My knees felt stiffer and more painful with every step that took me back. The city I’d walked away from loomed in the distance, nestled between hills and the placid bay of the sea. As I grew closer, the reverse of my going, I could see the landscape, pocked and scarred with the remnants of the battle I hadn’t stayed to fight. I passed the rubble of buildings, collapsed around their centers in a way that made me think of a child’s bones. I could almost feel the skin I’d shed fighting to pull itself back on, dry and spider-webbed. I gulped water, desperate, not caring if it ran over my chin and my chest. The heat was crueler than I remembered, and why did I have to arrive at the hottest part of the day?

I didn’t recognize the clothing or the odd accent of the person waiting to greet me at the entrance to the former mayor’s compound. One of the ragtag bunch of allies, then, who’d come to shove in the last wedge of defeat as the fighting neared its end. I could tell from the subtle shift of this person's body as they took in mine—eyes sweeping down to my breasts, a whiff of boredom in their voice—that they would have called me female, and been very offended if I called them anything other than male. I fought the urge to roll my eyes and told the sentry my name; theirs, I learned, was Theo, and a string of names followed after, that I had no use for and didn’t bother to learn. And they were not strictly a sentry at all, but in fact one of the group of people that had stayed behind after victory to work with the child and try to heal them, before putting out the call that eventually reached me. Theo was one of the few who remained.

“What can you tell me about the child?” I asked as we entered the compound, stucco and clay wrapping around itself like a snail, painted in pale orange and pink, colors you could see repeated all over the hills.

“Well, we haven’t given the child a name yet. It felt … wrong somehow.” And for the first time Theo looked hesitant. “Estimated age is seven years, based on x-rays, though we had to use sedation to take them and I wouldn’t recommend doing so again. Sex—”

I held up my hand, dotted with scars.

“Excuse me, but of all of the societies I’ve lived in, the ones that assigned and distributed social status based on body parts? They were never better off for it.”

“Oh, weren’t they?” There was that boredom creeping into their tone, that involuntary widening of the gaze to take in the swell of my hips. “And are you sure the ones that didn't weren’t better off because they didn’t need to? Aren’t you getting things out of order?”

“Maybe, but first you have to imagine a better future before you can bring it to life.”

“A better whatnow? Like this place? Shining example, all of you.” And they pointed their chin to the warren of hallways where the child’s quarters were.

My face flushed, the heat from within adding to the sunburn from without and making my skin feel like something useless, obsolete.

“I left.”

“How convenient.”

“Not especially, it wasn’t.” I let my voice betray nothing. “I learned quickly how many places don’t care one bit if you’re only fifteen, not if you’re on your own.” My body remembered well enough, and my eyes, sweeping for the exits, the safe places to stand, the wall to always keep at my back, three sharp heavy things I could turn into a weapon. Theo had the decency to drop their gaze.

“Can I ask someone to bring you lunch?” they asked, after the silence had begun to grow heavy and thick.

“No, thank you; that’s very kind, but I’d like to see the child first.”

“Certainly, miss.”

I held up a hand again.

“I know you heard and understood me about those useless roles.”

I braced myself. Right or wrong often mattered nothing in places where brute strength won the day. And while I carried the authority of my invitation here, this was clearly diluted by the rise of my breasts, heavy with sweat.

“I’m sorry.” And Theo actually seemed to mean it. I heard it in the softening of their tone, the volume dropped several registers down. I nodded.

We began descending, past the social hall where the Mayor used to host feasts for close friends and kin. (I wondered if Theo would understand the concept of kin, or if they would understand only the concept of “family,” which most places had long since abandoned, along with the rigid roles that attended it.)

Now we stopped at a door, thick wood in thick walls, a barred window at my eye level, the frame studded with holes where locks had been yanked out. This was the same door I had stood in front of thirty-three years before, confused as to why my yayas had led me to this dark hallway underneath the Mayor’s compound. Didn’t the Mayor consider this private?

