The woman cracked a smile.
“You must keep painting, then. Sometimes art can be the onlyrefuge in this world. These soldiers take our loved ones, but they cannot take this. That’s how we keep a memory alive, even if it’s gone.”
Corin thought of patchwork quilts stained with paint, clay pots drying by the window, a tiny cottage made of lime-washed brick, and a roof so low she could kiss the thatch. Her father’s calloused palms, her mother’s belly pregnant with Elly, the low hum of a song they’d made up. She could paint the memory into permanence, proof that there was once a home where love overflowed.
She took the elderly woman’s hand. This was someone left with no family, just like her, searching for a way to bond with another human being. Corin would give her that connection. She would let the woman know that, despite their despair, at least they had crossed paths with one another.
“Thank you,” she said. “I won’t give up on my dreams.”
The woman crinkled her eyes and nodded with conviction, as if her heart turned a little softer from their brief connection with each other. They bid goodbye, and Corin watched the woman leave before dropping her smile. Her hands dug in her pocket, where the edge of a wedding ring pressed against her palm.
It was smaller than she would have liked to barter with, but she could still make some decent money from it.
Maybe it took a mind deteriorating with old age to fall for a trick like this, believing in the dreams of a starving artist. But the truth was that dreams were never enough. Her mother died when Corin was ten, her paintings and clothes discarded by leering men who wanted to put their own marks over her body. Corin’s father changed after that, stewing in liquor and regret until he finally gave in to his darkest desires and drowned himself a year later.
No, if Corin painted a memory, it would be this: A raging riverthat took three bodies. A baby wailing as the water drowned them. A girl who only had the strength to carry her sister, not the weeping man who brought them there.
It would be a portrait of survival, because in the end, that was what mattered. Not the fleeting love of a mother gone too soon, not the strength of a father who’d lost too much. Not even a makeshift home that once opened itself to an orphaned teenager, only to disintegrate before she turned eighteen.
Corin had no capacity to focus on something as meaningless as art. After the insurrection took her friends, there was no one else but Elly and her.
Now, there was only her.
Because even as she kept searching, Elly never returned.
• • •
CORIN WOKE TO the sound of soldiers seizing her home. It wasn’t much of a home to begin with, but she had depended on the deteriorated building as a roof over her head, even if that roof was composed of wooden boards and cobwebs.
Troops barged in clanking metal and heavy guns, stomping up a creaky stairwell that led to an alcove blocked by a rotting wood door. When they kicked it open, she barely made it out of bed. Their eyes fell upon the pile of burlap and moth-eaten sheets, their noses wrinkling at the rotting odor of trash and unwashed clothes. She felt naked under the gaze of these strangers, like a roach found belly-up in a sticky trap.
“No squatters,” one of the men yelled. “You’re on our turf now.”
The distant roar of bulldozers made the floorboards rumble. The walls trembled, as if they could tell another man-made machinewas coming. Corin’s pulse raced as she rifled through her bags and fished out crumpled documents.
“I rent under Woodbine,” she spat, as if the name of a rich landlord meant anything. Her pointer finger stabbed the bottom half of her papers, where both of their signatures were scribbled beside last year’s date. She had recalled the day she met the old man with as much regret as getting talked into holding a knife, even though she’d never made the cut. His pale eyes had locked onto her first, sensing her desperation even from across his shop. His smile had chipped incisors, like a wolf baring its teeth at his next prey. She knew she’d made a mistake shaking his hand and it had haunted her ever since.
The only consolation from their deal should have been the new roof over her head, even if it was in a decrepit building. But the soldier barely glanced at the document she presented. His disinterested expression felt like a rock sinking in her stomach. She understood, even before he spoke, that any prior agreement she’d made was for nothing.
“Woodbine sold ownership of his land and left Gyldan. Demolition orders call for any illegal housing to be claimed under Zilar military.”
The soldier stamped the Zilar flag, a striking blue marked by an eagle and a coat of arms. He raised the pole high enough to puncture the boarded rooftop. Corin watched the flapping cloth in the sky with shaking anger. Her curled fists wanted to smash Griffith’s pallid face. He had put blood on her hands the day they traded favors, and the desolate excuse for a home she was about to lose had not been worth her sacrifice.
The barrel of a gun pressed into her back, forcing her to move. She couldn’t even walk a clean path to the door as hordes of menswept the home for valuables. Metal detectors crawled the floorboards like mechanical spiders, hunting for hidden gold from a once prosperous land. Corin sneered at their pointless search. Greedy men who already had everything always wanted more. Her family had escaped Zilar for refuge in Gyldan, only for their home to be stolen once again.
If they had asked, she would have told them there was nothing to seize. She’d sold Elly’s old toys and baby clothes for a pathetic amount of bills after her sister outgrew them. She’d already thrown away palettes and brushes when she gave up on art. At least when they took her parents’ home, there was furniture to overturn and memorabilia to destroy. Old paintings and cracked pottery and things that could have mattered if she still had a family.
They couldn’t take from someone who had nothing left now.
Yet something floated behind a tattered sheet, small and round and strung by a metallic chain nailed to one of the scorched beams. Instinct crackled her heart and made her lunge for it. The sudden movement caused a soldier to knock his gun into her head and force her knees to the ground. He pressed a boot to her back and grabbed the chain. The pendant, a hollowed ring where a gemstone should have been, dangled between his narrowed eyes. He let out a snort, dropping the necklace to the floor where her cheek pressed against wood.
“Worthless,” he muttered.
He was right. Her grandmother’s pendant held no monetary value, the lack of gemstone turning the necklace into nothing more than a misshaped copper band. There was no practical reason for Corin to keep it like a family heirloom. And yet, his disgust at the ornament, as if it were as insignificant as the rest of her ancestry because they weren’t gilded by fortune, made something snap inside her.
Corin snatched the chain before standing.
“You’re wasting your time,” she spat. “There hasn’t been gold on this land for centuries. The only thing you’re digging up are the graves you’ve made yourselves.”
