She pulls the book from my hands and spreads the parchment out on her desk. It’s numbers. All numbers and letters.
“You wrote a proof . . . of the boar.”
She turns over her shoulder, still holding down the parchment at its corners, and nods, smiling.
I rush over to her stack. “And these?”
“More inisisa.”
I roll one up at random and put it to my eye. A series of bats. Then another. A dragon. I look up and see Aliya wiping blood from her nose.
“I’m fine,” she says, voice muffled by her sleeve.
She holds the cloth to her nose and tilts her head back. I must look as concerned as I feel because she waves her hand at me and says, “Taj, it’s nothing. The air here is too dry, and I haven’t been drinking enough water.” The cloth bunched on her nose reddens. “It’ll stop soon.”
Soon enough, it does.
Of all the emotions I expect to feel now, I’m not counting on anger. It surprises me to find my fists balled at my sides. “The river.”
She sighs, and her shoulders slump. “The inisisa have been coming to me in visions ever since we left Kos. And they wear their colors like in the Before.”
“You mean like how the Scribes draw them on the Wall around Kos?”
“Precisely.”
“Is this what happened during your . . . when you collapsed by the river?”
She nods. “It’s what I see. I see the inisisa as proofs. As equations. And I see . . .” She trails off.
I’m about to ask about that trick with the water when we hear a crash from downstairs, and a young child starts wailing while an older one shouts at him to stop being so dramatic.
After a moment, Aliya and I chuckle. More voices have joined the kids, and now everyone’s shouting.
“Sounds a lot like home,” I murmur.
“They would have a difficult time in the Great House of Ideas.”
I move to sit in her chair. “No shouting, eh?”
“No, Taj. No shouting.”
“And if a lizard runs over your foot, you are telling me you would be able to keep from shouting?” I point at her and close one eye, like my finger is an arrow.
“Plenty of lizards have crossed my foot without me screaming,” she says.
“I don’t believe you,” I tell her, smirking.
The noise downstairs gets louder, but I can tell it’s just a family being a family. It’s what I dream of families sounding like. Noisy and loving. Sometimes mad at one another, sometimes playful.
“Hey,” I tell her at last. “Let’s get some fresh air.”
* * *
• • •
Morning is almost here.
The refugees, for the most part, set up camp outside the village. It’s starting to become clear that they still don’t care much for us. Some of them try to give the gemstones sewn into their clothes for Healing or food, but the villagers always refuse to accept any sort of payment.
Aliya stops to look at them. I walk to her side, and together, we stare in silence. “They look like they’re already preparing to move on,” Aliya says. “They have no intention of going back to Kos.”
Who would want to go back? I want to ask Aliya, suddenly annoyed. When she speaks of the refugees and their movements, I feel a pang of guilt. Like she is saying, Taj, you’re weak to give up on your home so easily. And it would be easy to tell her about what it was like to be aki in that place. It would be easy to use that as my weapon against her. To make her think that life as aki was nothing but horror and embarrassment and, eventually, a painful death. But there was friendship in it. There was love in it. There was Bo and the others, the Aunties, the aki at the camp—the family we made for ourselves.
To avoid having to keep looking at the refugees in their makeshift camp, I wander the other way, into the empty desert, slowing eventually to let Aliya catch up.
“I know you like it here, Taj,” she says, quiet but insistent. “You don’t have to tell me for me to see it.”
She’s starting to sound like a housefly trying to find my ear. My fists clench at my sides.
“Sure, we can vanish here. Make new lives. But eventually we have to—”
“Go back,” I say under my breath.
“Yes. We have to go back.”
I turn around. “What is there for us, Aliya? Everyone, everything I’ve ever loved is gone. It’s time we admit it.”
“It’s not about us, Taj.”
Something catches in my throat. I can feel the anger bubbling up too fast to stop. “I can’t save anyone,” I hiss. I turn on my heel and storm away.
“Taj!” Aliya calls out after me. But I don’t have time for her lahala anymore.
