Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [2088]

Her kids. Yet they had taken a boy who wasn’t a sharer and left a girl who was. How long would it have been before they came back for the girl? Perhaps they had a lucrative offer for the boys as a pair, so they sold them first. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 2088

Note

The passage does the cold arithmetic of a market in children in three clipped steps — observation, gap, hypothesis — and the free-indirect logic (“Perhaps they had a lucrative offer for the boys as a pair”) arrives in the register of a business transaction, which is the horror. “Her kids” as a two-word sentence holds Emery’s whole loss without commentary.