And Then She Whispered 'No.'

In a future where the human race is struggling to survive, life can be difficult for a little girl... unless that girl was trained by the Sisters of the Sun and Stars.

Here's a question for you:

A group of men have got you surrounded. Fires burn all around, from the wagons mainly, and in the gold-painted night you hear a growling louder than the bears at the head of the line. Suddenly, your ribs are aflame, a pain your frail body has only ever come close to knowing a few times. Then it's your leg, and then, your neck. Now you're dying, with steel bowbolts protruding from you every which way.

What are you gonna do?

But you bear a secret. You may be a girl, just a young thing with unkempt orange hair and no way to tell the difference between your many freckles and the dirt that's constantly caked on your face, but you've just found out something that changes everything.

You've heard that we're all connected, that each of us is made from the dust of stars and hold within us the memories of the universe. Sometimes this makes little to no sense, especially when one sees the type of horrors that go on in this world. A band of highwaymen on motorized A-frame cycles can any day just hijack an ursebound* caravan carrying children, for no better reason than because they're men.

They banged this into your head pretty deep at the House of Sun and Stars. The Sisters trained you well, in their blood-red vestments and white hoods, crying out mercy for the world but with such a devastating secret kept hidden within their cloistered hearts and minds.

All of life IS connected. The world only exists because you perceive it to be so, and when they feed you the Leaf of the Lady this all becomes too clear for your mind to handle. See, they don't know what you've been through. They don't know the times your daddy and his friends decided your fate for you, again simply because they're men and you're not.

And as your life ebbs out onto your petticoats, you realize that their lives are one with yours, and with the other girls on the caravan, with the drivers and bodyguards and bears that lie dead now, and with everything living or not all around you.

But the sisters have taught you well.

Let me ask you, stranger: what would you do in this situation?

I'll tell you what She did.

You ever see that hole out in the desert? That empty spot, what looks like a giant steel ball fell into the earth and then somehow got carted away? You know, if you stand right in the middle of it, at night, it reaches out as far as the eye can see by flamelight. You think about that... as far as your eyes can see in every direction.

You want to know what happened there? Let me tell you.

That little girl, with fire and death all around her, hair glowing the same color as the night... she looked up and she asked herself, "is this really happening to me?"

...And then she whispered, "No."

(*"ursebound" in this case means "drawn by bears")

Author's Note

I'm particularly interested in what people think of the voice in which this story is written. I'd like to use it for a novel series I'm working on, but I'm concerned it may not read as well as I'm hoping.