The hunger isn’t going away. And to add insult to injury, the base is out of rats. It’s not unexpected. They were more of a distraction than a legitimate food source anyways. But they were their only distraction, and Lion had appreciated it.
Last time Lion bothered the Captain about the food, he said he’d have her. And besides if he really does have her kill someone only one person dies, whereas if she doesn’t talk to him at all everyone dies, so it seems worth it. At least, that's what makes sense in her mind as she walks down to the captain's office, dread weighing down on her shoulders. Crow is by her side this time, walking silently beside her, and the decision to go has been made by all of the older kids, not just themselves. Lion’s still nervous. She knows he couldn’t have meant the threat, though. That if she bothered him again he’d make her kill one of her girls. He might be an asshole and a sadist, but he’s not insane. Probably.
They come to the door and knock.
“Enter,” a voice from inside calls, so they open the door and step through. The Captain raises an eyebrow at them. “You two? Again?” he considers them for a moment. “Out with it,” he orders.
Lion opens her mouth, closes it. She’d had a whole speech prepared but it’d fled the moment she crossed the threshold. Crow speaks in her stead. “A third of your troops are gonna die.”
The Captain looks… bored, maybe. The way he’s slow with his words makes her nervous. “Look. If this is about the food again, I’d appreciate it if you stopped lying to me,” he says. “Besides, I thought I told you when you first got here. You’re replaceable. You’d do best to remember that, girls.” Then he looks back down at his work, like he’s done with this conversation. Like he expects them to just go well, alright, and walk out.
“That’s not–” Lion starts, pissed.
The captain raises a finger to his lips and goes shhhhh, and it’s annoying and childish and in this context entirely ruthless, and Lion’s mask snaps.
“You absolute fucking cunt, just give us some fucking food–”
“Shut up,” the captain orders, and that’s when Lion’s mind catches up with her mouth. Her mouth shuts so fast you can hear her teeth snap. She looks off to the side, claws biting into her palms.
“You,” he says, turning to Crow. “Go get me one of the other girls. First one you see, please.” She blinks and sweeps out of the room without even a nod in his direction, body probably moving on its own.
Lion watches her leave and then tries to say something, but she’s still under orders to shut up, so she can’t. Then a couple too-short moments later Crow is back with one of the others trailing nervously behind her. All three of them have their eyes on the Captain, watching and waiting to see how this is gonna go. He opens his mouth.
She doesn’t hear the kill order over the complete whiting-out of her mind in panic — she follows it anyways — but she does hear the girl’s little whimper as she reaches for her gun. It’s Ozzy, some sort of rodent hybrid, sleek grey fur over her arms and wide round eyes.
She stops thinking when the gun goes off. Around her the Captain and Crow fade out as blood rushes in her ears, joining the chorus of the buzzing in her mind. Lion sees the body fall but she doesn't recognize it, ears pulled back so far they’re nearly flat against her head.
Her rifle is weighty, the metal warm from her hands, which hold onto it with a death grip. The buzzing and rushing continues. Blood pools out around the body on the floor, reaching her boots. Her ears twitch further into her hair at the sharp-iron smell of it. She stops.
Over the next few years, Lion will get very skilled at repression.
That little hyena kid — Lana, her name is — is dying. She’s five. The girl came here skinny and she’s barely eaten since.
They’ve got her in bed and have her marked off as being sick so she isn’t expected to go to training, since they’ve been told starving to death isn’t a viable reason to skip. She hasn’t gotten better with rest. If anything, Lion thinks that maybe lying down all the time has given her body the permission it needs to fail, though Cal has told her that’s not true.
They feed her the ration bars. None of them are sure if that’s safe. Even Cal doesn’t know, ‘cause to be honest even if she’s their medic she’s never been properly trained. Anyways, they figure there’s probably some meat in them, and Cal says that maybe what she doesn’t throw up she’ll be able to digest. Or it might make things worse.
Either way, it feels like they’re just delaying the inevitable.
So, she finds Dimitri in his room late that evening. He’s got a personal room, though small and somehow less decorated than the barracks, despite him presumably having been here much longer. No office. He watches her out of the corner of her eye, unreactive, waiting for her to speak first.
