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We were in semi-orbit. Something small floated in front of me. I blinked to let my eyes refocus and saw that it was a tiny white screw, like those that held together HandRights and such. Aidann's hand reached out and grabbed it just before it bumped into my nose. I turned to watch as she zipped the debris back into her purse. Such sudden, floating movement made my stomach feel queasy. I swallowed. The juices in my mouth tasted dark and prickly. The skycraft jostled, but I just bobbled back and forth in my seat, restrained only by the safety harness. My stomach twisted again. I swallowed a shadowy burp.
Aidann looked over at me. “How do you feel?”
“Bad,” I managed.
Aidann nodded. She opened her purse again, rooted around until she pulled out a tiny envelope of manila-colored plastic and handed it to me. Before I reached out for it, she simply released it. It hung freely in mid-air.
I giggled on another burp. “Wow.”
Whatever the opposite of nonplussed is, Aidann was it. “Open it and take one. Just one, though.”
I reached for the envelope in wonder, easily plucking it from the air. It was no longer than my four fingers and just barely as wide as my thumb. Through its shell, I could feel an indeterminate number of tiny round things rattling around its innards. I released the envelope's seal and looked inside to find a pinch of mauve spheres, each the size of a nonpareil.
My stomach gurgled, but I stared into the envelope with freezing mistrust. I looked sidelong at Aidann.
“Skysick remedies. Don't take more than one, or you'll have to experience zero-g diarrhea on top of everything else.”
I held the open envelope back out to her. “You take one first.”
“Careful,” Aidann warned, making a protective upside-down cup of her hand and hovering it over the mouth of the envelope. “You're going to lose them all like that.”
“You first,” I insisted.
“They're yours,” she answered, “from Naomi.”
“Kids aren't supposed to take remedies from strangers,” I said.
“It's your choice. You trust me, or,” she reached over my head and pulled down from the personal console above me a yellow-orange tube about five centimeters in diameter, with a wider opening made of soft, removable plassein, “or use this.”
A sickvac. The very sight of it made my mouth fill with bile. Fighting every twitch of reverse peristalsis, I reached into the envelope with one finger. On my fingernail I brought forth just one remedy. I closed my eyes and placed it on my tongue. It dissolved swiftly. I swallowed. The sharp tastes went neutral. I waited another minute, my eyes fixed on the safety information printed on the back of the seat in front of me. My stomach quieted. I allowed myself to relax.
I looked up at Aidann. “Thank you,” I whispered grudgingly.
She smiled again, just a waif of a smile.
I looked out the window again, gawking at my first real glimpse of the world from outside of it. The earth glowed with a rich, golden-white light. I blinked in amazement. I pressed my palm to the cool portal, as if I could reach through it and pat the globe with my palm, splash my hands in the oceans. I looked up from the earth's aura into the blackness of star-sprinkled space and wondered at it.
“The world looks like a toy from here,” I said.
“Remember this moment,” Aidann said over my shoulder.
“Why?”
“Whenever things get tough, think of the world like this. The more you distance yourself from the world—”
She stopped to cough twice, dry, fruitless coughs.
“—the less important it seems,” she finished.
I turned back to her. She began coughing again, tightly cupping her left hand in front of her mouth, as if she were violently cramming those coughs back into her lungs. Her eyes began to water, and her face became cloud white. The other passengers across the aisle, even the one in the gray dress, began to stare and pull away from her. The man in the seat in front of Aidann's turned and glared at her.
“You okay, Aidann?” I asked, leaning toward her, concerned.
“Careful!” she snapped, shoving her elbow out at me at such a threatening angle that I immediately backed away.
She shut her eyes so tightly I thought she might burst a blood vessel. Quietly she added, “Don't touch me right now.”
I said nothing, instead backing further away from her, like the other passengers had.
Keeping her left hand firmly over her mouth, she unbuckled herself and began wending her way to the back of the craft, pulling herself along the aisle, her right hand gripping the seat handles lining the walkway, using her left elbow for balance and leverage, coughing all the way.
