Status Updates From Parable of the Talents (Ear...

Lauren levels with her new traveling companion, and they begin a hopeful journey. In the story-present, Larkin recollects how she left her adoptive parents, and became the target of all kinds of ugly rumormongering, just because she was a young woman living alone, not under the authority of a male relative.

The sad story of a young woman from a wealthy household, who was treated as less than because she was born from a surrogate's womb rather than her mother's like her brother. How she ended up on the street, struggling to stay alive -- and perhaps why she's so harsh to Lauren. It seems that people have become arrant wolves to one another, even family, outside Acorn, or Lauren's father's tiny neighborhood.