The days that followed were like a candle kindled in an eternal night: faint and flickering, yet stubbornly refusing to go out.
Bella Cora, the girl with Amber eyes, became the only regular visitor in Corax's lifeless, gray existence within his prison.
Every day, or at fixed intervals that Corax gradually learned to dimly perceive, the little opening in the ceiling would slide open without a sound, revealing that familiar little face with its concerned expression, and those Amber eyes that remained clear and bright even in the dim green glow.
She always brought something.
Sometimes it was half a pouch of murky recycled water that tasted of rust, held in a flattened, flexible container she had found somewhere.
Sometimes it was another blackened, rock-hard lump of chemical dough, or a few wilted yellow leaves or moldy chunks of synthetic protein that looked as though they had been picked out of the kitchen waste.
In a world ruled by corporate magnates, even the lowliest slave laborers would probably have turned their noses up at such things. They were garbage in every sense of the word.
But to Corax, they were the only fuel sustaining the faint flame of his life, which seemed ready to go out at any moment.
He accepted them in silence. With pale, almost translucent hands and pronounced knuckles, he slowly, carefully brought the unpalatable food to his mouth, struggling to chew and swallow.
The murky water moistened his cracked, bleeding lips and throat.
That pitiful amount of food and water was nowhere near enough to restore his health, but it did keep him alive. His vitality had been ravaged to its limits by prolonged experimentation and confinement, and these scraps kept him from slipping quietly into death through utter exhaustion and organ failure.
Often, while eating