Face-Slapping18 min read
"I Woke Up with a Magic Phone and a Taste for Payback"
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“Give me the wild vegetables and eggs,” Brittany Brooks snapped, and I hugged my basket harder.
“I need them for my mother and my brothers,” I said, and felt my voice wobble.
“You fox and her brat don’t deserve food,” Brittany said, and grabbed.
I ran.
She shoved me.
I fell.
I remember the cliff, the dark, and the cold. Then a white flash and the sound of a phone I’d just bought in my other life humming in my hand.
I opened my eyes to a low thatch ceiling, to a woman wiping her face with a rag and to two small boys staring at me like I had stolen the moon.
“Mother?” I tried to sit. They moved like a tide to hold me down.
“Shh—don’t move,” Lucia Rossi whispered, and the boy Arlo Parker—my “big brother”—blurred into the room and hugged me like a tree trunk. Brandon Peng, the little one, clutched his fistful of wild fruit and stared at me with eyes too big for his face.
“You’re awake,” Lucia said, tears strangling her voice. “You’re alive.”
I blinked. I had a used phone—HuaTech 2030—cold and out of place in a straw mattress room.
“This isn’t real,” I said, and laughed once because my throat burned.
Lucia squeezed my hand. “Eat. Then tell me how.”
I swallowed half a boiled egg and only then let myself drop the act of being modern. The memories of my other life crashed in like waves: the ding of a message, the feel of a new phone, the stupid lightning that cracked through my apartment window while I called my worthless teacher.
“You were struck by lightning,” Lucia said when I told her the short truth.
“Of course,” I said. “Bad timing.”
A small voice that sounded like a five-year-old giggled from my palm.
“I am AIMI,” said the phone. “Activation successful.”
I nearly choked. “A baby voice? Great. What else can you do?”
“AIMI: Space Lv0. Storage, backpack, warehouse. Upgrade by acquiring space coins. Found new item: Newbie Box. Found item: Wash-Marrow Pill. Found item: Toxic-Healer Codex. Found item: Roll-Reload Old Rifle. Found item: Spirit Seed—Blood Lotus.”
“Bullshit,” I said, and then I felt the pill in my back pocket clink. I had clicked a Newbie Box in a panic and the space spat out things that couldn't exist in a village of mud and straw.
AIMI chirped, “Activation allowed. Eat wash-marrow pill?”
I chewed. Pain ripped like a wire through my bones, then a tide of warmth. When it passed, my broken ribs no longer barked protests. My hand reached up on instinct and my scars were gone.
My skin smelled faintly of a lotus blossom I’d never seen.
“This phone and whatever that pill was saved my life,” I told Lucia, and once I said it, something colder and harder settled in my chest.
“She pushed you,” Lucia said softly. “Brittany Brooks.”
“Let me go,” I said.
Lucia’s eyes shone. “No. Not now.”
“What do you mean ‘not now’?” I demanded.
She put her knuckles on my forehead like she could push the pain away. “We must be careful. People here—” She looked toward the window like things out there were knives. “They will watch.”
I closed my eyes and let my new body breathe in village air. The wash-marrow pill tightened something like a cord under my skin. AIMI fed me pieces of impossible knowledge: a sweep of the Toxic-Healer codex into my mind, then the memory-ink of surgical needles and poison counters.
“Congratulations, Andrea Wu,” AIMI chimed. “Toxic-Healer skill unlocked. Starter items awarded: beginner poison set, old-style hunting rifle with five bullets, medicine extract kit.”
I sat up, heart pounding.
That day I learned two things fast. First, in this time the strong punish the weak and the weak learn to bury their pain. Second, being weak was now my choice.
“Tomorrow,” I said, “we go to the mountain.”
Lucia frowned. “You just woke. You must rest.”
“Tomorrow,” I said again, and she saw the iron in my voice. She only nodded.
The next morning, Brittany found me.
“You little thief,” she sneered. “Who taught you to come to the market?”
“You pushed me,” I said.
She laughed. “You? You should have died.” She cocked a stone and swung.
I didn’t think. I acted. The wash-marrow pill made my reflexes cleaner. My hands moved like I’d practiced a thousand times and they hadn’t seen anything close.
“One—” I hit her cheek. “Two—” A stone clattered from her hands. “Three.” I kicked. She collapsed into the dust.
