Semua Bab The Branded Cage: Bab 21 - Bab 23

A belly can be a clock, if you know how to read it. This is the first thing I remember learning from my mother, before the world closed in around her bones and left only the echo of her hand on my shoulder. When I was small, she would place my palm against her skin and say: “Feel that? That’s the body, counting down.”I keep the lesson. Now I lie in the dark beside Caleb and feel the tick of the new life inside me, each flutter or turn marking the days left until something happens—something I cannot name, but already know I cannot stay for.He sleeps with an arm over my ribs. Some nights he slides his hand up, under the curve of my breast, or down to where the skin is pulled tight and thin as wax paper. Sometimes he is gentle, fingers making soft circles as if the child could be shaped from outside. Sometimes, even asleep, his grip hardens into a kind of threat. I have learned to tell the difference by the drag of his breath: shallow and quick when the day was bad, deep and heavy when

Morning is the sound of frost. I wake to the crack of thin ice on the world, the soft rasp of Caleb’s breath, the dull ache of my body caught between sleep and the promise of another day. He is already up, pacing the small perimeter of our hollow, boots leaving careful prints in the crusted ground. The fire from last night is gone, only a black thumbprint in the dirt.I do not ask if we are leaving. I know the answer. The only thing colder than this camp is the thought of staying in it.He tosses me the last heel of bread. It is still frozen, a stone in my hand. “Eat,” he says.I do. My gums bleed, but the taste is less salt and more memory, and I make it last.He watches me, arms folded, face hard with something that is not anger, not quite. “We move at sunup. Bring only what you can carry.” He has already packed the blanket, the strip of bandage, the crude knife dulled by months of use. Everything else is left behind. We do not speak of the red tent, or the women who did not make it