The cat looked at him for a long time before answering.

When it did, the voice was different. More careful. Picking each word the way you picked stones to cross a creek.

"It is a word that gets used," the cat began, "for souls that the crystal cannot read. The crystal looks at a soul. It is supposed to find — *resonance*. A note. A shape that matches one of the seven of them. When it finds one, it calls. When it doesn't —"

The cat paused.

"When it doesn't, the soul is called *tainted*. The word is not new. It has been around a long time. It comes from an older meaning than the one Solis gave you. The original meaning had to do with — with the way certain souls are *attended to*, *marked*, *claimed* by something that is not part of the seven. By something that sits *outside* the system the seven built. The crystal cannot read those souls because the crystal was never built to. It is not that the soul is broken. It is that the soul is —"

The cat stopped.

"— is, in a specific way, *promised elsewhere*. It belongs, very faintly, very subtly, to —"

It stopped again.

The forest noises got louder for a second. A bird very high up in the trees called twice and went silent. The white flowers near Dante's feet trembled, all of them, as if in a wind that wasn't there.

The cat closed its eyes for a moment.

"— and that, in short, is the story."

Dante blinked.

"Wait," he said.

"Yes?"

"Wait, no, I — what was the story?"

The cat looked at him.

"What story."

"You — you were telling me. About — about Tainted Souls. About what they actually —"

The cat cocked its head. Slowly. Like it was searching for a memory it should have had right at the front and instead had to dig for.

"I was?"

"Yes!"

"What did I say?"

"You said — you said the original meaning — and that the soul is *promised elsewhere* — and then you started to say *belongs faintly to —*"

"To *what.*"

"*I don't know,* you stopped —"

The cat sat with that for a moment.

Then, very dryly: "Ah. Yes. That."

"That what?"

"It's the same problem as my name. There are some things I am not allowed to speak about, in this body, in this form, in this world. I can begin sentences. I cannot finish them. The world will, very politely, eat the parts of the sentence that approach the forbidden. And — apparently, I am only now learning — it will eat the *memory* of having said them, on both sides of the conversation. So we are now sitting here knowing only that I tried."

"That's —"

"Yes."

"That's *infuriating.*"

"It is. I find it so. I have found it so for a long time. You are getting a small flavor of an experience I have been having for centuries. Welcome." The cat sounded, for the first time, genuinely tired. "Some questions you will have to answer with your own feet, child. Walk far enough and the answers tend to find you. Or, more often, they find you whether or not you walk."

Dante sat with that. He did not have a response.

After a moment the cat said, more gently: "You will get there. You are already further along than most. You asked the right question."

"I didn't get the right answer."

"No. But the question matters. Even when the answer doesn't come."

It paused, then added: "What I *can* tell you is this: it is not your fault. Whatever it is that the crystal saw or did not see, it is not *something you did*. It is something that was true about you before you ever walked into that hall. You did not earn it. You did not deserve it. You are not, in any sense the word matters in, *defective*. You are simply pointed at a different door than the one Solis was checking for. That is all."

"Thank you."

"Don't. I haven't done anything yet that deserves thanks. The work hasn't started."

---

The cat looked at him for a beat.

Then its tone changed. Sharpened. The dry patience was still there, but underneath it, something harder was beginning to surface.

"Now," it said. "Let's talk about what you *will* have to do, because you're going to live or die on it within the week and I would prefer the first option."

"Okay."

"Stand up."

Dante stood up. His knees protested. He stood anyway.

The cat looked at him. Up and down. Slowly.

"You are," it said, "not in good shape."

"I —"

"I am not insulting you. I am stating a fact. Look at yourself."

Dante looked down at himself. The robe. The narrow shoulders inside it. The wrists. The lightness in the chest that came from not eating enough and sleeping too little, from spending a year in a chair in front of a screen and another year in a chair in front of a different screen.

"You are sixteen," the cat went on. "You are functionally a body that has been used as a footstool for sixteen years. The other children who came down with you have been given new bodies — taller, stronger, the works. You were not. Solis returned you the body you walked into the hall with as a *small mercy*. He thought it was cruelty disguised as kindness. He was right. It is going to be very hard for you, in the first months, to do the things you are going to need to do."

The cat let that sit.

"I cannot give you a new body. I do not have the kind of authority over flesh that the Heptarchy has. I can give you a Blessing. I have. I can give you tools. I will. But the body — the body you have to build yourself. With your own hands. From the body you brought."

"Okay."

"And it is going to *hurt.*"

"Okay."

