Chapter 260: What She Does Instead
The heavy wooden bucket handle dug brutally into Estella Everdawn's palm.
It was day seven of the famine gap in Bastion Seven. The freezing morning air bit at her face as she hauled the water up from the deep Vanguard well in the outer ring. The massive iron distribution pumps had failed an hour ago due to a lack of maintenance, and the civilian line wrapping around the block was dying of thirst.
Estella hoisted the second bucket onto her opposite shoulder. She marched toward the distribution center. She focused intensely on the physical burn in her muscles.
Draven Mordis had been gone for four days.
She was not pining. She was not sitting in the private courtyard staring at the southern horizon, waiting for a ghost to return. She was furious, she was exhausted, and she was working.
But the thoughts still came.
'It hits me when I am not looking,' Estella realized grimly, setting the heavy buckets down on the wooden counter.
