NaNoWriMo...exerpt for your reading pleasure

Starr was born in the dark.

Her mother had been blinded by The Fist when she was young after they killed her father and baby brother. She wandered the streets in agony, her face a mess of blood and eye tissue from where the butt of The Fist’s blade had smashed into her nose and eyes. She was found by a renegade who brought her back to the Underground. Over time her face healed but her eyes never did. She was young, she adapted. By the night of Starr’s birth her mother knew her way around the camp almost perfectly.

It was cold. Bitterly cold. The Northern American province of the G.U. had become even more intolerable over the years, as the shifting plates met at the Rocky Mountains creating towering craggy peaks. The wind and snow were wet and stuck to Starr’s mother as she stumbled through the compound. The wind was howling, throwing off her mind’s eye of her location. The baby would be here soon, she knew. She had to make it to the midwife. She would be angry when she discovered that Tanila had even attempted to make the walk in labour, by herself, in the storm, in the dark. 'but I’m always in the dark,' Tanila smiled through the contractions.