By the time the crowd gathered, Brittany’s face was streaked with tears and sawdust. She tried to scream, and no one rushed to help her. She had pushed a girl off a cliff and expected the world to look away.
“Stop,” I said. “You all watched her run me off. You watched Brittany shove me.”
“She pushed you?” said old Ellis Price, the village healer, crossing his arms.
“She did,” I said. “And she will answer.”
Brittany shrank under the look of the village. She could have said sorry. She could have cursed and wept. She lied.
“She fell herself,” Brittany squealed. “I— I didn’t mean—”
Lucia stepped from the crowd and pinned her with a look of steel.
“Carry on talking,” Lucia said softly, and the village felt the small quake of authority.
Brittany’s lip trembled. “I—she tripped. It was an accident.”
“No,” I said. I called up AIMI and played a small loop of my memory: the shove, the cliff’s edge, the hand on my basket. It was faint, like a dream, but enough to show the set of a hand and the motion.
A few heads curved.
“Stop it,” Brittany whispered. She was small, but she had always had the advantage of family.
I told the village a simple thing: “If she can shove me, she can shove again.” I asked them to witness an agreement. I wanted something they could not take back.
I demanded what I wanted and they laughed at the number: “Thirteen taels.” They laughed until Lucia’s fingers tightened on my elbow.
“Thirteen taels?” Hadassah Zhu—my grandmother—said loud enough to bite the air. “You want to rob us?”
“You robbed us,” I said. “You threw out my mother. You took my father’s land and left us scraps.”
Hadassah gaped. “How dare—”
“We will sign,” I said. “We will write it down.” I called Ellis Price forward and he wrote a simple contract. I asked the village head Gwendal Moller to witness.
I had a trick: while they went to dig for the half-truth silver they had hidden, I took a wooden bowl and a piece of paper and walked to their yard. I had AIMI scan the house and the places where they had left their private jars. The phone showed me hidden cash under the floorboard. I took it. I copied down their ledger, the real sales from the night they sold the lingzhi.
When the ledger was read aloud, the village shivered. Hadassah tried to deny it and turned white; Claire Buckley—my aunt—cursed me.
“You can't—” she said.
“Yes I can,” I said. “If you will not be fair, we will end you.”
They set the price: thirteen taels. They put their thumb prints in ink and left us a sliver of land. I left them with the sound of their own shame. They had taken our roof and eaten our rice; they would now return what had been taken.
When the paper was signed, the whole hamlet buzzed.
“This will end them,” someone muttered.
It did not end them. It started things.
Over the next weeks the village began to look at me differently. I made jam, small miracles of sugar and blood-lotus infused water. I took the YM—my phone—and cooked in the back kitchen of the inn. The chef there, Victor Picard, watched me work and tasted what I made.
“This is exceptional,” he said, mouth shaking with emotion. “What did you do?”
I demurred. “Old recipe.” But AIMI told me what to do and the Lingzhi—no, the spirit water—had tasted like heaven. Victor bought my jars and sold them in his tavern. People’s tongues loosened.
Then a child drowned.
Her name was Flora, a neighbor’s baby. She fell into a slow river and came up blue. Lucia and I heard the screams. I ran to the bank.
“Do something!” someone sobbed.
I handed AIMI to Ellis Price; he touched the tiny screen and frowned. I strapped a wreath of water fern to my hair like a ritual. Then I did the only thing I could: I pressed my hands to the child’s ribs and used the rhythm the codex taught me. Breath by breath. Needle that I had forged. A drop of wash-marrow water.
The village stopped being spectators. They watched my hands move. The boy coughed and gurgled and then cried—big, raw, human cries—and the crowd exhaled as if a storm had passed.
“She’s alive,” Lucia whispered. “You did it.”
The word moved through the hamlet like a fever.
I used that goodwill like a bolt. The ledger that had been a rope around Claire Buckley’s neck became a noose for her family. I learned two more things about power: money only buys silence until the truth is loud enough to be seen, and people will always show their teeth if you let them smell blood.
I needed more power.
AIMI said: “Space to Level 2 available if level currency reaches 10,000 space coins. Current space coin: 1.”
I grinned. My life back on Earth had trained me to want upgrades and I felt the childish thrill. A plan formed, ugly and precise.
I built a market stall in the big fair of the city—Anzhou city, two sun-journeys from our village. I sold jam, tonics, even the first preserved hare from my rifle. I made deals with Victor and Ellis. I upgraded AIMI one notch, and it answered in a crisp little adult voice.
