Getting close to the lame handler took three days.
He didn't open with words. He made himself visible first.
Each time the man came through the corridor, Pei Jin was sitting near the front of the cell — not watching, not performing, just present. Close to the bars. Both times the handler glanced over. By the third time the glance became a pause.
On the fourth day the man set down his evening bowl, scanned the room, let his eyes settle on Pei Jin for a second longer than the others, and left without speaking.
Fifth morning: the bowl had something in it.
A dark grey piece of something, thumbnail-sized, lying on the porridge. He lifted it. Dried meat — the origin unknowable, the texture of old leather — but real. Protein. He ate it without changing his expression.
That afternoon, during the midday check, the handler stopped beside him.
"You don't look like the others in here."
Pei Jin didn't move. "What do the others look like."
"Ground down," the man said. He tilted his chin slightly toward the room. "Either they've been worn to nothing, or something in them broke months ago. You —" A pause. "Don't have that."
"What do you want."
"Nothing." He shifted his weight off his bad leg. "Just an observation."
He left. But at the door his ring of keys knocked against the frame — not quite accidental, not quite deliberate.
Pei Jin filed the sound away.
He thought about the man's reasons. Someone who had spent years on this floor, carrying a bad leg and a set of keys too valuable for his station, who dropped protein in a subject's bowl and then came to remark on the subject's resilience — that was either pure pity or someone looking for something. Pity had no value here. The other option did.
Two days later, Pei Jin spoke first.
"The red-wax jars in the storeroom," he said as the man passed, just loud enough. "Alchemical concentrate."
The footsteps stopped. The handler turned, eyes narrowed. "How do you know that."
"Your hands," Pei Jin said. "You've handled the jars. The residue doesn't wash off cleanly."
A lie. He'd never smelled anything on the man's hands. But he knew the red wax from having seen it before, and more importantly, saying you can smell it was harder to disprove than saying you recognised the colour. It made him seem useful in a way that was difficult to verify.
Four seconds of silence.
"What do you want."
"A look at the scrolls."