Page 150 of Shatter

Anni laughs back, the first time I've heard it since the spring.

When the door opens, Tindra comes out first with her eyes red and a broom in her hand.

She stops beside me.

"Don't you dare make her cry." Tindra's whisper is fierce.

She walks out.

Anni stands in the bathroom doorway.

Her hair is gone.

The copper, all of it, the tangle hanging past her shoulders, cut away.

What's left is short and blonde, curling at her jawline, pale gold under the bathroom light.

The color it's been growing in for months, two inches at her part, and then three.

Her real color.

She looks at me, chin up, braced.

"Well?" Her voice shakes a little. "Say something."

I stand up and cross the room to her.

Slowly, I reach up and push one short blonde curl back off her forehead with my finger.

"Hei, Annika." It comes out rough. "There you are."

Her face crumples.

She steps into me and presses her face into my chest, and she cries, finally, a cry to wash something out instead of tear something open.

Behind her, on the bathroom floor, the copper lies in drifts on the white tile.

***

Six weeks later, I'm standing outside the kirkja door.

The hall's crowded.

Ulf leans on the wall beside me, with Gorm across from us and Aren a few feet down with Njal, arms folded, all of us in our prospect cuts.

Nobody's talking.

On the other side of the door, the vote's been going for forty minutes.

I can hear voices through the wood, the murmur of them, rising and falling.

Once, Rati's laugh, loud.

Once, a fist hitting the table.

I don't know whose.

My palms are sweating.