Free The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert V S Redick Page B

even prowls the edges of your dreamlands, it soon becomes hard to remember that that story is just one among many. You hear no others, and if you remember them at all, it is like remembering snowflakes in the midst of a steaming jungle: silly, fantastic, almost unreal.
    Of course, that was exactly the point.
    But even as these thoughts came to her, Thasha felt a stab of guilt. Hadn't the Sisters themselves taught her all this about her mind? This, and a thousand other lessons? That there was more to love in this world than gossip and rich food and a dress from the Apsal Street tailors? And she thanked them with hate. By detesting them, laughing at them inwardly. By slandering them to her father. By dropping out.
    She looked down at her hands. There was an ugly scar on her left palm that looked as though it had been made with a jagged stick. Almost two years ago, on her fifteenth night in the Lorg, Thasha had run to this bench in tears, guilt like she had never dreamed of hammering in her chest: guilt for existing, for not loving the Sisters as they loved her, for letting her father waste his fortunes in sending her here, where she spat on every opportunity. Guilt for questioning the Sisters, guilt for trying not to feel guilty. It was unendurable, this guilt, even before the elder Sisters caught up with her. We warned you, they said. We told you exactly what you would feel. A girl who chooses to be weak may hide the truth, but her heart knows. What does it know? That its owner is a vain and useless blight upon the earth. A canker. A parasite. Tell us we're wrong, girl. Thasha could only sob as they prattled on, adding up reasons for grief, and then she reached out and snapped off a brittle rose stem and drove it straight through her left hand.
    The Sisters shrieked; one hit her on the back of the head; but the act of mutilation saved Thasha's life. She knew it: another minute and she would have died of self-loathing. As it was her head cleared instantly, and she thought, How obvious, how brilliant, to make us love them for torturing us! And before the Sisters marched her to the infirmary Thasha swore that however long she stayed, she would think her own thoughts and feel her own feelings when she sat on that bench.
    Yes, she had become a woman here. By fighting them.
    Thasha rose now, and with grateful fingers bid her bench goodbye. Then she turned and moved swiftly toward the fish hatcheries. She could see the Mother Prohibitor's red cloak through the translucent glass. Don't explode, don't attack her , she thought. You're almost free .
    Some girls would never know freedom again. The Lorg had no graduation process. You simply stayed until you found a way of leaving, and there were not many of those. You could drop out in highest disgrace, which was Thasha's choice, even though the furious Sisters had promised to warn every other school in the city of her “spiritual deformities.” You could murder a Sister, which was slightly less disgraceful. You could be recalled by your parents, as Thasha had begged her father to do in fifty-six letters, starting her first night in the Lorg. You could (this was Thasha's invention) climb Sister Ipoxia's weeping cherry until the rubbery tree bent over with your weight and dropped you over the wall; but the local constables had sharp eyes, and hauled runaways back to the Academy at once, for which they received the blessings of the Mother Prohibitor and a handful of coins.
    Or you could marry. This was the one entirely legitimate way out of the Lorg. The school sponsored two Love Carnivals a year, when the Sisters dropped their teaching, gardening, wine-making and catfish cultivation to become frenetic, full time matchmakers. One of these started in just three days: by then Thasha wanted to be far from the Lorg. Her timing had enraged the Mother Prohibitor. Someone had heard her shout in the vestry: “Three hundred men seeking Love Conferences, and she renounces? What are we to tell the