I pressed my palms flat against the soil and closed my eyes.
“Help me,” I whispered. Not a prayer—I was done with prayers. Just a plea, sent to the bees and the plants and the very earth itself.I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to fight this. Please. If there is anything listening, anything that cares, help me.
The earth did not answer.
For the first time since I was a child, I screamed.
I screamed into the early morning air until my voice cracked into something raw and broken. I screamed for my mother, for Sister Margareta, for every woman who had ever come to me in the dark, desperate and afraid.
I screamed for Heinrich, trapped by something that played at power while doing nothing.
I screamed for myself. I screamed for years and years of milking, sweeping, cleaning, hauling, and toiling, all for a cold, hard bed and stale bread. I screamed for the girl I might have been, for the life I might have had if I had just stopped being so afraid to be seen.
I screamed because I was sotiredof being silent.
The bees swarmed around me, agitated by my distress, their buzzing rising to a deafening crescendo. They landed on my arms, my face, my hair, their tiny feet crawling, humming, pressing against my skin as if trying to burrow inside.
“Stop it!” I swatted at them. “Leave me alone! I don’t want your warnings. I don’t want your?—”
A bee stung my palm.
The pain was sharp and sudden, and something inside me snapped.
The rage I’d been swallowing for ten years—the rage I hadburied beneath fear and the desperate need to survive—erupted from my chest. It poured down my arms, gathered in my stinging palm, and reached for something toburn.
The rosemary bushes at the edge of the garden exploded into flame.
I stumbled backward, my hand still outstretched, and watched the fire spread along the row of herbs I’d tended since I was a child. The smoke rose thick and black into the morning sky.
I had done that.
The buzzing in my ears shifted, no longer a warning but a choir that had the resonance of approval.
I heard voices at the garden gate.
I turned, my hand still crackling with heat, and saw them—black uniforms pushing through the narrow entrance, boots trampling the garden without regard for the hours of effort put into its creation. The leader pointed at me, his mouth moving around words I could not hear over the roaring in my ears.
The fire was still burning behind me. I could feel it at my back, feel its hunger echoing my own. It would be so easy to turn that hunger outward. To send the flames racing across the garden, to watch them catch the guards’ uniforms and climb their bodies and?—
Yes, the buzzing seemed to say.Do it. Burn them all.
But my mother’s voice rose alongside it, fainter now, fighting to be heard.
Do not let hatred take root.
I had listened to that voice my whole life. I had been kind. I had been careful. I had swallowed my rage and bowed my head and done everything right, and they were still coming for me. Just as they had come for her.
I had hidden in that cabinet. I had stayed silent. I had let them take her without lifting a finger.
Not this time.
“No.” The word hit the morning air like thunder. “You will not take me.”
I’m sorry, Mama. But you also told me to survive. He was right. I don’t want to survive—I want to live.
I thrust my hand toward the guards and reached for the fire, trying to pull it forward, to send it roaring across the garden and into their smug, sneering faces. I felt the heat respond, felt it surge toward my call?—
And then nothing.
