Death smells like sugar and dirt. When a hard Louisiana rain mingles with a lightning strike in the cane fields, the scent chokes the plantation, a bittersweet reminder that the only way out of here is burial in shallow ground.

No one wastes a marble crypt on people like us.

Fog swirls through weeping willows and rolls low in the fields, and a full moon glares, teasing me with its freedom in the starry night sky.

Ahead, a haze bends into the form of a woman, gliding through the grass separating the big house from the field. Missus Sabine is out of bed.

I freeze and consider running back inside the big house, but that will make me look guilty. I’m not supposed to be out at this time of night, and she’s already seen me. I fight the tremble rumbling through my body. My mind turns over the lie I must tell.

She slowly walks closer. Her heels stabbing the dirt. A specter like death himself closing in. I wonder who’s getting whipped tonight, who has angered her and yanked her away from her beauty rest.

The broad expanses of cane fields merge with the trees of the distant wood. She ignores the slave quarters, glancing ahead to her two-story plantation home.

My heart races. My fingers grip my bag as I tuck it behind me. Guarding my plan and all I own. She’ll demand to know why I’m not asleep in my attic room or preparing her breakfast for tomorrow morning. I hold my breath.

Sabine’s skin blends with her white nightdress. Her hair looks like flames tied up in a bird’s nest of a bun. Her sharp angular features and icy blue eyes are as hard and jagged as the two stone chimneys rising above the house. She belongs here.