I'd been left alone. High in my chest, panic fluttered. My fingers and feet began to move without my having given them leave. I unbuckled my seatbelt and began to sit up. This ended up taking more skill and concentration than my impetuosity had anticipated. Having spent all of my ten years under the influence of a certain amount of gravity, my muscles were accustomed to exerting specific amounts of force for certain tasks. However, exerting that same amount of force during zero-g produces vastly different effects. I bounced against the overhead console twice, hitting my head both times. By my second return trip to my seat, I thought to grab the armrests and stop myself.
Deciding to make my second attempt a more careful one, I rose gingerly to my feet, still holding the armrests, so I was hunched over, my sore forehead leaning against the seatback in front of me. Keeping my feet perfectly still, millimeter by millimeter I straightened to a fully upright position, the previously offending overhead console a safe handspan above me. I reached for the guide handle on the nearest seat sides and pulled myself—still gingerly—out into the aisle.
I looked in the direction Aidann had taken. At the back of the cabin, I saw two doors on either side. One door was blue, one red. A sign running above the doors in bright yellow-green flashed a handful of characters similar to those on the sign for the Greater San Diego MexiKorean Community Center. This was followed by a set of horizontal squiggles that seemed to dangle from straight lines above them; this I guessed was Indian (I was too inexperienced to know what Hindi was at that time). Finally, one blessed English word marched across the screen: Restrooms.
I clambered down the aisle, like pulling myself through deep water. The handles on the seats were like the edge of a pool, and it took light but concentrated control to keep my feet from flying out either in front of or behind me. Ahead of me, the blue door opened, and out stepped a Korean man in a baggy black cutaway, self-consciously fluffing his green, yellow, red and white patterned four-in-hand about his starched collar. I clung to the handle and made myself flat enough that he could pass. By process of elimination, no pun intended, I then made my determined way towards the red restroom door.
I wrapped the fingers of my right hand firmly around the chrome grip by the doorjamb and knocked with my left. “Aidann,” I called. “Are you okay?”
With a speed that blurred my vision and boggled my mind, the door opened, Aidann reached out, pulled me in, and shut the door behind me.
I started to yell at her. “What—!”
She clamped a freshly travelgloved hand over my mouth. “Be quiet or go back to your seat.”
She held me like that until I nodded acquiescence. She released me and placed me firmly over the closed toilet unit. I say “over” and not “on”, kind reader, just in case you have yet to experience the joys of semi-orbital flight. If so, you need to be aware that the facilities designed for women's use in zero gravity are far less seat-like, and far more like squatting upon a plassein-encased vortex.
Aidann then turned her back to me, leaning over the counter where a courtesy dispenser pump offered low-grade hand cleanser and free tissues. Recovered from her coughing spell, Aidann held what looked like the drive to a HandRight between her thumb and middle finger, pressing it against the counter.
She looked over her shoulder at me. “Take a guess. What's the strongest part of your body?”
I frowned and thought hard. “Fist?”
Then she brought her elbow down hard on the drive. I heard a crunch and winced, expecting it to be the sound of her funny bone quivering with the blow. Aidann lifted the drive and shook it. It rattled like raw rice in a plastic bottle.
Looking at me out of the corners of her eyes, Aidann replied, “Guess again.”
I don't think she really wanted me to answer, which is a good thing, because I was too confused by her assault on what I thought was a harmless HandRight drive. I watched her slip the drive back into the device, secure it with her screwdriver, fasten the casing back over its innards, then slip the reassembled but useless computer into her purse.
“Let's go,” was all she said, steering me out of the restroom and back to our seats.
ˆˇˆˇˆˇˆ
The pilot came over the speakers and advised the passengers in four languages, including indifferent English, that for our protection during reentry, the blinds of the portal windows would be closing. I watched the covering slide itself over my little window like a drowsy eyelid, but it wasn't enough to keep out all the orange brightness. The craft shuddered, and I kept my eyes fixed on the safety information pocket. I squinted at the pictograms highlighting in blue where the emergency exits were, miming where under my seat to find the emergency pressure suit, where above me my collapsible oxygen helmet was kept. I flicked a glance over at Aidann. She was perfectly still, perfectly calm, like a quiet pond without a single ripple on its surface. I wondered at her fearlessness and looked mindlessly back at the safety card.
