He reached out and patted the girl's head, careful, like she might break under his hand.
"That won't happen again."
Certainty ran under the gentleness in his voice.
"I'll come back to see you. And I'll bring more with me next time. Food, medicine, whatever you need. I'll bring it."
"Really?"
Every head lifted at once. A dozen pairs of wet, hopeful eyes fixed on him, holding the smallest and fiercest wish there is, which is to go on living.
Nobody with a scrap of decency left in them could look at that and say no.
"Really." He nodded, and there was nothing polite or hollow in it. His pale blue eyes held nothing but the promise.
"Elder Matsuzaki, get some food into them." Gojo stood and gestured at the pile of cans around his feet. "Don't ration any of it. There'll be more."
He could see how long it had been since any of them ate their fill. Bones showing through skin, cheeks hollowed out, and still that hunger sitting behind their eyes.
Matsuzaki's throat worked as he looked at them.
He hadn't tasted meat in years himself.
Long enough that he'd nearly forgotten what it was like. The wanting nearly drowned out everything sensible in him.
"Yes. Whatever you say, Mr. Gojo. I'll start now."
He turned at once and took up the chipped aluminum pot.
Three times he scrubbed it out with clean water, terrified a speck of grime might spoil food this precious. Only then did he pick up two cans and work them open with the small knife he carried.
One packed solid with luncheon meat.
One with vegetables.
The smell of it spread through the tunnel the moment the lid came free.
Nothing elaborate about what followed. He tipped meat, vegetables, and juices together into the pot, added a splash of water, and set it over the crude stone stove, stirring slow while it heated into a rich, steaming stew.
It looked like nothing. No plating, no seasoning worth the name.
But set against that grey paste from before, the smell alone belonged to another world.
The pot began to bubble. The scent thickened and filled the chamber.
A chorus of swallowing rose among the children, each one trying to be quiet about it.
They crowded around the stove on tiptoe, necks stretched, eyes locked on the pot. Throats bobbing.
Not one of them shouted. Not one of them pushed forward.
They stood and waited, so well-behaved it hurt to see.
The cooking didn't take long.
Matsuzaki killed the flame and picked up a tin box, washed so many times its edges had gone smooth, and wiped it down again. Then two of the emptied cans, clean and bare.
He filled all three to the brim, ladling out the best of what was in the pot, and carried them over with both hands to Gojo, Betty, and Sumire first.
Having eaten a full breakfast at Rentaro Satomi's apartment that morning, Gojo wasn't hungry in the slightest.
Faced with kindness that pure, though, refusing it wasn't something he could get his mouth to do.
He took the steaming tin and thanked the old man quietly.
Betty and Sumire accepted theirs without comment.
Only then did Matsuzaki turn to the chipped bowls and start serving the children, one by one.
His hand shook a little on the ladle.
Into every bowl he worked as much meat as he could, as much of the good broth.
By the time the last girl had a full bowl, almost nothing remained in the pot. Not enough for one more serving.
It didn't seem to trouble him.
He poured water from the kettle into the pot, swirled it around to catch the grease and scraps clinging to the sides, and emptied that into his own bowl. Thin broth with a few beads of oil floating on it, and little else.
He carried it to one side and sat.
Only then did the children lift their bowls in both hands and chorus, clear and bright, "Thank you for the food."
Then their heads went down and they ate.
For a while the tunnel held nothing but the sound of eating and the soft clink of spoons against bowls.
"It smells incredible."
"This is so good. I haven't had anything this good in forever."
"So that's what meat tastes like. I'm so happy."
Small voices between mouthfuls.
One girl nearly burned her tongue rushing and refused to slow down anyway, puffing air over each spoonful and shoveling on.
Another ate in tiny bites, picking the meat out and drawing it out piece by piece, treating it like something rare enough to be wasted by hurrying.
One started crying partway through, tears dropping into her bowl. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and kept eating, smiling.
Inside ten minutes every bowl was empty. The bottoms had been licked clean.
Watching them sit back with their faces full and content, something warm broke across Matsuzaki's weathered face. He hadn't seen them eat like that in longer than he could remember.
Gojo finished his own portion without a flicker of distaste.
He'd grown up on the finest food money could buy, the best of everything, desserts made by people who'd trained decades for it. Nothing in his life had prepared him for a meal this plain, this rough.
