The Sweetest Dark Read Free

reverie; my head jerked back and my hat mashed against my seat.
    â€œEr—sorry—”
    â€œRighto,” he said cheerfully enough, but his hand didn’t move.
    Ticket, ticket—I straightened my hat and patted my empty coat pockets. Where had it gone? I’d begun to run both hands rather desperately down my skirt before I recalled I’d stuck it in the suitcase at my feet.
    I bent over to snap open my case. The stout woman crammed next to me shifted irritably. The third-class compartments had rows of narrow wooden benches and too many passengers and precious little else. My bench mate had been pushing her boot against my bag for the last half hour, as if she could shove it through the wall of the train to get it out of her way.
    She reeked of days-old sweat and chickens. I wished I could shove her out of the train.
    â€œAll the way to Wessex, then?” the agent inquired, still jovial, his hand punch biting holes in my ticket with a series of rapid click-click-click s.
    I nodded.
    He cocked his head and gave me a dubious squint. “Land Girl, izzit?”
    I knew I looked young; I was small and angular in all the wrong places, something the too-tight coat seemed to emphasize. But the Land Girls, those strapping city girls headed out to England’s farms to finish the work all our fighting young men could not do, were usually at least eighteen. However old I actually was, I knew I was nowhere near that.
    â€œSchool,” I said, and the man’s face cleared. He gave me back my ticket.
    â€œAye. Wessex, then. Good luck, luv.”
    â€œThank you.”
    He walked on. As the train rocked back and forth, the chicken-woman began to brush at the wrinkles in her dress, using the movement as an excuse to force me harder to the wall. She spread her legs and jammed her foot up against my case again.
    I had not grown up in the halls of Blisshaven for nothing. I freed my own foot and kicked down against her instep. For someone my size, I was surprisingly strong.
    â€œOh, I’m awfully sorry,” I said sweetly, meeting her outraged look. “Was that your foot? I had no idea. It’s so dreadfully tight in here, don’t you agree? I swear, I can hardly breathe.”
    I had to do that only twice more before she got up and left.
    ...
    The hours crept by. As the sky beyond my window grew glummer and darker and the stops more frequent, the train began to empty. Around four I rummaged in my case and found the meal that had been packed for me back at the Home: an apple, a thick slice of buttered bread, and an actual, amazing seared pork sausage.
    The Home had never been overly generous with food, and meat was already becoming scarce. I stared down at the sausage in its waxed-paper packet, genuinely shocked that someone in the kitchens had thought to give it to me. Perhaps it was meant as a final farewell.
    The air raids were taking their toll, and the government had recommended sending as many children out of London as possible. Blisshaven itself had been hit nearly right off. No one had been killed, but the entire northern section, a decrepit warren of leaky pipes and peeling paint that had served as our schooling arena, was now rubble. Most of us considered it an improvement.
    So the Home had been emptied. I was, in fact, the very last orphan to leave, and I knew this was not because I was the eldest or the youngest or the least or most attractive, or any of the other rumored criteria that had been whispered about the dormitory in the days after the hit.
    I knew I was the last because I was tainted. I had been sent to Moor Gate.
    All the other wards had been scattered to the four corners of the kingdom, sent to whichever other foundling homes had room to take in more of the unwanted.
    But for me. I hadn’t been assigned to another orphanage.
    â€œThe Iverson School for Girls,” Mr. H. W. Forrester had informed me, examining me like a nearsighted owl from over the tops of