They lined up in the cafeteria and were each given a tray. As they went down the row, cafeteria workers served them each small but adequate portions of eggs, fruit, bread, and bacon. The woman named Tiny—who, when not operating the crane, was apparently tasked with the solemn duty of doling out bacon—gave Letho a wink when she slid a couple of extra slices onto his tray. He wasn’t sure what to make of the lurid wink, but the extra grease candy was much appreciated.

As Letho went to find his seat he realized that everyone had stopped eating and was staring at him. Letho would rather have taken a shotgun blast to the face than address an audience, but the stares persisted, lingering on his skin like flies. So he stood up, cleared his throat and slicked his hair back absently with his hand.

“Uh, hi. My name is Letho Ferron.”

A collective intake of breath robbed the room of oxygen and the audience erupted in a tidal wave of susurration. The whispers were varied, but conveyed roughly the same sentiment:

It’s him!

No it’s not. He died, remember? Went off to Alastor’s ship and never came back.

I heard he brought a Mendraga with him.

It can’t be him. He’s too short!

“Yes, it’s me. just wanted to introduce myself. Thank you for taking my friends and me in. Really dig the place,” he finished, attempting to make his smile appear as genuine as possible, but in the process causing his face to contort like cheap plastic. He hoped that his joke would earn at least a few chuckles, so he did something that any comedian would tell you not to, he attempted to explain; “Get it, dig the place? Because we are underground?” No one laughed, and Letho cleared his throat, hoping for a moment something horrible would happen to him, that the roof would collapse, that one of them would stand up and rush him. Anything to get him out from under the scrutiny of all those eyes. It was the ambivalence that unnerved him the most. He could have handled smiles, and even looks of derision, but the sea of vacant stares, the idea that he had absolutely know idea what any of them were thinking was truly terrifying.

“Is it true?” asked a woman with wide eyes and a shock of white hair.

“Is what true?” Letho asked.

“Did you really come back from the dead?”

“I… think so?” he said, in a statement that was also a question. “I’m not sure exactly, because I might have been dead at the time.”

Some laughed, while others continued to regard him with bullet-lead stares.

“How many Mendraga did you kill?” asked a young man with thinning hair and a blue-black tattoo of a lightning bolt draped over the craggy ruin of an eye.

“Enough to know that they aren’t as tough as they seem. And their heads blow up real good,” Letho said, dropping his hand to his Black Bear. In a flash he drew the pistol, spun it a few times on his finger, and holstered it again. The people in the cafeteria barely had time to react to the fact that he had drawn a pistol before the display of his talents was over. They cheered, and this time a little more of the crowd joined in.

I’m getting good at this.

“But you travel with a Mendraga. A woman. Word is that she was one of them that came to the Centennial Fulcrum with Alastor himself. I seen her!”

The mood that had moments before been laudatory immediately turned toward suspicion and anger. Just as Letho was scanning for exit routes, a reassuring hand clasped his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. The old man at his side raised his hand into the air, and the crowd immediately grew silent.

“Now folks, I’m sure you have lots of questions, but let’s save those for the next town meeting, shall we?” Zedock said.

“But what about the Mendraga?”

“Yeah!” shouted another from a mouth that looked tailor made to suck on a moonshine jar until its owner’s guts rotted out.

“Yeah! We deserve to know!”

The louder the crowd got, the more their collective pool of intelligence dwindled.

No one is as dumb as all of us! Letho’s mind sang, flashing an image of some poster he had once seen in someone’s cubicle of a bunch of cats scrambling to get out of a toilet bowl.

“All right, already,” Zedock said, not quite shouting, but raising his voice just enough to cause those directly in front of him to flinch and those in the back to snap to attention. “Yes, we brought a Mendraga in last night, and yes, she does know Alastor, but she is fully cooperative, and at this time is cooling her heels in the detention center.”

“What if she’s communicating with Alastor right now?” one shouted.

“Son, if she can talk to Alastor through thousands of tons of solid rock, I’ll shit in my own hat and eat it,” Zedock said. With this singular expression he had half of the crowd back in the palm of his hand. Letho marveled.

Crap jokes. They never get old.

“She was close with the enemy, but I say that we use it to our advantage. She knows things. She’s been on the inside. And my friend Letho assures me that she killed one of her own to save him. I ain’t never heard of a Mendraga doing something like that before. What about y’all?”

The crowd didn’t seem to be completely behind Zedock on this point, but at least the vibe that that they might tear Letho limb from limb had faded.

Letho surveyed the group before him. Based on what Zedock and Saul had told him, the people in the cafeteria couldn’t be more than a sliver of the Haven’s population. They were an interesting cross-section of Fulcrum society as he remembered it: there were folks who appeared accustomed to finer things and thus rather petulant about their current food and board, and those who were obviously thankful for warm food and clothes on their backs. There were people with white skin, brown skin, and all manner of shades in between. Forty or fifty unique sets of eyes watched him, measured him. In some he could see appreciation, and a kind of wonder; others looked upon Letho with a rather thinly veiled contempt. There was no room for his exploits in their view of the universe, for it defied logic, and therefore was immediately suspect. Hell, Letho himself had been a skeptic up until he had awoken that day in the underneath, the fatal wound from Alastor’s sword completely healed, his life given back to him by science, some great cosmic mistake, or a miracle. When you didn’t know for sure, Letho decided, all three things were more or less one and the same.

“At any rate, good people of Haven, I have an announcement to make,” Zedock said. Letho’s heart lurched. Surely Zedock wasn’t going to…

But he was. Zedock summoned Saul to come stand next to him, with Letho on Zedock’s other side, and he draped his arm around both of them before continuing.

“I am happy to announce that my long-lost son has come home to me,” Zedock said, clutching both young men close to him.

“Aw, Dad, I wasn’t even gone that long,” Saul muttered.

Oh no.

“That’s right, folks. I thought I’d lost him, but he’s come back. Letho Ferron is my son. I am a blessed man to have two such fine young sons—both of whom are eligible, I might mention, young ladies! I wanted you all to hear it from me first. Word tends to travel fast around here, and sometimes gets twisted up in the transmission, so there it is.”

Letho expected some kind of reaction from Saul, but he was surprised by the shocking severity of it. Saul’s face turned an explosive shade of red, and the way he jerked his way out of Zedock’s embrace caused the old man to stumble a bit. Zedock would have fallen to the floor if Letho hadn’t been there to support him.

The crowd gasped. Saul stood there, resplendent in his rage, pitiful in the embarrassment that clearly shone on his face. He said nothing, and after a moment he stormed from the cafeteria, sending an unwitting bystander careening with a shove of the shoulder. Letho watched as some soldiers he recognized from Saul’s personal guard stormed out after their leader. One of them stopped and glared at Letho. Another made a familiar gesture: two fingers toward his own eyes, then the same two fingers pointed at Letho.