“How’d the carnivores in the last batch eat?” She asks.
“With their mouths?” The joke is dry like the desert and entirely unhelpful. She snarls, tail lashing.
“Sorry. No way you can copy,” he amends.
“We can’t well fucking starve to death, either, how’d they get their food?”
For a minute he just eyes her silently - uselessly - and she bristles under the weight of his pity. Then he sighs. “The rebellion provides," he says cryptically, like it’s some aged old saying. Then he sees her face. "I mean, they traded with the rebellion for food. Information, usually."
“Okay, how’d they get that set up?”
“Through me.” And then he stops talking, fucking again. He’s being frustratingly dense.
“And why can’t we do that?”
“Because last time it got every cadet at this base and two rebellion members executed. So the rebellion won’t try it again.”
She doesn’t know what to say. “There’s a kid starving to death in the dorms, though. We're all already gonna die. All the carnivores.”
“Yes,” Dimitri acknowledges. “All the carnivores. But everyone else here will survive.”
All their deaths would be a net good for the rest of the compound, then. That’s what he’s saying. …He’s probably right.
Lion pauses. “Okay,” her mouth says, and she goes for the door. Then she stops.
“Is there any way– what do I do?”
Dimitri sighs. “You don’t need to do anything, sweetheart. You just need to wait.”
Lion doesn’t punch him in the face, but it’s a near thing, her hands twitching in their fists. It’s more a testament to the dread stunning her than to her self-control.
She leaves the room and pads silently back to the barracks with her mind fraying at the edges. For the first time, her desperation outweighs the hunger. She feels like she’s failed, but she hasn’t even really tried anything.
That night the dog pile centers around Lana. Lion lays next to the kid, pressed up against her with an arm laid out across her chest, feeling it rise and fall, slower and out of sync with the rest of the pile.
At some point in the very early morning the kid stops breathing beside them. Lion lays there for maybe an hour, straining to feel another breath, but eventually she falls unwillingly back to sleep. When she wakes up it’s to the half-cooled body beside her, nearly cold where she wasn’t pressed up against the other kids.
Raja and Crow and some of the others wake up with her, and they grab most of the older kids, leaving a couple of the youngest there to sleep. Lion carries a sleepy six-year-old with them.
Raja carries the body.
They take her down to the pit, where the burial (if you could call it that) is so underwhelming and ungraceful that Lion starts silently raging there in her place. They stand there in the early morning cold until the younger ones start complaining, and they have to go inside.
They’re hungry.
The next day during training the Captain shoots a girl in the foot for disrespect. She’s fine - Cal is on standby - but it’s a little difficult to go on with rifle practice when there’s a bullet in the foot of one of their own and a five-year-old lying in the grave out back.
And Lion realizes, not for the first time but maybe the most definitely, that he doesn't give a shit about them or whether they lived or died. That a man who would shoot a kid with no warning for no good reason isn’t going to have any problems with watching all nineteen carnivores left here starve to death. That if he isn’t going to help them, and if Dimitri and his rebellion aren’t going to help them, then all they’ve got here is themselves.
So in the middle of the night, when the hunger is once again eating into her bones and her stomach is squeezing into itself, a biting pain in her stomach, she decides she’s going to eat. Something fucking filling. Yeah. She’ll get food in every other carnivore in the facility, too.
Now, she’s got no idea how. But half asleep at the bottom of a dogpile that is what she decides. She closes her eyes.
The hunger keeps her awake, but in her partially-present state she drifts. Sonja’s death makes its way back into her mind. The speed of it. Beasts look like big dogs, which is funny, ‘cause Lion used to kind of like dogs. She dreams of the dog tearing through and out of Sonja’s body in that explosion of gore, spines like spears stabbing through her body. It’s a pretty common dream these nights. Lion thinks a lot of the others have been having it too. She remembers the color of the blood spilling out onto the sand, the smell of it.
She remembers the bodies of the beasts they killed the rest of that day and the days since. They really do look like dogs, when they’re dead and limp in the dust. Like if you ran your hand over them you’d be running your hand over a warm body and not rotting magic, solidified in a cold solid form.