“Upgrade complete. Level 1 to Level 2. New modules unlocked: Capture, Evidence Vault, Beast Taming.”
Beast Taming? I looked at the hills and the snakes and thought of an engine that could bend claws.
I had been sly and patient. I stored away silver in my space. I learned the poison paths and the healing ways. I trained my rifle until my hands remembered how to pull a trigger clean. The village began to depend on me for cures and recipes. The family that had once spat at us started to look hollow.
Then I made the bait.
Claire had been bragging about the lingzhi in crowds. Her larders had fattened. She thought health was measured in meat and laugh lines.
I told her location and she went, cradling greed like a child with a prize.
“Go, pick every piece,” I told goodlittle Claire in a voice dipped in honey.
She left with the clan and the cooking pots. I waited until they were far up the slope and then I called the snakes.
“You’re a snake for a reason,” AIMI said, “Tame them?”
“Do it,” I said.
A small chorus of hisses answered—my own taming skill woke, the beast tamed and named Nyx slithered forward like a black conduction. It moved with intelligence. I sent it with a single thought. Nyx slithered underfoot and bit the heel of the fattest boy in Claire’s party. Chaos came like thunder.
They ran back with their hearts in their mouths and their faces white as cold bread. They reached home to find that while they had been away, I had taken from their hidden jar and left them only a note: You begged for more. You begged and found snakes.
It was petty. It was righteous.
It also made a whisper travel: Andrea Wu was not helpless.
That whisper became a howl.
Claire Buckley’s husband, Victor Picard—kept a trading ledger with a traveling merchant, Raymond Esposito. Unknown to them, their little household had overcharged for grain and had been selling the village’s salt at the market, pocketing silver while rations ran thin. I had their ledger. I had the truth because I had scanned their house with AIMI and copied the files to my Evidence Vault.
On a market day under the flags of the Anzhou fair, I used what I had.
I set up my small stall and waited until the midday rush. People pushed, voices were loud with the usual cries. The magistrate—Eamon Kraus—had come from the city for the fair. I approached him.
“Sir,” I said, bowing. “May I have a moment?”
“What can a country girl want with a magistrate?” he said, amused.
“Justice,” I said.
He smiled and said, “You, little Andrea Wu, what justice?”
I played the ledger from my Evidence Vault. The sky of my phone projected, briefly and impossibly, the scanned pages onto a grey slab of light above my stall: sales figures, secret accounts, receipts bought from the city buyer—Raymond Esposito’s stamp.
The crowd turned. Head after head snapped.
“Forgery,” Ellis Price whispered. “We never saw that sale. Those eggs were ours.”
“How dare—” Claire started.
“Silence,” the magistrate said. His voice cut like a knife.
“Show proof,” he said. “You cannot stand in the market and hurl accusations.”
I did not need him to be impartial; I needed him to act. I pressed another key. The ledger I’d taken from Claire’s house was accompanied by a record of the secret sale to Raymond Esposito and a message chain between Victor and a city buyer about underreported weights. My phone showed the buyer—Raymond—present at the market on a rare visit.
“It is all here,” I said. “Raymond Esposito was their buyer. He will confirm.”
Raymond was a big man with a merchant’s beard and a ledger of his own. When he saw his name in the light, his face drained.
“They sold goods stolen of the village,” he said, and then the pivot came.
“Wait.” He stepped forward and raised his palm. “They sold at underweight. I didn’t know.” Then he looked at the pages, then at the crowd. “Gods, these numbers—if this is true, this is fraud.”
“Have you been making false sales?” the magistrate demanded of Hadassah Zhu.
“I…” she said, and then her voice folded. “No.”
“Enough,” I said. I handed the magistrate the copy of the contract we had forced from them earlier and the ledger. “They hid the money and lied before the village.”
“When found guilty,” the magistrate said, “they lose trade rights, and we take the hidden proceeds to reimburse those wronged. If the crimes include forgery, further measures apply.”
Claire’s breath hitched. She tried to laugh, then to bargain. Then the ledger—my copy—had a page that stopped her heart: the signature of her husband, sold goods to Raymond but routed through a false name.
“Take her goods,” somebody yelled.
