When an army of darkness falls from the sky, Alex Kingsley enlists the help of her male peers and ventures into spirit-infested lands to save humanity.
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She's an outcast cursed to consume the memories o...
I glared at the old digital watch hanging on my bedpost, hours off. Someone had welded the edges shut, so it was perpetually out of sync. Dying slowly, like the rest of us.
My father had placed a note on my bedside table informing me he'd left early to save us some seats. He must have felt guilty for yesterday; he rarely let me sleep in past daybreak. Not with mouths to feed and weeds to pull.
I flung the covers off and scavenged my drawers for any unstained clothes. After a comfort debate, I decided on my only pair of hole-less pants, a clean long-sleeved shirt, and Tom's hand-me-down army boots.
Much to my professors' horror, I refused to wear "female apparel," primarily for practicality reasons. Ranching, fighting, climbing fences—a dress hindered all of that. But even on formal occasions, I still chose pants and boots over anything with ruffles. Not because delicate colors and fabrics repulsed me, but because every time I wore staples of femininity, in flowed the compliments and the special treatment. The hungry eyes summing and subtracting my qualities. I couldn't stand it.
I'd learned early on that men were threatened by women who dressed like them. Who defied expectations, who stared down authority. So I had to rebel in the small ways I knew how. Kicking against the current was the only way to keep from sliding under.
My dad complained. He said that skirts were cheaper than pants, and I wore out my pants faster than my socks. I told him I'd be happy to roam around naked if our budget demanded so, and he let it go.
I ran downstairs, snatched the monkey's fist knot from the back porch, and chucked the rope into the open field. Richard shot after it at the speed of lightning, launching himself off the deck and sending the chickens scrambling in all directions.
I leaned against the door frame, my gaze sweeping over our ranch at the dawn of the harvest season. Beets. Cabbage. Carrots. Greens. Only a few thriving fruit trees left. Guinevere and Ophelia, our dairy cows. It wasn't much, but we helped provide food to the poorer districts of Belgate, and with the growing population, we were never short of consumers.
Just sunlight.
Even after switching to shade-tolerant plants and equipping the gardens with grow lights, we still struggled to produce enough to support ourselves. It was one of the reasons my father was so adamant about marrying me off. With an agricultural crisis on our hands, we'd both need a new source of income. A safety net.
Sighing, I grabbed the pail of feed from the porch and moved for the coop.
Now that it was just the two of us running things, my duties had tripled, and when I wasn't pulling weeds or filling the trough, I was at school, wishing I was pulling weeds or filling the trough. It was easy to envy the boys' after-school sporting events and part-time apprenticeships.
But I had to admit, while I didn't want to tend to this ranch forever, it was far from a bad life. I enjoyed living a few miles outside the city, surrounded by aspens, fringed by a snaking river. When I closed my eyes at the far end of the field, sometimes it even felt like I'd escaped this place.
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