Rebirth13 min read
My Faultless Luck: A Drowned Girl Who Got a Space
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I woke to cold hands pulling at my arms and a dozen rough faces leaning over me.
"What's going on? She isn't dead—stop! Don't touch my girl!" a woman's voice sobbed above me.
I squinted. Mud, straw, and the smell of smoke. I tried to remember water, the downward rush, the cutting cold—then the wedge of a shark's jaw in a breathless flash. I shouldn't be here. I wasn't supposed to be here.
"Let go," a man's voice snapped. "She's dead. We have to bury her and leave before dawn."
"She caused trouble again," another woman hissed. "Always looking for attention."
Hands grabbed me to drag me away. Panic lit my lungs. I pushed with everything in me. People thudded back, coughing.
"Hey—she's moving!" someone cried.
I opened my eyes fully and saw a face that might have belonged to my grandmother in another life: small, lined, fierce. She squeezed my hand like she would never let go.
"Keira! My girl! You're alive!" she cried. "Thank God."
I blinked and sat up. The room smelled of smoke and boiled herbs. I was under a rough blanket, my neck black and bruised where a rope must have pressed. My head was ringed with confusion and a surprising calm. I wasn't in any beach town I knew. I wasn't in my world at all.
"Where am I?" I asked.
"Don't fret. You're home—or as much as you ever were," my mother said, wiping tears in her sleeves. Her name, her face—Beth—felt right. She held me like the whole world balanced on her palms.
"I tried to kill myself," I said before I could stop it. The words taste-bitter. "I hung myself."
"No!" my mother gasped. "Why would you—"
"Because of the north—they'll come. The northern raiders. We all heard about them. They take everything. I thought—"
"It was foolish," my grandmother, Lynn, scolded, though there were tears on her own cheeks. "You don't give up. We don't leave a daughter behind. Get up and pack—we move tonight."
I had memories that weren't mine and yet felt like my bones. I knew the valley, the names on the road, the taste of the ration biscuits from a life I hadn't led. I knew the villagers, their jealousies, and why they always sneered when my family came up in talk.
"Don't listen to them," Beth whispered. "Those women—Valerie—she can be cruel."
Valerie Santiago's laugh drifted from the doorway. "You're all a mess. Grab what is necessary and go. We don't have time to play at funerals."
I felt something thaw inside me. If I had been cowed before, I wasn't going to be any longer. I had survived worse—in another life. I swallowed and forced a smile.
"Pack what we can eat," I said. "We will leave at dawn."
Beth looked at me with a strange mixture of hope and fear. "You sure you're able?"
"I am." My voice sounded steadier than I felt.
By night, everyone hustled. Old grudges surfaced as they always do when people fear for what little they own. "You always had the worst bowls," a woman jeered, pointing at our broken pottery. "Why even bother bringing anything from your house?"
I snapped. "Because we are not empty-handed," I said, and nobody expected that. I moved with a purpose I hadn't had that morning. I helped Beth fold the blankets into leather bags, stuffed a small knife at my waist, dipped into my head for the one useful, absurd thing: a memory of how to use the sea.
At the village edge the rain had stopped but the river hummed with swollen water. Villagers clung together like a herd, and above their murmurs a new fear rode in—men in iron skirts had been seen scouring ahead for easy prey: the northern raiders.
I ran. I had to find food. I couldn't bear the thought of Beth and me starving on a road that might be long enough to kill us.
The county town lay half under water. I ran to the hill and looked down. The sight made my breath hitch: roofs like only teeth, a white plain of rice and unburied things. Yet my mind buzzed a second before my senses caught up, because there—floating on the water like some stubborn treasure—was a diving suit. My mouth opened.
"No way," I breathed. "That's mine."
I had worn such a suit once, in a life that had belonged to me before all this. It was stupid, impossible. But when I reached out, my fingers brushed rubber.
A surprise space opened in my eyes, a white room that wasn't a room. It was an empty, echoing place with only that suit in it.
This was the impossible. I stepped into the little void and felt cool air and the faint hum of something with rules.
"Who are you?" said a voice in my head—sharp, mechanical.
"A host," I said aloud. "I—" Panic fluttered. "I can put things in here?"
"Yes. Storage available. Misuse of granted functions will be penalized."
"Sounds fair." I stuffed the suit on and dove into the water.
