Blood Is Another Word for Hunger

by Rivers Solomon

Anger is an energy. A young girl, a slave in the South, is presented with a moment where she can grasp for freedom, for change, for life. She grabs it with both hands, fiercely and intensely, and the spirit world is shaken.

A Tor.com Original

Genres: Short Stories, Fantasy, Horror, Fiction, Historical Fiction, LGBT, Historical

25 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 24, 2019

About the author

Rivers Solomon writes about life in the margins, where they are much at home. They live on a small isle off the coast of the Eurasian continent.

Reviews

[Nataliya · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this short story because it’s Hugo-nominated. And my verdict it - I did not care for it. I’m not quite sure how it got the Hugo nod, really. Which is too bad, as the only other work by Rivers Solomon that I read, The Deep, was quite decent.

A young slave girl Sully kills the slaveowner family that owns her. And then she proceeds to birth out revenant ghosts - one for each of the dead people, starting with a teenage girl and then adding others to this brood. Then the idea becomes to kill more to bring more of the revenants back. Then there’s a sort of a homemade do-it-yourself hysterectomy situation. Yeah.

I’ve read weirder plots, but the strangeness is not the only thing that makes this story not work well. You see, it’s just not well-written, and that’s a failure you can’t recover from. It’s does not flow well and feels rough, like a first draft or very much a beginner work. The language is very uneven, wooden and with many words and phrases that felt incongruous for the time period described, destroying any feeling of immersion into the story. The pacing and the story structure - none of that felt finished or polished at all. Ideas are introduced, executed, poorly developed and the result is a strange partially baked mess with a jarring ending that does not fit in this story’s framework.

It needed another draft or perhaps an editor to avoid the underwhelming result. But for now I have no idea how it made it all the way to Hugo finalists.

1 star only since I two-starred (in retrospect) much better works already. Easily my least favorite of the Hugos bunch.

Very unsatisfying.

———————
Read it free here on Tor.com: https://www.tor.com/2019/07/24/blood-...

Or better - just skip this one and read The Deep by the same author instead for a much better experience.

———————

My Hugo and Nebula Awards Reading Project 2020: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another Hugo award-nominated short story, free online here at Tor.com. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:

In the American Civil War era, as soon as she hears that the man of the house has died in the war, Sully, a 15-year-old slave, slits the throats of the five women who own her and have mistreated her. That’s not really so surprising, but what happens to Sully next is.

The murder of a family by a girl so tender and young ripped a devilishly wide tunnel between the fields of existence, for it was not the way of things, and the etherworld thrived on the impermissible.

Sully’s anger cuts a path between these two planes of existence, and the spirit of a teenage girl who died long ago rides that path into Sully’s womb and is immediately born in flesh (conveniently and temporarily shrinking down to baby-size for the birthing process). The new girl, Ziza, and Sully get along well, but there are four more lives Sully took that still require balancing, additional revenants who will need more food than their farm can produce, and a nearby town full of people who are bound to come checking on the farm sooner or later.

Sully’s seething anger toward her former owners is understandable. It’s not the initial murders that take me aback here, but the ongoing bloodthirstiness of the tale, which makes for an odd combination with the romance and the hopefulness of the ending. “Blood is Another Word for Hunger” offers some disturbing metaphors for our own day and time. It’s a disquieting tale: a cry of anger and wanting retribution and more from a world that’s never felt fair.

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!

this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.

this is the FOURTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your 2019 reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.

if you scroll to the end of the reviews linked here, you will find links to all the previous years’ stories, which means NINETY-THREE FREEBIES FOR YOU!

