Fior had seen her first corpse when she had still been twelve for the first time. When she had still been counting days, that one single day, over and over, carefully enough to be sure of it.

It hadn’t looked anything like it did in the movies. That had been her first thought, how, just like the food in commercials never looked as good in real life, there must have been tricks they used in movies to make death look more glamorous and true. More real, a body staged perfectly in glutinous scarlet blood and time, not a bad joke the world would have to take back when it realized no one was laughing.

Not an empty thing lying at the bottom of a staircase, its neck twisted at a chicken-bone angle that jutted against the skin, its face frozen in stupid shock. Not a body lying like a burst sack between rows of raised garden beds, roots curling out from its throat and stick-brittle left forearm as if violent motion had been enough to split the skin and they had been waiting just within. Soil and blood and smashed produce all seeping together to spoil the air, spilling from a person she had promised to give more time, enough to make her own choices in the end.

A few unwatchful minutes couldn’t have been enough to turn that person into the lifeless, senseless mess that a dozen others were milling around now. An inanimate problem they could mutter and argue about how to clean up as if it had never been a person at all. She hadn’t been shocked the first time she had seen a corpse.

She hadn’t been sorry. But now…