Silent Girl (18 page)

“Why are you punishing me?” she said as I packed my clothes and Aaka Elin's sealskin pouch in which I kept dried herbs. “I believed in you before he did.”

I tried not to hear her words or see her tears as I left for Gruzumi's apartment in the next building. Tried not to think of her talking in her sleep with nobody to hear.

Gruzumi's parents were behind one closed door when I arrived, his grandmother and sister behind another. “To give us time, alone,” he said in a hushed voice as unfamiliar as his night clothes: wide-legged white pants and flowing white shirt.

The common room was dark except for one corner, lit from an ancient time. Floating candles encircled two embroidered cushions on opposite sides of a tray holding stone cups that had survived the Great Migration. The past cast an aura around the room, masking its shabby present.

“My mother made us tea,” he said.

“Sprouted bread and jam, too,” I said, so he'd know I noticed even though my gaze rarely left him. “Don't think I can sit. Feels like I'm bleeding, but there aren't any wounds.”

“No,” he said, “no evidence, no proof. Who will believe us?”

The wood floor groaned under his bare feet as he crossed it for more cushions. He made me a bed, helped me lie on one side. I watched him wince as he carefully kneeled, watched his calloused hands pour tea into the cups. His hair looked almost yellow in the candlelight. Should I have been serving him? A swallow of panic. I'd joined his family with barely a thought as to what my role would be. I raised myself onto an elbow and drank. Willow bark tea, sweetened with honey, the slightly bitter aftertaste promising to take my pain away.

“I thought I'd be left without you, shouldn't have put you in danger,” he said. His shadow on the wall reached over to touch my cheek.

“We could have pushed them back if we'd planned it,” I said.

“Not against shields of lightning. Next time it will be bullets.”

The thought of a next time thrilled me. We had chosen the shields over retreat.

Later, in his room – mine too, now – we could only gently touch, our muscles as fragile as worn thread, but his body became my safe haven and I slept without dreaming.

I woke to Sunday morning light slipping through slatted blinds and the reverberating drone of a sky car flying low, rattling the windows.

“Mercenaries,” Gruzumi said, from the edge of the bed, where he sat peering through the slats. My eyes stroked the fine, white hair on his shoulder. My Arctic wolf.

“The police must have brought them in,” his father, Adero, said after we lowered our still sore bodies to the large, square mat in the main room. I was unaccustomed to eating on the floor. Ada and I used a small table and chairs rescued from the landfill.

Gruzumi's mother, Katsi, brought us bowls of soup of dried fish and spring greens. Afraid I'd spill the soup between the floor and my mouth, I waited until I saw Gruzumi's aaka, Pilipaza, and fifteen-year-old sister, Asalie, hold their bowls and spoons close to their mouths. No one seemed to expect anything of me at the moment. They were intent on the words Adero spoke with a hint of the old language: the sibilant sounds like drawn out zeds, my name an exotic “Zelanna.”

“The police chief came on the radio. Said we threw rocks at his troops. Troops! We're at war now?”

“He's lying,” Gruzumi said.

“Did he say they beat and shocked us?” I asked.

Pilipaza sniffed. “Of course not.” At seventy, the bony-faced Pilipaza was one of the oldest Snows. Her status as Elder Council member earned Gruzumi's family a three-bedroom apartment. Her flat, unfriendly voice had always intimidated me even though her body was so bent, I could have toppled her with a finger. The next time we had fish soup, I'd add nettle greens for her thin bones.

“Thank you for the bread and jam last night,” I whispered to Katsi who had sat on my left, “but I couldn't swallow anything except the tea.” She smiled and gave my arm a quick, gentle squeeze. She was older than my mother with unapologetic lines radiating from the corners of her eyes. After several miscarriages, she'd had Gruzumi when she was twenty-nine and Asalie four years later.

