Five men and women sat eating around the stove, and Abu was happy to see fruit and bread on the table, and all manner of illegal delicacies. One of them had brought a rotten piece of cheese, stolen from some shop. It would have been enough to hang them; even their clothes would have been enough, for mixed with the yellow rayon of their caste, Abu saw rags of cotton, linen, even silk, in many proscribed colors.

A tall man, wearing a shirt that had once been white, sat balanced on the back legs of his chair, cleaning his teeth with a pocket knife. His hair was coarse under a black cap, and his black beard was stiff with dirt. Dirt lined the wrinkles and the cuts around his eyes, and lay smeared like a doctor’s salve over his pimpled cheeks. When he laughed, his teeth flashed strong and hard and very white. They were his pride, and he was always picking at them with the point of his knife or with fragments of wood. His name was Jason Mock. He was a thief.

“It tastes like shit,” he remarked, picking a piece of cheese out of his gums and scowling darkly at it on the point of his knife. He spoke in the high pitch common to them all. It seemed particularly out of place in his fierce mouth.

“You wouldn’t say that,” whined another man. “Not if you knew how slick it was. Hard to catch. Six months if you’re caught, just for that one piece. Second offense. It’s valuable.”

“Tastes like six months. Tastes like a year. What did you do, bury it while you were in?”

“That piece? That piece isn’t two days old. I just walked in and put it in my hat, slick as anything. That blind old parson never said a word.”

“Mmm. What’s it called?”

“Cheddar.”

“Mmm. Tastes like . . . excrement.”

“Hunh. You wouldn’t say that. Not if you were used to it.”

“Used to it? Excrement? I’ve been eating excrement ever since I was a boy. An expert. That’s why my teeth’s so distained.” Mock forced his knifeblade in between his molars and then pulled it out and frowned at it. “I can’t find the sense in it,” he continued. “Six months in jail, what for? It’s rotten. They should make it three months and serve it every day. That way nobody’d go near it.”

“Perhaps,” said a boy, “perhaps they don’t want us to know how bad it is.”

“You shut upl” retorted Mock. Then suspiciously, “What do you mean?”

“Perhaps it’s their secret, how bad it is.”

“Don’t you be smart with me. What do you mean?”

“Perhaps it’s envy of them, what keeps them up and us down. Envy more than force.”

“Shut your mouth,” commanded Mock. He lowered the two front feet of his chair until his boots touched the floor, and then he leaned forward across the table, glaring at the boy. “Are you trying to be funny?”