"You awake?" Marina's voice was soft, a finger worrying the hem of the quilt.
"Yeah." Brielle kept her voice small. The body's throat made it sound younger than the mind.
Marina's hand found the child's forehead and lingered. "You were cold. Sleep turned you wrong." She tightened the quilt around the skinny shoulders.
Brielle closed her eyes and catalogued: twelve-year-old bones, thin but not broken. A tightness in the scalp where fingers met gauze. Taste of iron when she tried to swallow. The bandage on the head moved when she blinked.
"Where's Em?" Brielle asked. She sounded like a child testing the kitchen smoke.
"At Aunt Yelena's," Marina said. "She fell asleep at the loom. Regina had a temper tonight."
Brielle let the lie slide. It wasn't important whether Emmeline slept at Yelena's or behind the barn. The lie told her how the house survived: by careful half-truths and someone swallowing anger.
"Eat first," Marina said. "You don't eat and you pass out again."
"I will." Brielle pushed the sheets back and swung the legs over the side of the kang. The motion was simple and filled with pain. Muscles she knew as a thirty-year-old operator didn't obey without cost.
"Don't try to hide it," Marina warned. "Regina... she watched you until you slept."
"I'm not hiding." Brielle put both feet on the floor. The soles were calloused in places that made no
