I ended up finishing both bowls.
Even cold, they were some of the best I'd had.
Now I was just sitting there, across from the pale kid still hunched over his schoolwork.
"Hey," I asked, "are you finishing your schoolwork?"
He looked up slowly, like I'd just asked if the sky was wet.
"There is no school in the Gutter."
Huh.
So that was Karu's little brother. The one she was trying to get out of here. Made sense now. The studying, the silence. Like the world depended on whatever he wrote down next.
Karu had told me to hold tight until she could close shop for the day.
Then she'd take me directly.
"Even someone like you could be kidnapped for someone's pleasure, pretty boy."
Huh.
She thought I was pretty.
I wasn't sure how to feel about that.
I found myself twiddling my thumbs, tapping my foot, then twiddling again. The sound of dishes clinking behind the counter, the faint drip of water from overhead, it all settled into a rhythm I didn't quite mind.
Time passed weird here.
No clocks. No sun.
Just the haze of steam, the weight of the air, and the quiet rustle of pages as the kid beside me flipped to a new one.
At one point, he adjusted something in his homework, erased a line, and muttered under his breath in perfect calculation. When he stood to leave, he double-checked the shop lock with a practiced flick, not anxious, just precise.
It was easy to forget how much depended on him.
Outside, through a cracked window, I caught sight of someone slouched against the alley wall — alone, laughing softly to himself, smoke rising from a thin blue-glowing pipe like the one from Indigo Smoke. His eyes didn't quite track anything real. He just smiled and stared through the concrete.
I didn't know what Reverie did to someone long-term.
But I didn't think he was coming back.
Cayos had left.
Not with drama. No smoke. No riddles.
Just a smile and a last line.
I didn't think he was coming back.
Not soon, at least.
I sat back on the stool, watching the steam curl off the broth-stained bowls in front of me. My legs dangled. My thoughts drifted. I couldn't tell how long it had been, minutes, hours, more?
For the first time in days, I wasn't reaching for my phone. Wasn't staring at the photo. Wasn't clenching the ring. My hand drifted toward my pocket once, muscle memory, but I stopped halfway and let it fall.
I wasn't doing anything.
Just waiting.
And, somehow, that felt okay.
From the kitchen, I heard Karu laugh. A short, sharp sound that cut through the quiet.
It startled me. Then it settled something in me.
Maybe, just for a little while, I could stay in this moment.
Before whatever came next.
Before I remembered what I came here for.
—
"Kairo, keep watch of the shop while we're out. And finish the chapter before you sleep, I told you to do it earlier."
The boy nodded wordlessly, already rising. He handed her the folded stack Cayos had left by his elbow.
It wasn't subtle.
Notes of hundreds. Crisp, clean. I didn't even recognize the currency, but judging by Karu's face, it was a lot.
She froze. Went even paler, if that was possible.
"He's never given this much before…" she murmured, voice low, fingers trembling slightly.
She slipped the cash into a hidden pouch beneath the counter, knuckles white.
Then she looked at me.
"Let's go before I change my mind."
She didn't wait for a reply.
Just turned and walked out into the dripping corridor.
I followed.
"You sure he'll be safe in there alone?" I asked as I caught up.
She didn't look back.
"Yeah. In terms of the Gutter, we're in a relatively safe neighbourhood. And nobody would try anything, anyways."
As we walked, someone rounded a corner ahead of us, tall, shoulders hunched, coat too clean. He took one look at Karu, paused, and stepped back into the shadows without a word.
Something clicked that I hadn't thought of before.
"You know, for someone who has a rule for no questions, you do seem pretty enthusiastic to answer."
That made her smile. Not the fake kind. The kind that looked like it cracked through something stiff. Like an invisible weight was loosening from her shoulders.
"Yeah. That rule's been there since my grandfather's time. I don't mind personally. But he did."
—
We moved quickly after that. The corridors narrowed, the air got hotter, wetter, louder. Music and shouting echoed down twisting alleys lit by pink neon and oil lamps strung on wire. The smell of grilled meat and sweat mixed with something metallic. The deeper we went, the more the Gutter changed.
Less homey, more dangerous.
And then, colder.
The heat broke like a fever as we passed beneath a crumbling arch of rebar and exposed pipe. The shift was instant. The air thinned. Damp turned crisp. The kind of cold that clung to your bones but didn't make sense, not with how deep we were.
I shivered, feeling goosebumps run up my skin.
Karu didn't.
Her pace changed, just slightly, tighter now, more watchful. The lights here were dimmer. Flickering. Older.
We crossed a chain bridge between two buildings, or what had once been buildings, long before Halden rebuilt itself above. Now they were just shells, buried and forgotten, hollowed out by time and desperation. Repurposed. Reinforced. Claimed.
Some of the walls were marked, not with paint, but symbols. Spirals, slashes, repeated words. One in particular stopped me: a crown split in two, scorched into a metal beam. Underneath it, someone had carved in jagged black letters:
The One Who Broke.
I didn't know what it meant, but it made my chest tighten.
Karu saw me pause. "Old names," she said. "From back when people still thought the Reverie was a gift."
She kept walking.
Above us, vines and moss clung to what had once been rooftops. Now, they were lower than the surface of the streets we'd left behind. These buildings hadn't been made underground.
They'd been buried.
We descended through a collapsed floor and into a wide-open chamber lit only by floodlights bolted to the ceiling.
Cheers roared from below.
I stepped to the edge of a rusted railing.
We were in a pit.
Not just any pit, a combat ring, circular, about thirty meters across, with concrete walls fractured and blackened in places, the floor scorched, cracked, patched with old blood and newer ash. Around it, the remnants of buried buildings loomed, hollowed towers and broken walkways, their windows blown out, their walls crumbling from too many stray Vows.
Spectators leaned from shattered windows, perched on rusted balconies, clustered along catwalks strung between floors that no longer had roofs. Someone had strung coloured cloth over broken beams, like it could pretend to be a roof. People dangled their legs from ledges. A few had glowing pipes, thin glass tubes lit with the same eerie blue flame, which I had already seen a few times.
It shimmered unnaturally in the dark, made their eyes glassy. One girl laughed too hard and too long, gripping the edge of a window like it might fly away.
And in the centre, two Sworn.
You could feel it. Their presence hit like static. One moved with brutal, animal grace, shirtless and bleeding from the ribs. The other, calm, in a coat that shimmered strangely in the light, raised his hand and twisted two fingers.
The bleeding man dropped to his knees.
No sound. No gesture. Just... obedience.
The crowd went silent.
Then erupted.
"This is the Hollow's Edge," Karu said beside me, not bothering to shout. Her voice cut clean through the noise.
I couldn't take my eyes off the ring.
She didn't move.
"Stay quiet. And stay close."
I did.