Rebirth15 min read
I Woke Up Cold — Then Took Back Everything
ButterPicks14 views
I woke to cold that pinched my bones and a dark roof above me that felt like an insult. I sat up, felt the thin cotton of my jacket, and cursed in my head: this is not how a special-operations soldier wakes.
“Are you awake?” a small voice whispered.
I blinked. The moon let a sliver of light through the door crack. I counted the breaths around me — three children, the thin rise and fall of a woman on her side, and my own heavy breath.
“This is Kamryn,” I told myself out loud, like an oath. “You’re Kamryn now. Get up.”
I swung my legs over the edge of the kang and touched cooling clay. My fingers found holes in the padded jacket, no cotton left inside. I pulled the thin quilt over my siblings first — protect others first, like a habit hammered into me by years of training.
“Don’t wake,” I said softly.
Footsteps creaked outside. Someone threaded the room like a sparrow — quick, used to moving for fear of being heard. I felt one warm hand on my forehead, then another hand on my shoulder.
“Good, she’s breathing,” a woman said. Her voice was rough but quick to soften. “Kamryn, eat a little. The soup’s still warm.”
“Soup?” I managed. My stomach complained. “What time is it?”
“About dawn.” The woman’s hand left my shoulder. The quilt shifted. “Eat quick and go cut firewood. Don’t lie around.”
I stared at the patchy floor, at the wooden stools that were more blocks of wood than furniture, at the low table scarred by knives and years. I thought about the last thing I remembered: an explosion, the burn of metal, the weight of someone’s life under my hands. Then nothing. Then cold and a mouthful of someone else’s name.
“This is not a dream,” I heard myself say. “You did it, Kamryn. You’re here.”
“Who are you talking to?” Hendrix — my little brother — poked his head in, sleepy and too trusting of the world.
“I’m talking to myself,” I said. “Eat.”
Hendrix ran to the stove. January — my older cousin who feels like an aunt and is still the same size as me in this twelve-year-old body — smiled like an open window.
“You came back,” January said. “You’re not burned or anything. You scared us.”
“Scared us how?” I asked.
“By fainting on the road,” she said. “You hit your head when the cow ran. Aunt Lenore said you shouldn’t be lazy; go cut wood.”
I remembered being dragged from a van, hot and heavy, and then waking in another life. I remembered a green-white jade tag slipping into my hand as I pried a body from the road. Now a creak at the foot of the house made me look up. The small thing wrapped in mud had been my key.
When I walked outside the sun was an orphaned coin. The village smelled like smoke and sweet grass and hard work. Women already stood trading stories like coins. One of them — a sharp-voiced older woman who owned the kitchen of our house — saw me and pointed.
“You awake? Don’t be a princess. Come chop wood. Winter’s coming.”
“Fine.” I bit my tongue, the old reflex. I held the wooden cleaver awkwardly in small hands that had once been made for different work. My body annoyed me — weak, a twelve-year-old’s arms and bones. My mind hummed with training memory like a second pulse.
“You look thin,” my mother, Cassandra, said, pressing a bowl of watery congee into my hands. “Eat. Then go.”
“I will.” I ate. I learned to swallow the taste of lignified rice. It tasted like survival.
We were the third household down in the long courtyard. Lenore — the matriarch — sat where she always sat: expression like a ledger, measuring us all in scoldings and dues.
“She kicked us all out last time,” January whispered later as we moved firewood. “She said we were taking straw while the big rooms had no right.”
I had questions — why did this family treat us as if we were a different species? Why had I no memory of being raised here, yet I had their child’s face? But every question dug into a thousand other questions. Survival is short and sharp. We chopped wood.
By noon I had caught a rhythm similar to breathing. I made traps where I had once mapped assault routes. I dug a shallow pit, set a crude spike, covered it. The set of muscles behind my ribs remembered force. After an hour, I slumped against a rock so exhausted my whole life blurred. My hand brushed something in the dirt.
It was white-green, no more than an inch wide, smoothed by soil: a small jade tag, pale as the moon. When I touched it the world went slightly soft-edged, like a camera out of focus.
I closed my eyes and thought, quietly: “In.”
