He recognized the signals. But he just couldn’t see how he’d made her cry this time. He hadn’t been in a fight with any of the other kids for at least a week. He hadn’t mouthed off to an uncle for even longer. His room was tidy, his schoolwork was gold-starred in everything except math and blade weapons, and both Uncle David and Mr. Sessions said he was improving even in those. He’d helped in the kitchen most evenings that week, and when he burned himself on the edge of a pan the day before, he’d shrugged it off with one of the control techniques they were working through in Aunt Chitra’s pain-management class, and he could see in Marisol’s eyes how proud she was of that.
So why?
He racked his brains on the way out to the mountain, but couldn’t find an answer. Marisol didn’t cry often, and she didn’t cry without reason at all, except that once, he would have been about five or six, he came home from school with a raft of questions about money, how did some people end up with more than others, did uncles get more than aunts, did you have to have it, and would you ever do something you really, really didn’t like to get some. That time she cried out of nowhere, suddenly, still talking to him at first as the tears rushed up out of her, before she could turn away and hide them.
He knows, knew then as well, that the other mothers cried like this sometimes, for reasons no one could work out, and of course Rod Gordon’s mother had to go away in the end because she kept doing it. But he’d always been vaguely sure that Marisol wasn’t like that, that she was different, the same way he was absently proud of how dark her skin was, how her teeth glowed white in her face when she smiled, the way she sang in Spanish about the house. Marisol is something special, he knows. Discovers it, in fact, for the first time now, wisps of knowledge, taken for granted, taken on trust, coalescing suddenly into a solid chunk of understanding that sits in his chest like damage. She jumps into sudden focus in his mind. He sees her across the chain link and razor wire, as if for the first time.
She raises her hand, slowly, as if she’s in a class and not sure whether she really knows the answer or not. Waves to him.
“I want to talk to her,” he says to the uncle.
“I’m afraid you can’t, Carl.”
“I want to.”
The uncle straightens up off the fence, frowning. The chain link rebounds with another metallic shiver. “You already know not to talk like that. Your wishes are very small things in this world, Carl. You are valuable because of what you can do, not because of what you want.”
“Where are you taking her?”
“She’s going away.” The uncle stands over him. “They all are. She’s done her job now, so she’s going home.”
It’s what he already knew, somehow, but still the words are like the slap of the wind in his face, buffeting, robbing him of breath. He feels the strength in his legs drain out, his stance shift fractionally on the worn concrete beneath his feet. He wants to fall down, or at least sit down somewhere, but knows better than to show it. He stares out across the huddled structures of the Osprey Eighteen settlement, the cottages in tidy rows, the schoolhouse and dining hall, lights just starting to come on here and there as the afternoon tips toward evening. The bleak undulations of coastal moorland under a darkening pewter sky, the distant rise of mountains worn smooth and low with age. The cold Atlantic behind it all to the north.
“This is her home,” he tries to convince himself.
“Not anymore.”
Carl looks suddenly up into the man’s face. At eleven, he’s already tall for his age; the uncle tops him by barely half a head.
“If you take her, I’m going to kill you,” he says, this time with conviction as deep as all his sudden knowledge about Marisol.
The uncle punches him flat.
It’s a short, swift blow, into the face—later he’ll find it’s split the skin across his cheekbone—and the surprise alone puts him on the ground. But when he bounces to his feet, the way he’s been taught, comes back with his rage fully unleashed, the uncle blocks him and hits him again, right fist deep in under the base of his ribs so he can’t breathe. He staggers back and the uncle follows, chops left-handed into the side of his neck with a callused palm edge and puts him down a second time.
He hits the ground, whooping for air he can’t find. He’s fallen facing away from the helicopter apron and Marisol. His body hinges convulsively on the asphalt, trying to turn over, trying to breathe. But the uncle knows his pressure points and has found them with effortless accuracy. Carl can barely twitch, let alone move. Behind him, he thinks Marisol must be rushing toward him, but there’s the razor wire, the chain link, the other aunts and uncles…
The uncle crouches down in his field of vision and scrutinizes the damage he’s done. He seems satisfied.
“You don’t talk to any of us like that, ever again,” he says calmly. “First of all because everything you have ever had, including the woman you think is your mother, was provided by us. You just remember that, Carl, and you show a little gratitude, a little respect. Everything you are, everything you’ve become, and everything you will become, you owe to us. That’s the first reason. The second reason is that if you ever do speak to one of us like that again, I personally will see to it that you get a punishment beating that’ll make what we had to do to Rod Gordon look like a game of knuckles. Do you understand that?”
Carl just glares back at him through brimming eyes. The uncle sees it, sighs, and gets back to his feet.
“In time,” he says from what seems like a great height, “you will understand.”
And in the distance, the waxing, hurrying chunter of the helicopter transport, coming in across the autumn sky like a harvester scything down summer’s crop.
He drifted awake in a bed he didn’t know, among sheets that emanated the scent of a woman. A faint grin touched his mouth, something to offset the bitter aftertaste of the Osprey memories.
“Bad dream?” Rovayo asked him from across the room.
She sat a couple of meters off in a deep sofa under the window, curled up and naked apart from a pair of white briefs, reading from a projected display headset. Streetlight from outside lifting a soft sheen from the ebony curves of her body, the line of one raised thigh, the dome of a knee. Recollection slammed into him like a truck—the same body twined around him as he knelt upright on the bed and held her buttocks in his hands like fruit and she lifted herself up and down on his erection and made, again and again, a long, deep noise in her throat like someone tasting food cooked to perfection.
He sat up. Blinked and stared at the darkness outside the window. Sense of dislocation—it felt wrong.
“How long was I out?”
“Not long. An hour, maybe.” She tipped off the headset and laid it aside on the back of the sofa, still powered up. Tiny panels of blue light glowed in the eye frames, like the sober gaze of a robot chaperone. She shook back her hair and grinned at him. “I figured you earned the downtime.”