have worked to make our neighborhood a safe place for you? How could you be so ungrateful?”
A dozen emotions washed across Sejal’s face. “Is that all you care about? It’s always about the neighborhood. ‘You have to be a good son of the neighborhood, Sejal. You have to be a model for the neighborhood children, Sejal. The neighborhood must be safe. The neighborhood must be clean.’ The neighborhood, the neighborhood. Who gives a shit?”
Vidya slapped him. Sejal fell silent. “The neighborhood let you grow up, boy,” she hissed at him. “I built the neighborhood for you, so you would always be safe.”
Something clicked in Ara’s head. “Because it wasn’t safe for Katsu and Prasad?” she said. “Because it wasn’t safe for your husband and your daughter?”
Vidya snatched her hands back and folded them in her lap. Her head bowed.
“What daughter?” Sejal asked. A red mark from Vidya’s slap was darkening on his face. Sejal’s jaw trembled, and Ara couldn’t tell whether it was from anger or tears. “Mom, what’s going on? Who are Prasad and Katsu? Why can’t I be Silent? You have to tell!”
Vidya remaind motionless for a long moment. When she finally spoke, her voice was steady. “You can’t be Silent, my son, because I arranged it to be so.”
“What do you mean?” Sejal whispered.
“Your father’s name is Prasad Vajhur,” Vidya said. “You also have two brothers, but I don’t know their names. We had to give them to the Unity.”
“What about Silent Acquisitions?” Pitr asked.
“Our original contract was with them,” Vidya answered. Her voice was flat, emotionless. “It was hard. When the Unity blighted Rust, there was no food anywhere. Prasad and I were starving, and we knew we would die soon. Both of us, however, carry the genes for Silence. We are not Silent ourselves, but any children born between us will be. This includes you, Sejal.”
“But-” Sejal began.
“Let me,” Vidya said. “Silent Acquisitions offered us food, shelter, medicine, and money in exchange for two babies. The condition was harsh, but at the time it seemed a better choice than painful death. If I had known then how difficult it would one day be, I would have let myself die with Prasad beside me.”
“But you didn’t know,” Ara said.
“I was young and we were dying.” Vidya’s hands twisted in her lap. “Less than a week after Prasad and I signed the contract, the government surrendered to the Unity, and the Unity took over our contract. It dictated new terms, and we could do nothing. The money was reduced to a fraction. The first contract promised we would have housing and medical care for a year after the second child was born, but a month afterward, we were on the street. I don’t know how, but Prasad found work as a garbage collector. We had two tiny rooms in a half-ruined apartment building, a single small income, and I was pregnant again.”
Vidya fell silent again. Sejal stared at his mother as if hypnotized.
“That must have been Katsu,” Ara nudged.
“Yes. She was a beautiful baby, and all ours. The Unity knew she was Silent, but I managed to convince myself that the ten years I would have with her before they took her away would be a far, far better thing than losing babies I never had the chance to hold.”
“But you eventually realized that wasn’t the case,” Ara said. “So you arranged a fake kidnaping, hoping to hide Katsu someplace safe.”
Vidya looked at Ara, genuinely surprised. “The kidnaping was very real. When she was nine months old, someone broke into our rooms. They took my little Katsu. I woke up in the morning and realized she hadn’t cried all night. My first thought was that she had slept through the night, but then I found her empty bed.” Vidya’s voice had gone flat again. “Prasad was…I don’t think I can describe it. He wanted to run in a thousand directions at once. I begged him to let the guard find her, but Prasad insisted that he had a better chance, that he knew the neighborhood better. He left, and he didn’t come back. I reported him missing as well. A week later, he was still missing, and I realized I was pregnant again.”
“Me?” Sejal said.
Vidya nodded. “You. I was sure whoever had kidnapped Katsu had killed Prasad, and that they would come next for this baby and for me. So I ran.”
“You changed your name to Vidya Dasa,” Ara put in. “Easy to do, since the Annexation damaged so many records.”
“Yes. I took part of Prasad’s name and made it mine and his son’s. Perhaps that was a mistake.”
“But if your genes make every child you and Prasad have Silent,” Kendi asked, “why were you so sure Sejal wasn’t?”
“I arranged it to be so,” Vidya said.
“What?” Sejal said. “How?”
“When you were less than two months in the womb,” Vidya told him, “I found a…man. A genegineer. He said he could make a retrovirus. The virus would alter your genes and render you non-Silent.”
“A lie,” Harenn said flatly. “Such changes are only possible for an embryo less than two weeks old. For a fetus, it is not.”
“This was a new procedure,” Vidya said. “He wanted a test subject, but could find none. Making a valuable Silent into a worthless non-Silent would be highly illegal in the Unity. Because of this, he was willing to perform the procedure without payment. And it worked. When Sejal was born, the Unity doctor scanned him for Silence and found none. I was so happy.”
Sejal shifted on the cobblestones. “But I’m Silent, Mom. I touched Kendi, and something exploded in my head. He said only the Silent feel that.”
“We’ll have to figure that out later,” Ara said.
“I didn’t want my son to disappear,” Vidya continued as if no one had spoken. “The genegineer gave me secret money in exchange for permission to examine Sejal from time to time, which let me stay away from tax collectors, but the only place I could afford to live was a neighborhood as bad as the one where Katsu had disappeared. Drug dealers, gangs, and thieves were everywhere, and the Unity did nothing to stop them. But one day I realized the good people in the neighborhood, the ordinary ones, outnumbered the bad, and I remembered a thing Prasad had told me when we were walking to Ijhan during the famine. He said that our old community had been destroyed. To survive, we had to build another.
“I talked to my neighbors and united the building I lived in. Then the building next to us joined us, and the next and the next. We threw out the gangs and built a wall out of scraps and ruins to ensure they would stay out. We repaired everything we could and cleaned what we couldn’t. Our neighborhood was a proud place, and it was as safe as I could make it.”
Vidya stopped speaking and looked at Sejal. “Though I didn’t make it safe enough,” she added, voice heavy with sadness instead of anger. “How could you do this thing? I thought you were a good son, a son I could be proud of.”
Sejal flinched as if he’d been dealt a physical blow. “And you were a great mother?” he snarled. “Do you know what my first memory is? Sitting on the floor at a damn neighborhood meeting. You were talking to other people and ignoring me. You’re always talking, Mom, and it’s always to someone besides…besides me. You talk, but you sure as hell don’t listen.”
“I talked and I worked,” Vidya cried, “so you would never have to worry about being attacked in the street or stolen away from your family.”
“What family?” Sejal shot back. “All my life, you were doing something for the neighborhood. When were you home to make us a family?”
“I was home always,” Vidya said, looking shocked. “The neighborhood was my job. The collections paids our rent. The neighborhood-”
“I don’t give a shit about the neighborhood,” Sejal shouted. “Don’t you know anything?”
“I know my son has been selling himself on the street.”
“I was doing it for us,” Sejal said, voice cracking. “I was trying to earn enough money to get us off this slimy rockball. Just us. Not the neighborhood, not anyone else. For once I wanted something for just us.”
Tears ran down Sejal’s face. Ara squirmed on the bench, acutely wishing she were somewhere, anywhere, else. The looks on Pitr’s and Kendi’s faces proved they felt the same way. Harenn was hidden behind her veil, and
