"I'll be back later than usual, old man. I have to do something."

The blind man nodded at Naial and smiled a slow, wan smile. It was one of those gestures that could mean nothing and everything at the same time. She knew he still understood what went on around him. He wasn't addle-brained, just blind to the world, and Naial wasn't sure how much of it was a weakening of the eyes and not a weakening of the spirit. People gave up in surprisingly varied ways. She lifted the basket the man had weaved in one hand and opened the tent's flap with the other. The Counter hadn't arrived yet. She could see him prodding people out of a hovel twenty, maybe thirty paces away. She always made sure she was up and waiting before giving them the chance to storm into her tent and drag her out. She couldn't bear feeling the same way again.

You are human, the voice in her dream had said. It had been bodiless, and unconnected to whatever it was she had been dreaming, but the voice had stuck with her. It was just those three words, and they had settled into her along with the words she had traded with the stranger who had come to her hovel a few nights before that. Now she had two men's voices following her, and she didn't like it. She didn't like anything about men. Kids and old men were almost different animals altogether, but adult males were bereft of any of the virtues of both of those. How one turned into the other and back again to something else was something that eluded her, no matter how much she dwelled on the subject. And yet, she had to bear the voice of two of those animals -for she assumed the voice in her dream had been a man's- for no reason. One had talked at length about kindness. The other one had just said those three words, but that was the one that gnawed at her the most.

It was nonsense. She knew what human meant. She didn't know why, but she knew. And it was something else, something more and less than the only two words she had defined herself by all this time: Leashed and woman. It had to mean more than both of those, but it was something much less evident. The Leash bore into her skin every night as she rested her head on her arm, and what made her a woman was distinct and unmistakable. But human? She was vaguely aware that she was part of it, as well as the men. That had to include the young and the old, but did it include the Chainkeepers as well? What was the line, then? Standing upright was all it took to be one? She looked at the Counter as he approached her, followed by a half-dozen 'keepers that kept looking back and forth to make sure no man or woman escaped them. They pushed and shoved and dragged and whipped, but never had to raise their voice. They were calm even when their fists spoke fury. Were they even human, too? Or had they been made from a sturdier stock, rock for bones and mud for blood, with a buzzing insect in their heads to teach them violence?

She put her head back into the tent.

"Come, boy. We don't want to make them wait."

The boy had been lying with his eyes open since she had woken up. He just did that sometimes. He slept like a log and then woke up and stayed there until she shook him. When she gave the matter any thought, she worried about it, so she had chosen to avoid thinking about it. Children were strange. She had known that...

She called out again, and the boy stirred, shook, and sat up. He dropped the blanket and got to his feet. He was at her side, eyes downcast and lost, as she faced the incoming Counter and his entourage. And fear filled her as she noticed it was a different man than the usual one.

The hawk-like eyes of the Counter regarded her exactly as a bird would, from a height so unconquerable that she was but a dot against the plains, a vermin he wasn't even interested in feeding off. She shivered but remained stiff, eyes slightly downcast as she had learned long ago, but still able to see the man's face out of the periphery of her vision. You learned to be aware of your surroundings at all times in the Hub, but mostly to read each slight upturn of a lip or shadow of a frown to weather the coming dust storm. Now, though, Naial found her sense of danger was telling her to run. She hadn't run from someone since her first lashes taught her it was useless.

The Counter approached her as he would a crate of produce and squinted at the number on her leash. He held his breath to avoid breathing in her smell, but he inadvertently blew the air he held in and she quivered when she felt the hot air against her neck. The man grinned as she recoiled and his nostrils flared when he saw her spring back to her position. The cattle was still alive but it wouldn't even kick when prodded, his eyes said. The boy grabbed her shirt and tugged from it, trying to pull her away but at the same time clinging to her. The boy wasn't sure anywhere else was any safer than right there with her. Naial wasn't sure either, but she wanted to be away from that horrible man. Still, any move she made would be met immediately with a fist or a whipping, or worse. Her only hope was to remain completely still and to pray this wasn't one of those men who got angrier at stillness than at fear. Those were the worst, the ones you could never read, who would look for any excuse to hurt you, and for whom your mind's futile attempts to appease them were another form of torture.

Stolen novel; please report.

