Author: Nell Carlson

The girl died. Normally, that would have been the end of it. Thousands of people died every day and millions had died in The Culling and nothing especially unusual happened afterwards. But the girl had died on the black river at the same time millions of people had been praying in remembrance and revenge and maybe that had made all the difference. After all, the river had been sacred before being so polluted that the waters formed black sludge as the tributaries died up one by one.

Later, of course, the oligarchs had requisitioned the river claiming it was too toxic for anything but their experiments. No one but their military personnel were to have access to the area the officers had made their base but the girl was starving. And starving people will take measures others would not. They fed her bullets, of course, as she ran over the causeway and cursed as she threw herself in the black water rather than falling flat on the causeway like they’d anticipated.

They filed their reports and sent someone to clean up the blood and promptly forgot about the killing. They killed someone every day, hundreds of people a day, sometimes, and they had simply fulfilled the Modus Operandi for thievery, of course. But in the water, in the form that had been the girl, something woke up.

The plague arrived the next day and in weeks the base became a memory but the body of the girl or rather something wearing her form walked away.