2016: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
2017: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
2018: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

reviews of these will vary in length/quality depending on my available time/brain power.

so, let’s begin

DECEMBER 26

In a wooden house on a modest farmstead by a dense wood near a roving river to the west of town, miles from the wide road and far away from the peculiar madness that is men at war, lived the Missus, the Missus’s grown daughters Adelaide and Catherine, the Missus’s sister Bitsy, the Missus’s poorly mother Anna, and the Missus’s fifteen-year-old slave girl Sully, who had a heart made of teeth—for as soon as she heard word that Albert, the Missus’s husband, had been slain in battle, she took up arms against the family who’d raised her, slipping a tincture of valerian root and skullcap into their cups of warmed milk before slitting their throats in the night.

the first part of this story is huge and wonderful and i loved it like crazy. it began with a dark and retributive violence that reminded me of The Book of Night Women or The Devil in America, and overall i loved the writing, but i lost some of my enthusiasm around the halfway mark, when it became more reconstruction than vengeance and the bloody bits were glossed and offstage. i guess that makes me a bad person, but oh well.

anyway, that's all i have for this one, because i am bitter at goodreads removing one of my reviews for this challenge by deleting the book altogether and i don't feel like risking another deletion so i guess no more short story advent calendar for me next year. this is not the first time it has happened, but it's the first time it has happened on the calendar-in-progress, which means my reading challenge has been affected and i'm already so far behind it's just one more thing to mope about.

so.

read it for yourself here:

https://www.tor.com/2019/07/24/blood-...
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DECEMBER 14 GOODREADS ERASED THIS STORY AND MY REVIEW FROM THE SITE, SO IF YOU REALLY WANT TO READ IT, IT IS HERE. THANKS.
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come to my blog!

[Dennis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lately I'm having trouble to understand some award nominations. Is it just me? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

For me this was somewhat underwhelming.

A fifteen-year-old slave girl kills the women that raised, but also owned her. It's a very bloody beginning. But not as rewarding as it could be, as we never really get to know the five women, and barely learn anything about how life was like for Sully growing up.

But soon another element enters the fray, as Sully gives birth to a revenant. Several in fact. As for every person she kills she gives birth to one person who had died already. And the killing and birthing continues throughout the story. However, both mostly happens in the off.

Sully and the revenants spend their days together on the farmstead of her former (and now dead) slavers. But it seems like Sully only really has a relationship with one of the revenants. A girl her age who is the polar opposite of Sully. We don't learn much about anyone else. Though I suppose the other revenants are pretty busy bringing Sully more people she can kill. Which, again, happens in the off. But we don't know much, if anything about those people anyway.

The author really made some odd choices here. I would even go so far and say this is a poorly laid out story. The prose is fine, sure. But it feels like there are just some ideas thrown into the mix and none of them are elaborated on in a satisfying way.

I don't see what makes this worthy of an award nomination. But here you go, Hugo 2020 finalist for Best Short Story.

2.5 stars, rounded up, just. Because of some bad-ass moments in the beginning and also because of the hopeful ending.

This story can be read for free here: https://www.tor.com/2019/07/24/blood-...

____________________________

2020 Hugo Award Finalists

Best Novel
• The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
• Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
• The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
• A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
• Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
• The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

Best Novella
• Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom by Ted Chiang ( Exhalation)
• The Deep by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes
• The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark
• In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire
• This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
• To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

Best Novelette
• The Archronology of Love by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed Magazine, April 2019)
• Away With the Wolves by Sarah Gailey ( Uncanny Magazine Issue 30: Disabled People Destroy Fanatsy! Special Issue)
• The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye by Sarah Pinsker ( Uncanny Magazine Issue 29: July/August 2019)
• Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin
• For He Can Creep by Siobhan Carroll
• Omphalos by Ted Chiang

Best Short Story
• And Now His Lordship Is Laughing by Shiv Ramdas (Strange Horizons 9 September 2019)
• As the Last I May Know by S.L. Huang
• Blood Is Another Word for Hunger by Rivers Solomon
• A Catalog of Storms by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 26, January-February 2019)
• Do Not Look Back, My Lion by Alix E. Harrow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #270)
• Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island by Nibedita Sen (Nightmare Magazine, Issue 80)

