Lena wasn’t listening. All right, so she was safe down here—but it still wasn’t enough, was it? What if she wasn’t meant to be here at all? What if this was all some big mistake—like her parents had left her little basket on the steps just for a moment, and returned to find it gone? Or she’d been swapped with another child by accident? What if there was some other life she should be living, some other place where she would belong? She didn’t feel like she belonged here, that was for sure—and yet this was where she was trapped. She found her vision blurring, frustration trembling her fingers.

“Why aren’t you answering?” Vigo snapped. Quickly he tried to soften his voice, though he still sounded irritated as he packed the intestines into their stoneware grave. “If you want to try something else, you only need say.”

He’d misunderstood her silence completely. Lena felt instantly sorry: it wasn’t his fault she felt this way. She gathered herself together and spoke at last. “I would like to stay with you, Vigo, of course I would. I just wish … I just wish there were more options to choose from. Before the quarantine…” She looked down at the corpse. One eye sewn open, one eye shut, his face was frozen in a grotesque wink.

Vigo sighed, sealing the intestine jar with a deft twist of his swollen-knuckled hand. “Before the quarantine, you would have had the option to leave Duke’s Forest altogether, is that what you’re saying?” As he set the jar down and wiped his hands, he looked very old and tired, and Lena knew he understood.

“No, I just…” She shook her head. “This is my home, Vigo. But it sometimes feels like a prison too.”

He sighed. “People like us are marked out for the life we lead, Lena—marked out by the Ancestors themselves. I understand your frustration. When I was your age, I wanted to see the world too—but what was I to do, as a cripple? It is cruel, in a way, the fate that we are handed. My parents abandoned me after my accident. I was a child of six, old enough to remember who they were, to remember their love, our home, my brothers and sisters, my name.” Lena said a silent prayer of thanks that she had been so young when she was abandoned. It was easier not quite knowing what you had lost—and although Vigo spoke briskly, in his usual matter-of-fact tone, she could hear the pain beneath his words. “It is cruel,” he carried on, his voice quickening, “to give it all up. But it is also an honor. Our families abandon us, divest us of our names, and sever our ties to our own blood Ancestors—but it’s only in order that we might serve all the Ancestors. Think on it.”