Folio Two, Page Fourteen (svegra mos itzkron tal-dros)
I always rushed right in with no head for consequences when I was a kid, not even if I had read and heard the rules dozens of times. Plotting out cause and effect never made sense. Everyone else seemed to know how things would go, but I only saw the future plotted out in fits and bursts. It had never occurred to me that my aunt would stare thoughtfully at me in the train station without saying a word or that Anumë would twiddle her thumbs, eyes downcast. It felt like watching distant monsoon clouds.
Kobeis hooked her arm in mine as we boarded. It was packed, and the air had already turned steamy and thick like soup. We pinned ourselves by one of the windows where an older woman sat with her embroidery.
“What do you think Aunt Nikis will do?” Kobeis’s voice shook.
I struggled to hear her, and then I struggled to put words together. The last time Nikis had punished Anumë — my mind came up with nothing; Nikis had always tolerated her.
She had punished me.
Two summers earlier, I hadn’t wanted to do a genealogy project, so I had avoided gathering colored paper and printed photographs. When that didn’t work, I climbed the monsoon-soaked ivy outside the gymnasium and ducked into the crawlspace where the technicians manage the retractable roof. The teachers had searched for me everywhere, but in the end, I was found in the little nook above the gymnasium showers with baby snakes in my palms. Nikis had flogged me with light, knotted cords. She could have broken my hands.
What would Anumë have done if Nikis had struck her? I hazarded guess after guess. Nikis was not the young girl on the living room wall’s slide show, but an old woman worked in twisted glass. What would happen if she died — but these were just guesses, and I knew very well that life did not block like one of the operas.
Kobeis squeezed my hand. “Eràsis?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t like it when people in the family rough one another up.”
She accepted the answer.
Most passengers stepped off at Kararga and Nobsveika, the two working-class suburbs, and the rest of us waited for the train to reach the outlying suburbs. Kobsarka was the end of the line.
When I found a seat, I leaned back and closed my eyes. The seat vibrated against my head and back. I wondered which car Sukua was in, or indeed whether he had left Menarka at all. I regretted leaving him and realized that he probably thought I had used him only for the money. The thought made me sick.
By the household gods, I swore that Sukua and I would meet again, and not just because I thought that befriending a potential android would be cool. He had tapped a rhythm against the back of the train seat in front of us. Perhaps he knew music.
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