Accidents happen,the guard had said.She'll owe double the years.
You're too much,her aunt had said.You'll need to be useful.
Delia looked at the forest.
She looked at her bound hands.
She looked at the guards, still fighting their horses, their backs turned, their attention elsewhere.
Lightning flashed again, and in its brief white light, Delia saw herself reflected in the woman’s empty eyes—saw her future, sick and silent and slowly dying on a road to nowhere.
Something cracked inside her.
A part of her that had been frozen for years, dead for longer, beaten and starved and shamed until she'd forgotten it existed.
No.
The word was small. A whisper in her own mind.
No.
Louder now.
NO.
Her hands moved before she could think. Twisted in the rope, pulled, worked at the knots that the guards had tied carelessly because why would they bother with proper bonds for a woman like her? She wasn't dangerous. She wasn't strong. She wasn'tanything.
The rope loosened.
Slipped.
Fell away.
Delia stared at her bare wrists, at the raw red bands where the hemp had bitten into her skin, at her own hands that suddenly seemed like they belonged to someone else.
Move,she thought.Move now or die here.
The guards were still fighting the horses. The storm was still raging. The other workers hadn't moved, hadn't even looked up, their spirits too broken to recognize opportunity.
Delia couldn't save them. She knew that with a clarity that felt like a knife.
But she could save herself.
Maybe.
She moved. Clumsy, shaking, rain-soaked in seconds as she slipped through the torn canvas and dropped to the muddy ground. Her ankle turned on a stone; she caught herself with one hand, mud squelching between her fingers. Cold. Everything was cold. The wind cut through her wet dress like it was trying to stripthe flesh from her bones.
The forest was fifty feet away. Forty. The shadows waited, patient and deep and full of things her father had warned her about.
Monsters.
Behind her, the guards were shouting, and she heard the sound of boots hitting mud.
She ran.
It wasn't graceful. It wasn't fast. Her body was not built for running, and the mud sucked at her feet and the rain blinded her and her lungs burned with every step.
But she ran anyway.
