Page 15 of What Remains

He did what she asked.

He waited. He lived his lie in Sarhad, though no one was quite as friendly as before. With his mother gone, something changed. He thought he knew why. Everyone had always sensed his oddness, but his mother’s presence helped to smooth the wrinkles, negotiate the sharp corners. Mami, who always had a plan. As her mahram, he fit in. A boy escorting his mother was perfectly normal. Mami had been as necessary a prop as that stage weapon, the gun which appeared in Act One and must go off before that final curtain.

Where he had been careful before, now he was paranoid, wary. Vigilant. He still went to school where he excelled, but then again, that was no different than before. He groomed horses for neighbors and corralled sheep in exchange for food and fuel. Every morning, he took exquisite care with his disguisebecause no element, not even Mami, was more important than his eyes.

The hammer came down very early one morning in mid-May. By then, the road to China was nearly done. Trucks still came with equipment and construction crews, but other trucks loaded with rocks, chugged out on their way to a refinery in Kadar. Sarbaz regularly rode into town from what was clearly now a mining operation, mostly to pick up more boys. That morning, a lorry for him and his men also arrived.

There weren’t many people out; this early in the morning, most were tending to flocks, or having their morning meal of yak tea and flatbread. Since Mami’s departure, he’d not been sleeping well, so he gulped tea and went out to watch the trucks go by.

The day was bright and very windy. Sarbaz and his men had stopped on the near side and were busy roping together their latest acquisitions when the wind picked up. Each fresh gust scooped up earth and tiny pebbles to swirl into small dervishes or spatter the undercarriages of the passing trucks with pings and pongs and hollow pocks. Poya winced as much against the grit as the sun and reached into a pocket for his sunglasses…which were not there.

Oh, no.He needed those glasses. How could he have forgotten them? He never went anywhere without them because accidents happened. His eyes might slip and that would be hard to explain.

Go.He turned on his heel.You’re so stupid, how could you forget?—

A fresh gust swirled just as a particularly large truck labored past on an exhalation of oily black smoke. Ripping aside a canvas tarpaulin stretched over a load of sand, the wind churned, spinning a small tornado of fine grit. Screwing up his face, Poyaraised a hand to protect his face as sand pecked and stung his face. He blinked, once, twice...

That was when Poya felt a sharp stab of pain in his left eye and the sudden sting of fresh tears—and then the eye…slipped.

Oh no.A bolt of panic. His blood iced. Palm clasped to where, only seconds before, his eye had been safely ensconced, he backed away from the crowd of onlookers. He needed to get to the house. He’d run out of eye drops long ago, but clean, warm water worked. He needed to flush away the grit then look in his small mirror and slide his eye back where it?—

A hand clamped onto his left shoulder and dug in. “You all right, boy?” Zahid bawled into his face. “Something in your eye?”

“Yes,” he gasped. The old man’s teeth were pegs, brown and black with rot, and his breath was no better. “I’ll be fine,” he said, wrenching free of the old man.

Suddenly off-balance, Zahid flailed; his hand snagged the crook of Poya’s left arm and jerked Poya’s hand down from his face.

And that was the moment everything changed: when Poya’s world fell apart for a second time.

“No!”With a curse, Zahid backed up so quickly, his feet slipped out from under. The old man toppled, sprawling onto the dirt where he writhed on his back like an overturned beetle. “Dog! Demon!” Snatching up his walking stick, the old man jabbed the air. “Keep back!Kalb!” the old man screeched the curse in Arabic. “Yakhsaf Allah bin al’ard!”

“No, please.” But it was already too late. A person might dismiss an old man’s ravings, but not something as plain as day and the nose on their face. People had turned, curious to see what all the fuss was about. Pausing from marshaling his latest shipment of boys, Sarbaz stared. “It’s all right,” Poya said to no one in particular. Left hand clapped to his eye, his right pattedthe air as if to put everything back in its place. “It’s fine. There’s nothing the matter.”

“Shaytan!” Jaws working, the old man let loose a gobbet of foamy spit which the wind snatched and flipped back into the old man’s orange-red beard. “The Earth should open beneath your feet!” Zahid shrieked. “You should?—”

Poya never did hear what he ought to do next. Hand clasped to his face, he sprinted for his miserable mud-brick hovel, bulled the door open, and rammed it shut.

Then he fell to his knees and cried his eyes out.

Both of them.

4

Now,as he lay with his mother’s cellphone clasped to his chest.

He’d once thought that Sarhad was at the very edge of anything remotely like civilization. He wasn’t wrong either.

At the moment, he was trapped in a camp of Kyrgyz nomads and, on the northern edge of Lake Chaqmaqtin. This was, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere. Sarhad was two weeks’ walk away in theoppositedirection. Karchyndy and Bourguitiar were closer, but these were outposts, little more than a handful of yurts and mud-and-stone houses. Even worse, the Little Pamir’s current leader lived in Bourguitiar. Run there, and he’d be returned almost instantly.

Or maybe wind up somewhere worse.Yes, there was always that, given what he was.They might sell me.

Ibrahim had done exactly that, about two weeks after Zahid’s spit oozed, slimy and slick, between Poya’s toes. After his left eye slipped, Poya stayed close to home. Didn’t go to school, didn’t wander about by himself for long, though his neighbor still allowed him to groom his horses and herd his goats.

Everyone in Sarhad had heard some version of Zahid’s story about the demon-boy. People had a field day with that. Some hinted that Poya had eaten his mother. Others worried that shemight have been conjured or was a jinn in her own right, and what about the children she’d taught? Were they safe? Fearful gossip like that was a marvelous incentive towards making oneself scarce.

In a way, he really wasn’t surprised when, one afternoon, Ibrahim brought Amu to look Poya over. (Although Ibrahim made sure Poya’s eyes were in beforehand. No sense in spooking a potential client.) A frowning Amu poked and prodded Poya’s muscles and even checked his teeth before agreeing to buy Poya for twenty sheep.

That, Poya later discovered, was only a fifth of what a man might pay for a bride. Once a girl began to bleed, she was worth over a hundred sheep. Women were expensive out here since most died young and in childbirth. Their children weren’t spared either. With no medical care and a limited diet, many never saw their fifth or sixth birthday. So, people bred early in the Wakhan and often.

---