“Xie,” I said, and heard my voice crack.
And then, finally, she spoke. Her voice was flat and plain. “A generation ago the Mountain Glacial States closed their southern reservoir gates and let what was left of Bangladesh vanish into a cholera storm. Two million people died. They didn’t have enough water to keep their hands clean, and they died.”
Her voice was like a mask with no face under it. “We did that,” she said. “My father did that. He was nineteen years old.”
I felt my chin come up and my throat tighten. It was a gesture of pride, but a feeling of fear.
“Cumberland is thirsty,” she said. She was looking right at the Panopticon, and she was speaking far too plainly. “It’s so cruel, thirst.”
“Xie, stop.” I slid forward and knelt beside her cot. The flagstones bruised my knees. “You have to stop.”
“Sometimes I run away,” she said.
“What?”
“Sometimes—I walk out the door and look at the brightest part of the sky until I can’t see anything anymore. I get tired of seeing. So I run away.”
She was speaking as if directly to the Panopticon.
“The sex is the same thing,” she said. “Playing coyotes. I’m staring at the sun.”
Suddenly Xie was speaking faster, her voice wobbling. “You think . . . I don’t understand you, Greta. I don’t know why you can’t see it. Elián—he’s not being taught. He’s not being disciplined. He’s being tortured.”
“Da-Xia, stop.” Desperate, I leaned forward, as if to cover her with my body, to come between her and the Panopticon, to give her that shelter. Though it would not be enough. There could be bugs anywhere. In the cracks of the stone. In our clothing. Our skin. “Come back, Xie.”
“He’s being tortured, Greta. Right in front of our eyes.”
“I know that. I do know.”
Though I hadn’t. Not until I’d said it aloud.
“He’s not even the first,” she said. Close up, I could see she was weeping. “Do you know what they did to Thandi when she came here? They used dreamlock, they used drugs. And I can’t stop seeing—”
Her hand was locked on mine. I lifted my other hand and wiped her tears away.
Da-Xia had eyes. She saw things.
But when I saw Thandi the next morning, she was the same as she’d ever been.
They used dreamlock, Xie had said yesterday. Of course, just because she had said it yesterday did not mean it had happened yesterday. It had been years ago. Still, I wondered how I had missed it. Was I truly so blind? I had been only ten when Thandi had been hostaged, but still: I could read Greek, at ten. Read Greek, and miss this? And now. Was there a little gel, maybe, in the hair around her temple?
But I stared at Thandi, and I swore she was unchanged.
And, finally, Elián.
Elián missed—was held through—lecture and lunch. It wasn’t until after the fifth bell that he came out. The six of us were working just then under the pumpkin trellises, tying nets around the pumpkins so that they would not pull the vines down with their weight. I happened to glance around, and spotted Elián coming down the slope toward us.
I shot a look at Da-Xia, but she had her face raised to the sky. I turned back to Elián. See him, I said. Look. So I stopped working, and I watched him come.
There was something vulnerable about the way he walked, as if he were remembering how to do it, calling up each piece of the movement from the software. When he came under the trellis, he stopped. He stood there swaying.
I looked at him. He stared at me. “I like your hair,” he said. His samue was undone, falling away from his breastbone, flapping loose at his wrists.
“You should tie your shirt,” said Han. “There are ticks.”
Elián didn’t seem to hear.
I could see the soft inside of his forearms; the faintest of branching marks, ghosts of bruises where electricity had followed the nerves under his skin. This was more than what had happened to me, to all of us. This was more; this was different. And I had missed it. “Elián,” I said. “Tie your shirt.”
Elián nodded and fumbled with the tie at his wrist. Well, it is in truth hard to do—the trick is to use your teeth—but he failed and then simply stood there with the little strip of cloth in his hand. His top drooped open. I could see the indentations where the ribs joined his sternum, like thumbprints in clay. He’d lost weight.
Torture will do that, said a voice inside me. It was so—alien. The way I was just standing there. The voice in my head that did not seem my own. I felt as if I had been possessed. My known self was cold and small and still. Something larger and more wild had pushed it aside.
“Let me help you,” the larger me said.