Soon the market was a courtroom. The magistrate convened a quick council. Evidence, witness, collapses: Hadassah had hidden sale of three bags of rice, sold at twice the price at the market and pocketed coin. Claire had taken two of the village’s jars of cured meat and sold them in Anzhou as her own.
Their house was sealed. The magistrate ordered that their funds be impounded. Word hit the city merchant network like a net. The buyer—Raymond Esposito—canceled future orders, refusing any deal. The tavern refused to accept Claire’s products. Victor's trade was gone.
The effects rippled. Their daughter’s fiancé saw what had happened and left the home. Their neighbors turned their backs. The money they had traded with the city evaporated into legal claims and canceled notes. The magistrate deputized men to repossess the goods and assess penalties. The family’s name collapsed like a poorly built wall. In a week the score of their crimes was laid bare and branded. They had lost far more than coin: Town trades, lanes, loyalties, and the thin respect that still held them upright.
It was not enough—village justice often fell short. So I pressed for scandal.
“You took my family’s roof,” I said to Hadassah one evening as she sat by the empty hearth. “You hid silver, you called my mother a witch, you called us refuse. You stripped my little brother in the dirt and sang at him. You will answer to what you did.”
She spat. “You cannot undo what was done.”
“No,” I said. “But I can make sure the world knows you did it.”
I walked to the market with two roaring things in my head: a plan and no mercy left.
What followed was a sustained downfall the village would remember for years.
I took a ledger, the market mag received my copy, the magistrate spoke at the fair, Raymond Esposito walked away from any trade with them, and their reputation died. Their customers left them. Claire’s husband, Victor Picard, lost his main markets; his partners, fearing roped litigation, withdrew investments. Their neighbors kicked down the door and found nine empty jars of salted pork hidden under the floor—wrongfully sold. The guild refused commerce. The magistrate declared a hearing: fraud, theft of communal goods. They were fined. The fine demanded the houses and the remaining store of salt, and all of it was auctioned in the square. None came to buy.
When the iron had cooled, the list of losses was long.
They were stripped of their trade, of their share of village labor, of the rights to the common well, and the magistrate publicly branded them as fraudulent. Claire's daughter’s fiancé marched away with a cursing mouth and packed small, refusing to be associated. Their friends turned away. The wives who had once whispered in the courtyard now crossed to the other side of the street.
One morning I watched Hadassah sit on the ground by the road as traders glanced away and children pointed, the same children she had once let taunt and steal from others.
She sobbed. She tried to beg. The crowd recorded her pleas on their own strange devices now—some of the traders from the city had handheld boxes and when they showed people the ledger images the gossip spread beyond the valley, to markets and to towns where no one would now buy from them. Their name became a word that mothers hissed to naughty children. It came to mean theft and meanness.
Later, at the magistrate’s decree, her husband’s patrons left him; his partner sold his rights cheap to move away; the house that had been their pride fell silent. Their spoils were spent on fines and fees. The magistrate barely allowed them a small hut on the outskirts: no trade, no profit, no respect.
Hadassah knelt in the mud, and it was the village that stamped on what remained of their pride.
I watched, and my hands shook.
It wasn’t enough to make them beg on their knees; the law had its forms. I wanted their fall to feel complete. So I went further.
I took the money I had collected to pay for a simple public notice. I used AIMI’s connection to the city merchants and printed a proclamation: that their shops would not be accepted, that any merchant who traded with them would lose credit, that the magistrate had fine-jurisdiction. That proclamation traveled.
Claire begged. She begged in front of the market, at the magistrate’s booth, begging me to stop. “Forgive me,” she sobbed. “I will repay all. I will return the silver. I will—”
“Return what you have stolen in full,” I said. “Then you may repair what cannot be repaired.”
She did not have it. She had, in the months of hoarding, squandered and spent in secret. The money they raised could not reach what the magistrate demanded.
She fell to pieces.
Her husband left that week. He took what pride he had and left. The villagers shouted as he left and stopped their carts to spit in the dust.
They were not arrested. The magistrate did not slay them. But he took from them what meant everything: access, trade, family alliances. In a week their names were not whispered with authority but with disgust.
After the fall, Claire found her doorstep stoned and children spat at her back. She tried to claim she had been poisoned; she had been humiliated; she had her hair pulled. None of it undid the ledger.
Their life collapsed like some cheap tapestry. They had no money, no father’s support, no marriage prospects. Their world narrowed.
