The second man was nobody of importance, but I had looked up his history anyway, curious about who might befriend Amita Bhattacharya’s son. Baqir Nassar, twenty-one years old, was born in a North American refugee camp during an epidemic of Danzmayr’s disease. He had left the desert several years later when his four parents—a complex marriage of two men and two women—finally applied for and gained Councils citizenship, but not before three of his siblings succumbed to the plague. Nassar was permanently scarred by the disease: his left arm had been amputated and replaced by a robotic prosthetic. He did not disguise his metal arm and fingers with synthetic flesh or gloves; the silver gleam caught the light when he gestured.

His scars were all most people would see when they looked at him. He would have to work twice as hard to prove he was worthy of citizenship, of this research fellowship, of a place alongside all the pampered children of the Councils. He would spend his entire life being blamed for the choices his parents had made, for being born in the wrong place, for being ill, for carrying the dust of the desert wasteland in his veins. The United Councils of Earth pretended to care for all of humanity, but their compassion had limits.

I wanted to understand if Nassar felt those limits, or if he pretended he was treated as an equal. I wanted to know what he was doing here. What he hoped to prove. If he knew that it would never be enough.

It was possible, I thought, that my mother had encountered Nassar’s family when she worked in the refugee camps during an outbreak. She had volunteered in the borderlands when I was young. That had been her first experience of the desert, the first time she saw how the Councils treated the people who chose to live outside its false security, the first time she tasted that hardship and freedom for herself. She might have held an ailing baby boy in her arms while his mother recovered from childbirth, bringing a small, insignificant life into the world while thousands died around them and the Councils offered nothing but overworked doctors and empty promises. As outbreaks raged and the camps overflowed with the sick and dying, the Councils dragged their feet, refusing to expedite the byzantine citizenship application process, refusing to open the borders, refusing to welcome desperate families, refusing, refusing, refusing. Far removed from the hardship, Councilors and commissioners argued about the risk of a global pandemic, the impact of devoting even the most meager resources to those in need, the danger of opening the gates and letting anybody pass. They may have kept their mutterings about plague-ridden criminals overwhelming their perfect clean cities to private conversations, to whispers behind closed doors, but still they muttered, and my mother heard them, and she never forgot.