Grandma was unwell.
Everyone was unwell, these days. Some people got sick from the rivers, or the air, or the smells belching from the furnaces. But Grandma was especially unwell, so unwell the Shiboni doctors couldn't heal her. And no one else was seeing Shiboni patients. Local Santoyan children would cluster around her, patting her clan tattoos, asking her to tell them Shiboni stories, but no one would dispense medicines to someone with the fourteen dots of the Fourteenth Ingathering.
“Shiboni stories are so much more fun!” children would squeal. “They are so much more real!”
"Shiboni stories are real because we have had everything done to us," said Father, in his angry moods.
“It hasn't been all bad,” Grandma always said, and Abri knew Father was grousing so Grandma would reassure him. “There was real joy in there. I met your father, and boy was he an experience.”
"Death-stealers!" People would call at Grandma as she walked down the cobblestones to market.
“I hardly know what death they expect us to steal," Father groused if he had come along. "Heaven knows we can’t get to their cemeteries.”
Or anywhere of importance. Shiboni were barred by law from visiting the restaurants of Santoyan citizens. They couldn’t go to the same parks, or wander the same school hallways. They were cordoned off, quarantined lest the Profound touch the dead once more.
“Set apart,” Grandma insisted. “We have been set apart by the Great Eye. We are blessed
But the blessing in her life had been kicks in the ribs and sullen murmurs if she was seen on the road.
“The Shiboni are the kicked of the earth,” she’d said, time and again. “We get kicked so others don’t. It’s our destiny.”
“But why do we take it? Why can’t someone else be the kicking back?” Abri asked.
“That’s not how the world works,” Grandma said, cuffing her lightly on the head. “The Shiboni are kicked. We don’t kick back.”
Her face tattoos always wrinkled when she said that. She had the most ornate face tattoos in the Quarter, added slowly over the course of seventy years. She was one of the last who remembered the days before the Quarter, back when they had worked for the Shaytakh.
“Half Shaytakh, half monkey, they called us,” Father always said. “We were the animals they didn’t want in their zoo, and the humans they didn’t recognize as kin. Their monkeys had it better in the zoos, the Shaytakh had it better alone on their Plain. We had neither.”
“Your father is unhappy,” Grandma always said. “She remembers what could have happened, not what happened.”
“But if we were promised a place and a ration,” Abri said. “Why didn’t we get one?”
“No one offers the Shiboni a place,” Father said. “The Shiboni are their own place.”
“But this is better than suffering under the Shaytakh!” Abri said.
“The Shaytakh and the Santoya, neither are our friends,” Father had said. “Trust no one, no matter what they say.”
A doctor at last came from Nagosi, a Shiboni and the wealthiest man in the NagosiQuarter. There were mysteries of herb and leaf, pestle and oil, that the Shiboni knew and no one else knew. Before the Quarter, they had roamed the Plains, paying off the Shaytakh, avoiding the Cities. They knew how to heal and how to keep the mind from forgetting how to heal. The doctors of the Shiboni were paid handsomely for their knowledge, although it was frequently resented in the Cities that they shared all of their earnings with the entire Clan. The Shiboni paid for each other.
The doctor came, but he did not leave quickly. He was an old man, already worn out by decades of endless service to the Stampers and their families. His hair was stringy but tied back in the three braids of the Shiboni Gulf Clan. He felt her forehead, felt her pulse, listened to her heart. He had old machines, dials as old as magic, artifacts from the Fallen Nations. These were the priceless relics of the Shiboni, unusable unless you were Shiboni, but useful beyond measure to everyone.
“Not good,” he murmured. “But maybe…” and he’d pull up another image, another small squiggly line, another number projected in the far right corner.
“Ah,” he said once, as Abri stood in the doorway. The doorframe was cold, her hands could feel the knots in the wood as she watched the old doctor work.
“Will she live?” Abri asked, once, when the doctor looked particularly troubled.
“Hush,” Father said. “He can’t focus on the magics if you’re asking so many questions.”
“He doesn’t have any magic,” Abri said. “It’s just some plates that some long-dead magician implanted magics into.”
“Don’t say that,” said Father.
“It’s true,” Grandma whispered. “It’s all true. Magic is dead. We are just working magic from dead mages.”
“It eternally renews itself,” the doctor said, mystically. “It will eternally renew itself until the Avi.”
“What’s that?” Abri asked. “What’s the Avi?”
“Hush,” Father said. “How should I know? The doctors have their own chants. I’m just a tailor.”
“What’s Avi?” she asked, as the doctor was walking out. “What’s it got to do with Grandma?”
“There is no Avi,” said the doctor.
“Will Grandma die?” Abri asked.
“We all die, child,” he said. He pulled up his mask and headed into the late evening dusk.