The bowl came at the same hour every night, when the last sliver of sky above the grate went from grey to black.

Tomlo had learned to tell time by hunger. Not the dull, constant kind that lived in his stomach, but the sharper one, the one that arrived in his jaw, behind his eyes, sometime in the deep afternoon and didn't leave until the bowl did. He was twenty-three years old and he hadn't ever gone to sleep full.

He sat with his back against the cold wall and listened. Footsteps in the hallway. The familiar rhythm of them - long step, short step - the gait of a man who had learned to compensate for something painful. Then the creak of the hatch in the door, and the yellow light of a lantern beaming through.

The master's face peered in with the light.

Tomlo had stared at it long enough to know every mark on it. The long scar from cheekbone to jaw, silver and old. Two small punctures at his neck, close together, like something had tried to hold on. A ridge of thickened skin along his forearm where his sleeve had ridden up, as if whatever made it had been dragged free. His left hand was missing the tip of his smallest finger. Not the whole finger. Just the last joint, gone.

He slid the bowl through the hatch. "I'll be back before morning" he said. He always said it. He always was.