"This is the Black Truffle Monastery? It's falling apart."
Raphael looked around, and found a small girl sitting on the front steps.
She had one hand propped under her chin, her round face carrying the particular expression of a child working through something too complicated for her age.
The clothes she wore had been washed so many times the color had surrendered, the fit wrong in the way of hand-me-downs, sized for someone else entirely. Her hair was black, not silver.
Her eyes were deep brown, close to black, not the green he knew. She was thin in a way that went past slight.
He wouldn't have recognized her at all if not for the mole at the corner of her left eye.
He crossed to her and crouched down.
"Hey. Are you Evelyn?"
The girl's round eyes moved to him, cautious but not frightened.
"Hello, mister. I'm Evelyn. Are you here to see Sister Maria? Or Director Golana?"
He hadn't expected a response. This was her memory, he should have been a ghost in it, invisible, without any capacity to interact.
He filed the surprise away and shook his head.
"Neither. I just noticed you sitting out here alone. What are you doing?"
Evelyn studied him with the careful attention of a child who had learned to read adults quickly. She should have been wary of a stranger.
Somehow she wasn't, there was something in her expression that said she recognized him in a way she couldn't account for.
"I'm waiting for Sasha. My best friend. She just went to, I can't say. We made a promise."
Before he could respond, light footsteps came running from the side of the building, quick and excited.
"Evelyn! I'm back, the sisters didn't notice, right? I got something really good this time..."
The girl who came around the corner was older than Evelyn by several years, moving with the specific energy of someone who has gotten away with something.
She went straight to Evelyn without registering Raphael's presence at all, pulling something from her coat pocket to show, a collection of seeds, a full handful of them, the kind a child would have had to ask for or search for.
"That's so many. Sasha, you didn't steal them?"
Sasha's clothes were as worn as Evelyn's. The one exception was a metal hair clip, kept with the careful attention of something precious, the finish maintained against all odds.
"Of course not. The farmer felt bad for us and gave some. He said something strange, though. I didn't really understand it."
Evelyn started to gesture toward Raphael, Sister Maria's lessons about manners with strangers surfacing automatically, but Sasha had already taken her hand and was pulling her back toward the entrance.
"Come on, come on, Director Golana is going to be back soon and she's nothing like Sister Maria when she catches you.
Remember what happened to the last kid who snuck out? Apparently she couldn't sit down properly for a week."
Evelyn let herself be pulled, but turned back to look at Raphael as she went.
The moment held, and then it broke.
Crack.
The scene fractured like dropped glass, pieces falling away into darkness, and the dark held for a breath before the next memory assembled itself around him.
He was inside now. A large room, the walls bare concrete gone rough with age, paint long since peeled and fallen, cobwebs accumulated in the upper corners without anyone having bothered them.
A long table dominated the center of the space, and around it sat a group of children in complete silence, eating from bowls.
What was in the bowls barely qualified as food. Some kind of grey porridge, wild greens, unripe foraged fruit, black bread broken into small pieces and cooked down, a scattering of grain throughout.
Two nuns sat at the ends of the table, and before eating they had led a prayer, the children's voices joining quietly, the words imprecise but entirely sincere.
"Thank you for this food, so that we might eat and not suffer hunger. May the hardship end soon. May the children not go to bed empty."
The prayer ended. The children ate in silence.
It tasted the way it looked. Bitterness from the unripe fruit, earthiness from the greens, the black bread's texture surviving the long cooking mostly intact and occasionally delivering small fragments of grit that had to be worked around.
No salt. No seasoning of any kind.
At the head of the table, an older woman sat over a phone with font too small for her glasses to fully resolve, her face carrying the particular exhaustion of someone who has been managing an impossible situation for a long time and has stopped expecting it to improve.
"I'm leaving."
One of the nuns said it without preamble, mid-meal.
The other nun, Sister Maria, from the expression that crossed her face, looked up sharply.
"You too?"
The first sister had clearly been holding this in for some time. She pressed her hands flat on the table, breathing unevenly, until something broke.
"Maria, you don't understand. I can't do this anymore. One meal a day, sometimes two days between meals, and what we're eating, I can't..."
She covered her face. For a moment she couldn't speak at all. Then:
"I miss a warm house. I miss clean water. I miss eating breakfast. I gave ten years to this place. Ten years. I've done what I could. I can't give more."
Maria listened to all of it without trying to interrupt. When it was done, she glanced at Director Golana, then shook her head slightly.
"Not in front of the children. If you need to talk, we can go inside."
The adults left the room in silence.
The children looked at each other across the table.
"Is Sister Ana leaving too? Like the others? Did we do something wrong?"
"I don't think so. I heard Sister Maria and the Director talking, the food supplies keep getting smaller. Look at today, one small bowl each. The adults got even less."
"Is the monastery closing? More adults keep leaving, and some of the others got adopted. There are fewer of us every time."
"If all the adults leave, what happens to us?"
"I don't know."
The worry moved around the table without landing anywhere, and Evelyn sat quietly in the middle of it until Sasha, sitting beside her, reached over and tugged her sleeve.
"Evelyn. Let's plant something. The empty lot on the side of the building. We can do it quietly."
Evelyn considered this.
"Okay."
Raphael watched all of it and felt the shape of things falling into place.
2012 The 12th District Famine.