During the day, Sorcha wandered. He played his violin. Quietly, discreetly, he strayed from me. He wound up in the 23rd again. It was hard for me to get him out; the jealousy was something I did not expect. He took a beating for flirting with a Qin girl. The beating left him with a broken rib and a broken nose. A Qin doctor intervened before it got any worse and took him to the borough’s healer. Sorcha flirted with the borough healer, a young woman transplanted to Rabatha from the Chalir foothills for her training. She healed him for free, and she advocated for him in the borough so he could find work as a midwife. Some of the pregnant women refused to see him, but some let him in, trusted him, and paid him for his service in bread and tea. Midwifery was good for him. It gave him focus and kept him out of trouble. More or less.

It was not an easy life: we were warily watched by half the borough and contemptuously ignored by the other half. Few Semadrans acknowledged me on the street, and fewer still would speak to me. Sorcha was an outsider, and for that he was given a measure of latitude, but I had lived there with them, and left, and returned a man with nothing but a trail of broken rules behind him. I was a pariah, but I was tolerated because Sorcha had proved useful and Nisa and Dirva had carved out respect from their neighbors. Still though, there was no one to advocate for me when Sorcha’s run-ins with the law cost me my job. The stamps of contact covered my papers, marking me as a friend of a repeat convict, and despite my skills I was not worth the trouble to the Qin. I ended up on a factory line. I worked in a wool factory, where I fed raw fiber into the spinners, great metal gears that turned as fast as the wheels of a train. The factory was full of us: disposable people, forgotten people, desperate people. Some were Semadran, but many more were nahsiyya or displaced Chalir. Some bore the brands of the slaveborn on their cheeks. There were accidents, and the accidents were grisly, but I was lucky. The worst I got were burns.

The factory was a terrible place, but still, I was happy. I had Sorcha. I had nothing but Sorcha, but having him was enough. I was happy, and I was settled, and I expected life to stretch on like that forever. But of course it didn’t. Life never settles. It slows sometimes, and it grows smooth sometimes, but it never settles.