Once Upon a Broken Heart

Chapter 21: Hunger's Accounting

Hunger came to the shop three days later.

Not threatening—she'd been prepared for threatening, had prepared herself against the particular pull of Hunger's presence, the way it made you feel the gap between where you were and where you wanted to be. What she found was something she hadn't expected: a Fate in the process of something she could only call reckoning.

He stood at the front door. She opened it.

"I'm not here to interfere," he said. "The loop is broken. I accept the outcome." A pause. "I came because—" He stopped. Recalibrated. "The guard. Corvin. What I did to him."

She stood in the doorway.

"I know what I did," Hunger said. "I know the mechanism I used. The grief of a father, the specific vulnerability of it, the offer I made that I knew would not be fulfilled." He looked at the street. "I don't—I don't grieve. I'm the Fate of wanting, not of loss. But I find that I—" He stopped again. Something was working in his face, something effortful, as though the machinery of it was less well-oiled than the Fate expression. "I find that there's something I want that I don't know the name of."

"Accountability," she said.

He looked at her.

"You want to have it acknowledged," she said. "That what you did—" She paused. "The wanting isn't wrong in itself. You're Hunger. You're constitutionally incapable of not wanting. But using Corvin's grief for your amplification—you want that to be on the record." She paused. "You want the wanting that you did wrong to be named."

He was very still.

"Yes," he said. "That."

She thought about the empty vault. The classification system. The new category.

"I'll tell Cassian," she said.

Hunger looked at her for a moment. "He keeps records."

"He does."

"Complete ones."

"Yes."

Hunger was quiet. "That's what I wanted," he said. "To have it kept. Accurately." He paused. "I know that's—I know the accounting doesn't undo what I did."

"No," she said. "It doesn't."

"But it should exist somewhere."

"Yes," she said. "It should."

Hunger looked at her with those eyes that assessed—but differently now, without the inventory quality. Looking at her as a person who had just said something he'd needed to hear.

"Mapmaker's daughter," he said. "Your father would have noted this."

"He would have," she said. "Both lines. The double notation for the place where two accounts diverge." She paused. "He believed that was the most honest marking."

Hunger nodded once. He turned from the door.

"The grief in the world," he said, over his shoulder, "is returning to its natural level. The amplification is gone. Aravel will—" He stopped. "It will feel lighter, in time. The secondary grief will clear." A pause. "You'll notice it. You pay attention."

He walked away down the November street.

She stood in the doorway for a moment. Then she went inside to find Cassian.