Chapter 12 · free to read
Eleven matches left. She spent the first four just proving to herself she was still alone on the ledge. She was not.
She never spoke. She wrote — badly, backwards, a nine-year-old's hand that had had sixty years and no practice.
Nine women delivered and it would let her go. She had been a child sent to fetch other children's mothers, for sixty years, on a promise.
And here was the thing the hunger had not accounted for when it conscripted a child: children are bad at this. Part of her did not want it at that price.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.