Chapter 2

Sera

"Sera." He sounded worn. "I just got pulled in to cover the perimeter watch. Charles fell ill." I wasn't surprised. Charles had moved to Eclipse pack alongside us; he and Dad were old battle comrades. Father was excused from regular sentry duty because of his old injuries, but he never turned down emergency call-ups. It helped us fit in here faster.

"When will you be back?" I asked.

"Should be tonight." A pause, and I could hear him weighing whether to say what came next. He always decided, and he always said it anyway. "Rook's supply order is sitting in the storeroom. Feed, sugar, cleaning supplies, lamp oil. Can you drop it off for him today? He'll run out by nightfall otherwise."

"Of course."

"And Sera — eat something before getting out. Take care of yourself."

"I'll."

I went to his room after hanging up, looking for the keys on the hook by the door. His nightstand had the same clutter it always had: a tin of salve, a broken watch he would fix eventually, and the photograph in the cracked frame. Three of us, a long time ago, in front of a house that does not exist anymore. The right half of it had gone pale and blistered, washed out to nothing but the ghost of a shoulder and the corner of a mouth, because I had cried into that photograph so many times as a child that the paper had given up. I had been small and stupid and certain that if I touched it enough she would come back.

She had not. She had chosen to go. It took me years to learn that, and when I did, the grief turned over into something harder that kept me warm at night. I could never understand why he kept it — why a man would leave the wound propped up where he had to see it every morning and every night. I turned the frame face down on the wood, the way I did whenever I was in there alone, and took the keys off the hook.

The kitchen smelled like the breakfast he had made before he left, which meant he had gotten up at four to do it. A glass of milk under a saucer. Two fried eggs, the yolks gone dull from sitting. And one doughnut, the kind with the pink glaze and the sprinkles, the kind I used to beg for on the walk home from the lower market when I was eight.

I stood at the counter and looked at it for a while. My stomach turned over, slow and sour, the way it had turned over every morning for the last two weeks.

"Come on," I said to nobody. "He made it."

I drank half the milk and got one bite of egg down, and the third bite nearly came back up on me. I put the plates in the refrigerator with a clean cloth over them, thinking I'll eat when I'm back, and grabbed a square of chocolate out of the drawer on my way out the door because chocolate, at least, had always stayed down.

The storeroom was cold and smelled of burlap and dust. I carried it out in armloads — two fifty-pound sacks of flour, then the sugar, then the box of soaps and the bottles of lamp oil wedged against the wheel well so they would not roll — and by the fourth trip my shirt was stuck to my back and my breath had gone shallow. On the last bag I bent and took the weight in my knees the way my father taught me, and something low in my belly seized and pulled, a dull sinking drag of a pain that spread down into my thighs and made me grab the tailgate with both hands and hang there.

I stayed like that for a few seconds, breathing through my nose, my face going cold. Then it let go, the way a fist lets go.

"What was that," I said, under my breath, hand pressed flat below my navel. It was not like anything I had felt before — not a cramp, not a stitch, not the ache from lifting. It was heavy. It was low. It was as if something down there had shifted its weight and resented being moved.

The dream came back at me, unbidden — the wet sheets, the heat, the long pull in my gut just before I woke.

"Low blood sugar," I told the truck. "You didn't eat. That's all it is."

I straightened up slowly, wiped my forehead with the back of my wrist, and dug the cold boiled egg out of my coat pocket and ate it standing there with a mouthful of water from the canteen. That was the sensible explanation, and I took it, and I got in the cab and started the engine, and I did not think about it again for almost an hour.

The road out of the lower district runs flat and slow with the boundary fence on one side and the shop fronts on the other, and I was doing a careful twenty-five with a full load when the black car came up behind me and cut across the center line.

I heard it before I saw it. Then the wheel snapped and the whole truck lurched and something behind me let go with a sound like a dropped crate of bottles, and I had the wheel in both hands fighting to keep us off the fence while the back end of the truck swung out and came back and the engine screamed and then died.

For a second there was nothing but the ticking of hot metal and my own heart in my ears.

Then the door of the black car opened and a woman got out.

She was small and she was flawless — the kind of flawless that comes out of a gene pool nobody in my district has ever touched — in a white fox fur thrown over a dress worth more than the truck, and she stood in the middle of the road and looked at the crumpled back panel of my truck and then at me, in that order, and her lip curled like she had stepped in something.

"Do you have any idea," she said, "what you just did to my car?"