He was standing in the mouth of the tunnel with his hands behind his back.
Amber eyes catching the green off the walls. Long hair hanging in front of his face. That filthy purple scarf slung over one shoulder.
His shirt was still torn open across the ribs, where the gash had been.
There was no gash. Just skin, and the same grey dust on it that was on everything else down here.
'…'
'No.'
The creature hit me under the arm and put me on the stone, and I barely noticed the landing, because I was busy having the most useless thought of my entire life.
'I checked your pulse. I sat there and I felt it stop under my fingers.'
The boy came in across that floor with the same unbothered ease he'd carried sitting on a rock beside his stolen lake, and every animal in the room turned toward him, and he looked at them the way you look at weather.
Then he took his hands out from behind his back.