Maybe, before the Emperor came – (he’s a god, Lion has heard, and has his hands far too fucking deep in the magic balance of this planet) – they weren’t rotting like they are now. But whatever they used to be they aren’t anymore.
She wonders what they eat. They’re all in the same food-barren desert, after all. They probably don’t, being physical embodiments of magic. But they’re still… sort of meat. Probably. They still rot when they’re dead and still smell like dead things, even if they rot faster than should be possible. Meat has bones, and the beast’s bones still lie out in the desert after they die. So they’ve gotta be meat. Right?
Crow blinks an eye open as Lion carefully extracts herself from the pile, letting out a little noise. “Shh, go back to sleep,” Lion murmurs as she runs a hand through the other girl’s hair.
She’s gonna be furious when she learns that Lion went off and tried this shit alone, going to say she should’ve brought her along. But Lion at least has the presence of mind to realize she’s probably walking off to her death. She just doesn’t have the presence of mind to realize she should crawl back into bed with her friends and lie there hungry and alive.
Her rifle is lying under her bed. She grabs it and pulls the bells off her backpack, tying them to her belt. It’s easy to get out of the facility. Probably every girl here would run away if they could, but the superiors leave all the doors unlocked anyway, because where would they run? The desert? They’d fucking die. Lion realizes this is an ironic thing to think, considering she’s currently opening the door to exit the building.
Besides, don’t run away was one of the very first orders the Captain set on them, right up there with don’t try to kill yourself and behave loyally to your empire.
Lion is exhausted. Starving’ll do that to you. Plus she hasn’t slept well since she got here, with what the hunger, and honestly hadn’t slept well before that either. Juvie didn’t inspire healthy sleeping habits even after she settled in and learned how to protect herself.
Despite the exhaustion, the moment she crosses the magic barrier separating their base from the vastness of the desert she starts running. She's not wearing any shoes. With no boots and no pack she can run fast, so she left both back at the base. The boots don't really fit her anyways, since they're made for humans. Her claws get stuck in the end of the shoe and they fit weird against her ankles. The pads of her feet are thick enough she doesn't really need the boots as a protective layer anyways.
The cold air bites into her cheeks as she runs, and the sand has lost all of its daytime heat, but she’s got pads and thin fur on her feet so it’s not too cold. She runs for maybe 15 minutes before the bells start ringing. It’s a constant, incessant rattling, different from the way they bang around when she runs. She stops in her tracks and pulls out her gun, slowly turning around in a circle, watching.
There's the lightest little noise - sand, quietly shifting, something padding - behind her, and she whips around just in time to see the beast lunging towards her, and for a moment it's close enough that she could reach out and touch it and she regrets coming for the first time since she left tonight but at the same time she's glad, because there are only two ways this can end and neither of them involve things going the way they have been (hungry and in pain) and then she aims her rifle and shoots. Two bullets, right in the stomach, and then a third that misses the beast as it falls.
For a moment they're both stunned but she must not have been a good shot because then it's on her again, and this time she doesn't pull the trigger fast enough. A heavy paw presses into her chest as the beast's mouth splits open. Its body is twisting like the beast that killed Sonja’s did right before it ripped her apart from the inside out, and she pulls the trigger again. Shoved up against the ground on her back like this she can't aim, but it catches the beast in the shoulder and it stops twisting. She presses the muzzle of the gun right into the base of its neck, pushing its head and mouth away from her, and pulls the trigger one final time. There’s an empty click. Her mind whites out with terror but her hand still moves to her coat pocket, feeling for the extra magazine, but the pocket is empty. She's out of ammo.
Because she's still somehow fucking alive, she drops the gun and drags her sharp claws across the beast's face and belly, kicking at it. Cold blood runs down her arms, sprays everywhere. The beast finally - finally - falls over. Lion watches it twitching, scrabbling at the ground as it tries to get back up, but it's got three bullets in it and its belly sliced open and glistening black blood running into its eyes, and finally the creature goes still. She feels her forearm with her good hand and the skin is ripped open all up it. At some point in the struggle the beast clawed her arm open and she didn't even notice. In the dark of the night, her blood looks as inky black as the beast's.
