2. Maeve
MAEVE
Gretchen braided my hair for the first time three months in.
I was fourteen. Sitting on the ground between the barracks and the fence, my back against the wooden wall, my knees pulled up.
My hair was breaking off in chunks—no products, no oils, no protection, three months of labor and weather doing what the guards hadn’t bothered to.
Matted at the roots, dry and splitting at the ends, coming out in my hands when I pulled.
Gretchen sat down behind me without asking.
Her hands were rough, split knuckles, nails ground to nothing.
But her fingers in my hair were gentle. She didn’t explain what she was doing.
She sectioned, she detangled, she braided.
I sat there with my knees drawn up and someone else’s hands in my hair for the first time since my mother’s.
The memory hit before I could brace for it.
My mother behind me on the ground outside our shelter, working oil into my hair with her fingers while the other women cooked.
The smell of smoke and whatever was in the pot.
I couldn’t remember what she was saying.
Just her hands. Just the feeling of being held still by someone who wasn’t trying to hurt me.
I cried that first time, quiet, the way you learn to cry without moving your shoulders so nobody behind you knows. Gretchen didn’t stop braiding. Didn’t ask why. She just kept her fingers moving, section after section, like crying was a normal thing a person did while getting her hair done.
Gretchen’s braids held for two weeks. When they came out, she did them again.
The ground is cold against my cheek.
I’m lying where I fell. The root under my face is gnarled, the bark rough against my skin. Above me the canopy shifts—wind, or something moving through the upper branches. The light is dimmer. I was unconscious. I don’t know for how long.
Four years of camp reflex fires. Sluggish, delayed, a coal losing its heat, not dead yet, just going gray. Position: ground. Exposure: total. Mobility: questionable. I try to push myself up. My arms shake. I make it to my elbows before my shoulder gives and I go back down.
I lie there and breathe.
The musk is everywhere. In the air, in the bark against my face, in the soil under my fingers.
The smell has a texture—thick, warm, metallic, coating the inside of my throat.
Some animal part of me keeps repeating the same warning, wordless, useless.
The thought doesn’t produce a plan. My body is out of plans.
Lisa on the clearing crew. Day shift, eight hours hacking at root systems that grew back overnight.
The Ordained didn’t care about progress.
The labor was the point. We were the women they couldn’t sell—too scarred, too defiant, too used up for the Gilded Cages—and the camps were where the system put the ones it had no other use for.
Lisa was sharp. Angry in a way the camp couldn’t blunt.
She had a mouth on her that got her hit more than the rest of us, but she never learned to shut it, and after a while I stopped wanting her to.
Her anger was the only honest thing in the camp.
Everyone else—Shayla included—had smoothed themselves into something the system could digest. Lisa refused. She spat it back.
She covered my back on the line. She noticed things the guards missed—when my shoulder was worse, when the fever came back, when I was chewing on the wrong side and blood was running down my chin.
The day a guard hit me hard enough to knock the tooth loose, Lisa helped me spit the blood into the dirt without the overseer seeing.
She didn’t say anything comforting. She said: “You’re fine.
Swallow the rest. Don’t let them write it up. ”
Camp comfort. Practical, blunt, stripped to what you needed to hear to keep standing.
Something in me went soft and hot, hearing it—not the words, the fact that she’d stayed close enough to catch the blood before the overseer did.
I didn’t have a way to say thank you that wouldn’t have gotten us both hit for talking out of turn, so I let the gratitude sit in my chest with nowhere to go.
I try to move again.
My arms hold this time. I drag myself up to sitting, my back against the root.
My hands are shaking. Cracked nails, torn skin, the bones of my wrists sharp under skin gone ashen.
These hands cleared vegetation for four years, swung tools until the blisters opened and bled, calloused over, opened again. I flex my fingers. They work. Barely.
Looking at them does something I don’t have time for—a hot, tired ache behind my eyes, the shape tears would take if my body had water to spend on them. I let it come and go. Chasing it further is how you end up somewhere you can’t climb back out of.
Water. How long since I last drank. Not since the stream.
My lips are cracked. My tongue is thick.
The clearing around me is maintained: underbrush hacked back, paths worn smooth.
The firepit is close, its coals dark. The mound of earth with the wildflowers is farther back, tucked against the base of a tree so large it could house a family in its root system.
Something drips—water, the thin steady sound of a stream over stone.
My legs are not going to carry me to it.
Shayla’s morning inspection.
She walked the line every day at dawn. Neat, composed, her hair pulled back, her clothing clean in a way that no one else’s in the camp was clean.
Shayla wasn’t Ordained—she was human, a woman who had chosen to work for them, to run their camp and keep the rest of us behind fences, and she performed her role with the calm of someone who truly believed she was doing good.
“You’re losing weight, Maeve.” She said it the way a farmer assesses livestock. “Eat more at meals.”
The meals were boiled grain and whatever the supply carts brought—never enough for the labor they demanded. Shayla knew this. She adjusted workloads when someone was sick. Reduced shifts when a woman was close to collapse. Made sure the water barrels were filled. She knew our names.
The kindness was real. The system it served was not.
That was the thing about Shayla that made my skin crawl worse than the guards.
The guards were simple—they hurt you because they could, because cruelty was the only skill they’d been asked to develop.
Shayla was dirty in a different way. She truly cared about keeping us alive, and she used that care to keep us compliant.
Every adjusted workload, every refilled water barrel—all of it fed the same machine.
Stay behind the fences. Be grateful. The alternative is worse.
The day a Shade flew overhead during clearing work, every woman in the line dropped flat.
The shadow passed over us like a stain on the sky—massive, fast, crimson-dark against the canopy.
Shayla stood. She didn’t duck. She stood with her hands clasped and her face turned up, watching the shadow pass.
When it was gone, she looked at us pressed flat on the ground and said: “You see? That’s what waits outside the fences. In here, you’re alive.”
I was flat on the dirt with my hands over my head, my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
Underneath the fear, something else moved, quick and ugly: I hated her.
Standing there with her face turned up like the sky owed her a show, while the rest of us ate dirt.
The hate didn’t last. Hate cost calories too.
Shayla was right. In the camp, I was alive. Outside the camp, the shadows had teeth.
The light is almost gone.
I’m still against the root. My body has made its decision—it’s staying here, in the territory of something the camps told me would kill me. My arms have stopped shaking because they’ve stopped trying.
The shift happens slowly, the way a shelter leans once its props start to give, one after another, until nothing is holding the roof at true. What’s left is a woman lying at the base of a tree, her cheek on the bark, her eyes on the darkening canopy.
Two days was optimistic. One. Maybe less.
A sound moves above the canopy to the north, closer this time—wings, the heavy rhythmic displacement of air.
I don’t flinch. The freeze response is gone, spent the same way the adrenaline is spent.
I lie on the ground and listen to something enormous move through the canopy above me and I don’t have the energy to be afraid of it.
The musk intensifies, thicker and closer, layered with something else underneath—warmth, almost, a living heat.
My eyelids fall, too heavy to hold up any longer. The canopy goes dark.
Tomorrow I won’t get up. The knowledge is physical. Factual. The camp built me to endure. I endured. Now the endurance has run out.
At least I’m not behind the fences.
The thought is thin. Almost nothing. But it’s mine.
Somewhere far off, past the fear I’m too spent to keep holding, there’s a small, stubborn ember of something that refuses to be only afraid.
It isn’t hope—hope needs more fuel than I’ve got left to burn.
It’s smaller than hope. It just sits there, lit.
I hold it while the dark comes down.