Folio Two, Page Thirty-Two (svegra mos bietkron tal-roh)
Anumë went to the wardrobe and looked through the clothes. She picked out one or two items and held the ensembles up against me with a thoughtful look in her eyes. “Your mother’s belongings have transferred to you. She stated that quite clearly in the personal will. She had to provide for you somehow.”
“What?”
She smiled. “Never mind.”
“What do you want from there?”
“I want nothing from her,” she said. “Go through the pockets and make sure she left nothing in them. There will be a shipment from her apartment in Galasu coming in a few days. You must go through that as well. The boxes will be sent up to your room.”
Someone elsewhere in the house had started screaming, probably one of the really young kids. Our house was almost never quiet except in the darkness of night. “But I’m just a kid. Won’t someone want to help me?”
“She used the Progeny Clause to will everything to you instead of the family. Quite frankly, her trick was brilliant. The less we know about what she did, the better,” Anumë said. “Besides, some people in this house have oil-greased fingers. Keep your door locked.”
She meant herself, of course. I had known about her doublespeak long enough to understand. It meant that somewhere in the house — on whichever private channel Nikis hid the camera screens — she sat and watched us in the darkness, studying our mouths for evidence that everything she wanted Anumë to communicate had been said. Anumë wouldn’t have hidden theft from me. She would judge me by what I did or did not do to stop her.
As soon as she left, I locked up the cupboards and changed all of the passwords to the storage compartments by the room. The AI let me do everything. Perhaps it had forgotten my earlier transgressions against the family.
I wouldn’t check the pockets for Salus’s things, not this close to her death.
From one of the cabinets, I took my ksibja case and slung it over my shoulders. It poked up behind my head like the crests on the mara birds that had built a nest outside my windows the previous year. I imagined for a moment that my arms were wings and that I was diving down, down, down — but I always stopped thinking before that turn up. The rushing water I imagined below terrified me.
About half of the household had gathered downstairs to play card games or Three Armies, a Narahji strategy game that had taken off during the Occupation as an acceptable and cheap way to spend the evening. Nikis hadn’t activated the AI in the front foyer, so no one noticed me slip out.
Outside, I took a deep breath of the fresh summer air and opened my arms to the bowing sun. The trees’ red leaves brushed against the concrete sidewalks, branches sagging. Purple-tinged creeping ivies along the road closed their mouths as a commuter pod train passed by. We had always battled against the forest, even here, and this is the first time in my memory that it seemed the darkness of the Canyons would win out over everything. I saw the overgrown ruins of Kobsarka in my head and prayed that my children would never see it.
You must suspect the route I took from my house, Nishet, but you’re wrong. I took the high road to the block down by the old university outpost where they taught swimming and had the summer career fair to encourage the young kids to choose what they wanted to do in violation of their families’ hopes.
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