I swam into the drowned market like a thief in holy ground. The town had been ransacked by the flood and time; but people had packed goods into tightly sealed jars. I peeled lids, I pried casks. I filled the space with rice—wheat—salt—pickled meat, and the scent of other people's lives. I found a jewelry stall and, despite the odd guilt, gathered small coins and trinkets that would buy us a better future.
I wasn't born for greed, but I recognized something: supplies could weigh a person into survival. I moved like a machine. By dusk, I had tracked into my inner storage nearly two hundred pounds worth of grain, spices, oil, and a crate of coins.
I returned to the hill and gave Beth the first wide-eyed look she had worn since morning.
"You look like you've swallowed a sun," she said.
"Line them up. We take what's light now—food first," I said. "I found a wagon and horses. We'll make a proper cart."
At our door, when I slapped the first thief-sounding man in the face—Valerie's sharp-tongued son, who had mocked my family—he staggered and the room fell silent.
"I will not let you call us paupers and keep our things," I said.
He spat. "You have the nerve, little cow—"
But my fist had found a gap in his arrogance and sent him sprawling. They stared. Some faces smiled. Others retracted claws.
Night came and we ate rice and meat. My hands trembled only when I thought of the diving suit and of the pocket of the strange space that hummed like a hive behind my ribs. I tried again to enter it.
"Storage temporarily suspended," a voice said. "Unauthorized use of enhanced functions detected. Penalty: temporary withdrawal."
"Why?" I shouted. "I needed to—"
"Rules are provided for your safety," the space said. "Penalties are inevitable."
It took things from me—my diving gear, my immediate access. The jars, the coins—all locked inside so they could not be retrieved. The voice said it would return them "later." Later felt cruel and a long way off.
"You've got to be kidding," I told the space, bitter. "If it wanted to punish me, it should tell me what I did."
Silence settled like a blanket. I kept my face neutral for Beth. "We'll recover it," I said. "We'll go again."
Next day the raiders came through the village like a dark wind. They were crude, cruel, and the very sight of their standard made small children hush into the shape of prey. Three of them caught Beth in the doorway. One hand had already unfastened her dress.
"Get away!" I screamed. I felt something old in the marrow—my grandfather's hands teaching me how to turn anger into motion.
I ran with a blade and a fury. The first raider fell to my knife as if he'd been carved out of rotten wood. The other two hesitated at the speed that erupted from me, the violent little girl who had once been patient with insults until the day she wasn't. I cut, I slashed, and the last one collapsed with the sun in his eyes.
Beth's hands smoothed over my hair. "Where did you learn that?" she asked, voice shaking into a whisper.
"From myself," I said. "And maybe from the man that used to be my grandfather in the other life."
When the smoke from the burned houses mixed with the rain, we gathered our things and left. I drove a cart I had designed with a shoulder I didn't know I had. I repaired a broken axle, strapped a crude cover and a trapdoor. We left shelves of empty accusation behind us.
The village gathered at the foothill of a place the old folks called Mount Black. It was a big cavern where we all hoped to wait the worst. People packed and argued. Some wanted to go alone. Most wanted to go with the herd.
"You saved your mother from being taken? You are a miracle," Emerson Cameron, the village head, told me while wringing his hands.
"I am not a miracle," I said. "But I won't let them treat her like a tool."
Valerie's family came. Her eldest son, a slanderous man who'd spat on our door, stepped forward with a cruel grin.
"Keira," he said. "So brave now. You must be proud to have a cart and food."
"I am proud we will leave with a full belly," I answered. I felt something stern and cold bloom. "And I'm proud the raiders won't take our grandmother's house."
He laughed. "Arrogant as ever."
I looked at him. "Arrogance feeds fools who didn't learn to bind their hands," I said.
He came forward like a dog to a chop. I did what I had to—just as I had in the market—and knocked him flat. For many of them, that was the day their mouths found a new respect for me.
"Enough," Emerson said. "We leave in an hour. We'll send scouts."
But you know the village. People love to gossip. Their tongues are broom bristles.
"She stole from the county!" that same man cried later when we were loading carts. "She took the store, she plundered the town."
"She is a thief," someone else joined.
"She used witchcraft," Valerie insisted. "No decent woman would have that strength."
Emerson looked at me, at Beth, at the cart.
"Keira, care to explain?" he asked.
