Description: 1 To bleed is to be. -Vanessa, First Bloodmaid of the House of Hunger Before she was first bled, when she still had the name her parents gave her, Marion Shaw was a maid at a townhouse in the South of Prane. On that morning-the morning she would later come to identify as the beginning of her second life-she knelt on the hard wood floor of the parlor, sleeves rolled up to her bony elbows, a scrub brush in her hand. Across the room, in an upholstered armchair, Lady Gertrude sat, watching her work. She was a shrewd woman, blue-eyed with silver hair and a pinched aristocratic nose, spattered with age spots and freckles. While other nobles preferred to leave their maids to their labor, Lady Gertrude preferred instead to preside over them, watching with a falcon''s eye as if to ensure that her help earned every penny she paid them. "You missed a spot," she sneered, seizing her cane to point at a minuscule stain on the floorboards. Marion batted a dark curl out of her eye. She did what little she could to mind her tone. "I''ll be more careful, milady." "You ought to be. There''s girls more handsome and less sluggish than you who''d be happy to have your position," she said, and she bit down on a brittle tea cookie, spitting crumbs when she spoke again. "You''ve grown slow . . . and lazy. I can see it in your eyes. The little light there was in them has long gone out, and now you expect to drag yourself through my halls on your hands and knees like a common drunk. With your hair unkempt and your apron stained-" "Rest assured this floor will be spotless by the time I''m through with it," said Marion, cutting her short. She could feel the rage pooling in the pit of her belly like bile. "You have my word." At this, Lady Gertrude merely frowned, the slack skin of her brow wrinkling like fabric. Marion couldn''t help but think that she was rather lonely. Long widowed, without children of her own, or companions or family to speak of, she had no means of social stimulation apart from Sunday mass. Thus, every day she followed Marion from room to room, watching her scrub the floors and polish the silver, sometimes (if her health allowed it) going so far as to trail after her into the kitchens, where she''d remain until her aching knees drove her back to the comfort of her parlor. Marion polished the floor until she could see her own reflection in it-wide-set eyes gaping back at her, a firm nose and full lips slightly parted, tongue tucked behind her teeth, skin a deep tawny, hair a mess of curls. She frowned at herself just as the church bells rang twelve. With a ragged sigh, Marion peeled her gaze from her own reflection, dropped her scrub brush into the bucket with a splash, and pressed slowly to her feet. In accordance with the new labor laws, all workers were promised an hour''s rest at the top of their seventh hour of work, a precautionary measure enacted after no fewer than six girls worked themselves to death after twenty-hour shifts in a cotton mill. And while Lady Gertrude was not a particularly kind woman, she was a great adherent to order and strict regulation, regardless of whether it was a benefit to her. Thus, when the clock struck noon, she was quick to dismiss Marion. Unlike many of her set, Lady Gertrude couldn''t afford to buy herself a townhome more than a spitting distance from the more . . . unsightly corners of Prane, and it took Marion only a few minutes to reach the cusp of the slums. Here, Marion''s pace quickened and she felt her spirits lift, if only slightly. Gradually, the fine brick townhomes gave way to shanties and warehouses, cast in a pall of smog. Marion shouldered down the crowded streets of the stockyards and adjoining meat market, trudging through half-frozen manure and past the racks of cattle corpses that hung, swinging, by the hooves. Instinctively, she rounded her shoulders against the blast of the coming cold. Fall had only just begun, but it was unseasonably chilly that day and the streets were thick with snow and slush. Outside, the crowds spread through the stockyards, rounding the corrals where the cattle huddled-shuddering from the cold or the fear of the coming butchery or both. Marion trained her eyes on her boots as she passed them by. Almost ten years of walking every day through the stockyards and she still couldn''t bring herself to look those beasts in the eye. Marion kept walking. The seething smog was low-slung, and so thick that the sun could barely shine through it. The streets were thronged, as they always were at midday. Crowds gathered around the vendor stalls, and if Marion had coin to spare on a bit of roast eel or herring, she might have joined them. But she didn''t, so she went about her way, navigating the crowds and icy streets, snow slush leaking into her boots as she walked. A vicious wind circled down the alleys and ripped at her coat as she neared her favorite place to sit, a dark doorstep at the back of an abandoned warehouse, on the cusp of Prane, overlooking the trenches and the long scar of the northern railroad beyond them. It began to rain, and Marion retreated into the shadow of the awning, fishing a pack of matches and her last cigarette from the back pocket of her coat. She lit the smoke and nursed it, cupping her hand to shield it from the wind. Between draws she wheezed and shivered, blowing smoke through her fingers to warm them. The cigarettes did wonders to calm her hunger pangs, and at a halfpenny a pack they were far cheaper than the offerings of the roadside food vendors, who, as far as Marion was concerned, always overcharged. "If it ain''t the jewel of Prane." Marion turned to see Agnes wading toward her through the thick of the crowds. She raised a hand and Marion greeted her with two raised middle fingers in turn. Agnes was a gaunt, jaundiced matchstick girl with pale brown eyes and thinning hair that she wore in a braid that hung, like a rat''s tail, down her back. Like Marion, Agnes had spent the early years of her childhood pickpocketing on busy street corners. In fact, that was how they''d met, and they soon learned that thievery was a trade better suited to two. Agnes would act as the distraction-chatting nonsense with their targets, keeping them occupied-while Marion crept up from behind to nab a coin purse or slip a silk handkerchief from the breast coat of a passing lord. But at age ten, when the legal repercussions of thievery became too steep, Agnes had taken up honest work on the factory line where she made matches-dipping wooden sticks into sulfur-from dawn until dusk. Soon after, Marion secured a position as the scullery maid of Lady Gertrude. Still, despite their new occupations, every day at noon the two girls made a point to converge at the same street corner where they''d first met. But Marion and Agnes weren''t friends, because Marion didn''t have friends. The way she saw it, friends were a luxury reserved for people who had the spare time to spend with them-like the girls who wandered Main Street with their parasols and bone-white gloves, retiring to their parlors in the afternoon to take a bit of tea and talk. No. Girls like Marion and Agnes had no use or time for companions. They were simply fixtures in each other''s lives, a part of Prane''s habitat, like the reeking miasma and the crows and the rats that roamed the streets in packs at night. Marion passed Agnes the nub of her cigarette and slipped both hands into her skirt pockets, doing what little she could to keep herself warm. She had another five hours of work ahead of her, and it was hard to scrub floors with cold-stiff fingers. Agnes pulled on her cigarette in silence, the smoke leaking through the gaps of her missing teeth. She looked haggard from the time she''d spent slaving away on the line, breathing the toxic phosphorous fumes day in and day out until the chemical stench filled her up like a second spirit. That was something Marion''s mother used to say. That folks in Prane had two souls-one made of the stuff of the heavens, the other from miasma. Agnes took a final pull on her cigarette and flicked the butt into the trenches. "Ugly day, isn''t it?" Marion shrugged. "No worse than the others." "But it is. The days are shorter than they ever were before, the nights are longer. And the sun, it doesn''t rise as high as it used to. I swear it. The summers aren''t as warm. Fall is shorter. The winters are colder." Agnes shook her head. "I can feel the change." "Prane doesn''t change," said Marion, and it was true. Prane was the northernmost city of the South. It existed in the rift between the worlds-the arctic North and the punishing heat of the industrial South. And so, Prane was never one thing or another. In the night, the light of the city was such that it seemed the sun never fully set; in the day, the gray pall of smog made it seem like it never fully rose. Thus, the slums of Prane felt much like a realm caught between, in perpetual indecision, as if the skies couldn''t decide what they wanted to be. Never fully day. Never fully night. Never anything at all. And though she knew nothing else, Marion had come to hate that indistinction . . . and most everything else about Prane too. She sometimes wondered if there was a single person in the slums who found something, anything, to love about the place. Agnes, for her part, seemed resigned, even content. But begrudging contentment was not the same as happiness. At best it was familiarity, and at worst defeat. It certainly wasn''t the same as true fondness. Marion lowered herself to the stoop beside Agnes,

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