Best Series
• The Expanse by James S. A. Corey
• InCryptid by Seanan McGuire
• Luna by Ian McDonald
• Planetfall series by Emma Newman
• Winternight Trilogy by Katherine Arden
• The Wormwood Trilogy by Tade Thompson

Best Related Work
• Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski
• Joanna Russ by Gwyneth Jones
• The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick by Mallory O’Meara
• The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn
• 2019 John W. Campbell Award Acceptance Speech by Jeannette Ng
• Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, produced and directed by Arwen Curry

Best Graphic Story or Comic
• Die, Volume 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans, letters by Clayton Cowles
• LaGuardia, written by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford, colours by James Devlin
• Monstress, Volume 4: The Chosen, written by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda
• Mooncakes by Wendy Xu and Suzanne Walker, letters by Joamette Gil
• Paper Girls, Volume 6, written by Brian K. Vaughan, drawn by Cliff Chiang, colours by Matt Wilson, letters by Jared K. Fletcher
• The Wicked + The Divine, Volume 9: "Okay" by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, colours by Matt Wilson, letters by Clayton Cowles

[Bookishrealm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting...

This is the second work that I have read by Rivers Solomon and I found it to be interesting. There are trigger warnings for gore, traumatic childbirth, death, violence, suicide. This short story focuses on the experiences of Sully a young girl who makes the decision to kill her slave owners thereby opening the doors to another world where she can resurrect the dead. I like that the narrative focused on necromancy. I think I got lost in the middle of the book when it began to focus more on rebuilding and reconstruction and that mystical element was lost a little bit. There was great conversation around the fact that sometimes revenge doesn't give us the feeling of fulfillment that we're looking for. And I think that this happens because when people do things that are bad they still leave their mark. Basically this means that when someone harms us the damage is already done whether we are able to harm them in return or not. I think that the main character struggled greatly with this when she expected to feel better after killing her Slave masters. But instead of feeling better she ends up more engulfed in her unhappiness. I would be interested in seeing where the story could go if Rivers Solomon was able to turn the short story into a full length novel. Overall I thought this was a good short story but The Deep is definitely still my favorite.

[mark monday · Rating 3 out of 5]

Death came to stay with the girl, a secret smile on her lips.
"Your life is a living death as is, I feel quite at home here.
You have given me such a comfy place in your heart.
All the world hates your people - I can see why you hunger for slaughter."
And then Death sat back, to see what would be wrought.
And so the girl took a blade, and plunged it into her body.
The girl would give birth to more deaths, and so unleash them upon the world.
A new country will be born!


read all about this new country, for free:
https://www.tor.com/2019/07/24/blood-...

[Norah Una Sumner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well that... was not what I expected, damn. There sure is blood.

[Cathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

“A young girl, a slave in the South, is presented with a moment where she can grasp for freedom, for change, for life. She grabs it with both hands, fiercely and intensely, and the spirit world is shaken.“

Odd. Very wordy, very bloody, with a faint touch of romance and hope at the end. The tale was unsettling and had no rewarding features for me.

Can be read for free here:
https://www.tor.com/2019/07/24/blood-...

————
2020 Hugo Award Finalist

Best Short Story
* “And Now His Lordship Is Laughing”, by Shiv Ramdas (Strange Horizons, 9 September 2019) ★★★☆☆
* “As the Last I May Know”, by S.L. Huang (Tor.com, 23 October 2019), ★★★★½
* “Blood Is Another Word for Hunger”, by Rivers Solomon (Tor.com, 24 July 2019), ★★☆☆☆
* “A Catalog of Storms”, by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2019), ★★☆☆☆
* “Do Not Look Back, My Lion”, by Alix E. Harrow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, January 2019)
* “Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island”, by Nibedita Sen (Nightmare Magazine, May 2019)

[Katie.dorny · Rating 3 out of 5]

A tor original novella about a young woman revolting against the five people who owned her in the Deep South and the balancing of life thereafter.

