The Uncapping

Four times a year, Annet Cobb sits down at an open hive at dusk and gives away three months of her life.

It is the office. Marl Green has kept its wardens this way for two hundred years, and the reason given is that the office asks a warden to be honest about her own decisions without a witness. Twenty-two years in, Annet has eighty-eight entries in the register and no memory of the life they describe. She takes the parish's word for what she was, and she has never once minded.

Then the southern boundary starts to die, one household after another, and she finds her own family hive cut back to the rib by a hand she cannot account for.

The one man who still holds those years is Gil Hesketh, the parish taster, who would lose his office the day he reached for her.