The warmth of last night's food distribution had not entirely faded. The eyes watching from the shadows remained wary, but had lost some of their instinct to flee at the sight of anyone.
Little Mud huddled in the deepest shadows, her back against the cold stone, not daring to move.
She was eleven, or twelve, or thirteen... she could no longer remember.
Age meant little in Black Swamp Town.
There were only two kinds of people: those who could still move, and those waiting to die.
Little Mud did not remember her parents' faces. She only remembered the salty taste of dust pouring down her throat the day the mine collapsed.
Later, someone told her that her mother had been buried beneath it. Her father had lasted another six months before dying at home.
His body was dragged away the next day and dumped into a pit.
Children like her were far from rare in Black Swamp Town.
When hunger became unbearable, she would crawl along the swamp's edge, digging out bugs. The spaces beneath her nails were always black.
Little Mud's hair had matted into a single mass, plastered to her scalp as though someone had poured tar over it.
Festering sores spread from her neck across her shoulders and back. Yellow fluid seeped from the open wounds, staining the scrap of sackcloth that barely covered her black.
Whenever the wind blew, the stench spread. Even rats gave her a wide berth.
She stared toward the mouth of the alley, where footsteps and unfamiliar voices sounded.
"These people came from the north." Those words had been spreading through town since last night.
She knew about those barbarians from the Northern Frontier.
When the adults chatted in the mines, they had said the barbarians of the Northern Frontier ate people.