Chapter 2: Cael Volunteers Before She Can Breathe

The name Velvet Sorn pulled from the second bowl was Ammet Tole.

Sable had clocked him in the fourteen-year-old section: small for his age, the particular thinness of a boy who had been growing faster than his family could feed him. She had seen him before, she thought, at the lumber yard's edge where children sometimes waited to walk their fathers home. He had a gap between his front teeth. She had filed this without knowing she was filing it.

He heard his name and the hearing of it moved through his body in a visible wave — a flinch that started in his shoulders and traveled down, the way a tree behaves in the seconds after the axe bites but before it falls. He had not yet started walking when the voice came from the seventeen-year-old section, six rows back and three bodies to the left.