A second later I could feel cool grass under my cheek. I opened my eyes and there it was — a small clearing, a pool of water under a soft sky. The water tasted clean and cold and did something to my muscles that no army ration ever could. I drank and felt my limbs light. I smiled and laughed because I could feel the strength coming back like a tide.
“What is it?” I whispered to no one, then realized: I had a space. My own little place with clean water and a house and a spring. I laughed with the stupid delight of someone who had found a secret bunker.
I stayed until the sky bruised. I trained until the sweat tasted like metal, then drank the pool until my arms stopped shaking. Then — because I always came back to duty — I stepped out of the space and walked toward home with a couple of rabbits clutched like promises.
When I came in the yard there was surprise. A boy shouted, then a voice chided. “The sweepster’s back with meat? That girl got lucky.”
“Let me help,” I said, and handed the rabbits to my father.
“You did this?” Thomas — my father — asked. He had the hands of a scholar and the hunched shoulders of a man who had carried the costs of other people’s hopes. He looked at me with something like cautious wonder.
“It’s a start.” I said.
That night we ate better than we had in years. For once the bowl of rabbit was not a scrap. The old house breathed relief. Even Lenore ate and looked at me in a way that was not all calculation.
“You did good,” Thomas said after the children slept. “Tell me how.”
I told him. I tried to explain the pool, the jade tag, the way the water cinched my bones like a hand. He listened. He did not understand, but his brain checked and made plans.
“Keep this to yourself,” he said. “If anyone learns it… they will come. People like Fitzgerald will come.”
“Fitzgerald?” I asked.
He put down his teacup. “Fitzgerald Craft. He’s the county lord’s client. He takes and takes. He costs us more than money.”
We had a name for the man who had bruised our family: he was the power that had pressed its thumb into our lives. My soldier’s instincts curled.
“I’ll be careful,” I said.
“Be better than careful,” Thomas corrected softly. “Be invisible until you’re not.”
I went back to the space every day. I trained until my shoulders thickened and my legs remembered how to push and leap with the power I had used before. I taught myself to move silent as dusk.
I also learned the village. People talk. Names that seemed small in my new life carried weight. There was Lenore Ferreira as matriarch. There was January Duffy, the cousin-child-turned-aunt who fed me and smoothed my hair. There was Hendrix Horn, my little brother who dug trenches for fun. And then there was Fitzgerald Craft, the man who had sent his boys into the county jail earlier and left our lives cracked like a window.
“Fitzgerald’s boys?” someone in the market spat. “They beat Thomas in the county, then the magistrate told the family to stand down. Who can stand down when someone stands up in that county?”
I had a map of wrongs. The thread that led back to the pawnshop run by Fitzgerald’s people, the man’s constant extortion and unsmiling appetite, the story of my father humiliated in the county square. I could have walked away. I could have kept my mouth like a locked jaw. But being a soldier taught me favors but not surrender.
When I could do more for the house with my own hands than scrawl applications for work, I started going to town. I sold rabbits and birds. I learned arithmetic again from Thomas in the evenings. I saved silver until the numbers looked like armor. I bought tools, not jewelry: iron parts for traps, better steel for knife tips, string for composite bows. I learned who smelled corrupt and who merely had a clean conscience.
“Why don’t you take this, Kamryn?” Thomas offered one night, his voice small. “You already do so much.”
“I can pay my own way,” I said. “Let me. Let me do this by myself.”
He nodded. “Be careful with money. Be careful with shopkeepers.”
I nodded. But quiet is not always safe. Quiet breeds the same old injustice. I saw a chance: Fitzgerald’s pawnshop in the town — a low-windowed house with heavy shutters — began to attract gossip. People said the owner took too much and returned too little. People like stories and then repeat them until the story is truth.
One evening I walked the lane to the pawnshop and listened. A man in front of the shop argued with the clerk. “You said two taels,” he cried. “This paper says something else.”
The clerk held his ledger high like a shield. “Sign here,” he said. “You signed.”
“The signature is not mine,” the man insisted. “My hands are old. You’re lying.”
I watched the exchange and felt a cold hardening. The clerk was one of Fitzgerald’s men. Fitzgerald had friends with ledger ink and magistrate ears. If the man was lying, that meant Fitzgerald’s net was a rope around everyone’s neck.
