Snow ✓

New and Dangerous Things

The girl dreamed she stood in a line that didn't end. Soldiers clad in black armor passed out silver buttons to those who waited. The woman in line behind her kept biting it in wonderment to determine if it was real, she claimed, even as her teeth began to chip and break away. Finally toothless, she gummed the thing.

An incessant buzzing burrowed deeper into the girl's head the closer she got to the front, but she never arrived. Instead, she watched countless others before her fall single file into the mouth of a metallic monster with a glossy black hide.

She awoke to her heart trying to climb out of her chest.

She remembered where she had heard that noise and couldn't believe she had ever forgotten.

After Eli had taken her to that town only to demand that she leave it, she tore down back alleys and shimmed under fences that puzzled in terraced backyards, the fabric over her face suffocating, until she turned a corner and barreled into a man.

"Watch it," he spat and shoved her.

Startled, she forgot to keep her head down and he fell into those pools of liquid gold. So close to him was she that his beady eyes darted between them. Before she could move, he reached up and ripped down her scarf.

He inhaled sharply, then cursed through clenched teeth.

She tried to shoot past him, but he grabbed her arm.

"Ow. You're hurting me."

Using a calloused thumb, he roughly rubbed at her cheek.

"What kind of makeup is this?"

He pinched her cheek and she squealed. He laughed at that.

"Doesn't matter. The right buyer will pay for any child. Come with me," he said, and started to drag her back toward town.

"No—" she fought him, wriggling about.

He slapped her so hard that stars erupted in her eyes and a bell rung in her skull. She might have careened into the stone-cobbled wall had he not kept his grip.

Her vision wobbled with pain but she could see that he heard it, too—a buzzing that swelled over the ringing in her head.

He searched the thin strip of cloudless sky above the alley. "What is that?"

The air changed, feeling as it does on balmy night when a thunderstorm approaches, making her skin tingle.

He started and his lip curled when he turned back to her. "What's wrong with you?"

She felt her nose running, tasted it as she bled into her mouth. She touched her lip and her finger came away green, shimmering in the sun. Then she did the only thing she thought to do—something her mother did to her father once--she socked him in the groin. He howled and she slipped through his grasp, felt him tug on her cloak, heard it rip as she kept running. The buzzing lingered, tickling her between the ears all the way home, long after she had left that town behind.

The girl moved her furs and pillow to the floor. She opened her bedroom door a bit wider and laid down where she could see the back of Mat's head on the couch and drifted back into a troubled sleep.

The day her brother dragged her through that nameless town, she saw the likes of things she had only ever read about in storybooks: horses, fish for sale on street carts, dogs begging for scraps—and it was no different at Gran's cottage.