The first sin was distributed.
One prisoner knelt and prayed.
The second sin.
The person beside him judged the prayer a false confession.
The third.
A man tried to set fire to the bread crate.
There was no flame.
He tore out his own nails and rubbed them together.
Blood and nails scraped wood.
One spark appeared.
Twenty-four cathedral sins entered wagon thirty-nine.
The empty became experts the moment they received sin.
How to pray.
How to pronounce guilt.
How to abandon a patient.
The sins were not theirs.
Their hands still knew the sequence.
Cassian kicked the burning bread crate.
It struck the wagon wall.
Bread spilled across the floor.
The prisoners rushed the bread before the fire.
Sin had entered them, but hunger still belonged to the original bodies.
Cassian stepped on the bread.
"Stop if you want to eat."
No one listened.
The midwife, carrying a cathedral sin, tried to open another person's ribs and extract a confession.
The former soldier gripped a chair leg like a sword.
The shoemaker tried to stitch a mouth shut like a shoe.
Cassian had no sword.
No right arm.
The fingers of his left hand were old and broken.
So he used the wagon.
He kicked the floor brake.
One wheel of wagon thirty-nine locked.
The wagon tipped sideways.
Everyone poured against one wall.
The praying prisoner collided with the one pronouncing guilt.
The knife in the midwife's hand cut the shoemaker's thread.
The former soldier's chair leg lodged in the ceiling.
The sins did not know one another.
The wagon threw everyone in the same direction.
Only Cassian remained standing on the brake.
On the tilted floor, he stepped on one prisoner's head.
"I'll say it again."
He pointed at the bread crate.
"If you want to eat, bind the sin beside you."
Nev moved first.
He tore the praying prisoner's sleeve and bound his wrists.
Two more followed.
They pinned the people beside them.
Not to survive.
To receive bread.
Cassian kicked one loaf from beneath his foot toward Nev.
Nev did not eat it.
He put it in the praying prisoner's mouth.
"Why give it to him?" Cassian asked.
"Because tied people get hungry too."
"It was your share."
"I decided what to do with it."
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Nev did not imitate Cassian.
Even after receiving the bread, he used it his own way.
Cassian did not stop him.
The bread quieted one more person.
The result was the same.
Ria recorded everything from beyond the tilted doorway.
The white cord connected to Cassian's restraint pulled her body sideways too.
Her left-arm splint struck the frame.
Her expression changed. Her pen did not stop.
"You purchased violence with rations."
"The violence was already here."
"You bought its direction."
"Cheaply."
"The starving do not set the price of bread," Ria added.
Cassian did not argue.
Twenty-three prisoners were subdued.
The last remained standing.
Oren Vass.
Forty-five.
A former soldier who hid under tables during thunderstorms.
The sin implanted in him belonged to a cleric who had killed cathedral guards and locked the door.
Oren tore out a chair leg.
He did not aim at Cassian.
He threw it at Ria beyond the wagon door.
It was the habit of killing the witness first.
Cassian pulled the white cord.
Ria fell beneath the doorway.
The chair leg passed over her head and shattered the end of her splint.
Oren raised a second chair leg.
Cassian lifted his foot from the brake.
The wagon leveled.
Oren's knees reacted one beat late.
Cassian drove his torso into him.
His right shoulder was empty.
Striking with the boneless side broke his own balance further.
Even so, he slammed Oren into the wall.
He wrapped his left arm around the man's neck.
Nev and three prisoners pinned his legs.
Oren could not move.
Only his mouth remained open.
"Kill me."
The cathedral sin spoke.
It was not Oren's own voice.
"Kill me before I kill the witness."
Cassian looked at Ria.
"Alive?"
"A late question."
Ria rose.
Blood ran from her forehead.
"There is no need to kill him. He is bound."
"I know."
Cassian pressed the pulse beneath Oren's jaw.
A sinmark had formed there.
It had not originally belonged to Oren.
But it occupied his body now.
Killing him might yield an ability.
The instinct to erase witnesses first.
The authority to lock a door.
One trophy Cassian had missed in the cathedral.
"Don't," Nev said.
"Not because I need to," Cassian answered.
"To verify it."
Oren was already subdued.
No one was in danger.
Cassian tightened his left arm.
The neck broke.
It was a short sound.
Oren's body went slack.
His last breath emerged.
Cassian received it.
There was no ability.
No memory.
No sensation of sin.
At the instant of death, the cathedral sinmark left Oren's body.
It passed Cassian by.
And returned to the fortieth wagon.