"Stop saying *okay.*"

Dante closed his mouth.

The cat watched him for a moment.

"You have," it said, "a habit. I have been observing you for longer than you know — since before the hall, since the moment the Heptarchy's call brushed past me. I have seen — let us say I have seen *enough*. You have a habit, when something is hard, of preferring to lose at it slowly rather than to risk failing at it quickly."

Dante's mouth opened. Closed.

"You stay up too late," the cat said, "playing games where the rules are written down clearly, where the consequences of failure are zero, where every loss can be redone. You do this because the world outside the games does not have those properties. The world outside the games asks you to *try* at things, to risk being bad at them, to risk *being seen* being bad at them. And you have decided, for some time now, that this is too high a price."

"That's —"

"I am not finished. You did this with the homework. You did this with the friend in the green shirt — yes, I know about the messages, I do not know what they said because that is not my business but I know that you did not answer them. You have done it with your mother."

Something moved in Dante's chest at that.

His hand moved without permission to the front of the robe. Pressed against the place where the folded note still was, somehow, against his heart.

The cat's eyes — which had never left his face — flicked down to the gesture. Took it in. Did not comment.

"Your mother left for work and put a note on the fridge for you. With a strawberry magnet. You read it once and stopped reading it. You ate yogurt past its expiration date because you could not be bothered to throw it out. You did not take the trash out the night before. You did not call her. You did not write back. *These are not crimes,* I am not standing here calling you a monster — these are the small daily failures of a sixteen-year-old boy and they are entirely normal. But they were *yours*. They were chosen."

Dante couldn't speak.

The note under his fingers felt very small. He thought of his mother standing at the fridge in the early morning before her shift, sticking the note up with the strawberry magnet she had bought because she'd thought it was funny. He thought of the way she had paused, probably, before she'd left — the way she always paused before leaving, listening for whether he was awake, deciding whether to wake him up to say goodbye.

She had decided not to.

She had decided not to, every time, because she had not wanted to bother him.

(*She had not wanted to bother me.*)

(I could have woken up early. Once. I could have gotten up and made her coffee. I could have walked her to the bus stop. I could have done a hundred small things that would have cost me thirty minutes of sleep, and I never did, because I was *tired*, because I was *playing a match*, because some other small reason, every single time.)

(And now she is in a kitchen I will never see again, and she is going to find an empty bedroom, and she is going to make tea for two people because she has been making tea for two people for sixteen years, and the second cup is going to sit on the table, and she is —)

The cat was still talking. The words were landing further away now.

"— the thing I am asking you to understand is a small and simple thing, and it is the thing this entire conversation has been building toward. *You can choose to be different now.* You can choose, starting in this forest, in this body, with this Blessing — to be the kind of person you wanted, on some quiet level, to be. You did not have to choose. Up there. In the old world. There were too many easy ways out. Down here there are not. Down here the choice is in front of you, and the choice has *teeth*, and there will not be any way to play another round."

The cat's voice gentled by another notch.

"You are not your worst day. You are not the trash bag by the door. You are not the unanswered messages. You are not the boy under the pillar in the cafeteria who wished, very quietly, for something to happen and did not actually mean it. You can be more than those. I am giving you *very little*. It is, by any honest measure, *not enough*. But *what you do with not enough* is what makes the difference. It always has."

It looked at him.

"I am giving you the chance. I cannot make you take it. If you take it, you will hurt for a long time. You will fail at things. You will be afraid almost constantly. You will not always be the person I think you are. But you will be *moving*, and that is more than most do."

A long silence.

It was at this moment — sitting on the cold stone of the cave mouth in front of a forest he did not understand, with a god in the shape of a cat in front of him and a folded paper note over his heart and a half-built sun on his hand — that Dante began to cry.

Quietly. Without sound. The way he had learned to cry as a child when his mother was sleeping after a night shift and he had needed to and he hadn't wanted to wake her. Just shoulders. Just water. Just a small private collapse.

The cat said nothing for a long time.

Then, more quietly than it had said anything else:

"I am not telling you this to hurt you, child."

"It hurts."

"I know. I am telling you because — *listen* — because the reason I am bothering with you at all is that you are *capable* of caring about this. The fact that you are crying right now is the reason I picked you. Most of the children I might have picked would have shrugged. Or argued. Or accused me of being unfair."

Dante wiped his face with the sleeve.

"Okay," he said.

The cat closed its eyes.

"I told you to stop saying that."

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Be *less stupid.* Sit down."

Dante sat down.