I could. I had an explanation that would leave my hands clean. I could lie: "We found a gift from my dead father." But lies fester. So I chose a different weapon: truth that sounded like a weapon.
"I swam," I said. "I went into the waters where the town drowned and took what they left behind. I took from no man who is alive to claim it. If you think I'm a thief, go ask yourself who saved our bellies tonight."
"But the rules of comity," Emerson said.
"The rules of comity do not feed or save," I answered. "They only make room for excuses."
The insults merged into the night like smoke. I slept in half-dawn. A few hands patted me as we left the mountain. I hoped their acceptance would stick.
Weeks on the road were a lesson in human hunger. People steal when they think they will die. Women trade shame for food. Children whisper and disappear into arms that are not theirs. I kept my own eyes open and my knuckles raw. Beth hummed to pass the way, and I practiced things with my hands: knots, the way to sew a patch, how to predict a storm.
We passed through a town and found a magistrate's storehouse with a stone door that should have been impenetrable. I thought of the suit, the strange space, the momentary notion of breaking rules—and the memory of lightning and punishment.
At dusk, I did something unwise. I muttered that I wished I could simply have the doors open. A ridiculous, half-joking thought. The space answered with a terrible, mechanical voice: "Unauthorized request." The sky flared. The thought vanished with a hiss like a steam release. The space took the suit as punishment.
"Why?" I cried into the dark. I sounded like a child.
But fate is not patient. We reached a market where a parade of relatives—my old tormentors among them—sat in the sun like toads who'd had too much. Valerie's voice cut across the square.
"There she is, the one who thinks she is queen," she cried. "She steals, she fights, she is an abomination!"
Emerson sighed. "Valerie, settle yourself," he said.
"You let her steal and she did not answer you? She strikes men? What sort of sorcery is that?" Valerie jabbed, loud enough for every ear.
I stepped forward into the bright glare and set my jaw. I had something to do that could not be undone with anger. I needed to force a truth to stand like a wall.
"You want the truth, Valerie?" I asked. "Fine."
She preened. "Of course."
"First," I said, gathering the gathered; "when the county fell, I went into the water and saved what I could. What I could not carry I put aside. I did so to feed my mother, my grandmother, the people on this cart. I did not steal from you because you're alive and would have said so. Those who call me thief are those who had food yesterday and made sure they still have it."
Valerie's smile tightened. "You are mad. You speak like a prophet."
I stepped closer. "You called my mother contemptible and wanted to leave us to die. You said she'd welcome the raiders. You called us names. You told everyone that we were already dead so you could avoid carrying us. You lied, Valerie."
"That's a lie!" she cried. "I only said—"
"Stop." I lifted my hand. "You told Lynn that she had no reason to find us, so you'd have less work. You told Emerson that you saw us run away. You sold the story that we'd fled so you would not be bound to slow your steps with us. You were lying so you could take our share. This market knows how you bargain. This town knows how you take the last piece of meat from an old woman."
"How dare—" Valerie stepped forward, face red. But that was when I did what even I did not expect I could do. I reached back into the place a moment of the world—not the storage hole but the other thing that hummed under everything—the thought-things I could still see sometimes like flashes—and I spoke what I had seen.
"You told a lie to grandma that made her trust you. 'I saw them leave,' you said. You lied when you had chance to help, because lying gave you more of the village's pity and left more bread for you. Tell them now." My voice didn't waver.
For a moment there was only the thin sound of breath. Then someone in the crowd who'd seen Valerie that evening stepped forward. "That's true," he said. "I heard her. She said the same thing back then. She told Lynn you'd gone."
The crowd stirred. Some had remembered. Others tried to cover the memory.
Valerie swore. "You are making this up to shame me!"
"Shame is thin," Emerson said. "You sowed it."
Valerie suddenly began to change. The smile left her. She glared at the crowd and then at me. "You dare humiliate me!" she screamed.
I did not shout back. I told them what I had done: how fences of my own had been lifted, how the town's stores had been salvaged, how I had tried to keep Beth fed. I told them how I had rebuilt parts of the cart. I told them that bodies rot alone and the living must gather.
Valerie's mouth twisted. "You think yourself better because you have power?" she hissed.
Power, I thought, is like salt: too much burns; too little leaves bland suffering. I couldn't begin to tell them about the space that favored me like a trickster and then punished me like a child. I couldn't explain the hum in the hill. So I did the only honest thing I could.
