Kin resolved to stay hidden until the stabbing pain in his back eased, on the premise that an injured boy would be easy prey for even smaller Sirens. He settled on a small cupboard that creaked when he closed the door and huddled inside, and nearly jumped out of his skin when his hand landed on another.

Bony and slimy, ragged bits of flesh dangled from the cadaver’s limb. Kin squinted, his heart pounding in his chest, and he could make out the empty eye sockets, deep black in the night. They stared right back into Kin, the eyes of literal death boring into his soul.

Kin reasoned that the corpse would hurt him a lot less than the Sirens because the corpse would not try to eat him because it was not alive. So he stayed put.

Kin started to feel hungry.

The corpse’s hair floated in the water, wafting in an invisible breeze, small pieces of its long decayed meat--having detached after ages of rot--flying like motes of dust in the glow of Kin’s flashlight.

Kin removed a nutrient tube from his bag.

The corpse’s head was knocked to the side by Kin’s elbow. The aged vertebrae strained, then split, the head lolling at a strange angle sideways and the spine discharging a brackish brown substance into the water.

It was disgusting.

But Kin was hungry.

So Kin ate, sitting next to his new, and very much dead, companion.

“Were you a boy or a girl?”

Kin’s eyes roamed nervously around the entire body. Whatever clothes it wore had rotted off long ago, but--

“There’s not much to see, but you have long hair, so--”

Clang

Something was poking around outside.

The body stared.

Kin held his breath.

The clanging sounds grew distant, then faded all together.

Kin exhaled.

The body stared.

Kin breathed in, out, in, out. In out in out.

Calm.

He settled back into a sitting position.

What shall I do now? What have I learned?

So Kin sat and waited and though, sifting through his trip, trying to make sense of, to understand it. To see how it could be used.

Watching.

Learning.

Waiting.