Free Birthmarked by Caragh M. O'brien

“Now go find your sweetheart,” he said.
    She ducked her head, set her hands inside the rough surface of the wall, and crawled forward toward the light. She had barely passed through when she heard Derek closing up the gap behind her, and she looked back. Even now, the gap was vanishing as Derek’s two flat stones filled the hole. With shaking hands, she rolled the dough out of the towel and wedged it into the seams around the stones. Despite the streetlight farther along the road, it was dark in the cavity where she was working, and she fumbled with the dough, scraping her fingers as she tried to smooth it in. At last she had wedged in all she could.
    She turned again toward the inner street and saw the refuse pit on her right. Rubbing her hands on the towel, she tossed it in with the refuse and then swiftly took off her black cape and tucked it under a pile of broken earthenware crockery. Then she straightened her red tunic and skirt, and slid forward toward the street and the streetlamp that glowed there. A bug pinged against the glass globe and flew back into the warm darkness.
    Her fear mixed with a thrill of promise and hope. She would find her parents. Maybe she would even see her brothers, too. In theory, any boys she met who were nineteen or twenty years old might be her brothers. She wondered if she could recognize them purely on a family resemblance. How amazing that would be.
    She was instantly aware of how clean everything was inside the wall. Every building was whitewashed, so that even by night, a little bit of light went a long way. On the narrow streets, the doorways were set on high sills over clean-swept gutters, and she saw frequent drain grates, so she knew that what she’d heard was true: the rain was saved from the streets, saved for recycling into drinking water. It would take work, but we could do the same thing outside, she thought. By the occasional streetlights, she could see urns hanging in some of the windows, large, decorated ceramic water holders that would keep the contents cool even in the scorching heat of midsummer. That, at least, was the same.
    Gaia walked firmly and quickly along the dark streets, startled when her motion triggered streetlamps to come on while she passed. Thin, white light from the little bulb in each lamp was magnified and reflected around her. Whenever there was an option of which direction to take, she chose the way that sloped uphill. Eventually she came to a main street, wider than the others, bordered with finer row houses. She had a glimpse of shadowy vegetation coming over the white walls, and in one place she recognized the leaves of an apple tree, so she knew gardens were tended on the other side. It was all just as she’d seen in the Tvaltar specials, only better because now it was real.
    Twice she passed other women traveling in pairs, all dressed in red. They barely glanced at her as she drew the hood of her tunic near her face and kept on. Once a solitary old man passed her, and then several young men, but they all ignored her, and with growing confidence, she realized Derek had been right: she was taken for a servant. At last, as the sky began to lighten in the east, she came to a graveled open area with several closed shops, and then farther above, a wider, stone-paved square with an enormous building at one end that stretched the entire width of the space. This, she realized, must be the Square of the Bastion. Arched arcades lined two sides of the square, and a prodigious obelisk monument dominated the center, black against the distant purple of the sky.
    Gaia stepped under an arcade and rested beside one of the wooden columns. Near the obelisk, a pair of men were hammering at a platform, a single lightbulb illuminating their work, and their rhythmic bangs echoed around the square.
    At right angles to the largest building, the Bastion, along the fourth side of the square, were several functional looking buildings behind tall iron fences. A tall,