“Since when does bleeding make a person an idiot? We all do it. It’s totally natural.”
She rolled her pretty brown eyes, making another grab for me. I huffed, giving up my hand. I wasn’t actually bleeding, but the burn on my hand was all red and angry, so it had probably appeared that I was bleeding, at first. She dropped my hand and spun to the stove, tossing a pot of water over the licking flames that I had lit beneath the cooking cupboard. As steam filled the room, she started rummaging around in the drawers of my mother’s tiny kitchen. The first three drawers that she opened contained small medical packs made of cloth, but they had all been depleted.
“Over there.” I decided to help her out, jerking my head in the direction of the bed in the corner of the room.
It was the only proper bed in our cottage—my mother had bought it when Emmy’s parents had died, saying that she could live with us and that the two of us could share it, while she slept on the mattress on the floor. It didn’t take her long to kick both of us to the floor instead, to the thin stretch of foam that had always been my bed in the past. Emmy found the fourth medical pack tucked beneath the bed, and brought it over to me, making quick work of bandaging my hand.
“I told you not to use the stove anymore,” she chastised, a frown furrowing between her brows. “That’s why I cook enough to last for the week, if you keep it properly.”
“I wasn’t cooking, I swear. I would never. Not even if you forced me.”
“Why was the stove hot?”
“There was something inside it. I thought if I made it hot, it would crawl out.”
“With the door shut?”
“Whoops.”
She laughed, finishing up with my hand and spinning to face the stove. It was made of stone, a long and bulky structure reminiscent of a fireplace, with an area to light a fire below a stone cupboard with a cast-iron door, which filtered into a chimney. She wrapped her hand in a cloth and popped open the door. That was what I had done wrong—not wrapping my hand before trying to touch the hot metal.
Emmy winced, and then closed the door again. “Guess we’re having rat for dinner.”
I inspected my hand, totally impressed with her bandaging skills. “Can’t I keep you here, Emmy? You’re so handy. What am I going to do without you?”
“I might not get picked,” she reminded me, her voice soft.
She was afraid. I didn’t know why. Maybe she was afraid of leaving me alone, or maybe she was afraid that she would get picked. Blesswood was a whole other world to us outlying dwellers—a world that we had barely any knowledge of, and absolutely no experience in. A form stumbled in through the doorway, and we both turned to watch my mother slump down onto the twin bed with an incoherent mumble.
“Mum,” I groused, walking over to the bed and shaking her leg. “The selection ceremony is this sun-cycle, remember?”
“Just leave her.” Emmy grabbed my hand, pulling me away. “We’re going to be late.”
I was pissed. I didn’t want my mum to stand Emmy up on her big day, but she’d obviously been at Cyan’s tavern all night. Again. I tried not to think about it in certain terms—they were her life choices after all—but I was pretty sure that she was having sex with travellers passing through the tavern to earn enough tokens to keep us all alive.
Okay, those were pretty certain terms.
That would have been bad enough, but I was also pretty sure that she was drinking away most of the tokens that she earned. She wasn’t a very responsible mother. She barely seemed to notice that we were around. Emmy kept her fed, and I sometimes pulled her shoes off when she stumbled into the house with the dawn. That was the extent of our relationship now. Maybe it would have been different, if Emmy hadn’t come to live with us. Maybe I would have needed her more, and that would have forced her to act like a mother.
Emmy started to drag me out of the house, but we both stopped on our way to the door, looking down at the broken timepiece on the floor. Each of the village households were permitted a single timepiece to share, and I must have accidently dropped ours after I had burned my hand. The glass cover was shattered, and the two pointers were struggling to move. The longer, thinner pointer, which clicked quickly around the timepiece to measure clicks in time, was just twitching back and forth over the same number. The shorter, thicker pointer, which would rotate to the next number after sixty clicks—indicating a rotation in time—had broken off completely.