Your neighbor Abdumasi is a good guy. When he sees how upset you are, he gives you a caraval kitten to hold. He tells you he’s training the gangly little kittens to kill pigeons, for gambling reasons. You try to explain to him the pain of missing someone who was never born.

“You sound like you’re in love,” Abdumasi says. “I read that you can fall in love with someone before you’ve ever met them. And when you see them at last, you say, ‘Oh, that’s why I hurt,’ like you just found an old splinter buried in your foot.”

You hate splinters, so you shudder.

“People need some things even if they’ve never had them,” Abdumasi opines. “That’s why we invented the Mbo, right? Some people said slaves have never been free, so they can’t want freedom—but the Mbo said no, everyone wants freedom. Now there’s no more slavery anywhere. We ended it. We’re mbo people because we help other people get what they need.”

You pet the caraval kitten listlessly. It squirms from your arms.

“Tau-indi,” Abdumasi says, looking at you in worry, “Tau-indi, manata”—which means my beloved friend—“you need to let this twin thing go.”

The attending doctor and her midwife tried to take blame for the stillborn child, identical in every way to Tau, except that they never screamed or breathed at all. Tau-indi’s umbilical cord had strangled them. “As we rushed to your house, Tahr, we must have walked along the shadows,” the doctor said, trying to take the blame, “and today there was a calendar taboo against following the sun’s lines. The twin’s soul saw us break taboo, and turned away in disgust, back to the Door in the East. Thus they were born dead.”

But Mother Tahr was gracious and of good trim, and she chose to blame the umbilical rather than the doctor. She burned her unnamed ungendered child out on the hill, raked up the ash of the burning, and ate it in an ash cake, to put her given body back into herself. Then she put her grief behind her and set about raising Tau-indi.

The House Bosoka asked the child, at age six, for their gender, and the child was a laman. Lamen did not exist everywhere in the world, but many mbo people were lamen, and Tau-indi felt quite sure they must be one.

At age thirteen, the day this story begins, Tau-indi asked their friend Abdumasi a terrible question.

“Do you think,” Tau-indi whispered, “that I killed my twin in the womb, so that I could be Prince alone?”

The caraval kitten began knocking Abdumasi’s ceramics down off the shelf. They both ran around after it, begging it to be civil. Quickly they forgot the terrible question. After a while Abdumasi said, “Tau, this is the first birthday you’ve had without your mother here, right?”

“It is.”