"People who refuse to help will be found out," I said. "I found out, Valerie. The hill knows what you did. The market hears your whispers."
She scoffed and stepped back. "I am not afraid of words."
Then I told them what I had seen beyond coins: a ledger in the magistrate's chest with a name scratched—Valerie's—next to a note about taking a share. A clerk came forward, face pale: "I remember the ledger," he said. "I saw a mark against her name. She took more than her share that day."
"Enough!" Valerie screamed. She tried to lash out. The crowd pressed like iron. People were stunned. Their faces were sharp as flint, and they had those small devices now—pockets full of small jars, coins traded, witness mouths that could turn once-sympathy to a verdict.
My words unfurled into the sun and found the ears that had been quiet too long. They remembered. They watched her. The village turned from amusement to anger like a weather shift.
"Take it back," she whispered, suddenly smaller than her hate. "Take it back."
"Take it back," echoed a dozen voices.
They closed in. Older women began to spit, the way they had always spit when their pride had been pricked. Young men who had been sent by Valerie in petty cruelties felt names come back to them. The clerk unrolled the ledger and read the lines, the marks. There it was in ink: a small list of trades where improper shares were recorded.
"Valerie Santiago," Emerson said, voice hard. "You used the fear of death to buy more than your share. You lied to get others to run. You told an old woman her family had gone so you could keep her share for you. You helped the raiders by making others weak. Stand and answer."
She trembled, then lashed out in a final spasm. "You think you're so high and mighty, Keira? You robbed the town!"
"Those items were submerged," I replied. "You have never been without a shilling and you know it."
The crowd was not merciful. They demanded restitution. The men who owned the ledger argued about punishments. They did not want blood—they wanted reparation in front of their neighbors. They wanted a public marking so that Valerie's lies would be visible and recorded.
Valerie's reaction changed like the shade of a bruise forming: first indignant, then shaky, then furious, then pleading. "No—no!" she wailed. "I didn't—"
A woman from her own clan slapped her. "You knew what you did," she said. "You traded our neighbors' bread for your cunning. Look at them!"
I stood back. The town wanted spectacle. They wanted a lesson.
"Very well," Emerson said. "We bind her purse to the communal chest. She must work a month for those she stole from. She must carry the milled grain to the sick and apologize in front of us. She must be marked by this ledger so that any who would steal in fear do it in full sight of their neighbors."
Valerie's face crumpled. She pleaded. "No—please—"
But the crowd whispered and the decision became a thing bigger than number or coin. They carried her to the granary and made her shoulder sacks of wet flour, forced her to knead under watch for three days. People watched and recorded. Children pointed and shouted. Women spat and priced the hurt in acts. Men stopped their cursing and turned to sober murmurs.
As she worked, she crumpled and changed. First she tried to rage, then to lie, then to deny. When all else failed she begged. Her shame unfolded: "No one will want me," she said to a girl she had bullied. "I am nothing."
The small crowd swelled. Someone took out a scrap of the ledger and read aloud the list of her greedy marks. Each name that had been taken from added a weight. When she asked for mercy, the people remembered all the times she had refused to share fire, to lift a child. They saw their lives as tiles—one wrong, and the pattern changed.
Her punishment lasted longer than the town had planned. It bent her. She learned to carry grain, to apologize publicly, to knead and sing the names of those she had wronged. Some days she would walk into the market and people would hiss. Other days they would nod. But the ledger remained: a small scrap nailed to the granary door.
When the ritual ended I sat on a rock, knuckles sore but steady. I had not struck her dead. I had made a spectacle of her lies so that the town would remember what selfishness did to the living.
Valerie left with no crowd to cheer her. The market had changed.
Beth took my hand that night. "You made them pay," she whispered.
"No," I said. "They punished her so the rest of them won't do the same. She broke the code. She taught the town to notice. That is the only kind of justice I can give with the tools I have."
We left the town soon after, our cart full of bread and small live animals, and a ledger copy we kept as a record. The space stayed silent for now. It had taken, it had punished. The world still operated by rules I didn't fully understand.
I kept a small thing under my tongue like a promise: if the space gave me another trick, I would ask permission first. If it took something, I would try to get it back. If someone tried to take Beth from me, I would not hesitate.
And always, always, the diving suit sat in a dark corner of my mind like a beacon I would one day reach again.
The End
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