She lays on her back in the sand, still and panting. The stars are pretty tonight, she notices. Bright. Then the hunger kicks back in.
There’s a clarity to starving. A clarity to pain. The understanding that your body is failing on you and the hunger like knives piercing into your stomach; it washes away all other thoughts and concerns. It's exhausting, too, but she stands up anyways, walking over to crouch by the beast.
She forgot her knife, so she tears a chunk of meat off with her claws and stuffs it in her mouth. It tastes like meat, if meat was rotting and made out of ink and also the corrupted physical embodiment of the energy that powers the world. So. Not exactly like meat. She rips another strip off and eats it, then another, too hungry to care about food safety.
Only after she has to turn away and puke on the sand does she stop to wonder, for the first time this night, if eating something like this might kill her. She finds she doesn't care. Starvation would also kill her. If not starvation the Captain could kill her, or a beast could explode her in a fight, or she could have a random mistake with her gun. There are a million reasons she could die and this is the first meat she's seen since they ran out of rats. And besides, she just puked up everything she had eaten, so now she's hungry again. She goes back to tearing into the beast.
When she strolls back into base a half hour later, on quiet feet and not at all lightheaded and only the tiniest bit nauseous, miraculosly fucking full, Raja is up waiting for her. She looks fully the part of a furious mother who’s teenager just hoisted themselves back in through the window in the middle of the night. Lion quails. In response, Raja mercilessly shakes Crow awake, looking Lion dead in the eyes as she does so.
Crow has to shake off her sleepiness, but once she does she immediately identifies and sends a glare at her. They probably noticed she was gone and set up watch, Lion realizes as they hop out of bed and guide-slash-drag her out of the dorms to the shower rooms.
“Where were you?” Raja drawls in that endlessly exhausted and endlessly patient way of hers.
Beside her, Crow is glaring dramatically. She’s not nearly as patient.
“I may have gone out to the desert,” Lion admits.
“Alone.”
“Maybe.”
Raja’s patience snaps. “Do you actually have a death wish? You run off on your own to dangerous things, you break Dimitri’s face in, you incrementally disrespect the trainers every chance you get- someday they’re gonna snap, Lion - you go up to the captain, a known psychopath, and ask him for things-“
“Actually, I do that too,” Crow interrupts.
“Shut up, Crow, I’ve already yelled at you.” She turns back to Lion. “What’s your fucking excuse this time?”
“I found food?”
The anger breaks, replaced by several different expressions flashing across her face. She settles on wariness. The sort that hides desperation. Raja might not be a carnivore, but she is the biggest and the sturdiest of this whole unit, enduring like a rock in the storm. She immediately took it upon herself to try and be a protector, even if she’s got less aggressive methods than Lion and Crow. Lion knows watching a third of them starve and being able to do nothing has taken its toll on her as well.
“What?” Both of them ask as one, and after a few minutes of explanation and a lot of skeptical questioning, they go back to the dorms to collect some more fighters.
“She alright?” Cal calls sleepily from her bunk.
“Physically,” Crow responds. “Mentally, I ain’t so sure.”
They grab some of the older kids, who are grumpy at first but jump out of bed as soon as they hear what it’s about, and whisper in the dark as they collect better supplies.
Guns, extra clips, bells. They grab heat packs to stuff into their pockets and boots. The backpacks are still left behind. As Lion said, best to travel light.
They drag two more beasts back to camp that night. Everybody eats. They cook it this time, in fires a few hundred yards from base, so it tastes a little better. Puking is still involved.
Then when their stomachs are full and they're peeling the last bits of not-meat off a glistening skeleton, the glyph starts up its buzzing -- (be at the training room at 7, the Captain had ordered last night) -- calling them back to their cage.
They’re a couple of minutes late to the morning exercises, so they get a lecture and twice the reps, but no one passes out this time and Lion’s only a little nauseous. Whenever any one carnivore meets eyes with another they can’t help but break out into a grin, at least until the trainer turns around with his hawk eyes.
It’s a good day.