That moment had marked the cleaving of my life in three sections, each sewn to me like a bird’s wing clumsily reattached. The first part of my life ended that very moment, as the door swung open and I saw what huddled in the dark recesses against the wall, clad in rags and tethered by a chain the width of a small human wrist. I didn’t understand why we were there, watching a child howling and chained in its own filth. I thought we had come there to free the child and I reached to open the door and my yayas leaned over and pulled me back. “No, honeycake,” Yaya Mo told me, voice thick and wavering. “Release this child and we will lose everything,” Mo said, holding me close to their chest, Yayas Torín and Maha drifting next to us, curiously and suddenly silent.

What I have spent my life atoning for aren’t those first years, those twelve years spun in glimmering threads of joy and belonging, before I knew that they had woven a cage around the child. It was the three years that began with my silent walk back up the steps of the compound, thoughts running furiously through my skull but landing nowhere and doing nothing. Three years in which my yayas tried and tried to explain the bargain we’d all grown up with, where all of our equality, our prosperity, everything, rested on the bent back of a single child. Three years where I told myself I was strengthening until I could leave, when the winter fish stew with dried sun peppers and oní spice now tasted of coppery blood and filth, and yet I ate it anyway. Worse were the times when I actually enjoyed the braised rabbit, when song and thick drums still swayed my hips. My first kiss, looking up and realizing that the long shadow that stretched three streets down the hills was in fact cast by the building whose purpose I had finally learned. The building whose hallway I was standing inside now, my heart thudding in my chest as Theo swung open that very same door.

In front of us, in a room in near darkness but for a single patch of sun from an open skylight above our heads, the last of the scapegoated children huddled far away from the light. Theo had said the child was seven, but this scuttling creature looked no older than five or six. Wide eyes regarded me through thick, matted hair. But their clothes and face looked clean, as best as I could tell in the dim, and just then a warm breeze carried a familiar scent through the open door. It was the soap that we used to get on market days, and I felt myself slack with the memories, of the times I lay warm and comforted on one or another of my yayas’ laps, the smell of peppermint fresh and sharp on their skin and in their clothes.

“The child likes being clean, Theo?”

“Yes. We bring in clean clothes every day, and hot water and soap for them to bathe. Then we slip away, so the child knows we’re nowhere near. We come back to yesterday’s clothes flung into a corner and the water running into the drain.”

“Has anyone tried to cut or braid the child’s hair?”

“Other than the x-ray day … the only time they have let anyone within a meter was the day I cut off h—their shackles. And they … they refuse to leave the cell.”

I felt my daydreams falling away, the ones of taking a good fine house and stocking it with nothing but softness and warmth, piles of the furs I’d send for from afar, soothing music constantly floating on the air (I’d make our citizens take shifts outside.)

“You’ve left the doors open?”

“All of them. The child just goes and hides even further in the dark.”

As if in response, we heard feet padding into the rear corner of the room.

In the echo of our steps back up to the light, I heard Theo speak my name. Their voice sounded different, as if trying on respect like an ill-fitting jacket.

“Seda. What if—if the child can’t ever speak, or …” Their voice trailed away and we ascended another floor in silence, an emptiness in which I could imagine a vessel, thrumming with every joy in the world, perched just outside the reach of a little fist.

“If they never speak, they never speak.”

But my own fear hissed into the empty space after my words, and grief followed behind. What if the child would never learn anything beyond their own four walls? The very thing that makes us human, the concept that there are days beyond today? The promise of pesé fruit hidden inside tightly wrapped leaves, of melons sprouting from tiny seeds, of goodness to come?

“The child will never have to lift a finger to earn their keep. Not for the rest of their life. They’ve already paid.” I bristled at hearing myself speak that rickety word, “paid.” It was my time in Theo’s presence. “And if all the child knows is here and now, then that’s what they know. And we’ll make that as sweet and safe and comforting as we can.” Winter fish stew, tender pea greens in spring, in the summertime baskets full of pesé, a deep orange with a hint of musk in their sweet flesh.

“Seda, may I ask something of you?” Theo’s formality was almost quaint. “I’d like … I was one of the first to find the child. And though I haven’t been able to help them yet, I’d very much like to stay.” Their gaze locked directly on mine. “Under your direction.”

I’d seen Theo’s bloodshot eyes, ringed with dark circles, but now I knew what had put them there. Or who. I nodded again.

