I sat back breathing heavily; my lips tingled with danger. It was risky to empower the workers. I looked around to assure myself that no one but the old man and William had heard. My eyes landed on the old man’s face, scrunched up in puzzlement. He scratched a chafed spot on his forehead.

“Are you alright?” I said, suddenly nervous. Would he go mad right here and now?

He was looking at me like I’d grown a third eye. “Are you?” he asked. He began to cough.

“You should rest,” I said.

He shook his head. “No. No time to rest.”

I gestured for William to get water. The old man stopped coughing, but his chest continued to wheeze.

“I just reckoned what it is I got to say. What it is I’ve learned,” he said, weakly.

“Okay, I’m listening,” I assured him.

“Back long time ago, workers think the Earth was flat.” He paused, catching his breath. “But we know now that she ain’t flat, see? She fat. She been eating up all the people from all the years, see?” He reached down to scoop up an imaginary handful of soil and rubbed it between his fingers. “All the stories go down her gullet, and that how she grow.” He waved his hand, spreading his fingers out from his palm, like sprouting plants. “Corn, wheat, sycamore, cattail—Kongo. They all the old folks come back. We all go down and we all come back.” His digits closed over his palm, then sprouted again. “See?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t. What does all that mean?”

“It mean, we be her, so we got to trust her. See?” He flexed his hand open and closed, open and closed. Sprouting and resprouting his imaginary plants. “We come up from the earth and go back and come up again. You got to trust that boss girl, not no computer. No telling where that computer come from. They come from Her? No. Where they come from? What they made of? Where they going?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know—nowhere.”

“See?” He drew the word out as if he’d made a brilliant point. And, for a brief moment, I thought I did see. Then he broke into convulsions of coughing so hard, blood and spit ran down his chin. I jumped up, calling for Robin. She came with a black scarf and tied it around the lower half of Kiwi’s face.

William took my arm. “Come, Arika.”

“But he needs—”

“He no talk more,” William interrupted.

Seeing that he was right, that there was nothing I could do, I put the lid on my ink and let William pull me away. In my mind’s eye, I couldn’t shake the image of Kiwi, his furred chest, and his hand flexing at his side.

* * *