That night, I crawled onto the roof with no gear but my training and the small green jade tag in my pocket. I had the space. I had the pool. I had a small thing I could do without swords and without judges: I could take what was already being stolen and give it back to those who needed it, and I could expose the man who had been making the village bleed.
I slipped inside like a shadow sliding between blades. I moved without sound through the room where three sleeping men lay — a clerk and two burly watch-hands — all drunk off the cold coin of domination. I tied them up with strips of their garments, bound them with the tightness of knots that did not cut but did not loosen.
I plundered the boxes the way a surgeon plucks splinters. I took ledger slips and seals, and most frightening of all, chests heavy with silver piled like small moons. I stole enough to feed my family for years, to buy cloth and heat.
When I ran through the yard and over the low wall, I felt the old adrenaline of combat: a clean, justified theft. I did not pretend I was a saint. I justified myself with need and then with justice.
Back home I counted coin until my hands shook. It was more than anyone had expected. More than the rumor said. When I went to close the ledger and hide the loot, Thomas, who had always been the man with his brain in other people's books, looked at the pile and started to laugh with the kind of relief I had never seen from him.
“You did this?” he asked, half-proud, half-worried.
“Yes,” I said. “We’re not starving. We’re buying cotton. We’re buying grain. We are not a family that will become invisible again.”
We spent quietly, not like men who had replaced poverty with extravagance, but like men repairing a rift. I bought fabric for a cotton bed in every room. I bought thread and needles and paid an ironworker to make the pieces I sketched: an arm brace, a hammer that balanced like a hand, and the mechanism for a small repeating crossbow — something no one in this town had seen.
“Kamryn,” Thomas said one night, his voice low. “You must be careful with Fitzgerald. He will notice.”
“He will.” I fixed my eyes on the small jade medallion around my neck. “And when he does, he will see what we look like without him.”
I planned like a soldier and acted like a widow of war. I kept giving meat, but I kept more for ourselves. I used the space to hide the live animals and tools; no one could suspect a dried-up pond under a hill. I trained Hendrix and Bonnie until their punches were honest and their legs knew how to take them through gaps. I taught them to stand like people who belonged to themselves.
Word of the pawnshop theft spread. Rumors are wolves that find a flock. Fitzgerald’s men swore and stamped. Fitzgerald himself did not storm the village at once. He came with a slow hand, a smile that measured how much a person could pay with their throat.
One day he came to the market square when we had a small fair: cakes, warm bread, and the smell of meat. He came wearing silk that had no place in our weather and a ring like a small sun on his finger. His presence is authority like a shout in a chapel.
I walked up to him with the quiet nerve of someone who had spent months in the dark learning to move her hands without tremor.
“Fitzgerald,” I said in front of the stall where people took in a breath at the appearance of trouble. “We need to speak.”
He smiled like a man who has always been served. “And who might you be, child?”
“I am Kamryn Wallin,” I said. “You tried to take my father’s dignity in the county. You took more than that from many people here. Your men took silver and took faces.”
His smile lasted a blink. Then he laughed. “You come here with a child’s scold? Come now. Everyone knows my family helps the magistrate. Who are you to speak?”
“Everyone knows you ‘help.’ Everyone knows the ledger that changes in your hand is a different life to those who sign.” I held up a stack of slips I had taken. “Tell me, Mr. Craft, which of these are signed honest?”
His face tightened.
“You don’t make threats in my square. I have men,” he hissed.
“You have men,” I agreed. “And I have witnesses.”
Word had spread. People edged closer. A hundred faces ringed us. Some were curious, some were frightened. A little boy with a cloth cap looked up at me wide-eyed. A woman in a blue apron held a child to her chest like a shield. The market grew quiet, the kind of quiet that is a held breath.
“You’re lying,” Fitzgerald said to the crowd. “This child has nothing. Why listen to a thief?”
“Thief?” my voice edged steel. “You call me thief while your men take the poor’s silver and call it law? I took coin that was yours only by your rope, taken without right.”
Fitzgerald’s expression collapsed into something more animal than human. The crowd leaned forward.
“You must have papers,” he said. “Proof, then. Give me proof. Who stole from my house? That is theft.”
I turned and tossed the ledger slips that I had hidden into the market’s open sun. They scattered like pale fish.
