Fairer, Safer

Hannah Reid spends her days on nursing rounds across the outer edge of Melbourne — changing dressings, reassuring young mothers, where the new estates run up against the bush. She has a wedding to plan, a big Greek family, and a faith so comfortable she has never once had to fight for it.

Her fiancé, Josh, is building the national identity system that will make everything fairer, safer: one login for benefits, Medicare, scripts — so that no one falls through the cracks. And when a frightened world finally exhales behind a single calm voice that no one can quite place, the relief is total.

It is the relief that frightens her.

As the kind new order tightens by quiet degrees, Hannah will have to learn what her faith is actually for — and what it costs to tell the true light from the one that is almost the same.

Thessaloniki, 1941. A city can starve with the sea in front of it, and nine-year-old Despina Naoumidis learns to tell, from a long way off, which people in the soup line will not be in it much longer.

Then the ration cards come, and with them a list: your name is found, a mark is made, and you eat. It does not feel like a snare. It feels like rescue. By spring a kind man from their own streets is given a desk. He asks only to register every household, to keep them safe.

Across the courtyard live the Cohens — old Barba-Avram, who keeps the black iron key to a house in Spain four centuries lost, and Estrella, born the same month as Despina, four steps of stone away.

A story of bread, and lists, and the strangers we choose to see. The standalone prequel novella to Fairer, Safer.