I stop at the sick tent, not entirely sure why.
The beds are spaced out wide enough for nurses to attend to the sick. Juba stands in a circle with some of the Larada. When she sees me enter, she smiles and beckons me to a young man shivering on his pallet. Nurses hover over the boy. Sweat pours from him. He wears nothing but a cloth tied over his waist. His ribs poke against his blue skin.
Arzu stands against a far wall of the tent, arms folded across her chest. Her blond hair comes down in braids over her shoulders, like some of the other tribespeople. The vest she wears and the striped pants that hug her legs hold so many colors it dizzies me to look at. A loose headscarf covers the scar I know winds along her neck. But she stands alone, observing, and I note that from where she stands, she can see all entrances and exits, just like she used to do back at the palace.
Juba and the nurses whisper to each other. From time to time, Juba looks up and chances a glance in Arzu’s direction, and something secret and silent passes between them, and they both try not to smile afterward as they return to whatever they were doing before. So that’s what Arzu’s been up to. She has made herself Juba’s sicario. Juba’s keeper. Her bodyguard, her shadow. Heh, clever.
Behind me, a woman who looks like she must be the boy’s mother clutches the gemstones sewn into her sleeves so tightly in her fingers that her knuckles grow white.
After consultation with the nurses, Juba moves toward the boy. It’s more like she’s gliding over the ground than walking. She drops to one knee and looks the boy over. Then she runs a hand over the boy’s forehead. It comes back slick.
Juba moves to the head of the bed and comes down to both knees, then presses her forehead to the boy’s. She murmurs words that sound like the prayer I heard earlier. Her voice starts out soft—barely a whisper—but then grows louder and louder. Suddenly, the boy seizes. Juba breaks away. All at once, several other Healers and nurses are at her side.
“A bowl,” Juba says suddenly, and one of the nurses rushes off and returns a moment later with a calabash bowl. “Now sit him up.” The others slowly gather the boy into a sitting position. The nurse with the bowl slips it beneath the boy’s chin. Another nurse stands behind the boy, hands pressed against his back.
The boy gags, then chokes. A nurse whispers to him, “It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK,” over and over.
The boy’s shoulders heave, then it all comes out. Black ink spills into the bowl. The boy dry-heaves a few times before collapsing into the waiting arms of another nurse. The nurse with the bowl brings it outside, and Juba follows her. I watch, frozen, as the boy’s mother rushes over and throws herself onto her son. People hurry back and forth, making sure the boy is comfortable on his pallet. When I see that the boy has at least stopped shaking, I head outside. I follow the sound of Juba’s voice. She and the nurse are behind the tent. The sin, in the form of a lynx, leaps from the bowl, and I rush over to help. Juba holds up her hand, silently telling me to stop. I pause just as the beast sits quietly and regally before her and the nurse.
Juba takes one step toward it, and it doesn’t move at all, then she puts her hand to its forehead.
The darkness rolls off its shoulders, its legs, its back. It glows beneath its fur.
The lynx comes up on all fours and cocks its head at her quizzically before turning around and leaping into the streets. I run out to see where it goes, and I watch it run and run and run, glowing more with each step until it’s nothing but light, and then nothing at all.
Juba appears behind me. “Sometimes we keep them around. The children enjoy having pets. Most times we free them. More boring than how it is done in Kos, I imagine.” She smirks. So that explains all the animals in this village. I walk with her back into the tent and see that the boy is sitting up on his own now, and his mother is whispering hurriedly to him. Then she reaches down, takes off one of her slippers, and whacks him over the head with it. She’s shouting now at the poor, cowering boy. He tries to dodge his mother’s strikes, but she’s too fast, and before long, he darts out of the tent with her chasing after him.
Juba laughs to herself, and I see a few of the nurses chuckling as well.
“Sometimes,” she says, turning to me, “it is not sickness that keeps a child from sinning, but the bottom of his mother’s slipper.”
