She stands alongside another girl. They are both very young, likely not more than five or six years of age, although she has no way of knowing. The other girl is a stranger, newly brought into the master’s keeping. Both girls are raggedly dressed in clothing too big for them, scraps taken off the last atoner who died. Clothes aren’t alive, and thus safe to pass on to the next atoner, because Spore can’t lodge in them. It is twilight. Wagons and nervous retainers wait behind her. A soldier prods the other girl with the butt of his spear. As the newest atoner, this stranger is required to be first to walk down the lane that cuts through a hollow thick with trees. There is a light barely visible in the distance where the ground rises beyond the hollow. This lantern marks their destination, a ramp that leads up an embankment and onto a road forbidden to atoners, although it will become the master’s safe haven for the night, if they can reach it. But they have all heard the Pall’s whispery scrape, rising hidden amid the trees. She smells the rose-oil scent that means Spore is irrupting nearby.

The spear pushes the other girl forward. Small as she is, the little girl cannot resist; she starts to cry with fear. A whip rises among the guards. In an instant it will snap. So it is up to El to protect the newcomer, if not from the threat of Spore and Pall—that’s not possible—then at least from the strike of the whip. She grasps the other girl’s hand to show she will go with her; they’ll go together, not alone. It is the first time she holds the hand of the girl who will become her sister, but not the last. They make it through the wooded hollow and all the way to the ramp before the third atoner, the one walking at the end of the procession, screams.

Elen jolted up, eyes flying open, water splashing out of the tub. The sound came again, but it was a shriek of laughter from the caravanserai’s parlor where drinks and food were served. Not a scream of terror followed by the wet impacts of flesh being hacked to the bone as the soldiers killed and then burned the atoner so the Spore that had latched onto him could not spread to anyone else. It had all happened long ago. She wasn’t there anymore.