LEVEL FOUR

  Carefully, Selphie changed the dder she was climbing. The dder that led to level three did not lead to level four, but she was close enough to it that she thought she could grab it. Then she could move herself over without having to go all the way down and then all the way back up. The levels were getting high enough to scare her. Level one was like climbing onto the roof of a house. Level two and level three were still like climbing tall trees, but, no matter what, the height of level four frightened her. It was very high.

  However, she had hoped that level three contained the end of her story and her punishment.

  Selphie and Carma did not have a nice life living at the boarding house. Selphie was not entirely sure how old either she or Carma was because she didn’t know their birthdays. They were orphans, but they were old enough to fetch and carry, so they had both been taken in by the ndlord of the boarding house where the men who worked at the sawmill lived. The two girls worked in the kitchen and it was their job to take food to the mill. Because they carried food near the woods, they had been lectured about the dangers of wolves, bears, wild cats, and anything else that might be interested in an easy dinner. They had been taught to climb trees to escape the wolves.

  Selphie had done it a few times. Carma had done it more.

  Having a job in a kitchen in a pce like that was less fun than it sounded. It was very isoted. The biggest problem was that there wasn’t enough food to go around sometimes. There was food brought in on supply runs, which were unreliable. Sometimes they were early, but most of the time, they were te. If the men left work to hunt, they didn’t always share their killings. Often there wasn’t much to share when you were one man and you only snared one rabbit. The men who were less skilled at hunting and trapping would come after Selphie and Carma, bullying them for kitchen scraps.

  Think of Esau returning from a hunt empty-handed and finding Jacob with food. He traded his birthright for the meal, but even if birthrights of loggers were up for grabs, Selphie and Carma had nothing to trade. They had their meals taken from them in times of want.

  It was a day like that, a night like that, a time like that when Brawley took out his frustration on Carma. She was a little girl with small hands, slight bones, wild hair, and almost nobody at all inside her pinafore. He’d been picking on her for months. In his rage of not getting what he wanted just because he wanted it, he spped her so hard... something inside her neck snapped and she fell broken on the floor. The wood under her sounded hollow like bones.

  Time stood still. Brawley didn’t move because everything had stopped in a heartbeat. Then, without warning, one thing moved.

  It was Selphie.

  She snatched up his knife, which he had carelessly left within her reach. “Want some meat? I know where we can find some,” she said in a dangerous whisper like she was the broken girl and not Carma on the floor.

  For a moment, it seemed like he thought she was finally offering him food, but she was not.

  She lunged at him. She didn’t try to take a slice from his arm. She went at him exactly the way she would have killed an animal who had already been shot but needed a finishing blow.

  If Selphie had only meant to frighten the woodsman or if she had meant to kill him, she didn’t know. Her intention didn’t change the fact that she sliced his throat and his blood covered the floor in a horrifying red pool that kept growing.

  With the threat down, she turned to see Carma. The pool of Brawley’s blood spread across the wood floor so that it touched the white knuckles of the girl on the floor. Selphie’s gaze moved from Carma’s white hands up to her white face. Her face had no expression. The ck of expression, the gssy look in her eyes, and the odd angle of her neck all meant she wasn’t safe.

  She was dead.

  Selphie’s brain sat stupified in a brown and red muddle that suddenly meant too much for her to comprehend. Her fingers grasped the knife and she stabbed Brawley in the chest several more times in a frenzy of blood sptter and horrifying cracks.

  Her heartbeat slowed as the danger passed. As each of her heartbeats ticked like the second hand on a clock, the rage of her crime receded and she recognized the terrible scene that surrounded her. She dripped with blood and she knew at once that she couldn’t stay there. She was a murderer. She took the knife and ran.

  Bloody footprints.

  Dripping blood.

  That was what she saw when she arrived at level four. It was a line of her own bloody footprints on the white floor like the ones she had left in the white snow.

  Selphie swallowed and knelt on the floor next to the bloody footprints that were unmistakably hers.

  She had fled into the woods. The men would be able to track her. She had to hurry. She had to get rid of the blood.

  On the fourth level, Selphie pulled on the straps of her pinafore. She had to clean up the blood. She’d start with the jumper. When it was full of blood, she’d use her shirt. If it too filled with blood, she had her chemise and her underclothes.

  She mopped up the blood.

  She used her pinafore.

  She used her shirt.

  She used her skirt.

  She used her chemise.

  Even her underclothes.

  That was enough. Every piece of clothing she had soaked up so much blood that not even the tiniest bit of the fabric appeared white.

  Then she got dressed, putting the bloody clothes back on her body.

  She couldn’t leave the clothes on level four. Nothing had been left on the other three levels. The knife was down on the first level, but in a way so were Carma and Brawley. She couldn’t drop her bloody clothes down for the wolf to eat and she couldn’t continue on naked.

  Selphie had to let herself be seen for what she was—someone covered in blood.

  She found the dder that led to level five and moved toward it.

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  Author's Notes: Thanks for reading! I'll be back on Thursday with the next chapter. See you then.