At this, the tent fills with laughter.
Aliya hovers in the entrance to the tent. I catch her smiling just as the beaded curtain swings closed.
CHAPTER 15
OUTSIDE, ALIYA IS nowhere to be found.
I start to head in the direction of our dwelling when I hear it. The kind of loud, excited yelling I haven’t heard since we left Osimiri.
It’s easy to follow, and when I get to it, a crowd of people blocks my view. All I can see are the backs of people’s heads, but I think I recognize some of the refugees. Their skin is no longer as sallow and gray as it was when they first got here, but their faces, even the children’s, have that haunted look in them. Even while they cheer and shout, scattered throughout the crowd, they don’t look fully alive. I weave my way through just as the noise reaches a roar. Some of the tribesmen and tribeswomen in the crowd notice my sin-spots, and they make a path for me. It feels weird. In Kos, people got out of the way because they didn’t want to be touched by disgusting, marked aki. Then, when I served in the Palace, people cleared a way for me because they didn’t want the Kayas’ wrath to fall like a hammer right on their heads. But now people make way for me and smile. A few even pat me on the shoulder. They sway when they do it. And for a brief second, Zainab’s face appears in my mind, one of the last aki I buried with my own hands.
Zainab had sniffed crushed stones to quiet the shouting in her head, to help fight down all the guilt she’d accumulated from Eating so many sins. It had numbed her. Made her dizzy sometimes. But it made the pain bearable.
Is that what these people are doing? There’s a sickly sweet smell in the air. Sort of like refuse left in alleyways to boil in the sun before monsoon season.
Somewhere nearby, people are beating a fast rhythm on drums. The shouting gets louder. A cheer erupts timed with the beats, then quiets, and it’s just drumming again.
Eventually, I get to the front of the crowd and can see that a circle has formed. In the center is a small tastahlik dressed in leathers similar to what Arzu used to wear when she too served in the Palace. He stands with his feet wide apart, arms outstretched so that from fingertip to fingertip, he’s one straight line. In one hand is a longstaff with a blade fixed to one end.
The people are cheering. The tastahlik boy has a cut on his cheek, but he’s smiling. Across from him is a sin-bear so large that when it stands on its hind legs, it towers over the tallest member of the crowd.
All at once, tastahlik and inisisa move toward each other. The bear slams its forepaws down and charges. The tastahlik twirls. His staff whistles through the air, and the blade slices right through the bear’s arms and legs. But the beast whirls around a moment later, legs re-formed. It lunges forward, and the tastahlik can’t spin out of the way fast enough. When he does roll away, the front of his shirt hangs from him like rags. He puts his free hand to his stomach, and his palm comes back red and shiny. The crowd’s noise has vanished.
The boy tries to get to his feet, using his staff to pull himself up, but falls down to one knee. The bear rears up, then rushes forward. No one else in the crowd looks like tastahlik. They drink from flasks and sway left and right. A few let out gasps, a few more cheer, but nobody’s going to do anything. Are they . . . enjoying this?
Before I can stop myself, I break from the crowd and put my hands out in front of me, then close my eyes and try to focus.
Everyone is silent.
When I open my eyes again, all heads are turned my way. There’s confusion on some faces and, weirdly enough, anger on others. What in all of Infinity could they possibly be mad at? I’m trying to help.
My concentration is broken, and the sin-bear breaks away from my hold. It dashes my way. Its jaws are wide open. Shadowy saliva drips from its fangs. Before it can leap at me and swallow me whole, a spear comes flying through the air and cuts straight through the nape of the inisisa’s neck, sticking itself in the hard ground. The sin-bear crouches there for a moment, impaled, then collapses and dissolves into a swirl of sin-mist.
The wounded tastahlik is standing now, holding his hand to his stomach, and he looks at me like I just spit in his egusi soup. He’s so focused on me, he barely even blinks as he opens his mouth and lets the dissolved sin swim down his throat. He gulps it like he just drank from the inside of a coconut.
