Introduction
Thank you for choosing my book. This had been a life long dream of mine and had been over a decade in the making. Please enjoy and always remember plagiarism is against the law.
Josie was an orphan, she didn't know where she came from and it didn't really bother her much. No-one knew how old she was because she just showed up one day wandering around the little seaport village. She was quite small, which could be attributed to the lack of sufficient food. She had short choppy brown dirty hair and large green eyes, she wore boys clothing not a skirt or shift like other young girls in the village did. The only people that seemed to know she was there was the other lost children those that didn't have anyone else but each other to look after them and they let her stay with them. Josie appeared to enjoy being with the other lost or run away children within the city. The younger ones stayed together and the older ones didn't bother them much. They would find their meals from the garbage with the older kids but even then they would leave little for their younger counterparts. They sometimes would not have anything to eat for days at a time.
One particularly drizzly miserable day Josie and a couple of the other children, hadn't eaten in a week, thought to look for berries in a heavily wooded area north of town. The children realized they had gone deeper, into the forest as it would turn out, than they had initially thought. It was just before dusk when they were turning back for town. Josie thought she saw a thatch of berries when she squinted through the diminishing sunlight and rain. She stopped and leaned over an embankment to grab at a branch. She didn't even have time to scream when her hand lost its grip on the small sapling she held for balance and she fell. She hit her head as she tumbled down the steep slope of the creek bank. She was out cold. The children with her saw her go down and knew they couldn't get to her themselves, they hurried back to the village to tell the older kids anyone that they could find what had happened but they didn't care and wouldn't offer to help. When they tried to go back for her they couldn't find the creek or Josie.