We landed. When we were permitted to disembark, I followed Aidann into the Delhi skyport, my muscles sluggish at their reintroduction to gravity.
“Stay close,” she said. I was not inclined to disobey this time.
Delhi's port was more crowded—and more malodorous to my western nostrils—than SAND was. The smell in the air could have wafted forth from a steaming Crock Pot filled with decaying gums, stale urine and burning tires, seasoned with tufts of sweaty armpit hair. The voices around me had a clipped guttarality, like bubbles of phlegm being partially swallowed. There was another hushed undercurrent of sound rustling about me, generated by the proximity of bodies, the brushing of sleeves, the collisions of a million breaths: the sound of concentrated humanity. It was warmer here, but I couldn't determine if that was due to the climate or the crush of people.
The whole time we rushed. I had little chance to notice anything, but what I saw I worked hard to retain for future reference. Most of the women and girls were dressed in the same style as Aidann was—baggy pants, dress-type top—in a rainbow of colors. Most of the men wore suits that seemed to be neat and clean, though a percentage were faded and out of style. The drop ceiling tiles above us were loose in several places, and the ceiling itself was about fifteen times lower than the SAND foyer. I looked down; the concrete floor was stained with varying shades of darkness from a variety of human spit. The voices around us were alternately hushed and natteringly loud. The louder the voice, it seemed, the more outstretched the speakers' hands in the universal language of begging.
A few times my eyes watered from the odors churning around me. I dabbed the back of my hand at the bottom of my nose for relief, wiped the sweat from my forehead with my glove, then dabbed at my nose again.
Aidann leaned over and said near my ear, “Don't do that. That's rude, not to mention unsanitary.”
I lowered my hand, but I'm sure I pouted as I did so. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, to look for disapproving glares. Behind us, I saw two men watching me—boys, really, not much older than Aidann looked, both wearing very thick turbans about their heads. I turned away, embarrassed that I was being stared at for being so obviously “still American.”
With no checked bags to collect, our departure from the port was relatively quick, despite the crowds and preponderance of boys and men shouting to us in reasonably good English, demanding we permit them to give us a ride to a hotel, a train station, our parents. We dodged them through to the exit, and Aidann and I were outside. To my surprise, night was falling.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Eight thirty PM give or take,” Aidann said, surveying our surroundings cautiously.
I looked out at the mash of streets in front of me. Yellow headlights pierced and whirled through a smog of traffic. The air was laced with the acrid scents of internal combustion exhaust and burning plastics. Traffic lights blinked on the corners, but no one appeared to take them very seriously. I think I saw about twelve vehicle models similar to Ranice's car. I thought of Ranice. A lump came to my throat.
“Come on,” Aidann said, again stopping herself from reaching for my hand. I followed on her heels, clutching the strap of my disemboweled bag with one hand, my rail ticket and passport with the other. Horns honked intermittently, at us, at each other, at a wealth of bicycles weaving deftly about. I watched the cyclers, wishing someone had taught me how to ride one. It looked kind of fun. It looked easier than walking, anyway.
We walked until my feet hurt. I looked longingly at the drivers who pulled up along the walkway, practically begging us to let them take us somewhere.
“Ignore them,” Aidann said, “and keep your hands close to your sides, or they'll slap something on your arm and try to make you pay for it.”
Just when I thought I would not be able to walk another inch, Aidann said, “Here. Train station.”
Relief that I would soon be sitting lightened my steps. We took a suicidal route across the street and walked into the station, which was decorated in the same “unwashed masses” motif as the skyport. I looked up at the old LED signs—in Hindi and English—displaying where the trains would be boarding.
“There's ours!” I shouted, pointing with my index finger. “Himalayan Princess, track 5!”
Aidann pulled my arm down. “Chin,” she reminded me.
I barely heard her; I was too busy noticing that I was again the recipient of stares. A mother grabbed her little son and daughter, about three or four years old and saucer-eyed, and dragged them away from me as if my generous hand gestures were the symptoms of something contagious.
“Jane.”
“Yeah?”
“Do you remember when I said you wouldn't have your perks much longer?”
I felt my eyes widen. “Yeah.”
“We're going to sell your ring now so I can get train fare.”
