Chapter 3: What the Mentor Doesn't Say

Breck was already at the table when Sable found the dining car.

He was sitting with his hands around a glass of something amber, not drinking it, just holding it with the particular grip of a man who has learned that having something to hold is its own kind of management. He was fifty-three or fifty-four, she estimated — the math would have made him nine or ten during the Forty-fourth Games, which meant he had won at nine or ten, which meant whatever had happened in that arena had happened to someone who was still mostly a child, and whatever was left afterward was what she was looking at now. A broad face, gone soft at the jaw. Eyes that were attentive in the way of something that learned attention as a survival mechanism and never stopped needing it.

He looked at her when she came in. He did not stand.