0739 died before dawn. Not the man who held that number now — the one beside him.
Pei Jin had never learned his name. Nobody traded names in the Black Tower. Names were weight without worth. All he knew was that the man slept in Bunk Three, that he'd started running a fever the night before, and that this morning he didn't turn over.
Light was still a grey suggestion when the iron door grated open. Two keyturns, then a servant's shuffling step — one of the handlers who fed and emptied and dragged. He glanced at Bunk Three, lifted the edge of the rough cloth, confirmed what he already knew, and left through the ankles. Bunk Three's skull knocked the stone floor on the way out.
Pei Jin didn't turn his head.
The cloth went with the body. He lay on his back and studied the crack in the ceiling, spending the minutes before breakfast on the only thing that mattered: what they'd injected into 0738 last night.
0738 was him.
That needle had been different.
Not the usual kind — the kind that drove into bone and made you grit teeth until your jaw ached. Last night the pain stopped almost before it started. His left arm went numb for three seconds, then nothing. Not relief. Something else. Some place pressed shut, and somewhere adjacent to it, a seam had been cut open. He couldn't say it better than that. What he knew was that before he slept he could hear the sound of his own blood — a thin, sustained hiss, like gas escaping through a pinhole.
Breakfast came. Thin grey porridge the colour of ash, one fist-sized cake of black bread, dense enough to crack a tooth.
He sat up and ate everything.
Three bowls went untouched around him. One man too sick to lift his arms. The other two had been taken for trials yesterday and hadn't come back. The room held a smell — Bunk Three's smell, still settling into the straw and the stone.
He sat with his back to the wall and looked at the three abandoned bowls for two minutes. Then he stood and pulled them close one by one and drank them down to the clay.
Nobody spoke.
Nobody here still cared about fairness. The ones who talked about fairness either hadn't been here long enough or were stupid. Pei Jin was neither.
How long had he been here — he couldn't say. Time in the Tower was a soft thing, shapeless without windows, measured only in meals. He remembered waking in this body the way you remember surfacing from deep water: a bucket of cold sluiced over him, a body on a cot that he didn't recognise, and then the body was his, and he was 0738.
He had no memory of anything before. Or rather — he had fragments, charred at the edges, barely legible. He remembered a way of thinking. The logic of use and cost, of what a thing is worth and to whom. Everything else was gone.
It was enough.
He glanced at the empty bunk. Thought about the cloth.
Tonight would be cold.