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The night after our fight, Nola and I slept apart for the first time since Mom died. I don't think either of us was actually angry anymore. We were just ashamed and had no idea how to process it. So, we spent some time apart--as much as anyone could in this place, anyway. The Pit took up a huge plot of land, but its space was finite, nonetheless. The iron walls seemed to rise for miles, but really it was more like forty feet or so, ending in jagged shards of glass and steel in such a compact tangle that no rope would survive any weight being put on it when draped over the lip. The entirety of the compound was probably a little over two hundred yards across, and most of that taken up by the belching gash in the earth where we worked. On one side of the Maw stood the Den and the barracks where the Scrofa slept and ate; on the other, set into the hideous iron walls, stood the Spike.

Point being, there was no real way to keep apart from anyone else. You could stand at opposite walls of the Pit and, provided the fumes weren't too bad that day, you could still easily see each other. There was no "hiding" from each other, so we simply ignored each other's presence as best we could and slept on different ends of the sleeping pile.

Nobody slept next to me. Everyone edged very purposefully away from me wherever I'd lie down. Only Nola slept next to me after Blake's death, and now she wasn't talking to me. It was still winter, and I shivered alone with my back against the cold stone wall of the Den, staring morosely into the darkness. My ears would have drooped if they could, but for whatever ungodly reason, they were permanently perky. It probably ruined the image, not that it mattered much to a six-year-old. I simply wrapped my arms around myself and shivered myself into unconsciousness.

Every day at mealtime, I stared at Ollivander. I started eating again, because I had to, but my guts churned every time I looked at him, making the task damned hard. Van never missed my gaze, and never did anything to hide his disdain and supreme lack of fear. I mean, of course he was unafraid; what the fuck was an emaciated kid going to do against a grown man? Nothing.

Unless...

Unless I could sneak up on him. Steal a sharp chunk of rock from the rock pile before bed, sneak up to him in the Den, and murder him. Maybe I'd even get away with it, if he died quiet enough, but probably I'd get thrown into the Maw. That was fine. Mom was gone, Nola hated me, and Blake was down there somewhere. I'd get to join him forever, and leave this awful place behind. Maybe that was better than getting away with it.

For two days I slept alone and shivering, eating alone while watching Ollivander. When I was older, I'd have known to use my time staring to study him, search for weakness. A slight limp in his left leg from an old calf injury; partial blindness in his right eye, leaving him open to a feint on that side; maybe even a torn ligament in his left elbow that didn't heal right, making his left hook weaker than his right. But I was six, and I didn't know any of that yet, so I just stared. Twice Nola crept close to me, as if about to speak, but turned away with a furiously twitching nose at the last second. That was fine; I didn't want her near me right now, when I was plotting something so awful.

The next day I finally gathered up my courage and set about putting my plan into motion. During my second rotation breaking down the murky off-white rock (I was almost twelve before I ever thought to ask what kind of rock it was--turned out to be limestone) I glanced around to make sure no one was watching and snatched up a short, narrow spike of rock. Only then did a fatal flaw in my plan reveal itself: I had no clothes to hide the weapon in, and the guards weren't so incompetent that they'd miss a kid trying to sneak a pointy rock into the Den.

I only had one place to hide it.

Now, this plan wasn't so crazy as it sounds. Blake was gone, but that didn't mean my hands had been idle. Sometimes, at night, I would reach back and push a finger in there, trying to remember how it had felt when the Vithis had shoved his much thicker finger in, or the head of his cock, but it was never the same. Even two fingers, while comparable in size, had felt like... less, somehow. But I kept at it, gods knew why since it never felt as good as Blake had. Thankfully, it had a benefit now.

After another quick, terrified glance around for watchers, I shoved the rock up my ass. In order to get any of it to fit, I had to push it in pointy end first and let the bulbous end dangle out, clenching my cheeks together to try and hide it from view. Let me tell you, few things are quite so thrilling as knowing the slightest wrong move could make you stab yourself inside your own asshole and probably bleed to death.

Thinking back, I must have looked absurd, waddling around like a penguin. Surely the guards knew there was something going on there, but none of them searched me. I came so fucking close to death right there; had any guard been paying attention as their job demanded, I'd have been found out and likely tossed straight into the Maw without so much as a word. Instead, I waddled into the Den, made a note of where the Lontramar laid down, and waited.

Once the moon was out, I carefully slid the smelly white rock out of my ass, now streaked unpleasantly with a bit of brown and more alarmingly, with traces of blood. My morning business was going to hurt. A lot.

I had my weapon. I had my intent. Now I just needed the will. But as angry as I was, as hateful as I was, I was still just a terrified and grief-stricken six-year-old boy with a sharp rock. Working up the nerve for cold-blooded murder was not something that would come naturally or easily. I stared long and hard into the pale darkness where Van slept, trying to force myself to act.

As I sat staring into the shadows, a flicker of movement caught my eye. I turned to the wall the slop buckets stood against and squinted. There: a faint glimmer, then darkness again. Carefully and quietly, I stood up and moved toward the other end of the Den. I didn't have to worry about guards--they locked the only door to the Den until dawn and left us in here to our own devices. So, all I had to worry about was the fifty or more prisoners crammed in here together, and not stepping on any of them.

I paused momentarily when I passed Nola. I wanted to stop and hug my sister, tell her I was sorry, but the shame still burned in me. Besides, I still wore the bandages over my right eye where she'd scratched my retina. I was a little salty over that. I let her sleep and kept creeping.

When I reached the slop buckets, I saw that one of the bottom stones in the wall had been entirely removed. A two-by-one-foot hole, just barely large enough to squeeze through, led out into the main yard of the Pit. Surely there were night patrols out there? Who would be crazy enough to sneak out of the Den at night? Curiosity killed caution in my head, and I dropped to my belly and slipped outside.

The Pit looked shockingly different in the dark of midnight. The iron walls shone faintly with moonlight, making them seem like dull, angry reflections into a shadow-world parallel to this one. Far off in the distance, a single Scrofa guard leaned against the wall, halberd propped next to her, snout resting against her ample chest as she dozed. I couldn't see any other guards from this angle, but we were more or less behind the Den and out of view of a vast majority of the Pit. I wriggled out of the hole and stood up.

Some fifteen feet away, sitting in a huge, dark pool of shadows in lotus position, was Ollivander. His dark eyes glinted in the waning moonlight as he stared at me. I froze in terror, every inch of my body rigid as ancient instincts kicked in. The hand gripping the rock-shiv gave the slightest tremble.

"Kid," Van grumbled, "you're gonna have to get rid of that old instinct if you wanna survive here. It's gonna get you killed."