Marla points her pistol at the ground to the left of the boy’s feet and pulls the trigger. He yelps.
“Get out.” Her voice is dead calm. Her face is a stone. She shoots again, this time on his right side. And slightly closer.
He turns and runs as though pursued by wolves.
“Don’t come back, or I’ll sic my dogs on you!” This, of course, is an empty threat. Years ago, maybe, her dogs could have torn the poor child limb from limb. But not anymore. They are impossibly old. Plus they are drunk. Drunk in love with the Sparrow.
The Sparrow sits on Marla’s right, leaning her head on the older woman’s muscular shoulders. She has not just arrived. She has been there the whole time.
“I told you,” the girl says.
“This proves nothing. The boy is nothing but a bundle of junk and sighs and juicy thoughts and sweaty socks. It’s not magic that drew him. It’s pheromones. I knew boys would be sniffing around in your vicinity someday, so it’s no surprise. Pay him no mind. He’s one of many.”
“Don’t be mean,” the Sparrow says. “He’s nice.”
“God,” Marla snorts. “Please.”
“I must go find Papa.” The girl stands and stares down the path. Marla gives her a narrowed eye.
“Really,” she says, glaring at the spot where the boy had just stood. “You’re off to find Simon, and not . . . anyone else?” Marla is the only person in town who refers to the junk man by his proper name. Always has. Even before the Sparrow came into their lives.
The girl smiles and gives the egg woman a kiss. “Hug my hens, will you?” She waves at the chickens in the barn, the Most Remarkable Hens. Each one regards the girl with their loving, identical eyes. The egg woman waves her off with a grunt.
“I wish you didn’t have to go,” Marla says. “And don’t follow that boy home.”
“I won’t,” the girl lies.
She disappears down the trail.
“Don’t go,” Marla whispers to no one in particular. “Please.”
8. Then.
The Boro comet appeared in the sky four times a century, which meant that four times a century pregnant women in his country would fuss and worry over the possibility of bearing a child with magic. And, four times a century the government sent operatives into the hospitals and clinics. They listened to rumors and hired spies and tattletales and read furtive glances. They measured the middles of women of child-bearing age. They banned prophylactics. They made lists of the names of pregnant women and their due dates. No one knew how many children would be born marked by magic—it was different every time. But the papers were ready and the payouts accounted for.
The nation’s women did their best to protect themselves. They made their husbands sleep in yards and outhouses and sheds. They researched herbs to promote impotence and snuck them into sandwiches. They developed headaches. Those who found themselves pregnant anyway drew runes on their doorways and draped white sashes over their bellies. They prayed and prayed for unmarked babies.
Not a magic child, they whispered. Please not a magic child.
Magic children were, after all, expensive children, the price of them measured in heartbreak and loss. They were taken, worked, and depleted, and then they died young. They were children who belonged not to their families, but to the government. And no one wanted to bear a government child.
The Sparrow was conceived under the spell of the Boro, of course. Two months before she was born, her mother had been rounded up with the other pregnant women and held in a high-security maternity ward, with nurses trained in martial arts and doctors who were excellent marksmen.
Even the orderlies had military training.
“No security measure is too great when it comes to protecting these precious mothers and their blessed progeny,” the Minister intoned on the Vox.
Staff stylists coiffed the hair of the expectant mothers, aestheticians de-clogged their pores, manicurists pampered to their quick-bitten nails. They were given the best food, the sweetest drinks, and the highest-quality drug cocktails to imbue them with a giddy sense of well-being. The mothers felt as though they were floating through clouds of feathers and bubbles. They forgot about their families, about their bellies, about everything. They were happier than they had ever been in their lives.
The Minister congratulated himself heartily.
“A regular humanitarian!” he said to no one in particular.
The Sparrow’s mother couldn’t get enough of it. She stole drug patches from the haunches of passed-out mothers in the recreation hall, or in the bathroom, or the morgue. She raided the trash cans, licked them clean.
The Sparrow, in her unborn, watery world, was as addled as her mother. She dreamed of a tower as high as the sky. She dreamed of a jewel hovering over the world, pulling energy toward itself like a magnet, or a black hole. She dreamed of a wave pulling out of the center of the world, of a man riding its crest, a look of ecstasy on his face. She dreamed of a wobbly tower and a wobbly cart and red flowers and yellow coins and of a girl disappearing into the sky.
She dreamed of her mother.
And then there was only darkness.
9. Now.
No one sees the junk man’s daughter. Not today. At least not so far.
She wears a dress that she made herself from cast-off bits of fabric and a man’s belt wound twice around her waist and a large, wool jacket that used to belong to the junk man, but now belongs to her. In theory. She has nothing on her tiny feet. Her soles are black and thick with road dust and farm dust and factory dust. They do her fine and take her where she wishes to go, which is all a body can ask of a pair of feet. And anyway, she hates shoes.
She sits in the back row of the church, listening to the pastor intoning on the virtues of Virtue, and of the beloved
