The Prison Healer

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains descriptions of violence, self-harm, suicide, sexual violence and exploitation, psychological and physical torture, addiction, power imbalances, child death and injury, and incarceration.

Kiva is at the river picking berries with her younger brother, Kerrin, because she wants her mother to make a delicious jam. Suddenly, she hears a scream and looks at her father, Faran, who is picking aloeweed. Faran reassures her, but Kiva’s mother yells from the cottage, urging Faran to run. However, her warning comes too late. Soldiers emerge from the cottage and surround Kiva, Kerrin, and her father.

Ten years later, Kiva is still an inmate in Zalindov prison. Now, she stands over a boy who is strapped to a metal table, using a white-hot knife to carve a Z—for Zalindov—onto his wrist as he struggles. Kiva is the prison healer, and she is tasked with carving this symbol onto each new prisoner. Kiva hates herself for what she must do, but she fights the urge to soothe the teen because she does not want to give him false comfort. She knows that “Zalindov showed no mercy, not even to the innocent. Especially not to the innocent” (7). Kiva was only seven when she first arrived at Zalindov and was assigned to launder and repair the guards’ uniforms.