Mira woke on day ten and something was different.
She lay in the dark for a moment, taking inventory the way she always did — ceiling, sounds, the compound breathing around her in its nighttime rhythm. Everything was the same. The room, the tea that would appear outside her door before six, the war being built outside the walls.
But something inside her had shifted.
Like a bone set wrong for years that had finally, quietly, been reset. Like she had stopped bracing for the next blow and started simply — standing.
She thought about her mother.
Lena Cole, who had carried what Mira carried and spent her whole short life not knowing what to call it. Who had run through winter forests making impossible choices. Who had left a two-year-old daughter with a frightened man and drawn the danger
