NANAKO BONJOU: two sweeps / six years old
The older grubs don’t put you on the camel often, which’s a shame: from all the way up here, you can see for miles and miles and miles, and you feel like a rani surveying her kingdom. The sand stretches as far as your eye can see. So do the camels, all shades of brown and tawny, and the children trailing them like hair ribbons, all greens and golds.
“Are you paying attention to me, cactus-face?” Toshio scolds, and when you jolt up in the seat from your half-slouch, eyes wide, she laughs. “Good! Because what we’re discussing is very important, lah, we don’t need you going in all shocked.”
“I won’t! I won’t, I won’t, I won’t --” Your voice pitches up, tilts into shrieking, and just like that, the world goes red. You have to clamp both hands over your mouth and breathe in through your nose in big, gulping breathes until the shine stops, and everything goes back to the proper blue, blue, blue, blue as the night is long.
Toshio laughs at you again, bright and warm, and pulls your hands free. “After this, you’re going to be a full member of the group, ‘kay? You and Papaya and Fatiya, You’ll be properly devoted to the moons, just like me!” Her grin is as crooked as her teeth. “And then we’ll get that glowing problem sorted out, moongrub,” she teases. “Wrap those up in glyphs and dedicate ‘em.”
Toshio’s got a hold of your hands. Hers are so much bigger! And broader, and rougher, so when you wrap your fingers between hers, they barely even fit, and it’s hard to swing ‘em. You try anyway, tugging them until she notices.
“Why can’t we do it now? Why we gotta go to town?” You’ve been to the town before, when you were little, little, little, but you don’t remember none of it: what you remember is what you’re told, ‘cause Toshio and Affron gather all of you pupas up, every time they find a new one and stick ‘em on the caravan, and they show you everything. This is the cavern you came from, hidden away in the mountains. This is the route you all travel. These are the oasises you need. And yesterday, when the big tent was up and everyone was around the fire, Toshio had pulled out the map, unfurled it right on top of your bedroll, and told you about the town again.
Your camel grunts. Toshio tugs on your hands, reprimanding, and you stop bouncing, but it’s hard. “I bet you could do it,” you wheedle. “You’ve got marks! Affie’s got marks!” All the older kids have the same red swirled across their faces like fingers gone astray, and none of the two are the same. It can’t be hard to get them, you don’t think. You and Papaya copy them in the dirt all the time, and in the soot of the fire on each other’s skin.
“You’re silly,” Toshio tells you. “Because they’re words, you little pricklebear! I can’t write words, not like that. They say who you are, and who you’ll be, and everything about you, so everyone knows, forever and ever. And the only one can pop you open and see’s the priest, which’s why we’re takin’ you.”
“Pop open your soul, Nana,” she corrects, “and see what you should be.”