This short story relies heavily on magical realism and it did send my head spinning a little, but I enjoyed the overall storyline.

[Matthew Galloway · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was dark and violent and cruel and yet... also lovely and sort of beautiful, while being both melancholic but hopeful. So... A real mess of emotions that somehow makes me feel like the world might be a bit more okay.

[Sahitya · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s probably more of a 3.5 but I’m rounding up.

Another short story I read because it’s nominated for the Hugo.

This is pretty out of my comfort zone coz it’s so bloody and gory, with quite a bit of violence. I loved the vengeance part of the story because there’s just something satisfying about a slave girl extracting it from her masters. But what happens later with the balance between life and death, and the main character’s hunger for a place where she and her loved ones can feel safe was both disturbing as well as hopeful; and I’m amazed at the author’s ability to evoke so many contrasting emotions in me.

I’m not sure this will be for everyone, so I don’t want to outright recommend it. But if you’ve read the author’s other Hugo nominated novella The Deep and enjoyed it, you should give this a try as well. It just might surprise you.

[Lata · Rating 4 out of 5]

Visceral, full of pain, but with a small measure of hope at the end. Rivers Solomon’s continues to impress me.

[Benjamin - Les Mots Magiques · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collection de nouvelles et d’essais publiés à droite à gauche en VO, Soif de sang est une bonne porte d’entrée à l’univers de Rivers Solomon. En effet, ces différents textes sont l’occasion de découvrir un beau panel des thématiques qui animent l’auteurice. On y parle notamment de racisme, de genre, de trauma, de santé mentale, ou encore de maternité.
⠀
J’ai bien accroché aux différentes nouvelles, déjà pour leur côté très engagé mais aussi pour la plume, parfois assez crue, de l’auteurice. J’ai quand même été un peu frustré de ne pas en avoir plus mais c’est souvent mon problème avec les nouvelles.
⠀
Concernant les essais, ils n’ont fait que confirmer mon intérêt pour les écrits de l’auteurice qui semble vraiment être une personne passionnante et extrêmement humaine.
⠀
Après avoir lu ce court recueil, je n’ai plus qu’une hâte : découvrir tous les romans de Rivers Solomon qui traînent dans ma PAL depuis trop longtemps, malgré le fait que j’ai toujours été persuadé qu’ils me plairaient !

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story starts out as it means to continue, violent and bleak, with the main character's internal landscape perhaps scarred beyond saving. But what is saving?

At first, the spare, emotionally broken austere reality is tempered with poetic language, and as the story progresses the language gets more and more beautiful, achingly so, until the portions I thought I would absolutely have to quote in a review to convey said beauty turned out to be almost all of the last portion of the story. So I won't, I'll leave them here for you to read. CW: This is a very violent story, and the scoured-out soul of the MC is arguably even harder to read, but I thought it was absolutely worth it by the end. This is my first Rivers Solomon encounter, and I'm stunned and gratified.

[Sage Agee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short story does not get the love it deserves. This is the first short story I’ve ever given 5 stars, Rivers Solomon’s writing has this deep intimacy and intelligence, and the stories they are able to craft are wildly beautiful. This is no exception to that, but they managed to do it in 24 pages.

[Evelina | AvalinahsBooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Rivers Solomon's writing. This was great.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my Must Read stories for July 2019: https://1000yearplan.com/2019/08/01/t...

[Lois · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was dark, unique, beautiful, strange, and poignant.
I loved it

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was odd but beautifully written. Review to come.

[Justine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for the 2020 Hugos. My second piece of short fiction from Rivers Solomon, and I'd definitely like to read more from them! The story of a slave carving out a place in the world and the supernatural beings she births (quite literally) after violent actions, this was a powerful tale that I think would be a great one to read over and over -- I think you'd get more out of it each time.

