Folio Two, Page Thirty (svegra mos bietkron)

I stayed up there for hours. Around the house, I heard slamming doors and shouts from almost everybody. Through the glass ceiling, I saw billowing gray smoke from the prayer room.

The fires stayed lit until noon the following day. I returned from school to a scrubbed home. Only my room remained untouched out of respect for the dead. I crawled into my mother’s wardrobe and leaned against the boards, breathing in the still-strong smell of her perfume and sweat and skin. “You shouldn’t have left me here with these people,” I whispered. “How am I ever going to know right from wrong without you to guide me?” Tears streamed down my cheeks. She never would have kept things in the shadows, at least not for long — except for me.

As my weeping subsided and I surrendered to the afternoon stillness, I became aware of a faint beeping noise below my feet. She had always kept the bottom of her wardrobe clean, whereas my storage section looked like tornado fallout. I saw no electronic devices, just solid wood and a small box of ornamental pins and chains to keep loose-hanging gyenya in place.

I opened the door and ordered the lighting fixtures to bend enough to shine into the wardrobe. Everything seemed smooth, and I couldn’t find a depression. I knocked on it once, twice, a third time — nothing happened. It made me want to cry. I couldn’t remember any of the things people did on television.

The beeping stopped. Perhaps she had a weight alarm on the bottom of the wardrobe.

Just then, I heard a knock at the door. “Who is it?”

“Anumë. May I come in?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. The AI would have alerted family members if I tried to lock her out, but seeing her made me feel like a bird in a cage. What would she break this time? “What do you want?”

“I need to speak to you about something. It’s important.”

She sounded urgent, but I didn’t want to see her alone. “We can meet in the courtyard,” I offered. “Whatever you want to say, you can say there.”

“We need to speak alone.”

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