I whirled on her. “But how will I get on the train without my perks? They won't know who I am!”
“This train only has a perks receptor in first class, and that's not us. Your ticket and passport are enough.”
“But what if you leave me here? I don't even have any clothes.” I tightened my fist and held it behind my back. “My perks is all I have.”
Aidann's look softened. “I know you must be scared. I know I was when my mom—when I was first on my own. I wasn't much younger than you are now. I remember what it was like. I want to stay with you so you don't have to go by yourself. But I can't travel with you without a ticket, and I can't get a ticket without selling your ring.”
“Why do you have to sell it?” My voice verged on desperation. “Can't you just pay with it?”
Aidann shook her head. “It was deactivated after you checked in for our flight.”
“But how?”
“Naomi,” she said, as if that explained everything.
I lifted my knotted fist to my eyes and gave my perks ring a good, long look. The ring held my DNA code and every other piece of data that was my formal identity—a formal identity I'd been reminded throughout my life should not have been permitted to reach childhood in the first place. I opened my fingers and pulled the ring over my knuckle, then surrendered it into Aidann's upturned palm.
I followed her through the crowd again, eyes darting all about, feeling particularly vulnerable having left what amounted to my existence in someone else's hands, soon to be lost to me forever. Aidann led us over to a cart manned by a teenage boy wearing a long, ivory shirt, matching pants and brimless hat. Aidann haggled with him in another language I had yet to understand. Eventually, Aidann accepted a loose wad of dirty, rumpled paper money, and my ring went into the boy's possession.
Then Aidann marched us into a blob of people formed around a ticket window. With well-placed elbows, ducking at times, Aidann got us to the front, where she purchased a one-way ticket from the clerk behind the dirty, scored glass. The whites of his eyes were yellow. His travel gloves were an indifferent shade of brown.
I looked over my shoulder while I waited: those two men who had been staring at me in the skyport were there, staring again. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled, but I tried to brush it off.
I feigned bravery as Aidann led me out into the cooling evening. After we waited a silent half-hour on the platform, our noisy, puffing, clanging conveyance arrived. The people around us did not form lines, as Americans would have; they bunched, forming plugs of humanity at the doors of each car. Conductors emerged from the wheezing hulk and asked in several languages for tickets. “Second class, chair car, third class,” the conductor closest to us shouted as Aidann nudged me into the crowd, which in turn practically carried us to the entrance.
As the conductor collected our tickets, Aidann said something to him in non-English. He responded in turn, jerking his chin to our right. Aidann said something with a slight bow of the head, and we moved in the suggested direction.
The train was designed inside and out with a preponderance of beige. Well-scratched chrome luggage racks hung overhead. Worn pleather seating was occupied by mothers and children, businessmen frobnicating on their handhelds, college-student-aged men and women, old couples with more wrinkles on their faces than I'd ever seen on human beings. I reminded myself not to plug my nose. People sat, stood, leaned and slouched. Towards the back of the car, Aidann found an open spot of wall against which we could lean, far from the breath of any of the open windows.
My feet throbbed. “No seat?”
“It's only an hour and a half.”
I slid my back against the wall next to Aidann. My stomach grumbled, loudly enough for Aidann to remark, “You'll have to wait till we get to Naomi.”
Unsurprised, I leaned my head listlessly against the cobbled beige plastic and shut my eyes. After a few minutes, the train moved, and under its gentle rocking, I let the last sleepless night I'd spent at the VanDeers catch up with me. Aidann jabbed me with her elbow, and my eyes flew open.
“Stay awake,” she warned.
I obeyed.
ˆˇˆˇˆˇˆ
The hour and a half Aidann had predicted stretched into two and a half after the train stopped in the middle of the tracks at five different places for varying stretches of time. At our stop, about half of the remaining passengers disembarked with us. The station there was smaller, dirtier and darker, with most of its incandescent bulbs either dead or shattered. The darkness and strangeness scared me, but Aidann again took the surefooted lead.
We wove out of the station onto a main thoroughfare. Aidann found another merchant hanging around outside the station looking for people like Aidann who had things to buy or sell. This guy looked to be the descendent of an Irish Renaissance visitor, with auburn curls and dark freckles sprinkled across his deeply tanned cheeks. He leaned against his bicycle and held open to the buying public the contents of a green duck duffel about seven times the size of my wounded bag.
