He inhales, and your skin reverberates with his horror when he draws near enough to see Uche. He's not a boy anymore, hasn't been for a while, so you remind yourself again to start thinking of him as a man. Lerna, Makenba's boy from down the road, who went away for a few years and came back a doctor. Familiar, and soothing in a familiar way. You hears footsteps in the hallway between Uche's room and that of Nassun, your daughter. You ignore this, too.įinally, someone breaks the glass on the house's back door. Someone bangs at the window in the front room. Thinking of these things would make you consider your son's corpse under the blanket, and why would you want to do that? You ignore the door knock.

That would require you to wonder who is there and whether you should let them in. Late the next day, someone knocks at the house's front door. The steampipes have stopped rattling it's cold in the house. (You fetched him a blanket during one of these trips. These things you could do without thinking, by rote. You've risen, used the toilet, eaten something from the coldvault, drunk the last trickle of water from the tap. You've spent them in the house with your dead son. Two days pass before anyone comes for you. You've been through a lot, you're very strong, but there are limits to what even you can bear. It's just a bit much, isn't it? Too much. House empty, too quiet, tiny little boy all bloody and bruised on the den floor.Īnd you… shut down. You discover all of this when you come home from work one day. You're the mother of two children, but now one of them is dead and the other is missing. He's the foreground of the painting that is your life together. Jija's a Tirimo man born and bred, a stoneknapper of the Resistant use-caste everyone knows and likes him, so they like you peripherally. The baker doesn't because you're quiet, and because like everyone else in town he just thinks of you as Jija's wife. The butcher probably knows your name because she likes to flirt with you. You're neither the best teacher nor the worst the children forget you when they move on, but they learn. Since you were obviously well educated, you became a teacher at the local creche for children aged ten to thirteen. You came to Tirimo from elsewhere the townsfolk don't really care where or why. Only three people here know what you are, and two of them you gave birth to.įor the past ten years you've lived as ordinary a life as possible. You're an orogene who's been living in the little nothing town of Tirimo for ten years.

The fifth season book 2