Murmurs ripple through the crowd. I have no idea what people are saying, but I know they’re disappointed. Slowly, people begin to disperse. Not a single person steps in to thank me.
The tastahlik stomps my way, then angrily pulls his staff from the ground.
“You don’t look like you’re about to say thank you,” I mutter.
The tastahlik glares at me. His stomach’s practically ripped open, and this boy has the audacity to glare at me? I have half a mind to crack his stone right here and now. But I calm myself. Take a few breaths. Aliya would be proud of me. Arzu too. Maybe. “You should visit one of the, uh, one of the Healers; that looks deep,” I say.
For a few seconds, I wonder if the tastahlik is mute, because he says absolutely nothing before turning and stomping off.
“You’re welcome!” I shout after him.
“Hey!” I follow the boy back to the village, elbowing my way through the crowd. He’s heading to a part of town I haven’t been to before. The houses are few and far between, and there aren’t any torches for light. The whole neighborhood is shrouded in shadows. Only thin beams of sunlight cut across streets and alleys.
We keep walking, and things get quieter. There’s a steady hum of conversation, but it’s sort of in a different language or dialect, so the accent chews up any words I might know. Still, I recognize the sound of it. For a moment, I’m transported back to Kos. It’s the sound of pickpockets and kids with knives in hand, waiting for their targets. It’s the sound of homeless, newly turned aki, desperately plotting how to steal their next meal. It’s the sound of newsboys comparing routes through the city, how to get from one dahia to the next as fast as possible, which alleys are good and which ones aren’t, where to watch out for Palace guards. It’s the sound of the part of the city that lives in shadows. To me, it’s the sound of a city breathing. It’s the sound of home. I don’t know what the kids lounging by the wall of that empty building are saying, but I understand them completely.
There are maybe eight of them, if I’m guessing correctly at how many are cloaked by the shadows. The boy I followed is gone. These others all wear similar jackets, like a uniform. Some striped, some solid colors. Some of them wear bangles all up and down one wrist, while a few of the others are covered in nothing but sin-spots. Their pants billow, cinched at the ankles, and some of them have one pant leg bunched up their calves. Not all of them, and I wonder if it’s a rank thing, like how high it is means y
ou’re the boss or something, but I don’t see any order to it. All of them eye me but don’t move a muscle. I can tell they are picking me apart in their heads. They’re trying to figure me out—to see if I could be one of them. These must be the Onija that Juba warned me about. The ones who fight because they want to. I can see it in the cocky way they carry themselves. Anyone who fights inisisa for fun must contain a certain level of arrogance.
They dress so differently from the aki back home, but I know their look. I know why they’re sizing me up like this. I know because I used to do it all the time to new aki. They’d come to us on their own, having been on the streets for a few weeks or maybe longer, foraging for food all by themselves, and I’d size them up to see if they had what it took to do our kind of work. Or Auntie Nawal or Auntie Sania would bring new orphans from the marayu and put them in our care when they’d outgrown the orphanage. And I’d do the same. Take their measure. I’d make sure they saw me do it too, because that was part of the test.
Hyenas growl from the shadows. Only after I hear them do I see their eyes glinting in the darkness. That same lightning pulses beneath their skin that I’ve seen in the other animals roaming the village.
I make sure to stand straight. The tallest Onija breaks away from the wall and chats with a few of the others. He moves like he’s made of rubber, swaying and occasionally pawing at the dirt with the toes of his flats. And he’s always grinning. I squint and realize I recognize him. He was at the fight where the small tastahlik almost got his stone cracked by that sin-bear.
One of them fishes a flask out from a belt at their waist and spins the top open. Instantly, I can tell where that smell came from earlier. It’s whatever lahala they’re drinking. I almost vomit. I want to block the stench with my hands, but I manage to keep my reaction to a flinch. Can’t let them think I can’t handle this sort of thing. It sends fire up my nose just being near it, but I’m not going to crack. They’ll have to try harder than that.
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