All Cassian retained was the sensation of breaking Oren's neck.
He had possessed that already.
"There really is nothing."
Ria wrote in her ledger.
`Oren Vass. Forty-five. Former soldier.`
`Killed by Cassian Crow after restraint was complete, to test the possibility of obtaining a trophy.`
"Is any part incorrect?"
"No."
"Any regret?"
"It was a necessary test."
"There were other methods."
"Were they slower?" Nev asked.
Cassian looked at him.
With Aaron.
At the orphanage.
In the cathedral.
Always the same words.
This time it would not have been slower.
They could simply have left Oren bound.
"No," Cassian said.
"Killing him was simply more certain."
One of Nev's seven scripts wrote the sentence.
The other six did not.
A bell rang in the wagon ceiling.
Felix opened the door.
He saw Oren's body.
The warmth did not leave his face.
It grew quieter.
"Oren disliked salty soup," Felix said.
"He should never have been left alone during thunder."
He closed the corpse's eyes.
"You killed him."
"You saw me."
"Why?"
"To see if there was anything to gain."
Felix did not strike Cassian.
He did not summon the guards.
He lifted Oren into his arms.
"Food distribution to compartment thirty-nine is suspended."
The prisoners caught their breath.
"A murderer cannot sit at the family table."
"You only need to starve me."
"Family eats together and starves together."
Cassian looked at the sinmark on Felix's throat.
The trace of justifying collective punishment with the word family had deepened.
"Then I'll need to find the food wagon."
"You cannot."
"Wagons move. Smells remain."
Felix carried Oren away.
The door closed.
Nev stood before Cassian.
"Who's next?"
"What do you mean?"
"Which of us will you use for your next test?"
The prisoners released the people they had bound.
Oren was dead.
The sin had returned.
But there was no reason Cassian would not verify it again.
"He'll choose someone more useful next," the midwife said.
The shoemaker stood beside her.
Two thieves moved together.
The prisoners bound one another's wrists again.
Cassian had not ordered it this time.
Nev tore the hem of his prison clothes to make more knots.
"Set a rule," Cassian said.
"No one stays alone with you."
Nev tied the first knot between the midwife and shoemaker.
"If someone dies, at least one other person must witness it."
The second knot joined the two thieves.
"If someone becomes a corpse, we state the name before asking what use it has."
"And if I refuse?" Cassian asked.
"Then use us alone."
Ten pairs of wrists were joined.
The final three shared one knot.
Ria wrote the rule's name in her ledger.
`The Oren Vass Rule.`
"Why that name?" Cassian asked.
"So you read it before killing the next person."
Ria spoke the name aloud once.
Everyone who saw the knots heard it.
If Cassian divided people by skill, he first had to accept the rules of those skilled people.
Cassian did not answer.
Nor did he break the rule.
Acceptance did not require words.
They only needed to move.
Cassian studied the wagon's structure.
Ceiling vent.
Floor brake.
Family chain.
The bread had not entered from the rear.
When the wagon tilted, it had fallen from the right wall.
Food traveled along a track over the roof, not from an adjacent wagon.
"Shoemaker."
The man who had tried to stitch a mouth shut raised his head.
"Can you make a leather strap?"
"If I have thread."
"Midwife."
"What?"
"You can put your hand through narrow openings."
"Even where a baby's head is caught."
"Former thieves?"
Two prisoners raised their hands.
Cassian did not divide people into good and evil.
He divided them by skill.
The shoemaker: straps.
The midwife: narrow openings.
The thieves: roof locks.
Nev: seven scripts and noble habits.
"If we bring back food, the workers eat half."
"And the other half?" the midwife asked.
"I decide."
"How is that different from Felix?"
"I don't call you family."
No one found comfort in that answer.
They moved anyway.
The shoemaker tore the hem of a prison uniform.
The midwife measured the gap in the ceiling.
The two thieves selected bone splinters.
What Cassian could not obtain through murder, he made from ration control and a ledger of skills.
He gained no power.
He gained a hierarchy.
Oren's body was carried to the fortieth wagon.
The black mouth swallowed him.
It put one cathedral sin into him again.
This time Oren did not rise.
Only the corpse's mouth moved.
A woman's voice emerged.
The forty-seventh person who could have been rescued from the cathedral.
The final request Ria had written.
"To my daughter," the corpse said.
"Tell her I was alive."
Ria's ledger opened by itself.
The same sentence wrote itself again in blood.
The fortieth wagon asked Cassian.
"Did you tell her?"