Lucy hadn’t eaten in nearly three days by this point. Tomas and Mr. Broom found this alarming in that it had potential to upset their escape, and so they brought him another fish and sat before him; and whereas earlier they were disinterested in whether or not he chose to eat, now they were all the more keen, so that Lucy felt a pressure to please them. His hunger was startlingly vivid; it stabbed and pinwheeled in his stomach and seemed at times to possess the attributes of color. And yet he felt he simply could not perform the action of severing the metallic scales with his teeth, and he told his comrades he wouldn’t do it.
“It will give you pluck, and so you must,” said Tomas.
“If we’re leaving in the morning, as Mr. Broom says, then I can do without.”
Mr. Broom shook his head. “We’ll be days in the darkness, and it will take our every bit of strength to see this through, if it’s even possible to see it through. I’m sorry, Lucy, but we really must insist that you eat.”
Lucy glared at the fish, knowing that he would consume the thing but hating it, and unsure just how to start. Tomas touched the tip of his finger to the fish’s belly. “Here,” he said. “Just shred it away.” At last Lucy drew the fish to his face and bit into its flesh; and at the same moment he did this, the fish fairly exploded, shooting out a clammy glut of roe, for it was a female, and had been on its way to the spawning ground when captured in the stone corral. Lucy was incredulous, and he sat very still, roe clinging to his cheek and chin. When Mr. Broom and Tomas ceased laughing, they took the fish away and fetched him another, a male. Lucy did not dawdle with this, but consumed it with a certain violence or anger. Soon the fish was but a head, tail, and skeleton; and as Lucy felt his body accepting the much-needed nourishment, then did his mood lighten. He lay back on the sand, watching the distant purple circle which was the shading sky framed by the mouth of the Very Large Hole. His stomach squirmed loudly, relentlessly; he was listening to this with dispassionate amusement when a consequential thought, like a bird flown through an open window, came into his mind and perched there. He sat up alertly, looking across at Tomas and Mr. Broom, both of whom had also eaten and were ruminating upon their own concerns.
“The fish head upriver when they spawn, do they not?” said Lucy.
“They do,” said Tomas.
“How far upriver do they travel?”
“I don’t rightly know. Do you, Mr. Broom?”
“A good long while, anyway,” Mr. Broom answered. “Why do you want to know?”
“Well,” said Lucy, “if we were to follow one, mightn’t she lead us to freedom?”
When he said this, Mr. Broom, too, sat up. Tomas wore a skeptical expression; and yet there was a stiffness or seriousness to him as well. He asked, “And how might one do such a thing, even if we weren’t making the journey in total darkness?”
Lucy was staring at the woman’s boot, situated once again in the center of their circle. He believed he knew the answer to Tomas’s question but he didn’t respond right away, forcing himself to act with calm. He took the boot up and poured out the water. Removing the lace, he laid this in a straight line before him, watching it awhile before unlacing his own boots, and tying each of these to the first, tripling its length. Mr. Broom drew his fingers to his mouth in a gesture of surprise and recognition; now he also began unlacing his boots. Tomas didn’t understand what was happening, and had to be enlightened; once this was done, he still didn’t want to give up his laces. But Lucy and Mr. Broom entreated him, and though Tomas thought it far-fetched, neither did he want to spoil their fun, and so he handed over his laces as well, and these were tied to the rest, so that there was now a single lace of goodly length laid out between them. They studied this for a long while, and with reverence, representative as it was of their last chance for escape. Later, and the men slept, dreaming their dreams of vainglory, the tongues of their boots lolling in the sand as if exhausted.