"So what was your name before?" I say, and she freezes, her back to me. "Before you came to the Wilds, I mean."
For a moment she stands there. Then she turns around. "You might as well get used to it now," she says with quiet intensity. "Everything you were, the life you had, the people you knew....dust." She shakes her head and says, a little more firmly, "There is no before. There is only now, and what comes next."