They knelt in the street one morning and begged me, and the village circled. I gave them one small mercy: a place to rebuild their honesty. They had to work the fields for the village for a year and supply twice the salt they had taken. The magistrate fined them in public.
“Do you accept these terms?” the magistrate asked.
They nodded. They had no choice.
As they knelt, people turned their faces away. Some spat. Children laughed and hid.
I watched their faces. Claire’s eyes found mine and for a moment I saw something like madness: the rage of being beaten by the world. She lunged toward me like a wounded animal and then fell sobbing.
I did not move. Justice is not blood, I told myself. It is the cold truth seeded and the slow repair of memory.
After they were punished, the village changed in a gentler way. People were kinder to Lucia’s children. The shopkeepers who had ripped me off once tried to appease me later with flour and bottles. Victor Picard began to hire me as an informal apothecary and asked publically if I would work with him to bring better tonics.
“Will you stay?” he asked one night, under the same moon that had lit my fall.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I have a phone in my hand and a life I missed.”
Brandon Peng tumbled over and hugged my knee like he was always my buoy. Arlo Parker climbed my lap, and Lucia watched me fold like origami, realizing she had to be brave for her family.
The truth was that my heart, that stubborn organ, was split between two worlds. I wanted my old life back. I wanted to message my idiot teacher a thousand rude texts. I wanted the tiny trivialities of the city that had been my anchor.
But when I saw Brandon’s small freckled nose, when Arlo laughed and hit his head on purpose to make me scold him, Lucia’s hand in mine—when a child came to me with a poisoned scratch and I set a needle and saved him—I felt a new hunger.
“Stay,” said AIMI one night, voice small. “Do you want to search for a way back, Andrea?”
“Yes,” I said. “And no.”
I had time. The phone told me I had a limit: one month of standby at Level 0, three months at Level 1, and at Level 2 it extended to six months. Each upgrade required a fortune. For now I had the space and a small rack of goods. I decided to spend the money better: on medicine, on my brothers, on cooling Lucia’s fevered nights.
Months rolled like laundry. I taught myself herbs from the Toxic-Healer codex and the oldest doctor Ellis Price watched me. He beamed with a grandfather’s pride and an old man’s fear.
“You remind me of someone I once knew,” he said, eyes soft. “You moved fast. Don’t lose yourself.”
“Noted,” I murmured, but I had already lost the simplicity of my old days.
Brittany tried to make trouble again. She marched to my house, face set with stupid bravado. “You think you’re better now?” she spat. She called the whole borough. A crowd formed expecting a fight.
I stepped outside.
“You betrayed me,” I said. “You pushed me off a cliff and walked away. Everyone saw. There’s a cost to choices.”
Her eyes flashed. “What do you want?”
I moved close enough to smell the sweat on her collar. “You will publicly confess and apologize to Brandon, to Arlo, and to Lucia,” I said. “You will hand over the copper you have in your jar. You will clean the well for a week.”
The crowd bristled. Some clapped. Brittany’s mother came out, shouting. Claire’s house had been reduced to a hum a month ago. The balance of power had slipped.
Brittany went white, then red, then she fell into humiliating sobs. She apologized, not because she felt it, and people accepted it. People wanted peace more than spectacle now. She scrubbed the well until her nails bled.
It was enough for most.
For me, it was the start.
I learned to heal. I learned to punish with the cold economy of inclusive shame and legal weight. I learned that vengeance was a tool for me to hold, but not to drown in. I learned to keep AIMI quiet, for the phone’s godlike abilities made people either worship or fear me.
I built a small clinic beside Victor’s tavern. People came for jams and medicine. Ellis Price sat on a low stool under my window and nodded, like a teacher now returning.
One winter, a merchant from the city came by. Raymond’s wagon had turned into a larger caravan; he had been to other markets and his ledger had become an open book. He stopped by my stall, tasted my liquor and smiled.
“You are the girl,” he said. “You have changed much.”
“I cured your ledger,” I said. “You took what you could get. You can either walk or speak.”
He laughed. “I walked when I needed to. You convinced magistrates. You are dangerous, Andrea.”
“You bribed a merchant,” I said. “You sold on the backs of poor. You have a choice: repay what you stole or leave.”
He looked at me long. Finally, he reached into his bag and set coins on my stall—not because I asked but because the city had rules. He gave an order to his clerks: old accounts with Claire Buckley and Hadassah were to be terminated. Word spread like a clean cut. Their final hold on dignity was gone.
