"You know." Mia met Nessa’s gaze. The little girl’s eyes conveyed a clear message, do you think I’m stupid?

  "Your face does a thing when people call you it. Like you've forgotten to answer and then remembered." Nessa shrugged with one shoulder. "I didn't ask because…I don't know. Everyone had secrets." She shrugged again.

  Mia was quiet for a moment. "Mia," she said. "My name is Mia. And I don’t want you using that name."

  Nessa nodded, as if this settled something. As if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, to have learned someone's actual name after months. Maybe it was. "And you're not a boy."

  "No." Mia laughed a little at that.

  Nessa’s gaze was critical as she scanned Mia.

  Nessa clearly thought she was a boy.

  It was an easy mistake. Tall-ish, sharp face, skinny. She’d hidden her gender, knowing she looked like a boy, but it still hurt.

  "Okay." Nessa looked at the camp again. The sun had shifted; it was past midday, the light going amber and thick. They’d have to march soon. "What can I do?"

  "Nothing,” Mia said.

  "But you've been sitting here for an hour." She looked at Mia. "So you weren't going to…just do it, either."

  Mia didn't answer. She wasn't sure what the answer was. “I was thinking about it.”

  Mia looked outside at the little old man and woman.

  She'd seen him an hour ago, before Nessa arrived.

  She had clocked him without meaning to, the way she'd clocked everything in camp. The way she was retraining herself to do it: looking for threats, for useful things.

  An old man, slow, tired, and declining, suffering showing in every breath. Yellow at the whites of his eyes. He barely moved. He was travelling with a woman. When he needed to walk, she walked beside him with one hand at his elbow and the other full of a bundle.

  It was a miracle they survived the first attack.

  When she first saw him, she thought: he's going to die here. It was an observation, the same way someone might say it's going to rain, or this path loops back to where I started. His body was already in the process of dying.

  She told Nessa.

  Not all of it.

  Not the way her mind came up with different ways to make it happen.

  Not how she turned it over and over in her head, looking for a justification.

  Enough, but not everything.

  "He's ill," she said. "He won't last another month. Maybe not another week. Maybe hours if there’s another attack." She looked at her hands. "It's not. I'm not telling you this to make it easier. I'm telling you because I can't make myself not see it, and I've been sitting here for an hour, and I think I'm going to go." A pause. "I think. I'm not…I haven't…"

  She stopped.

  She'd killed people.

  She'd killed people.

  In the forest, they were already dying. The man in the camp was killing Nessa. None of those were easy, but they felt necessary in the moment. This was different. This was sitting in camp, in the daylight, and planning how to kill someone in a way her conscience could accept.

  "I'm not sure I can," she said. It came out smaller than she intended.

  Nessa stood.

  "Where are you going?" Mia asked.

  "To find out his name."

  "Nessa—"

  But Nessa was already walking, that familiar determined stride. Mia had learned that there was very little point in calling after Nessa once she'd started moving. She sat and watched the camp, turned the saber over, and did not let herself think in full sentences.

  ***

  Nessa was gone for a long time.

  Mia sat. The camp went about its business around her. Cooks at the fire, warriors cleaning equipment, scavengers talking about their next meal. A place and people that had learned to keep moving regardless of who was or wasn't in it. Someone laughed at the far end. Someone argued over something that sounded like cards.

  Familiar sounds, the sounds of people, a tune that made her want to cry.

  Someone came and talked to the woman. Then he spoke to the man. The woman walked off with the bundle, following the man who came to speak to them.

  Mia cared nothing for the people who died. She’d been wary of them, but it all seemed like a waste. They weren’t different from the people Lady Adeline threw overboard the ship. Their lives hadn’t changed.

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  There was nothing to it.

  A system she couldn’t and didn’t want to change.

  Mia laughed, the sound low and bitter. She saw herself in them, and it added more pressure that she’d end up just like them.

  She was watching the far end of camp, not really seeing it, when Nessa came back.

  She came back faster than she'd left. Her face was a mix of difficult and resolved expressions. Her hand was in her pocket, and she looked wrecked: a mix of resigned and determined.

  “What did you do?” Mia asked.

  "His name is York," she said. She kept her voice even. "His wife is with him, Polly. She's the one with the bundle." She sat down, and both hands were on her knees. "I went to Mox's table."

  Mia looked at her.

  "I had three hundred and ten points," Nessa said. "I've got two hundred and ten now." She said slowly, forcing herself to say hard things. Facts in a small firm voice. "I told them I wanted to make a payment on someone's debt." She picked at the loose thread again before forcing her hand to still. "Mox wasn't there. The woman at the table said that's not usually how it works, but she wrote it down and then sent someone to him. So it's..it's his. York. Whatever his body's worth, plus a hundred points to his wife."

  Mia stared at her.

