“Yes,” Nayima said, testing her thin voice.
“We added younger students this year,” the minder said. “Stand by.”
Three smaller squares appeared inset beneath the girl’s image — classrooms, the children progressively older in each. The far left square held the image of twelve wriggling, worming children ages about three to six sprawled across a floor with a red mat. A few in the front sat transfixed by her image on what seemed to be a looming screen, high above them. Every child wore tiny, powder blue plastic gloves.
Nayima had to look away from the smallest children. She had not seen children so young in forty years, and the sight of them was acid to her eyes.
Hadn’t Raul said the girl was four?
Nayima blinked rapidly, her eyes itching with tears.
Crying, she was certain, was against the guidelines.
Nayima willed herself to look at the young, moony faces, braving memories of tiny bodies rotting on sidewalks, in cars, on the roadways, mummified in closets. These were new children — untouched by Plague. Their parents had been the wealthy, the isolated, the truly Chosen — the infinitesimal number of survivors who were not carriers, who did not have the antibodies, but had simply, somehow, survived.
Nayima leaned closer to her screen. “Boo!” she said.
Young eyes widened with terror. Children scooted away.
But when Nayima smiled, the entire mass of them quivered with laughter, a sea of perfect teeth.
Nayima’s teeth were not perfect. She had never replaced the lower front tooth she’d lost to a lab-coat she’d smacked across his nose, drawing blood. He’d strapped her to a table, raped her, and extracted her tooth on the spot, without anesthesia.
Nayima had been offered a dental implant during Reconciliation, but a new tooth felt like a lie, so she had refused. In previous classroom visits, she had answered the question What happened to your tooth? without bitterness — why should she feel contempt for brutes any more than she would a tree dropping leaves? — until a minder pointed out that the anecdote about her extracted tooth violated the guidelines.
The guidelines left Nayima with very little to say. She chose each word with painful care.
These schoolchildren asked the usual questions: why she had survived (genetic predisposition), how many people she had infected (only one personally, as far as she knew), how many carriers were left (fifteen, since most known carriers were “gone now”). By the fourth question, Nayima had lost her will to look at the children’s faces. It was harder all the time.
The girl who spoke up next was not yet eight. Her face held a whisper of brown; a girl who might have been hers. And Raul’s.
“Do you have any children?” the girl said.
All of Nayima’s work, gone. No composure. No smile. A sharp pain in her belly.
“No, I’ve never had children,” she said. “None that survived.”
Nayima shot a pointed gaze at the minder, who did not contradict her. Maybe the minder didn’t know about Specimen 120. Maybe a bureaucrat had made up the story to tease Raul.
“Okay,” the girl said, shrugging, not yet schooled in the art of condolences. “What do you miss the most about the time before the Plague?”
An easy answer came right away, and it almost wasn’t a lie. “Halloween.”
When she explained what Halloween had been, the children sat literally open-mouthed. She wondered which part of her story most stupefied them. The ready access to sweets? The trust of strangers? The costumes?
The host looked relieved with the children’s enchantment and announced that the visit was over. A flurry of waving blue gloves. Nayima waved back. She even smiled again.
“Don’t forget my water credits,” Nayima said from behind her happy teeth.
But the minder’s image had already flashed away.
Nayima lined up her contraband on the front table — the sawed-off, a box of shells, an old Colt she’d found in the attic with its full magazine, the baseball bat she kept at her bedside. She’d even found a gas mask she’d bartered for at market. When the marshals came, she would be prepared. In her younger years, she would have boarded up at least her front windows, but her weapons would have to do.
“Raul is the real child,” she told Tango and Buster while they watched her work. Buster swatted at a loose shell at the edge of the table, but Nayima caught it before it hit the floor. “He believes every word they say. ‘Things are changing,’ he says. Believing in miracles. Sending marshals here — to me!”
Tango mewed softly. A question.
“Of course they’re not bringing a child here,” she said. “A judge’s ruling? In favor of carriers? You know the lab-coats would fight to keep her.” She shook her head, angry with herself for her weakness. “Besides, there is no child. Babies with carrier genes don’t live.”
The crate was light enough to lift to the table with only slight pressure in her lower back, gone when she stretched. But she could only roll a barrel slowly, oh-so-slowly, across her threshold. How had Raul managed so easily? She left the second barrel outside. By the time she closed her door again, her lower back pulsed with pain and she felt aged by a decade.
“Lies,” Nayima said.
Tango and Buster agreed with frenzied mews.
She would have no Sunday dinner if she died tomorrow, Nayima reminded herself. So she got her cleaver from the kitchen, unwrapped the beef, and began chopping the meat on the table, not caring about dents in the wood. She chopped until she was perspiring and sweat stung her eyes.
Nayima held a chunk with both hands and sank in her teeth. She mostly did not bother with salt in her own cooking, so the taste was overwhelming at first. The cats gnawed at the meat beside her on the table with loud purrs.
“Could there be a child?”
Suppose they’d had a breakthrough, found a way to rewire the genes? But why go through that trouble and expense when other children were being born? The girl must be a failed experiment. A laboratory fluke. Did they need caretakers for a child born with half a brain — was that it? Nayima swore she’d be damned if she’d spend the years she had left tending the lab-coats’ mistakes.
“But there is no child,” she reminded Tango and Buster. “It’s all a lie.”
After dark, with her flashlight to guide her, Nayima set her traps for the thief cat with slices of meat and visited the wooden chicken coop Raul had helped her build, as big as her grandmother’s backyard shed. She checked the loose wires in the rear, but the hole was still secure. She hadn’t collected eggs earlier, so chickens had defecated on some. A few eggs lay entirely crushed, yolks seeping across the straw.
Nayima was exhausted by the time she’d cleaned the nestboxes, scrubbed the surviving eggs, and set them on a bowl in her kitchen for Raul to find later — but she couldn’t afford to sleep tonight. The marshals might come at any time.
Nayima fixed herself a cup of black tea from her new water — so fresh! — and sat vigil by her front window with her shotgun, watching the empty pathway. Sometimes her eyes played tricks, animating the darkness. A far-off cat’s cry sounded like a baby’s, waking Nayima when she dozed.
Just before dawn, bells jingled near the chicken coop. Heart clambering, Nayima ran outside. The food was gone from the first trap she reached, but the door had not properly sprung. Shit.
More frantic jingling came from the trap twenty yards farther. Nayima raced toward it, her light in one hand and her gun in the other.
A pair of eyes glared out at her from beyond the bars.
The cat scrambled to every corner of the cage, desperate to escape while bells mocked him. This was the one. Nayima recognized the monster tabby’s unusual size.