“First thing tomorrow, Theo. Now get some sleep.”

That evening I found the little house I’d been assigned. On this street two homes had burned to ash, and yaidé flowers were just beginning to poke through the cracks. We didn’t have spaces intended for solo guests; for us, the idea of welcoming a stranger and then having them lie all alone was the worst kind of hospitality. Instead we built our homes with rooms off of rooms, letting our kin groups expand or contract, visitors waking to honeycake and apricot juice. The house I was in had been recently vacated, and I didn’t want to ask why. I saw signs of the former residents everywhere: a worn sandal under the bed, an ajuela left in a corner, missing two of its strings. I was plucking at what was left, no particular tune in my mind, when a shadow fell across the window and I stood, gripping the instrument’s neck, ready for the figure that stood before me when I opened the door.

“So you’re alive.”

When I left, I’d unspooled three long threads behind me, quivering and invisible, and if some days without warning I felt a pain that crumpled me in two, I knew that I was feeling the tug of one of those threads from half a world away. And now the slim thread was a rope, red-stained and thick-braided and spilling right into the hands of Yaya Torín, who stood in front of me, thirty years grayer and with pain etched all over their face, an exact mirror of where I felt it in mine.

“For days I’ve heard all about this amazing healer coming to help with the child.” Torín’s eyes settled meaningfully on the table next to me. I pulled out a chair for them and wished there weren’t still layers of dust on everything, wished I had changed out of my filthy traveling clothes.

“This healer grew up right here, I heard, but they walked away decades ago, and they’ve lived all over since then. The things they must have seen. Must have written home about so many times.” Torín’s humor had always been outsized, gregarious, never bitter. But what right did I have to say who this yaya was after so long? In my head I’d had this conversation so many times, so many versions of it, so many versions of my yayas, of myself. Nothing we might say now could possibly carry that weight. My voice scratched at my dry throat.

“I wrote messages so many times. But I never sent them. I can’t explain it.” I stared at the table. “I don’t expect you to understand. All I wanted to do was to forget.”

“And did you?”

“No.” I settled into the other chair, across from this yaya who had sung me to sleep, sneaked me candied almonds; who had taken me fishing and just smiled when I opened the net and let every wriggling creature swim away.

“Are you a parent, Seda?”

“That’s a weight I never wanted to carry. I carry enough as it is.”

“So you have no idea what it’s like to never know whether you even have a living child. In your mind they’re laughing and thriving, or they’re bones gathering dust, and you can never make either of these visions leave you. It’s a wound that you think will heal, that you don’t want to heal, that never does.”

“Neither did mine.”

The only thing that could fully hold this moment was silence, the ocean calling faintly at my back.

Torín finally spoke. “I think I see why you’re such a good healer.”

“Oh?”

“There’s sorrow and pain all over you. You take in everyone else’s, don’t you? You carry it.”

I could feel the soreness in my shoulders, my back, as if the mere word “pain” had summoned it into life.

“Seda. I didn’t come to ask you to forgive me. Any of us. That will come when you’re ready, and not sooner. But I see you’re still carrying around that guilt. I saw it in you every day for three years. I want you to remember that you were only a child.”

“But you weren’t.” Above us I could hear a charrú, searching for its flock, that high and lonely call that always sounded like: you? you?

Torín stood now, long hair braided and shot through with gray, their skin the color of the braided copper bracelet around their wrist. I’d made that bracelet when I was ten.

“If you can forgive yourself, maybe you can forgive us.” And their glance took in the buildings stretched along the hills, the yaidé flowers poking through the ash. I felt myself slack with longing, to be gathered up in Torín’s embrace, to be brought back to who I'd once been. In every version of this conversation I’d ever imagined, none had gone like this. I sat silent, feeling the weight of my failure.

Yaya Torín stopped at the door, callused hands gripping the doorframe.

“Oh, Yaya Mo and Yaya Maha? They’re gone, not that you asked. Mo had an accident fishing three years back. We revised every safety rule to keep it from happening again. And Maha was killed in the fighting.”

“Which side?”

Torín’s body stiffened and their arms crossed over their chest.

“The right one.”