He and Aidann greeted each other with the tolerant familiarity borne of a history of brief but frequent business exchanges. Aidann pulled the HandRight from her purse and began to bargain, leaving me wondering why, if she was going to sell the broken HandRight, had she needed to sell my perks, too? After much yelling from the boy and glacial persistence from Aidann, the HandRight went into his duffel and a handful of smaller gadgets, naked components I couldn't identify, went into Aidann's purse.
Then we scurried into a tight alley lined with closed warehouses. I clung to Aidann's shadow, cast as it was by the faint light along our path. Behind us, a dog howled, and I nearly leapt from my clothes. Icy sweat pressed through the back of my suit into the jacket I still wore. I looked behind us in the direction of the caterwauling and saw two other shadows, of human shape and size, gaining on us quickly.
I gasped. All enculturation surrendering to survival instinct, I reached for Aidann's hand in the darkness. She stopped and turned around.
The forms came closer. They were the two staring males from the skyport and the train station.
One murmured something that I, of course, could not understand literally, but I knew it wasn't a kind offer of dinner and conversation. I thought my heart would pop out of my ears. Then the silent one lunged at me like a leopard, hands clenched into menacing claws.
I screamed and backed away, but instead of falling back on Aidann, I tumbled to the grimy, moist ground. I looked up and saw a precisely controlled blur of legs and arms. Aidann. She whirled a kick at the boy who had gone for me, her foot striking high enough to hit him in the forehead, knocking him firmly on his rear. When the sharply aimed double-kick to the other one's stomach barely halted his advance, Aidann, with a powerful cry, gave her elbow to his nose. Something crunched.
Then she was holding on to my upper arm, pulling me through the maze of alleys at a dash. My feet and legs pumped double-time to keep up with her. I was breathing so hard that I began having sharp pains just below the sternum with each inhalation.
Just when I thought I could go no further and I would have to let Aidann leave me behind in this warehouse wilderness, Aidann's pace slowed to a jog, then a trot, then a walk.
“Just at the end of this block,” she said in an easy, conversational tone. She hadn't even broken a sweat.
We stopped at the wide, wooden door to a three-story freight shed. Its nondescript stucco façade hulked over the entire block. There was no bell on the door, but a long tassel of dirt-worn hemp twine hung through an oversized peephole. Aidann did not knock. Instead she took the tassel in her fingers and began to turn it into complex macramé. Too frightened to ask why, all I could do was lean against the door and catch my breath. When Aidann released the braid, it disappeared behind the door in one ghost-swift motion. Then the door opened.
A girl between my height and Aidann's stood on the other side. She wore an outfit similar in silhouette to Aidann's, but of a dusty shade that matched the shadows cast by the hand lamp she placed on a rickety stand by the door.
Placing her palms together under her chin, elbows slightly out, she nodded to us. “Namaste,” she said.
Mirroring her greeting, Aidann responded in kind. “Namaste, Samireh.”
Looking from one to the other, I decided to press my hands together. “Nah-mahs-tay.”
The other girl smiled at me beneath her tired gray eyes. Her words she directed to Aidann. “They're just finishing up meditation right now.”
“Who leads tonight?” Aidann asked.
“Bhenji Fleuvbleu,” she said with a note of irritation.
“Bhenji Nealingson?” Aidann asked.
“Meeting with customers.”
Aidann nodded to the girl, then beckoned me, palm-down, up the set of wooden stairs to our right. I hurried after.
As we ascended the first flight of creaky stairs, then the second, the sound of a flat, droning voice became louder and closer. On the top floor, Aidann walked down the long hall to the open doorway, from whence came the rambling speech.
Aidann stopped at the threshold and began to remove her footwear. She motioned that I should do likewise. Barefoot, we proceeded into the dimly lit room, and that was the first time I beheld my new classmates. About seventy girls in all sat on the floor, their backs to me, all facing the front of the room, where a short, stout woman paced to and fro. She wore the same style outfit as Aidann; apparently this was the Naomi uniform, for all the other girls wore the same.