“These are copies of your receipts,” I said. “This is the record of what you've taken. This is how you forced people to sign for amounts they never received. This is how you kept names like Thomas on paper and out of bread. This is how you made them kneel.”
A woman in the crowd — someone who had had her cow taken by Fitzgerald two winters ago — began to cry out. “He took my cow!” she screamed. “He says I owe him two silver, but I only owed him half a sack of grain. He took my cow and left my children to the road.”
More people stepped forward. The law that Fitzgerald had bought with coin was not a blanket; the law had a seam. People started handing me things — letters, receipts, tags, tears. My father stood up and came into the ring, shaking.
“You took his honor,” Thomas said, voice cracking. “You humiliated me in the county and took my father’s life with the shame.”
Now Fitzgerald’s mouth worked like a trapped fish. He went from polite man to puffed beast.
“That’s not true!” he spat. “You dare— you slander me. I am a man of standing.”
“Standing?” a man in the back cried. “You stand on our necks.”
Fitzgerald’s face reddened. For the first time I saw fear in his eyes. He shifted as if his silk suddenly weighed a ton.
“You lie! You lie!” he screamed. “This is the work of a thief! Take her! Arrest her!”
Two of his men stepped forward, but they were mid-step, and the crowd blocked them like a human hedge. A woman from the crowd — a quiet baker’s wife — spat on the ground at Fitzgerald’s feet.
“You took my husband’s savings, scrawled his hand, told him to sign for grain he never got,” she said hoarsely. “And when he could not pay, you took the only land he had left.”
The crowd’s murmur swelled into something else: accusation. Fitzgerald’s flinty smile flickered. His voice tried to be iron.
“You accuse me with my own ledgers?” He grabbed one of the slips I had shown and squinted. “These are forgeries.”
“Forgeries?” I raise my voice. “Bring the clerk, Fitzgerald. Bring the man who signed the original affidavit at your hands. Bring your seal.”
He snapped his fingers. A boy, pale and small, came. He was Fitzgerald’s clerk. The clerk looked at the crowd and at the papers, then at Fitzgerald, then he began to shake.
“You told me to change the numbers,” the clerk said in a voice like crushed paper. “You said people could not read. You said no one would know. You said it was for the treasury.”
“You liar!” Fitzgerald roared. He turned white with fury. “You denounce me now?”
The clerk shook his head. “I cannot force their hands. They refused. They demanded receipts. I kept receipts. I could not live with it.”
Fitzgerald’s calm snapped like old twine. He lunged toward the clerk and the crowd stepped between them like a river dam. A hundred voices began to chant the same simple demand: justice.
“Listen!” Fitzgerald hissed. “I will take every one of you to court! I will tear your lives apart!”
“Then take us,” someone said. “We will go to the magistrate with paper. But this time the paper will be ours.”
A tall man from the back — one who had once been a soldier at the county gate — stepped forward. He drew a circle in the dirt and numbered the receipts that I had tossed. People lined up to confirm their own papers. One by one, Fitzgerald’s men shrank. The ledger was a net, and each fish in it shook free.
Fitzgerald’s face emptied through stages. First he looked insulted. Then his color fled. He snapped and clawed for someone to back him up. His men did not hurry to hug him now. He tried to deny and then to bluff, “This is perjury!” he screamed. “You have no right to accuse me!”
A woman in the crowd produced the magistrate’s own seal, a sobbing thing she’d taken when her house had been threatened by officials in cahoots with Fitzgerald. The seal had a crack. The crack was proof that paperwork can be flawed. The crowd’s interpreter was clear.
“You can not hide now,” someone said simply. “We have real receipts, real signatures. You scrawled false numbers. You forced signatures. You have been caught.”
Fitzgerald staggered. For a moment he looked like a man hearing his own funeral procession.
“You…you are lying!” He roared. “This is ifry— ifry—” Words broke. His face twitched. People began to clap and shout. Some laughed, an ugly spontaneous laugh that sounded like relief.
“Beg him,” someone said. “Make him beg.”
I felt a part of my old self — the soldier who’d watched enemies break — smiling coldly. “Fitzgerald,” I said loud enough that everyone heard, “kneel.”
He glared at first. Then he staggered, searching for a way out. The magistrate’s men were near but had not stepped in; in this market the rules were made by the crowd complaining first.
