It was the same alley her uncle had shown her, full of tilting buildings, and she marched along bravely into the not unfamiliar gloom. Then a man unfolded from the deeper shadows, and she stopped. Leodora remembered him—he had passed by their stall two or three times and then asked her about the cod, listened with a wolfish grin to what she told him, and thanked her for her recitation. He hadn’t bought anything. He grinned at her again now. He had very good teeth.
The woman shoved ahead of her and said, “Give me my money.” But the man shook his head. “When I’ve made the delivery, when they’re happy with their new arrival.” Both of them glanced down at her, and that was the moment she knew something was wrong, but the woman still gripped her wrist. The two began to argue. Leodora pulled with ever-increasing urgency to get away. The woman was too busy squabbling to notice. Abruptly Leodora broke the hold, but it was so sudden and she’d pulled so hard that she spun against the wall. The man was on her before she could get up. “All right, darlin’,” he said. The stink of him smothered her. “You come along with me now to get your surprise. No more working in a fish stall for you, not a lovely girl like you. They’ll like you where we’re going. You’ll be the most popular girl they have.” Smiling though he was all the while, his sweet words were more ominous than anything she’d ever heard. She twisted, but his grip was much harder than the woman’s, and the wall was at her back, offering no way to put distance between them. She started to scream. The man clamped his hand around her face and hissed at her. He ordered the woman to do something to silence her, and they both closed in where there was hardly enough room for one of them alone, and the acrid sweaty stink poured over her like the stench from rotting meat. The woman crouched, cooing, trying to sound tender beneath her jagged, hungry sharpness. Leodora fought for breath beneath a mask of filthy fingers. She grew dizzy.
The grip abruptly lifted from her face; the stench and the man swept away as if by magic. The woman bit back a shriek, grabbed Leodora again, and tugged her down the alley and back out onto the boulevard.
A crowd was collecting. They blocked the woman’s retreat, so that she cried out, “Someone, someone stop him!” and then, almost as an afterthought, “My child, my baby!” She wrapped herself protectively around Leodora, and the crowd obligingly opened a space for the two of them. Even as they moved into it, the crowd moved with them, stepped back as if to accompany them; but they weren’t following the woman. They were fleeing something else. Leodora twisted her head around to see.
Her grandfather.
He caught the woman before she could get past the last of the people choking the boulevard. He tore Leodora from her grasp, then wedged himself in between them. Dreamily she looked back and saw her uncle in the alley. He was bent over and seemed to be gesturing fiercely. His fist raised high and held, hovered. It clutched a mallet. The hand and mallet were wet and dark. She had seen her grandfather holding a mallet that way as he drove pegs into holes he’d cut, but Gousier brought it down harder than Grandfather ever had.
People began shouting “Kuseks!” and she looked up at their mouths, their fearful eyes. Then the woman toppled beside her, knocking someone aside, skidding on her face upon the paving stones. Their eyes locked, just for a moment, before the woman’s expression went slack and the eyes fluttered shut. The crowd turned, roaring, and split in two directions. The space filled almost instantly with a swarm of police—the Kuseks, so named for the striped sashes they wore. They grabbed her grandfather immediately. She saw him struck with a stick, and she screamed.
Her uncle charged from the alley. Blood drenched his face and clothes. He bellowed at the Kuseks to release her grandfather. She watched it all as if from the rail of Ningle, as if it were all transpiring far below, far away from her—the mallet striking once, the police beating her uncle senseless, and beating him even after that. Her grandfather swaying on his knees, blood from his scalp covering his face like a membrane,