The bell over the compound gate rang before the sun was fully up, and Finn was already awake to hear it.
He’d learned that much in six days — the bell didn’t wait for anyone, and neither did Dols.
He sat up on the thin cot nearest the door, the one Pell had told him was reserved for whoever’d arrived most recently, and pulled his boots on in the dark by feel, the same way he used to lace them in a small house that smelled like tar and river water, a lifetime and a whole world away from this one.
“You always wake before the bell,” Pell said from the next cot, voice thick with sleep, one eye cracked open to watch him.
“Every morning. How.”
“Habit.”
“Weird habit for someone who’s only been here a week.”
Finn didn’t have a good answer for that one, so he didn’t offer one.
Pell yawned, gave up trying to get more out of him, and rolled out of his own cot with considerably less grace.
Breakfast was thin porridge and a heel of bread, eaten standing at long tables in the mess hall with forty other indentured boys, none of whom seemed inclined toward conversation this early.
Finn ate quickly, the way everyone ate quickly, because the bell for floor work rang twenty minutes after the breakfast bell and nobody wanted to be the one still chewing when it did.
Dols met the new intake — six of them, Finn included — at the warehouse doors with a slate of assignments.
“Hale. Grain floor, second bay. You’re stacking today, not hauling — Corbin’ll show you the manifest system.” Dols didn’t look up from his slate.
“Learn it fast. I don’t repeat myself twice in one week.”
Corbin turned out to be the broad-shouldered boy who’d been eyeing Finn since the mess hall, unimpressed in a way that had nothing to do with anything Finn had actually done yet.
“Stack by weight first, then by manifest number within each weight class.” Corbin said it fast, bored, already deciding Finn wasn’t worth a second explanation.
“Get it wrong and it’s my name on the correction, not yours, so get it right.”
“Weight first. Then manifest number.”
“Congratulations, you can repeat things back.” Corbin turned away without waiting to see if Finn actually understood, and left him to work it out from watching the boy beside him instead.
Finn worked it out inside the hour.
It wasn’t difficult — nothing about sorting grain sacks required anything he hadn’t already learned three times over in three different contexts across two lives — but he was careful to make it look harder than it was, careful the way he’d learned to be careful about everything here, because a twelve-year-old who mastered a new system in an hour flat invited exactly the kind of attention he didn’t want.
By midday his shoulders ached in the specific, unglamorous way of muscles doing real work for the first time, an ache that had nothing to do with angels or gods and everything to do with simply being a body that hadn’t built up the calluses yet. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
“You’re not bad at this,” Corbin admitted, grudging, somewhere around the fortieth sack.
“For a first week.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t let it go to your head. Everyone’s decent the first week. It’s the second month that separates who’s actually built for it.” Corbin said it like a warning more than a compliment, and went back to his own stack without further comment.
Supper was better than breakfast — actual stew, more bread, a rare orange passed hand to hand down the table that everyone got exactly one segment of and nobody complained about the size of the share.
Finn ate slower this time, listening more than talking, learning names he hadn’t caught yet, filing away which boys were kind and which were merely tolerable and which, like Corbin, hadn’t decided yet which one they were going to be toward him.
After supper there was an hour before lights-out that belonged to no one but the indentures themselves, and Finn spent his first free hour of the week the way he’d been planning to since the barge first pulled away from the dock at Bracken’s Ford — sitting at the end of his cot with a stub of pencil and a single sheet of paper the Guild post allowed each indenture per week, working out exactly what he wanted to say and what he didn’t.
He wrote three drafts in his head before he let the pencil touch the page.
Dear Mother and Father,
I arrived safely.
New Taipeng is larger than I expected — I don’t think I understood, until I saw it, how big a city could actually be.
The warehouse district smells like grain dust and tar, which isn’t so different from home, if I squint.
My work is stacking and sorting on the grain floor.
It isn’t hard, exactly, just new — my arms are sore in ways I didn’t know arms could be sore, but I expect that’ll pass once I’m used to it.
The foreman, Dols, seems fair.
There’s a boy named Pell in the next bunk who talks more than anyone needs to before breakfast, but he’s kind about it, and another boy, Corbin, who I think might come around eventually, once he decides I’m not worth disliking on principle.
I think of the river most nights before I fall asleep.
Tell Bram I haven’t forgotten about the leaf and the second piling, and that I fully expect a rematch when I’m home.
Tell him not to let Whit’s cousin eat all the oranges before I get back either.
I miss you both more than I know how to write down properly.
I promise I’m all right.
Seven years is a long time to say out loud, but it’s just a number, and numbers end eventually.
Yours,
Finn
He read it over twice, folded it exactly the way the Guild courier had instructed on his first day — three folds, sealed with the cheap wax provided at the compound office — and set it on the small shelf above his cot to hand over at morning bell.
𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑙𝑒𝑓𝑡 𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝐶𝑜𝑟𝑏𝑖𝑛’𝑠 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙 𝑏𝑒ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑖𝑜𝑟, the System noted, quiet, once the letter was sealed.
𝐴𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑢𝑛𝑘 𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛.
𝐴𝑛𝑑 𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 ℎ𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜𝑑𝑎𝑦.
They can’t do anything about any of it from Bracken’s Ford.
Telling them just gives them something to lie awake over.
Finn lay back on the thin cot, staring up at a ceiling with none of the familiar water stains he still, somehow, expected to find there every night out of pure habit.
There’s no version of that letter that helps them.
Only one that worries them less.
𝑇ℎ𝑎𝑡’𝑠 𝑎 𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑎𝑑𝑢𝑙𝑡 𝑤𝑎𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑎𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠’ 𝑓𝑒𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑜’𝑠 𝑡𝑤𝑒𝑙𝑣𝑒.
I’ve had practice being older than I look.
The System didn’t argue the point.
Finn closed his eyes, listening to Pell’s breathing even out into sleep in the next cot over, and let himself drift, slow, toward a rest that still, some nights, tasted faintly of river water and home.
He didn’t know yet how long the letter would take to reach Bracken’s Ford, or how long a reply might take to find its way back.
He only knew he’d hand it over at the morning bell, and then there’d be nothing to do but wait, and work, and wait some more, the way every single day of the next seven years was apparently going to ask him to.
He fell asleep before he could finish being sad about that, which he decided, drifting off, counted as a small mercy in its own right.