Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [548]

“How do I get out of this family,” Marcus muttered to me as we watched. I sympathized. He had to share a room with Keith, and the two of them, only a year apart in age, fought all the time. Now things would be worse. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 548

Note

A brother’s mutter reframes the beating as an exit problem rather than a moral one, and Lauren’s ‘I sympathized’ is the coldest sentence in the chapter — she agrees without objecting, then immediately reverts to logistics (who shares which room, how much worse it will get). The family in this book is measured by how little anyone can leave it.