Nate woke before the horn, his stomach already awake and empty, and lay a while looking at the cane roof of the common house. Above him, in the bunk, someone coughed. Below, a boy of the trade — not a child, fifteen or sixteen, still with a right to the bowl — scratched a jungle bite and did not turn over. The air smelled of bodies that slept too close, of old smoke, and of the root pap that never quite washed out of the bowls.

Today he turned twenty-one. In Hoya de Karr that was not a feast. It was a door closing behind him.

He sat up. His ribs marked the fiber shirt. He had never had meat to spare; the common house ration was not enough to invent a body. Long arms, thin wrists, a work-mark on the palm from passing needle and cord so long in the net workshop. The warriors, when they came through for water, did not look at him. Or they looked and went on, which was worse.

He went down barefoot to the bowl yard. The stone floor was cold and damp. Beyond the inner palisade the jungle could be heard, a continuous noise of insect and leaf, and farther off the dull blow of something large moving between trunks and not letting itself be seen. No one from the common house hunted that. Hunting was for those who no longer ate from the common pot. Or for the warriors, who were not many anymore and did not spend arrows on a skinny man from the workshop.

The cook — an old woman, one of those who stayed after the Quiebre — held out the bowl without asking him the day.

“The last,” she said, and it was not cruelty. It was the account. “Until the horn. After that, the pot doesn’t know you.”

Nate looked at the bottom. Gray pap, a thread of fat, a piece of smoked root the size of his thumb. He ate it slowly, standing, so it would last. The heat went down to his stomach and went out at once.

“Materials?” he asked.

“After the circle. Not before. If I give them to you now, some clever one will trade them for a bite and you’ll go out with empty hands.”

He nodded. He washed his mouth with a sip from the common jar. The water tasted of stone and moss. In the inner rings there was still a cistern. In the outer ones, the old people said, the Quiebre had split the channels and what remained was mud or bone.

He had not known the before. He had been born when the Hoya was already an empty tooth: houses for thousands, people for three hundred, and those three hundred almost all with white hair or with a spear. The young of the common house were a handful. Those who turned twenty-one went out. Some came back on the fourth day with a kill and a different face. Others did not come back, and the circle did not send anyone to look for them. The tribe did not answer for those who were already of age.

Midmorning they called him to the circle of slabs, under the tree that no longer gave fruit. Mother Sorn sat on the low stone, not by a queen’s rank — in Karr there was no queen — but because her knees did not obey her. Beside her, two warriors. One of them, the one with the scar on his neck, looked Nate up and down and spat to the side, without theater.

“Nate, of the net workshop,” Sorn said. Her voice came out hoarse, used. “Today you leave the common house. The ration ends. The common roof ends. If you get sick, there is no herb from the pot for you. If a beast eats you, no spear goes out for your name. Do you hear?”

“I hear.”

“The Hoya can give you on the way out what is left over, not what you need. A bone knife. Three nails. A hide. A rope. A pot of charcoal. With that you go out better off than with nothing. It isn’t a debt. It’s a push. After that, you supply yourself.”

They set the things at his feet. The knife was short and yellowish. The rope was bitten at one end. The hide smelled of badly dried animal. Nate picked them up anyway. In this tribe, refusing a nail was for someone who had not gone hungry.

Sorn looked at him a moment more. Not with pity. With the same look you give a roof that may or may not hold the rain.

“For lack of people,” she went on, “the one who turns twenty-one chooses. Not a prize. A burden. Women who have no man to answer for them, and whom the law puts under your roof and your hunt. You eat, they eat. If you don’t eat, they don’t eat, and the shame is yours, not the Hoya’s. You choose two. No more. No less, if they are there and you dare. Today they are there.”

A short murmur among the slabs. There were not many waiting at the edge of the circle. Some already had the mark of another house. Others were too old for the law of the new mouths, or too young, and those the Hoya still counted as common ration. Nate saw first the ones who were not going to be his: one with a child on her hip, already claimed; one who turned away before they named her.

And he saw the two who were.

Vessa stood with her arms crossed, black hair loose and heavy down her back. Twenty-three. Her body filled the fiber tunic as if the cloth had been cut for another life, a life of more food: wide hips, high chest, thighs that marked when she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She was not soft. She had the shoulders of someone who carries water and argues. The mouth, still. The eyes, not. They went over him — wrist, rib, thin neck — and stayed on his face with a clean scorn, without ornament.

A step behind her, Ryn. Twenty-two. Red hair fell in a badly made braid, loose at the temples. Shorter. Quieter. Her gaze also went down Nate’s body, and it was not sweet: it was the gaze of someone who has already done the account and cannot find where to set the hunger. When he held it, she lowered her eyes, not from respect. So as not to spend them.

Sorn did not smile.

“Name them.”

Nate swallowed. The morning’s pap no longer existed.

“Vessa,” he said. “And Ryn.”

Vessa let out a short laugh, ugly, that never quite became a laugh.

“Of course,” she said, loud enough for the slabs to hear. “The one from the nets. The one who can’t lift a deer even with both hands. What luck of ours.”

Ryn did not speak. She looked at her own hands, then at the bone knife in Nate’s, and pressed her mouth. Her scorn made no noise. It stayed on her face, warm and deep, like a small fever.

No one in the circle contradicted them. The law did not ask that they want him. It asked that they go out.

Chapter 2

There was no ceremony of hands. In Hoya de Karr, when people were plentiful, they said wrists were tied with red thread and meat was eaten until the fire sank. That was an old woman’s tale. Mother Sorn pointed at the door of the slabs with her chin.

“You go out before the second horn. If the second horn finds you inside, the common house throws you out anyway, and without materials. Vessa. Ryn. The law has already heard you. What you think of him, you say it on the path, not on my stone.”

Vessa did not ask for time. ...