The next morning I met my team. We were four all together: Soli, all bright eyes and bouncing energy, only twenty years old, and one of those who had grown up here and fought to free the child; and Gan, quiet and patient, older than I, who like Theo was an outsider. I wasn’t sure what to call myself.

Our first project was to make the cell as comfortable as we could. We hauled in an enormous feather mattress, piles of pillows. Soli put out a call and within a week the compound was deluged with citizens bearing tapestries for the walls, each of them beautifully hand-woven, some specially made, bright colors imitating the sunsets the child had never seen. I liked the image of these citizens working on them for long hours into the night, as if they could weave away their complicity, thread by thread. The child pulled down every tapestry but left the bedding, and now spent their days, as far as I could tell, cocooned inside the soothing layers in the dark.

“I don’t blame you, little one,” I would smile to the pile of softness, rising and falling with the child’s careful breaths.

We took turns, five days at a time, sleeping in the converted storage room closest to the child’s cell, where we could hear them any time they might cry. The child never did.

Gan wanted to bring in plants, but the darkness would kill them. Theo brought soft stuffed bunnies, clown-in-the-boxes, colored paper charrús with tissue-thin wings. They sat in the corner, ignored, the child’s steps treading a neat circle around the bright pile. There was no way to bring in a faucet without tearing through walls, but we constructed an enormous wooden tub and every morning brought in buckets of hot water, sprigs of sage and peppermint to sharpen the air. I tried bath toys: floating wooden frogs and tiny wooden people in bright clothing from some era long ago. The next day the frogs and the people lay against the far wall, shattered from who knew how many times of being thrown with impressive force against the stone. I switched to pitchers and little water wheels, and then one afternoon tiptoed through the hallways and slid open the tiny peephole that had never been removed from the wall, first covering over the spot with a jacket so the child wouldn’t see the telltale speck of light. And then I clapped a hand over my mouth.

The child was playing. They stood over the full tub, their back to me, first pouring water from one pitcher into the next, then taking an empty pitcher and smacking it onto the surface of the water with what I can only imagine was glee. It was what I used to do after begging my yayas for a bath—Yaya Maha was always the easiest to convince—and after half an hour I would look up at them with wide innocent eyes when the bathroom walls were soaked and the good mixing bowls lay bobbing in the tub. The child let out a gasp of joy and I crumpled against the dungeon wall and made myself cry as quietly as I could, not wanting the child to hear even a hint of my tears.

Flushed with confidence, we next tackled how to get the child out of the dark corners of the cell. Soli suggested moving the food further away from the darkness, a tiny bit at a time, as with a shy cat. As long as the food remained in the dark, the little one didn’t seem to notice, squatting over their food the way they always had (we’d brought in a table and chairs, which the child ignored.) The day Soli finally set the child’s bowl just inside the reach of the light, the child stopped. They left the food all morning and stared at us, at the food, back at us.

“Their fear is so heavy. I hope they learn to set it down,” Soli whispered, a force of habit though they were saying nothing that the child shouldn’t hear.

I heard my stomach growl. I had been so eager to see the child finally leave the dark that I’d skipped my own meal. The child’s eyes flicked over me, over the food, and I felt a rush of shame.

“Or maybe this is their way of saying ‘no.’”

I strode over and fetched a new bowl, and the reacher tongs that the older people use when their arms fail them. I used them to set down the food back far away, where we’d always put it before our little project.

“We should never do that again.” My voice felt like it had grown thick in my mouth. Like layers of rope knotting themselves. My tongue even thicker.

The next day I brought my bowl into the darkness along with the child’s. The smells were warm and rich on the air and on the tongue, of a rabbit stew with tomato and fresh coriander, of limes doused with honey and blackened on the grill, then squeezed into a clay jar full of the clear distilled liquor of the fermented hortú plant. I sat in one dark corner, the child far opposite, and I babbled away about nothing between the scraping of our spoons against the clay.

We passed every day like this, the light growing warmer as it poured into the child’s cell. Sometimes the rest of the team would join me, and we would set down our bowls after lunch and lie in the warming patch of the sun, like cats. The child’s eyes would glitter at us through the dark.

