Oil-black meets green, and the lanky boy with a stack of books in his arms and a ink-dark mouse on his shoulder blinks when addressed. He's dressed in black as well - a sensible color - up to the neck, even his hands in gloves despite being indoors. There's a dark bruise wrapping up his neck to his jaw on the right side, a delicacy to the way he holds his left arm, but otherwise he's just a tired looking young man with deep violet half-circles under his eyes.
(Lockjoint nestles in most of him in the form of fine crystals, small wounds of excision marking where someone went to work easing it earlier. There are five deep punctures in his left calf, stitched carefully closed, and he's dappled with bruises and injuries of varying ages from neck to toes. He holds his left arm that way because his shoulder is sprained and littered with tiny scabs.)
"No," Paul says, as if called on by a teacher, "And I don't think it's that they see it as a normal fact of life."
The stranger's eyes should be, by all rights, much less strange than many of the things Paul has seen in Trench. They're set in a normal human face, one asking a normal human question, and Paul thinks that may be exactly why they're more unsettling. He glances away, adjusting the books (Moon-Blood Divination; Lacuna and Lethe; The Southern Constellations, Theorized) in his arms.
"They act as if they don't know what you mean when you ask them, but these people aren't fools," Paul explains, as his mouse twitches her ears, "I can't believe that none of them have ever asked themselves how we come here, or why. Most people might take it on faith, but all of them? It's not plausible. There has to be something else."
(1)
(Lockjoint nestles in most of him in the form of fine crystals, small wounds of excision marking where someone went to work easing it earlier. There are five deep punctures in his left calf, stitched carefully closed, and he's dappled with bruises and injuries of varying ages from neck to toes. He holds his left arm that way because his shoulder is sprained and littered with tiny scabs.)
"No," Paul says, as if called on by a teacher, "And I don't think it's that they see it as a normal fact of life."
The stranger's eyes should be, by all rights, much less strange than many of the things Paul has seen in Trench. They're set in a normal human face, one asking a normal human question, and Paul thinks that may be exactly why they're more unsettling. He glances away, adjusting the books (Moon-Blood Divination; Lacuna and Lethe; The Southern Constellations, Theorized) in his arms.
"They act as if they don't know what you mean when you ask them, but these people aren't fools," Paul explains, as his mouse twitches her ears, "I can't believe that none of them have ever asked themselves how we come here, or why. Most people might take it on faith, but all of them? It's not plausible. There has to be something else."