[Amanda at Bookish Brews · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weird, dark, interesting. I, uh, wanted to like it more, but maybe I just didn't get it?

[Natasha Niezgoda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vengeance isn’t fulfilling when the pain you sought to heal just keeps coming back again.

[Michael Sorbello · Rating 3 out of 5]

A 15-year-old slave named Sully lives in the Deep South, enduring constant abuse under the Missus, her two daughters and her sister and aunt. After catching news that the man/master of the house was killed in battle during the civil war, Sully takes the chance to drug the abusive women of the household and free herself from her torment by slashing all their throats. Her violence, hatred and rebellion against her abusers and her predestined role in the world is so strong that it rips a hole in the ether, making her body a conduit of the spirit world. In exchange for every evil life she takes, the lost soul of one of her ancestors is reborn through the spiritual gateway in her uterus. Thus begins a violent quest of destruction and regeneration.

A solid civil war revenge story with a very unique paranormal twist. Revenge is used as a metaphorical conduit of literally being reborn through surviving cycles of trauma and learning to move on in the world with the guidance and support of other survivors. Though choosing violence often creates more problems than it solves, sometimes people are pushed into unfair situations where there are no other options. Nobody truly wins under these circumstances, but the survivors of the aftermath have the chance to hopefully make things better for future generations.

***

If you're looking for some dark ambient music for reading horror, dark fantasy and other books like this one, then be sure to check out my YouTube Channel called Nightmarish Compositions: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPPs...

[Powerschnute · Rating 5 out of 5]

Durch die TOR Originals auf diese Geschichte aufmerksam geworden, habe ich dabei nicht nur ein sehr tolles Kleinod gefunden, das mich zutiefst berührt hat, sondern auch einen neuen Autor. Rivers Solomon war mir bislang absolut unbekannt. Da Rivers Solomon transgender ist und im Englischen die Pronomen they/their bevorzugt, bin ich etwas aufgeschmissen, was das deutsche Äquivalent dazu ist. Ich würde zu xier tendieren, weil they/their für mich eher in die non-binary Kategorie fällt. Falls ich dies falsch sehe, korrigiert mich bitte.

Aber zur Geschichte: ich wusste nicht, wie stark sie mich berühren würde. Sully ist ein fünzehnjähriges Sklavenmädchen, das seine Herrinnen tötet. Für jedes genommene Leben muss sie eines gebären und so kommt als erstes Ziza aus der Anderwelt in unsere Welt. Später folgen noch weitere.

Beeindruckt hat mich Sullys Wut und ihre Rage. Ich fragte mich ständig, wieviele Ungerechtigkeiten ein so junger Mensch schon ertragen haben muss, dass er soviel Wut in sich trägt. Diese Wut wird auch nicht weniger, als die Herrinnen tot sind und die Geister von Sully geboren werden. Sie erkennt auch, dass sie nie mit dem zufrieden sein wird, was sie hat.

Diese Geschichte ist eine Geschichte über Liebe. (yes, there’s gay love, deal with it!) Eine Geschichte über Wut und Einsamkeit. Eine Geschichte darüber, wie die Sklaverei anders hätte enden können, wenn es auch hier eine sehr blutiges und brutales Ende gewesen wäre.

Sullys Wut und ihre Einsamkeit berührten mich zutiefst und standen in starkem Kontrast zu Zizas fröhlichem Wesen und ihrer Liebe zu Sully.

Fazit:
Blood Is Another Word For Hunger hat mich sehr beeindruckt. Von Rivers Solomon werde ich wohl noch xier Werk An Unkindness Of Ghosts lesen müssen und ich hoffe natürlich auf mehr Werke aus Solomons Feder.

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blood Is Another Word for Hunger was originally published in July 2019 as a Tor.com Original and it was a Hugo Award Short Story Finalist, I found this story to be quite intriguing and enjoyed the premise.