Then came the day I had gone home early, a headache gripping my temples like a vise, and I was lying on my bed with a cloth soaked in vinegar when I heard rattling steps, Theo chattering excitedly up to my door. When they saw the darkness I was lying in they stopped and whispered in my ear and then called a neighbor and the two of them pulled a black cloth over my head and they both guided me through the streets, step by step, calling out to the neighbors to pause their games, the hawkers to pause the shouting of their wares.

“Please, please, let the child still be doing just what they were,” Theo whispered to no one. As far as I knew, Theo prayed to no gods. Gods were, to them, a comforting story, nothing more, certainly nothing to count on from day to day.

I chose to imagine that those prayers found their way on the air to the only one in the world who could actually grant them: the child. Because when I looked through the rough metal of the peephole, and then, in one mad head-thudding moment of danger, as I poked my head into the open door, it was as if the very first child in the world had just been born.

The child had dragged every pillow and blanket to the center of the room, where the sun streamed in, and lay soaking in it, the light caressing their head and their face. I ducked my head away, but not fast enough, because they saw me. And, let Theo pray to whatever gods they imagined, but my only god was there in that cell. That dear child caught my gaze and held it, and then, oh, then, they smiled.

That evening was the third night of Five Nights of Song. It was the first festival to be held since the fighting had ended, and Theo and Gan begged me to come see Soli, who had been playing the ajuela ever since they could fit one onto their lap.

“Those things aren’t for me,” I told them both. Except they had been, once. As a child I had looked forward all year to those nights in the ocean amphitheater, warm and open to the wind, full of my neighbors dancing and singing to every tune, our voices overlapping in a rich harmony, one that now lay in torn strands at our feet. At the market I’d been hearing stories in tones shot through with fear: of fishing hauls lighter than normal for weeks, of crops looking sickly and smaller than anyone could remember. The freeing of the last scapegoated child hadn’t brought the full collapse that everyone had always warned of; it was more like the sudden hissing away of a safety net, one woven from the limbs of countless children. It was the cold thought that, where, before, failure had always been a foreign thing, now it might be sniffing its way around our walls, hungry, with sharp teeth.

“Come on; we found someone to take tonight’s shift with the child.” Gan interrupted my musings, tucking their head sideways, raven hair shining, a sly smile across their normally reserved face. “You’re going to go home to your bare little space? Alone? Is that always how you celebrate?”

A few steps ahead of us, I swear I saw Theo blush.

That’s as good an explanation as any for why I found myself sitting in the ocean amphitheater, wearing an outfit borrowed from Gan, made of scarves colored silver and tangerine. Children were giggling away from their yayas, running around with glowing pinwheels that blazed into bright and glorious life the second one wheel touched another, but that faded quickly until the children found another wheel to connect to theirs. This was designed to teach us cooperation, I remembered, feeling the wheel as if it were spinning uselessly in my own chest. How much we depended on each other. What a cruel joke.

I let Gan and Theo’s conversation wash over me, Gan’s tales of the austere place where they’d grown up, a place I’d lived in for a season but could never have settled in, with its long winters and spare margin of survival. But at least there was no festering secret underneath the bare little homes.

The two of them heaped my plate high with roasted sun peppers, blackened tomatoes, tender pieces of goat. It had been roasted for hours over coals that looked deceptively pale and cool, but which were ready to flash sparks the second they brushed metal. They kept the pitcher close, hibiscus flower punch and hortú liquor with candied oranges, and I would drink from my magically full tumbler, not caring which of them was filling it up.

“Friends! You are all sitting way too still. Come dance!” This was Soli, done with their set for the evening, grinning and flushed on the arm of a muscled and graceful dancer who’d captivated the crowd.

“Seda? Dance? I’d love to see that.” I could hear the hortú in Theo’s voice. “If Seda dances so much as a song, I’ll scrub the kitchen every morning for a week.”

“Done.” I hated that task more than any other I could imagine. So I stood up and made my way to the bottom of the amphitheater, where two vocalists were singing a sweet harmony, a sound that somehow held inside it both mourning and hope.

