It was just before the start of school when I was fourteen. All summer I had been short-tempered to the point of absurdity, picking fights with everybody, sulking for days in my bedroom with the curtains drawn. Baqir had visited for a couple of weeks, but he had gone home two days ago. We fought before he left—there were shouts, blows exchanged, bloodied lips, and quickly hidden tears—and I was certain when the school year began he would decide that friendship with me wasn’t worth the trouble, and I wouldn’t be able to blame him. I had said unforgivable things. I couldn’t even stand my own company. I woke every morning wanting to crawl out of my skin, went to bed every night hoping I wouldn’t wake up in the morning, and through all the hours in between, I felt phantom aches and pains vibrating through my entire body. I would lie in my bed, the house hushed around me, and imagine fissures appearing in my bones one by one, like cracks spreading over a frozen lake. I pictured them as faint lines of sickly yellow light, a spiderweb of fractures spreading through my body, every one of them sparking with the slightest pain as it broke open. I had seen the images from my medical records. Half my bones had broken when my mother’s experimental craft accelerated me away from House of Wisdom; the pilot’s chair had been designed for a full-grown adult in a compression flight suit, not a twelve-year-old child in his pajamas. By the time I was fourteen, the injuries were healing, the constant pain finally reduced to occasional flares, but in dark moments I could feel every wound becoming new again.

It had been a hot day and it promised to be a hot night. The monsoon finally passed from the hills above Dharamsala a week or two before, leaving in its wake a heavy mist that slunk over the lake, cloaking the rhododendrons in a clinging damp veil. It was too warm to open the house to the outside, but my aunt asked the staff to do it anyway. She liked to taste the night around her, unfiltered by the house’s enviro controls. We ate dinner at the counter in the kitchen, a simple meal of dal and roti. We did not speak. I picked at my food and stared at the lake. I watched the mist drift above the water and wondered if it would feel good to take a night swim and knew I would not find the energy to do so. The stars were hidden anyway, and the night was no comfort without stars.

“I have something for you,” my aunt said.

I was so surprised to hear her speak that I started, bumping my plate into my water glass with a soft clink. “What?”

“You’re old enough now,” she said.