Chapter 13 · free to read
They did not surround us with soldiers. They surrounded us with mirrors, and then they waited politely for us to notice.
Sixteen years of being nothing. And here at last was someone offering me an enormous, beloved, hundred-year-old somebody to be instead — and all it cost was the sixteen years.
She had known me nine days as a person. She had known me a year as furniture. Of every voice in that clearing, hers was the one I did not expect.
They left it where we would have to walk past it. Not a threat, they would have said. A reservation.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.