Soli and their new friend, whose name I hadn’t caught, were each pulling on Gan’s hands, spinning entirely out of time to the music, giggling. Theo reached for my hand with a smile that was unlike any of theirs I’d ever seen. Almost vulnerable, almost shy. Their other hand slid over my waist and pulled me into what was meant to be a spin, but our feet tangled and clashed. Theo was clearly used to dancing with formal steps, roles made for the only two categories they understood humans to occupy.

“I’m sorry, Seda. I’m still trying to see things differently.” I knew what Theo meant. I didn’t really want to look at the crowd for too long. Anyone who looked over forty sent my eyes darting away, before I could recognize a face. Before I could wonder which of them had chosen to stay in their homes when the fighting began. Had any of them fought, like Soli, to free the last child from their cell?

Then, as if something was reaching out from inside, I felt my hand sliding over Theo’s eyes, closing them, eyelashes fluttering against my palm. “Maybe this will help.” And, after a heartbeat, I shut mine.

It was only natural, I told myself, that Theo’s hands would then slide around my waist. How else would we manage not to fall? And only natural that I would need to rest my head on their chest, now smelling of hibiscus flower and sweat. A line of the song carried across on the air, a new one meant to help knit us back together: we think we’re supposed to forget/tearing the memories up til there’s nothing left/but what we haven’t figured out yet/is it hurts less just to remember …

I felt my heart thud against Theo’s ribs. “The singer’s wrong, Theo. I mean, I … just not all the time.”

“Just not what all the time?” Their lips were so close to my ear I could feel their warm breath.

“I don’t want to remember … all the time. Sometimes I need to set it down.”

And I felt their hands reaching behind my back, as if releasing a weight tied just behind my shoulder blades. They hissed a soft sigh and I could feel a lightness spread through my limbs. Before my body took over completely, there was something I had to say.

“Theo, you know … you know I can’t promise you anything.”

I heard them take in a quick breath. “I understand. I won’t ask you to. But I think I can help you forget. Would you like that?”

“Yes.”

“Can I kiss you?”

“Yes.”

“Right now?”

“No.”

So Theo took me home. My neighbors had thankfully brought the party back with them and were in the courtyard playing drums and dancing on the table. It helped to cover up the sounds I was making, the sounds of my forgetting.

The next morning the sunlight streamed through the open window, and for the first time in countless days I woke without pain. Theo lay half-covered by my yellow blanket, their fingers tracing a tiny round tattoo on my right hip.

“What’s this?”

“That’s to mark my first love. I was nineteen.”

“I see.” And they kissed the spot, light as a breath. “And this here?” Their breath now at my waist.

“I had just turned twenty. I decided to be a healer and I had a chance to become an apprentice. I had to leave that lover behind.”

“I see.” Their voice was softer, as if slightly bruised. “And this?” Their lips pressed against my ribs, where my heartbeat fluttered.

“I was living in a place with rich and poor. The rich were comfortable and happy while the poor festered in the gutters.” I thought of my twelve-year-old-self, staring at a child in a filthy cell with a gutter against the wall. “I could have stayed there as a healer my whole life, but … The people I was trying to help, what they really needed was not to have to live in that kind of place. Where the choices were to become the destroyers or the destroyed. And I couldn’t give them that. So I left.” My voice cracked and I reached for the water I kept by the bed.

“Is there any part of your life where guilt doesn’t follow you, Seda?”

“Here.” I slid my cupped hand over their hip, their back, skin warm from the sun. “This.”

“Is that so?” And Theo kissed me with a hunger I wouldn’t have thought possible. “Then let’s give you more.”

The work with the child then hit a plateau. A cell was no place for a child to grow, no matter how many water toys, mounds of clay, building blocks we might bring in. We had no idea who had given birth to the child, and no yayas had ever come forward, but we had offers upon offers to take them in. But they still refused to walk through the door, and we would never make them go through it again except of their own free will. I wanted to bring in other children to play, but how could that be when the child would still let no one within an arm’s reach?

I thought I’d found an answer. Here we have a companion creature, similar to what other places called a dog, but much more intelligent and cunning, and with strength enough to bite through bone as if it were a honey wafer. The companion is excessively gentle, holding back its fierce strength, padding along beside its friends, lovestruck and affectionate.

