APIBAGS Chapter 35

Merai brought Ranen and Mary to where the other children were kept. Even Ranen, imprisoned in the basement since everything went wrong, had never been to this part of it. He'd expected to be taken back to the dormitory. What he saw when he stepped inside stopped him cold.

"My good children—you've been waiting quietly, just as I asked."

The children were huddled together in a corner, pressed in close. The room had frightened them. The underground dormitory, grim as it was, had still been livable. This room was something else entirely.

The bladed tools hanging from the walls were not decorative. They were sharp, and they showed signs of use—the particular wear of things that had been put to their purpose. There was a chair in the center whose function was not immediately legible. The whole room smelled of rust and something long-steeped—an old, bittersweet metallic smell that had worked its way into the stone. Ranen swallowed against nausea.

"Yulma..."

Worst of all was Yulma, bound. The boisterous, irrepressible Yulma hung limp with exhaustion. By some grace she appeared uninjured—restrained only, not harmed.

"You two disappeared and left your brothers and sisters unguarded, so I had to punish Yulma on your behalf."

The director's voice was soft against Ranen's ear. She pushed both Ranen and Mary into the room.

"If any of you misbehave again, you'll be punished just like Yulma. Understood?"

That voice still held warmth in it—the warmth of a lullaby at the end of a nightmare, of a prayer for peaceful sleep—and the dissonance of it made Mary cry.

"My beloved children—you know how dearly I love each of you, don't you? I have something I need to fetch, so I'll be back shortly. While I'm gone, all of you will be on your very best behavior. Mouths shut, still as the dead. Understood?"

The director met each child's gaze in turn, delivered her warning, then locked the door and left. Ranen waited until the footsteps had faded, then tried the handle—click—locked, solidly, just as expected.

Mary flew to Yulma's side.

"Yu—Yulma, what do we do..."

When Mary's composure began to crack, a younger child put a finger to her lips—shh—face tracked with dried tears, quietly asking her to be careful. Mary nodded and pressed her mouth shut, performing steadiness for someone younger than herself.

Meanwhile, Ranen took something from the wall—a large pair of tongs shaped like an enormous pair of scissors. He filed away the question of what they'd been used for, filed it to a corner and didn't look at it, and cut through Yulma's ropes. When the gag came out too, Yulma spat and dragged in a rough, shuddering breath.

"It's my fault... it must have hurt so much, I'm sorry, Yulma..."

"Ha... you're apologizing for something you didn't do. Same as always."

The director had cited all manner of reasons why Yulma was being punished in Ranen and Mary's place, but Yulma was not a person who swallowed that kind of reasoning whole.

"Are you hurt anywhere?"

"No. She tied me up as punishment. That was all."

Ranen helped Yulma sit upright. The younger children crowded close, asking if she was all right; Yulma, rather than thank them, told them to stop making noise.

"But is it safe to untie her? She said she was coming back—what if we get in even more trouble?"

"It'll be fine."

Ranen explained quietly: he'd heard Troy arriving with others, and the director had seemed sharply rattled by it.

"She probably went upstairs. And maybe... maybe Troy can get us out of here."

"That's ridiculous. Troy? And if he comes up empty-handed and the director comes back?"

"Then I'll handle it."

Yulma understood from that answer what Ranen intended if the director returned. The tools on the walls.

Was he out of his mind? Hurting someone wasn't simple, not when your head was clear. And the person in question was the director—the woman Ranen had trusted and followed like a parent his entire life, whatever betrayal had come after.

Among all of them, Ranen was the one who had depended on her most. Even after swinging a weapon, he would be turned inside out by guilt. Yulma knew this about him.

She made a cutting sound, irritated.

"All right, say it comes to that—where do we go afterward, with all the children? Another orphanage? To Daisy's?"

"What other option do we have? You know what's waiting for us if we stay here, Yulma. You're smart enough to understand. Every single tool in this room has been used before."

They'd both assumed they would be sold. Since being locked in the basement, meals had come regularly and no one had laid a hand on them.

But being brought to a room like this—there might be physical punishment ahead now. Some of the children who'd supposedly been adopted and disappeared might have already been brought here first.

"And there's Troy."

Yulma still couldn't understand why Ranen put such faith in him. She ran her fingers along the scar on her arm. Troy had given her that scar. Because of it, a scheduled adoption had fallen through, and Yulma had stayed on in the orphanage ever since.

And Ranen wanted her to rely on Troy—the one who'd screamed at every opportunity about orphan trash and places like this deserving to go under?