He ate every bite of it, deliberately.
That paste the children had been living on was, unless he badly missed his guess, expiring flour boiled in water. No fat in it. No taste at all.
Day after day of that.
His breath escaped him in a quiet sigh.
Compared to the children he'd seen in the Slums of Lugunica, these girls had it worse by a wide margin.
However hard life ran in those Slums, at least nothing there had built a complete ladder of contempt to press down on them.
Here, the Cursed Children were despised by nobles and commoners alike, hated even by the poor sharing the same gutter. Everyone above them, and everyone beside them.
And yet, when the Gastrea came to swallow the world, these same girls were the ones expected to spend their lives holding the line.
Cruel and ironic in equal measure, the way things stood.
After eating, the children washed their bowls, put them away, and drifted off to a clear patch of ground to play, keeping their voices down.
Gojo drew Matsuzaki aside and asked him about the place.
Five years, the old man said. He'd been down here five years.
Before that he'd taught language at a public elementary school in Tokyo. A whole life spent teaching, and all he'd ever wanted was to watch children learn and grow up well.
Then the Gastrea appeared. The Gastrea War broke out. The Cursed Children were born, and the world rearranged itself.
He'd watched girls abandoned at birth, beaten in the street by strangers, treated as garbage by everything around them, and found he couldn't look past it.
So he started taking them in.
The school fired him for it.
Colleagues he'd worked beside for decades froze him out.
Neighbors he'd lived among his entire life drove him from his home.
Everyone called him mad. A degenerate who kept company with monsters.
He'd never once regretted it.
He came here to give homeless children a roof and walls between them and the rain. He sold the house he'd lived in his whole life. Every yen of savings from a career's worth of work went into food, clothes, medicine.
But years passed, and a man with no income runs dry.
The house was gone. The savings were gone.
So he was up before dawn every day, going through bins in the city for food past its date. Digging edible weeds out of the ruins on the outskirts. Scavenging scrap metal from dead factories to sell.
Beaten, cursed at, chased by dogs. He'd never stopped going.
Even so, what he brought back barely counted as anything.
If nothing changed, before long he wouldn't manage even the paste.
Listening to it all delivered so calmly, watching the girls laughing on the far side of the chamber, Gojo's gaze went distant. Behind the dark lenses, something moved in the pale blue that nobody could quite read.
"There must be a lot of children like this across Tokyo."
He said it slowly, after a long silence.
"There are." Matsuzaki's nod came weighted with helplessness. "But an old man like me can't find them, can't bring them here, can't care for them if I did. Protecting these dozen has taken everything I have. And they're good children, Mr. Gojo."
Fierce protectiveness ran through the last of it.
"People call them Cursed Children, but not one of them has ever hurt anybody. They'll grieve for hours over stepping on an ant. Do you know something, Mr. Gojo?"
He drew a breath, and the look he turned on Gojo had gone heavy.
"I've been down here a great many years. In all that time, children have reached their limit more than once. Do you understand why this place is still standing?"
Something bitter sat in his voice that wouldn't dissolve. An old man who'd weathered more than most, and his eyes were reddening past his control.
"To protect me. To protect the others. When one of them senses her Corrosion Rate climbing toward the edge, that she's about to become a Gastrea, she slips away alone. Finds somewhere no one goes. And ends it herself."
His voice broke apart entirely on the last of it.
"They're children. They're supposed to be curled up in someone's arms being spoiled, at that age, being loved. And instead this world corners them until killing themselves is the only kindness left. I can't let myself imagine what those last moments look like. What they're thinking. What it costs them to decide. How frightened they must..."
He couldn't finish.
Off came the glasses, and he pressed a rough, split-knuckled palm hard against his eyes, scrubbing at the tears that kept coming.
Gojo said nothing.
Sumire said nothing.
Betty said nothing.
The tunnel held only the old man's swallowed sobbing and the laughter of children in the distance.
Braided together, the two sounds cut worse than either would alone.
None of the three were fools.
They knew exactly what it takes for a conscious living thing to end itself. What that costs in nerve and resolve.
Even for a grown adult with a settled mind, it's beyond hard.
Of all the people who take their own lives each year, the overwhelming majority are driven there by depression or something like it.