Shaken, I reach for her arm as though to pull her back, and feel rough skin under the robes: old scars, burns, long healed. For some reason I am reminded of another traveller, long ago, a little girl fleeing a burning house, running out into our pilgrim-train. She would have become a priestess when she grew up, I think. It is not impossible. Tekel, the woman had said before she died, and I wonder what she shares with my son.

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Read “Unrest” by Grace Seybold, in Issue #12

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Grace Seybold lives in Kingston, Ontario, where she works as a copy editor and valiantly tries to resist correcting public signage. Her fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Reckoning, Machine of Death 2, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among other places. Her name is pronounced "SIGH-bold".

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