“We need people to speak the truth,” Adero said, the triangle of beard below his full lips moving up and down. He wore a tusk-shaped shell through his nose – only at home, to embarrass his children, he told me once. He kept fit maintaining the Village rainwater tanks, clambering onto roofs to clear leaves from gutters and check for drowned creatures: “four-legged, two-legged, winged ones,” he said so many times Gruzumi would roll his eyes. A line from a child's verse, but I wondered if he'd ever actually found a two-legged one in the tank.

“What we need sooner is a new tag with the correct building and apartment code for Selanna,” Pilipaza said, turning her full gaze on me for the first time. To all, she said, as if in proclamation, “Not a rock was thrown.”

“Why are you so sure?” Katsi said. “We left before Sela and Zumi.”

“Yeah, why did they zap
you
?” Asalie said, squinting at Gruzumi and me. She looked empty-headed with her faddishly sheared hair. I'd be teaching others like her before long.

I squinted back. “Nobody threw any rocks.”

“The march was a mistake,” Pilipaza said.

“It could have been better organized,” I said, forgetting her role in it.

“When you're on Council, you can criticize. It was
too
well organized. We got a permit too easily, delivered ourselves into their hands. You just think about that.”

All eyes turned to me. “When I'm old enough for the Elder Council, I hope it does more than issue ID tags, assign apartments, and beg the government to fix rotting wood and broken glass.” You just think about
that
, I wanted to add.

Gruzumi made a show of kissing my hand and the others laughed, even Pilipaza.

“What's so funny?”

“You don't back down,” Gruzumi said.

The rumble of heavy vehicles drew us from breakfast to the wide front window. Quick-moving Asalie claimed the vantage point. Long, brown cargo trucks with fat wheels parked along the seawall across the street. Mercenaries from the republic of Mid-Norte spilled out. They levelled their rifles at Snows seated on the sidewalk in the traditional talking circles we called hoops. We'd seen the mercenaries before, but only in parades. In exchange for potable water, they were on call to protect us against invasion. Whatever they said made the Snows stand, drop their heads like supplicants and hurry into their buildings. The previous day's humiliation burned through me like a fever. I wanted blue lightning to spurt from my fingertips, cut through the glass, and knock the soldiers to the ground.

“I remember the day we were herded into these buildings,” Pilipaza said, her voice more numb than flat. “No more cooking fires. No more boats. We accepted everything.”

“Isn't that your mother, Sela?” Asalie said.

I squeezed in beside her, pressed my forehead against the glass, and peered down. Pointing up in our direction was Ada. Although the soldier next to her was tall, he had to look up at her face. Had she been in a hoop? She detested that custom, claiming it tried to keep a doomed past alive. To her, nothing worth mentioning had happened before today unless it had happened to the Rainbows.

“She's turning us in,” Asalie said.

“What for?” Katsi said.

“For marching.”

“She'd have to turn in half the Village, then. She probably wants Sela.”

The soldier must have asked for Ada's
ID
because she pulled out her tag. If she didn't always wear that dark blue jumpsuit on her Sunday morning scavenges through refuse bins, I'd have sworn she had deliberately dressed like the mercenaries. The soldier waved over another who consulted a palmtop and shook his head. He gestured towards my mother's building. Ada stomped a foot and waved her arms about. A ridiculous sight that stabbed me with pride.

“I better go down,” I said.

“I will,” Adero said, putting a restraining hand on my arm. “Your tag. They might not let you back in here.”

By the time Adero made it outside, Ada was sitting on the sidewalk, arms obstinately folded. Three mercenaries stood over her, conferring. When Adero approached, they stepped back quickly. One levelled his gun. Adero put his hands up. Another pulled the tag out from under Adero's shirt.

“It's that travesty in his nose,” Gruzumi said. “They probably think it's wired.”

Only Asalie laughed. No one mentioned the disk in Gruzumi's ear.

When Adero returned, his face was tight. “They wouldn't let me talk to her. We must apply to the police for permits, now, to assemble outside and to enter any building we don't live or work in. They have a machine with our codes in it.”

“A palmtop,” I said. “Embarrassingly old technology, my fellow students like to say, but it's more than
we
have.”

“We talk to each other, not machines,” Adero said, as if our deprivation was by choice.

Rainbows found the way we talked to each other unsightly: out in the open, in hoops. But sitting on the ground showed our respect for Aaka Earth and our responsibility to each other. The sight of Ada on the ground took me to task. I had brushed her aside like a cobweb.

“They can't keep us from the gardens,” Pilipaza said. “I'm going to weed the asparagus. Others on the Council may have the same idea.”

It was the law for all, even the Rainbows, to grow food for the government to harvest and sell back to us. Except for Parliament's ceremonial lawns, each patch of grass, every swimming pool, and all but a few parking lots had been converted into communal gardens or habitat refugia. The earth around the Village had been parcelled into plots, each apartment responsible for one.

We watched Pilipaza appear below with her trowel and heavy gloves, watched her show her tag to a soldier who waved her on to the plots at the back of the building. Ada rose and followed her. Later, Pilipaza said she had invoked Elder Council privilege and ordered Ada to join her in the garden. “She misses you,” was all she would say about their conversation.

The soldiers left after a week, replaced by police officers checking tags at each entrance. Others in air scooters hovered over the sidewalk and streets, ensuring we got into the proper shuttles. Sky watchers. Helmeted birds of prey.

“Every vandal and bike thief must have floated out to sea,” Adero said. “The police seem to have nothing else to do.”

“They can't keep this up,” Gruzumi said. “When they relax their guard, we should be ready.”

To do what?

For weeks we woke expecting sympathetic Rainbows to speak out in outrage over our situation and the Elder Council to come up with a resistance plan. But the “snow flakes” were mute, and the Elder Council couldn't agree on a single action despite many meetings at the gardens. The matter-of-fact way Pilipaza reported their indecision clawed at my insides, Gruzumi's too. They needed more information, she said, needed us to gather intelligence about what Gruzumi began calling the Occupation.

At the desalination plant where Gruzumi backwashed filters and removed Asian green mussels that clogged the intake pipes, he learned the government had hired an advisor from Mid-Norte. A surge of immigrants from deluged Caribbean islands had made disruptive demands there and almost gotten away with it. At a different plant, Katsi ran a machine that filled and sealed pouches of drinking water for export. She heard someone say if there were fewer of us there'd be room for more skilled refugees from ravaged countries. Miracle makers, we laughingly called them, who'd resurrect a world of boundless water, food, and fuel.

I approached a student named Siri. Black hair, skin the colour of wild chanterelles. The closest I had to a colleague, having been paired with her in the food lab. I watched her enter the classroom and look around with a confidence only the Rainbows had, waited until she took a seat and slid in next to her. “Seems police headquarters has relocated to the Village,” I said with a short laugh, as if it were inconsequential. “What have you heard about it?”

Lying next to Gruzumi that night I told him Siri had looked at her shoes when she said it cost a fortune to police our protest. Looked at the ceiling when she said her father told her they couldn't afford to let us get out of hand again.

“What's that mean, out of hand?” Gruzumi said, stroking my arm with his thumb.

“Blocking traffic, apparently, trampling the Parliament lawn – that shrine to turfgrass. She hadn't heard about the shields, and I could tell she didn't believe me.”

Gruzumi looped an arm around me and pulled me over so my head was on his chest.

“Siri says we have it pretty good. Says, nobody gives them a home for nothing. When I told her we pay with our labour, she reminded me I wasn't working and didn't have to pay for the program like she did.”

Gruzumi laughed when I told him I said it wasn't
my
fault she couldn't have a swimming pool. “Wait, there's more,” I said. “When she said there's no room for anyone else because of us, I said anyone else would be better off migrating into space since most of the island will be under water soon. She looked scared, like she believes what they say about us being psychic, or is it psycho?”