"The Great Famine."
Raphael had read about it once, in a history book. A food crisis caused entirely by human hands.
The scene broke apart again before he could finish the thought.
When it reassembled, he was standing beside Evelyn, following her perspective as she pressed her eye against a gap in a door, watching the adults talk.
Some amount of time had passed. Evelyn was older now, but thinner, skin pale, the kind of thin that came from sustained deprivation rather than natural build, the look of a child whose body had been asked to do too much with too little for too long.
"You already know, don't you. About what Sasha was doing. Growing food without permission, using the things her mother left her to trade with the nearby farmer for seeds."
Sister Maria said it directly, not softening it. Director Golana brought her hand down hard on the table.
"You knew and you didn't stop it? Haven't you read the law? The land privatization act?"
She didn't wait for an answer.
"Everyone knows that black soil grows things. Everyone knows a small plot could feed these children. But we have no money."
The anger in her voice was already becoming something else, flattening into exhaustion.
"Every piece of that land was bought by grain merchants who buy it and let it sit empty. One step off monastery grounds and you're trespassing on their property, let alone planting anything.
They would rather watch the land go to waste, block every farmer from touching it, and watch thousands of poor people starve to death before they'd let the land value drop a single point."
Raphael listened and remembered.
2012.
The administrative body of the 12th District, operating under sustained lobbying and financial pressure from grain merchants, had passed a local ordinance that had no reasonable name for what it actually was.
The Land Privatization Act. It sold off vast stretches of northern black-soil farmland to the highest bidder.
It seized the plots that individual farmers had been working for generations, drove them off their land by force, and treated their objections as irrelevant noise.
The grain merchants had coordinated. They bought collectively, drove prices up across the region, and used the manufactured shortage to extract capital at a scale that required a disaster to sustain.
They made money on the crop prices and money on the land values simultaneously, and the money kept coming as long as the famine did.
The municipal government had cooperated in exchange for the financial support it needed for other things.
The mayor had used the resulting funds to purchase favorable media coverage and win re-election, securing his position through a crisis his office had helped engineer.
The cost of this arrangement was two hundred and ten thousand people dead from starvation.
Farmland stripped and left fallow. In the worst-affected areas, the things people did to survive had stopped being describable in ordinary language.
The perpetrators had eventually faced consequences, the legal systems had caught up, eventually, the way they sometimes did.
But the broken families, the children who had grown up in the middle of it, the years that had been taken from people who had never gotten them back, those didn't have a legal remedy.
And now Raphael was watching one of those years from the inside.
He crouched beside Evelyn without thinking about it. She was focused entirely on the gap in the door and didn't notice him.
Inside the room, the silence had grown heavy.
Director Golana pressed her hands over her face. When she spoke again, her voice had gone flat with the particular weariness of someone reciting facts that still hadn't lost their capacity to hurt.
"Under federal statute. Unauthorized cultivation of privately held land for personal benefit, 5000 Colin minimum. Criminal sentence of two years or more for all parties involved."
A pause.
"The municipal subsidy for a small institution like ours is 1500 Colin per month. We can't feed the children on that. The last time we were able to buy them new clothes was three years ago."
Sister Maria sat with her head down, her hands in her lap.
"I know. But Director, did we have a choice? Since Sister Ana left, eight children have died. Their bodies were already compromised.
When the malnutrition became severe enough, they went quickly. We didn't even have money to bury them properly."
Her voice broke on the last sentence.
"You didn't have to handle the burials, so perhaps you don't know what that was. I carried them, at night, those small cold bodies, kilometers out to wasteland and put them in the ground without markers, without anything written to say they had existed.
And the entire time I was terrified that someone would see me, because if we were reported, every child in this monastery would starve. All fifty of them."
Director Golana exhaled hard and looked up at the ceiling, eyes unfocused.
"The seed cultivation stops. I'll find another way for the food."
Maria started to speak.
"There are more children at the gate," Golana said, cutting across her.
"Their parents died, some of starvation, some beaten to death for stealing grain. They've been gathering, looking for somewhere safe. But we have nothing left to give them. We can barely feed the children we have."
She said the next part very quietly. "I had to close the door and watch them leave."
She stared at the wall.
"After they left. Where did they go? Some of them probably died somewhere cold. Some of them died of hunger before they found shelter. Some of them..." She stopped. "There are reports from some areas. People doing things to survive that."
"Enough."
Maria said it sharply, cutting her off, unwilling to follow that sentence to its end.
She looked at the wall. At the figure mounted there, a local folk deity, the Harvest Goddess, one of the older beliefs that had persisted in this region long after the official religious institutions had moved in and established themselves alongside it.
Even now, in all of this, the figure had been maintained carefully. No dust on it anywhere.
"Ah... ah—"
Maria went to her knees.
The floor was rough concrete and she didn't seem to feel it. She moved on her hands and knees to the base of the figure and pressed her forehead to the small step at its feet.
"Harvest Goddess. Please. Please save these children. The youngest of them is five years old. Their lives have barely started."
Her forehead came down again. And again. The skin broke.
"Please. You are great, you are merciful, you are capable of anything. Let them survive this winter. I give you whatever I have. My soul, my service, anything you ask, for any price!"
Blood ran from her forehead onto the step.
Director Golana watched her for a long time without speaking.
Then she opened a desk drawer and took out something that had been pushed to the back of it, a piece of parchment, yellowed, accumulated dust suggesting it had been there for years.
She looked at what was written on it with the expression of someone who has run out of other options and is examining the last one remaining.
A name. A method of contact.
"Witch Charva."