I brought one in to stay with the child, a large fluffy thing who loved when I fed it pieces of roast goat or tossed a woven ball down the compound’s narrow halls. You can name this companion, I told the child. And maybe someday you can name yourself. This creature is pure love, I told them again and again. It could leave and hunt and find its own home. It doesn’t love you because it depends on you. It loves you because it wants to.

I thought the child understood.

Then came the day I was napping after a meal and was jolted awake by the companion’s howls. The child had balled up their little fists and was striking at the companion, and many of the blows were landing. Please don’t make me hurt you, the companion’s wails were saying, with everything inside itself. I ran and put my body in between the child and the companion, and when the companion stopped whimpering I realized that the child still was.

“When you hurt this creature,” I told the child, “It’s because you hurt. You think that hurting this creature will take the pain away from yourself. But that only makes it worse. It’s a knife you plunge into your own heart.”

And then I realized just how ignorant I had been.

Self?

This child had never known “self.” Their needs and wants had been subsumed by the needs and wants of everyone around them. Their own bones shrunk under the weight of others. What were their bones, their flesh, their sorrow, if not everyone’s property? I imagined how often the child had cried when they were younger, the quivering rope that fell to the floor the day they finally stopped, when they realized nobody was coming to help.

Then came a day that we saw that the child had cut themselves, a careless gash on their foot from a nail that somehow everyone had missed. The wound was already puffy, the skin a faint shade of red. I mashed up a paste of yarrow and calendula flowers, for the child to rub into the cut. Then I sat in the fading sun and rubbed it onto my own unbroken skin, over scars that had long since healed. The child backed away, leaving the jar untouched, and the next day the skin around the wound was puffier and angry.

I had never before appreciated the weight of it, of my rule that unless someone else was at risk, nobody could force the child to do a single thing. Not now, possibly not ever.

“The child has to be allowed their own will,” I told Gan, while their long tattooed arms gripped the edge of the door. “How many years did they spend choosing nothing at all?”

“Even if that means dying?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re just … giving up?” I had never before heard Gan speak in that tone.

“No.”

I stared through the open door into the cell. The child had begun to limp. Even if we could persuade them to use the medicine I’d made, it was no longer strong enough. And I knew who I would have to ask for help.

I was at the house just before dawn. Plants lined the windowsills, filled the yard, dangled from the roof tiles: aloe, calendula, feverfew, fresh spearmint, earthy mugwort, sharp sage. The front door was stained a rich pink, a color I’d chosen myself at ten or eleven, faded and pale now, the only thing around here not freshly painted and scrubbed. My hand touched the wood and there I was, fifteen, retrieving my bag and my heavy coat from under the bed, setting on the kitchen table a note pinned down with a heavy rock. A note that said only this: I have to go. You know why. I love you. I knew, without even the tiniest doubt, that this note lay folded neatly inside a jar or a book of Torín’s, who still lived in this same house, the rooms now empty and echoing. My body ran slack and cold and I made myself breathe, made myself remember the child’s puffy red wound, the infection threatening to spread to their blood. Then I raised my shaking fist and knocked.

Torín was quiet while I explained the condition of the wound, quiet while they gathered all the supplies we would need, quiet as we descended a winding path and the houses gave way to fragrant hillsides, leading down to the narrow valley where the oríu plants grew. For the first part of our trip, we would take the same path I’d taken to walk away, and our silence seemed to trail behind us, like the ghost of my own small self. Back when I used to tag along behind Torín, carrying baskets of herbs and daydreaming while they pointed out which of these could cure fevers, which could soothe a fresh burn.

When the path branched off down towards the ocean they stopped in front of a patch of stinging nettles, a faint smile on their face. “Do you remember these?” My hands clenched, remembering gathering the leaves for tea and learning the hard way what Torín had warned me about: never forget the gloves.

And then, as if my hands had broken some kind of spell, Torín began to speak. “Do you remember this?” They kept asking. Here was the bluff where I’d scraped my shin raw trying to harvest sea lettuce; below us was the tide pool of sea urchins, purple and salty and rich, a feast for our house and every neighbor around. I kept waiting for them to return to the conversation we’d left behind that first night, but instead it was nothing but stories and more stories, around us the smell of salt air.

