It took me three days to forget all about my Semadran clothes. I lived in Sorcha’s cast-offs without complaint because he was right—they suited me better than the clothes I’d brought with me. It took a week for our sleeping arrangements to lose their forbidding strangeness. It took a week and a half for my drab Coastal Lothic to blossom into florid City Lothic. It took three weeks for my ear to fully heal, and a few more days for me to forget it had ever been pierced. By then, I looked and sounded like I belonged at the squat house. I lost a little weight and gained the hungry look of the rest of them. I had been hassled by peacekeepers while minding my own business in the Square and had picked up their defiance. Sorcha and I were inseparable. We woke together, I followed him around while he conducted his musical business, we ate together, and then we fell asleep together. We were rarely apart for longer than an hour. Three weeks was all it took for me to grow closer to him than anyone else I’d ever met. I fell into the rhythms of his life, which were smoother and simpler than the rhythms of my own.

Three weeks in, though, I still could not shave to Sorcha’s satisfaction. I had never had to learn; Semadrans don’t shave. My beard was a mark of manhood back home. Granted, it was patchier than I would have liked, but it was mine, and it had its worth. Sorcha would have none of it. He himself had enough red blood in him that he grew little facial hair, so his razors left much to be desired. Even when he scraped together enough to present me with my own—a Qin razor bought in the Qin markets—I still was not very good with it. I was unused to its sharpness and nearly slit my own throat at least twice. And then, out of fear that I would hurt myself further, I took to scraping very gently, so gently I was hardly shaving at all.

One morning, just shy of a month after my arrival, Sorcha woke me after my morning nap and told me he couldn’t stand it anymore. If I couldn’t shave myself properly he guessed he’d have to do it himself. I laughed and burrowed under the blankets. I didn’t think he was serious. And, looking back I don’t think he actually was; I think it was a pretense for what followed, but he claimed he was serious. He dragged a chair over. He went outside and brought back a basin of water from the pump outside. He slung a tattered towel over one shoulder and told me to pull my shirt off and sit down.

“Why do I have to take off my shirt?” I asked.