The Council notice sat folded on the desk where Soren had left it the night before.

The review board had changed its mind and a classification was coming and there was nothing to do about it before it came.

So he didn’t do anything about it. He made a tray of breakfast and put it in front of Mona instead.

She didn’t understand food at first.

She looked at the tray, then up at him, the same suspicion she’d given her own hands the first morning.

A thing done to her, not for her.

"You eat it," he said.

She picked up an egg with her whole fist.

"With the fork."

She looked at the fork. She looked at the egg in her fist. She decided the fist had already worked and ate the egg.

He didn’t correct her again. A mole had spent its life eating in the dark with no audience and no rules and the fork could wait. The eating was the part that mattered and she was doing the eating.

◆◆◆◆

Beasts didn’t eat on a schedule. They ate when the body said to.

Mona’s body had only just become the kind that ran on hours instead of hunger and she had no idea when the hours wanted her to eat, so she ate when he ate.

Soren went to the cafeteria at the eighth hour and she came with him.

He sat at the corner table and she sat across from him with her tinted lenses pushed up on her head because the cafeteria lights didn’t burn the way the sun used to.

She watched what he did with his tray and copied it a beat behind.

He lifted the cup.

She lifted the cup.

He set it down.

She set it down and got it slightly wrong, the cup landing harder than his, a small clack she didn’t notice making.

The clack was the most human thing she’d done all morning.

◆◆◆◆

By the third meal she had the fork.

She held it point-down, ready to dig, the grip of someone who’d only ever handled tools in a tunnel, and she got food into her mouth with it more often than not.

When she missed she stared at the fork, blamed it, tried again.

She did not get frustrated.

Frustration was a thing people learned later, after they learned to expect themselves to be good at something.

Mona expected nothing of herself yet.

She just tried the thing, and missed, and tried it again, and her face stayed open the whole time.

Selah sat down next to Soren halfway through and watched the fork operation with the flat attention she gave to anything she was deciding whether to mock.

"She’s getting it," Selah said.

"She is."

Across the table Mona got a full bite to her mouth without dropping it and made a small sound, the augh sound, the only word she’d ever had, pleased with herself.

Selah almost smiled but she caught it before it finished.

◆◆◆◆

The cost moved under him while he watched her eat.

It had come every day since the form stabilized, a thinness with no edge to it, the worn-coat feeling Garrow had named in the severance field and Soren had filed away with the other things he understood and hadn’t said.

The system measured bonds getting deeper and this wasn’t that.

This was the bond taking its price for a thing already done.

A girl learning to hold a fork.

A door closed under the academy.

His own self thinning a degree to pay for both.

He’d accepted this when the lid failed. He didn’t un-accept it watching her chase a bean around a tray with a fork held upside down.

He drank his coffee and did not tell her or anyone what the watching cost.

◆◆◆◆

She started arriving before him.

He’d come to the corner table at the eighth hour and she’d already be there, lenses up, hands folded, tray empty in front of her because she hadn’t worked out yet that she was allowed to get the food before he came.

So he taught her the line.

He walked her through it, pointed at the trays and the food and the woman who swiped the cards.

The next day she went through the line herself and came out the other end with a tray that was mostly eggs because eggs were the thing she could identify.

She sat down across from him with her wall of eggs and waited for him to start so she could copy the start.

The homing had always pointed her at him.

That was the bond, the frequency, the thing she did without choosing, the loop she ran around every room until she found his signal and sat against it.

She’d done it as a mole in the dirt and she’d done it against the side of his bed the night the form held.

This was different and he watched it be different.

She wasn’t homing to the table. She was getting there early.

◆◆◆◆

On the sixth morning she said a word.

He’d sat down and lifted his cup and she put her hand flat on the table, not reaching for him, not the homing pull, just a hand set down on purpose to make him look up.

He looked up.

"Augh," she said, which was the old word, the only word.

And then she tried the new shape her mouth had been working on since the morning the light stopped burning, the one she’d been getting closer to and closer to over a week of meals, and she got it.

"Every," she said.

He waited.

"Every. Food." She pointed at him, then at the table, then at the space across from him where she’d been arriving early for six days.

The lenses slid down off her head and she didn’t push them back up. "You."

It wasn’t the homing.

This was Mona deciding where she wanted to be and saying so out loud, the first thing in her short loud life she had chosen instead of been pulled toward, and she was choosing the table, and him, every meal, for as long as the word held.

Soren set his cup down.

He felt his strength wane as she spoke, but he kept his expression steady.