With the sun slowly falling to the caress of the horizon, the alleyway was lit only by lampposts on the main street. Only a few meters away were people, people in their thousands, many, many people. Safety.

Yet she was far. So far from the light, obscured by an iron goliath enshrouded in darkness staring with metal eyes, looking for an inch of movement that would end someone's life. The Spirit Strider was on its haunches, but it's figure was still towering, undefeatable. Marilin was trapped in a bind- death by escape, or death by waiting. Neither set of cards seemed to play to her favour.

"What are you going to do?" Her voice was weak, feeble, lacking any sense of confidence. She was vulnerable, and the power imbalance gripping her by the throat could as well be between a duke and a peasant.

The Spirit Strider did not move, but Marilin could have imagined it laying there, the winter wind of the still January whistling into the grooves of its armour, staring at her, and thinking. She mocked herself mentally, thinking herself foolish for considering such a trivial matter before a giant shell inevitably ripped into her chest. She laughed, and the Spirit Strider noticed.

It was a single movement, a single swivel from the great machine, quiet and automated. Marilin's back straightened, stiff as a board, as if the Spirit Strider had the eyes of a hellish monster rather than dull sockets of steel.

"My job."

Any sign of humanity bled off the voice like the green off the Academy trees in autumn. Marilin stared helplessly as she reached for the deck of cards and found it empty. With no more plays to make, she was at the mercy of a power far greater than herself. Her palms were on the hem of her dress, soaked, and her heartbeat was a taunting stopwatch to an inevitable moment of intolerable pain, then nothing. So close were the people on the street- thousands of people, numbers, safety. She was frozen in time, neither person nor machine moving even an inch. She wished it would stay that way, that she could compose herself and drawl out a miraculous speech that would save her life, but she was simply there- stuck like the stuffed cat in the hallway of her dormitory.

Instead her mind flew to somewhere else, to a moment that she thought she had hoped to forget but had been revived when death was so close, the stream of life slipping from her hands as if it were nothing but a pile of sand.

---

It was a quiet afternoon, a day where the earth was hopelessly clutched in the inescapable grasp of deep winter. I knew this would be another hard few weeks. The farms on the outskirts of the city had closed- the air was bitterly cold and polluted, the soil crackled and dead. Farming was ground to a halt until the factories could open again and fertiliser could be shipped back to the orchards and stack farms. For now, people who could afford it relied on the food they had stockpiled for the past months. The poor begged, roamed, starved- then ultimately, died. Nobody thought it brutal, unfair. People called the winter months in Shiinevaar 'the thinning'. I imagined helping those that came to the door, asking for food- but I knew I could not, as we did not know if we ourselves had enough to survive the winter. Last week one such man came up to the Cabin, begging for scraps. Mother found him the next morning next to the compost bin, which was empty. He had died in his sleep.

What could I do? I was nine.

This life I had lived for eight years. I remember sweeping palaces, domed arches, places of grandeur and luxury. Everyday I imagine, try to remember. Everyday belief in the existence of such a life trickles like the morning dew off the edges of the window. I ask Mother, and she does not say anything to me. There are five of us here, and of all of us, I am the most different. I am pale, Lewis keeps telling me- white as snow. My hair comes down in dull brown threads, unlike the rest of them, an identical black. They are strong, able to help around the house, able to bring food to the table and help us all survive when winter spites all those that are still living. I am frail and weak. I am a burden.

I know that I am different, that I do not belong. Laura doesn't need to keep telling me that.

Specks of snow line the dirty surface of the window, forming a crystal-like lattice that envelops the glass and obscures the outside world in an icy filter. I am small, and am able to curl up on the windowsill. A tattered book that I like to think is held together only by my devotion to reading it over and over again, is in my lap. Mother is out in the storm chopping firewood, doing what Lewis says is a man's job because Father died before I even came to the house. Ben would be in the back, trying to cover our potatoes with a tarp in a futile attempt to make them survive the cold. The others would be in the woods, trying to find food, like mushrooms, that might've survived the coming of winter. I am snuggled next to the fireplace, staring out the window, finger tracing the line I had been reading for the past hour.

I am a burden.

Sometimes I ask Mother where I can help, and she flashes me an angry look, telling me to go back and read. I can see them all, spiteful glares and words ready to burst from their mouths. Yet I sit down, curl up, and there is nothing but silence.

We have four books. One of them no longer has text, it’s pages yellowed and anything that was once written on them now faded away. Two are booklets full of food stamps, which we use in the warmer months at the office on the outside of the city to receive a sack of supplies that can last us a week, once per month. Laura said that Father died for those two books. I fail to believe that such scraps of paper could hold such value.

The last book has a cover that is lost to time, but the inside still has words that I know will soon also disappear. Of us all, I am the only one who can read- the books were once Father's, but he is gone, and as the only one who can understand them, I am their custodian.

I have read the story that the book holds many times, spending days and nights perched on the windowsill, eating, sleeping, existing. I am different, I am weak, I am incapable of helping, and the spot beside the window is my world- my life nothing more than that of a pretty bird in a cage.

"Mother, why do people die?"

Often I speak and I am ignored, my feeble voice splitting the silence and falling on deaf ears, as if I am the only one in the room. This time, she stopped, her hand clenching the ladle as my eyes glimmered in anticipation, ears awaiting a response. The silence was only broken by a slight bubble as the soup finally came to a trickling boil.

"People die so that other people can live." Her voice was not restless and impatient like how she usually talked to me, but rather solemn, as if once, she as a young girl, had asked the same question to her own mother. "Try not to die, sweetheart, not if you can help it."

She had never called me- or even any of the others- 'sweetheart' before.

Alas, that brief moment of joy was cut short as she turned back to face the soup, her face growing once more weathered and old, that slight hint of a smile disappearing like the bodies on the streets at the end of every winter.