The pacing woman was speaking in a language that had the same small-mouthed roundness that I would hear when one of the VanDeers would accidentally open the NipponToday netcast channel. To the ten-year-old me, she appeared to be of Asian descent, but her too-straight-then-upturned-at-the-bottom nose did not seem to fit the rest of her face. Years later, I would learn she had inherited her proboscis from her father, a native of Marseilles, while the rest of her face came from Kyoto by way of her mother.
The rows at the back of the room were largely populated with girls slightly larger than myself. I couldn't really see their faces, by their size I guessed them to be about my age. The taller girls knelt mostly towards the front of the room. All heads were bowed. I guessed the oldest couldn't have been more than nineteen. All the girls seemed to be placed in an even grid, with a few spots empty. On the wall that all of them faced and in front of which the speaker paced was a 2-D picture of a woman, the nameplate beneath it reading “Naomi Brock-Woolthersham.” Silk cherry blossoms and lotus flowers wreathed around the frame.
Aidann placed her shoes, soles together, along the wall, lined with about seventy other pairs. I put the soles of my freshly removed sneaker-boots together and placed them next to Aidann's. Then, Aidann gestured for me to sit at the farthest end of the last row, where I stuck out like a hangnail.
I did not close my eyes and bow my head as the other girls in my row did. Instead, I watched Aidann walk calmly to one of the empty spots in the third row from the front and make a deep bow in the direction of the pacing woman. The woman suddenly broke off her rambling and spoke in a sharp, quick, loud voice. Her eyes narrowed at Aidann. Aidann bowed again and said something that started with “Fleuvbleu-san.”
The woman snapped in a French accent, “I will say this in English, then, so that our new student can learn not to repeat your disrespect.”
The other girls kept their eyes closed, heads bowed, palms on their thighs.
“You interrupt my meditation, you do not seek permission to step on the tatami, and you tell another girl what to do? So, you are sensei now, Parrish-san?”
I could not see her face, but Aidann bowed even further.
“If you had bothered to be on time, you would not have been tempted to this lack of reigisoho!”
Enraged at this, I couldn't stop myself from crying out, “It's not her fault! Our train was late!”
Now the girls in my row opened their eyes and looked at me in disbelief, in warning. I ignored their looks and raised my nose defiantly at Fleuvbleu-san.
She looked at me, then back at Aidann, shoulders high with fury. Aidann's sole response was another bow. Apparently not satisfied with this, Fleuvbleu-san marched over, pulled her hand back and slapped Aidann across the face.
I expected—no, I wanted Aidann to turn into the graceful blur of self-defense that she had been back in the alley. I was disappointed. Aidann only bowed even lower than she had before, while Fleuvbleu-san's eyes and jaw set like cement.
“Another slap is waiting for you,” Fleuvbleu-san hissed at Aidann but with her eyes in my direction, “if your little friend says another word.”
I leapt to my feet. “But—!”
Another slap. I reeled backwards as if my own cheek had been struck.
“Aidann!” I yelled over the silence of the room. “Come on, fight back!”
Fleuvbleu-san's hand swung back, ready to deliver the third blow, when another voice called from the entryway.
“Fleuvbleu! Arrêtez-vous!”
I swung around, as did all the other girls in the room. In the doorway stood a willowy woman with a braid the thickness of my arm draped over her shoulder past her hip. She wore a gracefully draped sari over a snow-white knit blouse. A sheer scarf draped over her head without covering her face, and a purse much like Aidann's hung from a strap across her shoulder. There were mirrored discs tacked about the hem of her skirt, and they reflected what little light there was in the room. A mood-bindi graced the area between her eyebrows, and beneath it, her eyes widened in displeasure that matched the black of the bindi.
All around me the girls stood, turned fully to face the door and bowed to the recent arrival. I turned back to see Fleuvbleu-san; she likewise bowed, but her fierce jaw removed all semblance of obedience from the gesture.
Back at the door, the woman was looking at me. Concern was in her dark eyes. I looked down at my toes and simply listened.
“My little sisters,” the woman in the sari said, “it is late and breakfast is early, and I am sure you are tired from all your hard work today. Aidann, Bhenji Fleuvbleu and Jane E, please stay behind. All else, good night.”
