In half an hour the cramped, unfamiliar position met my healing injuries and joined forces against me. I was sweaty, too, even though the work wasn’t strenuous. But it was just what I wanted. It slowed down thought, and channeled it into unfamiliar paths, ones my life to date hadn’t sown with mines. I was surprised when I reached past the last onion sprout and found that it was the last.

“Good work,” Kris said. “The next row is lettuce. It looks like this.”

A minute into that row, and Kris pointed to the thing in my hand. “That’s also lettuce.”

“Oh,” I said. After that, I did better.

Eventually I could figure out for myself which were the weeds. At that point, Kris moved on to the next garden plot, and I had the first one to myself. It was hypnotic work, with its own loose rhythm and a set of physical techniques both precise and trivial. The way a slow, smooth pull would bring a weed up by the roots and a jerk would snap it off at the surface. The way dandelions had to be pulled by all their leaves at once. The machinery of my arm moving out and back, reach, pull, toss. I could do this. I knew where this skill came from, and whose it was. Mine, mine. Wherever the rest of me was stolen from, this was mine.

Via Kris, who had taught it to me. Then was it Kris’s skill, after all?

And someone must have weeded China Black’s garden. Whoever it was, I shared this knowledge with her or him.

I’d stopped in midmotion, still crouched and kneeling, the latest thing I’d pulled still in my hand. It was a thin-stemmed little plant with short oval leaves climbing in pairs up the stalk. At the end was a cluster of star-shaped flowers in an aching, vibrating magenta.

I had pulled one of these before — in China Black’s garden. “Sparrow?” Sher’s voice came to me, from the end of the row.

I couldn’t breathe, except in little bursts that seemed to catch halfway down my throat. I had pulled one of these when, angry with Sherrea for something I’d done, I hadn’t listened while she told me again: You don’t belong to them. You don’t now, and you never did.

The origin of my body and my mind didn’t matter. I, the part of me that learned, that called on my memories, that knew I’d pulled a plant like this before, that had moved this hand to do it, was fifteen years old and innocent of evil or good. Neutral. From here forward, I was blank tape; what would be recorded there, and when, and why, was up to me.

I couldn’t breathe. I’d dropped the plant; I closed my dirty hands over my face as if I could find and tear away whatever was keeping the air out. My whole curled body shook with gasping, with the high, thin sound it made.