He took a step, then another, then he fell to his knees on the hard dirt where goats had walked earlier that day. The silk slid and his hands trembled. He looked ashamed, and then he tried to push the shame away with rage.
“Get up!” he cried. “Get up! I am not—”
“Get up when you apologize,” I said. “Tell them how you forced them to loose their little savings. Tell them how you had the guard beat a man until he wet himself in the magistrate’s cells. Tell them you lied.”
For a long minute Fitzgerlad’s steel met with the crowd’s weight. Then his expression broke. He began to speak — at first sharp and full of bluster. Then his voice caught, then he trailed into denial. Then — and it was the best half hour I’d never wanted to see — he collapsed.
“You…you don’t understand,” he said. “I only did what was needed to keep the town from chaos. They would have wasted grain. They would have sold children.”
“You justified robbery?” the baker’s wife spat.
“No—” He tried to cover that, and then something raw surfaced. “Forgive me. Please. I…I was greedy. I thought I could be above the law and guard it too.”
Then he began to cry like a punished child, tears that dribbled into the dirt. The crowd leaned in. Some people took out writing papers and sketched the scene — no cameras here, but hands remembered, faces would remember. Some people turned away. Others took out pieces of paper and began to write testimonies.
At first people hissed and stepped forward to hit him. Then the crowd grew quiet. Someone — a blacksmith’s apprentice — took a small stick and pushed it in the dirt near Fitzgerald’s head, like planting order where disorder had grown.
“You humiliated us,” the blacksmith said. “You took our grain. You made us beg. You sat in silk while our children froze. Beg for them, Fitzgerald. Beg for forgiveness. Give back what you took.”
Fitzgerald made all the motions that guilty men make: bright eyes, quick words, then a plea turning into a jumble of promises. He tried to bargain.
“Money,” he begged. “I will pay them back. I will give back the land I took. I will return your cows.”
“Return it now,” someone called. “Begin with the cow, the grain, the stay that keeps men out of work.”
He rose to his feet, knelt again, and at first he tried to deny, then he admitted, then he started to crumble. He left the square with his head down and his men in silent shame. The town sent a runner to the magistrate. Some of the papers I had kept were handed in. Other people tore up their own old receipts and made new ones with their own hands.
When the crowd finally loosened, voices rose — a mixture of applause and the sound of the wind returning to the square. For eighty heartbeats the market had been a tribunal.
Later, under a lamplight smoke, an old woman — the baker’s mother — tapped my shoulder.
“You took the coin,” she said. “But you gave us something heavier back.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A bit of our faces,” she said. “We were ashamed. You made us look up.”
I thought of the jade tag in my pocket, the secret pond, the nights in the cold when I was a ghost in my own life. I thought of my father and the new cotton blankets and the way January’s eyes had had less fear that morning. I had gone in there as a thief and come out as a bridge.
“What now?” Thomas asked later that night when we divided what we had. “They will fight back.”
“They will,” I said. “But their strength is public now. And public is a courtroom that no silk can buy.”
We repaired our house. We bought a small cart for shipments to town. We trained and taught. I made sure everyone had a warm cotton jacket sewn by hands that had been learning the art all winter.
I still slept with my hand on the jade medallion. Some nights I slipped back to the pool and let the water press out noise and fill me with precision. In the space the sky did not close in the way the real one did. There I could be a soldier again and not pretend to be a village girl.
But the public punishment of Fitzgerald was a turning point that was both a closing and an opening. He stayed in town, but he moved differently. He stopped visiting our market with mocking silk. He never caught me alone again.
Months passed, but I never said those words people put at the end of a story. I did not promise anything to anyone. I kept the jade medallion warm in my pocket.
One afternoon in late winter, when the sky was a flat sheet and the pond had a thin skin of ice, I sat with Hendrix and Bonnie on the kang and held the white-green tag between my fingers.
I wound the little jade medallion like a watch until it felt warm as a coin. The pond in my secret place trembled, and when I looked up I knew something that was no longer only mine: the place with the spring, the place with the pool, the white-green jade tag — that little miracle would always be the thing that began the change.
I listened to the spring’s small “drip” like a second heartbeat and smiled.
The End
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