The sixth tube stood beside the seventh, and inside it a much larger woman floated in the same suspended nothing, her broad frame at ease in the liquid the way a body at ease in water always looked — unbothered, unhurried, patient in a manner that had very little to do with virtue and everything to do with appetite.
Erin Gula had been enormous even before the demon queen found her, though not in the way the word was usually meant. She had been enormous in want. It was the first thing she remembered about herself, older than her own name — a hunger that did not correspond to any hunger her body actually had, a hollowness that food had never once managed to fill no matter how much of it she put into the space where the hollowness lived.
She had grown up in a village that starved most winters, which should have made her hunger unremarkable, one hungry child among many. It had not been unremarkable. The other children's hunger ended when the food came. Erin's did not. She remembered, at seven years old, eating a full week's ration of bread in a single sitting while her younger brothers watched with the particular horror children reserve for things that break a rule they didn't know existed, and she remembered that the hollowness had not moved even slightly, had simply sat inside her the same size it had always been, indifferent to what she poured into it.
Her mother had called it a curse. Her father had called it worse things, in the years before he left. Erin had learned, by the time she was grown, that the correct word was neither — that what lived in her was not a curse and was not a sin, no matter what the village priest muttered about her at the well, but a specific and terrible kind of emptiness that had chosen her the way lightning chooses the tallest tree, without malice and without meaning, simply because she was the shape it fit.
~
She was thirty when the demon queen found her, half-starved in a city that had no more patience for her hunger than the village had, working in a kitchen for scraps and stealing more scraps than she was given, and by then she had stopped believing food would ever be the answer to whatever question was actually being asked inside her.
"You've been trying to fill the wrong thing," the demon queen had told her, the first words she'd ever spoken to Erin, standing in the alley behind the kitchen where Erin had gone to eat what she'd stolen before anyone caught her at it. "Bread doesn't touch what's hollow in you. It was never going to."
"Then what does."
"Everything else," the demon queen said. "Every ounce of will a person has ever spent staying alive. Every scrap of purpose a soul carries around without knowing it's carrying it. That is what your hollowness actually wants, and bread was only ever the substitute your body reached for because it didn't have the vocabulary for the real thing." She had held out her hand, pale in the alley's dark. "I can give you the real thing. And I promise you, Erin — you will never again sit at a table and still feel empty when the meal is finished."
Erin had looked at the offered hand for a long moment.
She had thought, in that moment, of her brothers watching her eat the week's bread with the particular horror of children who did not understand what they were seeing, and she had thought that whatever she was about to become, it could not possibly be a worse thing to be than what she already was — a hungry woman with no bottom to her hunger, feared by the only people who had ever loved her.
She took the hand.
The hollowness did not disappear. She understood that almost immediately, in the first rush of the demon queen's gift moving into her — the hollowness had simply found, for the first time in thirty years, something large enough to actually feed it. Energy. Will. The specific substance of a living thing's determination to keep being alive, which she could now draw out of a person the way she had once torn bread apart with her hands, and which, unlike bread, actually reached the place inside her that had been empty since before she had words for empty.
She had devoured her first person within the week. A soldier, sent to arrest her for the theft she'd been caught at three separate times, standing in her doorway with his hand on his sword and no idea that the tired, broad-framed woman in front of him was about to reach into the specific center of him where his will to keep breathing lived and simply take it.
He had not screamed. That had surprised her, that first time — she had expected screaming, expected the violence of the act to look like violence from the outside. It had not. He had simply stopped, mid-sentence, mid-threat, his eyes going distant and then empty and then closed, and he had folded to the ground the way a puppet folds when the hand holding it lets go, and Erin had stood over him feeling, for the first time in her entire life, completely and totally full.
She had cried. She remembered that clearly, even three hundred years later in the tube's long nothing — she had stood over the first person she had ever killed and cried, not from guilt, though the guilt came later and stayed, but from the sheer unbearable relief of a hollowness that had finally, finally, been fed enough to stop screaming.
She was not proud of what she'd become. She understood, with the specific clarity the tube's stillness gave her, three hundred years too late to matter, that there had probably been another way to fill what was hollow in her, a way that did not require a village's worth of dead men and women behind her before the demon queen ever ranked her sixth among seven. She had simply never found it in time. The demon queen had offered her the first thing in thirty starving years that actually worked, and Erin — hungry in a way no bread had ever touched — had taken it without asking what it would cost the people standing in doorways for the next three centuries.
~
The tube's liquid began to move.
Erin felt the warmth of the demon queen's hand against the glass the same way Sabrina had felt it in the tube beside her, and she opened her eyes into gold light for the first time in longer than she had numbers for.
"Sixth of mine," the demon queen said. "Wake up. There is a great deal of hunger left in this world, and I need you to help me collect what it's owed."
Erin came out of the tube already reaching, some old and terrible instinct in her rousing before the rest of her had fully arrived, and the demon queen watched her with the same patient, unbothered amusement she had shown Sabrina, the specific expression of someone who had built exactly the tool she needed and was pleased, three hundred years later, to find it still sharp.
"I'm hungry," Erin said. It was the first thing she said, and it was true in every direction the word could be true.
"I know," the demon queen said. "That's why I chose you."