Another roomful of bows, and seventy-ish girls made seventy-ish beelines for seventy-ish pairs of shoes. The room cleared with a disciplined swiftness, leaving just us four.
“Bhenji Nealingson,” without invitation, Fleuvbleu-san began to explain, “Parrish was modeling poor reigisoho—”
Bhenji Nealingson held up her hand, firmly commanding silence. “Bhenji Fleuvbleu, we who impart musumegokoro-do to our little sisters must show by example how to empty one's mind of all aggression. The way of musumegokoro is not one of resistance but of flexibility. It is difficult to teach this emptiness and gentleness when we ourselves are striking our little sisters in anger.”
Almost chastened, Fleuvbleu-san bowed deeply but kept glaring at Aidann out of the corner of her eye. “Desolée, mademoiselle.”
“Mademoiselles,” Bhenji Nealingson corrected.
With a wink-worth of hesitation, Fleuvbleu bowed first to me, then to Aidann. “Desolée.”
Aidann bowed even more deeply, also saying “Desolée,” but the unrequested apology only seemed to anger Fleuvbleu further.
“Bonne nuit, ma sœur,” said Bhenji Nealingson by way of dismissal, and the three of us watched Fleuvbleu-san depart.
With a deep breath, Bhenji Nealingson dusted her hands off on her sari and hunched down so she and I were of equal height. “You must be Jane E. My name is Preeti Kaur Nealingson. I am headmistress here. Welcome.”
Seeing how she had defended Aidann, seeing how warmly her eyes shone at me, I felt I had found a new ally in this strange new place. With well-aimed effort, I pressed my palms together and nodded. “Namaste,” I said.
Bhenji Nealingson's smile widened, revealing teeth whiter than milk. “She learns quickly, doesn't she, Aidann?”
“Yes, Bhenji.” Aidann said.
Bhenji Nealingson reached down to her purse and looked inside. I noticed a silver bangle bracelet around her wrist, and a cord around her waist held a tiny jeweled dagger. “You girls must be hungry, no?”
I opened my mouth to speak in the affirmative, but Aidann quickly said, “We are fine, Bhenji Nealingson.”
“Aidann, our little sister is still American—” There was that phrase again. “—and not accustomed to the required first polite refusal. Let's us indulge her, at least tonight.”
Bhenji Nealingson waited while we tied our shoes, then she led us out to the hall and into a tiny but comfortably appointed office. The light illumined a well-kept desktop unit of a rather old model sitting primly on top of a tidy desk. Next to it was a yellowing black-and-white 2-D photograph in a polished silver frame: a well-freckled Caucasian man wearing some kind of military uniform, arm-in-reluctant-arm with an Indian woman. Neither smiled.
Bhenji Nealingson gestured Aidann and I into two worn embroidered chairs on the other side of her desk and offered us each an antivibac hand wipe in preparation for our meal. Then from her purse she pulled forth three puffy pita-like rounds.
“Roti,” she said to me. “I am sorry I have no onions, but please, enjoy.”
I reached for the bread, but Aidann stopped me. “You first, Bhenji,” she said to our host.
Shaking her head, Bhenji Nealingson said, “Oh, I'm not hungry, but thank you.”
“Thank you, Bhenji Nealingson,” I said as I took one of the rounds. She smiled at me then spoke a command. On the shelves behind her, a teapot began to hiss.
As I chewed my first mouthful, Aidann reluctantly took a piece of roti. She placed it on her lap. I watched her touch her hand to her forehead, then to her stomach, then to each shoulder in turn. She bowed her head gratefully over her roti.
That shocked me enough to stop chewing. I nearly choked. Aidann was a Catholic! I waited for Bhenji Nealingson to do something; at the very least reprimand this “little sister” for being so openly foolhardy. Bhenji Nealingson merely smiled; on closer inspection, I saw a shimmer of actual pride in that smile.
A soft “ding” sounded from the teapot, and Bhenji Nealingson served us steaming, fragrant cups of sweet, milky tea, very welcome to my long-abandoned taste buds.
