sofie winchester. 10. cb. fin

Papa Winchester always said Sofie asked too many questions. Sofie doesn't understand the logic behind her father's statement, because you can never ask too many questions.

"Papa," she asked one day, eleven years old with dirt under her nails and sweat on her brow, she squinted up at her father, sun in her eyes -- she was always the smallest. In her class, in her home, in her world.

"Why'd y'all have so many kids if you knew we coulda been reaped?"

Sofie is small in stature but her mind is not. It expands, forever unsatisfied. She fills it to the brim with knowledge and it empties like a pail with a hole at the bottom, always asking. Always questioning.

She asks what it's all for, motioning outwards towards the land the winchester ranch lies on. Her older siblings say survival, but sofie furrows her brow, unsatisfied with that answer. If survival is so important then why couldn't she learn how to throw punches?

Too dangerous, says her father. A peacekeeper might find her and shoot her in the head.

She’s got dirt on her freckled, sunburnt nose and it scrunches every time she doesn’t hear an answer that satisfies her. Sofie asks how a peacekeeper could find them all the way out here and she's told to go muck out the barns and stay content with her life, stay grateful. She wants to ask how she can stay content with a life so easily thrown into a glass bowl full of names every year, but Sofie has learned that some questions are better left unsaid.

Because she has already answered them for herself.