  "I don't know…" Nessa said, before Mia could speak. "I don't know if I did the right thing. I just. I needed to do something." Her voice had developed a slight unevenness at the edges. She pressed her mouth together to smooth it out. "His wife is nice. She gave me a piece of dried fruit." Nessa said this detail with great focus, as if it mattered. "She's not from the same place as him. She was a slave. He bought her contract, and then they stayed together for years. They have a son. There was a drought, and they lost their farm, and when they couldn’t pay their debts. That's…" She stopped. Pressed harder. "Anyway."

  She was struggling. Mia saw it; the struggle of someone accepting a situation where right and wrong blurred.

  She was ten years old. She had bought a dying man's life with a hundred points because she couldn't stop Mia, and she couldn't walk away, and she had found the only thing in between those two impossible positions and done it, and it had cost her a third of everything she'd saved, and she was sitting here fighting to keep her face together.

  Nessa had done something unnecessary. She’d taken a burden off Mia’s shoulders at the cost of herself. "Nessa," Mia said. She reached to pull those trembling shoulders into a hug.

  "Don't." Nessa shook her head. "Don't be kind about it. I'll cry."

  Mia closed her mouth.

  "Just." Nessa's hands tightened on her knees. "Just come back. After. Come back and tell me you're alright."

  ***

  York was at the edge of the camp, sitting on a crate while his wife went to the water queue. His wife's name was Pell, and she had a stern face. Someone who had been doing difficult things long enough that she'd forgotten what the alternative looked like.

  Mia waited until Pell reached the front of the queue. The old woman looked back, tears in her eyes before facing forward.

  Mia came around the side of a supply tent and sat down next to York on the crate and said, as if they'd spoken before: "You look like you could use a walk."

  He looked at her. His eyes were shrewder than his slowness suggested. They were clear, even if the rest of him wasn't. "Yes. It’s a fine day for a walk."

  His calmness made everything worse and easier.

  "The forest is cooler than the camp. If you want to sit somewhere quieter for a bit."

  He looked toward the queue. Pell had her canteen out, back still turned.

  York went with her.

  Mia swallowed the words, don’t you want to say goodbye.

  ***

  The tree line was forty paces from the camp edge. Everything changed once they were inside. The air was sharper, cooler, the ground softer underfoot.

  Mia kept pace with him without appearing to, matching his slowness without making it obvious.

  He talked a little. Not to her specifically. About the camp, about Pell, about the strange quality of days in Cinderwild where time seemed to move at two speeds: too fast and too still. He told her about being a woodworker and then a farmer.

  She listened.

  She didn't speak.

  She listened.

  Mia let him talk.

  She accepted the weight of his life.

  It happened quickly. She'd made that promise, early on, standing at a different tree line, that if she did this thing, she would do it quickly, and she kept the promise. He made a single sound, and then he was on the ground, and Mia was crouching beside him with one hand already pressed to the earth.

  She stayed crouched for a moment.

  Then she stood up and walked three steps to the nearest tree and vomited.

  It came up hard and fast, and she let it, both hands braced on the bark, forehead tipped forward. Her eyes were watering. She told herself it was the physical effort of it, the mind’s refusal, and she believed this right until she didn't, and then she stayed there with her forehead against the bark, breathing until she could breathe normally.

  When she straightened, she was still shaking. She looked at her hands: the right one, the one she'd used, and the left, and she watched them tremble.

  This is right. This is what it should feel like. This is the part that means you're still…

  But, there would come a point when she wouldn’t feel like this anymore.

  Something shifted.

  Inside her.

  She didn't have a word for it. Not breaking…nothing dramatic, nothing loud. Another small movement, like when she was by the river.

  More like a bolt sliding home.

  The shaking stopped. The nausea eased.

  There was that aching hollowness that Molly talked about, but that was physical.

  Mia sat with her emotions. It wasn’t numbness. It was something quieter and more frightening than any of those things.

  Acceptance.

  She noticed the ledger in her left hand.

  Not borrowed. Not rented. Not Mox's paired copy with its mocking updates and its restricted fields.

  Her own ledge.

  She turned it over in her hand.

  She did not open it.

  She stood beneath the branches of a tree she didn’t know, held the ledger, and listened to the camp sounds carrying through the leaves. Someone laughing, the card game argument still going, a pot on a fire, someone searching the woods.

  She thought about the word debt.

  She put the ledger away. She straightened her shirt. She walked back out of the trees into the flat late-afternoon light of the camp, and she found Nessa standing at the camp's edge exactly where she'd predicted Nessa would be, watching the tree line with her arms wrapped around herself and her mouth set in a grim little line.

  Mia stopped in front of her.

  Nessa looked up.

  "I'm alright," Mia said because she'd promised to say it.

  Nessa nodded. Her eyes were wet, and she wasn't doing anything about it.

  They stood there for a moment.

  Then Nessa put out her hand, and Mia took it, and they walked back to the fire together.

  Mia felt the warmth of the grip and the warmth of the fire and the warmth of exactly nothing else, and she kept her face composed, and she did not think about what any of it meant.