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“No, he wouldn’t think you a fool. Only a fool would give their life for a few trees,” Dawsyn says. She means it.

“And yet,” Hector starts, stoking the flames in the hearth, “here I am, relying on my neighbors for wood and furniture.” He looks forlornly around his cabin and then closes his eyes, unable to bear the sum of his life.

Disregarding her clothes, Dawsyn stands, her hands clenching. She goes to him. She strikes him hard in the chest. “Stop this. Pitying yourself will not save you!”

He does not respond. Dawsyn watches him stare into the flames, his eyes going filmy and then wet. A tear escapes, taking a short path into his stubble.

He reaches his arms out towards her. She accepts and they fold around her back, drawing her in. Her breasts press against his chest and his head sinks into her black hair. He begins to cry in earnest.

Someone looking in might think them lovers, the naked girl cradling a crying man. The truth is that they are just two shades of the same loneliness, friends in commonality, holding each other through the storm.

Dawsyn strokes his hair and keeps her other arm around his waist until the muffled sobs quieten, until Hector raises his head and scrubs a hand over his mottled face.

“I should dress,” Dawsyn says carefully, wiping the wetness from his cheek.

Hector only nods, but his eyes go vacant again and Dawsyn is sure he is still remembering his father on the day he was taken. Dawsyn knows well how the memory can turn into a ghost.

There are beasts over the Chasm. The very beasts in fact who herded the people onto the Ledge so many years before. Their gatekeepers. Their wardens. The masters of their fate.

The Glacians.

The great white-winged creatures drop provisions, meagre rations, onto the Ledge every so often, but that is not the only time they come.

The people of the Ledge call it the Selection Day. A morbid forced ceremony. A day of reckoning.

On the first day of each new season, the villagers gather before their various stoops and wait. They wait for the Glacians on the other side of the Chasm to come, to claim.

It is customary for the head of each household to wait several paces in front of their family, offering themselves in the place of the others. Every season, the villagers watch the skies for a handful of Glacians to soar over the trees, their veined wings outstretched and beating. They circle like a flock in the sky above, a frightening prelude, and then they swoop. The people will flinch but not seek shelter. There is nothing to be gained by cowering. The households that dare not present themselves never go unnoticed; the Glacians kick cabin doors in, crush roofs under their heels, and haul the inhabitants over the Chasm… every last one.

So, the villagers offer one and spare the rest. The Glacians will swoop. Their taloned feet will take a villager at random, piercing into their shoulders and hefting them into the sky. They will disappear into the clouds above and they will not return.

The general opinion of the villagers is that the selected are devoured. Whether they are actually consumed by the beasts or not has never been confirmed. Dawsyn has seen her neighbors crushed, dropped and clawed by the Glacians, but never bitten by one. Never made into a meal. She supposes, though, they must go to such lengths to capture and contain humans for one reason or another. They need humans – like a human needs to sow seeds, tend the crop, reap the harvest. The Glacians do not come to annihilate. They herded humans here, to their fields, and they come to garner the season’s cattle for slaughter.

Dawsyn remembers the day, two seasons ago, when a glistening white Glacian broke through the flock, spearing for the Face and Hector’s cabin before it. She remembers Hector’s father standing out in the open. She can hear the wails of many that rang out across the Ledge as talons purchased skin and curled around bone. But Hector’s father did not make a sound. His face crumpled in pain but before he could scream, he was gone. One moment there, and the next just a speck in the sky.

Before Hector’s father was taken, it had been more than ten years since his family had sacrificed a member. Hector and his mother both said it was to be expected, but they felt his loss like an infected wound. Dawsyn knows acutely that those wounds can go unnoticed, but slowly, slowly, it spreads, mutates, and then takes hold of its host when they are unsuspecting.

“The next Selection falls a week from today,” Hector says now.

He will take his father’s spot, ready to disappear into the sky to spare his mother.

And Dawsyn will stand once again as the head of her own household – the sole member – as she has done for the past seven years.

Last night, the thought struck her, as it does at the end of each season – this next Selection, will her luck run out? Seven years, fourteen Selections and she has survived each one, unscathed. Eventually, she assumes, her good fortune will come to an end.

“The offer still stands,” Hector tells her, breaking her reverie. “You can stand behind me, with our household.”

But she cannot. She cannot leave the Sabar cabin – the den of girls – and let Hector offer himself in her place.

She smiles at him. “If you want a wife, you could just ask me.”

Hector scowls at her. “If I did, I’d never know another day of peace.”

“Perhaps not.” She shrugs. “But at least you’d have someone to guard your trees. Whispers on the Ledge say you have trouble defending yours.”

Hector smirks. “Youwoundme.”

He goes to the food hold, collects two pears and passes one to her. It seems he reaped more from the Drop than she.