Parable of the Talents

done all that! We'd made a good home for ourselves, were making an honest living. Now people with crosses have come and put slave collars on us.

And where is my baby? Where is Larkin?

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They separated the women and older girls from the men and older boys while we were paralyzed. They left the men in the larger room of the school and dragged us women into one of the smaller ones. I didn't think about it at the time, but that was an odd thing to do because there were more women than men in the community. We were dumped onto the wooden floor, half atop one another, and left there. The windows were open, and I remember thinking it strange that no one bothered to board them up or even close them.

The only good thing was that as I was half lifted and half dragged, I saw Bankole. I don't believe he saw me. He was lying on his back, staring straight up, one scraped, bloody hand on his chest. I saw him blink. I did see that, so I knew he was alive. If only he had gotten away. He would have been more likely than anyone else to find some way to help the rest of us. Besides, what will our captors do to a man his age? Would they care that he was old? No. From the way he looked, it was clear that he had been dragged across the ground just as I was. They didn't care.

Would they care that my Larkin was only a baby?

And where was she? Where was she?

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I was terrified every time someone came near me. All our captors were young men, and I'd seen two or three angry, bloody ones. I didn't know at the time that this was Gray's work. I didn't know anything. All I could think about was Larkin, Bankole, my people, and the damned slave collar around my neck.

As the sun went down, my body began to hurt—my back and my hands and arms burned where they had scraped along the ground as I was dragged. My head felt lumpy and sore. It also ached in a hard, throbbing way that might have had something to do with the gas.

It was dark when I began trying to move. For a long time, all I could do was flop around a little. Someone in the room groaned. Someone else began to cry. Someone gasped, choked, and began to cough. Someone said over and over again, 'Ah shit!' and I recognized Allie Gilchrist's voice.

'Allie?' I said. I slurred the word, sounded drunk to my own ears, but she heard me.

'Olamina?'

'Yeah.'

'Look, did you see Justin before they dragged you in here?'

'No. Sorry. Did you see Larkin?'

'No. Sorry.'

'They took my baby too,' Adela Ortiz said in a hoarse whisper. 'They took him and I don't know where he is.' She began to cry.

I wanted to cry myself. I wanted to just to lie there and cry because I hurt so much in so many ways. I felt too weak and uncoordinated to do anything but cry. Instead, I sat up, bumped someone, apologized, sat stupidly for a while, then found the sense to say, 'Who else is here? One by one, say your names.'

'Noriko,' a voice said just to my left. 'They took Debo­rah and Melissa,' she continued. 'I had Melissa and Michael had Deborah. We were running. I thought we were going to make it. Then that damned gas. We fell down, and someone came and pulled both girls away from us. I couldn't see anything but hands and arms taking them.'

'And my babies,' Emery Mora said. 'My babies....' She was crying, almost incoherent, 'My little boys. My sons. They took my sons again. Again!' She had had two young sons when she was a slave years ago, and they had been sold away from her. She had been a debt slave—a legally indentured person bound for her family's unpaid debts. The debts were accumulated because she worked for an agribusiness corporation that underpaid its workers in company scrip instead of money, then overcharged them for food and shelter so that they could stay in ever-increasing debt. It was against the law for the company to break up fam­ilies by selling minor children away from their parents or husbands from their wives. It was against both local and fed­eral law, so it shouldn't have happened. Just as what's hap­pened to us now shouldn't have happened.

I thought about Emery's older daughter and stepdaughter. 'What about Tori and Doe?' I said. 'Are they here? Tori? Doe?'