Butler, Octavia - Parable of the Sower

“Thanks for the encouragement,” I said.

Zahra gave him a look, then patted my arm. “Don’t worry,” she said. “No germ will get past that old man.

He’s mad as hell at you for getting yourself shot.

Says if you had any sense, you would have stayed back here with the babies.”

“What?”

“Hey, he’s old,” Harry said. “What do you expect.”

I sighed. “How’s Allie?”

“Crying.” He shook his head. “She won’t let anyone near her except Justin. Even he keeps trying to comfort her. It upsets him that she’s crying.”

“Emery and Tori are kind of beaten up, too,” Zahra said. “They’re the other reason we’re not moving.”

She paused. “Hey, Lauren, you ever notice anything funny about those two— Emery and Tori, I mean?

And about that guy Mora, too.”

“How many times did you die?” Mora asked me.

“Three at least,” I answered, as though this were a sane conversation. “Maybe four. I never did it like that before— over and over. Insane. But you look well enough.”

His expression hardened as though I’d slapped him.

Of course, I had insulted him. I’d said, Where were you, man and fellow sharer, while your woman and your group were in danger. Funny. There I was, speaking a language I hadn’t realized I knew.

“I had to get Doe out of danger,” he said. “I had no gun, anyway.”

“Can you shoot?”

He hesitated. “Never shot before,” he admitted, dropping his voice to a mumble. Again I’d shamed him— this time without meaning to.

“When we teach you to shoot, will you, to protect the

group?”

“Yeah!” Though at that moment, I think he would have preferred to shoot me.

“It hurts like hell,” I warned.

He shrugged. “Most things do.”

I looked into his thin, angry face. Were all slaves so thin— underfed, overworked, and taught that most things hurt? “Are you from this area?”

“Born in Sacramento.”

“Then we need all the information you can give us.

Even without a gun, we need you to help us survive here.”

“My information is to get out of here before those things up the hill throw paint on themselves and start shooting people and setting fires.”

“Oh, shit,” I said. “So that’s what they are.”

“What’d you think they were?”

“I didn’t have a chance to think about them. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Harry, did you guys strip the dead?”

“Yeah.” He gave me a thin smile. “We got another gun— a .38. I put some stuff in your pack from the ones you killed.”

“Thank you. I don’t know that I can carry my pack yet. Maybe Bankole— ”

“He’s already got it on his cart. Let’s go.”

We headed out toward the road.

“Is that how you do it?” Grayson Mora asked,

walking next to me. “Whoever kills takes?”

“Yes, but we don’t kill unless someone threatens us,” I said. “We don’t hunt people. We don’t eat human flesh. We fight together against enemies. If one of us is in need, the rest help out. And we don’t steal from one another, ever.”

“Emery said that. I didn’t believe her at first.”

“Will you live as we do?”

“…yeah. I guess so.”

I hesitated. “So what else is wrong? I can see that you don’t trust us, even now.”

He walked closer to me, but did not touch me.

“Where’d that white man come from?” he demanded.

“I’ve known him all my life,” I said. “He and I and the others have kept one another alive for a long time, now.”

“But…him and those others, they don’t feel anything. You’re the only one who feels.”

“We call it sharing. I’m the only one.”

“But they… . You… .”

“We help each other. A group is strong. One or two people are easier to rob and kill.”

“Yeah.” He looked around at the others. There was no great trust or liking in his expression, but he looked more relaxed, more satisfied. He looked as though he had solved a troubling puzzle.

Testing him, I let myself stumble. It was easy. I still

had little feeling in my feet and legs.

Mora stepped aside. He didn’t touch me or offer help. Sweet guy.

I left Mora, went over to Allie, and walked with her for a while. Her grief and resentment were like a wall against me— against everyone, I suppose, but I was the one bothering her at the moment. And I was alive and her sister was dead, and her sister was the only family she had left, and why didn’t I just get the hell out of her face?

She never said anything. She just pretended I wasn’t there. She pushed Justin along in his carriage and wiped tears from her stony face now and then with a swift, whiplike motion. She was hurting herself, doing that. She was rubbing her face too hard, too fast, rubbing it raw. She was hurting me too, and I didn’t need any more pain. I stayed with her, though, until her defenses began to crumble under a new wave of crippling grief. She stopped hurting herself and just let the tears run down her face, let them fall to her chest or to the broken blacktop. She seemed to sag under a sudden weight.

I hugged her then. I put my hands on her shoulders and stopped her half-blind plodding. When she swung around to face me, hostile and hurting, I hugged her. She could have broken free. I was feeling far from strong just then, but after a first angry pulling away, she hung on to me and moaned.

I’ve never heard anyone moan like that. She cried and moaned there at the roadside, and the others stopped and waited for us. No one spoke. Justin began to whimper and Natividad came back to comfort him. The wordless message was the same for both child and woman: In spite of your loss and pain, you aren’t alone. You still have people who care about you and want you to be all right. You still have family.

She nodded, then glanced sidelong at Bankole.

“He knows,” I assured her. “But…look, you and Grayson are the first sharers I’ve known who had children.” There was no reason to tell her she and Grayson and their children were the first sharers I’d known period. “I hope to have kids myself someday, so I need to know…do they always inherit the sharing?”

“One of my boys didn’t have it,” she said. “Some feelers— sharers— can’t have any kids. I don’t know why. And I knew some who had two or three kids who didn’t have it at all. Bosses, though, they like you to have it.”

“I’ll bet they do.”

“Sometimes,” she continued, “sometimes they pay more for people who have it. Especially kids.”

Her kids. Yet they had taken a boy who wasn’t a sharer and left a girl who was. How long would it have been before they came back for the girl?

Perhaps they had a lucrative offer for the boys as a pair, so they sold them first.

“My god,” Bankole said. “This country has slipped back 200 years.”

“Things were better when I was little,” Emery said.

“My mother always said they would get better again.

Good times would come back. She said they always did. My father would shake his head and not say anything.” She looked around to see where Tori was and spotted her on Grayson Mora’s shoulders. Then she caught sight of something else, and she gasped.

We followed her gaze and saw fire creeping over the hills behind us— far behind us, but not far enough.

This was some new fire, whipping along in the dry evening breeze. Either the people who attacked us had followed us, setting fires, or someone was imitating them, echoing them.

We went on, moving faster, trying to see where we could go to be safe. On either side of the highway, there was dry grass, there were trees, living and dead. So far, the fire was only on the north side.