For a moment, Yulma reached a thought she hadn't considered before: had Troy done it on purpose? Going to the trouble of returning to an empty orphanage and bringing others with him—if that was true, then all the harassment and damage he'd done could have been deliberate all along. Too much to hope for, probably.

"Fine... all right. You're right that staying here helps no one."

No other choice but to try believing in him. Once Yulma agreed, the rest moved quickly. She turned to the younger children and told them to go stand in the corner.

"Whatever sounds you hear—don't turn around. Not for anything."

There was no need to drag the little ones into what might come next.

"Yulma—sounds. She's coming back."

Ranen took a weapon from the wall and positioned himself directly beside the door. Yulma swallowed. The lock disengaged, and the door swung open.

The children had assumed the director had gone upstairs. In fact, Merai was standing before the man in chains.

She had been scratching her arm until it finally bled. It ran down in a thin line.

"Ten days now. Aren't you hungry?"

"I'm always hungry."

Especially right now—with the smell of blood this close, this present in the air. Appetite was not something Melek was able to suppress. He swallowed.

"Then why won't you eat?"

The director tilted her head with the expression of someone who genuinely could not understand.

"I've told you. I don't eat people. Children, especially—never."

"You won't eat them?"

The director's mouth curved into something that was not quite a smile. Then she burst out laughing.

"Hahahahahaha! That is truly the funniest thing I have ever heard in my life!"

She laughed until her eyes watered.

"You're a demon. Twenty years ago you chewed children alive and watched them burn and loved every moment of it—and now you're refusing a sacrifice?"

In the days when Merai was still just Merai—twenty years before she became the director—Merai had been an orphan at Ainoa.

She was a sharper child than most. The director then had found her quickness charming—so charming, in fact, that he shared his work with her.

The first day she went down to the basement was the day she saw a child who'd been bragging two days earlier about being adopted by a wealthy elderly couple—barely conscious in what appeared to be a torture chamber below the ground. There were others. Children who'd supposedly left the orphanage. Not just suffering. Consumed.

What lay beneath every cry and every moan and every ragged breath was a single continuous thread of laughter. The demon the director so diligently served was watching all of it with the expression of a man attending a comedy.

The director held Merai's head so she couldn't look away.

"Merai—that is a demon who grants wishes. Entertain the demon, and you receive something in return. The food you eat, the clothes you wear—all of it was bought with the demon's money."

When the demon's private theater came to an end, the demon would tip the proprietor of the establishment.

"I think especially highly of you—as you well know. Help me look after the demon from now on, Merai."

After that, Merai helped the director tend to the demon's needs. For two full years. By that point, there was no child in the orphanage older than her.

What had seemed like an eternal arrangement ended when the Grand Temple began rounding up sorcerers.

In those days, countless people were executed—convicted of sorcery, or of having aided it. Ainoa Orphanage could not escape the crackdown.

The director locked the door to the basement and frantically disposed of every record he could reach.

"Merai—did you report me? It wasn't you, was it?"

Somehow it had come out anyway. Whether discovered through other means or through someone trying to lay blame—the director was convicted of sorcery and burned.

Merai inherited the orphanage and its useless children. She was the director's legal adopted daughter. She ran a new orphanage in the same building because the children who'd lost their guardian had clung to Merai, the oldest of them all, and there was nothing else to do.

"I'm hungry, big sister."

"What are we going to do now, Mei?"

In the beginning, the money the director had left was enough. The orphanage kept running adequately for a time. But the money dwindled, and when Troy was born, everything came apart. The children went hungry. They were cold. There was never enough.

Merai had been turning the problem over in her mind for some time when, one day, the thought of the old director surfaced. On a chance, she went and tried the basement door. No demon. He'd never been able to tolerate boredom; of course he wasn't waiting there.

With no demon, Merai took the next best option. She sold the children to slave traders.

Quietly. Carefully. So that no watchful eye could catch her, so the children wouldn't notice, so she would not repeat what had happened to the original director. She brought a temple priest into the arrangement with bribes and bound him to it. Over time, instead of going through a middleman, she developed a regular clientele through word of mouth.

The money from selling children went to feed and raise the ones who remained. But one child's ransom barely kept things going for six months. And even that had been disrupted repeatedly by Troy—blocking transactions, upending arrangements at every turn. She'd never told Troy the truth, so she couldn't understand how he kept finding out.

When he was younger, that had been the extent of it. But as Troy grew older the defiance escalated, until not long ago he'd borrowed a considerable sum against the orphanage building as collateral and demanded she surrender it to him—insisting she stop all of this. That this whole place should simply close.

Wretched boy. Couldn't he see that the children would starve the moment Merai was gone?