Folio Two, Page Nine (svegra mos tusjga)
Sukua didn’t go to the public school like his cousin Akarsi. His grandmother had brought a private tutor into the house, a graduate of Menarka Open University, and he lived by a strict schedule. Lesedau, his Tveshi father, worked as a business liasion with a biotech company; his mother had worked in one of the synthetic skinterface labs before something happened that he wouldn’t talk about. I asked him at least seven times on the train, possibly eight.
The refinements I had escaped through illegitimacy were written plainly in his behavior. He wore his hair in small, neat braids—a traditional young boy’s style—and a small henna flower on his forehead that marked him as a member of a dance group. Showing aggressive behavior in mixed-gender company was considered very impolite; many young boys struggled with it, but Sukua spoke softly and kept his hands visible and still. It was difficult to think of him as a kid. I decided that he was an android on minute five of the train ride.
He narrated two stories about the beginning of the world, and I listened. He inflected voices to represent the various characters, which made me laugh, and imitated the movements of various animals with his hands.
When the train sloped down into Menarka North, I decided that if the police didn’t arrest me, I would call at his house frequently. We looked at each other and stood, preparing for the automatic doors to open. He wasn’t wearing shoes, either. “Did you sneak out?”
“Yes.” He looked down and wiggled his toes. “They don’t like me going out. I did for the first time last year. Akarsi took me with her best friend to a Dream Garden in Menarka.”
“But not … before, you know what I mean? You weren’t taken out before?”
We stepped onto the wet terminal concrete. It had stopped raining in Menarka, but the air still smelled like rain.
“No.”
We took the lowering platform to the city streets in silence. Adults in red mourning attire pressed against us from all sides. It was difficult to breathe. The doors whooshed open. People pushed against me. I locked my fingers around Sukua’s arm and pulled him until we stood just outside.
Shafts of sunlight broke through the overcast sky, illuminating portions of the city below us like a grid puzzle. The air smelled fresh and clean; the temple fires had been exitinguished for the memorial, with the exception of Hatkranar’s sancutary in North Quarter. Black smoke billowed from its ventilation chimenys like a nineteenth-century factory, sending the sour stench of alka leaves towards the western edge of town. The funerary procession would end at the crematorium beside it, a squat structure made almost entirely of steel and organic glass.
“You should sneak out more,” I said. Although we stood on a rise, the roadways curved illogically and I couldn’t figure out which one we needed to take. “I mean it.”
“I can try.”
The street that seemed most direct curved towards a line of small stone city shrines, sculptures shaped like various animals or anthropomorphic figures with space for incense cakes and liquid offerings on their heads or tongues; the entire thing bordered an upscale apartment complex choked with nut trees. We would need to turn away from the street eventually, but I couldn’t see a shortcut from here. “Good. Do you know when it started?”
“Third Hour, I think—halfway Second at the earliest.”
The clock outside the station read 3h03. I didn’t have time to choose the best route.
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