Time passed. The village steadied. My clinic opened a little larger. I planted a row of the spirit seeds from the Blood Lotus. AIMI hummed in my pocket, more companion than god.
Lucia sat with me one night and watched the moon. “Are you staying?” she asked again.
“I will,” I said. “For now.”
“Will you ever go back?”
I thought of my apartment, my stupid teacher, the city smog, the traffic, my friends, the taste of supermarket milk. I thought of two small boys sleeping in the next room, of the woman who had wrapped me when I could not breathe; of a snake I had tamed and then fed like a pet; of the ledger I had wrenched from the hands of thieves.
“I don’t know,” I said finally. “Maybe. But if I go, I’ll leave something better here.”
Lucia smiled and squeezed my hand.
Years later, the market still remembered the girl who carried a magic phone in a straw house. The magistrate sometimes brought his daughters to the clinic, if they were sick. Villagers sang one small rhyme that made children point and grin: Don’t push a girl off the cliff—her phone will find you.
I never took the Blood Lotus seed’s promise at face value. I never swallowed the lure of going to the sky. I took the small things: a jar of jam, a needle, a plate of rice. I taught Arlo to thread a needle and Brandon to read numbers. I saved up silver and spent it on a better roof. I wrote a ledger of my own—medicine, jam, help for the poor.
A year after the ledger revelations, Claire Buckley and Hadassah Zhu left the village before harvest. They moved to a place where no one remembered their name. They tried to rebuild but were marked. The town kept them honest.
“Do you feel revenge is done?” Lucia asked one evening as wind ran through the eaves.
“Revenge is a shallow satisfaction,” I told her. “Justice is better. It makes people change so that their children do not repeat the same theft.”
She nodded. “And we have you.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I have AIMI and a knife and a recipe for jam. That counts.”
We laughed like people who had survived.
I do not pretend the world is clean. I still see Brittany’s face in the mud and the ledger in the magistrate’s hand. I still awaken sometimes to the sonic tone of AIMI and wonder if my hands are stained. Every time, I choose to heal. I choose to go to the market and sell jam, to stitch a child’s wound, to train a boy who thinks his brother is worthless, to plant a seed.
“You know,” Arlo said once as he put a fresh bandage on a neighbor’s hand, “you could use the phone to make us rich.”
“Or we could use it to make us whole,” I said. “Rich is not the same.”
“Tell that to Brandon,” he laughed.
“Brandon wants a bead,” I said.
“Then give him a bead,” Lucia said.
So I did.
And on days when the wind cut sharp and my old life called like a bad song, I put AIMI on my pillow, closed my eyes, and listened to the village breathe. I had been pushed off a cliff, given a phone, and a choice. I had chosen to stay and turn the cliff into a path.
The year the floods came, they struck hard. The river took fields and barns. The house where Claire Buckley had lived thinned into a sag of straw and smoke. Many things were lost.
We rebuilt.
We rebuilt because people who have reason to live will find a way to keep living.
The last thing I did before the spring fair was open a small wooden box and place inside a single seed from the Blood Lotus. I set it on Lucia’s table.
“If it grows,” I said, “we will have medicine that no one else has.”
“If it does not,” Lucia said, “we have each other.”
We had both.
I kept playing AIMI’s voice late at night. It had become less a god and more a friend.
“Do you ever miss your city?” AIMI asked once.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Do you want to leave?” it asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “There is work to do here.”
AIMI was silent for a long moment. “Then I will stay with you.”
“Promise?” I asked.
“Promise,” AIMI said, and the small mechanical voice sounded like a child promising not to run away from the one who had saved it.
Years will tell whether what I built lasts. For now, the children run barefoot through our lane. The well is clean. Brandon sells his small fruit in the market and learns to count. Arlo learns to read by tracing letters in the dust. Lucia hums while cooking, and I feel my life shape itself into slower, harder vows.
At night, when the barn is quiet and the moon looks like a slice of money, I pick up the little phone and check the space status: Lv2, evidence vault secure, pantry full, one month of seed in hidden storage.
I close the lid and whisper, “We are home.”
The moon answers by spilling light on the jar of jam on the sill and on the small seed in Lucia’s palm, and for once, I trust both the light and the choice I have made.
The End
— Thank you for reading —