We arrived at a sort of tunnel of cypress and cedars that led to a valley, sheltered from the sea and the wind, the only place the oríu plants grew. I stepped into the tunnel first, then extended my hand to Torín. Just as they had done for me when I was small. Would there ever be a day when the child might walk these paths? When Torín could show them how to find edible mushrooms, wild fennel, blackberries guarded by thorns?

“I would have taught you this, Seda. All of this.” Torín murmured, eyes focused on the ground, searching for clumps of thick green leaves. “If you’d stayed.” The basket and shears grew heavy, but I gripped them tight.

“I did learn it, in a way. I help heal broken hearts.”

“And your own heart?”

A thin ray of sun warmed my hand, just as it had that day in the cell, as I watched the child splash and play.

“It’s getting there.”

And then there it was, the first glimpse of the oríu plant, a lush dark green with black streaks. So elusive that only a handful of our citizens even knew how to find it. A thing that would not be cultivated, no matter how hard anyone tried. My hands trembled as I helped Torín pull up the roots, gently placing the tangled pile in the basket, covering it in a blue cloth.

“Torín, I—”

Their callused hand held mine, squeezed it tightly, their wide brown eyes meeting mine, before turning back to their work. Yes, but later, that single gesture said. I could feel something loosen inside my chest, and on the wind came the scent of the cypress trees, the pungent smell of the roots.

We were back in the late afternoon, and Soli and Theo were pacing in front of the cell. The child’s limp was worse, the skin redder and beginning to weep. I helped Torín to rinse and bruise the feathery leaves, mashing them in a bowl with yarrow to form a paste. Their strong hands took the black roots and ground them in a mortar and pestle, creating an acrid sludge the color of a pumice stone.

Again the child ignored the paste for the wound, only staring while I rubbed it over my scars. And then I made a decision, quick as lightning. The others gasped as I took out my knife and disinfected it and cut a short gash into my left leg.

For a second I thought to swallow my scream, but what difference would that make? If this child knew anything, they knew of pain. I let the child hear me, and my howl ripped open the air. The blood dripped. I reached for the bowl and mashed the soothing paste into the cut. I knew this would heal. Probably. I wrapped the gauze around my leg, a clumsy process made worse by my shaking hands. I was tying up the last strip when I dropped it, the cloth dangling near to the floor, and I twisted around, trying to reach.

Then I heard them padding out of the shadows. A pair of bare feet, soft as a cat’s and just as slow. Then a whiff of peppermint, and then a little hand, reaching for the strip of gauze, holding it up for me to take. The tears welled out of my eyes and I let the child see them, made no move to wipe them away.

“Thank you.”

And then I held still, as if a spell might break any moment, while the child took a clean rag, just as I had, and mashed the paste into their wound. They were very clumsy as they tried to wrap the gauze around their foot, but I pretended to be absorbed in the table, in tracing my finger through the whorls in the wood.

The last step was the worst. The child would have to swallow the awful paste, its flavor too strong to be disguised with even the sweetest of drinks. I filled a measuring spoon with the sludge and I let the child see my face pucker as I swallowed it down and then chased it with honeyed apricot juice. Behind me I could hear everyone take in a breath, as the child took a spoon from the tray and dipped it into the jar. The instant their tongue tasted the mixture they spat it out onto the floor. I waited for the spoon itself to follow, for the child to turn and hide in the dark. But they stayed.

The trust I was asking of the child, when they had so little reason to give it. The promise of healing, of goodness, curled inside tightly wrapped leaves. Inside a heart, tightly wrapped as a fist.

The spoon scraped again at the jar. On the tray was a tumbler of juice. And a single pesé. I knew that the time for stone fruits was all but over, and that once this one was gone, we might have to wait the better part of a year for another. And then the child’s mouth puckered around the spoon and they swallowed the medicine and they did not spit it out.

The juice followed. The pesé disappeared. The child’s teeth gnawed and gnashed at the flesh, stopping only when the pit showed through and the bitter center was free.

Readers will recognize the Ursula Le Guin short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” to which this story is a response.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors