some were shoddy, but apart from the roads there was scarcely a stride of land left bare. Yalda understood that some kinds of manufacturing needed shelter from the dust and the wind, but she would have been hard-pressed to name half a dozen. How little she knew of her own village, she thought, let alone the wider world.
“There’s the refinery.” Fulvio pointed out a broad stone building ahead of them. A truck was parked some distance away, its winch attached to a complicated system of pulleys that was raising a bin full of brown ore toward a long chute leading into the building.
“Why make it so complicated?” Yalda wondered. “Why don’t the trucks just tip their load in where it’s needed?” She gestured at the point where the chute entered the refinery.
“The trucks need to keep their distance,” Fulvio explained. “The liberator they use has to be ground very fine, which means it leaks out of everything. That’s bad enough for the trucks themselves, but if it gets into our production line people can die.”
“Oh.” Yalda had been striding forward eagerly; now she slowed her pace.
“Don’t worry, we’re careful,” Fulvio assured her. “And the liberator factory is a long, long way away.”
As they approached, a rhythmless cacophony rose up over the sounds of traffic and the noises from the other factories. Fulvio led her to an entrance on the other side of the building from the ore chute. Yalda stepped through, peering into the gloom ahead; the air was thick with dust, shimmering in pale columns slanting down from the grubby skylights.
As her eyes adapted, she made out a long line of shallow trays, joined to each other in a sequence that zigzagged across the cavernous space. People were standing beside the trays, bashing lumps of ore with hammers, scraping smaller rocks over elaborate toothed sieves, sorting fuel from clods of dirt with practiced darting fingers. There must have been four dozen workers in all, laboring amid the noise and dust.
Yalda let out a faint hum of distress. The harvest wasn’t easy, but it only lasted six days. The work here looked like a kind of never-ending torture.
Fulvio must have noticed her discomfort. “There are three shifts,” he said, “so it’s really not so bad. I used to help out myself, before I started school. And my brother, my sister and my co all still work here.”
Yalda waited for him to introduce her to them, but then she realized that he wasn’t prepared to do anything that might interrupt the flow of ore from tray to tray, as it grew ever finer and lost its troublesome impurities.
“Your co works here?” she asked. “Fulvia?”
He gestured toward a girl bent over a sieve. “And there’s my brother, Benigno.” The slender boy was sweeping orange dust across the floor into a grate, carefully separating spilt traces of fuel from the general muck; if he knew Fulvio was watching, he gave no sign of it. “Benigna works a later shift; so do my cousins.”
“Where’s your father?”
“He’s in the office with my uncle. We shouldn’t disturb them.”
Yalda retreated into the sunlight. Fulvio followed her. “I don’t know why you’re so upset!” he said. “Your brother and sister still work on the farm, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Everyone has to do something,” Fulvio declared. “Or they’ll starve.”
“I know,” Yalda conceded. “But you and I, our lives are so easy now—”
“You and I are learning to do other kinds of work. Why should we feel bad about that?”
Yalda didn’t know how to reply. After a while, she said, “Couldn’t they use an engine to smash the rock?”
“They use engines at the mine,” Fulvio said. “But once the pieces of ore are smaller than a certain size, having any liberator around is too dangerous.”
“There has to be a better way than people with hammers.”
Fulvio spread his arms. “Maybe there is. And maybe when I’m educated, I’ll find it.”
Yalda said, “I should probably get home now.”
“I’ll walk with you back to the village,” he insisted. “I don’t want you getting lost.”
Yalda didn’t object. As they walked, she wondered what she’d expected to see in the refinery, if not toiling children. Some dazzling secret of light, revealed? Fulvio and his family didn’t know how fuel turned into light, any more than she knew why wheat-flowers glowed. Half the things that happened right in front of their eyes remained as mysterious as the most distant stars.
As they approached the village, Fulvio turned to her.
“Do you have a plan yet?” he said. “For your children?”
“What?” Yalda stared at him.
“A plan for them. Who’ll raise them, who’ll feed them?”
Yalda felt her skin writhing, as if it could sweep his words away like troublesome mites. “That’s a long way into the future,” she said.
“Of course,” Fulvio agreed. “I just wondered if you had something in mind.”
Yalda said, “Thank you for the visit. I’ll see you in school.”
When she reached the empty eastern road, she started humming quietly to herself. She’d thought she was turning into Clara, that mysterious paragon of knowledge and friendship from her father’s stories of her mother’s time. But what exactly had become of Clara? Yalda had never dared ask.
Giusto had wanted to harness her strength for the farm until she went the way of men—but what kind of escape from that fate was it, to step into a world where would-be co-steads were already sizing up her children as factory fodder?
When she came to the turn-off leading back to the farm, Yalda kept walking. She found a quiet corner of a neighbor’s field where she knew no one would disturb her.
She knelt low on the ground beside a sweetbush and let a sharp twig press into her skin, until the muscles all around the point of impingement were sweeping back and forth, desperately trying to dislodge it.
The third symbol of the third dozen was one of the hardest: a full figure of a person, bipedal, four-armed, standing alone. Composed, self-contained, holding no tools. Maybe the four arms were for balance, or beauty.
Yalda stayed kneeling against the bush, shouting with frustration at all her stupid failed scrawls. A teacher and a writing partner made it easier; rest and guidance and encouragement made it easier.
But when the sun had crossed half the sky, the figure from her memory was there on her chest, imperfect but legible, hers to command.
3
On the day after her twelfth birthday, Yalda woke before dawn and forced herself to open her eyes before the cool soil lured her back to sleep. The vines that crisscrossed the low ceiling above her were studded with tiny yellow blossoms; thumps and scraping sounds filtered through from the floor of the markets as the stallholders made their preparations.
Zeugma’s public beds were much in demand, and Yalda preferred to be gone before the night shift workers came down grumbling and prodding for spaces of their own. She rose and threaded her way between her sleeping neighbors, aware of other shapes moving softly nearby. The slender vines gave out just enough light to let her see where she was going, but it took care and practice not to step on a sleeper, or collide with someone else on the
