replaced by a cold, creeping confusion.
"What the hell do you mean, 'food'?" she repeated.
The boy pointed down. Not at the ground, but at the ledge below them. At the slumped, massive carcass of the second beast. The one with the severed leg. The one leaking a river of black sludge that smelled like a sulfur pit.
"It is just meat," he clarified, and then he started moving again.
Jyoti stared at him, disgust curling in her stomach.
"You're joking," she whispered to herself. Then, louder: "You're going to eat that? Did you smell it? It smells like a corpse that's been marinating in a sewer! It's black blood! That has to be poisonous. You'll die. You'll literally die if you put that in your mouth."
He didn't wait for her nutritional analysis. He didn't care about her toxicology report. He dropped to the next level, focused entirely on the prize. To him, it wasn't a monster. It was calories. It was fuel.
Jyoti stood on the ledge, watching him go. A sickness curled in her gut that had nothing to do with the stench. It was him. The way he switched off. The way he looked at a corpse and didn't see death, but dinner. It was a survival instinct so pure it wasn't human anymore. It made her feel soft, and in this place, soft was just another word for dead.
Before she followed him down to the butcher shop, she felt a pull. A weight on the back of her neck.
She turned. She looked back up, toward the high plateau, toward the distance where the Alpha Beast still stood in the dark.
The tone of the world shifted. The comedy of the descent vanished, sucked into the vacuum of the horizon.
Far away, the Alpha Beast was changing.
The euphoric shuddering had stopped. The slack-jawed, paralyzed bliss that had rendered it harmless was evaporating. Jyoti watched, her blood turning to ice, as the creature stiffened. The loose, rubbery skin seemed to tighten against its frame. The four-sectioned face, which had been split wide in ecstasy, began to knit back together with wet, sickening squelches.
The drug was wearing off. The high was over.
The awareness was returning.
The beast lifted its head. It didn't roar. It didn't thrash. It let out a sound that was far worse.
Screeeech.
It was a small screech. High-pitched, metallic, and incredibly oppressive. It sounded like a nail being driven into a chalkboard, amplified until it vibrated in Jyoti's teeth. It wasn't a cry of pain. It was a signal.
The beast turned. It began to limp toward the dark horizon, its movements jerky and unnatural, but purposeful.
Then, the answer came.
From miles away, from the deepest part of the gloom where Jyoti's eyes couldn't reach, a sound drifted back.
Screeech.
Soft. Distant. An echo that wasn't an echo.
It was another one.
Jyoti gripped the edge of a rusted sheet metal, her knuckles turning white. It wasn't just a pack. It was a network. That screech wasn't a warning; it was a coordinate. Long-distance communication. The Alpha was telling the others. It was telling them about the box. About the essence. About the intruders.
The Alpha limped into the shadows and vanished, but the dread remained, sitting heavy on Jyoti's chest.
Her heart hammered a frantic rhythm against her ribs. She was safe for the immediate moment—the boy was right, they needed to move, they needed to eat—but the realization pressed down on her like the ceiling of a tomb.
Where am I?
The question was a physical weight. She looked out at the sprawling, undecipherable terrain of the dark caverns. It went on forever. Endless mountains of scrap, endless dark, populated by things that got high on death and talked to each other across miles of silence.
She knew why she was here. Russell. The Ash Binders. The betrayal. But the location... that was a mystery that terrified her. Was she even in the Pits anymore? Or had she fallen deeper, into some sub-strata of hell that even the prisoners whispered about in fear?
The uncertainty gnawed at her resolve. Could she survive this? The boy was a machine, a creature partially but definitely adapted to this dark ecosystem. But her? She was just angry. She was just desperate.
She thought of Maya. The image of her face flickered in her mind, fragile and distant. She thought of the revenge she had promised herself, the heat of it that had kept her warm in the cell. She thought of the scriptures, the jagged text that burned in her memory.
If I die here, she thought, the despair tasting like ash in her mouth, no one will ever know. I'll just be another stain on the rust.
Thud.
The sound broke her spiral.
It was the heavy, wet impact of feet landing on solid ground.
Jyoti blinked, the existential fog clearing. She looked down.
The boy had reached the ledge where the deceased beast lay. He stood next to the massive carcass, the smell of sulfur and rot rising around him like a visible aura. He didn't touch it yet. He paused.
He looked up.
He looked right at her, his face a pale oval in the gloom, his black eyes unreadable. He was waiting. Not patiently. Not kindly. He was waiting because he needed her to watch his back while he ate, or maybe he was just waiting to see if she had the stomach to join him.
Jyoti looked down at him. It felt like a sick joke. She was up here shaking, her mind broken by the sheer scale of the nightmare they were trapped in. And he was down there, standing next to a pile of toxic sludge, looking at her like she was late for dinner.
She let out a breath she didn't know she was holding. She shook her head, a small, bitter smile touching her lips.
What an asshole.