This is a short story about Sully a 15 year old slave girl who "frees" herself by murdering her mistress and 4 others after learning that her master has died. But what ensues after that is a tale of death and rebirth, murder, necromancy, freedom, love and hate.

In reading this short story it gave me Beloved and The Color Purple vibes.

[Julia971 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book lead me on very mysterious paths, and I appreciated it. It was a short read but I intend to keep this author on my "list".

[Andria Potter · Rating 3 out of 5]

A generous extra star for the pretty cover, the story starts with a lot of long run on sentences that made it hard to focus and then kept going, on and on until I just dnf'd. 2.5 stars rounded up.

[Bobbi Jo · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's bad when I DNF a short story. There's questionable word use very early on (Obi Wan says "slaked" is not the word you're looking for; pants are worn on your lower body [try PANTING, instead])... I can overlook that sort of thing, though, usually.

The first (and nicer) problem, to me, is the story is pretty ambitious in scope and probably would benefit from being AT LEAST a novella. It deals with some intense issues and situations without giving any of it gravity as it RACES towards its word count limit, without bothering to explain anything. It feels like there was no editor because so much of the story seems to exist only in the author's head.

A more aggravating problem is, though very little is given by way of description or setting, the style of writing seems to assume the things mentioned in the narration have previously been described or referred to. This is a sort of subtle issue but one that always annoys the shit out of me, when I see it. For example, 'ham' and 'onion' are mentioned exactly one time each in this entire story but this happens, "thick pieces of meat from the ham hock mixed in among the onion," at one point. THE ham hock? THE onion? What ham hock is that? Where is this onion from? I start scanning back, looking for the prior mention of said 'ham' or 'pig' or 'onion' because surely I missed something but, no, I didn't. It's just sloppy writing.

It's free on Tor for now but I don't have time to invest in reading a badly written story for a premise that requires more time and effort to be interesting.

[Davy Kent · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a difficult review to write because I'm of two minds about Blood Is Another Word for Hunger. I settled on a compromise of two stars, because one mind says one star and the other says three.

I find short stories difficult to really enjoy, so me not liking this one isn't a great shock. Where Blood differs is that I feel it actually has the potential to be a full-length novel. Its shortness is a flaw here. Normally, I can do without a short story's message regardless of length, but this book would have translated really well to becoming a novel. This is where my edge towards three stars comes in, because I have to give credit to the premise. I liked the bones of this. It would have been a great slow-burn story about abuse, revenge, and recovery.

But, on the flip side, it's really short. This works against it, especially because it has a problem with wordiness. It's too short yet it spends too much time wasting words... all the while neglecting to mention essential components to the story and environment. Very little information is offered to the reader, instead making you assume details and hope you're right. I tend to find that short stories rely on abstractness and aestheticism, and Blood Is Another Word for Hunger plays right into that. Personally, I don't like it, especially when I can see the potential beneath it all.

In its current form, I wouldn't recommend this. However, were it made into a 60k-word story... That could be very interesting indeed.

[Lis Carey · Rating 5 out of 5]

During the years of the American Civil War, a farm now peopled only by women--the wife of the owner, their two daughters, her mother, her sister, and their fifteen-year-old slave girl, Sully, gets word that the owner has died in battle. Sully forms a careful plan, and puts it into action. That night, she mildly drugs all five of the women, and cuts their throats. The next day, she washes her clothes and all the bed linens, digs a hole, and buries them.

A few hours later, she gives birth to another teenage girl, who has been dead for two hundred years. Sully has, due to her rage, and the five murdered women, become a pathway from the other side.

What follows really should be more horrific and less a satisfying tale of Sully, Ziza, and other "recruits" successfully building free and productive lives together. Yet, I found myself really liking these young women and their other friends, and after each moment of "oh, no, I'm supposed to be appalled at that," I went back to cheering them on. Fighting for freedom is never a bad thing, and you use the tools you have.

Recommended.

I received this story as part of the Hugo Voters packet, and am reviewing it voluntarily.