Again Aidann gestured a cross over her upper body. Then she began to eat. I noticed red finger marks were swelling on her cheek. Not wanting to stare, I began to look around the office. The walls were covered with luxuriously woven tapestries: sun-gilded wildflowers; patterns resembling vast, stretching fields of rippling wheat; the strangest was a symbol of three crossed swords inside a circle on a yellow field, with rich variations of texture throughout.
Bhenji Nealingson began to converse with Aidann in the Punjabi I soon would learn myself. Since I only knew English, I was left out of this conversation. Without halting her verbal stride, Bhenji Nealingson broke the third roti in half, distributing it equally between her two guests, but Aidann placed her half in my lap. Famished past the point of good manners, I ate both pieces without even a word of thanks.
When our teacups were emptied, Aidann removed her purse and handed it over to Bhenji Nealingson, who took it with a nod. She looked quickly inside and said something that made Aidann blush and hang her head humbly. Then, Bhenji Nealingson pulled a thick shawl from the back of her chair and handed it to me. It was soft and springy in my grip. She switched back to English. “Well, my little sisters, your journey has been long. Aidann, please allow Jane to make a bed by your spot tonight.”
“Yes, Bhenji.” Aidann stood and beckoned me.
Bhenji Nealingson rose and opened the manual door for us. Then she took a tiny polished brass oil lamp from the stand by the door, lit it with a click-lighter, and handed it to Aidann. “Namaste,” she said.
“Namaste,” Aidann and I responded.
Aidann led the way, her little lamp piercing the darkness. I followed down both flights of steps, through a hall, out into a wide courtyard that held three cows, a vegetable garden and a stone well. The sliver of moon above gave little light.
The courtyard was lined with several doors. I noticed one was locked top to bottom with a series of bolts—some digital, some padlocks. Nodding her head at the door, Aidann said, “The vault.”
I wondered at this while Aidann walked ahead, straight to the door on the opposite side of the courtyard. I followed her through into a wide room,—larger than the third floor dojo—with a dirt floor. This was where the Naomi girls slept, bundled in all manner of improvised bedding.
Aidann walked through the darkness, through the web of sleeping girls until she found her spot—a neatly folded set of blankets close to the far back-left corner. She placed the lamp carefully on a bare spot on the floor, took the shawl from me, and spread it out on the floor to the right of her spot. She wrinkled her nose at this, picked up one of her two blankets, and placed it on top of the shawl.
“But you'll only have one!” I protested in a whisper.
Aidann ignored me. She removed her shoes and set them at the head of her spot. She extinguished the lamp. Then she unfolded her blanket, opened it out onto the floor, lay down on one half and pulled the other half over herself, the blanket covering her only when she pulled hard at its edges. She made of her arm a pillow.
For my part, I fumbled in the darkness to remove my shoes, rolled my bag into an improvised pillow and nestled into the shawl and blanket. All around me, as my eyes adjusted to the night, I heard the heavy breathing of my fellow inmates, punctuated by the occasional snore. My body felt utterly wrung, but my mind still raced with questions. I rolled over in my nest of blankets to face my guardian.
“Aidann?” I asked in a hoarse whisper.
“Yes,” was her hushed response.
“When that teacher hit you, why didn't you hit back?”
I heard Aidann sigh. “That would not have helped either Fleuvbleu-san or me.”
“It would have taught her not to be so mean to you ever again.”
“How? How would that have stopped her from hitting me again, and harder?”
I thought this over for a minute but could come up with no real answer. “My foster mother, Mrs. VanDeer, is mean like that. If she ever'd hit me, I would've hit back, and I don't even know how to fight like you do. Those guys that came after us—”
“I shouldn't have done that,” Aidann interrupted, voice heavy with shame.
I was stunned. “But you had no choice!”
“There is never only one choice.”
I pondered this for another moment, trying to fit it into my exceedingly tiny worldview.
Before I had a chance to formulate more questions, Aidann whispered, “It's late. Sleep.”
With a sigh of my own, I rolled over with my back to Aidann, listening until I heard her breathing slip into that universal constant that transcends all cultures: the airy rhythm of sleep. Soon that sound worked in concert with the fatigue induced by my trans-oceanic journey, culture shock, and a lack of repose from the previous night, and I dropped into some semblance of slumber.