The Counter finally pulled away from her neck and without looking at him, grabbed the boy's arm, the one that had been holding her shirt, and broke it at the wrist. The boy opened his mouth to yell, but only soundless agony erupted, and it was the mute boy's impotent attempts to scream that curdled her blood. She didn't dare move to hold him. He fell to the ground clutching his hand and crying, and she didn't move. She didn't look at him, keeping her gaze fixed on the Counter's chest instead.

"That'll teach him, at least. You may need a different method."

She opened her mouth to speak but feared it would be met with a fist. The Counter looked at the boy.

"You can go to the animal keeper to have your wrist splinted. It will heal, hopefully. If not, you won't be able to work and you'll die of hunger. Think of better uses for your hands from here on out."

The boy got up without looking at them and ran away in the direction of the animal pens. Naial followed him at the edge of her vision until he was out of sight.

"You must be thinking I'm a terrible man. I did him a kindness."

"We have different ideas of it," she said before she could stop herself. But strangely, the fist she expected did not come. Another form of torture by making her wait for it?

"I did what you should have done. Cut him off from you. He'll think twice about clinging to a woman next time. And from what I gather from his number, he's not of your seed. That's an easier bond to break for a woman, isn't it? So why didn't you do it?"

She blushed, and all the blood must have gone to her face because her knuckles turned white.

"Oh. You're one of those. A goat with a substitute lamb."

She looked up at his face without meaning to, and quickly shifted her gaze back.

"Right. I understand, then. Even more of a reason to have that culled out of you," he said, and then relaxed his shoulders and put his hands on his hips. "Anyway, that was just a detour, a corrective action, a spur-of-the-moment thing. But I came here instead of the usual man because he was lax in his duties. He allowed something under his watch, something he should have stopped."

Her breath, her heart, everything about her seemed to stop, to stand in the lapse between his sentence and the next. Please, don't...

"He even spoke of it in front of others, can you believe it? He didn't seem to give it any weight. Just an oversight, right? There's always someone that grows soft, somehow. Well, we made sure he's straight now. Straight as a pole through the back."

She shook. The previous Counter hadn't been soft at all, but he had looked away for a long time.

"Now, I've come to rectify that oversight," said the Counter, and looked at the burly men who followed him. At his signal, they went ahead and into Naial's hovel. She yelled and moved toward them, but the Counter grabbed her arm. She tried to wiggle out, but he changed his grip from a firm one to a hurtful one. She had been stopped like that before. The pressure was mounting, and if she pulled, she would break her arm or pull it out of its socket.

"Please..." she said, sobbing. "Don't..."

"Hush..."

The Counter pushed her down with a slight increase of pressure from his fingers. She fell on her knees and could barely look up to see how they dragged the blind old man from the hovel. What broke her heart, in the end, was that he didn't resist.

"Why? How does this... affect you? You could have just turned a blind eye."

The Counter snorted. "Don't you know by now of the fundamental difference between those like you and my people? If you did, you wouldn't dare say so. Even now, I'm being merciful, not out of goodness but out of sheer practicality. You're a worker with many years ahead. You may even procreate again. It would do no good to hurt you further. So don't mistake these acts. This is not evil and neither are you innocent. Those thoughts I read behind your words don't mean anything. This is just the mechanism by which the world turns. You're a cog, just like that old man. It's just that he's now a worn-down cog. He can be useful, yet. There's always another mechanism into which even a battered or rusted cog can fit."

She couldn't turn to look into the man's eyes, but he read the question in her mind.

"He's going to be given to the canids."

Naial shrieked and flailed with her free arm. Her shoulder popped, and then the pressure disappeared. She fell on the floor and dove face-first into the ground, crying as she hadn't done for ages. She pictured the jaws of the great dogs closing around the old man, whose blindness would shield him from his fate in the final seconds. She felt the sharp chill of teeth sinking into her flesh, but it was only her arm that hurt like a thousand needles. She mumbled something the Counter didn't quite hear, but he nevertheless kicked her in the side in an angerless affair, as if he was prodding a beast. She fell on her side and mumbled something again, but no words came out. The Counter looked at his tablet and wrote something on it.

"You have pen duty today. Use your other arm to lift and then go and have it popped back in place after the day's over. You'll need it for tomorrow's carrying duties. You're going to the Fortress."

She lay there writhing until her heartbeat evened out, and cursed. But she no longer cursed the keeper. This one was all on her.