Chapter two

The beating she kneeling there waiting for.

When she could just leave.

That thought came to Sophia so unbidden that she had to check it wasn’t some kind of sending from her younger sister, or that she hadn’t picked it up from one of the others. That was the problem with a talent like hers: it came when it wanted, not when called. Yet it seemed that the thought really was hers—and more than that, it was true. Better to risk death than to stay here one more day.

Of course, if she dared to walk away, the punishment would be worse. They always found a way to make it worse. Sophia had seen girls who had stolen or fought back starved for days, forced to keep kneeling, beaten when they tried to sleep.

But she didn’t care anymore. Something inside her had crossed a line. The fear couldn’t touch her, because it was swamped in the fear of what would happen soon anyway.

After all, she turned seventeen today.

She was now old enough to repay her debt of years of “care” at the hands of the nuns—to be indentured and sold like livestock. Sophia knew what happened to orphans who came of age. Compared to that, no beating mattered.

She had been turning it over in her mind for weeks, in fact. Dreading this day, her birthday.

And now it had arrived

To her own shock, Sophia acted. She stood smoothly, looked around. The nun’s attention was on another girl, whipping her savagely, so it was but the work of a moment to slip over to the door in silence. Probably even the other girls didn’t notice, or if they did, they were too frightened to say anything.

Sophia stepped out into one of the plain white corridors of the orphanage, moving quietly, walking away from the workroom. There were other nuns out there, but so long as she moved with purpose, it might be enough to keep them from stopping her.

What had she just done?

Sophia kept walking through the House of the Unclaimed in a daze, barely able to believe that she was actually doing this. There were reasons they didn't bother locking the front gates. The city beyond, just outside its gates, was a rough place—and rougher still for those who had started life as an orphan. Ashton had every city’s thieves and thugs—yet it also contained the hunters who recaptured the indentured who ran and the free folk who would spit on her simply for what she was.

Then there was her sister. Kate was only fifteen. Sophia didn’t want to drag her into something worse. Kate was tough, tougher even than her, yet she was still Sophia’s little sister.

Sophia wandered down toward the cloisters and the courtyard where they mixed with the boys from the orphanage next door, trying to work out where her sister would be. She couldn’t leave without her.

She was almost there when she heard a girl cry out. Sophia headed toward the sound, half suspecting that her little sister had gotten herself into another fight. When she reached the yard, though, she didn’t find Kate at the center of a brawling mob, but another girl instead. This one was even younger, perhaps in her thirteenth year, and was being pushed and slapped by three boys who must have been almost old enough to sell off into apprenticeships or the army

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