Heart of Obsidian

on the other side of the house, she put down the datapad that held her despised math homework. “Is that man here again?” She hesitated, then said what was in her heart, since Kaleb had kept his word and not reported her terrible Silence. “I don’t like him.”
    Kaleb shook his head. “I came to see you.” A pause. “I don’t know any other children who talk to me.”
    “That must be lonely.” She broke off half her nutrition bar, held it out. “I know you probably think I’m a baby, but you can be my friend if you like.” Shifting on the stump when he accepted the snack, she made a space for him.
    “I don’t think you’re a baby.” He took a seat beside her. “I think you’re smart and you see things other people don’t.” This time, the pause was longer, his gaze focused on something she couldn’t see. “I don’t like him, either.”
    Another thread pulling free of the vault almost before she’d assimilated the last, another memory, this one tinged with laughter.
    Sahara poked out her tongue at the datapad on her lap. She might be eleven and much better at pretending to be Silent in public, but she still hated math. She’d tried to tell her teachers not to put her into accelerated lessons when it came to this one subject, but they kept pointing out the fact that her IQ scores placed her learning capacity in the gifted range. According to them, all she had to do was try harder. “Hah!”
    When Kaleb appeared beside the stump where she always did her homework, she smiled in relief. “I have to finish this by Friday,” she told him. “Or I’ll be put into an after-school math tutorial.” It wasn’t the tutorial part that horrified her—it was the thought of doing even more math!
    “Here.” He took a seat beside her, a greenish bruise below the curve of his left cheekbone.
    Sahara kicked her heel back into the stump to force herself not to ask about the bruise, the impact painful on her bare skin. She knew the answer to her question and she knew there was nothing she could do about it, the knowledge bubbling acid in her stomach. “What’s this?” Putting aside her datapad and tightening her abdomen against the futile surge of anger, she took the hard-copy book he held out.
    “You’re a tactile learner,” he said, as she opened the pages to see that it was a math textbook. “I thought this might help you remember the equations better.” Reaching into a pocket, he put two ink pens between them.
    “Why don’t you just tell me the answers?” she asked brightly. “Then we can talk about much more interesting things.”
    Kaleb simply looked at her with those beautiful starlight eyes that were too often an empty black these days, holding a numbness that made her chest hurt.
    Sighing, but happy because he hadn’t gone away again, she picked up the blue pen and began to do the equations on the first page, making sure to write down her entire painstaking process. When she was done, Kaleb went over her work, showing her where she’d made errors of logic so she wouldn’t make the same ones again.
    “Can you write down the correct processes, too?” she asked him. “I can use them as study aids while I do my homework.” No matter what the teachers tried, Sahara never learned as well at school as she did with Kaleb when it came to math. He knew exactly how to explain things to her.
    Nodding, he went down the page with a black pen, his writing strong and neat. “Did you have a dance lesson today?”
    She said, “Yes,” then ran over to the side of the house to peek at the window to her father’s study. He was still there, working on a paper for the
Psy-Med Journal
. Smiling, she ran back to Kaleb. “I learned a new step.” Bubbles of happiness in her blood. “Want to see?”
    Closing the math textbook, he set it on the stump and nodded. Then, as the birds flew home to their nests and the sky turned a dusky orange, she danced, the grass soft beneath her bare feet and Kaleb her quiet audience.
    Sahara’s heart warmed at the innocence of the memory, at her absolute trust in the boy-becoming-a-man who had understood that for her, dancing was like breathing, their friendship iron strong. It had only grown stronger as the years passed, but Kaleb had had to be so careful—Enrique had him on a very tight psychic leash, but the older he grew, the better he became at slipping that leash for small periods of time.
    Secret, everything had been secret.
    Her stomach clenched without