Chapter 9: Soliloquy at the Blood-Soaked Cornucopia

The wafer tastes of nothing. He eats it anyway.

This is, he thinks, the most honest thing he has done since arriving: this small, graceless act of feeding himself because his body requires it and his body is, for the moment, the only instrument available to him. He chews. He swallows. The stone column is cold against his back and the amphitheater's engineered light has passed its calculated zenith and begun its slow withdrawal toward the arena's first artificial evening, and the Career voices below have moved from inventory to argument — he can distinguish Marcus's register among them, that particular quality of command that is accustomed to never needing to raise itself — and somewhere in the eastern upper tiers there is, he believes, a girl with excellent reasons to remain invisible.

He waits.